Progress
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May 30, 2004
Pond Picture
Garbage Day
Joi Ito's Web: Garbage day in the village
Joichi posts about garbage day in the village, where everyone chips in and cleans up all the litter all over.
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There were many children helping out as well. Hopefully this annual garage day will help educate them not to dump trash by the road.
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Of course an alternate theory would be that the children will be taught that they can litter at will because the trash they deposit on the side of the road will be picked up during garbage day.
Blogroll
I have added some items to the "blogroll".
Comments Back On
I've upgraded to MT 3.0, so I can turn comments back on. You have to register with TypeKey to make a comment, but I imagine this will prevent comment spam.
Enjoy.
May 29, 2004
Tadpole
Sameer's Gallery :: May 2004 :: 29
The tadpoles really like to hide. I managed to catch this fleeting photo. Sort of reminds of me a UFO picture.
May 25, 2004
New York Times Graffiti
Glenn Reynolds has been running a series of pictures of New York Times boxes with LIES and other sorts of derogatory comment-tags on them. He appreciated the sentiment but the point was made that the graffiti was probably put there by those on the left, particularly given their penchant for tagging other things and disrespect for private property. It seemed to make sense, but the question was sufficiently clinched when I saw the same tag on a New York Times box here in Berkeley.
Well the New York Times I suppose can be proud to know that no one trusts them anymore, not just those on the other side of the political spectrum.
Legal benefits and deterrence
You Must Be Present to Win: Dahlia on the "Slippery Slop" argument
Douglas had to repost his post about polyamorous marriage and comments on my most recent post:
"He goes on to argue, however, that the complexity of multiple marriage (particularly multiple marriage with children) might benefit even more than traditional marriage from legal recognition."
I actually had not intended to argue this point, but considering what I actually wrote it appears that I have argued myself into believing this, to a certain degree.
As Douglas notes, we both agree that sensible default legal rules will benefit both traditional "dyadic" families and group marriage arrangements. Just as legal and societal recognition of marriage clearly outlines responsibility, creating legal structures of some kind for group marriages could, if done properly (a big if) delineate responsibility more clearly than otherwise, which would mitigate the negative effects on children of growing up in a group marriage.
The question, however, is if legal recognition of group relationships will make bearing children within such relationships more or less likely. As I noted already, legal non-recognition of same-sex marriage does not appear to be a deterrent to gay couples having children. It still remains unclear however if more gay couples will have children once their marriages become legally-recognized.
It could be however that although the legal situation does have a deterrent effect, the negative impact it has on those who are not deterred is significant enough to overrule the deterrent effect. It is sort of like legalizing drugs, actually.
The fact that drugs are illegal and not socially sanctioned does provide a deterrent to a significant number of people. However, their illegal nature harms the people (and their communities, given gang violence etc) who are not deterred. Therefore even though drugs are bad, on net the laws making them illegal harm society.
Does such an argument hold true for marriage policy?
Clearly an argument for a solid federalist approach to marriage policy. One can do a study of the effect on legalized gay marriage in Massachussetts on the prevalence of child-bearing in gay relationships, and that can be very helpful in formulating polcy in other states.
May 24, 2004
You must be present to win
You Must Be Present to Win: Dahlia on the "Slippery Slop" Argument Against Gay Marriage
I note that my good friend and former co-founder/Vice-President at C2Net seems to have started a blog of his own, and even linked this way in his first post. What an honor! hehe. He choses a very apt name for his blog, "You must be present to win."
He points out in his post that I am likely overstating my point about the prevalence of polyamory in the Bay Area, which is clear, I was exaggerating for emphasis, and also no doubt due to some latent bitterness due to the fact that it took me too long to discover that I don't fit in among the predominant poly- psueo-liberal progressive communities of which I was a part for most of my time here in the Bay Area.
That aside, whether or not there is a valid legal argument, however, that there is a "slippery slope" towards legalizing all forms of relationships, it is clear given the prevalence of non-monogamity in the so-called "progressive" communities here, that legalization of gay marriage is just a "first step" for the so-called progressive community here on the left coast.
Anyone who thinks that there will not be louder calls for recognition of group marriages once gay marriage is recognized is fooling themselves.
