Class Warfare

The Associated Press (via the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto) writes of the President's "Buffett rule" idea:

"Warren Buffett's secretary shouldn't pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett. There is no justification for it," Obama said as he announced his deficit-reduction plan this week. "It is wrong that in the United States of America, a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should pay higher tax rates than somebody pulling in $50 million."

On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.

The 10 percent of households with the highest incomes pay more than half of all federal taxes. They pay more than 70 percent of federal income taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office....

There may be individual millionaires who pay taxes at rates lower than middle-income workers. In 2009, 1,470 households filed tax returns with incomes above $1 million yet paid no federal income tax, according to the Internal Revenue Service. But that's less than 1 percent of the nearly 237,000 returns with incomes above $1 million.

This year, households making more than $1 million will pay an average of 29.1 percent of their income in federal taxes, including income taxes, payroll taxes and other taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

Households making between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay an average of 15 percent of their income in federal taxes.

Lower-income households will pay less. For example, households making between $40,000 and $50,000 will pay an average of 12.5 percent of their income in federal taxes. Households making between $20,000 and $30,000 will pay 5.7 percent.

The latest IRS figures are a few years older — and limited to federal income taxes — but show much the same thing. In 2009, taxpayers who made $1 million or more paid on average 24.4 percent of their income in federal income taxes, according to the IRS.

Those making $100,000 to $125,000 paid on average 9.9 percent in federal income taxes. Those making $50,000 to $60,000 paid an average of 6.3 percent.

The country can have a reasonable debate about whether the very wealthy should pay even more in taxes than they do. The country can have a related reasonable debate over the capital gains tax rate, various tax breaks that both reduce tax revenue and create market distortions.* But we can’t have a reasonable debate in which one side says, falsely, that, on average, millionaires pay less in tax, or at a lower tax rate, than middle-class workers.

This reminds me of the debate over the merits of raising the minimum wage back in the mid-90s. Economists David Card and Alan Krueger (the same Alan Krueger who is now tapped to head the Council of Economic Advisors) conducted a study of the effect on employment of raising the minimum wage in New Jersey, and concluded that the higher minimum wage actually increased employment. Now, one could imagine that the effect on employment was essentially zero, or, more likely, that a small decrease in employment occurred but other factors that the authors couldn’t control for more than offset the decrease, but it’s not possible to have a serious conversation about the minimum wage if one side insists that demand curves for labor slope upward.

If, indeed, Warren Buffett - reportedly worth many billions of dollars - is paying a lower average tax rate than his secretary, shame on us. However, if he understands that this is a bad situation for the country and continues to do so while lobbying to have the rule changed, shame on him.

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* For example, mortgage interest deduction, which benefits the middle class (as the poor tend not to own houses and the very rich tend not to have mortgages), encourages home ownership at the expense of the rental market. While home ownership has its benefits, it has costs as well, including increasing the costs of moving.

Flying in the Dark

For the first time in...well, ever, I changed the blog layout. Normal people would do so to shake things up, provide new visual interest, perhaps modernize a dated look.

Not me. Nope. I did it to solve a problem. Ever since I started using Mars Edit to upload entries, the pictures have been huge. I'm guessing that Blogger itself has some magic to shrink pictures to some predefined sizes, whereas Mars Edit just sends 'em the way they are. I'll eventually track down an easy way to resize the things before inserting them, I suppose.

What this has meant is that the pictures kept getting cut off by Blogger. As Mrs. Volare thoughtfully pointed out, the picture of the Vicereine a few posts back originally cut the poor lady in two. (I fixed that by deleting the original picture from the site and manually inserting it again in Blogger, which made it fit.) Interestingly, the "Preview" mode of Blogger doesn't use the template of the actual site, so the pictures showed up just fine, as they also do in Mars Edit.

I played with the HTML code in the original template and widened the text area, which made the entire picture appear. Unfortunately, the background (a yellowed parchment look) was a .jpg stored on some other server and not something I could edit, so the edge of the "parchment" went right through the text. Very distracting.

I thought about removing the background, but seemed easier to change templates. (One day, I've promised myself, I will know enough about this stuff to do it from scratch.) This one has the text on the left and seems to allow the pictures to stretch themselves across the canvas as far as they are inclined - even if it means encroaching on other elements of the page, such as the blogroll, which is why I moved that to the bottom. (Just in case you still want to see who hasn't updated her site in over six months. Heh.) The pictures are big, which may increase page load times. Then again, they show more detail. I waffle about how quickly I want to deal with this issue. In the meanwhile, problem solved.

Anyway, a long post about a small issue.

A Very Special Episode

[N.B. on the title, for those who didn't grow up watching television in the 70s and 80s. Once upon a time, in the 1980s, I believe, when advertisements for television shows had a different character than they do today, it was fashionable to generate interest in a long-running series with A Very Special Episode of [fill in the show - Blossom seemed to enjoy this trope a great deal]. This was usually the episode that dealt with Important Subject Matter: death, jail time, first period. Sometimes the lazy producers took the opportunity to make a clips show. I don't miss that trope. Much. Welcome to our clips show. - RJ]

In one of life's little coincidences, I noticed that the thousandth entry into this little Aetheric Journal more or less coincided with its third anniversary. Of course, that means it's time for a Very Special Episode, including a somewhat random walk down memory lane.

I no longer recall the (doubtless faulty) decision-making process that induced me to start this Journal in the first place. One likely motivation was that all the cool kids were doing it, which is, of course, the worst possible reason to do something. Ego was surely another motivation, and, again, not the best one. However, I suspect that the main reason I did it was to chronicle for my own amusement, and that of anyone who cared to read it, my ongoing explorations of Places I Visited and Things I Did in our corner of the grid.

My rez day was in early February 2008. I picked up some needed skills along the way - I have nightmares about the noob duck walk to this day - and stumbled across the Steamlands, in the form of Caledon, not terribly long thereafter. I lurked for a bit, but eventually persuaded myself that I needed a permanent home, and sent a note to the Guvnah asking him to place me on the land waiting list - a feature of the strong state of Second Life in general and Caledon in particular. I resigned myself to a fairly lengthy wait, but Guvnah Shang responded in fairly short order that he was opening a new area of Caledon relatively soon - Caledon Downs - and I was able to buy one of the first parcels there as soon as the engineers had tamed the once-wild area.

This was also around the time that the Caledon and Winterfell mushrooms began appearing. In my obsessive way, I started collecting the various types, eventually ending up with a complete set, but acquiring many copies of the more common varieties along the way (along with a few repetitive strain problems). Thus, the Journal started with this entry, complete with a typo in the title. Sheesh.

June 10, 2008: Eating mushrooms indiscriminately does not pay

Caledon had a substantial entry at SLB5, Second Life's birthday party for itself. Despite my nervousness, I visited. (I assumed correctly that the build would be filled with Caledonians, so I could hardly do my usual lurking. Of course, nearly everyone in the Steamlands is polite to a fault, even to - or perhaps especially to - the clueless newcomer - but that was of little comfort to my nervous self.) Among other things, I learned how important Relay for Life was to the Guvnah and thus to Caledon.

June 24, 2008: Caledon at SLB5, Part 2

Speaking of Relay for Life, the 2008 relay took place in July. I had no idea what to expect, other than lots of lag, but I went anyway. I am amazed at the dedicated people who battle the lag for hours on end to run. I have low tolerance for lag and a short attention span, and I certainly don't have the energy to be awake and online for that many hours!

