Current Events – Page 2 – Renaissance Guy

Unchosen Battles

Sometimes, you get to pick your battles. On items that don’t directly affect me, I can choose whether or not to have an opinion, and whether or not to do the research to be informed. Sure, being a good, well-informed person with a consistent ethical framework dictates that I try to have empathy even for issues that don’t impact me, and that I ought apply my principles in a consistent way, such that I tend to have opinions anyway. But I get to decide, for instance, to what degree I care about same sex marriage, or what’s happening in Yemen, or the regulations governing labor unions. None of these things has a noticeable effect on my day to day life, and as such I have the privilege of being able to ignore them without consequence.

Of course, this isn’t always the case. There are lots of policies that do directly affect me. The price of tuition, for instance, is of great concern, since I am presently engaged in acquiring a degree which I hope will allow me to get a job that will let me pay my bills, ideally without having to take out a small fortune in loans to cover it. Transport policy affects because I am an adult with places to be who cannot drive, and current American transport policy borders on actively hostile to people in my position.

And then there’s healthcare. I’m not a single issue voter, far from it, but healthcare is a make or break issue for me, since it dictates whether I, and many people I care about dearly, live or die. The policies of the US government in this area determine access to the tools of my life support, whether my insurance company is allowed to discriminate against me, and what price I have to pay to stay alive. These policies are life and death, but that turn of phrase is overused, so let me put it another way:

With the policy as it is now, I can scrape by. Others can’t, which is tragic, but I’m lucky enough to have money to burn. If the policy changes to make my medication affordable the same way it is in Mexico, I will in one stroke save enough money each year to cover my tuition forever. If policy changes to remove existing protections, then nothing else in the world will matter, because I will go bankrupt and die in short order. It won’t even be a question of choosing between medication and food or rent; without my medication I don’t live long enough to starve to death, and the money I’d save by starving is trivial anyway. I don’t have the privilege of choosing whether to care, or even which side I fall on. I would love to have other priorities; to say that Climate Change is the greatest threat, or immigration is a moral imperative, or whatever other hill I might elect to die on. But for the time being, as long as I want to continue breathing, I have my political opinions chosen for me.

That’s the way it’s been for as long as I have had political opinions of which to speak. But recently, there’s been a shift. Suddenly, after years of having to beg minor officials to listen, with the presidential election gearing up, people have begun to take notice. Talking points which I and the people I work with have been honing and repeating for seemingly eons are being repeated by primary front runners. With no apparent proximal trigger, our efforts have gained attention, and though we remain far from a solution that will stand the test of repeated partisan attempts to dismantle it, a potential endgame is in sight.

But this itself brings new challenges. Where before we could be looked upon as a charity case worthy of pity, now we have become partisan. Our core aims- to make survival affordable in this country -have not changed, but now that one side has aligned themselves publicly with us, the other feels obliged to attack us. Items which I previously had to explain only to friends, I now find myself having to defend to a hostile audience. Where once the most I had to overcome was idle misinformation, now there is partisan hatred.

This is going to be a long campaign. I do not expect I shall enjoy it, regardless of how it turns out. But my work to etch out a means of survival continues.

Who Needs Facts?

Let us suppose for the sake of discussion that the sky is blue. I know we can’t all agree on much these days, but I haven’t yet heard anyone earnestly disputing the blue-ness of the sky, and in any case I need an example for this post. So let’s collectively assume for the purposes of this post, regardless of what it looks like outside your window at this exact moment, that we live in a world where “the sky is blue” is an easily observable, universally acknowledged fact. You don’t need to really believe it, just pretend. We need to start somewhere, so just assume it, okay? Good.

So, in this world, no one believes the sky isn’t blue, and no one, outside of maybe navel-gazing philosophers, would waste time arguing this point. That is, until one day, some idiot with a blog posts a screed about how the sky is really red, and you sheeple are too asleep to wake up and see it. This person isn’t crazy per se; they don’t belong in a mental institution, though they probably require a good reality check and some counseling. Their arguments, though laughably false, coming from a certain conspiratorial mindset are as coherent as anything else posted on the web. It’s competently and cogently written, albeit entirely false. The rant becomes the butt of a few jokes. It doesn’t become instantly popular, since it’s way too “tinfoil hat” for most folks, but it gets a handful of readers, and it sets up the first domino in a chain of dominoes.

Some time later, the arguments laid out in the post get picked up by internet trolls. They don’t particularly believe the sky is red, but they also don’t care what the truth is. To these semi-professional jerks, facts and truth are, at best, an afterthought. To them, the goal of the Wild West web is to get as many cheap laughs by messing with people and generally sowing chaos in online communities, and in this, a belief that the sky is red is a powerful weapon. After all, how do you fight with someone who refuses to acknowledge that the sky is blue? How do you deal with that in an online debate? For online moderators whose job is to keep things civil, but not to police opinions, how do you react to a belief like this? If you suppress it, to some degree you validate the claims of conspiracy, and besides which it’s outside your job to tell users what to think. If you let it be, you’re giving the trolls a free pass to push obvious bunk, and setting the stage for other users to run afoul of site rules on civility when they try to argue in favor of reality.