Douglas himself doesn't discount the possibility that multiple marriage lies in our future:
"A more interesting barrier (to me, as a law geek) is that many of the relevant laws would map quite poorly to multiple marriage. It's not my area, but I would imagine that, say, default rules about who makes decisions about health care and burial, for instance, could get complicated. Something to think about. "
His point I think does however go to the heart of the key problem with progressive poly relationships (as compared with traditional hierarchical arranged marrage polygamy, etc.) which is that marriage is fundamentally a binary institution which does not suit itself well to multiple people. Legally, the question is clear, but more practically, as I've stated here before, if you spread responsibility around too widely, then no one will accept it. Therefore the children raised in a family where there is no clear responsibility for raising them will suffer. (As I have seen in extended family households in India.)
Of course this is in some ways similar to the only argument that holds any water with respect to not recognizing gay marriage, which is that children need both a mother and a father. That argument however falls apart because the fact that they can't be married does not appear to be a significant deterrent to gay couples having children. Therefore if they are going to have children, they might as well be married, in order to mitigate the damage.
Such an argument could also actually be used for polygamous marriage, however. If one can expect that a polygamous "family" will choose to bear children and the fact that marriage is not an option to them does not deter them from having children, then you could well end up in the same situation as with same-sex monogamy, and want to make polygamy legal in order to mitigate the damage done to children born in those relationships.
In this case, however, it is not clear that the polygamous marriage would mitigate the situation. In fact, given that of the n partners in the relationship, only two of them will be the actual parents, limiting marriage to the two actual parents of the child then provides benefits because it focuses the responsibility on the two parents rather than diluting it. This complicates matters however when there are multiple children with different parental pairings. In a situation like that does the responsibility for the child fall on the married pair entirely or does the unmarried parent assume responsibility?
In a legal sense, if the unmarried parent is the mother, then I would assume that she would be the legal mother, even though she is not married to the father. However if the unmarried parent is the father, then would the legal parent of the child be the married male or the unmarried biological father?
Food for thought. =)
May 20, 2004
Slippery slope to polygamy
The chief sources of polygamy in America, as I understand it, are likely to be Muslim immigrants and some Mormon sects. (These wouldn't be the only sources, but I suspect they'd be the main ones.) These are relatively socially insular. Few people outside the group are likely to have close friends who are polygamists.
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Prof. Volokh has clearly not spent any significant amount of time in the San Francisco Bay Area, where if you're monogamous you're regarded as a freak of nature.
May 19, 2004
Organic Food Fraud
Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | The costly fraud that is organic food
What contribution can organic farming make? In the words of the Indian biologist CJ Prakash, its only contribution to sustainable agriculture will be "to sustain poverty and malnutrition".
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This is no surprise of course.
May 18, 2004
Googlemail upgrade!
"You are currently using 10 MB (0%) of your 1000000 MB"
Looks like gmail is offering a full terabyte now?
Probably some sort of error.
Bonehead economics, complete
Today I am finally done with the stupidity that was Economics 100B. The final which was supposed to take three hours took one hour. I was a bit concerned that maybe I didn't get the second page of questions, but I checked and it looked like I got the full exam. What an incredibly boneheaded class. I'm so glad I'm done. It confounds me that such a boneheaded class can actually challenge people at a supposedly world-class institution. If these students are the best and brightest that California can offer, that's a really pathetic statement on the quality of California schools. With standards this low I'm not even sure private schooling would make sense here, because even though they're probably better than the public schools, they only have to be marginally better to attract students which implies that they probably suck as well. But perhaps the competition among private schools is sufficient to keep standards high.
May 16, 2004
This is what I need!
It's not an expensive technology - you can buy hypersonic sound generating devices for about $600 - and they will get cheaper. If anyone wanted to destabilise other people they could do it really easily by making them think they were hearing voices in their heads. The victims would be unable to distinguish whether those sounds or voices had an external or internal source. Again the law is a big black hole on cognitive liberty issues like this.
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I'd been thinking about some sort of deterrent to stop people from staring at my house, and I'd been thinking a motion activated voice thing could work, to scare people, but then I realized that would just attract more attention. This is ingenious though because it would really freak people out. I could have it say something really strange or make some scary sound, and no one would know where it came from except that they would know that they would hear it everytime they walked in front of my house. People would stay far away!