July 22, 2008: Relay for Life 2008

I don't know whose idea it was to create a volcanic island filled with clues to hidden sites, a Ceiling Cat and a Basement Cat, and a multitude of lethal things. The cats sound like the Guvnah, the murderous turkeys and such are the brainchild of Mr. Denver Hax, and the combination was the short-lived Caledon colony of Mondserrat. All I can say is that it's a good thing death is not permanent on the grid. As I later came to expect with Caledon, the island came to an explosive end one day, though any number of people seemed willing to keep dancing through it all.

January 24, 2009: Return to Mondserrat

Caledon wasn't the only Steampunk game in town, of course. Steelhead and New Babbage were there and, later, Steeltopia. Other Steampunk sims came and went. Some had a purer role playing focus - something I never managed to get into, largely because I'm too lazy to be in character all the time and partly because I had too many other places to see. At any rate, Rivet Town was one of the best: two sims of a dark Steampunk build with an interesting back story that created "haves" and "have nots" pitted against one another. Alas, it didn't last.

February 24, 2009: Beneath Rivet Town

My older sister Kathy eventually joined me in Caledon and in writing this Journal. I also rekindled my love of writing fiction, and placed several short stories in the stream (something I've neglected of late and, for better or worse, intend to return to). One can't help but hear of Gor and the various Gorean sims in Second Life. I couldn't believe that so many people were willing to role play a horribly misogynistic fantasy world, but I also naively thought that, as with so many adaptations of (particularly science fiction) books, surely the John Norman novels describe a more subtle and palatable version of this universe. I bought the first book in the series, a wretchedly-written, cringe-inducing screed, and realized how wrong I was. Ah well. That experience inspired this little adventure.

March 24, 2009: Jamesons of Gor

One of the things noobies have trouble with is the degree to which Second Life residents take their virtual private property seriously. I can't stand ban lines (which, fortunately, the major Steamlands sims prohibit), but I'll respect a "private property" sign and would never dream of walking into someone's occupied house. Sometimes it's less clear when something is intended to be a private area. Outside of Second Life, no one would consider walking into a laboratory, even if the door happened to be unlocked. Within Second Life, and especially within the Steamlands, a laboratory looks like the sort of thing that lends itself to exploration. Kathy thought so, at least. This led to an amusing set of comments.

April 28, 2009: I Venture into Mason Labs

Speaking of Kathy and Steelhead...

May 20, 2009: Dr. Alter Receives a Package

Kathy also ventured to New Babbage to cover the coup - an ingenious bit of role playing to cover real life exigencies - and the underground movement to oust the new overlord.

June 26, 2009: Obolenskidonia, or New Babbage Changes Hands

Another event for a good cause is the now-annual Boobie Ball, raising money for breast cancer research. (The group tag is the delightful "Saving Second Base," although those outside the U.S. may not have that idiom in their vocabularies.) What's not to love? Dancing, socialization, a good cause, and public nudity! (The link below contains only shots with everyone appropriately clad. I did a follow-up "after dark" that was most definitely not safe for work, assuming that one's workplace considers virtual nudity equivalent to the real thing.)

October 4, 2009: Boobie Ball - The Family-Friendly Edition

I don't recall how I came to know of the Aether Salon, but once I started attending I have made every effort to attend the monthly salons. The organizers - Miss Viv Trafalgar, Miss Sera Puchkina, Miss Jed Dagger, and Mr. Jasper Kiergarten (I hope I didn't inadvertently slight anyone) - get a guest speaker to spend 45 minutes to an hour holding forth on a topic of interest to the Victorian/Steampunk community, and take questions from the sometimes rowdy audience. The organizers have lured an impressive array of luminaries from the Steamlands and elsewhere to give us their thoughts on subjects such as effective use of language in role-playing, submersibles, weapons, and furnishings. The example below involved Mr. Edward Pearse holding forth on the topic of men's clothing in Victorian times. The Salon is steaming toward its third year with no signs of slowing down.

February 22, 2010: Aether Salon: Haberdashery!

One of the things that Second Life brings to the table, or so it seems to me, is that ability to create interactive role-playing scenarios. Each person brings a backstory that is generally consistent with the mythos of a particular area, such as the Steamlands, and the players jointly develop a story line. This has worked very well on occasion: Hotspur O'Toole had a lengthy adventure story that intersected with a number of other storylines - some tangentially, some intimately - and Ryne Beck/Headburro Antfarm set his "Steal Head" story in Steelhead Shanghai, interacting with many regular Steelhead role players, and especially Dr. Mason and his unusual clan. The problem with this approach is that it takes a great deal of coordination, which takes time. My alternative was to make reference to two ongoing story lines: Dr. Beck in Steelhead Shanghai and Dr. Mason hiding out in New Babbage as "The Scientist."

March 29, 2010: The Scientist, Part 1

One of Caledon's most impressive builds is its Steam Sky City, which has long been in the care of Mr. and Mrs. Vivito Volare, well before the happy couple was, in fact, the happy couple. One creation of their inventive minds was the Mad Scientist Convention, now in its third year. For the past two years, part of the convention involved the Manifesto Contest, in which bold Misunderstood Geniuses would step on a soapbox to deliver their proposed agendas as our overlords, should any of their plans for world domination actually succeed.

May 4, 2010: Manifesto Contest

Another favorite activity is Mr. Pearse's more-or-less-monthly Breakfast in Babbage, in which Mr. Pearse spins platters from his eclectic and apparently boundless music collection, organized around a particular theme. For example, in the link below, the theme was Money, a topic of many a song.

August 16, 2010: Breakfast in Babbage - Money

During a lull in the Steal Head story, I wanted to do my part to maintain interest in it, so I inserted myself into the story in a minor way.

October 10, 2010: In Search of Steal Head

A belatedly-discovered pleasure was the annual New Babbage mystery orchestrated by Master Loki. He lays out clues that, if properly followed, lead one to the solution of a crime. They require a fair amount of knowledge of New Babbage and some clever thinking, though occasionally one might find some assistance from Babbagers. I participated in the last two, and look forward to this year's episode.

December 20, 2010: The Adventure of the Black Heart, Part 1

One of the things this Journal has chronicled over the past three years has been the tremendous changes that take place within Second Life and particularly within the Steamlands. As the saying goes, the only constant is change. I miss old friends who have moved on; I've made new friends; I miss some of the wonderful builds that have disappeared; I continue to marvel at new ones. Perhaps I've lost some of the wonder I had when I was new (and so was the world), but I still look forward to my (ever-shrinking) time inworld because it's inherently a place of optimism. Unlike this first life of ours, here each controls her own destiny. I thank you all for reading these scribblings, Dear Readers, and for sharing some of my journey with me.

The Fine Art of Procrastination

I find the most absurd ways of procrastinating. There's the obvious: playing 20 consecutive hands of Solitaire, or watching TV. There's the "I'm getting organized. No, really" category: fiddling with my to-do lists in Remember the Milk, sorting out that drawer used for tossing miscellaneous papers over the past six months, inventorying printer inks. Finally, there's the "Don't bother me with work, I'm learning stuff" excuses: RSS feeds on technology, podcasts on *ahem* being productive or organizing one's life, reading books about the zen of organization. Part of my mind tells me that if I had the right journal, a better pen, the perfect task software, or an improved organizational plan I could get great things done.