Of course, most people ignore such obviously feigned obtuseness. A few people take the challenge in good sport and try to disassemble the original poster’s copied arguments; after all they’re not exactly airtight. But enough trolls post the same arguments that they start to evolve. Counter arguments to the obvious retorts develop, and as trolls attempt to push the red-sky-truther act as far as possible, these counter arguments spread quickly among the growing online communities of those who enjoy pretending to believe them. Many people caught in the crossfire get upset, in some cases lashing back, which not only gives the trolls exactly the reaction they seek, but forces moderators on these websites to take action against the people arguing that the sky is, in fact, [expletive deleted] blue, and why can’t you see that you ignorant [expletive deleted].

The red sky argument becomes a regular favorite of trolls and petty harassers, becoming a staple of contemporary online life. On a slow news day, the original author of the blog post is invited to appear on television, bringing it even greater attention, and spurring renewed public navel gazing. It becomes a somewhat popular act of counterculture to believe, or at least, to profess to believe, that the sky isn’t blue. The polarization isn’t strictly partisan, but its almost exclusive use by a certain online demographic causes it to become of the modern partisan stereotype nevertheless.

Soon enough, a local candidate makes reference to the controversy hoping to score some attention and coverage. He loses, but the next candidate, who outright says she believes it should be up to individual Americans what color they want the sky to be, is more successful. More than just securing office, she becomes a minor celebrity, appearing regularly on daytime news, and being parodied regularly on comedy series. Very quickly, more and more politicians adopt official positions, mostly based on where they fall on the partisan map. Many jump on the red-sky bandwagon, while many others denounce the degradation of truth and civic discourse perpetuated by the other side. It plays out exactly how you imagine it would. The lyrics are new, but the song and dance isn’t. Modern politics being what it is, as soon as the sides become apparent, it becomes a race to see who can entrench their positions first and best, while writers and political scientists get to work dreaming up new permutations of argument to hurl at the enemy.

It’s worth noting that through all of this, the facts themselves haven’t changed. The sky in this world is still blue. No one, except the genuinely delusional, sees anything else, although many will now insist to their last breath to wholeheartedly believe otherwise, or else that it is uncivil to promote one side so brazenly. One suspects that those who are invested in the red-sky worldview know on some level that they are lying, have been brainwashed, or are practicing self-deception, but this is impossible to prove in an objective way; certainly it is impossible to compel a red sky believer to admit as much. Any amount of evidence can be dismissed as insufficient, inconclusive, or downright fabricated. Red-sky believers may represent anywhere from a small but noisy minority, to a slight majority of the population, depending on which polling sources are believed, which is either taken as proof of an underlying conspiracy, or proof of their fundamental righteousness, respectively.

There are several questions here, but here’s my main one: Is this opinion entitled to respect? If someone looks you in the eye and tells you the sky is not blue, but red, are you obliged to just smile and nod politely, rather than break open a can of reality? If a prominent red-sky-truther announces a public demonstration in your area, are you obliged to simply ignore them and let them wave their flags and pass out their pamphlets, no matter how wrong they are? Finally, if a candidate running on a platform of sticking it to the elitist blue sky loyalists proposes to change all the textbooks to say that the color of the sky is unknown, are you supposed to just let them? If an opinion, sincerely believed, is at odds with reality, is one still obligated to respect it? Moreover, is a person who supports such an opinion publicly to be protected from being challenged?

Mind you, this isn’t just a thought experiment; plenty of real people believe things that are patently false. It’s also not a new issue; the question of how to reconcile beliefs and reality goes back to the philosophical discussions of antiquity. But the question of how to deal with blatantly false beliefs seems to have come back with a vengeance, and as the presidential election gets up to speed, I expect this will become a recurring theme, albeit one probably stated far more angrily.

So we need to grapple with this issue again: Are people entitled to live in a fantasy world of their choosing? Does the respect we afford people as human being extend to the beliefs they hold about reality? Is the empirical process just another school of thought among several? I suppose I have to say don’t know, I just have very strong opinions.

Fool Me Once

I’m going to start with a confession of something I’ve come to regret immensely. And please, stick with me as I go through this, because I’m using this to illustrate a point. Some time in early 2016, January or February if memory serves, I created a poster supporting Donald Trump for president. The assignment had been to create a poster for a candidate, any candidate. The assignment was very explicit that we didn’t have to agree with what we were writing, and I didn’t, we just had to make a poster.

At this time in high school, I was used to completing meaningless busywork designed to justify inflated class hours. It was frustrating, soul-dredging work, and since I had been told that I wouldn’t be graduating with my class, there was no end to my troubles in sight. I relished the chance to work on an assignment that didn’t take itself so seriously and would allow me to have some fun by playing around.

The poster was part joke, part intellectual exercise. Most everyone in my class picked either Clinton or Sanders; a few picked more moderate republicans or third party candidates, not so much because our class was politically diverse, but either out of a sense that there ought to be some representation in the posters, or because they believed it would make them stand out to the teacher. I went a step further, picking the candidate that everyone, myself included, viewed as a joke. I had already earned myself a reputation as devil’s advocate, and so this was a natural extension of my place in the class, as well as a pleasant change of pace from being called a communist.

