Thudfactor

That’s a lot of boxes

2009-11-06T11:30:14+00:00

If you want to make the place you call home seem alien, just drag everything out of the corners and put it in cardboard boxes. Photo: Boxes in the Sprout’s room by me.

We are finally moved into our own house. We didn’t buy a house in Northern Virginia because I felt like my employment had to be stable and it wasn’t much. Heck, I even changed career paths while we were up there. The Elf didn’t much want to buy a house either—to afford a nice place we’d have to move well away from the city. To get a close place, we’d have to mortgage our souls. And, of course, we wanted to move out of NoVa for years.

We didn’t really intend or expect to buy a house this soon, either, a story I’ve heard from a lot of people about their first home purchase. But we started looking, and then we found one we wanted, and we bought it. And here we are, homeowners.

Now, this wouldn’t be Thudfactor if I didn’t point out that we bought the house with significant government assistance. It’s not just the USDA Rural Development loan that got us a good rate and let us purchase with no money down. Nor is it just the $8,000 tax credit first-time homebuyers get. Those are obvious helps. We could not have purchased without either of these.

But it’s also the laws guarding the contract process, the building codes which serve as guidelines to whether or not a building is safe, the legal framework that’s been created to help ensure both parties live up to their responsibilities. We’re in Appalachia, which has a bit of a radon problem—so thanks also for the CDC and the EPA for their work in radon research and mitigation.

I’m thankful for the public utilities—water, sewer, trash collection—as well as mail service. We signed up for DirecTV service when we moved in and imagining having to go through a similar process to decide who gets to get water to my house or deliver my mail. Yikes.

We were thrilled with our private sector help too. Our real estate agent Jeremy Hart was patient and very helpful. So were our mortgage brokers at Alcova, who helped us find the right mortgage, locate a lender, and apply. The process would have been much more painful without them. Local outfit Robert & Sons packed and moved us, and without their services we would probably still be dragging things from the apartment, one U-HAUL van-full at a time.

Of course, we still need to unpack, organize, and make this space home so we feel like we have one. I don’t think anyone can help us with that. That’s entirely our job. So I better get to it.

Are SEO operators crooks?

2009-10-13T10:30:40+00:00

I won’t pretend that there aren’t bad Search Engine Optimizers out there. There are lots of them. Their ancestors packaged morphine in attractive bottles and called it an colic cure. Powazek is right when he calls these people “bastards” and “jerkwads.” And he is absolutely right that this activity is the impetus behind comment spam.

But he’s about twenty shades of wrong when he says this:

Look under the hood of any SEO plan and you’ll find advice like this: make sure to use keywords in the headline, use proper formatting, provide summaries of the content, include links to relevant information. All of this is a good idea, and none of it is a secret. It’s so obvious, anyone who pays for it is a fool.

Look under the hood of anything and you’ll find something fairly straightforward. “See, that’s the engine that turns this shaft that turns those wheels.” That’s what makes the car go. But when you start looking at things in detail, trying to pick them apart, and—hey, are these extra screws important?

SEO is straightforward, and the ethical (“white-hat”) SEO consultant’s tool box is as Powazek describes. Good keywords, good content, good links, and good summaries. Do you know what words people who are searching for your content use? Can you summarize each page in a twitter-length field? Can you provide this information the way Google is looking for it?

Saying SEO is simple is like saying growing your own food is simple, or making your own clothes are simple, or wiring your own house is simple. Yes, the principles are simple. The execution is time consuming and requires specialized knowledge.

There are many things that you can do for yourself given enough time and inclination to learn how. SEO is one of those things. Do you want to become proficient? Is this really where your interests lie?

Maybe it is. People who enjoy doing this work become SEO experts, and they contract themselves out to people who don’t enjoy doing that work. But if you have other things to worry about—designing car engines, or making sure your students matriculate, or running an amusement park, you’re not a fool for hiring an SEO consultant any more than you’re a fool for paying someone else to make a meal, wire your house, change your brake pads.

Powazek has his own simple advice: “Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.” Like SEO, easier said than done. Making something great is difficult enough; telling people about it is pretty damn tricky. It’s even more difficult when you are trying to tell people about it through the computer-mediated medium of a search engine.

Powazek’s vision of SEO is pretty warped: he sees people leaching off search engines, trying to trick them from doing their job properly. Google is constantly at war with them, changing their tactics, manipulating search algorithms to foil their nefarious plans.

