The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.
–E. Hemingway, as told to George Plimpton, Spring 1958, the Paris Review
[…T]hese tokens have their value, just as three buffalo horns Hemingway keeps in his bedroom have a value dependent not on size but because during the acquiring of them things went badly in the bush, yet ultimately turned out well. “It cheers me up to look at them,” he says.
Hemingway may admit superstitions of this sort, but he prefers not to talk about them, feeling that whatever value they may have can be talked away. He has much the same attitude about writing. Many times during the making of this interview he stressed that the craft of writing should not be tampered with by an excess of scrutiny—“that though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.”
–E. Hemingway, as told to George Plimpton, 1958, the Paris Review
It’s got to be some sort of scam that I can fly to Europe, at no extra cost, with two checked bags, a laptop bag, and a personal item (camera gear), no problemo, but then when I turn around and fly home with exactly the same things on the same airline, it’s 50 euros for the second checked bag, and they hassle me about the camera gear. “Look, you flew all this stuff over here, no problem! Why isn’t it the same going back? What about that lady over there, her maximum-overhead-bin-sized roll-on and backpack-sized purse are bigger and heavier than my stuff!”
And then it’s welcome to the secondary pat down line…
KAREN
This is your game. I’ve never played before.
FOLEY
It’s not a game. It’s not something you play.
KAREN
Well, does this make any sense to you?
FOLEY
It doesn’t have to, it’s something that happens.
It’s like seeing someone for the first time,
like you could be passing on the street,
and you look at each other for a few seconds.
There’s this kind of recognition,
like you both know something.
The next moment the person’s gone,
and it’s too late to do anything about it.
And you always remember it,
because it was there and you let it go,
and you think to yourself,
“What if I had stopped?
What if I had said something?
What if?
What if?”
I’m a techy kinda guy. But I tech where it’s appropriate. I didn’t buy a DSLR until the digital F100 came out, but I had digital P&S’s before that – I saw the future, I just didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it til the tech had matured. Ditto with smartphones – first was an iPhone 3GS. I skipped the first gens. But I had a first-gen CD player in 1982, a damn good one, cause the tech was appropriate [1]. I didn’t buy a personal computer for myself [2] until the Titanium G4 MBP [3].
So I didn’t get an iPad until Gen 3, when the display got good enough to use for a portable programmable portfolio. In one sense, it doesn’t have the awe-inspiring effect on me that it does early adopters, because I’m not upgrading from the old display. To me it just looks like it’s supposed to look [4].
But the issue for me is, even with the latest Jobs-approved tech, I still can’t roll it up and stick it in my back pocket. I’ve been walking around a large Northern European city the last couple of days with a NYer in my back pocket, so that when I rest shanks’ mares, have lunch, beer, espresso, whatnot, I have something to read [5]. It would be awesome to have a thousand-page book, WWF, email, Reeder, and the four latest issues of the NYer at hand in an iPad-sized package, but I’m not carrying an $1k iPad around in my hand – I’m a klutz, and easily distracted (too easy to walk off and forget it). I don’t want to carry a backpack, cause I’m already totin’ the not-light D700. The only way I can think of is the manpurse, but for me it holds the Seinfeldian stigma [8], even though no one would look twice over here. I do have a Chrome bike bag, which is almost a manpurse on a daily basis, but since I’m risking my life biking in, at at least 4500m peak risk-levels, if not K2 levels, it feels manly enough. I didn’t bring it on this trip though, would have been just one more thing to carry, and it’s not really a checkable baggage item like the Pata MLC is.
So the iPad has not yet worked its way entirely into my travel routine. Email me suggestions if you have them. Besides “nut up, get a manpurse” and “get a girlfriend. Who carries an iPad-compatible purse.”
I still have a Technics SL-1200II and my original B&O turntable. Appropriate tech. I have 1k vinyl albums.
Aside from cheap x386 Linux mail/webservers. Not a personal computer.
Which still runs at the same speed as my current laptop, albeit on 7 year old apps. It’s not worth buying another battery for though, and the screen is lo-res and dim.
Until I load up an un-Retina app, and see “wow, how bad is that, that’s what those guys had to live with.” But it looks fine until you compare.
There’s not (yet) always free wifis, and it’s not worth racking up huge cell phone bills roaming, even on someone else’s dime [6].