It helped that there was basically no research to do. Donald Trump was running on brand and bluster. There were no policies to research, no reasoned arguments to put in my own words. I just put his name in a big font, copy and pasted a few of his chants, added gratuitous red white and blue decorations, and it was as good as anything his campaign had come up with. If I had been a bit braver, a bit more on the ball, or had a bit more time, I could have done proper satire. I was dealing with a relatively short turnaround time on that assignment, but I tried to leave room for others to read between the lines. But the result was half baked, without the teeth of serious criticism or parody, only funny if you were already laughing, which to be fair, most of us were.

The posters were hung up in the classroom for the rest of the year, and I suspect I dodged a bullet with the school year ending before my work really came back to haunt me. I’m not so self-indulgent as to believe that my work actually swayed the election, though I do believe it may have been a factor in the mock election held among our students, where my poster was the only one supporting the winner. I also think that my poster succinctly represented my place in the general zeitgeist which led to Trump’s election. I learned several lessons from that affair. Chief among them, I learned that there is a critical difference between drawing attention to something and calling it out, since the former can be exploited by a clever opportunist.

Relatedly, I learned that just because something is a joke does not make it harmless. Things said in jest, or as devil’s advocate, still carry weight. This is especially true when not everyone may be on the same page. I never would’ve expected anyone to take anything other than maybe a chuckle from my poster, and I still think that everyone in my class would have seen it that way coming from me. But did everyone else who was in that classroom at that time see it that way? Did the students in other classes, who saw that poster and went on to vote in our mock election take my poster to heart?

Of course, that incident is behind me now. I’ve eaten my words with an extra helping of humble pie on the side. I won’t say that I can’t make that mistake again, because it’s a very on-brand mistake for me to make. But it’s worth at least trying to lear from this misstep. So here goes: my attempt to learn from my own history.

Williamson is using dangerous rhetoric to distinguish herself in the Democratic race, and we should not indulge her, no matter how well she manages to break the mould and skewer her opponents. Her half baked talking points rely on pseudoscience and misinformation, and policy designed on such would be disastrous for large swaths of people. They should not be legitimized or allowed to escape criticism.

Why do I say these things? What’s so bad about saying that we have a sickness care system rather than a healthcare system, or even that Trump is a “dark psychic force” that needs to be beaten with love?

Let’s start with the first statement. On the surface of it, it’s a not-unreasonable, logically defensible position. The structural organization of American society in general, and the commodification of healthcare in particular, have indeed created a socio-professional environment in the healthcare field which tends to prioritize the suppression of acute symptoms over long-term whole-person treatments, with the direct effect of underserving certain chronic conditions, especially among already underserved demographics, and the practical effect that Americans do not seek medical attention until they experience a crisis event, leading to worse outcomes overall. This is a valid structural criticism of the means by which our healthcare system is organized, and something I am even inclined to agree with. So why am I against her saying it?

Because it’s a dog whistle. It refers directly to arguments made by talking heads who believe, among other things, that modern illnesses are a conspiracy by Big Pharma to keep patients sick and overmedicate, that the government is suppressing evidence of miracle cures like crystals, homeopathy, voodoo, and the like, that vaccines are secretly poisonous, and the bane of my own existence, that the pain and suffering of millions of Americans with chronic illness is, if not imagined outright, is easily cured by yoga, supplements, or snake oil. I particularly hate this last one, because it leads directly to blaming the victim for not recognizing and using the latest panacea, rather than critically evaluate the efficacy of supposed treatments.

Does Williamson actually believe these things? Is Williamson trying to rile up uneducated, disaffected voters by implying in a deniable way that there’s a shadowy conspiracy of cartoon villains ripping them off that needs to be purged, rather than a complex system at work, which requires delicate calibration to reform? Hard to say, but the people she’s quoting certainly believe those things, and several of the people I’ve seen listening to her seem to get that impression. Williamson’s online presence is full of similar dog whistles, in addition to outright fake news and pseudoscience. Much of it is easy to dismiss, circumstantial at best. But this is starting to sound familiar to me.

What about the second quote, about psychic forces? Surely it’s a joke, or a figure of speech. No one expects a presidential candidate to earnestly believe in mind powers. And who is that meant to dog whistle to anyways? Surely there aren’t that many people who believe in psychic powers?

Well, remember that a lot of pseudoscience, even popular brands like homeopathy, holds directed intention, which is to say, psychic force, as having a real, tangible effect. And what about people who believe that good and evil are real, tangible things, perhaps expressed as angels and demons in a religious testament? Sure, it may not be the exact target demographic Williamson was aiming for. But recent history has proven that a candidate doesn’t have to be particularly pious to use religious rhetoric to sway voters. And that’s the thing about a dog whistle. It lets different people read into it what they want to read.

Despite comparisons, I don’t think she is a leftist Trump. My instinct is that she will fizzle out, as niche candidates with a, shall we say, politically tangential set of talking points, tend to do. I suspect that she may not even want the job of President, so much as she wants to push her ideas and image. Alongside comparisons to Trump, I’ve also heard comparisons to perennial election-loser Ron Paul, which I think will turn out to be more true. I just can’t imagine a large mass of people taking her seriously. But then again… fool me once, and all that.

Re: John Oliver

So I had a bunch of things to say this week. I was actually planning a gag where I was going to shut down part of the site for “Internet Maintenance Day“. Then stuff happened that I felt I wanted to talk about more urgently. Than more stuff happened, and I had to bump back the queue again. Specifically, with regards to that last one, John Oliver released a new episode that I have to talk about.

