Not quite. The speech the image is based on — and the idea behind it — bothers me.

The primary flaw is that it is based on assumptions which simply do not hold water. On top of that, it is patronizing, condescending, and seeks to minimize the role that successful people have had in their own success. Somehow the rest of us have now become responsible for it and deserve compensation.

The rest of us

“You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for,” she said. “The rest of us” is a theme she reprises over and over again, and it is classic “us vs. them” language. “We folks of average means,” she seems to be saying, “built this wonderful country . . . and now you’re coming in and reaping the benefits!” Sure, this sort of language will stir the lower and middle classes. How could it not? In the game of entrepreneurship and wealth building, it paints them as good-guys and victims and positions them against the successful business owners.

Like it or not, whether she meant it or not, this is class warfare, plain and simple. It also doesn’t make sense. The roads weren’t built for our hypothetical factory owner, they were built for (and used by) everyone. We all benefit from the roadways. Our education system benefits the educated¹ more than random employers of unskilled labor. The police force does more to protect those of modest means than it does a successful factory owner who could afford to hire armed guards in the absence of cops.

A big hunk

Now that Warren has set the stage — poor versus rich, good versus evil — we get to the action item: “Give us your money.” With a full paragraph of explication of how, precisely, society at large is actually responsible for the success of our hypothetical factory owner, we’re now told that the factory owner should let us take their money to “pay forward”. This point was alluded to in her first paragraph, but here it is writ large: since you, Mr. Rich Person, don’t pay any taxes, we’re going to need you to start. For the next entrepreneur. It’s the social contract that we all agreed to.

The problem here is that our factory owner has been paying into the system for just as long as “the rest of us” have, and the more successful he became, the more he paid in. He’s paid it in income taxes, property taxes, employment taxes, and sales taxes. He’s paid it by buying insurance and raw materials². Now that he’s successful, he’s one of the small percentage at the top of the income food chain who pay for the vast majority of social services in his city, state, and country. He has already given — and continues to give — a “big hunk” back to the community.

So why is Warren on this tangent? Because she wants more of the money he earned. Because she and the rest of the lower and middle class are somehow responsible for the success that the factory owner had.

The Social Contract

The irony of the speech, though, is just how out of sync with reality it is. The factory owner didn’t use infrastructure built by the middle class. In fact, the infrastructure was built with money taken from the rich to provide resources for those who are less successful.

It’s offensive to invoke the social contract as a ruse to take even more from those who are upholding their end of the bargain as much or more than anyone else. If we truly care about the social contract, shouldn’t we be at least as interested in reducing government waste, so the money taken from the rich goes farther?

Shouldn’t we be at least as concerned with reducing the dead weight as we are getting more juice from the engines? Shouldn’t we be trying to get rid of those whose participation in the system is more like a tapeworm than anything else?

The fact of the matter is that Warren, like so many liberals before her, is doing everything she can to play on jealousy in a poor economy to form a mandate to take even more from successful Americans so that she can fund the high levels of  entitlement programs and wasteful government spending that have come to be par for the course these days.

The only bright spot in this speech, if it is a bright spot at all, is that it is less obvious than Hillary Clinton’s infamous “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good” line.

1. to the extent that it, in its current form, benefits anyone
2. So that others can pay income taxes, property taxes, employment taxes, and sales taxes.

For anyone who pays even a modicum of attention to the world around them in America, the fact that Super Bowl ads are “a thing” is not a surprise. In fact, they’ve been a thing for so long that now even jokes about it¹ are cliché.

They’re expensive and a great deal of attention is paid to them. Their rise to prominence in pop culture has made them even more valuable and even more watched. Hell, there are people who don’t even watch the game who spend the next day finding the ads online and watching them, if for no other reason, so that they can understand chatter around the proverbial water cooler. This makes the stakes for such an ad unfathomably high.

GroupOn has a pair of ads, one of which ran during the Super Bowl, that have created quite a ruckus. One was about Tibet, the other about Brazilian rain forests. They seem to have drawn the ire of a number of busy-body, do-gooder types.

