Archive for November, 2008
November 30, 2008 at 12:00 pm · Filed under Project, food, local
When we lived in Hanover, PA a few years ago, we started buying boxes of a Lancaster delicacy: John Cope’s Toasted Dried Sweet Corn.
It’s good, and difficult to replicate. No other cornmeal or bready preparations are substitutes. There are no doubt a number of delicious recipes possible, but the one that is printed at the top of the box (or bag, these days) is still best, just as using Jiffy Mix for corn muffins is better than the supernumerary suggestions of waffles or even johnnycakes.
Also, in re John Cope’s effort: it’s cheap.
Buy it from the manufacturer, or their distributor, in 12-bag cases, and including shipping it’s less than $3.50 per box.
Zingerman’s Deli, here in lovely Ann Arbor, charges more than $11 for a single 7.5 oz tin. Because it’s artisanal, no doubt. Or maybe the tin is worth the effort, since it’s made by hand by Russian Amish people specifically for Zingerman’s, and flown here sustainably or something. Because that would be a $7 metal tin, I guess.
Plus shipping, if you don’t live in lovely Ann Arbor.
And if you search for it at Amazon, you can pay a mere 100% markup. Plus shipping and handling. Or for some kind of odd bulk repackaging I’ve never seen before, slightly less.
Let’s just sit ourselves down a minute, in these days of local communitarian sentiments and economic crisis and belt-tightening and thoughtful economy and direct compensation of artists and craftspeople for their intelligent work and sustainable transportation and stuff… and think about those alternatives.
Less than $3.50 per unit, net, for twelve you could share among friends. Said money sent direct to the manufacturer, I assume. At least closer to them than any alternative in the supply chain.
Or $8 or more for retail pricing of the same volume. In a metal bin, if you’re really fancy.
I note, by way of a fucking point: It is not illegal, to date, for purchasers to enter into informal agreements with one another to collaboratively seek bargains by sharing informational or practical costs.
I’m going to spend December thinking about that, OK? The whole damned Black Friday of a month.
And my mind may wander from dried sweet corn to beer, or other foods, or books, or magazine subscriptions, or toys, or DVD rentals, or copy-editing one another’s writing, or consulting referrals, or newspaper article writing, or photography, or design, or gardening, or building houses and communities. It might make a bit of sense for me to look at cartoonish John Cope, with his stereotypical bushy beard, and think a minute.
Just one minute. Especially if I’m tempted to play at Black-bumper sustainability, and conspicuously consume artisanal foods without thinking about the supply chain that got them to me.
November 30, 2008 at 9:32 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Google Maps must have purchased a new suite of road information recently. Or maybe they algorithmically tried to “improve” the dataset they had. Used to be it knew local geography pretty well; now, not so much.
When asking for directions from our farm (on Walsh Road, Webster Township) to the Dairy Queen in Hamburg Township, the driving (not walking!) algorithm suggests we stay on northbound Scully. If you saw it from a distance, the satellite image would lead you to believe that, yes.
Except that many years’ fierce argument at the county border has left a nasty but potent gate blocking the road, which will persist into the foreseeable future.
If you were to drive up the rough, mainly untended Scully Road on a snowy day, trying to get (say) to a hospital in Pinckney or something, the least that would happen is you’d waste a half-hour trying to back out of the last few hundred yards without ending up in a ditch… once you arrived at the impassable gate at the border, and well after you had trespassed on a private road at the end.
The De Lorme Michigan Atlas & Gazetteer, a nice old printed book I keep in my car, and which is so obsolete that it shows little red lines for roads of all sizes and characters, manages to catch the gap.
Now every dataset contains errors or missing information. But every time that dataset is used to make a single, summary statement, based on a single model? Badness can happen in unexpected ways. In fact, I am obliged to be curmudgeonly about it because of my professional experience in these matters: it is always wrong to present a single answer for any multi-objective or highly constrained decision-making problem. Big, fat period.
