Category: From the Old Server

On Sunday I attended a block party hosted by a friend up in Newburyport.  He had hired an English circus family to perform and afterwards I served some food and drink to the 13-year-old and 16-year-old members of this family.  Unlike the typical sullen American teenager they had exquisite manners.  It turned out that they had never been to school.  They’d lived their whole lives traveling around with their parents and siblings, oftentimes in a smallish RV (they started calling themselves “the Sardine Family” because of these cramped quarters).  All of their education came from their parents and from older siblings.

Could it be that going into a community of thousands of teenagers (i.e., school) is bad for a kid’s manners?   And that spending time with a high percentage of adults (i.e., home school) is good for a kid’s manners?

Full post, including comments

While driving up here to Naples, Maine for some seaplane training I listened to a lecture on political theory by Dennis Dalton, a professor at Barnard.  One interesting point was that Aristotle did not approve of voting except by middle-class or richer people.  His theory was that a poor person is likely to be illiterate and that, without having much property, won’t have any stake in stability.  Thus if Aristotle were remaking Iraq only perhaps 10 percent of the population would be entitled to vote.  In the U.S. maybe 80 percent of us would get to vote (though of course only 40-some percent bother).

Dalton talked about how the U.S. illustrates all of the ills of Capitalism predicted by Karl Marx.  In particular Dalton cited the percentage of children living in poverty here in the U.S. (“living in poverty” means in a family whose income is less than the Federal Poverty Level, a number determined by trying to figure out what the minimum necessary income is for a normal American life).

If the quantity of children in the U.S. were fixed it seems obvious that the higher the percentage of kids living in poverty the worse the situation.  But the quantity of children is not fixed.  People decide to have an extra child based on their perception of how easy it will be to take care of an extra child.  Perhaps a high percentage of children living in poverty means that poor people feel comfortable with (a) the  level of government support to be expected for that child (e.g., Medicaid, AFDC), and (b) the ultimate career prospects for that child once grown up.

What would stop a Reagan-style optimist from saying “look at all the children that our poor people are having, confident that their future will be bright” and citing that as an example of what a fantastic country this is for a poor family?

Full post, including comments

While driving up here to Naples, Maine for some seaplane training I listened to a lecture on political theory.  The professor was talking about Karl Marx and how the U.S. is a perfect illustration of all the ills of Capitalism described by Marx.

Full post, including comments

Just back from a workshop at MIT on technology for community-building in America.  The focus turned out to be poor communities.  Apparently the middle class don’t need community because they can enjoy their suburban comforts.  I reflected that technology has so far mostly harmed the poor in the U.S.  In the old days when telecommunications and transportation were expensive there was a real need in our economy for the labor of the lowest economic class.  Maybe they’d work in a factory or do some kind of clerical job.  In 2004, however, our businesses can get all of the unskilled labor that they want in China or India.  Fear of crime was once a motivator for trying to improve poor neighborhoods.  But improved management techniques, universal cell phones for calling 911, innovations like the gated community and security cameras everywhere, and pure technology such as the fancy alarm system have lessened this fear.

The elephant in the room that nobody wanted to talk about was education.  The non-profit world likes to think about affordable housing, leadership development, better health care, specialized training, etc.  If everyone in a poor neighborhood were educated to the standard of the average Harvard graduate all of the other problems would be solved.  Someone who is really well educated probably has a good job and makes a lot of money and can afford whatever housing is out there.  Someone who is really well educated may find that others naturally want to follow him or her so leadership development isn’t that important.  Someone who is really well educated will probably have better habits and won’t need as much health care (it is the college grads who wear seat belts).  Someone who is really well educated can read a For Dummies book and learn how to use a computer application.

Schools for poor people are government schools.  Everyone who works there is either a bureaucrat or a union member.  None of these people incurs any kind of pay loss or risk of firing if the kids remain totally ignorant.  All attempts at reform over the past 40 years have failed.  So people give up.  One community organizing expert sitting next to me responded to my observation that if everyone had a first class education the other stuff would fix itself with “that’s just not realistic”.

Working from the assumption that most people in a poor community are doomed to a third-rate education, what can we do for them with technology?  It turns out that the answer is “not much”.  Foundations fund thousands of small groups nationwide and they spend $billions on IT (i.e., indirectly the foundations are spending $billions every year on IT).  None, however, has a large enough budget to do more than buy packaged software or write some half-working half-documented custom software.  All the groups complain that there is no packaged software that actually serves their needs and that they can’t afford to develop full custom apps.  Although their IT needs are fairly similar none of them have a large enough budget to attract commercial software companies except for fundraising management software.