What Powazek does not say—perhaps he does not know—is that Google cooperates with the SEO community. Many of the tools SEO workers use (Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools) come from Google. Google has a blog on their search engine where they share tips on making your content more accessible and clear to Google. Some of those articles get pretty deep in the weeds. For example, here’s how to deal with duplicated content on your web site, something Google detests but most people have.

Google will even tell you how to shop for SEO services.

Now, Powazek has worked in the internet publishing industry for thirteen years. His projects have been high profile and he has had no problem getting links to them. He certainly had no trouble getting Boing Boing to link to them. Maybe much of what Powazek sees as simple about keywords and good content is so second-nature to him he doesn’t understand how other people struggle with the same work. That’s the problem with being an expert.

He’s also—because of his relatively high profile—going to find it insanely easy to “tell people” about the “great work” he’s done. Fame is supported by fame. Powzek has many resources at his disposal, some of which he might not even be aware. But almost everyone else needs to do marketing the hard way.

GOLD!!!

2009-10-09T10:01:13+00:00

When the revolution comes, you might wish you had more chocolate and less gold. After all, you can eat chocolate. Photo: Chocolate Coins by fras1977

~~Glen~~ Glenn Beck is pushing investing in gold, says Matt Yglesias. The economy is bad, Obama’s going to destroy America, world inflation is going to wipe out the value of all currencies, etc. So invest in gold, the only real money.

There are lots of things that puzzle me about gold investment. Chief among them is advertising about gold investment which—it seems to me—you wouldn’t really have to do if demand for gold was as natural as people tend to assume.

Secondly, investing in gold only seems like a good idea if you think society is going to be relatively stable.

If what you’re doing is handing over money and getting a piece of paper in return that says you have some gold. How are you going to confirm that? How are you going to claim it if there’s an economic collapse?

On the other hand, if you buy large quantities of it and actually have physical possession of it, how are you going to convert it into spendable currency? I mean, yeah, a few krugerrands might get you a tank and an army to push it around. But what are you going to do for a loaf of bread? How much of a gold coin do you have to shave off to purchase a quart of milk? And then there’s the theft and defense problem.

Now, if I were a big time gold investor here’s what I’d do. I’d purchase a lot of advertisement on a television show whose target audience was the paranoid and easily panicked. I would try to encourage them to believe that gold investment was the only way to survive the coming chaos. These many small investors will be slow to sell because they intend to use it to keep the barbarians at bay when Obama turns them loose. So, essentially, their paranoia will help prop the price of gold up a bit. And just before things start to calm down again, I’d sell my interests in gold at this paranoia-inflated price.

Of course all of that assumes there won’t be an economic collapse. In an economic collapse, though, gold is next to useless. But still more useful than the promise of gold.

Ken Burns does not need a hammer

2009-10-04T00:08:54+00:00

People have been raving about Ken Burns’ new documentary on the National Parks. Other people call him a coward for ducking the political argument. But maybe being silent this time is the best way to make the case. Photo: Cascade Falls on Little Stony Creek by laserbub

I haven’t yet seen the Ken Burns documentary on the National Parks, but after reading Jason’s excellent review of the series I’m more eager than ever. My “religious heritage” is not often reflected as much other than sideshow.

Even so, I will quibble a little bit with Jason’s statement that Ken Burns should have discussed or mentioned the starvation and dismantling of the park system since the Reagan revolution. Jason says:

I have to feel, that as much as I loved the scenery, the rapturous commentary, and the spiritual centrality of Muir’s vision to this series, this is a somewhat cowardly oversight. The happy ending of wolves being reintroduced to Yellowstone blatantly artificial considering the current controversies over their reintroduction. Nature Religion For Real (A Review of “National Parks”)

A commenter on the article is less inclined to balk at calling Ken Burns “cowardly,” and says “Conservative/Christians will be the death of our entire ecosphere if nothing is done to reign them in.”

I’m going to disagree with that. It is no doubt important to make your political cases forcefully and loudly to draw support and attention to your cause. But here the case is already being made. We have films, dozens of ecology groups, a President who ran on a platform of greening America’s industries and business. Even many conservative Christians are on board, having come to the conclusion that Objectivist/Randian exploitation of natural resources does not constitute good stewardship of God’s creation.

Not to mention the fact that every damn nature film not called “When Animals Attack” has at least genuflected in the direction of environmentalist concerns: “but the habitat of the blind snow-bunny is now being threatened by the most dangerous invasive species of all: man.” As gratifying as it may be to hear our own ideas forcefully stated, most people have learned to ignore these pleas lest their eyeballs roll out of their sockets.