I can’t complain, in all honesty, about advice given by a black box operations-research algorithm that on inspection I knew was incorrect. You get what you pay for. But I can complain about a cultivating a misleading user experience in a ubiquitous data-driven decision support system that presents only one solution at a time to the decision-maker. Hell, every iPhone in the world has one of these on it; they’re all wrong, too.
No, I don’t think I am feeling lucky, Google. And you didn’t even ask.
I want to see a sheaf of routes. The little “adjust the route and recalculate a new one using my milestones” handles Google introduced a few years back are a beautiful thing, a cunning artifact and a useful tool! And of course, the standard “avoiding highway” or “fastest” toggles let me reach in and fiddle with the search method. But only indirectly.
I want the objectives right there, not combined. I want not just to surface the meter (to use a phrase Dan Cooney’s taught me), but surface all of them. I want choices coupled to clearly differentiable supporting arguments.
Like the basic Google Search results themselves: ten routes at a time, ranked somehow. Or not even ranked, but handed to me as a Pareto-equivalent set of alternatives, some faster, some bumpier, some with bigger roads, some with more gas stations, some more scenic. Heck, maybe I just want to know there are at least ten ways to go back and forth, so I can stage a race, or not get bored on my commute, or defend against unwanted SUV invasion by a foreign county or something.
At least sometimes. Stop assuming I’m feeling lucky.
Next time, we can bitch about the misleading user experience and illusory authority created by the fuckin’ weather forecast format. Everybody complains about the weather forecast, but nobody does anything about it.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
November 29, 2008 at 2:02 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"This is an important insight as we look at right wing victimology — it's based upon old fashioned notions of honor that still characterizes certain corners of southern culture, but which has been incorporated into American conservative thinking at large as it adopted these regional folkways as its tribal norms. (The book Southern Honor by Bertram Wyatt Brown explains the whole "honor" mystique in great depth and it's probably as good a guide to the victimization reflex as anything.)"
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"One item in the Transition tool kit is “reskilling” – reviving energy-frugal skills that past generations took for granted, such as how to repair something rather than buying new and how to grow and preserve food. Says Proulx-Lough, who has spent time in Totnes twice this year: “A workshop on darning socks – that’s practical action, and an excuse to do things together!”
Among other Transition activities:
• Planting nut trees on street corners and orchards in the city.
• Signing up 50 people to buy solar hot-water heaters so the units can be purchased at a discount.
• Interviewing seniors who recall what living a low-energy life was like.
• Holding bicycle-repair workshops"
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"The purpose of the committee is presumably to ensure that the company doesn't waste money. And yet the result is that the company pays 10 times as much."
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Time for a competitor to steal eBay's alienated seller population wholesale… and leave the wholesale sellers to eBay.
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November 28, 2008 at 2:02 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"With these people, there is nothing more offensive than the fork. You are going to split the community, take away committers. It is heresy. It is a schism.
The nature of open source on the SourceForge model is academia at it’s most petty, because the stakes could not be lower. It is not about the source code, it is about the source code repository and control to access thereof.
GitHub puts an end to this nonsense. I can develop my software and I can use GitHub to publish my software. I don’t have to work within an arbitrary community, but grow support for my software through my own social and professional network."
November 27, 2008 at 2:03 am · Filed under del.icio.us
November 26, 2008 at 2:02 am · Filed under del.icio.us
November 25, 2008 at 4:40 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"The real lesson of this crisis is that the only infinite resource in the economy is financiers' capacity for self delusion.
So, lay off the black swans. It's not their fault. Responsibility for this crisis begins and ends with gullible bankers. And this is why we need broader regulation of the financial system: because at the end of the day, bankers (like all other humans) are greedy and gullible idiots."
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Nice intro to R
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"In view of the above, I must add that I cannot in truth recommend Mr Bewg to you. His work is shoddy, his attendance and punctuality leave much to be desired, and I have the gravest doubts about his character. His sickness record is appalling, and I have been put in the uncomfortable position of having to threaten various members of the medical profession with violence after they were so irresponsible as to provide Mr Bewg with certificates. However, should you decide to ignore my warnings and offer a job to Mr Bewg, he will be available for work upon completion of his notice period, in forty years time."