May 14, 2004
Everyone rallies!
I just received an email from Angelika, whom I knew from my cloudfactory days. Turns out she is rallying too! It's funny because when I saw their team driver's name on Special Stage I thought it looked familiar but maybe I was confused, but now that I see that name connected with Angelika, I have to assume I must have heard of or met that guy through Cloudfactory as well.
Good luck to the F4 Rallysport team, hopefully we'll see you out on the stage sometime!
We're the special forces of racing
Tim O'Neil on New Hampshire Public Radio:
May 10, 2004
Gmail account for sale
I bought my gmail account and now they are letting me invite someone else. So like a proper capitalist, I'm selling it on the most efficient market I can find, ebay. It's really cool to note how the going price for gmail accounts has declined since I bought mine. Both a function I'm sure of the increased supply (the supply probably grows exponentially as people who get invited get to invite new people, etc) and the decreased value of the fact that more and more usernames are getting taken, so signing up doesn't mean you will necessarily get the username you want.
I wish ebay would make statistics about selling prices for products public. One could do a lot of really great research with that data. Maybe now that I am an econ student at Berkeley I can ask them and that will give me the credibility I need for them to give me access to their data. That'd be cool.
Rim Results Analysis
SCCA Rim of the World Performance Rally
Going over the events at Rim and looking at the details of the scores, I can note a few key lessons learned:
o Don't put anything on the roof of the car. (Lost glasses and gas cap that way)
o Stay calm and try to figure out how to fix what is wrong when disaster strikes -- don't give up
-- When we got stuck on the second stage on Saturday (stage 6) we did not calmly go through the possibilties and actually discovered what was wrong because the workers on the starting line noted to us that the rear wheels looked locked.
o Even if we have a serious delay and lose lots of time and think we're last, we should still push hard, because other people lose lots of time sometimes as well, and we might not actually be running last.
-- On friday we finished only a few seconds behind the guys who were second last. After refueling on stage four we didn't push very hard getting to the end. If we pushed hard we would have come in before them for the day.
o Be sure the tank is FULL! whenever leaving service.
o Make sure fifth gear works so that transits don't use up too much gas
o On driving technique, a few things I need to work on...
-- Downshift before the turn so I have power going out of it
-- Romp harder on the pedal when accelerating
-- Late apex my turns better.. I noticed when the stage notes said "don't cut" I made better late apexes
-- Go faster, brake harder, countersteer quicker
-- Use less steering angle in turns, more brake
-- Get more comfortable sideways. I do the right thing when sideways but I still get a knot in my stomach. Have to make that knot go away.
Where to live
In catching up on Zooko's blog I noticed that he has been pondering where to move to, particularly noting places which would be good for kids. I'm of the opinion that the bay area would really is not such a great place to raise kids, particularly given the propensity of people with unstable lifestyles (e.g. having kids out of wedlock) to provide bad role models, the absolutely atrocious school systems, and of course the high cost of living.
I've been considering moving the foothills of the Sierras, perhaps outside of Auburn, after getting done with undergrad here at Berkeley. This weekend chatting with my rally team-mates we discussed how I really need to find a better garage setup if I'm going to be doing rallying long term, I noted that I'm pretty committed to leaving Berkeley once I graduate. (So really, I can say I was living in Berkeley only to go to school. It just took a -long- time!)
I was considering northern washington but realized after going up there for doo wops that it rains too much for me to be happy. Auburn I think could be nice (I don't know much about it yet) because it's a semi-rural community with a nice walkable downtown. (as far as I hear.) Land is cheap, you can get a nice sized house with lots of land for yards and fishponds and garage/workshops. The public schools probably still suck though, given that it's california. I don't know if I can really live with the cold in Colorado though so that might not work for me, but I think Zooko's idea about the hinterlands of Boulder might be a good one. Boulder might also have lots of unstable families which would be a point against it though.
Utterly incompetent
Over the course of the past few years I would note a very mixed impression of the competence of our president. Clearly he is simple-minded, but it doesn't take a complex-mind to be a good leader. It takes clear intentions, values, and clearly communicating your intentions and values to a competent staff.