If you don’t care to watch, the central thesis of the episode is, in a nutshell, that our medical device regulation system sucks and needs to be more robust. And he’s not wrong. The FDA is overstretched, underfunded, strung up by political diktats written by lobbyists, and above all, beset by brain drain caused by decades of bad faith and political badmouthing. The pharmaceutical and biotech lobby has an outsized influence on the legislation (as well as executive orders and departmental regulations) that are supposed to govern them.

But, and I’m going to repeat this point, the system isn’t broken. Don’t get me wrong, it’s hardly functional either, but these problems are far more often ones of execution than of structure.

Let’s take the 510(k) exemption that is so maligned in the episode. The way it’s presented makes it seem like such a bad idea, that surely this loophole must be closed. And I’ll agree that the way it’s being exploited is patently unsafe, and needs to be stemmed. But the measure makes sense under far narrower circumstances. To use an example from real life, take insulin pumps. Suppose a pump manufacturing company realizes that it’s replacing a high number of devices because of cracked screens and cases occurring in everyday use. It takes the issue to its engineers, who spend a few days in autocad making a new chassis with reinforced corners and a better screen that’s harder to crack. The guts of the pump, the parts that deliver insulin and treat patients, are unchanged. From a technical perspective, this is the equivalent of switching phone cases.

Now, what kind of vetting process should this device, which is functionally identical to the previous iteration aside from an improved casing, have to go through before the improved model can be shipped out to replace the current flawed devices? Surely it would be enough just to show that the improvements are just cosmetic, perhaps some documentation about the new case and the materials. This is the kind of scenario where a 510(k) style fast track would be good for everyone. It saves time and taxpayer money for regulators, it gets the company’s product out sooner, and consumers get a sturdier, better device sooner. This is why having that path is a good idea.

Not that the FDA is likely to apply section 510(k) in this scenario. Insulin pumps tick all the boxes to make them some of the most regulated devices in existence, even more so than most surgical implants. Any upgrade to insulin pumps, no matter how inconsequential, or how urgently needed by patients, is subject to months of testing, clinical trials, reviews, and paperwork. The FDA can, and regularly does, send applications back for further testing, because they haven’t proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no risk. As a result, improvement to crucial life support devices are artificially slowed by regulations and the market’s reaction to regulations.

Here’s the other thing to remember about medical devices: for as much as we hear about the costs of prematurely releasing devices, there is also a cost to delaying them. And frustratingly, the ones which often have the greatest cost to delaying- devices like insulin pumps, monitors, and other life support -tend to be subject to the greatest scrutiny, and hence the longest delays. For while the FDA examines numbers and research data, real patients continue to suffer and die for want of better care. We might prevent harm by slowing down the rollout of new technologies, but we must acknowledge that we are also consigning people to preventable harm by denying them newer devices. Some argue that this is morally preferable. I staunchly disagree. More than just trying to protect people from themselves, we are denying desperate people the hope of a better life. We are stifling innovation and autonomy for the illusion of security. This isn’t only unhelpful, and counterproductive, but I would argue it’s downright un-American.

Rest assured I’m not about to go and join the ranks of the anarchists in calling for the abolition of regulatory agencies. The FDA is slow, inefficient, and in places corrupt, but this is as much as anything due to cuts in funding, usually made by those who seek to streamline innovation, which have limited its ability to fulfill its mandate as well as ironically made processing applications slower. A lack of respect for the agency, its job, and the rules it follows, have inspired unscrupulous companies to bend rules to their breaking point, and commit gross violations of scientific and ethical standards in pursuit of profit. Because of the aforementioned lack of resources, and a political climate actively hostile to regulatory action, the FDA and the agencies responsible for enforcement have been left largely unable to follow their own rules.

Cutting regulations is not the answer. Improving and reforming the FDA is not a bad idea, but the measures supported by (and implied to be supported by) John Oliver are more likely to delay progress for those who need it than solve the issues at hand. A half-informed politically led moral panic will only lead to bad regulations, which aside from collateral damage, are likely to be gutted at the next changing of the guard, putting us back in the same place. I like to use the phrase “attacking a fly with a sledgehammer”, but I think this is more a case of “attacking a fly with a rapier”, in that it will cause massive collateral damage and probably still miss the fly in the end.

So, how do we do it right? Well, first of all, better funding for the FDA, with an eye towards attracting more, better candidates to work as regulators. If done right, this will make the review process not only more robust, but more efficient, with shorter turnaround time for devices. It might also be a good idea to look into reducing or even abolishing some application fees, especially for those applications which follow high standards for clinical trials, and have the paper trail to prove ethical standards. At present, application fees are kept high as a means to bring in revenue and make up for budget cuts to the agency. Although this arguably does good by putting the cost of regulating on the industry, and hopefully incentivizing quality applications, it constrains the resources available to investigating applications, and gives applying companies undue influence over application studies.