But the rational part of my mind knows that the only thing getting in the way of my productivity is me. Putting a blog entry together requires typing one sentence, then the next, then the next. Creating a research paper involves actually doing the research, then writing things down. It's not rocket science. (I've always wondered what rocket scientists say when they want to indicate that something isn't mysteriously hard.) Creativity is hard, though, and we all have our avoidance mechanisms. The rational part knows what the lazy, procrastinating part is doing, but it sometimes powerless to stop it.

I tend to think that part of the solution is to develop good habits. (Naturally, there are blogs, podcasts, and God-knows what else to help develop good habits. Resist, lazy part of the mind!) Set aside certain times when I'm likely to be (a) productive and (b) uninterrupted, and use that time to put together sentences. Not every day will lend itself to keeping to the schedule - life is nothing if not unpredictable, and work colleagues tend to drop in just at the time I've gotten started on a project, as though they know how to wreak the most havoc on my day, but getting a better routine isn't an impossible job.

I've been hearing this advice for some time now, from Mur Lafferty's I Should be Writing podcast to Merlin Mann's advice, most recently on his podcast with Dan Benjamin, Back to Work. (Mann and Benjamin are aware of the irony of having a time-sucking podcast about being productive, but that's what lunch breaks are for.) It just takes a while for the advice to sink in. I'm sure there's some scientific explanation based on survival characteristics and evolution: primitive man needed to conserve energy for hunting and gathering, so those with the lazy gene survived better than the gung-ho Neanderthals. True or not, it's just an excuse now.

I think I've earned myself working a Sudoku...

Crabaholics Anonymous

Hi! My name is Rhianon, and I'm a crabaholic. ("Hi, Rhianon!")

I complain a lot. It's a fault, I freely admit. I'm here today with my fellow problem complainers in order to do something about it.

Honestly, I often have no idea why petty things annoy me so. Some people have a great deal to complain about. Their spouses beat them; their cars break down and they can't afford the repairs; their jobs don't pay well, or have disappeared. Serious stuff.

Me, I complain about the trivia in life. I don't get a good seat on the train, or I end up sharing the seat with a seat hog. The guy in the quiet car has now taken three cell phone calls in fifteen minutes. It took me 45 minutes instead of two to change an outdoor light bulb that rusted in the socket and broke when I tried to remove it. I could go on, but you get the idea. Heck, I complain incessantly about my job even though it pays pretty well and my boss and colleagues are pretty good people. Sure, it's annoying that my wise advice is ignored consistently, but as long as the paycheck keeps coming, what's the real problem? And who among us hasn't felt that her great thoughts have been ignored?

What makes me a crabaholic? Damned if I know, except... I think that complaining about our lot is part of human nature. We worry about things, complain about things, most of the time concerning ourselves with things we can't change. We want to believe there is order in the universe, so we take personally things that are almost surely not personal. Yes, that tuneless whistling is highly irritating, but, thought about rationally, the whistler is surely not doing so to annoy those around him. (The seat hog, on the other hand...)

I'm not a big believer in New Year's resolutions. They tend to be grandiose and unachievable, and, when they are not achieved, create a sense of letdown. I'm going to write the Great American Novel this year, or walk two miles a day. Okay, two miles starting the day after tomorrow. Maybe a mile next week? But the constant crabbing about things was starting to get even me down, so I grabbed my little book of meetings and wandered down to this church basement to drink some bad coffee - oops, there I go again - and tell you my story.

The first step in solving a problem is recognizing the problem exists. When I find myself getting irritated at something, I've stepped back and asked myself why I find it irritating, and whether it's really a big deal. This method hasn't stopped the world from irritating me entirely, but it has given me a little perspective about not sweating the small details.

Not that it's been easy. I was doing fairly well - some minor episodes of falling off the perspective wagon - until the other night, when my commuter train broke down and we sat in the dark. For an hour. While the next train whizzed by. No announcements, other than vague, inaccurate, and out-of-date emails. The next train arrived, parked, and took those passengers close enough to a conductor to hear that we had a method of escape. My car was still left in the dark, both literally and figuratively. We eventually got going, whatever problem with the engine resolved, and made it home an hour and a half late. Needless to say, I was grumpy. I think there was a real grievance: that communication, both from whatever entity controlled information about a rescue train and from the conductors aboard our train, could have been vastly improved. On the other hand, engines do break down because of things beyond the control of anyone in the system, and we did manage to make it home, so getting frustrated at the entire situation was probably not the right reaction.

Ah well. Consider this a work in progress.

Fostering a Culture of Fiscal Irresponsibility

When I started with my current employer (a medium-sized Federal agency) back in the early 90s, we had a smaller professional staff than we do now, and many more “support” personnel whose jobs were no longer necessary now that everyone had a capable personal computer.* We had a higher project load than we do now, and that load increased substantially during the go-go years of the mid- to late-90s and early 2000s. Back then, every professional staffer in my part of the organization had at least one, and often two, major projects underway with one or two more in some sort of minimal-work stage, plus several longer-term projects.** Now, the volume of work has diminished substantially – partly because of the recession – while the number of professionals has increased – in part because of agency growth and in part because of substitution away from support personnel to professional staff. As a consequence, the workload per employee has diminished dramatically.

The workload would have diminished even further had it not been for a collective decision to undertake projects with ever-decreasing rates of return. Although government agencies have a very different purpose and approach than profit-maximizing entities, think of this as equivalent to an oil exploration company hiring new engineers at the same time oil prices are falling, and then justifying the added expense by drilling in increasingly unlikely spots. Sure, one or two of those exploratory wells in unusual formations may yield some oil, but most will be predictable busts.

Of course, in the corporate world, a firm that makes continual expensive mistakes will eventually come under pressure to change course. Earnings will fall, the stock price will fall, shareholders will complain, and the Board of Directors will eventually be forced to act or be replaced. Government has those pressures only indirectly: if voters get fed up with the psychic rate of return they’re getting from the bureaucracy, they can replace the men and women who control the overall agenda and purse (Congress) and the man or woman who appoints people to set the specific agenda (the President). The voters can’t directly replace a single person who works at this agency.***

The bureaucratic imperative, whether in the private or public sector, is to build one’s empire. Growth is essential to the process. The manager demands more staff, a bigger budget, more responsibility. I suspect this is part self-selection – those satisfied with the status quo tend not to go into management – and part self-preservation – if your colleagues are all playing this game, it’s professional suicide to stand on the sidelines.**** As an employee, I’m glad to know there is someone in my part of the organization fighting for budget dollars for my stuff, whether it’s new computer equipment, better office furniture, or more colleagues. I’m glad to know that my agency is skilled at wooing politicians and justifying its existence. But it's not necessarily a good thing from a more global perspective.

Having continuity across political eras is a good thing. From a staff perspective, it would be horrible to know that a Republican Congress meant a staff of 500 and a Democratic Congress meant a staff of 1000. Who would want such a job? The human cost of firing people is enormous. Fortunately, there seems to be a bipartisan more-or-less consensus about the value of the agency and its work.

