Subsidized indulgence
Posted on August 10th, 2010
This guy’s indignation1 really hit a nerve for me:
There is a bike crisis. Every pole in the neighborhood is littered with them. … These Yuppies are running [sic] the whole damn city, and I’m left to my own devices.
How did our culture get to this point, where using an affordable, easy-to-service machine to commute about is for the “Yuppie” bourgeois and Real Americans use their disposable income to transport themselves in comfort using expensive, wasteful, complicated machines that insulate them from the public? It doesn’t take Steven Levitt to see that government subsidy of automotive infrastructure has encouraged this upside-down view, or the self-fulfilling prophecies that urban density (and public transportation) are for the “limousine” elites or the “inner city” poor. Joe the Plumber has a country house, just like Louis XIV.
Joe also eats a lot of meat, which Uncle Sam also hides the actual financial cost of, to say nothing of the social/ethical, public health, or environmental costs.
Americans like their cars and their hamburgers, but it’s unwise to continue voting ourselves this largesse from the public treasury. The Gosplan, at least, made an effort to rationalize their unsustainable market distortion.
But Joe the Plumber would probably call me a (carless, urban, vegetarian) socialist because I believe government has a role in protecting the commons from externalities in education, conservation, and healthcare.
- via @aaronskelly [↩]
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Now 100 times slower
Posted on August 7th, 2010
In the ten months from mid-August 2009 to mid-July 2010, I travelled over 91,000 miles in inter-city trips. That’s nearly 4 trips around Earth, and an average velocity of 20 mph during waking hours, mostly via aircraft.
In the three weeks since we returned from our European tour of duty, we’re back to a comfortably urban 0.2 mph, almost all by foot.

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Police 2.0
Posted on February 3rd, 2007
It has been fashionable in our culture to address undesirable behavior by enacting laws that call for the police to make the bad people that stop doing those bad things by arresting them. For the really, really bad things, like possessing a leaf from a plant which makes you happy if you consume it, we even mandate the judicial system exact revenge for us.
Of course, in the tubes of the interwebs this has gotten difficult to sustain. People say things we don’t approve of and publish content to audiences of millions without our consent, and all those pesky jurisdictions geographic prevent us from having our revenge on other people’s neighbors. If we’re going to create safe places for the children, we need a global security force that can be summoned in response to internet crimes.
I think a web service with an arrest(ip addr) function would do nicely. Those who have contributed enough to the politicians who support the force could install bookmarklets like arrest site owner that immediately dispatch officers.
Tags: crime, culture, funny, idea, politics, uncategorized, web
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iToldYouSo
Posted on September 13th, 2006
Apple has pre-announced their TV-integration product, tentatively named iTV.
This is exactly what I’ve predicted the long-rumored “Asteroid” product to be. Since Apple embraced video on the iPod it’s been a simple conclusion that Airport Express and Front Row would end up in a targeted device. Lately I wondered if they were going to simply produce a Mac Mini HD, but I’m glad to see they understand that living room media presentation is a very specialized (yet common) need.
An important part of this announcement seems to be overlooked: this is not a Mac OS X computer. Unlike Microsoft, Apple is not a software company and is more than happy to build a future of personal media management based on a collection of specialized devices. AAPL shareholders should rejoice that the calls for a split between the hardware and software divisions of Apple were ignored, and that the company clearly understands that they need to be more than a PC manufacturer.
Tags: tagless
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Going plazes
Posted on July 4th, 2006
Plazes has promoted their new version, essentially going from 1.0beta to 2.0beta. It’s very “Web 2.0″ in design (except the corners are sharp) and it doesn’t look like anything has changed from the private pre-beta test. The new interface is much easier to understand, with simplified user and place profiles.
Tags: geo, web
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