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"And now, Bad Kreuznach finds itself at the centre of one of the most bizarre, high-profile murder mysteries in the country's history – the search for an apparent serial killer whom police and prosecutors call, simply, 'The Woman Without a Face'. They have no fingerprints to go on. No witnesses. No description. What they do have is a trail of DNA, now stretching back 15 years and across three countries – as well as a grisly new reason to put a face to her double helix. A case that had for years been gnawingly disturbing, yet still fairly obscure, has leapt on to the front pages of German newspapers. For it appears now that the mystery woman may not only be a killer, but a cop-killer."
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"I'd be curious to know how you folks at the Templeton Foundation reconcile the high rhetoric displayed here with the rather low and brutal practice of taking a civil right away from a minority group."
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"This suggests to me that the Templeton Foundation's pretensions to belief in the free exchange of ideas are fraudulent. And John Templeton, Jr.'s support of the Yes on Proposition 8 campaign suggests to me that the foundation he runs is willing to blur the line between church and state in order to deprive a minority of the civil right of marriage. Until the Templeton Foundation addresses the issue of its chairman's antagonism to gay civil rights, either by dismissing him or by issuing an apology, backed by equivalent funding to a group advocating gay civil marriage, I strongly discourage writers and intellectuals who believe in the free exchange of ideas, the separation of church and state, gay rights, or the protection of the civil rights of minorities from working with or accepting money from the Templeton Foundation."
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"Because the public doesn't understand the intricacies of finance, it's easily persuaded that this is definition of "soundness" is the same as keeping savings flowing to the banks so that the banks can lend to them to Main Street. That's why the public and its representatives have committed $700 billion of taxpayer money to Wall Street and another $500 to $600 billion of subsidized loans to the Street from the Fed — bailing out the investors and creditors of every major bank, including , any moment, Citi — only to discover, at the end of this frantic and unbelievably expensive exercise, that American jobs and communities are more endangered than they were at the start."
November 23, 2008 at 2:01 am · Filed under del.icio.us
November 22, 2008 at 9:55 am · Filed under Project, local
There’s a lot of local chatter lately (local in my social network, here and afar) about community development as opposed to tribal consolidation. That is, developing meetings and infrastructure that bridge between disparate groups who otherwise never meet and interact, vs. team-building and strengthening the internal cohesion of well-formed groups themselves.
Here’s an acceptance test I’m thinking of using for a long-term project of the bridge-building type (the one I call “real” community development). It’s hard to know whether your notion of how to run things actually fosters and enhances diversity rather than just consolidating pre-existing barriers, so I’m musing about a general-purpose challenge that discriminates them. Maybe:
- Pick up a local Yellow Pages.
- Open to a random page. You may want to slice the book up into chunks to ensure uniform sampling.
- Randomly select an entry on the page, maybe with a blind stab, and note the category it’s in. Plumbers? Lawyers? Dentists? Libraries? Landscaping? Escort Services? Restaurants? Used and Rare Books? Knitting? Jewelry? Wedding Planning? Septic Services?
- Repeat the previous two steps to select a second category at random.
- If you can create, announce, and populate an open-format unconference-style meeting that will attract at least five people who actually work in each of those two categories professionally, your community-building effort may have a chance.
You don’t need to ever repeat with the same two categories. But it might be interesting to walk ahead by adding a new category and dropping the oldest category in each successive meeting.
This may be a bit of a stretch. Wedding Planners plus Shoes I can see a path to; House Painting and Office Supplies, less so.
But what’s a test without a challenge?
November 21, 2008 at 4:01 pm · Filed under Project
Citi just sent us one of those ominous plain envelopes from South Dakota, and (as I expected) inside is a Notice of Change in Terms and Right to Opt Out. They’d like to move this particular card from Prime + 4.99% to Prime + 8.99%.
