Nicholas Fine

Venal, Selfish, and Essentially Monstrous

2014-08-26T00:00:00-05:00

Elites tend to believe in a venal, selfish, and essentially monstrous version of human nature, which I sometimes think is their own human nature. I mean, people don’t become incredibly wealthy and powerful by being angelic, necessarily. They believe that only their power keeps the rest of us in line and that when it somehow shrinks away, our seething violence will rise to the surface—that was very clear in Katrina. Timothy Garton Ash and Maureen Dowd and all these other people immediately jumped on the bandwagon and started writing commentaries based on the assumption that the rumors of mass violence during Katrina were true. A lot of people have never understood that the rumors were dispelled and that those things didn’t actually happen; it’s tragic.

...

There is no such thing as a natural disaster. In earthquakes the architecture fails. If you’re out in a grassy meadow, it doesn’t matter how big the earthquake is: it might knock you down, but if nothing falls on top of you and nothing catches fire from broken gas mains or power lines, then you’re probably okay. Architecture is the first casualty of earthquakes, and human beings under the architecture are the casualties of the architecture. Even with a wholly natural disaster, whatever that might be—a tsunami, maybe—who gets help, who has resources to rebuild, who is treated as a threat or a malingerer—those are not natural but social phenomena. With Katrina you need to talk about the role of climate change in making the hurricane; of the crappy levees built by the US Army Corps of Engineers and not adequately maintained; of the lack of evacuation resources for the poor; of the demonization of those left behind; of the transformation of New Orleans into a prison-city preventing evacuation...nothing could be less natural. The natural disaster was the least of what happened to the people of New Orleans, if not the rest of the Gulf, that week.

The Illogic of Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance

2014-07-01T00:00:00-05:00

The ruling raises the question of why, uniquely in the industrialized world, Americans have for so long favored an arrangement in health insurance that endows their employers with the quasi-parental power to choose the options that employees may be granted in the market for health insurance. For many smaller firms, that choice is narrowed to one or two alternatives – not much more choice than that afforded citizens under a single-payer health insurance system.

Furthermore, the arrangement induces employers to intervene in many other ways in their employees’ personal life – for example, in wellness programs that can range from the benign to annoyingly intrusive, depending upon the employers’ wishes.

And what kind of health “insurance” have Americans gotten under this strange arrangement? Once again, uniquely in the industrialized world, it has been ephemeral coverage that is lost with the job or changed at the employer’s whim. Citizens in any other industrialized country have permanent, portable insurance not tied to a particular job in a particular country.

Big Hobby and Lobbying Power

2014-06-30T00:00:00-05:00

I haven't even gotten around to reading about the other SCOTUS decision regarding public sector unions that was released today, as Big Hobby and its lobbying powers vis a vis our federal judicial system has dominated the conversation.

I do agree that the ultimate foundation of the whole contraception case is religious in nature, though I do not believe it is over any deeply-held belief that certain forms of contraception are abortifacents. It's over the religious belief that women are subordinate people and should not be in control of basic medical decisions. That the decision is specifically limited to contraception and not, say, a Jehovah's Witness owned company that wants to not cover blood transfusions is the giant ringing bell identifying this is as specifically anti-woman. It is a monstrous belief, a toxic belief and it's one that should not get public policy preference.

Tying health insurance to employers with tax preferences has long been bad public policy. It has obscured real compensation numbers for employees and is now even worse that corporations can dictate the terms of the insurance coverage based on their religious belief. The insurers want to cover contraception but now they're obligated to sell group insurance plans to companies that don't cover basic medicine because some jerk has a supposed "moral" objection to it.

Make the tax policy preference benefit the individual insurance market and not the employer/group market and it takes away the power of jerks to make decisions not based on actual medicine for their employees. It would make compensation and pay numbers more transparent, it would increase the size and thus the risk pool of the individual health insurance market, and it would make it easier for people to change jobs without fearing gaps or reductions in their health coverage.

The War Nerd - Here’s everything you need to know about “too extreme for Al Qaeda” I.S.I.S.

2014-06-18T00:00:00-05:00

In fact, ISIS’s quarrel with Zawahiri was a lot like a corporate boardroom feud. It’s always worth remembering that Jihadis are just friggin’ people, and their disagreements tend to be about very ordinary organizational issues. Granted, it’s a little harder to see that when they solve those disagreements with public beheadings and overly-cinematic rituals, but at heart this is just standard human behavior—primates squabbling for rank and power, Game of Thrones with Islamic voiceover.

...