But the system provides no mechanism for checking whether the size of the agency is a little too big or a little too small. (Or a lot too big or small, I suppose, but let’s focus on gradual change.) Yes, ultimately Congress gets to decide on a budget for the agency and can control the mission of the agency,^ but how much time can be spent worrying about the details of one agency? If Congress is out there printing and spending money as fast as the presses will operate, a request for another $20 million next year is likely to be met with a yawn and speedy approval. If Congress is practicing some form of austerity, the agency budget may not grow, and may even shrink, but again without much thought about the specific nature of what we do, how it fits into an overall government agenda, and what should be the appropriate amount of that work. Even an austere Congress is more likely to shrug and declare that all agencies will take an x% budget cut, rather than think through the right size of every individual agency.^^

I look around the office and see enormous amounts being spent – on more personnel, more office space, trips around the country for one reason or another – and look at the relatively low capacity utilization, especially relative to the mid-90s, and wonder why it is that we keep hiring people. This seems especially cruel if anyone thinks we’re likely to have a budget cut of any real magnitude: people just hired will be let go, having disrupted their lives to move here and possibly having turned down alternative offers.

Whose fault is this, anyway? I can’t blame my bosses, who are fighting for resources with other divisions. I can’t blame the other divisions for the same reason. I suppose I could blame the agency heads for not being responsible adults and asking Congress for less money – “Hey guys, good news for you this year: we’re seeing less business, so we don’t need quite as many people. We’ll be back asking for a budget increase when the time comes where we need the money.” – but it’s like blaming the lion in the zoo for eating the tourist who falls in. Lions do what they’ve evolved to do, and bureaucrats are no different. Ultimately, the buck stops with Congress. If they would scrutinize agency requests for more money with a critical eye, instead of spending their time naming Post Offices and dreaming up creative ways to spend more borrowed money, perhaps they’d be more effective at oversight. I have my doubts, though. The government is just too big, with too many agencies serving too many constituencies, for one organization to monitor effectively all its parts.

The problem isn’t limited to government, of course. Universities are notorious for increasing the number of faculty, departments, degrees, administrators, and what not, and grabbing as much land as possible. No one ever steps back and says, “Gee, was developing a cross-discipline program in the economics of chemical engineering Chinese literature during the Han dynasty really a worthwhile venture for us?” Instead, the ambition of universities tends to be limited only by the available budget. Churches tend to have an odd sort of mission creep as well, and corporations, despite the discipline imposed by the financial market, are not immune.^^^ Companies often think that being successful in one area gives them license to expand into other arenas, often beyond their competence, and almost surely without the degree of success of the first project.

Mind you, I'm not suggesting layoffs. I know the human cost of eliminating positions. And the government, bless its heart, has the luxury of not being subject to the harsh discipline of the market, so agencies have the ability to recalibrate their work force in a kinder way than the private sector. That's a good thing for the human capital involved, even if it's not as efficient as it could be. The labor market is flexible, a truly remarkable thing, but it is not frictionless. It takes time and considerable emotional energy to rebound from losing a job and to find another one. The solution isn't to halve the size of my agency overnight.

However, people retire and people move to other positions. If we should really be, say, 20% smaller than we are, a plan to get us from here to there would be a good thing. Losing 4% a year for five years could likely be achieved fairly painlessly. Yet I have the uneasy feeling that no one is looking that far ahead, and that one day someone will wake up and decide that the 20% reduction needs to be done in one fell swoop. That would be very painful.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to make myself useful while waiting for business to pick up...

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*For example, we had remnants of the old typing pool (now called “secretaries,” but, let’s face it, the amount of secretarial work hadn’t increased when the typing pool suddenly became outmoded) and an entire statistical division that essentially did basic data collation and calculations – essential once upon a time but an anachronism once Lotus 1-2-3, VisiCalc, and Excel arrived.

**I know the word “project” covers a multitude of tasks. I realize I’m being somewhat cryptic for the sake of privacy, which is a little silly given the nature of this post. But that’s the way it is. Looks, this isn’t Wikileaks; I’ve got legal confidentiality requirements in addition to personal privacy issues. Think of a project as requiring an average of 10 hours per week for an average of six months, though the variance on that is enormous.

***Nor should they.

****Heh – I worked in a sports metaphor!

^Sometimes the crazy folks micro-manage the damn place, down to demanding specific reports on specific topics. Don’t they have anything better to do under that big ol’ dome anchoring the National Mall? What a world! But I digress.

^^An oft-heard proposal these days is to fund the government at 2008 levels. A supporter of Big Government would lament the need to make significant cuts while a supporter of Small(er) Government would note that 2008 levels were significantly higher in real dollars than even a few years earlier and can’t be much of a hardship. Neither side would spend much time arguing about whether 2008 funding is appropriate everywhere.

^^^And, lest you all think I protest too much, my agency is far from the worst offender of even my limited knowledge. We may be overstaffed, but we’re overstaffed, by and large, with smart people who are interested in doing their jobs well. I try to remind myself of that on days when some of my colleagues severely try my patience.

The Ways of the Spammer are Mysterious, My Child

I take the point of view that if I want something from other people, I should make it as easy as possible. I like comments - hey, it's nice to know that someone actually reads these meandering entries - so I got rid of the need to type in the blurry, slanty word to prove that you're a machine that can read blurry, slanty words, and not a human being who can't read blurry, slanty words. Or something like that.

From others' experiences, I knew that there were such things as blog spammers - automated thingies that put links to male enhancement products and such into unsuspecting blogs' comments - but I figured there wouldn't be an intolerable number; after all, you lovely people are in a special minority even knowing of the existence of these scrivenings. Because Blogger tags most of these as spam, the comments usually don't show up on the blog even for the day or two it would take for me to remember to check and take them down.

For the most part, that hasn't been a bad assumption. I seem to be averaging one or two spam comments per post, which is easy enough to clean up once or twice a week. I haven't regretted turning off the slanty, blurry feature. What gets me is that anyone finds this technique to be effective. I've had what appear to be links to er*tic sites in German, and something completely incomprehensible in Cyrillic. I've had comments that were obviously spam, but entirely nonsensical - did those comments contain a nasty virus that was stripped out by Blogger and/or Gmail, so it appeared to me as plain text nonsense? Who clicks on these links? Who reads my Caledon blah blah blah and then decides that a male enhancement product is just the thing? Haven't these people heard of targeted marketing? We're living in a world of increasingly targeted advertising - your cell phone can send you come-ons for the coffee shop you're about to pass - so why don't the spammers do a little targeting themselves? I wouldn't find it nearly so bothersome if the come-ons were for Steampunk jewelry on etsy, or a promotional piece for the Clockwork Cabaret.

Second Life in a Browser; or, the Unwanted Guest

I greeted with mixed emotions Linden Lab's announcement that they were beta testing a way of logging into Second Life through a browser. On the one hand, it's not always convenient or even possible to load the full Second Life client onto a computer, and it would be worthwhile at times to be in-world even in a limited way. On the other hand, a stripped-down version that allows users to interact but not create seems like another step along the journey away from "Your World" to "Our World," from fabulous user creations to just a chat room with avatars. Nonetheless, I decided to try it out.

