When we talk about vice one of the arguments that’s commonly made for its permissiveness is that legalizing it, bringing something underground out into the open is safer because it can be regulated and, ultimately, taxed.  Legalizing prostitution for example, means that STDs can be contained and controlled, and that abuse may be curtailed.

The same argument is made about the legalization of marijuana in California.  Its set to be taxed heavily, and I assume that its lightened the load on law enforcement officers a great deal.  But this recent story from NPR highlighted my problem with legalizing vice.  Far from diminishing a problem, it actually emboldens and magnifies the agents of that vice who would rather not deal with regulation.  In short, it doesn’t end underground practises, but they benefit from the sense of openess created by those who have chosen to take their business above ground in exchange for increased regulation and limits.

Going back to the prostitution issue, Amsterdam has experienced a similar problem.  The existance of brothel prostituion has concentrated demand for a form of prostituion that will never be legal:  Subsersive sex acts that put the safety of the prostitute at risk.  This has been a huge problem for the Amsterdam authorties.

Back when I worked in a one hour photo lab something became very clear to me.  Even though our heavy grade processor, paper and printer produced higher quality pictures that lasted longer, and had the benefit of being reviewed by our staff who had training in color correction and the like–even for digital pics that got brought in–people preferred to view their pictures on their poorly calibrated, off-white, computer monitors and print them on their crummy home desktop printers.  On top of this they didn’t care to learn the basic of photo editing.  I don’t even mean reading a histogram or knowing to hit up the contrast setting.  I mean basic stuff like straightening a crooked shot.  Some of this, perhaps most of it, should be chalked up to ignorance.  But what produces that ignornace?  What makes people uncurious about their surroundings?

I suspect something about the human person, or at least something about moderns, is simply geared up to accept ease over quality.  To not think about the problems or consequences of their actions when they are presented with this option.  This might explain the millions of people moving into the shoddily contructed houses that fill up subdivisions.  Or the tendency to snub local businesses for chains.  Or the desire to sit and watch tv rather than go on a hike.  The list goes on…

As much as I despise economics, this may be the one thing economics is good for.  The dismal science could be the last basion of consequnces.

If you are one of the poor saps who has to endure the UPMC commercials during the breaks on the morning news, then hopefully you have learned an important lesson about buss-u-speak.  I won’t be offering an opinion here, because the example speaks for itself.

Today I replaced my Dell laptop.  It was my second Dell laptop and my experiences with both have been terrible.  My first Dell laptop developed a bad habit of shutting itself off for no apparent reason about 13 months after i bought it.

With the second laptop the battery cluncked out four months into owning it.  Ten months after I bought it, the monitor section broke off, requiring me to carry around a bookstand to prop it up with.  That gathered many ridiculous stares.

Last April my wife tried to buy a Dell Mini.  We waited five weeks for them ot ship it, and after there were more problems we cancelled the order.

Yesterday, as an early Christmas present, I recieved a new ASUS EEE 1008HA.  Ending this dark chapter of my life.  Hopefully I’ll never be that foolish again.

Assuming my three readers actually care about what I think, I’d urge you to pay attention because this is the closest I will ever get to a political manifesto.  To that end, I should inform you that my usual no re-edits policy [1] won’t apply here, because I’d like to return to this post from time to to time and keep working on it.  The key thing I want to stress is that paleo-romanticism needn’t be a backwards facing practice, always lamenting how good things used to be.[2]  Rather, I am asking that we not be too sated with, not that status quo itself, but how we’ve arrived to it.  I am asking that we not surrender ourselves to a fatalistic “this is just how things are.”  The past can be a strong and, in some cases, corrective element.  For me, paleo-romanticism is a call to “radically reimagine”[3] our present condition and where that condition seems to be taking us.

To show that paleo-romanticism is a tool for constructing a sensible future, I offer the following seven suggestions, each pulled from the past and yet very much “new” as common sense policies that persons of all stripes may agree to.  Simple suggestions that can make the world quantifiable better.

