Well-Motivated Customer Service

Yesterday, I knew I'd have a long wait in court before my case was called, so I brought my Kindle with me to pass the time in the hallway.  Just as I was folding it up to go in to the courtroom, a guy walked past me, brushed up against me, and it fell to the ground.  Well, it wouldn't turn back on.  And there were these funny, faded horizontal lines coming from the midpoint of the bottom of the screen, and every time I pressed a button or tried to turn the thing on again, another pixel of the fading lines appeared.

When I called customer support, I had to get bounced through three people, but eventually found someone who knew something about how Kindles work, and he said "Nope, it's busted and you can't fix it.  Let me verify your address."

A sinking feeling set in at the pit of my gut.  "Wait!"  I said.  "I can't fix it?"

"Yep.  That's why I'm going to send you a replacement.  You'll have it tomorrow.  No charge."

"I...  I...  Wow!"  I confirmed my address and sure enough, the replacement Kindle came today, and it took me less than two minutes to log back on to the website and download the approximately fifty books and twenty magazines that I had on the old one.

So -- that's about 28 hours I had to do without my Kindle.  And if I'd really wanted to read something, I could have logged on to Kindle for PC and read it there in the meantime.  The replacement came to me free of charge, and I have a box to send back the old, busted product for Amazon to refurbish and re-sell later, also at no charge to me.  By the time I got home, I'd already had the thing charged up and now it's like the whole thing never happened.

What's sad about this is that this counts as an exceptionally good customer service story -- something rare and wonderful in its pleasantness, reasonability, and ease of use.  And that I was deathly afraid that Amazon's reaction would be, "Oh, too bad, so sad, customer mistakes are out of the warranty so you'll have to buy a replacement."  Indeed, that was my presumption, and the cause of the sick, sinking feeling I experienced when the tech guy said the Kindle couldn't be fixed.

Indeed, we can contrast this with my recent ordering of a replacement AC adapter for my laptop -- HP charged me an unreasonable amount of money for the spare part -- there's no way this thing costs eighty dollars.  Back when I had the Gateway Ultra-Heavy model, a replacement AC adapter for that cost three dollars.  I only agreed to pay the $80 demanded by HP because I want to make certain that whatever replacement I get will work.*  What's more, HP wanted to charge me an additional twenty dollars for next-day delivery.  Here is a company that just plain doesn't care whether I have a working computer or not.  They sold me the unit, and now they'd just as soon not support it -- and the misfortune of my cat deciding to use the power cord like the way the dogs use their chew toys is, for HP, an opportunity to earn more profit rather than an opportunity to generate goodwill.

Amazon treated me much better than HP did.

Now, you'll notice that Amazon has every financial reason in the world to want to do this.  The Kindle they sold me doesn't produce a revenue stream for them unless I'm using it and buying more books and getting more magazines.  So they want me to have a working device for the very good reason that a) I paid for it, and b) the more I use it, the more money they make.

But it's also a model for other companies to look at -- when you care about providing good service, when you care about making sure your customer has a working product they're happy with using, when you have to put your money where your mouth is in terms of keeping your customers happy, this is how customer service can work.


* I'm sure that there are plenty of tech-heads out there who will tell me that there were way cheaper ways I could have solved this problem.  I'm happy to hear them for next time, but I did what I did and it seemed like a reasonable thing to do, and most of all, I can't go back in time and change what I did.

Agora

This doesn't look quite like the movie about Hypatia of Alexandria that I would have made...

...but then again, it's impressive that a movie about Hypatia has been made at all. And that they had the very good sense to cast smouldering hottie Rachel Weisz in the lead. While Hypatia of Alexandria existed, it may be overreaching by the promoters to call this a "true story."

Given what looks like a rather overtly anti-Christian theme, I'd predict that this movie will have as much trouble finding a U.S. distributor as did Creation. No U.S distributor has been found yet, and it's not clear whether the movie made money in European release last year.
The historical reality was a good deal more complex and nuanced than what looks like they're depicting in the film, which I guess is okay for movie purposes but the reality of it was that Hypatia would have presided over what we would today call a university rather than a library, and its scholars were a mixture of pagans, Christians, Mithraists, and Jews. As were the people who destroyed it, a destruction that probably did not happen over the course of a few days or in a single violent riots.

They Was Jess Representin'

Hey, International Olympic Committee. 