Point your browser to http://interest.secondlife.com/beta, wait for an ad to play while some magic occurs in the background (and, in my case, while a Java program is installed). When it's done, the screen says "Second Life is waiting for you" and prompts one to enter an email address to create a "guest" session. If successful - and I don't know the criteria for success; is it the PC's horsepower, memory, graphic card, or something else? - you have a temporary account that lasts for an hour, an a user first name of letters and numbers and the last name "Guest." There are about thirty locations in which to start; you can't teleport from any of them, but you can walk or fly across sims. For example, Winterfell Anodyne is one of the possible choices, but not Caledon. If you can discover which direction is south (no easy feat, as there is no minimap), you can fly to Caledon Cape Wrath. You are given a default avatar, but can easily change it to one of the other choices; as far as I can tell, no other editing options are available.

I was given the avatar of a macho male, with rippling muscles, cropped hair, beater T-shirt, dog tags, and camouflage pants. Fair enough. From my initial location in some sort of swamp, I switched to Winterfell, and from there flew to Cape Wrath and walked to Brigadoon, whereupon I met sister Kathy.

We had a special surprise, because the village of Brigadoon had appeared!




Below, the rare White Stag, Kathy, and Miss Guest, i.e., me.


Here is one of the female avatars, a biker chick of sorts.

The grand experiment ended a few minutes later, victim of a browser crash.

This is clearly beta software, but it's an intriguing start for running Second Life in a browser. Still, Winterfell is now overrun with "Guests," many of whom seem to be closely related to someone already in the Steamlands. Mindful of the adage that guests, like fish, begin to stink after three days, Linden Lab have limited their stay to an hour.

Modern Updates of Country Music

My ears often twists lyrics into words the ears want to hear, not the ones the singer actually said. As I was listening to the radio the other morning, I heard a country song in which the singer kept turning his truck around at the Georgia state line, but I never heard what the problem was. Was he not licensed to drive in Georgia? Did his route end in South Carolina? Or did he have a restraining order that kept him out of the state and therefore away from his true love? The last possibility intrigued me. Country songs are very tradition-bound, generally holding to a handful of well-worn themes - God, guns, pickup trucks, dogs, youthful hell-raising, the joys of family, and the heartbreak of cheatin' women - but perhaps the genre could use some updating. Here are some ideas:

For the Facebook generation: "He Unfriended Her Today" (to the tune of George Jones' classic "He Stopped Loving Her Today")

For the unhappy couple who has had to resort to the law to mediate the breakup: "I Got the Dog, She Got the Restraining Order"

For the true-blue boyfriend in an Internet romance: "I Walked the (Fiber Optic) Line"

For the country yuppies: "There's a Tear in My Microbrew"

For those who like Patsy Cline's "Crazy": "On Antipsychotics" ("I'm on antipsychotics/On antipsychotics for tryin'/On antipsychotics for cryin'/Over you.")

For the blue-collar crowd: "(I Moved) 16 Tonnes (That's 15.7472 Short Tons)"

For the transgendered: "A Boy Who Used to be Named Sue"

For the workplace litigation crowd: "Hey Good Lookin' (I Mean that In a Non-Harassing Way)"

For the greens: "Help My Prius Make It Through the Night"

For the politically-correct: "Mama, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up and Play Cowboys"

On the Reading of Books, and Stopping Thereof

Like many of you, I read a fair amount of fiction. Not highbrow stuff, mostly, but one cannot live on a diet of caviar and champagne; our budgets and digestive systems need the days of mac & cheese washed down with a club soda. I mention the Steampunk books in this Journal, but a high percentage of my reading list is mysteries, and I am a huge fan of Stephen King. Despite my alarmingly bad memory, which makes me unable to retain specific pieces of information for long periods, I always have at least two books going at once, and can have three or four in progress, picking up the plot where I left off.

However, I'm not a very fast reader, and I don't have a great deal of time each day to sit and read fiction. Most of my reading is done just before retiring for the night, in bed, nightcap by my side. (Some people like to watch television at this time of night. I'm open-minded about what you do in your bedroom, though I implore you TV-watchers to be kind to your neighbors in hotel rooms as it's hard to sleep with a rerun of Seinfeld coming through the paper-thin walls.) This means that I can complete about a book per week, give or take. Under the Dome, clocking in at 1200 pages or so, took a great deal more time, as did The Passage with its mere 750+ pages.* Because I read fiction for pleasure, I don't mind long books if they retain my interest. Every once in a while, though, a book doesn't retain my interest, or never captures it in the first place. What to do then?

Some writers - and writers are almost always voracious readers - are of the opinion that their time is too valuable to waste on uninteresting books. ("Some writers" is horribly vague, I realize, and that usage is often employed by lazy journalists to make an editorial comment without finding a proper source. You'll have to take my word for it that I have read this point of view more than once though I can't remember any specific instance.** I've long taken the opposite view, which is that, having invested in the book, I should do my best to finish it.*** This has caused me to spend countless hours slogging through something I don't really want to read in order to reach a conclusion I don't really care about.

A recent case in point: I just finished The Domino Men, by Jonathan Barnes. I really enjoyed his first book, The Somnambulist, which told the story of Edward Moon, a Victorian magician who also solved crimes, and Moon's sidekick, an enormously tall mute who with an addiction to milk (like a certain diminutive Clockwinder!). The book was an entertaining send-up of Holmesian detection and the Victorian fascination with the supernatural (and the modern fascination with the Victorian fascination with the supernatural, c.f. The Prestige). As a result, I picked up Barnes' next book without hesitation, thinking it would be set in the same era, even if it was not a direct sequel. However, The Domino Men is set in present times, and is narrated by Henry Lamb, a gentle soul who finds himself in the midst of a war between a beast called Leviathan, which has been promised the city of London by Queen Victoria, and a shadowy organization called the Directorate, in which Henry's grandfather was an important operator. While I found the book to be entertaining, I wasn't as engaged by it as by its predecessor. Several times I thought about moving on to the next book, but kept slogging.

Similarly, I started Stephen Hunt's The Court of the Air, a Steampunky (actually more fantasy) tale of intrigue filled with airships, clanks, a mysterious ruling class with its own covert military organization, and underground - literally as well as figuratively - revolutionaries, but I got bogged down around page 100 and never generated the enthusiasm to pick up the book again. I'm about 90% convinced I should just give up, but my subborn streak has yet to let go of the last 10%.

I've gotten better recently about getting on with books that don't thrill me. I am willing to skim paragraphs or entire pages, slowing down to read a passage carefully only if it seems as though the passage is important to understanding the plot. This seems like cheating, but then I realize there will be no test.

I'm interested in how others deal with the less-than-enthralling books they start.

Now where did I put that nightcap?

* Can't editors do something about the scourge of barbell-weight books?

** See above for my lamentation about my poor memory.

*** Economists refer to this as the "sunk cost fallacy," as consumers or other economic actors should recognize that sunk costs are irrelevant to how to act going forward. Hey, just because I understand the fallacy doesn't mean I act rationally.

In Which I Take a Sloppy Columnist to Task

[N.B. I try to keep that pesky "real life" thing to a minimum on this blog. I particularly try to keep anything remotely political out of it because I have a sense that, as Victorian understatement might put it, not all of my readers necessarily agree with my views 100% of the time. However, I couldn't resist this one and, for what it's worth, I'd like to think this is less a matter of right- versus left-wing and more a matter of decent economics and common sense. - RJ]

It must be difficult to come up with topics for two columns per week. Some weeks the ideas may not be there; other weeks the ideas may flow freely but the writing does not. On the other hand, the columnist doesn't have to pound the beat the way a reporter does, and the columnist can fire away with her opinions, so many reporters think having a column is a good gig. Consequently, I don't have much sympathy for the howler of a column that Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein put to paper on July 28.