Second, we need to discard this silly notion of a regulatory freeze. Regardless of how one feels about regulations, I would hope that we all agree that they should at least be clear and up to date in order to deal with modern realities. And this means more regulations amending and clarifying old ones, and dealing with new realities as they crop up. There should also be greater emphasis on enforcement, particularly during the early application process. The penalties for submissions intentionally misclassifying devices needs to be high enough to act as a deterrent. Exceptions like section 510(k) need to be kept as exceptions, for special extenuating circumstances, rather than remaining open loopholes. And violating research standards to produce intentionally misleading data needs to be treated far more seriously, perhaps with criminal penalties. This requires not only regulatory and enforcement power, which already exist on the books, but the political will to see abusers held to account.

Third, there needs to be a much greater emphasis on post-market surveillance; that is, continued testing, auditing, and review of products after they reach consumers. This seems obvious, and from conversations with the uninitiated, I suspect it’s where most people believe the FDA spends most of its effort. But the way the regulations are written, and certainly how they’re enforced in practice, post-market surveillance is almost an afterthought. Most of it is handled by the manufacturers themselves, who have an alarming amount of latitude in their reporting. I would submit that it is this, the current lack of post-market surveillance, rather than administrative classifications, that is the gaping hole in our medical regulatory system.

This is also a much harder sell, politically. Industry hates it, because robust surveillance often prevents them from getting away with cutting manufacturing costs after approval, when reducing costs would lead to reduced product quality, and it means they have to keep on extra QA staff for as long as they remain in business. It’s also expensive for industry because of how the current setup puts most of the cost on manufacturers. Plenty of politicians also hate post market surveillance, since it is a role that is ideally redundant when everyone does their jobs. When something goes wrong, we say that it shouldn’t have been sold in the first place, and when nothing goes wrong, why would we pay people to keep running tests?

Incidentally, from what I have been led to understand, this is a major difference between US and EU regulatory processes. Drugs and devices tend to come out in the EU commercially before the US, because the US puts all of its eggs in the basket of premarket approval (and also underfunds that process), while the EU will approve innovations that are “good enough” with the understanding that if problems show up down the line, the system will react and swoop in, and those at fault will be held accountable. As a result, European consumers have safe and legal access to technologies still restricted as experimental in the US, while also enjoying the confidence that abusers will be prosecuted. Most of those new devices are also paid for by the government healthcare system. Just saying.

Making Exceptions

Normally, I don’t go out of my way for cancer related charities. It’s not that I’m a Scrooge or anything, quite the contrary. The reason, aside from being a college student with no income, is that I’ve spent more than my fair share of time in the hospital myself, especially as a child. For a time I was even enrolled in a hospital school.

Here’s the thing to understand about hospital school: only a small fraction of children in the hospital end up there. Most children don’t spend long enough to need it. Your average broken bone, tonsillectomy, or even appendicitis is only a few days in the hospital. Moreover, it doesn’t apply to the really bad cases either. Obviously a kid in a coma or similar isn’t going to be in classes, and someone who’s terminal is going to have other priorities. So in practice, you get a narrow overlap of kids who are sick enough to need to stay in the hospital, but healthy enough that education is a going concern and a worthwhile investment.

Now, having a school where everyone is sick, most kids are disabled, and the cast rotates frequently enough (as kids either get better or worse) to have everyone be the new kid, makes for a comparatively egalitarian school environment. Indeed it was the only school I was ever in without any evidence of bullying. But despite this, hospital school is no utopia. Human nature is what it is, and so there were inevitably cliques. The kids who were longtime students, who had the same abilities or symptoms and shared the same diagnoses, and were on the same ward often formed their own cliques. Naturally, the largest and most influential clique was that of those students who had the most common diagnosis, who alll lived on the same specialty ward, and who, by the nature of their disease, got the most public sympathy, leading to charitable donations and better toys for them.
Yes, that’s right. In the hospital school I went to, the cool kids were the oncology patients.

Obviously, I don’t envy them, even if I might’ve wanted to have been given a diagnosis that I could explain to other people, or gotten some of the perks of the countless charities devoted to childhood cancer. For what it’s worth, they were all very nice people. As cool kids go, they were benevolent overlords. I never had anything against them as individuals, just against the fact that society seemed to recognize them, who were in effectively in the same position as me, because they had a particular diagnosis and I didn’t. They had a certain social privilege, that cancer was everyone’s enemy, whereas the doctors couldn’t even name what it was that I had.

There’s a bit more nuance here, but I’m writing this on a schedule, and that’s the short version. As a result, when it comes to organizations that provide resources specific to cancer, I tend to prioritize my contributions elsewhere. With the knowledge that cancer causes are usually fairly well supported and funded, all else equal I will usually donate my money, time, and energy to other causes. I don’t oppose such efforts, but it takes something exceptional to get me on side.

And the reason I bring all this up is because we’ve reached one of my exceptions. This Star Won’t Go Out is hosting its big indiegogo fundraiser. I like TSWGO. Their story warms my old grinch heart. And more importantly, I like their angle. Because as much as they’re about sticking it to cancer, and helping kids do so, they are also focused on promoting kindness and good. Even though they’re a cancer charity, their projects benefit people besides just those who have a cancer diagnosis. After all, it has benefited me.

Their community outreach and Project Lovely grants have kept a strong focus on making life better for those who need it, regardless of diagnosis. These may not be the most economically efficient means of converting dollars into comfort, but it is an excellent way of spreading joy, goodwill, love, and compassion. Full disclosure here: I applied for such a grant two years ago for a project based on my own experiences in hospital so long ago. I didn’t make the cut, but my interactions with them made it clear that we both cared about essentially the same things. The projects they eventually did fund have done good in the world, and I support them wholeheartedly.