Cut the Canadian Women's Hockey team a slackburger with cheese, huh?  They played a super-tough game against a really good U.S. squad and won the gold medal.  That's the top of the universe for women's hockey since there is no professional women's hockey league.  After the crowd went away, they went back on the ice and smoked some stogies and had a few brewskis.  Just like the boys do when they win.  Come on, IOC, look at the picture and tell me these women aren't providing the world a perfect representation of what Canada is all about. 

Okay, so sone of the women on the team was 18, maybe she had some beer, and drinking age in British Columbia is 19.  Let the police write her a ticket if they think it's worthwhile.  That's not your job.  Your job is to provide the world with interesting Olympic games.  But when the competition is over and the cameras are (mostly) away, that's for the athletes themselves to celebrate.  Let these women have a moment to bask in their victory.  They earned it -- they didn't even cheat this time. 

Congrats to the U.S. team, which played really well -- and taking a silver medal against the Canadians is no dishonor at all.

Self Affirming World Views

You are not immune to this.  Neither am I, neither is anyone.  Your cultural world view shades, often overtly and powerfully, what you think is real.  In other words, facts have ideologies.  But it's more than that.  Nudge-like, the manner and context in which information is presented will influence the way you rate a fact's ideology.  Particularly in the U.S., there are two dominant world views, with ill-defined but widely-intuited constellations of positions on issues, which are largely diametrically opposed to one another.  Depending on which camp you are in, this will tell you what is true and what is not.

Take global warming. If the policy proposal is limits on industrial growth or caps on carbon emissions, a conservative person is likely to suggest that anthropic global warming is an unlikely and unproven hypothesis.  But if the policy proposal is more nuclear power plants, that same person is likely to cite the risks of global warming as a serious issue.  The converse would be true for (some? most?) liberals.

How do you make decisions on their merits, then?  Well, that's the rub, isn't it!  You have to shed your ideology, remove yourself from party and tribe and personal prejudice.  And guess what, that's really difficult.  Some of your ideology comes from your education, which itself taught you how to reason and evaluate and make judgments.  You can't shed those skills.  So that means you also need to teach yourself how to separate fact from opinion, how to distinguish the objective from the normative.  At this point, we've reached a high enough level of abstraction, level of meta-analysis sophisticated enough that the vast majority of people are simply never going to bother to complete it.

Which means that if you are trying to get people to agree with you about something, you're going to have to do that meta-thinking for them. For politicians, lawyers, policy advocates, and anyone else who wants to simultaneously inform and persuade others, care and thought should be given to the manner of presentation and the way in which the proffered information will fit in to both likely constellations of opinions.

True Stumble

I've literally no idea how I found this story.  But it sent chills up my spine.

Norwegian Curling Pants

I want me some Norwegian curling pants,
'Cuz then I could go for the gold.
They got room to do the M.C. Hammer dance,
I got moves that never get old.

I love the argyle of white, blue, and red,
And fame from using a broom.
I'll let my ancestry go to my head,
And wear them from Oslo to Khartoum.*

With those pants, I could dress like a king
And no one would notice my mole.
The dry cleaner would always know they're my thing,
And my wife says they'd be great birth control.


* "Khartoum"?  Really?  You don't think you could have come up with a more artificial rhyme than that, TL?

Sending A Clear Signal

Via Bleakonomy, I see the deeply saddening and deeply disturbing case of Dr. Earl Bradley, a small-town pediatrician from suburban Delaware.  Dr. Bradley was arrested and has been formally accused of thirty-three counts of molestation of children, some of them very, very young.  The number of informal accusations will probably top a hundred by the time the case gets wrapped up. 

Dr. Bradley's M.O., according to the news report, involved getting the child into an examination room in the basement of his office building with no parents or other chaperones (read: witnesses) in attendance.  He would then allegedly rape the children and video himself doing it.  I assume that the prosecution is based on the authorities somehow getting hold of this video.  I can only assume further that Dr. Bradley's attorney has seen the videos.  There is no other explanation for this comment to ABC News:

It seems to me that we need to do a very rigorous exploration of his mental health and see if there's any pathology there ... This case kind of cries out for that kind of analysis.