So what’s the problem? Well, as it turns out, people were offended. Very offended². The spots touched of a media firestorm of outrage, anger, and hand-wringing. There is nothing inherently offensive about the ad. Tibet’s situation is handled as seriously and clearly as is possible in the 12 seconds (out of 30) spent on it before transitioning to the GroupOn-related part of the ad. So why are people upset?

Because people enjoy feeling offended. They enjoy it more, in fact, than helping the Tibetan people.

GroupOn spent more than a third of the time it paid for putting the issue facing the Tibetan people front-and-center for more than 100 million Super Bowl viewers. The vast majority of them, I’d wager, had gained most of their previously existing awareness of the issues in Tibet from cars like the one pictured above.

In the commercial, right before turning his attention to the service being advertised, Actor Timothy Hutton tells us “[Tibet's] very culture is in jeopardy.” But the sudden shift raises an immediate question for those unfamiliar with the plight: Why is their culture in jeopardy?

If even 0.1% of Super Bowl viewers attempted to answer that question for themselves (either by hopping onto Wikipedia or asking the nerdiest guy at their Super Bowl party), the ad would probably have done more good in 12 seconds than years and years of bumper stickers plastered on the back of hippies’ cars. If any of the viewers noticed the juxtaposition and thought “What an insulated little bubble we must live in to have trendy restaurants serving the food of an oppressed people,” you could practically visualize this happening to the person’s brain.

The people raising a stink, speaking in stern tones, and wagging their fingers at GroupOn are the worst kind of advocate: the kind that believes that their cause is far too serious and important for anything but somber and depressed conversation to be made about it. They thrive on the ability to demonstrate that they take their cause far more seriously than anyone else, and they would gladly trade  some of the best publicity the Tibet cause has ever received just to maintain their ability to look down their noses at people less serious than they are.

Looking at this analytically, you might get the impression that they’re actually just objecting to the thought that their pet cause might become popular, robbing them of their feeling of moral and intellectual superiority over the average idiot who currently doesn’t even know what Tibet is, let alone that it needs freeing. You might also posit that most of the anger is coming from people whose lone contribution to the Tibetan cause is the passive display of a bumper sticker.

People enjoy being vicariously offended because it reinforces their own perception that they’re just better than the people who aren’t offended. More enlightened. More aware.

In reality, they’re just more annoying.

It was a good P.R. move to apologize, but I’d really have enjoyed a giant “fuck you” with a call to action: “If you’re so offended, please feel free to donate to [some Tibet-focused charity] in the name of our rival LivingSocial.” Asking the Cult of the Offended to put their money where their mouth was would have been illuminating.

1. I watch for the commercials, etc…
2. Vicariously offended, of course, not personally.

Politicians frequently find ways to test this ability.

Take, for instance, the suggestion that Net Neutrality is tantamount to government censorship.

In her defense, she probably hasn’t the faintest idea what Net Neutrality is, or what the various costs or benefits of it are. To put you a step ahead of Ms. Bachmann, here’s a quick and dirty explanation of Net Neutrality, as the term is commonly used².

So what is net neutrality?

When you open up your web browser (which really ought to be Google Chrome, if you know what’s good for you) and navigate to http://www.google.com, a ton of things happen behind the scenes. Your computer reaches out across the internet to a computer³ owned by Google. That computer is responsible for responding to your searches and other googley requests. Between your computer and Google’s is miles and miles (in some cases, hundreds or thousands of miles) of cable, linked together by specialized computers that do nothing but route traffic around the net. These cables are owned by a wide assortment of companies.

Net Neutrality’s guiding principle is that the owners of the cable treat all businesses — and all traffic — the same. 1GB of Netflix traffic should be no different from 1GB of PeteHoliday.com traffic.

To give an example — an extreme one — of what could happen in a Net Neutrality Free environment. Oh, you want YouTube, Google, and Netflix? That’s gonna cost you. That’s not what we’re facing right now, of course, but you can bet there are some execs at Comcast who would love to see the Overton Window shifted far enough to allow that sort of pricing schedule.

But I want smaller government!

I do, too, but it’s important to realize that we’re talking about physical cables. I do not believe government is good for much aside from spending money indiscriminately and running the military, but one thing governments have generally done is regulate public utilities. One feature which can define a public utility is the need for physical conduit run all over the place. Take, for example, the water or sewer systems. Imagine a setup in which three or four competing companies all ran their own sewer or water lines. The maintenance logistics alone would be enough to drive someone to drink.