My, and by “my”, I mean “my employer’s” iPhone is not unlocked, even though we pay unlocked prices for them out of project funds. And I know from experience that I don’t get re-imbursed if I buy a burner phone and PAYG SIM card, but my employer will happily pay a $1k overseas phone bill. So because they won’t pay $75, they’ll pay $1k instead. I tried to save them money once, and it ended up costing me money. They lose money, I lose money — I pick them.
I gather that I have an instinctive knack for looking like a local, most everywhere I go. At least judging by the number of times I’m expected to know the rules, understand the language, and give directions to people who look even more lost than me (daily). This will be the subject of subsequent blog fodder.
Don’t know why – I manscape [9], I moisturize [10], but I draw the line at red parachute pants and the manpurse.
Cause I work out 2x/day and therefore shower at least 2x/day, and because when (not if) I hit the deck, I want the road rash to heal – it’s just easier to shave everything [11]. It makes the bike seat, wet suit, condoms, and speedos easier to live with too.
I’ve seen my slightly older non-moisturizing friends’ skin – ugh. Godzilla? Made a believer out of me.
Turns out that at every step of the way, what the students did was not only legal, but not even questionable – the authorities at UCD were told so by their legal department in advance. Also, at every step of the way, what the authorities did was not only illegal, but not even questionably so. That pepper sprayer? Illegal for police, or anyone, to own or use.
Want to bet that anyone other than the students will be held responsible? Sure, the students, in the end, will be exonerated, other than all that extra-judicial punishment — $$$ for legal representation, lasting effects from the pepper spray, thrown in jail, just the way the police try to do as much damage as they can when they arrest you, etc.
Just another message to remind the public – you might think you have inalienable rights, the right to peacably assemble, the right to free speech, the right to petition for redress of grievances. But that doesn’t mean you won’t be extra-judicially punished, right up to the point of death (and including that, if they think they can get away with it, and they can) for exercising them.
The police, the chancellor, anyone else who nominally should have known better? Still on the job, still getting paid.
But LV won’t run on a Mac, so I am forced to use it. I am regretting not getting an MBP and running BootCamp on it, though, because this $1700 Sony is also a POS.
We are in a depression, but not because we don’t know how to remedy the problem.[..] We are choosing continued depression because we prefer it to the alternatives.
[…T]he preferences of developed, aging polities — first Japan, now the United States and Europe — are obvious to a dispassionate observer. Their overwhelming priority is to protect the purchasing power of incumbent creditors. That’s it. That’s everything. All other considerations are secondary. These preferences are reflected in what the polities do, how they behave. They swoop in with incredible speed and force to bail out the financial sectors in which creditors are invested, trampling over prior norms and laws as necessary.
Read the whole thing, as they say:
We are in a depression, but not because we don’t know how to remedy the problem. We are in a depression because it is our revealed preference, as a polity, not to remedy the problem. We are choosing continued depression because we prefer it to the alternatives.
Usually, economists are admirably catholic about the preferences of the objects they study. They infer desire by observing behavior, listening to what people do more than to what they say. But with respect to national polities, macroeconomists presume the existence of an overwhelming preference for GDP growth and full employment that simply does not exist. They act as though any other set of preferences would be unreasonable, unthinkable.
But the preferences of developed, aging polities — first Japan, now the United States and Europe — are obvious to a dispassionate observer. Their overwhelming priority is to protect the purchasing power of incumbent creditors. That’s it. That’s everything. All other considerations are secondary. These preferences are reflected in what the polities do, how they behave. They swoop in with incredible speed and force to bail out the financial sectors in which creditors are invested, trampling over prior norms and laws as necessary. The same preferences are reflected in what the polities omit to do. They do not pursue monetary policy with sufficient force to ensure expenditure growth even at risk of inflation. They do not purse fiscal policy with sufficient force to ensure employment even at risk of inflation. They remain forever vigilant that neither monetary ease nor fiscal profligacy engender inflation. The tepid policy experiments that are occasionally embarked upon they sabotage at the very first hint of inflation. The purchasing power of holders of nominal debt must not be put at risk. That is the overriding preference, in context of which observed behavior is rational.
I am often told that this is absurd because, after all, wouldn’t creditors be better off in a booming economy than in a depressed one? In a depression, creditors may not face unexpected inflation, sure. But they also earn next to nothing on their money, sometimes even a bit less than nothing in real terms. “Financial repression! Savers are being squeezed!” In a boom, they would enjoy positive interest rates.
