Bike races and “my tax dollars”
Whenever I read “my tax dollars” in a letter to the editor, I know immediately that the writer cares nothing about the common good. Such an attitude is completely contrary to the whole purpose of taxes. In a recent issue of the Virginia Gazette, someone angrily wrote in about how a bike race completely disrupted their life, pillaging their time and money:
Why are bike races allowed along Lightfoot and Fenton Mill roads? Bicyclists were running at a break-neck 25 mph in a 55 mph zone.
I was at this race last weekend: a lazy Saturday morning in the middle of nowhere couldn’t be a better time and place to have a bike race. It’s so unfortunate that the author was driving one of the three cars that travel those roads every day. The race was not a closed course, so I suppose the author/driver didn’t have the patience to quit speeding and drive carefully, especially with police around as escorts:
Who pays for those police cars? If the bicyclists pay for them, I hope there is a hefty fee to cover the gas and wear and tear on vehicles that my tax dollars bought.
The author of the above statement is living proof of why a police escort was needed in the first place. When I’ve been on the bike, I’ve been accosted countless times by people like this. Such a person sees the road as his or her personal space: all others must bow down before them. How dare cyclists use a road paid for with “my tax dollars.” It’s not like the cyclists don’t pay taxes, either. Indeed, the registration fee for the race probably included pay for the police, which is one of the reasons bike races and triathlons are so ridiculously expensive. Of course, the letter continues with the obligatory bike path comment:
Bicyclists cry for bike lanes then don’t use them, there’s a $50 million path to Richmond that they don’t use.
I’ve already visited on how “running at a break-neck 25 mph” on a bike path is extremely dangerous to pedestrians, but the author’s emphasis is less on safety and more towards the “$50 million.” In the end, the money arguments aren’t really about misuse of “my tax dollars,” but more about everyone else just being in the way. Can’t we all get along peacefully?
Running Shoes and Marketing Hype
Today, for the first time in years, I went to a brick and mortar running store and bought new shoes. Until this winter, I had been wearing the same make and model shoe for years. I wore the same shoe for most of my college running career and continued to wear it afterwards until I hurt my knee. Then, sometime after my knee surgery and before I started running again, the manufacturer discontinued the model.
I searched for a replacement, preferring to buy online since it’s easy to find the same shoe online for 30-40% less than in a brick and mortar store. From suggestions on Internet forums, I bought a similar shoe from an online retailer made by the same manufacturer. However, the new shoe felt like running in sandals compared to the discontinued model. It gave me no stability and very little cushioning in the forefoot.
Why do shoe companies insist on changing their shoe lineup every year? There isn’t a shoe model that either doesn’t get changed or discontinued on a yearly basis. The shoe that treated me well for so long was suddenly gone. I probably bought 15 or 20 pairs of that model, and what does the manufacturer do to reward me for my loyalty? They hang me out to dry.
There’s no functional reason to update, discontinue, or introduce new running shoes with such magnitude and frequency. Some research indicates people are better off without running shoes. However, shoes are generally made to accommodate a small handful of biomechanical differences in runners. With these differences identified, each manufacturer should make a shoe that successfully addresses these problems for most of the population and let things be. With the current cycle of drastic shoe changes, either running shoe technology is so terrible that the manufacturers are constantly scrambling to find shoes that work or human evolution is taking place at unprecedented levels.
Instead of producing something consistent and functional, shoe companies care more about generating marketing hype surrounding their products. They want consumers to crave the latest running shoe with its biodegradable materials, patented cushioning materials, and futuristic looks. I don’t care how many proprietary materials the shoe is made out of or what the shoe looks like, I only want it to keep me from getting injured. Every shoe I’ve ever bought goes from mostly white to a dirty, muddy mess in a matter of days, but as long as it keeps me in one piece, that’s all that really matters.