I can think of one, and exactly one, reason why I might want to say something like that about my own client.  That reason, of course, is that I know good and damn well that I cannot possibly defend the case on the merits and I need to start steering for a diminished mental capacity (commonly known as "insanity") defense immediately.  The only other explanation for such a comment would be a colossal mistake on the part of the attorney because such a statement pretty much presumes that the actus reus is exactly what the prosecution says it is.

Actually, I hope that the defense attorney is right.  The idea that someone might do this sort of thing while not suffering from a profound mental defect is simply too terrifying to contemplate.

Antonin Scalia, Judicial Policymaker

There is a fourteen-day limit on the Miranda rule.  You didn't know that?  Neither did I, and neither did anyone else, not until this new interpretation of the case interpreting the Fifth Amendment got handed down with this fine piece of originalist, true-to-the-text Constitutional reasoning by none other than the King of Textual Literalism himself, Justice Antonin Scalia:

We think it appropriate to specify a period of time [after a suspect invokes his right to an attorney to allow police interrogation without the attorney present]. It seems to us that period is 14 days. That provides plenty of time for the suspect to get reacclimated to his normal life, to consult with friends and counsel, and to shake off any residual coercive effects of his prior custody.

The 14-day limitation meets Shatzer’s concern that a break-in-custody rule lends itself to police abuse. He envisions that once a suspect invokes his Miranda right to counsel, the police will release the suspect briefly (to end the Edwards presumption) and then promptly bring him back into custody for reinterrogation. But once the suspect has been out of custody long enough (14 days) to eliminate its coercive effect, there will be nothing to gain by such gamesmanship—nothing, that is, except the entirely appropriate gain of being able to interrogate a suspect who has made a valid waiver of his Miranda rights.

From which clause, you may ask, does the arch-textualist Antonin Scalia derive this 14-day rule? None. None at all. He pulls the 14-day period straight out of his ass the air and bases it on his own assumptions, academic knowledge, and personal experience about what it's like to be arrested and interrogated by the police. (Did I just say "experience?" Hmm, bad word choice there, TL, it's quite unlikely that Justice Scalia has ever been under suspicion by the police for anything in his entire life.)

In any event, if within the 14 days the suspect's lawyer hasn't instructed him on Popehat Rule #1, the lawyer should nevertheless have required her client to watch this video and its sequel.

Here's the take-away, the real rule that you should bear in mind if you are ever involved in an investigation of a crime:

Don't talk to the police. Ever. About anything.

This rule applies even if you know for sure that you're absolutely innocent and the only thing you're going to say is 100% exculpatory and no sane person could possibly interpret anything you say as incriminating in any manner and that nice, polite, courteous cop assures you that he just wants to "clear your name" so he can move on and look for the "real criminal."

Why?  Nothing good* can possibly come of it.

You have a Constitutional right to not talk to the police. A right that you will benefit from exercising.

They'll have plenty of opportunity to gather other kinds of evidence to do their jobs without your assistance, don't you worry your pretty little head about that. A healthy distrust of those in positions of authority is a deeply American character trait, so don't be afraid to exercise your rights, especially this one.  That right is there, after all, to protect the innocent.

And it's pretty safe to assume that the passage of fourteen days after you've invoked your rights will not cause the police to suddenly change their attitude towards you or the way they do business.  So even if the Miranda rule does have a 14-day limit, Popehat Rule #1 does not.
 
* Nothing good for you, that is.

Hat tips to Orin Kerr, Web, and Ken.

The Beast Is Dying Of Starvation -- Now What?

Assemblywoman Diane Harkey (a Republican, representing southern Orange County) joins Democratic Attorney General and likely Gubernatorial nominee Jerry Brown in saying that the state is "bankrupt."  Which is about right -- we're missing a quarter of our anticipated state budget and between now and the end of the upcoming fiscal year, we have to come up with a combination of either new revenues or spending cuts that total $20,000,000,000.  That's twenty billion dollars.  And we've got a sixteen billion dollar bill coming due, this year, for healthcare premiums to be paid for retired state and municipal workers.

But, not so far, say Controller John Chiang and a spokesman for Treasurer Bill Lockyer.  Chiang says that should the state have to miss a debt service payment, it will seek judicial restructuring of its debt repayment plans.  Which would be, it seems to me, exactly what happens in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy.  And according to Lockyer's office, Harkey and Brown are guilty of causing a harmful panic by even talking about this:

You might score some political points by saying the state is bankrupt, but you're hurting taxpayers when you do that. We are not basically bankrupt ... When you have that kind of talk out there and it makes it into the papers, it poisons the market when you go to sell bonds.