1. Let People Work When They Want, In The Location That They Want (aka ROWE).  This has a huge amount of benefits.  For starters, people can tailor their work/life balance for themselves.  If they want to volunteer at their house of worship, or their children’s school they are free to do so.  Parents being around more would be a big boost to families and small businesses and Farmer’s Markets would be able to compete with chains and box stores.  Stress levels would decline, leading to less injuries, illness and violent crimes.  Because large amounts of people would cease commuting there would be less cars on the road, less congestion and less pollution.
2. Organize High School Like College. Along the lines of previous item, let students have options about how many classes they take a semester and when the classes are held (evening, if so desired).  If an over achiever wants to go in the summer and take a huge amount of courses and graduate in two or three years, let them.  If someone want to take more than four years and work part time through high school let them.  Finally, make high school like college in that most of the work is done outside of class.  This would breed familiarity with sources, something that is sorely lacking at all levels or society.
3. Make Your Own Energy. With Solar power and wind turbines.  Beyond just the environmental benefits (we won’t need to use Mountaintop Removal techniques anymore), self-generated power can reduce dependence on large corporations, making people more self-reliant and able to save more of their money.  The credit schemes behind financing the deployment of these technologies will have to be changed too.  Presently, saving is incurred after the initial investment has been made, that needs shifted to the frontend.  Finally, installing other energy efficient technologies will decrease the overall needed efficiency of the solar panels and wind turbines we need.
4. Make Public Transportation an Option for Families. (also, plan walkable communities) The more family members that need to take the bus, the less public transportation can compete with car ownership.  Retooling these systems for “family plans” would strengthen their appeal.  Also, just having an easy to understand transportation system is important too.
5. Local Foodsheds. Beyond the ability of people in ROWE to visit local grocers and such more easily, building a food distribution and subsidy system that favors keeping food local provides healthier, fresher and tastier foods at a competitive price.  A big part of the reason that factory farms are so cheap, in spite of all the processing and warehousing and carting them hundreds of miles, are so much cheaper is that the subsidy legislation is built to favor them.
6. Start Censoring The Hell Out of Stuff (When it comes to Children). Now that V-Chips are required in televisions, and Windows ships with built in web filtering functions, the world–or at least media–should be safe for anyone under 15 or so, right?  Wrong.  These technologies are presently available, but nobody and I mean nobody bothers to use them.  This, of course, does not prevent parents for complaining after their children have seen something inappropriate.  Its time to start out with these items turned on as tightly as possible and forcing owners to set them to the levels that they want right away.
7. Make it Illegal for Governments to Spend More Money Than They Bring In

[1] Except for, as usual, grammar and readability.
[2] Like with hipsters and cartoon shows, when they were kids
[3] But not like remakes on TV

Jeez dotCommonweal, give it at least 24 hours.  Yeesh!

p.s.  And if they want to voluntarily convert, then so freaking what?  Shouldn’t the Church make it easy for them?  Don’t you usually decry the lack of options and such in Catholicism?

p.p.s.  “hostile takeover?”  Come on!

Dime sized drops
red out from my wrist falls
making less of things

There once was a maid from Fairhaven
and all the boys said she a taxodermy maven
But no one really knew
how skills had grew
she practiced on her 11 children

You know in the movie Kingpin when the Amish bowling guy is all like “we do everything 50% harder than you English?”  That’s sort of how I feel about my first Youth Group meeting.  I keep getting good feedback from kids and parents alike, and yet I don’t feel fulfilled.  I don’t feel like I’ve done things 50% harder than “the English” (in this case, other Youth Ministers in the diocese).  Five years ago, more like seven actually, I would have just given up if that had been the case, or had done things very half-assed as a result.  I think I’m coming to this career at the right time because since then I’ve developed something that resembles an actual work ethic.

Specifically, the biggest problem we had was I underestimated the attendance at the first meeting.  Twenty seven people showed up and I had projected about twelve.  The space was crowed and way too small.  I also didn’t have enough refreshments.  I view both of these things, obviously, as solvable problems.  Some of the problems I had aren’t “solvable” but won’t happen again.  For example, I instructed everyone to turn off their cellphones.  Most of the kids didn’t bother, but also I turned off mine and that’s how I keep track of the time.  So I thought I had less time than I did so I cut a lot of the material I had prepared.  More generally though, I thought the lesson portion was too vague to be helpful or interesting to any of them.  I also had trouble maintaining the attention of such a large group.

Anyways, I’m hoping to have a better showing in the future.

A few months ago I wrote an HTML frontend for the Catholic Worker Blogs Yahoo! Pipe that I wrote.  Since then I have hosted it in my public dropbox repository.  In the last week or so, though, I have been considering taking it down.  Here is my rationale:

1. I don’t even read it.
2. Its hosted on Dropbox, which is a cloud storage solution and not a proper web host.
3. It was an attempt to learn Yahoo! Pipes while I was unemployed and now I’ve learned it so…
4. I have no way of putting it in the hands of people who might actually benefit from it.
5. I have no way of telling how many people use it (see #2)

I’ve never been a huge fan of the whole “mashup” thing (girl talk included).  Its not that the idea in and of itself is bad, but most of the way the really good mashupers(?) take what could be a really good idea and don’t even try.  A mashup is distinguished from a remix in that there is no dominant song.  That mashups aren’t remixes are probably their biggest weakness, because mashups only really work if you can either turn your brain off enough to not care that the song has no coherence[1], in which case why get jazzed up about it being a mashup?, or if you are one of those persons who gets off on recognizes references to things[2].  But I think part of why mashups are so popular is that they are the musical/cultural expression of a feedback society.

Have you ever wondered why so much of new television shows seem so uninspired?  Its not because they imitate the few popular shows out there[3], but because in many new shows actually appeared in foreign countries first.  Shows like Ugly Betty, The Office and most reality tv shows spring to mind.  There’s no originality anymore, its all derivative.

In Artificial Intelligence and economics feedback has a destructive force.  Once somebody or something becomes aware that it is an indicator its behavior changes in such a way that makes it no longer useful as an indicator.  I’ve started to wonder is there is similar phenomenon at play in culture.  Once something becomes recognized as popular it eventually co-oopts itself until it is devoid of content.  Hence mashups and Family Guy[4].

[1] Because you are stone drunk
[2] Like if you think Family Guy is funny
[3] I’m still  waiting for a bunch of Mad Men ripoffs
[4] Or Robot Chicken.  That show was funny for exactly three episodes and then you realize that its just the same joke over and over again.