If Ken Burns had done this with National Parks, some of us would get to feel some satisfaction at having our justifiable but self-righteous anger expressed in a public forum. But what about everyone else? Some people would ignore it—they probably would. Others would prejudge the film based on its socialist / communist / environmentalist / hippie / liberal agenda and not even watch it. But by staying out of this fight, more people are likely to watch this without feeling like their politics or religion are being attacked. And maybe they, too, will fall in love with the National Parks or at least begin to see how important they are to all of us.

Unlike other issues—like torture, for example, or warrantless wiretapping—the state of our National Parks after years of neglect are pretty much self-evident. We can all see the disrepair. Anyone who is inspired by this series to go to a park will see reasons to get involved. And honestly, people are being hammered by this in all directions.

Will more hammering work? I don’t think so. I think we’ve had about as much effect with hammering as we’re going to get. Maybe this approach—the one that causes you to care by telling you the story of its birth, not making dire pronouncements of its death—has a chance to reach the people Al Gore could not.

Keep Away from the Reality Tunnel

2009-09-26T17:05:47+00:00

Arguments between atheists and believers always seem to go down the same paths. The lure of arguing existential questions is great, but perhaps we’d have more useful discussions if we stayed away from challenging core beliefs. Photo: At the End of the Tunnel by Sam Ilic Photography

After the last few posts I made on religion, I decided I had to step back for awhile and try to think more clearly about it. The conversations I’ve been having with people covered and recovered the same ground. A while back I said that the atheist argument is beginning to bore me (it is), but it was getting worse than that. I was beginning to bore myself.

When you can no longer entertain yourself by being a blowhard, that’s a very bad place indeed.

Anyway, the Dawkinsians declare that all religions can be summarily dismissed (and should be discarded) because the mythology of every religion are unverifiable, untrue, and silly. Like other atheists, they insist on scientific verification; but unlike other atheists, they hold scientific verification as the first hurdle any idea must cross before it becomes worthy of any other consideration.

It is that notion that I find most disturbing. When I read Dawkins insisting that Hinduism and Christianity are alike enough as to make no difference, and who cares about the details, I can’t help but think: you’re just going to wave off the combined cultural experience of all of humanity? Like it was last decade’s slap-bracelets or neo-swing? Science is the new hotness, I guess. (And even that phrase is old and busted.)

The way I’ve responded to this in the past is to argue both that the scientific process is practically inappropriate for judging philosophical or religious viability. Yeah, I know that sentence scans like crap, but it’s hard to distill a worldview into a single sentence. What I mean is, yes: science is great and tells us a lot. It could presumably tell us everything. But it can’t tell us everything right now. It still gets stuff wrong. So in the meantime I’ll use science and engage in religion.

That is what I believe, so it’s natural to argue that position. But I get into trouble because, as a practical matter, it’s not very constructive. That argument is a clash of world-views, and in making that argument I’m asking atheists to change something at the center of themselves, where it is generally not subject to scrutiny.

This is why those discussions often go awry and start to orbit epistemological questions like: Can reality be known? How accurately? Is the scientific method up to the task? Is logic a construct or natural law? What is religion, anyway?

These arguments are are self-perpetuating, well-rehearsed on both sides, and God-help-us-all dull after roughly twenty years. The conclusions we draw on these questions—Dawkinsians, Fundamentalists, and Universalists alike—are the acoustic tiling on our own personal reality tunnels. Getting beyond them difficult. This is why Timothy Leary resorted to drugs.

It is also why arguments between atheists and “theists” look to casual readers like civil war between Internet trolls.

The other real problem with this is it drags atheists into an argument that’s really about Dawkinsian extremism. Atheists and I have different attitudes on what’s appropriate to believe when, our what sources we should draw on when contemplating how the world works. That might make us sound a little weird to each other, but it shouldn’t prevent us from sharing a beer or sending our kids to the same school. Indeed, if we can’t tolerate a little difference in world-view here and there, we might as well hang the whole human experiment up.

It’s not really that atheism that’s the problem. It’s the Dawkinsian extremism. Bertrand Russell called religious belief a disease. Dawkins calls it delusion and mental illness. I suppose the religious can share a ward with homosexuals and those exhibiting a tendency to join labor unions.