Quoth Stephen Green, "Lockyer is worried California might have trouble borrowing its way out of its spending crisis." A pithy assessment of the proposed "solution" to this problem indeed.

Harkey and Brown are not just scoring political points.  Chiang doesn't like the word "bankruptcy" but that's what he's talking about as a functional matter.  And Lockyer is, well, living up to the sterling reputation for principled, intelligent governmental service that he built up for himself in the Assembly and the Attorney General's office.  Maybe Lockyer is a good lawyer and a good prosecutor; I wouldn't know, but there's a reason the Democrats are not looking to Lockyer as their guy for Governor this November.

Because Brown is right and Lockyer is wrong.  Harkey is right and Chiang is wrong.  The state is bankrupt.  The beast has been starved.  When obligations and debt outweigh available assets and cash flow this powerfully for a business, the decision is between Chapter 7 and Chapter 11.  For a state, as a realistic matter, Chapter 11 is the right way to go because the state has fundamental obligations under its own Constitution and under Federal law to continue providing a large number of services, and there is still an impressive cash flow.

And there is no equivalent of Chapter 7 bankruptcy for a state, something I made a bitter joke about nine months ago.  A state, once created, cannot be dissolved or altered as a sovereign political entity without not only its own consent but also an Act of Congress.  No such thing has ever happened in our history.  Such a thing happening now would kick all of California's problems off to Washington, and Washington doesn't want these problems, so there is no realistic way that Congress would agree to a proposal to place California in Federal receivership.

But someone needs to cut spending.  And it's going to sucksucksuck I mean megasuck, with good people losing their jobs and more good people taking painful cuts in pay, and all sorts of social services, including schools and prisons and courts, getting reduced in staffing and effectiveness.  I'm seeing it now in the courts as they prepare for the inevitable -- we're losing a judge up here at our local courthouse and come Monday, one in eight of the support staff (clerks, baliffs, courtroom attendants, and the rest) are going to be laid off.  Our income and sales taxes are already the highest in the nation, beating out even the traditionally heavy-footed governments of the New England states.  So there isn't much practical room for further taxation.

If the Legislature and the Governator can't or won't do it, the job of cutting state spending is going to eventually fall to a judge.  A judge who really, really doesn't want the job but will have to do it anyway, because judges, unlike elected politicians, have an obligation to actually resolve the issues that come before them.  I can confidently predict that in exchange for doing this job, the unlucky judge to whom this unenviable task falls will face the most profound political criticism any judicial officer has faced since Clarence Thomas first opened a can of Coca-Cola.  That's simply an unfair thing to do to an innocent judge, but that is what is looking to me like the inevitable means of resolution.

What that judge will do to earn this obloquy, though, is what the Legislature is too spineless to do on its own -- slash spending and demand that the California Constitution and a library full of laws containing spending mandates be re-written.  It will be profoundly undemocratic and it will open up political problems to solve for years afterwards.  And since we've populated the high ranks of our state government with invertebrates like Lockyer and Chiang, I don't see any realistic way to avoid it.

Enemies Who Deserve Each Other

OPEN SCENE:  Southaven, Mississippi.  An AGNOSTIC and the MAYOR are debating.
A:  Hey, when I go to court, I notice that the seats in the gallery are church pews!  Complete with crosses engraved in the side!  That makes me feel unwelcome in the court when I go to defend myself from a wrongful accusation of shoplifting!

M:  But we bought those pews from a church that closed, so we could provide seating in the court for the public cheaply.  No one ever mentions them and you're the first person in years who noticed them, and your religion or lack thereof has nothing to do with your guilt or innocence.

A:  Well so what?  I want to sue you for violating church and state separation if you don't remove the pews altogether!

M:  "I welcome the challenge ... Maybe it’s time the religious right stands up to the liberal left and says enough is enough. Where do you stop? Where’s the common sense? I’m not taking them out."

That last line is an actual quote, not a paraphrase.

The agnostic in this story is right in principle but wrong in approach.  To be sure, you shouldn't have to see religious symbology in a neutral court.  A court must not only be actually fair but labor to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.  Christian crosses on seats in the courtroom create the appearance of impropriety.