You’d think that the open source revolution would have attracted some notice.  Programmers who weren’t paid a dime generated a tremendous amount of social benefits worldwide.  What more effective use of grant money than to pay some programmers to develop open-source software products and toolkits for common non-profit organization requirements?  Yet nobody at the conference had ever heard of a foundation funding an open-source software project.

One bright spot… a handful of folks had set up free wireless Internet access blankets over struggling neighborhoods in various parts of the country.  All of the academic papers written about the “Digital Divide” turned out to be nonsense.  As soon as a poor person had an opportunity to get broadband without being reamed out for $50/month by the local telco or cable monopoly the poor person was able to leap right over the exotic language and cultural barriers that sociologists had posited.  I.e., it turned out that these folks were poor, not stupid.

Full post, including comments

Hmm.. it appears that for $25/month we Broadband Achievers can transfer an existing phone number to www.lingo.com, an Internet Protocol telephony service, and get unlimited calling domestically and to Western Europe.  Should we sign up and start calling random people in France, Spain, Germany, Italy to discuss the big issues?

[Would multi-lingual readers please fill up the comment section with French, Spanish, German, and Italian language translations of the following potentially useful phrase:  “Why can’t you speak English like an educated person?”]

Update:  I actually did try to sign up to Lingo immediately after posting this entry and 12 hours later.  Their server responded with “No backend server available for connection” and “A java.lang.IllegalArgumentException exception was thrown and not handled by any Page Flow.”  It seems as though Java, the SUV of programming tools, is not working out too well for these folks.  Let’s hope that the actual phone service was not built by the same programmers and/or that these folks don’t suffer the same fate as my students who were using Java.

Full post, including comments

Stuck at home for the last couple of days with a sore throat and earache and catching up on my TV viewing…  Just finished “Eye of Vichy”, a 1993 collection of newsreels produced in France during the period of the Vichy French government.  As the victors we’ve tended to write the history of World War II and forget that not everyone was unhappy in the France of 1940-44.

The film is a chronological assemblage of newsreels with a touch of commentary but mostly just subtitled translation.  Occupation and surrender initially usher in a great wave of optimism.  The French dream of a unified Europe from Japan through Siberia and west to the shores of France and Spain.  (Remember that at the time of the German invasion the Soviets and Germans were allies).  It was upsetting to have lost the war in a matter of weeks but the future of European union looked bright.

For the speakers featured in the newsreels “collaboration” is a good word.  They are proud of the millions of Frenchmen working in Germany, fighting in the German army (mostly on the Russian front), and building military hardware for the German army.  Cheerful young people are shown leaving France on special trains to take up apprenticeships in German firms where they are then shown alongside cheerful helpful German workers.  A narrator notes that France contributed more labor and war production to Germany than any other country; invading France really seems to have been one of Hitler’s best ideas.

The Jews come in for a bit of beating in these newsreels as you might expect and are blamed for having led a “peace-loving nation” into war.  Jews are compared to rats as a danger to the human race.  They are cowardly but are still dangerous due to their “superior numbers”.  [This is an odd claim considering that French Jews numbered only about 225,000 in 1933, less than one percent of the total French population.   For an explanation of how any of these Jews survived the war, see this review of the book IBM and the Holocaust]

As in German films of the same era the final year of the war brings a lot of sad coverage of bombed-out homes and cities.  The British and American air forces are the villains here, of course, bombing the innocent civilians that they were hypocritically claiming to be saving.  There is a clever animated film in which airplanes piloted by Disney characters drop “Made in USA” bombs on the home of some French suburbanites who’d been chatting about how much they were looking forward to liberation by the English and all of the beloved foods they’d be able to eat again as well as the English cigarettes that they’d be smoking.

If you’re a World War II buff this is worth seeing because of the 60th anniversary of Normandy.  If you’re an imperialist it might be worth seeing as an example of how to make invading and occupying a country pay off big time economically (cf. American invasion of Iraq 2003 for what not to do).

Full post, including comments

Starting in July police will begin searching subway riders at random in Boston, according to this article.  I’ve always like the T because it is one of the few dog-friendly mass transit systems in the U.S.  Probably best to leave at home anything that you don’t want the police to find, however.  It isn’t clear how effective this is going to be as a security measure.  Just as we often see airport security folks taking apart 85-year-old grandmothers the Boston police say “the planned searches will randomly pick out riders and are not aimed at singling out anyone”.

Full post, including comments

According to this recent New Yorker magazine article, Ahmad Chalabi, formerly Our Man in Iraq, is an MIT graduate.  The article also talks about the spectacular ups and downs of his life.  He went from being a math professor in Lebanon to head of the 2nd-largest bank in Jordan.  Just like a modern American executive, he practiced some creative accounting…

“An Arthur Andersen audit commissioned by Jordanian authorities found that the bank had overstated its assets by more than three hundred million dollars. In addition, a hundred and fifty-eight million dollars had disappeared from its accounts, apparently as a result of transactions involving people linked to the former management.”