The constant shoe updates also force me to buy from a regular retail store since I have to try on several pairs to find a new one that works. Sizing changes from model to model, so I’m wary of buying a new pair without first trying it on. Retail stores mark up prices as much as 100% of what they paid the manufacturer, so it’s easy to find an online retailer who charges far less than the suggested retail price. Going to the store today, I’ve found that what was the $80 shoe five years ago is now the $100 shoe. Some shoes are nearly $200. All of them wear out in 300-400 miles, so what exactly is it that warrants the extra cost?
Running shoes shouldn’t be any different than a household appliance. Shoes should be something that do their job faithfully and can be replaced at the end of their lifespan with a model that performs exactly the same way.
Quotes of the week v.2
Here’s some more stuff that piqued my interest over the past week. While I find most comments on the internet to be extremely immature, the Slashdot moderation system really makes the good comments float to the top, producing a lot of good insight. I have to say that whoever came up with the Slashdot moderation system had a real stroke of genius.
Executive Compensation
Slashdot recently covered a story of a Sun employee commenting on the golden parachutes received by executives as their failing company was acquired by Oracle. Debates ensued in the story comments as to whether or not greed and apathy drives executives to place little effort into keeping their businesses afloat, completely disregarding the interests of employees and even shareholders. It reminds me of this Ambrose Bierce quote which I remember being narrated by Leonard Nimoy in Civilization IV:
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
One of the commenters of the story gave a blunt analogy:
To make it easier to understand and to make a more basic explanation, let’s replace “money” with “food”. Let’s say that the executive in charge of Sun has a machine that makes food for thousands of people. He runs the machine so poorly that it breaks down, and thousands of people no longer have access to the food it provides. In the process of breaking the machine, he manages to engineer it so that the very last time he runs the machine, it makes enough food to feed him, his family and his friends’ families for a couple hundred years if they manage the food he created properly.
It sure seems that executives certainly have the opportunity to obtain massive individual profit with little responsibility. Hopefully, for each story like this, there are hundreds of executives that run their companies well and think about their employees when making decisions.
Show me your papers…
In another Slashdot story, users commented on the heavy-handedness of Verizon blocking internet access to a popular website. Verizon alleged that a denial of service attack originated from the domain of the blocked site, which prompted comments that such attacks could be construed as terrorism and must be thwarted by corporations and governments. While I can’t really argue against the actions of Verizon or governmental involvement in stopping DDoS attacks, one commenter posted the following in response to increased governmental involvement on the internet:
When I was a kid it was popular to point to various things in the USSR like the inability to travel freely without “showing your papers” as evidence of totalitarian oppression. Here in 2010 “showing your papers” is as American as apple pie!
Oddly, I agree with the concept of this statement but not necessarily in the context of the internet. Air travel comes readily to mind. Nothing screams “show me your papers” more than flying. International travel is even worse, with arriving travelers powerless to stop searches of their computers and other electronic devices. What was once fun is now excruciating now that I’ve got to remove my shoes, take half of my stuff out of suitcases and into plastic bins, shuffle through metal detectors, and fumble for my ticket and ID. It really dampens my enthusiasm about going to Sweden in April.
Lowering the bar in Virginia schools
Virginia legislators have been desperate to get more Virginians into their public universities, even at the expense of revenue and quality of the student body. In the article, one legislator commented that he knew of several students with 4.0 GPAs that were denied entry to Virginia public universities. Well, when you loosen the grading scales in primary and secondary schools, there are going to be more students with higher GPAs.
I find it amusing that at one end, Virginia Beach students are whining that the grading scales are too strict and prevent them from gaining admittance to college. At the other end are complaints that too many 4.0 students are not admitted to Virginia colleges. Instead of high school students working harder to get into school or doing something that sets themselves apart from other 4.0 students, the prevailing wisdom is to just lower the bar. Fortunately, it appears as though the attempts to force 75 percent in-state enrollment is halted for now.
Those condescending liberals…
A piece written by a UVA politics professor argues that liberals are much more condescending than their conservative counterparts:
American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration.
From postings on the internet, musings from friends, and from stuff I’ve heard around my college campus, I agree that liberals seem to be increasingly intolerant of any dissenting opinions. Everyone just drinks the Kool-Aid and can’t reason independently of news columnists or political party leaders. Nobody tries to understand all sides of an argument and understand the reasoning of the opposition.