In the meantime, the mayor is wrong as to the law but right to resist the lawsuit.  A lawsuit is not the answer here, but the mayor's desire to preserve the crosses has blinded him to the real solution.  Which is this:  judicious application of a router on the sides of the pews, and about $500 worth of painted ceramics and glue to put the seal of the City of Southaven or that of the State of Mississippi in place of the crosses.  Now, suddenly, the pews become "benches" decorated with secular, governmentally-appropriate symbols to which there can be no objection.  No claim of church-state violation; the city continues to save money, and the court can get back to the serious business of deciding whether the agnostic was guilty of shoplifing from Wal-Mart or not.

See, we don't always need to go to court to solve our problems.  But when everyone digs their heels in and insists that they must be 100% right, easily-resolvable disputes become intractible lawsuits.  Same thing if people insist on turning everything they do into political theater.  Then, only the lawyers win.  Which is okay with me, I guess, but there are better global solutions available here.

Hat tip to Friendly Atheist.

Haughty Much, Mr. President?

I can't look at this picture of the President from today's Gray Lady without being struck by the utter disdain on his face.  It's deeply unflattering and plays right in to the right-wing narrative of Obama as an arrogant autocrat -- a narrative which contains a germ of truth but also a very healthy dose of exaggeration.

Maybe the photographer just caught him at a really bad moment.  But never let it be said again that the New York Times is unwilling to print an unflattering picture of Barack Obama.

Context

Hat tip to Common Sense Atheism.

Turkish Democracy

One of the countries I keep a close eye on internationally is Turkey.  It's not just that there are plenty of predictions that Turkey will rise to global prominence over the course of this century, or that as one of the few NATO members (and possible EU members) that is primarily Muslim its existence is a powerful signal that the West is not engaged in a religious crusade.  Or that the political relationship between Turkey and my own nation is a murky, complicated stew of social tensions and affinities.  It's also that Turkey is a crossroads of visions for the future -- it straddles the competing impulses of secular liberalism and theocracy, and if it goes down the second of those roads, it will do so by democratic means.

So it's big news to hear that an alleged coup by the secularist military seems to have been suppressed with the simultaneous arrest of more than fifty top commanders of the Turkish military.  Obviously, these generals and admirals haven't had a chance to give their side of the story yet, and some of the claims are more than a little bit wild, like the one that they were planning to shoot down a Turkish jet and blame it on the Greeks to incite a war and thus seize power.  It's no secret, though, that the military would have preferred a more secularist government to take power; the current Prime Minister of Turkey is from an openly religious political party.

Seems to me that the best way to do that would be to win an election rather than stage a coup.  Which may be a factor in the decision to arrest these men -- the incumbents may be trying to discredit their opposition rather than out-argue them in the political arena. 

There has been some silly talk of military action in the political arena here, but it's been mostly fringe stuff and the promise of the political pendulum's incipient swing back to the right in this year's elections seems to have silenced that stuff.  That's because we are fundamentally committed to democracy in the U.S. and we hope that our allies, like Turkey, are too. 

It's interesting to note, though, that both sides of this dispute in Turkey will claim to have been acting in the interests of a democratic Turkey despite both being basically non-democratic in their thinking.  A religious party ultimately winds up advocating the adoption of theocratic rules and principles to underlie its lawmaking and bolster its claim to legitimacy.  But like the western Bible, the Koran is a fundamentally non-democratic document.  And of course the military is a fundamentally non-democratic institution.  "Democracy" may well be a gloss on the more abstract political idea of "legitimacy."

At the end of the day, though, Turkey must choose for itself a path for its future.  While it is not clear that Turkey can be integrated into the EU, the potential for that as a means to solidify Turkey's commitment to the west and the rule of law and democratic government and ultimately secular government is tremendous.  We should wish Turkey well in those efforts.  Along the way, Turkey will become enriched and the lives of ordinary Turkish people will improve, but the Turks' historical rivalry with Greece will need to be reduced to soccer matches and the occasional international lawsuit over control of Aegean islands used mostly for tourism.  Down that path is a Fukuyama-ist future of long-term economic prosperity highlighted mainly by rather dull trade disputes and political balancing of environmental protection against the expansion of industrial and service-sector economic growth, a world in which big decisions will be resolved by lawyers and businesspeople and but for language differences, Turkey looks a lot like the United States or France or Germany.