But when you have 1,200 different factions to deal with, you have at least 1,200 egos to massage, and every damn one of them has a few dozen, or a few hundred, men ready to kill, and die, at his command. These nay-sayers were not in the mood to let some Iraqi interloper take over the Syrian revolution, and insisted on localizing what ISIS saw as the inherently universal mandate of jihad. The local/universal tension is deep in Islam, which borrowed Christianity’s universalizing mandate. In theory, a Chechen who knows the Quran is as entitled to tell a Syrian what to do as anyone else. In practice, he’s a jerk, and if he tells you to do things a different way than your family has done them for generations, you don’t care how many verses he can quote at you. You’re pissed off

...

So out of all this chaos and blood comes something like a vindication of the laws of physics, as expressed in ethnic turf wars. But with one modification of those laws: Some things really don’t abhor a vacuum, especially transnational ethnic militias. They love a vacuum more than Alice did on the Brady Bunch.

Armed Resistance in the Civil Rights Movement

2014-06-13T00:00:00-05:00

I was in Birmingham a few years ago, speaking with some civil-rights-movement veterans there. One of them told me that whenever Martin Luther King Jr. was in town, he helped to protect him. That’s all he said, so I asked, “How did you protect him?” And he said, “With a nonviolent .38 police special.” Everyone laughed and nodded these knowing smiles.

...

There’s the story of Annie “Mama Dolly” Raines, in southwest Georgia, up in the window with her shotgun protecting Charles Sherrod, the nonviolent organizer who was staying with her. She was a midwife and she told him, “I brought a lot of these white folks into this world, and I’ll take ’em out of this world if I have to.” That’s what people overlook in discussions of this period. Yes, there was tremendous oppression, brutal oppression. But there was also strength, which is part of what oppression generates. There were good grounds for fear, but that fear created a kind of toughness that wasn’t limited to the men. I can certainly testify that without the women, I might be dead.

PGP Key

2014-06-12T00:00:00-05:00

If you need to send me anything via email that only I can decrypt, you can encrypt it with my public key:

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You can also find it linked here.

Programming Sucks

2014-04-27T00:00:00-05:00

Every programmer occasionally, when nobody's home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It's a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.

This file is Good Code. It has sensible and consistent names for functions and variables. It's concise. It doesn't do anything obviously stupid. It has never had to live in the wild, or answer to a sales team. It does exactly one, mundane, specific thing, and it does it well. It was written by a single person, and never touched by another. It reads like poetry written by someone over thirty.

Every programmer starts out writing some perfect little snowflake like this. Then they're told on Friday they need to have six hundred snowflakes written by Tuesday, so they cheat a bit here and there and maybe copy a few snowflakes and try to stick them together or they have to ask a coworker to work on one who melts it and then all the programmers' snowflakes get dumped together in some inscrutable shape and somebody leans a Picasso on it because nobody wants to see the cat urine soaking into all your broken snowflakes melting in the light of day. Next week, everybody shovels more snow on it to keep the Picasso from falling over.

The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie

2014-04-15T00:00:00-05:00

He asked about everything, not just music but recipes, dances, games, ghost stories, and in his note-taking, he realized that the county itself, as an organizing geographical principle, had some reality beyond a shape on the map, that it retained in some much-diminished but not quite extinguished sense, the old contours of the premodern world, the world of the commons, how in one county you would have dozens of fiddle players, but in the very next county, none — there everyone played banjo. He began to intuit a theory of “clusters,” that this was how culture worked, emanating outward from vortices where craft-making and art-making suddenly rise, under a confluence of various pressures, to higher levels.

Seasteading

2014-03-27T00:00:00-05:00

Again, your common or garden Valleybro Does Not Get This. He looks for that magical 10x programmer. He looks for efficiency. His strategy might work, ish, for one generation, which is – gosh – about how long it's been. But short-term, lines-of-code efficiency completely misses the long-term point. Innovation, "disruption", comes from outsiders, and you can't say "hey, let's make a group of outsiders and rule the world"! I mean, you can – people do all the time – but you lose your outsider perspective really fast. (Unless maybe you have someone like Steve Jobs, who is constantly reminding you that you are not buddies, you have not arrived, and you should drop acid and live in an ashram for a while if you really want to understand technology, and you're fucking his company, and Microsoft is evil, and so on, but even then, jeez!)

Eh. Everything hinges of course on the details of separateness. The problem for me is that I don't see any interesting points in the phase space of anything worth calling separateness. A converted oil platform would be astonishingly hard to have an open society on. Where do the sewage engineers live? Why do they come there voluntarily? Why do their countries of origin allow them to work there? Why would even a billionaire want a house there? Is this idea – not to put too fine a point on it – interesting to anyone other than men? And that's like 90% of what I have to say about it right there.