That’s true. But the revealed preference of the polity is not balanced. It is not some cartoonish capitalist-class conspiracy story, where the goal is to maximize the wealth of exploiters. The revealed preference of the polity is to resist losses for incumbent creditors much more than it is to seek gains. In a world of perfect certainty, given a choice between recession and boom, the polity would choose boom. But in the real world, the polity faces great uncertainty. The policies that might engender a boom are not guaranteed to succeed. They carry with them a short-to-medium-term risk of inflation, perhaps even a significant inflation if things don’t go as planned. The polity prefers inaction to bearing this risk.
iPad versus paper
I’m a techy kinda guy. But I tech where it’s appropriate. I didn’t buy a DSLR until the digital F100 came out, but I had digital P&S’s before that – I saw the future, I just didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it til the tech had matured. Ditto with smartphones – first was an iPhone 3GS. I skipped the first gens. But I had a first-gen CD player in 1982, a damn good one, cause the tech was appropriate [1]. I didn’t buy a personal computer for myself [2] until the Titanium G4 MBP [3].
So I didn’t get an iPad until Gen 3, when the display got good enough to use for a portable programmable portfolio. In one sense, it doesn’t have the awe-inspiring effect on me that it does early adopters, because I’m not upgrading from the old display. To me it just looks like it’s supposed to look [4].
But the issue for me is, even with the latest Jobs-approved tech, I still can’t roll it up and stick it in my back pocket. I’ve been walking around a large Northern European city the last couple of days with a NYer in my back pocket, so that when I rest shanks’ mares, have lunch, beer, espresso, whatnot, I have something to read [5]. It would be awesome to have a thousand-page book, WWF, email, Reeder, and the four latest issues of the NYer at hand in an iPad-sized package, but I’m not carrying an $1k iPad around in my hand – I’m a klutz, and easily distracted (too easy to walk off and forget it). I don’t want to carry a backpack, cause I’m already totin’ the not-light D700. The only way I can think of is the manpurse, but for me it holds the Seinfeldian stigma [8], even though no one would look twice over here. I do have a Chrome bike bag, which is almost a manpurse on a daily basis, but since I’m risking my life biking in, at at least 4500m peak risk-levels, if not K2 levels, it feels manly enough. I didn’t bring it on this trip though, would have been just one more thing to carry, and it’s not really a checkable baggage item like the Pata MLC is.
So the iPad has not yet worked its way entirely into my travel routine. Email me suggestions if you have them. Besides “nut up, get a manpurse” and “get a girlfriend. Who carries an iPad-compatible purse.”
- I still have a Technics SL-1200II and my original B&O turntable. Appropriate tech. I have 1k vinyl albums.
- Aside from cheap x386 Linux mail/webservers. Not a personal computer.
- Which still runs at the same speed as my current laptop, albeit on 7 year old apps. It’s not worth buying another battery for though, and the screen is lo-res and dim.
- Until I load up an un-Retina app, and see “wow, how bad is that, that’s what those guys had to live with.” But it looks fine until you compare.
- There’s not (yet) always free wifis, and it’s not worth racking up huge cell phone bills roaming, even on someone else’s dime [6].
- My, and by “my”, I mean “my employer’s” iPhone is not unlocked, even though we pay unlocked prices for them out of project funds. And I know from experience that I don’t get re-imbursed if I buy a burner phone and PAYG SIM card, but my employer will happily pay a $1k overseas phone bill. So because they won’t pay $75, they’ll pay $1k instead. I tried to save them money once, and it ended up costing me money. They lose money, I lose money — I pick them.
- I gather that I have an instinctive knack for looking like a local, most everywhere I go. At least judging by the number of times I’m expected to know the rules, understand the language, and give directions to people who look even more lost than me (daily). This will be the subject of subsequent blog fodder.
- Don’t know why – I manscape [9], I moisturize [10], but I draw the line at red parachute pants and the manpurse.
- Cause I work out 2x/day and therefore shower at least 2x/day, and because when (not if) I hit the deck, I want the road rash to heal – it’s just easier to shave everything [11]. It makes the bike seat, wet suit, condoms, and speedos easier to live with too.
- I’ve seen my slightly older non-moisturizing friends’ skin – ugh. Godzilla? Made a believer out of me.
- TMI?
Tagged iPad, tech, travelRant
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