So if you, like me, are a charitable person, but shy away from donating to big causes, join me on supporting This Star Won’t Go Out’s current fundraiser. They do good with limited resources, and seek to change the world for the better, not just for their tribe, but for everyone.

Change Your Passwords

In accordance with our privacy policy, and relevant international legislation, this website is obligated to disclose any security breach as soon as we can do so without worsening the problem. At present we have no reason to believe that any breach has occurred. But the fact that another account of mine was recently caught up in a security breach with an entirely different account raises the possibility, albeit remote, that a bad actor may have had the opportunity to access to normally secure areas of this site. The probability of such an attack is, in my opinion, acceptably minute, and honestly I expect it much more likely that there’s something else going on that I haven’t noticed at all than this particular vulnerability.

So you don’t need to worry about locking down your accounts, at least not from this site, at the moment. Except, maybe you should. Because the truth is, by the time you’re being notified about a data breach, it’s often too late. To be clear, if a security expert tells you to change your passwords because of something that happened, you should do that. But you should also be doing that anyways. You don’t buy a fire extinguisher after your house is on fire, so don’t wait to change your passwords until after a breach.

Also, use better passwords. Computer security and counter surveillance experts advise using pass phrases rather than ordinary words, or even random but short strings. Something like Myfavoritebookis#1984byGeorgeOrwell or mypasswordis110%secureagainsthackers. These kinds of pass phrases are often just as easy to memorize as a short random string, and stand up better to standard dictionary attacks by adding entropy through length. Sure, if a shady government comes after you, it won’t hold up against the resources they have. But then again, if it’s governments or big time professional hackers coming after you… well, nice knowing you.

In the 21st century, protecting against digital crime is arguably more urgent than in person crime. Sure, a mugger might steal your wallet, but a hacker could drain your bank account, max out your credit ruining your credit score forever, expose your private information to anyone and everyone everyone who might have an axe to grind, use your identity to commit crimes, and frame you for illegal or indecent acts, essentially instantaneously, perhaps even automatically, without ever setting foot in the same jurisdiction as you. As technology becomes more omnipresent and integrated into our lives, this threat will only grow worse.

Half Mast

If my blog had a flag, it would be at half-mast today. For the third time in recent memory, a friend of a friend has been killed in a mass shooting, marking the sixth such event to which I’ve had some kind of personal connection. The victim, in this case, was a father, the sole breadwinner for a family with special needs, who moved in the same communities as I do. There is now an open question as to how the mother, who has so far stayed home to manage the children’s health, will make ends meet with the cost of life support.

This is, of course, only the latest tragedy in a series of horrors, about which I have made my feelings quite clear: this is unacceptable. It is a national disgrace that we allow this level of violence, which would be unacceptable even in a failed state, to continue with only token measures taken against it, in what is allegedly the greatest country on earth. Our continued inability to act decisively is an affront to the victims and survivors.

I believe I have already made my position on guns and regulations about them quite clear: we need to do a lot better in a hurry. There is little more for me to say that isn’t beating a dead horse. But the lives of my comrades demands, at the barest minimum, a societal conversation more in depth than mere thoughts and prayers. And since I have little faith that the powers that be will fulfill this obligation, I suppose it falls on me to add to the conversation.

One of the things I have heard said in recent weeks is that shootings are a meme issue- that is, they generate a disproportionate amount of attention and media compared to the number of actual deaths in context. This is a hard claim to argue against, epistemologically. After all, how do you argue that something isn’t receiving too much attention? Relative to what? Claiming that the news spends not enough time on boring, everyday items seems to misrepresent the function of news- to report things that are newsworthy.

But beyond this, I feel it ignores a larger point. Saying that shootings are a meme issue requires an acknowledgement that it is, at the very least, a thing that happens. It is an issue, not just a one-time tragedy, (or, for that matter, a two, three, or so on -time tragedy). It is arguably not an issue of the same numerical scale as global poverty, or food prices, or nuclear proliferation. But even if shooting deaths are not as numerous as, say, cancer deaths, it is an issue that causes an unacceptably large number of totally unnecessary deaths.

And the deaths are unnecessary. There is no such thing as an unavoidable death by shooting. Mass shootings, terrorism, assassinations, accidents, even ordinary crime where guns are involved, are totally preventable with far more stringent restrictions on civilian weapon ownership, and better training and resources for law enforcement and intelligence services to enforce these measures. Proliferation of weapons is not some unavoidable part of human nature, it is a hallmark of a failed state.

What really bugs me, though, isn’t knowing that we could and must do better, but seeing how we do, for other issues. It’s not that Americans have some deep and inflexible fixation with libertarian ideals, that we are willing to stoically accept that it is ultimately the price we pay for a just and free society, to have some people die from the abuse of freedom rather than engage the slippery slope of restricting it. That would be an argument that I would ultimately disagree with on the basis of moral priorities, but could at least acknowledge for its self-consistency. But it isn’t that. Americans aren’t absolute in their freedom. We set aside our principles all the time, for all different causes, from having working roads and schools, to letting police and intelligence agencies treat our online lives as having none of our rights as citizens, to anything involving any kind of travel.