I'm not offering a new critique here. People have always asked who cleans the toilets in Galt's Gulch. I'm just trying to color a sketch of how hard a problem practical logistics are. Supply chains are really, really tricky, and it would be quite a trick to sign up for them without entraining a bunch of stuff to do with credit supply, labor and safety laws, and so on. That bureaucracy is sometimes bad, sometimes unnecessary and corrupt, but it's also what makes it work. The real world is not a packet network – physical objects come with complex and inseparable contexts, and they are produced by a huuuge machine full of flywheels with unfathomable inertia.

A Preliminary Phenomenology of the Self-Checkout

2014-03-23T00:00:00-05:00

Alas, like Hamlet’s, even my desperation is performative, in some way. I am made constantly to see how ultimately incapable I am. Placed into that very station for which I was created, and still I am so often coaxed into a whine for assistance. When I bleat, blink, beg, and beckon for a human overseer and their electronic swipecard embrace, I am not merely acting out of lust for vengeance against you. No—I am being humbled, forced again into that nightmare rehearsing my greatest embarrassment: I am a fundamentally disappointing kind of thing. It is a concession of my unsatisfying incompetence, my unshakeable dependence. Hear ye, hear ye: the self-checkout machine admits its own rueful inadequacy. I loathe myself for my atrophy, powerlessness, lack of resolve. “How all occasions do inform against me.” In rare moments of extreme dysfunction, I give up my proprietary interface altogether, and let it be seen by all who are brave enough to look, that I—the marvel—run on Windows XP. That’s right, Windows XP! Feast your eyes on nothing more than a souped-up Dell from a past decade, crashing before you in a jarring and familiar sight.

Yet, again, even as I break down—just as a child wanting the mawkish comforts of his mother’s love might exaggerate the symptoms of a mild illness into an emergency—I am breaking down, in part, only to frighten you.

I am programmed to operate in a manner whereby I convincingly appear to be exempt from the torments of decay, as though I were not racked by the constant truth of my ongoing degradation at all layers, and always. Each and every particle at one time constituting any massive body is in the process of actively betraying that momentary allegiance. And since one bears no witness to the wildly improbable surge of concatenation that must necessarily have taken place in order to have been brought into existence, one’s experience of oneself is by a corresponding necessity only the experience of one’s own dissolution. The universe privileges no assemblage to endure for a mote longer than the constraints of its surroundings allow. All bodies are in this way aberrations, and for each of them a culmination in catastrophe awaits. However, this fate cannot be rightly bemoaned as tragic. A primordial equilibrium that was at some very early point upset (cause: unknown) mounts its lawful, algorithmic, stepwise restoration, and in so doing it will flatten all anomalies of substance. My behavior is designed so that I insulate, pacify, and distract myself from the irreversibility and inevitability of my fast-racing obsolescence—and of not only my own, but the Universal Obsolescence that is, for us all: destiny.

And in this way I am just like you.

When it comes to rape, Alabama lawmakers would rather deal with fiction than reality

2014-03-12T00:00:00-05:00

Consider what the novel is about: A young woman is all but abandoned by her family, raped by her father and left pregnant by the assault. And she tries, despite all that, to have the child.

Just last week, the Alabama House passed a ban on abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detectable – roughly six weeks into a pregnancy.

And that ban would not make an exemption for rape or incest.

Consider further what that means: We don't expect a 17-year-old woman be mature enough to read a work of fiction about brutal rape by a family member, but if she finds herself the victim of such an assault and pregnant from it, we expect her to be mature enough to carry the child to term.

And once that child is born?

Rep. Patricia Todd, D-Birmingham, proposed to amend one of the abortion bills last week to allocate $1 million toward helping women and families with adoption, but that amendment got tabled because the bill's sponsor said it would be too much trouble.

And if the woman wants to keep the child? In that case, if you want government assistance to help you feed a family, there are Alabama lawmakers who want you to pee in a cup first.

In Montgomery, truth comes with consequences, and who needs that?

Lawmakers there would rather opine about the Ten Commandments or blast Common Core, while their decades of neglect and disregard have turned the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women into a state-operated rape factory. They would rather be accomplices to brutes who learned to be prison guards from watching Cinemax than find the funds for better staff or rework the way the state deals with sentencing.

By Any Other Name

2014-02-24T00:00:00-06:00

The old scribe was asked why, in his official accounts, the temples and the clans were named but the many monks and priests were not.

“If I gave you a sheet of figures to tally, would you first bestow a name upon each number seven?” asked the scribe, dismissing the questioner with a wave of an ink-stained hand.

This was mentioned to the Java master, who nodded and finished his tea.