After the bank collapsed, Chalabi turned to making his living from covert CIA funding.  After a falling out with the CIA he still managed to get $97 million in overt funding from the U.S. taxpayers beginning with the October 1998 passage of the Iraq Liberation Act.

Interesting and inspiring reading.

Full post, including comments

Took the airplane down to my hometown of Washington, DC for a bit of exercise this weekend.  The city was built to awe the citizens with an inhuman scale.  Plazas are vast and the Mall itself is a forbidding barrier if you’re trying to walk from place to place on a hot or cold day (the architects who wrote A Pattern Language concluded that no public square would be effective unless it was small enough that people could recognize each other from opposite ends).  The government buildings are huge and discourage casual entry by being set back from the street and not having any retail shops on the ground floor as a commercial office building might.

The D.C. of my childhood is vastly different from the D.C. of today.  Those imposing buildings that symbolize the government’s power are now wrapped in concrete highway barriers that broadcast the government’s fear of a lone terrorist driving a truck filled with a fertilizer bomb.  Around the Federal Reserve building, for example, the barriers cover part of the sidewalk so as a pedestrian you’re separated from the street by a wall of concrete.  The effect is certainly ugly and it will be interesting to see what happens if a beautiful Old World city such as Paris needs to be secured against lone terrorists in trucks.    But in a way the cowering of the government marks the triumph of the individual in American society.  “God created men; Colonel Colt made them equal” wasn’t quite right after all.  It was the terrorists who blew up the Marine compound in Beirut and those who blew up the World Trade garage in 1993 who actually made individual men the equals of government.

There is one new building in Washington, D.C. that harks back to an era when governments were all-powerful and individual men and women subordinate:  the World War II Memorial.  This is at the east end of the Reflecting Pool and adjacent to the Washington Monument (now wrapped in an ugly high security fence).  The new monument looks as though it was built by Soviet architects and indeed looks a lot like the WWII memorial in East Berlin.  The thing is huge and it makes one pause and reflect… “We’d better not start any more wars or we’re going to run out of space on the Mall.”

[My visit to the Memorial coincided with protests in Europe against American power in the form of George W. Bush, visiting to celebrate the American victory over the Germans in Italy.  Picking up on the theme of an earlier entry, I suppose it would not have been very politic of him to respond by saying “We’re sincerely sorry for being so bellicose and we’re going to show it by giving Italy back to the Germans…”]

Overall I still love Washington, D.C.  Where else can you drive on a riverside parkway, 100-percent paid for with Federal tax dollars, and pass adjacent signs reading “The George Bush Center for Intelligence” and “Turkey Run”?

Full post, including comments

Just back from seeing the movie “Super-size Me” and it occurred to me that, in an age of limitedless wealth, cheap food, and universal private automobiles, nutrition is best not left to amateurs (i.e., us).  Consider the process of going to a restaurant.  You, a completely ignorant and probably somewhat fat person, walk in and they hand you a long menu of potential dishes.  For each dish the menu lists a tiny fraction of the ingredients but does not fully disclose sauces or overall calories.  Even if the content of each item were fully disclosed it wouldn’t do most of us much good because most of us don’t know how many calories are appropriate.  Finally there is the problem that everyone gets the same quantity of food.  If you’re a 5′-tall woman and order “Chicken surprise” you get the same quantity of food as a 6′-tall man who orders the same dish.

Here’s an idea for a restaurant…  You walk in and give them the following information:  (1) height, (2) weight, and (3) whether or not you have exercised today.  They come back to you with a few choices, e.g., “fish, chicken, steak, or vegetarian?”  You choose one of those and finally an appropriately-sized quantity of food shows up on your table.  This is, I think, how the $1000/day fat farms operate.  But in an age of computerization it doesn’t seem as though it would cost a standard restaurant anything more to operate this way.

Thoughts?

[P.S.  I went through a 3-month period in which I ate almost every meal at McDonalds.  This was in 1993 while driving to Alaska and back (see Travels with Samantha).  I was a graduate student and the 59-cent hamburgers, 99-cent chicken fajitas, and drive-thrus were hard to resist.  I was about 30 years old and a tiny bit pudgy when I started the trip.  I probably lost at least 5 lbs. during that period.  I didn’t order fries or regular (sugar) Coke and I was riding my bike every few days.]

Addendum:  It occured to me after posting this that existing menu-based restaurants could adopt this system without chucking out their menu.  You tell them what you want plus your height and weight.  They then size the portions of your appetizer, entree, and dessert so that the total calorie count is appropriate.

Full post, including comments