But there is another path, one that looks east of Ankara rather than west of Istanbul.  Down this road, Turkey cools and ultimately severs its military relationship with NATO and decides to go its own way economically outside of the EU.  Instead, it enters into a de facto but unannounced partnership with Iran and Russia to contain expanding U.S. power in the middle east, centered in a democratic Iraq and a democratizing Jordan, seeking to eclipse Saudi prominence in wealth and religious prestige, while using diplomacy to dance around the military power of Israel.  The ultimate goals in this path is to first become the open regional leader and then to lure Iraq out of the geopolitical orbit of the U.S. and create a coalition of nations between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf such that supported by this regional alliance, Turkey becomes not just a regional leader but a global power in its own right.  Down that path ultimately lies a significant war once this coalition sufficiently contains its back doors in Arabia, North Africa, and Persia, and looks to southeastern Europe as its final avenue of expansion.

On Misuse Of Powerpoint

If this isn't exactly right I don't know what else is. A good powerpoint presentation is the exact opposite of reading the slides out loud. Yet again and again I find myself in presentations where people do exactly that.  It's a reminder to me that Powerpoint, intended as an aid to presentations, is much more frequently used in what can seem like a conscious effort to obfuscate.

For instance, don't ever show anyone whose respect you want a slide that looks like the one to the left.  This is way too busy, way too much by way of graphics, and not nearly enough explanation to figure out what in the hell is going on.  A graphic image on a powerpoint slide should be simple, direct, pertinent, and not distracting.  And it should obey the Rule of Thirds -- the focus object within an image should take up about one-third of the total space being viewed; it should be centered along lines to which which the eye instinctively gravitates.  So give some thought to what, exactly, you want your audience to see because the combination of whatever it is that you're saying along with your visually sparse (and therefore beautiful) slide will drive that point home much more effectively than something so busy it causes retinal fatigue that will literally put your audience to sleep.

What's more, bad background and color choices can ensure that your audience is completely unable to read whatever it is that you wrote and intend to read out loud to them.  Take, for instance, the example to the right.  The varying cloud background might look pretty but when you're putting together a slide you need to be much more utilitarian than that -- the title of the slide is nearly invisible and the sentences are so long that they can't be useful for anything.  They certainly don't reinforce whatever point is being made by the presenter -- which, I presume, are the sentences themselves.

And, of course, while we're looking at crowded, unintelligible powerpoint slides, let's not forget that a really good way to make sure that your audience hasn't a f-ing clue what you're talking about is to offer them a slide that is so dense with fine-print text that they spend the entire time squinting at it trying to make out what's there and zero attention to what it is that you're saying.  Although I've picked two medical presentations slides, there is certainly no particular reason why lawyers, technies, stockbrokers, investment analysts, or anyone else could not fall into this trap -- it's another case of expertitis, in which one's expertise in a particular field becomes much greater than one's ability to communicate useful information about that expertise to someone who is not also an expert.

Don't be afraid of blank space.  Don't read your slides out loud; use them to underline a few key concepts and keep the focus on the speech you make.  The slides supplement the speech, not the other way around.

Hat tips for bad powerpoint slides to Tim's Blog, ThugMed, and Neurodiversity.  And of course to Dilbert for the comic.

Depressing Reality

The cover story from this month's Atlantic is deeply depressing.  And, I can tell you from my (comparatively) brief experience with unemployment, based on a very real psychological phenomenon.

Back after The Wife and I moved to Tennessee and discovered that what we'd thought was the promise of a good job was actually nothing but hospitality, it took a long time for me to find new work.  Not having productive work and not contributing much to the household led me to sink into a pretty deep funk, from which I had difficulty summoning the energy and hope to go out and take the necessary pro-active steps to get out from underneath our problems. 

And it took a toll on my marriage; The Wife and I had many more conflicts, and much more serious conflicts, than we had at any other point in our relationship either before or since.  We managed to stay together and get through our tough time, and now hopefully we have the roughest waters behind us.  At least, now I can have the optimism to seriously think such a thing even if the realist within me knows that there are no guarantees about anything important in this life other than that it will eventually end.  After many years together, I've never felt closer or more in love with my wife than I am now and I'm certain that both of us having productive careers and a sufficient level of material comfort is a factor in that.  But I remember what it was like when things went unexpectedly bad and how frustrating it was to feel like we were powerless to change them, so when I read in the Atlantic that prolonged unemployment can cause significant and lasting effects on family dynamics, it doesn't take much convincing at all to tell me that this is something real.