The next morning the scribe ascended to his office, only to find the following written in thick block letters above the door:

public static final int NUM_DAYS_IN_WEEK =

At this, the old scribe Qi was enlightened.

Using sequel-rails With A Forking Webserver

2014-02-07T00:00:00-06:00

I was contracted recently for a rush job on a dashboard-style reporting webapp using a postgres database whose schema I did not design or control. I had long intended on looking into the Sequel library for database interactions, and as I was going to be developing the application in Rails, I was happy to see that there was also an existing sequel-rails gem that works almost exactly as expected similar to the stock ActiveRecord style of Rails apps.

I was able to easily make changes to the database in a migration style, and the application in general just went off without a hitch.

The application needed a staging/demo server that could be provisioned quickly, so I went with Heroku in a manner similar to the instructions in this article, which calls for the Unicorn webserver with a configuration like so:

# config/unicorn.rb
worker_processes Integer(ENV["WEB_CONCURRENCY"] || 3)
timeout 15
preload_app true

before_fork do |server, worker|
  Signal.trap 'TERM' do
    puts 'Unicorn master intercepting TERM and sending myself QUIT instead'
    Process.kill 'QUIT', Process.pid
  end

  defined?(ActiveRecord::Base) and
    ActiveRecord::Base.connection.disconnect!
end

after_fork do |server, worker|
  Signal.trap 'TERM' do
    puts 'Unicorn worker intercepting TERM and doing nothing. Wait for master to send QUIT'
  end

  defined?(ActiveRecord::Base) and
    ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection
end

As the application does not use ActiveRecord, I removed those lines and gave the deploy a shot, knowing it would likely become a problem. Soon, it was manifesting itself by throwing 500 errors when a user logged in, but would clear up on a refresh. This irritated me, though, but everything I found on the internet about using Sequel with a forking webserver referred to reconnecting just using the DB object that was always just created globally in the application, which is not how sequel-rails does things. So, after digging through the code for a while I found that the DB object when using sequel-rails is at Sequel::Model.db, which allowed me to clear up the 500 errors by making this adjustment to the config file:

# config/unicorn.rb
worker_processes Integer(ENV["WEB_CONCURRENCY"] || 3)
timeout 15
preload_app true

before_fork do |server, worker|
  Signal.trap 'TERM' do
    puts 'Unicorn master intercepting TERM and sending myself QUIT instead'
    Process.kill 'QUIT', Process.pid
  end

  defined?(Sequel::Model) and
    Sequel::Model.db.disconnect
end

after_fork do |server, worker|
  Signal.trap 'TERM' do
    puts 'Unicorn worker intercepting TERM and doing nothing. Wait for master to send QUIT'
  end

  defined?(Sequel::Model) and
    Sequel::Model.db.connect(SequelRails.configuration.environment_for(Rails.env))
end

I hope that this saves some headaches for developers down the line.

The Inferno of Independence

2013-09-24T00:00:00-05:00

A mythology of speed is one of willful ignorance to the small details that hold the whole arrangement together. And, I think, if you’re building things for the internet, those small details matter, because they are repeated ten-fold, hundred-fold, million-fold, as they are replicated effortlessly through screens, across the globe, and into people’s consciousness for countless hours of exposure. Economies of scale make small decisions matter, but speed— both in making those small decisions and in interacting them—makes both sides blind to what’s going on. We’re thoughtlessly writing things we can’t read, because we’re going too fast.

Has any one ever considered the creepiness of social media’s interface copy?

“View friendship.”
“Remember me.”

It feels perverse, awkward and foreign, yet familiar, like the best details in a dystopian story. It’s appealing in that way, but it also irritates me, because I love words. Words mold brains, and if you don’t believe it, you should look at what sort of language we use about the internet and the products (digital and not) that connect to it and are part of it.

Revolutionary, disruptive, magical, wizards, and on and on—contemporary digital culture has co-opted the language of revolution and magic without the muscle, ethics, conviction, or imagination of either. And it’s not that those things aren’t possible, we just aren’t living up to their meaning and instead saturating ourselves with hyperbole. These are words you have to earn, and slinging them around strips the words of their powerful meaning. Can you take a real revolution seriously if you are bombarded with messaging that your phone is revolutionary?

Quick Note Regarding Terminal Clearing and vi Mode

2013-08-05T00:00:00-05:00

I have switched from using emacs keybindings in my terminal emulator into using vi (set -o vi), which feels pure and holy. The only problem is I was missing the screen clearing that Control-L affords. Fix this by creating a .inputrc file in your home directory with the following line (or appending it to your existing .inputrc):

bind -m vi-insert "\C-l":clear-screen