The internet’s “last mile” faces similar challenges. DSL and Cable all run on existing infrastructure, giving their providers a huge advantage. When the government maintains or regulates these “last mile” type services, everyone wins. The result is lower costs, less waste, and more stability for the services themselves.

It’s a situation where, even if it were allowed by our governments, creating a competing cable company by running new wires to every home in America is so cost-prohibitive that it would take decades (probably several decades) for a competitor to recoup upstart expenses. There’s no such thing as “competition” in cable services.

The internet’s gotten by this long with no issues! What’s there to worry about?

That’s why Canada’s current predicament should be mortifying to frequent internet users. What’s going on with the internet up in America’s Hat?  Oh,  you know, nothing much:.

Starting on March 1, Ontario TekSavvy members who subscribed to the 5Mbps plan have a new usage cap of 25GB, “substantially down from the 200GB or unlimited deals TekSavvy was able to offer before the CRTC’s decision to impose usage based billing,” the message added.

For an idea of how much 25GB is, consider this: HD content on Netflix runs about 2GB per hour. 30 minutes a day of high-def programming would put you over your limit every single month, even if that’s all you did. If you also surf the web, check emails, play video games, download software, upload photos, or anything else, you’re going to hit that limit much, much sooner.

The truly horrifying thing about such low limits is that the marginal cost per GB of bandwidth to your ISP is virtually nothing. They’ve got the hardware in place, it’s relatively resilient, and the computer infrastructure is mature enough to not need constant fiddling in most cases. Charging $2 per GB is the rough equivalent of a restaurant charging $10 for a glass of coke.

Granted, Canada’s problem is less “Net Neutrality” and more “abuse of monopoly”, but the two are closely related.

Comcast is in the cable TV business. With the availability of Netflix Instant making it possible to get TV content using nothing but an internet connection, is it any wonder that Comcast has started to complain about the Netflix traffic?

How is Net Neutrality censorship?

I don’t know. As best I can tell, the politicians and talking heads are assuming that “regulating the internet” means “shutting down free speech”, even when the regulation would likely serve to preserve speech. In that way, it’s a bit like calling the First Amendment censorship. The censorship card is a scare tactic, pure and simple, and illustrates just one of the many failures to a one-size-fits all approach to politics and policy.

The whole concept behind deregulation is that free market competition will allocate resources, prices, and costs more efficiently than government regulation will. This holds true in places where open market principles exist, one of which is the existence of low barriers to entry. If it’s difficult or expensive to create a competitor, the “invisible hand” is pretty severely limited, an there aren’t too many industries where the barriers to entry are higher than in the last-mile ISP market.

1. Social modulation of pain as evidence for empathy in mice
2. Alternately, this link is a nice illustration of the situation
3. Okay, it really reaches out to a giant server farm, but stay with me here

We drink Diet Coke — with Quarter Pounders and fries at McDonald’s. We go to the gym — and ride the elevator to the second floor. We install tankless water heaters — then take longer showers. We drive SUVs to see Al Gore’s speeches on global warming.

These behavioral riddles beg explanation, and social psychologists are offering one in new studies. The academic name for such quizzical behavior is moral licensing. It seems that we have a good/bad balance sheet in our heads that we’re probably not even aware of. For many people, doing good makes it easier — and often more likely — to do bad. It works in reverse, too: Do bad, then do good.

“We have these internal negotiations going in our heads all day, even if we don’t know it,” said Benoît Monin, a social psychologist who studies moral licensing at Stanford University. “People’s past behavior literally gives them license to do that next thing, which might not be good.”

This is all to say nothing of the token environmentalists who do it to be trendy. Listen: if you think cars are going to cause catastrophic global warming, but you drive one anyway, you’re either lying or a hypocrite.

Suffice it to say that I’m a little too distracted to do much else right now.

Also, just for reference, here is an example of something else that’s stupid to do with TP.