His premise is that the U.S. economy needs a tax increase. He never really explains why, other than to mention in passing "an investment agenda to match the global challenges we face." Unless he takes as given that all the government spending that's done is necessary, it's not clear why he doesn't consider the possibility of redirecting spending toward this "investment agenda," whatever that is. But that's neither here nor there. Pearlstein could certainly make a reasonable argument that the current political climate, in which the idea of any tax increase is anathema, is unhealthy. The 2010 top marginal tax rate for personal income is 35%, scheduled to increase to 39.6% next year. I have no idea whether 35% is "better" than 39.6%, or even how to define "better" in this context, because much of tax policy is a matter of opinion. Sure, higher marginal rates discourage employment decisions on the margin, but tax revenue is needed to run a government, and reasonable people can disagree about the right size of government and the best way to raise the required revenue.

Here are the real howelers in the Pearlstein column: first, "raising marginal tax rates on the rich wouldn't be a huge deal." He cites economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin to say that "excluding upper-bracket households [which Pearlstein doesn't define] from a one-year tax-cut extension would only reduce employment by 300,000 in 2012." I guess whether one thinks an addition 300,000 people out of work is worthy of the "only" in that sentence is a matter of opinion, but when the unemployment rate is pushing 10% it's hard to see an increase in that number to be a good thing.

Second, Pearlstein cites with approval testimony from Len Burman of the Tax Policy Center, a creation of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. "Burman's point was that spending by rich people wouldn't change much even after a modest tax increase because so much of their income is saved rather than spent." Ow! I got whiplash from that sentence! True, consumption spending as a percentage of income falls with income. But "rich" people don't put the money under the mattress, they invest it. The money ends up in the form of mortgage loans, or corporate stock or bond purchases, or venture capital funding. A tax increase, modest or not, takes some of this money out of the hands of the "rich" and puts it in the hands of Uncle Sam. Whether that's good or bad depends, in part, on what private investments the government spending crowds out.

Third, to support the proposition that government spending is better for the economy than an equivalent tax cut, he cites a January 2010 Congressional Budget Office report to say that a million dollars in increased unemployment assistance would lead to between six and fifteen additional jobs.* It's a jobs-creation machine! (True, it's not a very efficient one, if each job created costs roughly $100,000 per year, in perpetuity.) This is the kind of number that should make even the laziest columnist go dig into the document to find out what magic is behind the calculation, but Pearlstein takes it as gospel.

Finally, "it's hard to understand why a profitable company, seeing an opportunity to expand, would forgo hiring because the profits generated by new workers would be taxed at 40 percent rather than 35 percent." Sadly, this guy has a Pulitzer Prize for his business column. It's pretty obvious that after-tax profits of 65 percent are higher than those of 60 percent, so any venture that's close to break-even won't be made at the higher tax rate. As an example, suppose a small business making iPad apps thought of a new product. To get it to market, the firm would need to hire an additional programmer at $100,000 per year, and it would take a year to get the product to market, with no additional costs. Expected sales are $180,000. At a 35% tax rate, the expected gain is $117,000, while at a 40% tax rate the expected gain is $108,000. If the firm's opportunity cost of capital is more than 8% (accountants like to use the term "hurdle rate," which reflects the fact that the firm needs to be compensated for the risk of the venture), the tax increase will mean that the firm will not hire the programmer. Again, I'm not making a value judgment about whether the benefits of the additional tax revenue outweigh the costs to businesses and individuals, but to say that there is no tradeoff to be made is indefensible.

Again, this doesn't mean that Pearlstein is wrong to believe that modest tax increases on wealthy people will have modest adverse effects, and that the benefit to the economy outweighs those adverse effects. But Pearlstein hasn't made that case and, really, his readers deserve better analysis.

* See Table 1, p. 18, and the text on the subsequent pages. Pearlstein uses the last column, which is the cumulative effect on employment between 2010 and 2015. The methodology is opaque, but the CBO seems to be assuming that the effect on employment comes because the unemployed will spend the additional money on goods and services, thereby stimulating demand for those goods and services, thereby increasing hiring. This can only be true if the CBO also assumes the money borrowed for such spending is never repaid (or is repaid after 2015; note that "repayment" can take the form of higher taxes in future years); otherwise, the increased spending by the unemployed merely crowds out private consumption and investment, a point which the CBO studiously ignores.

National Loathing

As the U.S. heads into the July 4 weekend, one might take the time to reflect on, say, the liberties that we enjoy, or the shared values that we embrace. One might think it odd to use the occasion to lament that independence from Great Britain means we can't get a decent cup of tea; we have many other days in the year in which to embrace the glass-half-empty philosophy.

Yet the leader of a well-known Steampunk band chose to retweet the following: "In the US, the idea of a female president still weirds many out. Iceland's female prime minister just married her girlfriend." Perhaps the first sentence is true, though it lacks any firm empirical basis. Personally, I'd be delighted by a competent female President, though choosing a political leader on the basis of gender (or race, I might add) seems to be a poor method.* Let me concede that gender (or race) matters to some voters. There's no accounting for tastes. (This explains why Air Supply was once popular.)

The second sentence of the tweet was news to me, but let me applaud briefly and say "Yay, score one for love." I don't care for politicians, but that's no reason they shouldn't get married, whether here or in Iceland. But what am I to make of the juxtaposition of the two sentences? That the U.S. should be more like Iceland because voters in the latter country are willing to elect a woman? Or a lesbian? Or that Iceland permits gay marriage? Perhaps I'm reading too much into two brief sentences, but this seems an example of an unhealthy line of thinking that seems all too commonplace. "I dislike my country because many of its residents don't think like me." How sad for those people.

Now excuse me while I brew myself an all-American cup of Assam tea in my Caledon tea mug.

* Not to digress too badly, but I find it disconcerting when pundits suggest that women and racial or ethnic minorities are supposed to vote according to gender, race, or ethnicity. It's demeaning. We have an African American President precisely because the racial majority did not vote according to race, yet the minority is supposed to let skin color factor into the decision? Tsk, tsk.

A Miscellany of Books

Not really a review of anything, more like a few notes on recent books. I've been musing lately over when to give up on a book. I usually try to slog through to the end, and I try particularly hard if I've purchased the book (yes, it's the Sunk Cost Fallacy, I realize that). Sometimes, though, it's a struggle, and as my pile of unread books grows I'm more inclined to stop struggling.
I generally enjoy Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley novels, despite several maddening ones. (An aside: her 2006 outing, What Came Before He Shot Her, spends an entire book chronicling the young boy who killed a major character in the previous book. I should have give up on that one well before the end. It was a clumsy attempt at social commentary.) I was dismayed at the 700+ page behemoth that was This Body of Death, but I developed my arm strength - or kept it up, after Stephen King's 1000+ page Under the Dome - by reading it. Not bad for the last two hundred or so pages, but it took a lot of slogging to get there. Don't best-selling authors have editors? "Gee, Elizabeth, you've got a nice 300 page book here. Too bad it's more than twice that length."