Many of the strange things that happened over the course of the past few years would lead one to think that GW Bush was incompetent turned out well. The supposed infighting between Powell and Rumsfeld, the leaks, the strange process getting UN resolutions. In the end, it all worked out greatly in our favor. I thought that perhaps what looked like incompetence from the outside was really just a great deal of cleverness.
It appears now that it wasn't cleverness, it was luck. We were lucky enough that the incompetent leadership skills of our president did not cause significant problems, but now it's clear that the president and his staff up and down the line are completely and utterly incompetent.
We are faced now with a dilemma. Do we re-elect a clearly incompetent leader who has clear and proper visions and goals but no ability to make those goals a reality, or do we a elect someone whose competence is unclear (It'd be hard to be less competent though) but wants to hand over control to the corrupt venal officials at the UN so they can turn Iraq into Bosnia?
At least if we elect Kerry and the UN produces genocide in Iraq, the blood would technically be on the UN's hands. If we re-elect Bush and his incompetence produces more disaster in Iraq, then the blood will be on our hands.
May 9, 2004
Rim Results!
SCCA Rim of the World Performance Rally
Brief summary of Rim:
o On the drive down, the van lost tread on a rear wheel. We popped on the spare, drove back to Gilroy, and bought two new rear tires at America's Tire.
o The next day when doing odo check and going to tech we discovered
-- Fifth gear really wasn't fixed
-- The terratrip odo computer wasn't working
So we returned to service, our service chief Pete Cowan fixed the odo and we also fixed the fifth gear. (Or so we thought.)
-- Then on the first super special stage we went off and had to be towed off a berm
-- On the first transit we discovered that we really didn't fix fifth gear, it was nowhere to be found.
-- We were late for the ATC before the second stage.
-- I lost my glasses before the third stage
-- On the fourth stage we ran out of gas half a mile from the end
-- Upon getting fuel from sweep we lost a gas cap
-- Saturday morning, during the turnaround between the fitfth and sixth stages we locked up the rear brakes and didn't realize it until we got onto the stage itself.
-- After getting back on during the sixth stage we lost our tach
-- Since we were running so late they stopped running the second super special before we got there, even though we clocked in properly and were not technically late, per the rules
-- On the third super special we went off onto a berm and had to back up to get going again
-- On the way back home after dropping off the trailer at storage driving the car back to my house, the rear brakes locked again, they overheated, the terratrip lines lit on fire, in the process of trying to get the car running again we destroyed a rear brake piston seal, and had to get it towed from hegenberger back to my house.
However
o We finished
o We weren't last.
Therefore
We accomplished both our goals! The rally was a success. By the end of Saturday about half the entrants did not finish. It was quite a tough rally and we were quite happy to have made it all the way through. On Friday we placed 9th in our class but on Saturday we made a better showing with 6th in class. So that should give us 220 points towards the California Rally Series championship!
Now we just have to
- fix fifth gear
- fix the rear brakes
- fix the tach
- figure out why the rear brakes were locking
- replace the terratrip lines
- maybe replace / fix the terratrip sensors
- Take apart, clean, and rebuild many of the completely trashed parts of the car!
On the last two forest stages we tried running with stage notes, and it was a complete blast. It was great to know what the turn would look like before entering it.
As many of the grade-school kids watching the super special stage were screaming while watching, "I love rally!"
May 5, 2004
Rim
We're leaving for Rim tomorrow! Hopefully this time I won't come in last. Hahah. We'll see. I have to finish too though, Not coming in last won't be worth much if I don't finish. You can keep updated as to how the event is going here
http://www.rimoftheworldrally.com/NotesAndQuotes.htm
Gmail rocks
I heard on marginal revolution that gmail accounts were for sale on ebay so I went to ebay and picked up myself a gmail account for $60. I'm trying it out now and it's pretty damn cool. Perhaps it will supplant my use of outlook? I didn't manage to get 'sameer' though as a username. Ah, I remember the old days when I could get my first name as a username wherever I went on the internet. No longer. But I did get a nice username, as opposed to something with silly numbers attached to it.
Of course the google ipo is very exciting. The liquidity and excitement that will bring to the area will be really good for the economy.