This is somewhat beyond a scientifically informed personal conclusion or a different worldview. It is a radical sociological theory and a political position. The Dalai Lama is not Ralph Reed in an orange robe. Alfred North Whitehead is not Torquemada. The Jainists are not Taliban.

This goes beyond different worldviews and comes dangerously close to being extremely picky about who you’ll drink a beer with. Or, for that matter, share a country with.

An absence of politics

2009-09-16T14:43:54+00:00

I just thought I’d drop a note here about the relative lack of political posting recently. I’m not entirely sure why I’ve stopped chattering so much about politics. Part of it has to do with someone in the White House that I can reasonably trust. But I think a larger part of it has to do with what I’d have to argue against.

More and more the political argument seems to be between people who have relatively tepid ideas (health care reform so far is a disappointment) and people on the other side who seem to exist on an entirely different planet. I saw a video the other day where Glen Beck was in tears over the prospect of Obama socialism. In tears. Granted, he looked like he was playing a role on Stephen Colbert’s show, but the fact that he’d be faking getting choked up about health reform that’s just tinkering around the edges and expect us to take it seriously is befuddling.

The vocal other side seems to have become so unmoored from reality that I really don’t know how to respond. And getting all exercised about killing granny, birth certificates, and god knows what else. People are even comparing Obama to Hitler. Hitler? Really? I mean, this is right after we had a President who ignored habeus corpus and the ex-Veep has been on the tee-vee defending torture. But Obama is Hitler for thinking people should not get screwed by insurance companies.

Dude, really, WTF? I mean, what do you say to that? Can you have a reasonable discussion with someone about whether or not Obama’s proposals represent the resurgence of genocidal fascism?

So on one side we have people arguing over whether or not health insurance reform should or should not include a public option, and then there’s this whole group of people basically running around the National Mall screaming “WE CAN’T STOP HERE! THIS IS BAT COUNTRY!”

I just don’t think they inhabit the same reality.

Obama’s Indoctrination Attempt

2009-09-05T12:08:20+00:00

What is this flap about Obama addressing school children? There’s a lot of liberty-talking going on (“Obama’s going to indoctrinate our kids! Parents should get to choose!”) but I don’t think this is really about indoctrination per se. People are just afraid Obama’s going to say something they disagree with and that their kids might hear it. Many of the people screaming about Obama’s speech probably wouldn’t see a thing wrong about insisting all kids pray in Jesus’ name every morning.

It is perfectly appropriate for a President or Ex-President to address children in this country. I disagree with Bush & Cheney quite a bit, but if they were going to be on the school television screens (and the Sprout was school age) I’d make damn certan his butt was in a chair. Kids need to learn how to listen to viewpoints they disagree with and think about those viewpoints critically, and they can’t do it if they are shielded from them. Kindergarten is not too early to teach this.

Attempts to inject religious education in schools, national Standards of Learning, standardized tests, and abstinence-only education are just some of the things we’ve done in the last several years to our public schools that carry more of a threat of indoctrination than the President giving a short address to children. We should be deeply concerned about what’s being taught there, and paying close attention.

But the appropriate defense for “indoctrination” to teach critical thinking. The only other alternatives are to tell other people shut up or to remove yourself from society as much as possible. Neither one is particularly conducive to a Democracy, but both certainly lay the groundwork for authoritarianism. That’s where the real scary stuff is.

A September Miscellany

2009-09-05T09:33:54+00:00

Wow, this might be one of the longest periods of time I’ve kept my mouth shut on this blog. It’s not entirely intentionall. There are three or four draft posts. But let me tell you what’s going on.

1) The Sprout is Two. In fact, he’s going to need a new nickname soon. The boy is tall for his age, for starters, and once you start chattering—we’re close—“Sprout” no longer applies to you. He keeps me busy at home. And since we still live in a very small two-bedroom apartment, the noise a two-year-old generates keeps me from writing except early in the morning and late in the evening. The energy a two-year-old requires keeps my early mornings and late evenings to a minimum.

2) We may not be in an apartment much longer. We’re finally buying a house (fingers crossed). Closing is in late October, and the house roughly doubles our available living space. More than that, since the house has a lot more storage. There will be space to write in. That, of course, is also taking time.

3) In the writing time that remains I’ve been working on my own book. I will have more about that soon, but 1) it is non-fiction and 2) it is not about computers or politics. Well, not about the politics of governance, at least. It’s about something I rarely discuss here: work.

But I still remember my password here.