Another book I nearly put down was Jeff VanderMeer's Finch. VanderMeer co-edited the anthology Steampunk, and an early review of Finch described the work as a Steampunk novel. Two problems: first, it's not remotely Steampunk. It's essentially a post-apocolyptic novel set in a city named Ambergris, which is under the rule of a fungal-based alien race. This leads to problem number two: it's not the first book VanderMeer has set in this universe, and Finch makes multiple references to earlier works and characters. Although it can be read as a stand-alone novel, I can't help but think I would have enjoyed it more having read the earlier books. It's another meaty tome, and for the first half or so it appears to be a detective novel - the title character is a police detective working for the alien "gray caps" and begins as Finch goes to the scene of a double homicide - before morphing into...well, it's not entirely clear what. Something else. Conspiracies abound, and, of course, the humans would like to overthrow their gray cap masters. Betrayals occur. Violence happens. I kept the pages turning, though, which I suppose is the point, or at least is half the author's battle.

I generally prefer novels to short stories because both require an investment in the characters and, especially in SF or fantasy, the world the author creates, and a novel allows both more latitude in developing characters and world and creates a lengthier payoff for the reader. But having lobster every night, no matter how good the lobster, starts wearing after a while. I find myself looking forward to the Neil Gaiman/Al Sarrantonio edited Stories, out June 15. The early reviews suggest that the quality of the tales is uneven. I don't find that surprising; even the stories of a single, talented author are of varying quality and, of course, subjectivity over different authors' styles comes into play in this kind of anthology. We'll see. Perhaps by the end of the summer I'll have made a noticeable dent in the pile of unread books. Now to find more places to store the read books...

My Ode to the Aetherwebs

One of the great things about the Aetherwebs is that it illustrates quite vividly that We Are Not Alone. Oh, I don't mean the extraterretials with whom we may or may not share a planet. I mean that, in a planet of six billion people, more or less, whatever your particular set of circumstances, someone out there shares those same circumstances.

Depressed? Plenty of fellow sufferers. Repetitive strain injuries? Ditto. Fetish for naked midgets? Yeah, probably that, too. In the pre-Aetherwebic Dark Ages, you might live in a small town where (a) it might be the case that no one else has what you have, and thus no one knows what you're going through, or (b) someone else does, but neither of you wants to admit it to the other. Alternatively, you might live in a large enough area to know that someone out there shares your problems, but you also have no way of contacting him or her for a little empathy.

So thanks to everyone who has shared something potentially embarrassing about herself, even if pseudonymously. Someone feels better because of it.

One of These Characters Will Die Tonight

I watch too much TV. It’s a vice I apparently share with a great many people, so there isn’t quite the social stigma attached to it as, say, heroin addiction, or liking the music of Miley Cyrus, but still, I have enough self-awareness to be mildly ashamed.

It’s that time of year again, when Sweeps Month meets the Season Finale extravaganza. For some reason, that got me thinking about the great Circle of (TV Show) Life. Back when writers and producers didn’t overthink things, each episode tended to stand alone. The end-of-season cliffhanger was something of a moot point, because there were no cliffs on which to hang. The Avengers replaced John Steed’s partner at least four times with nary a dramatic death or illness among them. (They explained Diana Rigg’s departure with two minutes at the very end of the episode, in which Emma Peel’s long-gone husband returned and collected her. I thought it was a big mistake, not the least of which was that kick-ass, independent Emma Peel meekly got in the passenger side of the car, just another 1960s TV wife. Gag. But I digress. These days, her departure would have taken at least half the episode, with some foreshadowing in three earlier episodes.)

Nowadays, after the Hollywood brain trust decided that the way to create loyal viewers was to have more crap about the characters’ lives cutting into the weekly stories, and to have story arcs that span episodes or even seasons, we have the spectacle of the Season-Ending Cliffhanger. “Who will live and who will die? Tune in tonight!”

One problem is that we don’t buy into certain types of cliffhangers. Their outcome is entirely predictable because, if the show is back, they can end in only one way. On Medium, the lead character has a brain tumor that – cue the dramatic music – could deactivate her psychic powers or kill her. Okay, and if that happens, do we rename the show Small and go on with just her widower (who can finally get a full night’s sleep) and her kids? Seems unlikely. On Bones, one of the two leads decides she doesn’t want to do this crime-fighting work any more. Oh really? Any chance of that lasting? Was Dr. House really going to spend the rest of his life in a mental institution, suffering from weird hallucinations? Seems doubtful.

Of course, you can kill off peripheral characters, or even main characters in ensemble shows. Get a big enough cast, and anything can happen. CSI lost William Peterson and went on (though he got the teary farewell, rather than the cliffhanger). And you can create plausible situations in which the principal setup of the show changes. When they “closed down the X Files” at the end of one of the early seasons of The X Files, you could imagine that Mulder would find paranormal cases even as he worked in some other unit of the FBI, or that he’d quit the FBI but would turn to his former partner to do the law enforcement bits. Okay, the betting was always on finding some excuse to get Mulder and Scully back in that basement office, chasing monsters on the taxpayer’s dime, but the alternative was at least conceivable.

It strikes me as cheap and lazy writing to get an emotional charge out of threatening the lives of characters we’ve come to know over the years. In some cases, perhaps it’s a matter of making a silk purse (ratings) out of a sow’s ear (the departure of an actor). Mostly, though, it’s an overused and hackneyed technique.

As it turns out, it’s a fairly ineffective technique on me. I have such a bad memory when it comes to such things that, by the time the new season rolls around, I’ve completely forgotten how the previous season ended. I’m not looking to see who survived the shootout at the lab because I no longer recall it.

My Sporadic Journal Entries

The regular reader of this Journal may have noticed that its frequency has declined recently. The frenetic pace of the first year and a half or so, in which I strove to have something in the feed on a daily or near-daily basis, has become a more genteel stroll of perhaps thrice weekly publication.

The reasons for this are several: my typist's obligations, which have reduced my in-world presence and my time available to compose these entries; my sibling's own adventures, which have left her tied up and unable to contribute as much as we both would like; fewer Victorian/Steampunk areas to visit; and, perhaps most of all, a certain lassitude in both my in-world wanderings and my typist's day-to-day activities.

I do not know whether those last two items are connected. It's possible that my frame of mind in-world reflects the heightened uncertainties of grid life in the past weeks: the coming of the abominable Viewer 2.0, the confused messages our Linden overlords are sending with regard to their vision of the world, friends either leaving entirely or cutting back their presence. However, I suspect that the culprit is my typist, who seems to suffer from a certain melancholia that waxes and wanes. The current waxing seems likely to be related, at least in part, to office-related events. (I realize that those of you who are currently between positions have no sympathy for a tough day/week/month/year at the office, and I expect none.) I assume the feeling will lift eventually and, in the meanwhile, I will just wait it out. Please bear with me.

Climate Science and Junk Science

For some reason, the climate has been on my mind. So let's talk about climate change. In particular, I want to focus on hypothesis testing.

Science is about creating hypotheses and testing those hypotheses in as controlled a setting as possible. If reality is at odds with a hypothesis, the hypothesis has to be modified or rejected outright. As a friend of mine noted, "Science is a harsh mistress."