Air travel is the most obvious example. We, as a society, decided almost twenty years ago that no act of airline terrorism on American soil was an acceptable price to pay for individual liberty. As a result, we took drastic actions to prevent a relatively rare scenario that not only kills fewer than guns, but fewer people than lightning strikes. We didn’t have to declare War on Terror; we could’ve tracked down the individual perpetrators, and then said that trying to prevent every madman from getting onto a plane was an impossible task in a non-totalitarian country. But we decided instead that this was a matter of principle. That we couldn’t afford to do anything less. We decided to treat a meme issue, and we dealt with it.

It would not be beyond our capacity to eliminate gun violence. If we were committed, in the same way we are committed to stamp out terrorism, it would not be difficult. Instead, we are told that scores of schoolchildren, teachers, fathers, mothers, friends, and first responders being killed every year is unavoidable, while those saying so live and work behind checkpoints and soldiers to ensure they will never face the consequences of failing to act.

Operation Endrun

I find myself with very little to say these days. Not because I don’t have anything to say, but because I don’t have the time or energy to put it in order. This is a recurring problem for me, particularly of late. Of course, a lot of it is because I’ve been kept on the back foot for a few weeks in a row now. Over the course of the last three weeks I’ve seemingly fallen prey to Murphy’s Law, with things piling up and compounding. I haven’t slept well, I’ve been having trouble thinking straight, and while I’ve avoided missing any particularly egregious deadlines in my classes, I feel more like I’ve been treading water than swimming forward.

Amid all of this, I missed putting up a post last week without noticing. I was actually pretty sure I had done something. In fact, if you’d asked me at the end of last week whether I posted anything, I would have been fairly sure I had already done that. I probably would have bet money on it. And I would’ve been wrong. This isn’t the first or only thing I’ve lost track of in the last few weeks, but it is arguably the biggest; or perhaps better stated, one of the things more resistant to forgetting that I nevertheless forgot.

This is bad. Distraction and confusion on this level is dangerous. This time around it was a missing a post that didn’t go up. Next time it might be a school assignment, which would be bad. Worst case scenario, I might space out and forget about my life support routine. I don’t think it would kill me, but that’s the kind of risk I try very hard not to take. Whatever is causing this fugue, whether that’s a lack of sleep, too much slacking an procrastinating, or not enough productive projects to focus on, needs to be brought under control. People with my condition don’t have the luxury of being distracted. I know this.

Of course, saying something is bad and doing something to solve it are very different. And it’s difficult to turn my life upside down in order to find and eliminate the source of a problem while also going ahead with schoolwork and other plans. So, what’s the plan?

Well, first I need to get ahead in my schoolwork. The plan here is twofold: first, to make sure I’m covered for traveling next weekend. Second, getting ahead will give me the breathing room I need to begin the next set of endeavors. This kind of planning would’ve been impossible in high school, because my teachers were never so organized as to provide expectation ahead of time of what I needed to do, which I think was partially responsible for the tendency for things to snowball. College, however, has proven far easier to navigate, with important items being listed on syllabi well in advance. Consequently, it is possible for me to make plans that include completing work ahead of time.

Second, I need to get my sleep schedule under control. This is a pain, because the only way I have found to reliably enforce a sleep schedule is to wake up early, and force myself out of bed, so that by the time night falls, I feel exhausted enough to fall asleep. This is always a miserable process, because, as I have mentioned previously, I am not a morning person. Waking up early is physically painful to me. I have designed most of my current life around the premise of never needing to wake up before 11am. This will be a sacrifice. But it is necessary.

Third, I need to get up and around more. Winter often has the effect of causing me to spend most of my days inside and sitting down, since I don’t tolerate the cold well enough to go for walks. This, I suspect, is bad for concentration, and it certainly weakens my stamina over time-something I can scarcely afford to lose.

Will I actually accomplish these things? Dunno. But by writing them down and posting them, I’m more likely to try.

Fully Automated Luxury Disk Jockeys

Here’s an interesting observation with regards to automation- with the exception of purely atmospheric concerns, we have basically automated the disk jockey, that is, the DJ, out of a job. Pandora’s music genome project, Google’s music bots, Apple’s Genius playlists, and whatever system Spotify uses, are close enough for most everyday purposes.

Case in point- my university got it in their heads that students were becoming overwhelmed with finals. This is obviously not a major revelation, but student stress has become something of a moral and political hot issue of late. The purported reason for this is the alarmingly high rate of suicides among college students- something which other universities have started to act on. Canada, for instance, has added more school breaks throughout the year during the weeks when suicide rates peak. Other schools have taken more pragmatic measures, like installing suicide nets under tall bridges.

Of course, the unspoken reason for this sudden focus on mental health is because the national political administration has made school shootings a matter of mental health prevention, rather than, say, making guns harder to get. My university, like my hometown, lies in the shadow of Newtown, and plenty of students here lost people firsthand. Most of us went to schools that went on lockdown that day. The university itself has had two false alarms, and police teams clad in armor and machine guns already patrol the campus regularly. So naturally, the university is throwing money at mental health initiatives.

Rather than do something novel, like staggering exam schedules, routine audits to prevent teachers from creating too much work for students, or even abolishing final exams altogether as has been occasionally proposed, the powers that be settled on the “Stress Free Finals Week” Initiative, whereby the school adds more events to the exam week schedule. I’m not sure how adding more social events to a time when students are already pressed to cram is supposed to help, but it’s what they did.