The trouble with Utopia

2009-08-20T02:17:32+00:00

When the Soviets put Marxist principles into actual practice, their Utopian dreams turned into a nightmare of authoritarianism. Is the urge to look for The Answer our greatest problem? Photo: CCCP by Mr. Omega

I thought I had taken a break from metaphysical pondering by picking up Matthew Stewart’s new book The Management Myth. Religion is pretty far from his subject, except for the fact that some people have religious-like devotion to specific management theories. Stewart notes that many management theories have a basically utopian view, which is:

... it holds that all conflict in society reduces to misunderstanding, or, to look on the bright side, that if we all made proper use of our reason we’d have heaven on earth. The Management Myth, p. 134

This is opposed by “tragic” view of existence, which “says that some degree of conflict is inherent in all forms of social organization.” He goes on to explain that the real problem with utopian visions is that “their visions of eternal sunshine usually involve a form of tyranny.”

You might already see why I’d gravitate back towards religious discourse again, a topic I am trying (and failing) to let go of as being pretty much a bad game, because this idea exposes…

The common root of absolutist atheism and fundamentalism

The explicitly atheist states—the Soviet Union and China—have been oppressive, sometimes violently so. I’ve mentioned this before and heard the response that Stalin/Lenin and Chairman Mao inspired religious-like fervor and belief, and therefore should be considered on the “religious” side. But this is like claiming George W. Bush was a liberal because he spent a lot of money. These governments were opposed to religious expression and were trying to annihilate it. They were (are, to some extent in China’s case) intensely atheist.

What this says to me is not that communism is also a religion, but that religion itself is not the culprit. Rather, it is the mindset. And that mindset can be operative in many different contexts—Atheistic, Christian, Republican, Democrat, pagan, indie-punk-rock fan. It goes beyond occasionally telling people what to do to insisting that everyone has to share the same view of the world. And if everyone did, then all strife would cease; so those who believe differently are opposed to the joy and happiness of everyone else. While utopianism has a reputation for starry-eyed naivete, once the utopians get power things can become very bad very, very quickly as they seek to purge the communities they control of everyone who is not a team player.

This, I think, is a real destructive force and it is one we can see operating in similar ways in many different contexts. We can see it in the micro-level in families. We can see it in a larger level in individual churches or, as Stewart does, in the behavior of businesses. And we can see it writ large religious and anti-religious movements, calls for political ideological purity.

What Stewart calls the “tragic” view is, strangely enough, the view that would seem to lead to less strife. Faced with the realization that conflict will always be present, we can try to mitigate it somewhat, regulate or redirect the conflict. But we will likely never come to a consensus. That means we’ll always have to work around it, yes, but that also means that you are not attacking my happiness simply by believing something different.

The Four Hour Work Week

2009-08-09T12:44:23+00:00

Since it’s vacation time for me I’ve been reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. His suggestions seem pretty straightforward: reduce your workload through automation and effective communication. Find ways to maximize your effective hourly rate, preferably by generating passive income. Don’t allow yourself to be trapped by monster work loads and decisions that reduce your hourly rate. Get the money you need to do the things you want as soon as possible, then do it.

Seems sensible. I might give it a try.

Before I got too convinced, though, I thought I’d look online to see what the criticisms of the book were. After all, it does sound an awful lot like a “get-rich-quick” scheme (although, come to think of it, I can’t identify anyone who ever got rich slow). Is what he’s talking about illegal? Really tricky to pull off? Is he selling you a line? Is he setting you up for a scam?

The criticism I found was mostly in this vein:

Work is sacred.

Work is giving yourself. It’s creative self-expression. It’s opening your heart and providing value to others. It’s exchanging a part of yourself with someone else. It’s a possibility for you to make a difference in the world.

Seeing work as just something to do to get by is like slapping yourself in the face. The Lie of the Four Hour Workweek

That strikes me as more than a little odd. There’s no reason you can’t do this once you’ve relieved yourself of the money-trap set for you. Lots of people have jobs that don’t respect the “sacred” nature of work, but it’s hard to escape that.

Early on in his book, Tim explains the need for figuring out what do do with your time once you get 1/3 or more of your life back. He likes to spend it traveling and doing athletic stuff. Maybe you want to spend it following Remote Area Medical around. Maybe you want to start your own non-profit. Fine. The point is to make that time your time, under your control. Not under anyone else’s.

Why are so many people offended at the idea that anyone would want to do that?