Freedom or Stability?
Windows and Mac users can download and install the newest Firefox version with a couple of mouse clicks. With Ubuntu Linux, however, no Firefox 3.6 is available in the Canonical package repository. Even worse, none of the developers plan to add any new Firefox versions to the repository until the next Ubuntu release. So, I attempted to install precompiled versions from the Mozilla website and the Ubuntu Firefox development build repository, but both installs really messed up the fonts, making them blurry and hard to read.
I tried desperately to fix the fonts, summoning the help of the Ubuntu forums. I tried editing font rendering settings in my local .fonts.conf. I deleted the font cache and reconfigured fontconfig. I tried adjusting a font quality parameter in Firefox’s about:config. For some forums posters, these solutions worked. For me, nothing seemed to help. Finally, I was able to get Firefox 3.6 installed with normal fonts by downloading and compiling the source code and installing the binaries compiled on my own system.
I’m not the only one who is frustrated by this. This was probably the first time I’ve resorted to compiling a third party application from source since first using Ubuntu and Debian in 2006. Normally, it’s just apt-get install whatever program you want. The package manager automatically updates everything and keeps out of my way, rarely nagging to reboot unless the kernel was updated. The package repository was one of the main reasons I switched to Linux in the first place: an easy, single step way to install anything and keep it up to date. No hunting for a download website somewhere on the internet or clicking through a bunch of dialogs in an install wizard.
With such lag before new third party applications get added to the Ubuntu software repository, plenty argue that Linux isn’t ready for the mainstream. I agree completely. Most people will have to go through similar steps as I to get many of the latest third party applications installed, and it can be a real pain. However, in Linux, I am free (as in speech) to customize or rewrite any part of the operating system and share my changes with others. It also gives me a free (as in beer), top notch development environment for my work. The problem is that such freedom comes at a cost: tinkering to get everything to work correctly. Every time I’ve upgraded to the latest Ubuntu version, something doesn’t work and has to be fixed. In another example, I recently installed the netbook remix version on my netbook and was rewarded by a flickering screen, which was fixed with a BIOS update.
Mainstream users just don’t want to be faced with flickering screens and BIOS updates, they want something that just works. Consequently, they are willing to give up some of that freedom (as in speech and beer) to have a device that boots normally and doesn’t have font rendering issues when they install the latest version of a program. Such users are better off with an Apple, and indeed Apple charges them a price in terms of money and control.
The iPad has launched a storm of controversy over its lack of user control. Essentially, the device is a large iPhone, except there is no phone. All applications must be purchased from the Apple-controlled App Store. The real question is: do mainstream users really need fine-grained control over their devices? One comment on a Slashdot post really makes an interesting argument:
What has choice done? It’s given us the chaos of spam, malware, worms etc… The average consumer should get a locked down device such as what Apple are proposing, a limited device with a closed market. And you do realise this is really no different to a games console. Full blown computers should be reserved for those of us who know how to manage them responsibly…Computers as they are today are simply too complex and difficult to manage for the average consumer, so you either give them something simple or you take the management out of their hands.
Combined with the “Linux is not for mainstream” argument, this really makes the case that perhaps devices that work well but allow little user freedom may be the best for most people. Most of the time, it’s the best choice for me. I’ve got a phone, media player, GPS device, and others that I want to just work and perform a very specific function. In these cases, I would rather they perform their jobs reliably than be extensively customizable. However, I do think that the option to exercise greater control should be there for those who want it, no matter how few. In the case of PCs, I’ll take that option, stick to Linux, and keep compiling from source when I have to.
Another citation from the Grammar Police
Here is a link to another blatantly obvious error that should have been caught. Work with spelling errors really comes off as sloppy and greatly hurts the credibility of the piece. If the author wasn’t able to catch this, how am I to know that the information presented isn’t erroneous either? At least this time the author gave credit to his sources.