I'm also reminded of an old discussion from a few years ago at the firm.  One of the attorneys had read that there is a seventy to eighty year "long cycle" in economics, which the author of the book thought was approaching its end.  The end of the previous long cycle was the Great Depression beginning in 1929, and before it, the Crash of 1873, which led to a six-year depression and a wobbly economy for a twenty-five years after that, and the long cycle that at the time was thought to be coming to an end would have started a few years afterwards.  I sure hope we aren't re-creating 1873.  Re-creating 1929 would be bad enough.

Now, the bit in the Atlantic about how unemployment depresses one's future earning arc may be true for most but unless you're on a Biglaw career track, attorney incomes often rise and fall according to a set of rhythms within which simple employment longevity is often not a significant factor.  But that's more important in terms of setting long-term fiscal policy for the government than anything else; the marketplace will take care of consumers getting things like food and insurance even if incomes do not rise as much as they have for the previous generation.

What I'm saying is that it's right to take a close look at the social effects of extended periods of unemployment.  They're real and they will change our society whether we like it or not.

Mock Trial: The Next Generation

The kids -- lots of freshmen and sophomores -- did all right tonight.  Not great; they need to acquire some presence of mind, learn how to work without notes, and summon up the gumption to actually make objections.  But they got through their case-in-chief and were able to conduct effective cross-examinations.  So we're on our way.

Happiness is Found Money

Well, okay, "happiness" might be too strong a word for it, but it's certainly a surprising pleasure.  Now, how to deal with The Wife wanting to do one thing with it and me another.

How's The Weather Where You're At?

I mowed the lawn today.  It really needed it since the grass has grown quite long over the past several weeks.

I wore short sleeves and cargo pants when I did it.  I worked up a decent sweat, too.  It's been several hours since I finished and my feet are still unreasonably sore from it.  There were still autumn leaves on the ground, nearly all of which I vaporized with the lawn mower.  The back yard needs another round with the rake, though; the leaves were damper there and did not vanish into dust and fibers so nicely.

I got the job all done before the rain hit and The Wife and I had to make an appearance at a memorial service.  Where I was quite warm in a suit.

Eat your heart out, D.C.  But don't worry -- I'll get my comeuppance in a few weeks when I'm in Milwaukee.

Taking Avatar Way Too Seriously

Apparently, there are people who have become genuinely depressed that the real world is not more like the world depicted in the movie Avatar. They want to live in a world of pristine beauty with a simple way of life and to experience harmony with nature.

And then there's this:

I would like to think that the behavior in the video above is fiction, a scripted bit for some sketch comedy show on TV or the net. But like a Poe, it is actually somewhat difficult to tell whether I'm seeing a glimpse of reality or satire.

Nor do I think that a reminder that "It's only a movie" will do any good. What these folks are doing is projecting their desires and hopes, and those are real enough. Longing for a simple life and wishing to be surrounded by beauty are perfectly understandable things. What disturbs me is not that people would want that or even that they might engage in fantasy role-play based on it. It's off-putting, though, for people to describe suicidal ideation and insist that what is depicted in the movie is real.

For the record, the image of the noble savage who lived in harmony with nature is an idealized fiction. The reality of Native American life was that Native Americans deforested most of the Rocky Mountains and surrounding plateaus in what is today the southwestern United States, with ecological effects that last to this day; early Native Americans hunted their best available food and clothing source, the wooly mammoth, to extinction; and left to their own devices, native peoples like the Aztecs, Incas, and Anasazi urbanized and formed stratified, monetized, slave-based economies that included ritualized human sacrifice as a significant part of their social fabric. Which is not to say that they were worse than the Europeans who supplanted them, only to point out that what you are looking at in the movie is a fictional analogue to a vision of history that has intentionally had all of the unpleasant bits edited out from it in the name of "dramatic license." The real-life Native Americans were people just like us, no more and no less than human beings, with all of the same moral falliability and short-sightedness that goes along with being a human that people experience today and that they have always experienced for as long as there have been people.