It pains me, then, to see claims that unusually warm winters and unusually cold winters are both signs of climate change. Perhaps it's true, but it's not scientific evidence of a theory if both A and not A are supposed to support the same theory.

A number of news stories have come out recently that cast doubt on the accuracy of the science behind man-made climate change, starting with the release of the emails from East Anglia University and continuing with articles on how bits and pieces of evidence (shrinking rainforests, disappearing ice cover) were not measured scientifically, but were instead anecdotes from self-interested individuals. The cry from the warming alarmists is that these revelations change nothing. Really? Can't we agree that, while some bad science doesn't necessarily rebut the entire theory, evidence of bad science at least reduces our confidence in the theory?

I recently read that NBC, which is broadcasting the Vancouver Olympics in the U.S., is planning to make a big deal of the lack of snow in Vancouver and how this is also somehow related to global warming, er, climate change. (Interesting how the name changed!) But NBC is owned by GE, which has obtained billions in federal funds for "green" projects and stands to gain billions more if the U.S. passes a carbon tax. Again, this doesn't mean that what NBC says is wrong, but one ought to consider the source...follow the money. Global warming alarmist Grand Poobah Al Gore has also made millions from such dubious activities as peddling carbon offsets, all the while preaching the gospel of climate change. Certainly making a profit off one's beliefs isn't bad in and of itself, but the connection - urging governments to spend billions and then raking off a share of those billions - ought to give one pause.

Uncle!

Now we're just getting ridiculous.

The December 19 storm was enough make me thoroughly sick of winter, before winter officially began. I think the official total for my neck of the woods was 16 inches of snow, though many people think we got a few more than that.

But that was just a warmup for February 5-6. I had heard the Forecast of Doom earlier in the week, when the call was for 16 to 20 inches, and the forecast got worse and worse from there. By Friday, two feet of snow was roughly the lower bound of the estimate, and the Federal Government closed four hours early.

Friday night wasn't so bad, however. Light snow fell, and the first few inches melted off the asphalt driveways. By the time came to turn in for the night, we had four to five inches on the ground. Then Bad Things started to happen.

Power went out at 4:15 a.m. It made a brief return late Saturday morning, but quickly failed again and didn't come back for good until after 9 a.m. Sunday. By that time, the indoor temperature had fallen to 42 degrees. Did you know that various household liquids become very viscous at low temperatures? Shampoo, liquid soap, dishwashing detergent, laundry detergent all ooze rather than pour. On the bright side, no one froze to death.

Snow was still coming down Saturday morning after falling heavily all night. The snow was so heavy that tree branches sagged, the lower ones on or close to the ground. The magnolia tree in the foreground of the picture below was one sorry specimen, and one branch had been neatly severed. I waded into the waist-high virgin snow to knock off as much snow from the branches as I could.

We shoveled, the neighbors shoveled, a kind neighbor ran his snow blower over part of the driveway and sidewalk, and by mid-day Saturday we had piles of snow six feet high lining the drive. The snow kept falling, though, so it needed another pass before the storm was over. The final total was a whopping 30 inches. (I know, I know, that's not impressive compared with colder places. The TV news managed to find a visitor from Anchorage who said airily, "Thirty inches? That's a normal Tuesday." There's a special place in hell for people like that.) I can rest easily knowing that, statistically speaking, I can live here another 50 years without seeing accumulation like that. I'm hoping the roof doesn't collapse under the weight, because it's not going anywhere any time soon, and more is expected Tuesday night.

Below, the mailbox just peeking out from the pile of snow:

The sidewalk looks so nicely plowed...for the first ten feet. Kids, I think you're walking on the street to get to school for a loooong time to come.

No more, okay? Just quit it!

A Few Words on My Inability to Multitask

It's been one of those weeks - again. Snow on Saturday, shovel on Sunday. Snow on Wednesday. Snow predicted for this Saturday, and maybe again next Tuesday. If I wanted to live in Volare-land, I would have moved there! (Though I shouldn't complaint too much: as bad as the mid-Atlantic states are at snow removal and residents who are unprepared to drive on slushy streets, I am led to believe that our friends and fellow travelers in the UK are even worse off when small amounts of wet solid stuff falls from the sky, and they've had their share of such events this winter.) In between watching it snow, cleaning up afterward, worrying about the next snowfall, and complaining about the whole thing, I've been obsessing about an upcoming office move - other than my telephone, computer, coffee maker, and whatever is still on the top of my desk, my work life is contained in 16 or so crates, and will remain that way for another week and a half - and obsessing for no good reason, as everything beyond the packing is being taken care of by someone else.

On the home front, I've been wrestling with living in a two-computer setup, mainly with efforts to get iTunes on the Mac to understand that the actual music lives on a networked PC. Really, this shouldn't be so hard, but even the directions thoughtfully written down on the Aetherweb and obtainable through the Googles have yet to work.

All of which is to say that I've been lax in my explorations in-world, and still more lax in writing them down. I've made an initial foray into Deadwood, having meant to do so months and months ago, and running out of time to see this version of the town before it is rebooted in March. More on my brief visit at a later date.

Also, the good people of New Toulouse have created a fun mystery to solve. I will have more on this as well in a few days, but I wanted to mention it now, because the mystery runs through the end of the month only. As much an effort to showcase this Louisiana-inspired estate as anything, the "Basin Street Irregulars" have constructed a plot, twenty clues obtained via notecards throughout New Toulouse and the adjoining Algiers sims, and a HUD to track one's progress with the promise of a prize at the end. Each clue provides a general location of the next, and some indication of the object to be found, so this is more like a hunt than, say, New Babbage's recent mystery. Still, it's fun, the objects have generally not been so difficult to find as to be frustrating (though I did spend a great deal of time in at least one location and thus fell short of finishing last night), and one sees much of the towns along the way. Read about the crime in the New Toulouse Tattler, then visit the link above, to Laveau Square, where more information, including the first clue and the HUD, is available.

Where Do We Go But Nowhere?

I'm sure everyone has heard the news by now - I'm nothing if not slow in reporting - that Dame Ordinal Malaprop has pulled her shops from Second Life. She explains here. Others have commented here, here, here, and here, and no doubt I've missed still others.

(below: What used to be Ordinal Enterprises in Caledon Prime - now only water.)




People come, people find enjoyment and stay, people lose that joy and leave. Others come and the cycle starts again. No one should stay if recreation becomes a chore. As Miz Dio said, "it's the fuckin' circle of life." Except. Except that some losses are more important than others. From the Caledon trolley system (ripped off countless times in other lands), to the amusing weapons, such as the Bee Cannon or the Clock-Winding Pistol, to her Aether Salon appearance on Weapons (and a later appearance on Whimsy), to her Journal entries (particularly her correspondence with brother Cardinal), Dame Ordinal is one of the signature members of the Steamlands generally, and Caledon in particular.

I can't say I was entirely surprised, as her appearances in ISC chat and elsewhere had become less frequent and less tolerant to the technological and business shortcomings of the Lab That Dare Not Speak Its Name. Still, I hope that some period of reflection will cause the good lady to reconsider her decision. As the above-linked message in her aetheric Journal noted, she has pulled up stakes, but not yet sold the homestead, so reversing her decision is not yet too painful. If this is it, however, one can but wish her well.

(title ripped off from Nick Cave)