The interesting thing to me is that we pay down our cards regularly and substantively, but (entrepreneurship being what it is these days) do maintain a balance. So I’m going to assume, based on the little I know about financial actuarial practice and business analytics, they’re reaching into their customer base and targeting those who they gauge willing to pay the increase and unwilling to bail out of the program entirely. The suckers, in other words.
I suspect, though I have no evidence on hand, that they may even be ameliorating rates for those in serious financial difficulties, since defaulting on credit cards (no matter what Congress does to change the bankruptcy laws) doesn’t give CitiFail any more money when you get right down to pocketbook accounting, or operating capital. And I bet they’re intentionally pissing off, or dropping outright, people (like my Mom) who are long-standing customers who pay down their balances immediately.
Intellectually, I don’t envy them. The times, and the crisis, are setting them against us. And if they make any wrong moves in the course of their collapse, they will not merely fail financially but end up being rendered in cartoons as big fat men with tophats and pocket watches. The only thing they can do (from their standpoint) is try to get what they can, trim the fat, and harvest the rest.
I find myself wondering if maybe, just possibly, there is an opportunity here to… well, the phrase coming to mind is “reverse the predator–prey relationship”. That’s pretty optimistic. “Level the playing field a bit” might be the more measured phrase. “Enable a collective defense” might be even better.
A transparency play.
I know that companies like Wesabe already aggregate (but keep private) credit account information. Not just how much money people owe, but I assume also information on Terms of Service and interest rates and suchlike.
What I’m imagining this afternoon is an anonymized but public aggregation of “everybody’s” terms of service, with a deep-ranging analytic system wrapped around it. How many people in your county have got better Terms? How many card contract structures are there, actually? What can we infer about Card Company X’s actuarial ruleset from the data on 100000 people’s contracts? What can those people do, looking at one another’s contracts, to identify opportunities to improve the “product” they are offered?
For example, when I called Inisha at Citi just now to bitch about these changes, she was (a) unable to tell me my Card Membership Date, (b) able to tell me that my Terms of Service cannot be seen online at all, anywhere, (c) able to put me on hold and propose a compromise interest rate somewhere closer to my original, without obviously working up a sweat. The implication to me is that this amounts to intentional obfuscation and hiding of crucial information, coupled with a big set of simple contingent reactions to protest. I have to assume that Citi keeps it hard to find anything out about the complex state of one’s terms specifically so that their representatives can offer a pig-in-a-poke incomparable alternative when challenged.
So I’d copy over my contract information somewhere, and even be willing to reveal limited balance data, if I was confident of its anonymity and knew that it was useful to reveal patterns in Citi’s (and others’) business practices and sales offer strategy.
I bet some other folks might be willing to do that too.
November 21, 2008 at 2:03 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"I think it’s incredible work you’ve been doing lately, and I wholeheartedly endorse it" YAY!!!
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"At the same time, of course, Disraeli could not and would not be pigeonholed as the representative of a minority. Instead, he made an asset of his supposed liability in two ways, as Adam Kirsch lucidly explains in his recent book about Disraeli and Jewish identity. First, Disraeli argued, in word and in deed, that there was no need to choose between Jewishness and Britishness—he could have both. Second, he hinted that his complexities and ambiguities of identity, his supposedly troubling "foreignness,'' would be of service to the nation. His exotic traits added up to a feature, not a bug. He could be both a British gentleman and a conjuror with skills beyond the ken of mere gentlemen."
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"Yochai Benkler, who’s written at length about the economics of commons production, pushes Heller for details, embracing the idea of the anticommons, but looking for specific ways out: do we need more commons? lower transaction costs? spot markets that make it easier to transact around property? Heller (correctly?) summarizes his question, “Very nice, but so what?” He offers a possible way out: in cases of scarcity, private property makes sense, while in situations with no scarcity, a commons model makes more sense. If it’s possible to use telecoms whitespace in a non-rivalrous fashion, spectrum should be a commons; if not, perhaps we need a more intelligent form of private property."
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