And there is no way to connect oneself neurologically with a "tree of life" and acheive communion with an actual, physical, living god-who-is-also-the-entire-planet. Like it or not, you are human beings and you lack those nerve endings at the end of a tail that the entirely fictional Na'vi characters in Avatar had -- and which, by the way, they completely ignored when they had sex.  A signfiicant error in storytelling, if you ask me -- if such a thing existed, wouldn't that be the ultimate form of intimacy, the ultimate expression of love and interpersonal union?  But it's not what happened; instead, we got about fifteen seconds of PG-13 level heavy petting.  So let's not fool ourselves into thinking that the Na'vi represent an ideal society because they really dropped the ball there.

If you're among the number of people who have seen Avatar and think it depicts and idealized, better world, great.  I think that rather than sighing into your webcam about how you wish you could fly one of those pterodactyl-looking dealies while shooting arrows (note that the Na'vi practice chemical warfare in total violation of the Geneva conventions) you'd be better off finding some way to work to make the world that you actually live in become a better place in some way.

Oh, sure, go have fun painting yourself blue and practicing archery for some escapist recreation, if that's your idea of a good time.  But adults ought not to mistake fantasy for reality -- that's one of the very definitions of being an adult.

Hat tip to Stephen Green for the video.

Terrorism in Austin

It appears that a 53-year-old Texas man named Joseph A. Stack had some serious and perennial tax troubles and had come to greatly resent the government for pursuing him to pay back taxes (and interest and penalties).  If that were the end of the story, it would not be news.  Quite unfortunately, this is news, because of what happened next.

Stack's house was set afire either yesterday or today, and today he posted a suicide note on the internet that read: "Violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer ... Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well."  Then, someone who seems to have been Stack flew a small plane into a seven-story office building in Austin which houses the IRS.  There are many injuries but as of the time I write these words no fatalities and only one person unaccounted for (who may well have simply not been at work today for some reason).

Now, here's the thing -- excerpted from the Business Week story linked above:

Spokesmen for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security said that initial indications show no ties to organized terrorism.
"It does not appear to be terrorism," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters traveling with President Barack Obama on Air Force One today. The Department of Homeland Security "is looking at all angles," he said.

"It does not appear to be terrorism," Mr. Gibbs?  Really?  Flying a plane into an office building trying to kill employees of the U.S. government isn't terrorism?  So how exactly are we defining the term "terrorism" these days?

I presume here that Stack was the suicide pilot.  In quantitative terms like scale and effect, Stack's suicide attack has fallen far short of achieving what al-Qaeda's strike on September 11, 2001 did.  But qualitatively, I have a difficult time distinguishing this from 9/11.

Can a lone actor be a terrorist?  Of course.  One does not need to be supported by a large network of like-minded individuals to be a terorrist.

Can a person be a terrorist acting against his own government, his own nation?  To be sure.  Timothy McVeigh is reviled as a home-grown terorrist.  Anthony Padilla has been held by the U.S. government despite his U.S. citizenship.

Does a terrorist need to have some kind of an announced or discernable political objective?  Stack presumably had one -- to get the IRS to change the way it does business, to leave people like him alone lest its offices be attacked in this fashion again.  Or at least to revenge himself on the IRS, which he seemed to view as some sort of oppressor.  Stack thought that achieving this goal, a goal detrimental to the strength of the U.S. government, was something worth exchanging his life for.

Now, my heart goes out to the families of the injured, and to the family of Mr. Stack -- his family should not be penalized morally for a crime that they did not commit, and they did lose a loved one today and may well be homeless and in serious financial trouble on top of that. I hope people can see that without getting blinded by anger at Stack himself. It's easy, too, to understand how a guy in Stack's position could feel like he was at the end of his rope, particularly if you've been through tough financial times yourself. So that makes the attack in Austin today a deeply saddening event.

But it's also one that really brings home the point that attaching labels like "terrorism" or "criminal" to a particular act is a very subjective thing -- and one that winds up having not just nomenclature but philosophical, political, and legal consequences.  This incident, to me, illustrates how smoothly-graded the shading between "terrorist" and "criminal" really is.  Which is why we need to be on our guard against turning a blind eye to the government eschewing Constitutional safeguards.  Like, say, Mirandizing a suspect, or arraigning him after he is arrested.  It's also a reminder that threats come from within the country as well as from without.