It becomes more complicated when you start talking about the validity and enforceability of the contracts, but that’s the basic idea. This is all background, however, for an amusing story about what seems like a blustery trial lawyer who got caught with his mouth writing checks that he doesn’t want to cash:

Attorney James Cheney Mason put it out there on “Dateline NBC.” When Nelson Serrano was convicted of killing four people in Bartow, Fla., in 1997, the prosecution’s case had hinged on a 28-minute window. In that amount of time, Serrano is said to have gotten off an airplane at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and made it to a La Quinta Inn, three miles away, where he appeared on security camera footage.

“I challenge anybody to show me. I’ll pay them a million dollars if they can do it,” Mason said during an interview with “Dateline NBC” in 2006 after a jury’s finding that his client maneuvered his way through the world’s busiest airport and made it to a motel off I-85 in under 30 minutes.

Read the whole article, but the short version of the story is that a law student took him up on his offer, did it, and now wants the $1 million reward that was promised. The defense attorney doesn’t want to pay.

The primary argument the defense attorney will probably rely on is the suggestion that nobody could have taken the offer seriously. I don’t buy that for a couple of reasons.

First, we’re talking about an attorney that goes on Dateline to talk about his client’s trial. He’s probably got the money to spend. Secondly, you might think “now, why would he pay someone to prove his client could’ve done it?” The better question is this one: if nobody had come forward to meet the challenge, can’t you imagine that being used? “I offered a million dollars on national TV and not a single person was able to make it happen.”

I’ll be honest, I’m also a little off-put by the fact that the defense attorney seems unnecessarily hostile as he’s protrayed by the AJC, but I’m a fan of holding people to their word, and if you’re going to promise a bunch of money for some sort of performance, you need to pay up when someone comes through.

Howell said he taught the Catholic Church’s position on homosexuality. He summed it up by saying, “A homosexual orientation is not morally wrong just as no moral guilt can be assigned to any inclination that a person has. However, based on natural moral law, the Church believes that homosexual acts are contrary to human nature and therefore morally wrong.”

To show how homosexual behavior would be considered under competing moral systems, Howell sent an e-mail to the students contrasting utilitarianism with natural moral law.  ”I tried to show them that under utilitarianism, homosexual acts would not be considered immoral whereas under natural moral law they would,” Howell said. “This is because natural moral law, unlike utilitarianism, judges morality on the basis of the acts themselves.”

I honestly don’t know what else to say. A student got offended because they were told that the Catholic Church doesn’t condone homosexuality, and the university actually took this person seriously. The first question that comes to mind: did this person not already know that most Christian religions are opposed to homosexuality? If not, how did such a person even get into a university? Second, the course is about Catholicism, what the hell did the person think they were going to be learning about?

Thank God I’m not affiliated with University of Illinois.

To preface, let me start by saying: I spent three years in law school volunteering with victims of domestic violence. On one occasion, I came out of a law firm’s office with a client to find the target of a protective order sitting in the parking lot. I understand that there are a lot of people out there who have a legitimate reason to hide. More importantly, I don’t think a person’s desire to keep their name a secret needs to rise to this level before it is legitimate or worthy of consideration.

The reason I believe RealID is no big deal, however, and the bit of perspective that I believe the histrionic nerdragers are missing is this: it’s just a forum. It is not an integral part of the game. A huge number of people play World of Warcraft and Starcraft and other Blizzard titles without ever commenting on the forums. They’re just not that important. If you are concerned about your name being linked to your WoW account, the solution is dead simple: don’t post to the forums.

I think that there’s a lot that Blizzard can do to ameliorate the negative externalities of this decision, but even if they don’t, refusing to participate is an option. Take your conversations to different web forums, to in-game chat, or any number of other venues.

That’s the problem with virtually every screed, diatribe, and rant against RealID: they start and end with the risks of putting your name out on the internet, and they almost universally fail to assert and support the idea that the forums are somehow vital to the games.  That, in my mind, is the threshold issue: if the forums aren’t important, adding a restriction on their use, regardless of how senseless or capricious it may seem, the impact of the decision is minimal at best.

I’d also like to state, so that there’s a record of it, that I believe that Blizzard is engaging in a bit of gamesmanship here. I believe that it is more likely than not that Blizzard intends to roll out a much less invasive form or forum restriction, but one that — offered by itself — would have been seen as outrageous. When they eventually double-back, the same restriction will be seen as eminently reasonable; they’re trying to shift the Overton Window.