As a commuter and part time student, most of this happens on the periphery for me. But when, through a series of events, I wound up on campus without anything to do nor a ride home, I decided I may as well drop by. After all, they were allegedly offering free snacks if I could find the location, and being a college student, even though I had just gorged myself on holiday cookies and donuts at the Social Sciences Department Holiday Party, I was already slightly peckish. They were also advertising music.

I got there to find the mid-afternoon equivalent of a continental breakfast- chips, popcorn, donuts, and cookies. Perhaps I had expected, what with all the research on the gut-brain connection, that an event purporting to focus on mental health would have a better selection. But no matter. There was a place to sit away from the sleet outside, and free snacks. The advertised DJ was up front blasting music of questionable taste at a borderline objectionable volume, which is to say, normal for a college campus.

Except the DJ wasn’t actually playing the music. He didn’t interact with any of the equipment on the table during the time I watched, and on several occasions he surrendered any pretense of actually working by leaving the table to raid the snacks, and then sat down at another table to eat while the music handled itself. No one else seemed to think this strange, but it struck me to think that for all I know, he might have just set up a YouTube Music playlist and let the thing run, and earned money for it. Heck, he wouldn’t even have to select the playlist manually- bots can do that part too.

There are two takeaway observations here. The first is that computer automation is happening here and now, and the first wave of that automation is hitting now. I feel it worth noting that this isn’t just manual labor being made obsolete by mechanized muscle. While it might not exactly be white collar, a modern DJ is a thinking job. Sure, it doesn’t take a genius to hit shuffle on iTunes, but actually selecting songs that match a mood and atmosphere for a given event, following up with an appropriate song, and knowing to match the differing volumes on recordings with the desired speaker volume takes at least some level of heuristic thinking. We’ve made it fairly low-hanging fruit for bots in the way we label songs by genre already, but the fact we’re already here should be worrying for people that are worried about automation-driven mass unemployment.

The second takeaway is a sort of caveat to the first, namely; even if this guy’s job was automated, he still got paid. An argument can be made that this is a function of bureaucratic inefficiency and an enterprising fellow playing the system in order to get paid to be lazy. And while this would be a fair observation, there’s another interpretation that I think is yet more interesting. Because the way I see it, it’s not like the university misunderstood what they were buying. They advertised having a DJ. They could have found any idiot to hook up an iPhone speaker and press shuffle, but instead they hired someone.

There was a cartoon a while back that supposed that in the future, rather than automation causing a total revolution in man’s relationship with work, that we would simple start to put more value into more obscure and esoteric commodities. The example provided was a computer running on “artisanal bits” – that is, a Turing-complete setup of humans holding up signs for ones and zeroes. The implication is that increasing wealth inequality will drive more artificial distinctions in patterns of consumption. Rich people become pickier the richer they get, and since they’re rich, they can drive demand for more niche products to provide work for the masses.

This hypothesis would fit with current observations. Not only would it explain why institutions are still willing to hire human DJs in the age of music bots, but it would explain why trends like organic foods, fair trade textiles, and so on seem to be gaining economic ground. It’s an interesting counter argument to the notion that we’re shaping up for mass unemployment.

I still think this is a horribly optimistic outlook. After all, if the owning minority can’t be bothered to pay living wages in the process of making their wealth in the first place, why would they feel a need to employ a substantial number of people after the fact? There’s also a fundamental limit on how much a single person can consume*, and the number of people who can be gainfully employed in service of a single person’s whims has a functional limit, after which employment stops being accurately described as work, and is more like private welfare. Which makes this not so much a repudiation of the problem of the problem of automation induced mass unemployment, as another possible solution. Still, it’s a thing to keep in mind, and for me, a good reminder to pay attention to what’s actually happening around me as well as what models and experts say should happen.

*Technically, this isn’t true. A person with infinite money could easily spend infinite money by purchasing items for which the prices are artificially inflated through imposed scarcity, speculative bubbles, and other economic buzzwords. But these reflect peculiarities in the market, and not the number of people involved in their production, or the quality of their work.

In Accordance With the Shutdown

In accordance with the partial shutdown of the US Federal Government, this blog has activated its contingency protocol to ensure compliance with the Antideficiency Act. Consequently, in order to maximize available resources and meet all of our ongoing mission requirements, the remainder of this post will include only prime-numbered words from a normal post.

Lately there has talk our something “Orwellian”. Accurate, interest public mind, examine original. That, “Theory Collectivism”, purpose writing. Library: Irreconcilable. Remain are. Trade with. Low, abiding intermittently daily, abolish distinctions, shall equal. History, same outlines again. Capacity govern. Overthrown the, enlist liberty. Objective, thrust servitude, cycle.

Low never. Softening revolution equality millimeter. Historic masters. Nineteenth, obvious observers. Cyclical, equality unalterable human. Doctrine adherents, change: hierarchical high. Aristocrats upon, compensation. Fraternity. Tyranny overthrown. […]

Oligarchies, circumstances. Practitioners, cheating. Knowledge delusion; rational. World-conquest fanaticism. Unexampled, the contradictions. Mystique paraphernalia.