Quotes of the week…
Instead of picking a topic and writing a lengthy thesis, here are three quotes/stories that really got me going in the past week:
Windows Bug Discovered
A Slashdot thread discussed a security bug that affects all Windows versions released within the past 17 years. One of the commenters really cracked me up:
Every time I read about one of these long-undiscovered instant pwn bugs, I always have to wonder if there’s someone sitting deep underground in an NSA computer center saying “Well shit, looks like we’ll not be using that exploit anymore.”
Is this a hole nobody knew about or a hole nobody but the people who knew about it knew about, and those people weren’t talking?
Obama on Scott Brown election
The election of Scott Brown really caused a stir in political circles, prompting a comment from Obama:
The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office. People are angry, and they’re frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.
Accountability much? Whatever happened to “The buck stops here?” I’m sure there will be more blaming Bush in tonight’s State of the Union. If more people took responsibility for their own actions, including the president, maybe the current political and economic climate wouldn’t be such a mess.
Budget Proposal Halts Return to the Moon
A White House budget request effectively axes the Constellation program, with a Slashdot commenter reacting:
So unless Congress steps in (which isn’t unlikely), Obama will be the President that ended America as a space-faring nation.
This comes on the heels of India’s announcement proposing a manned space mission in 2016. Instead, the Obama administration wishes to focus on terrestrial science. Yet another step backwards.
Infographics: How reliable are they?
With the social media flood comes a torrent of infographics, most of which focus on presentation instead of information. It reminds me of the “mediaglyphics” in yet another Neal Stephenson novel: The Diamond Age. In the futuristic novel, mediaglyphics are used by corrupt governments and broadcast media to inform and entertain a mostly illiterate population. Infographics aren’t much different: they blast the reader with colorful line graphs, maps, and pie charts to present an implicit and oversimplified argument.
I’ve found many of these infographics to be packed with spelling and grammatical errors. For example, try to find the error in this visualization of U.S. debt holders. With enormous font sizes and few words, any spelling or grammatical error really stands out. Such easily identifiable problems make me question the integrity of the statistics (and implicit arguments) these infographics present. Where did the data come from and how reliable are the sources? Many infographics do not provide references, so how am I to know that it isn’t just some ten year old kid making this stuff up? What if multiple sources produce conflicting results? In such cases, it’s almost guaranteed that the infographic creator just picked the result/data that best furthered his or her argument. Lastly, what information is not presented? When reading an infographic, I always wonder if I am seeing the whole picture. With so little information actually presented, I have no doubt that most of these infographics leave out plenty, especially stuff that hurts the creator’s argument.
I admit that infographics pique my interest in a subject to which I haven’t given much thought. However, with minimal content and questionable integrity, they may be no more than chartjunk.
Fan Mail for the New Year
Postmarked from San Francisco this time…
Looks like spring…
Mail arrived from the S.F. Peninsula
Again, the sender’s words were nebular
Even though it came
from The City By The Bay
The disguise’s failure was spectacular
Caught on Camera
Six months ago, in the warmth and sun of summer, I was out on the bike and got passed by a strange-looking car. It had a pole attached to the roof and what looked like one of those rotating siren lights on top. Instead, it turned out to be this:
Looking at the picture, I think I’m ready for summer. Today, wintry winds whip across the bleak and deserted Williamsburg landscape. Tumbleweeds blow across the Sunken Gardens. Snow is in the forecast and just thinking about biking outside makes my blood turn to ice.
Hello, my name is {Mark, Mike, Max}
But not Matt. I’ve always introduced myself as Matt to anyone new I meet, whether it be new students in the department, people at conferences, or just running into someone when I’m out. However, it seems the miss rate for my name is pretty high if I see someone I recently met more than once. Either I am not speaking clearly enough and/or Matt just sounds too much like Mark, Mike, or Max. Maybe whoever it is I just met only remembers that my name is short and starts with an M.
I could try introducing myself as Matthew and see how that goes. Or, I could say: “My name is Matthew, but you can call me Matt.” I started going by Matt in elementary school, but maybe it is time to switch back. I’ve already listed my name as Matthew on papers.
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