Today’s RSS Zeitgeist: Cheapskates

Two good posts on the cultural forces that discourage us from re-evaluating our vast piles of crap, one by Flea (who is, as usual, hilarious along the way):

I promise, if Alex had been with us (Christopher was, but in utero form only, so he missed the whole thing) the mighty bird fight would have been the one thing he remembered. Not the hot stone massage, not the putt putt, not the expensive restaurants or the fact that the gift shop sold couture.

Because of this, I tend to lean toward the dirty hippie style of parenting. It's easy to puff up and spout clichés about how it's not the money you spend on your kids, it's the time you spend with them. That's one of those things that rich people say. Money helps. You get treated like shit when you're poor, and your kids do, too.

And the other's at Living on Less, set up as a blatantly humanitarian concern:

It pained me to see the man spend $30 on haircuts for himself and his son, and give his son $20 as a gift for a birthday party he would be attending, but what's the alternative? To look like slobs, or show up at the party with some weird homemade gift? The only way to live affordably in our culture, even on incomes considerably higher than those of these two examples, is to be eccentric, but most people, by definition, don't want to be eccentric. Adhering to cultural norms is strongly reinforced, not just by the corporate-controlled media, who have an interest in keeping up people's spending, but also by one's own peers and even one's own self.

It's one thing to live in a weird apartment, maybe with a bunch of other people, wear thrift store clothes, dumpster dive for furniture and home accessories, and forego expensive commercial entertainment and goods when you don't actually have to. Choosing to live a lifestyle that resembles poverty is drastically different from being forced into it by actual poverty. But if only it were not so stigmatized, living like an oddball could provide some real financial relief to those who most desperately need it.

Which, well, yeah! Whenever we enforce our variously shitty consumerist cultural norms, we're doing real harm to those who must choose between conforming and eating, or conforming and paying down credit card debt, or whatever. These bullshit incentives don't just create a culture of waste and environmental catastrophe; they help perpetuate poverty. Why haven't I seen this put so clearly before?

yami · 12:11 · 31 Mar 2020 · #
Filed under: Cultural Criticism

A Personal Ontology of Bagels

I promised I'd bring bagels:

yami · 22:10 · 30 Mar 2020 · #
Filed under: Quizzes

Pharmaceuticals

The smartest take I've seen on these so-called "conscience clauses" for pharmacists is most of the way down here:
Four states already have laws that specifically allow pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions that violate their beliefs.

Here's the plan for when I get canned:

1. Move to one of these four states.
2. Become pharmacist.
3. Convert to Christian Science.
4. Get paid for doing NOTHING and they can't fire me!

Posted by Sarcastro at March 28, 2020 04:23 PM
Goddamn! I shoulda taken more biochemistry in college.

But, y'know, pharmacists need these provisions for the same reason people need to be able to file for Conscientious Objector status within the military. Like soldiers, pharmacists are required to serve the full terms of their contracts (which are subject to unilateral extension or "stop loss" policies at the whim of the Department of Health and Human Services); pharmacists who leave their jobs during an epidemic are subject to the death penalty. Moreover, all high school chemistry students must register with the Selective Health Services department and will be subject to a draft in the event of a severe shortage of pharmacists. So it's a testament to this country's commitment to religious freedom that we allow Christian Scientists to perform community service web-surfing, rather than conscripting them into passing out drugs!

Free! And! Democratic!
yami · 20:03 · 30 Mar 2020 · #
Filed under: Feminism, USian Politics

New Athletic Allegiances and the Advanced Study of Mud

It's official, signed, sealed, and if not quite delivered, at least dropped in the mailbox: I'm off to UC Berkeley next fall for a Ph.D. from the Department of Earth and Planetary Science. Do not hesitate to fail to withold your applause!

Topics to be covered in the next 5+ years may include (in that nested list format that's so trendy this week):

  • Mud:
    • Its squooshiness.
    • Its jiggliness.
    • Its squooshiness when jiggled:
      • On Earth.
      • On Mars.
  • Beating civil engineers over the head:
    • Sometimes simplifications are necessary for projects to proceed efficiently.
    • Sometimes they clearly haven't been paying attention to:
      • Seismology.
      • Statistics.

I'm still working out the implications of this decision in the hypothetical case of a Stanford-Iowa State playoff. It's a good thing I have a Division III alma mater and don't really follow college sports at all, or my head might explode.

yami · 13:08 · 30 Mar 2020 · #
Filed under: Diary, Announcements

Gah Spam!

So I've been hit! And badly, too; the server has been responding at best intermittently this morning. Or perhaps someone else was hit; with 80 sites co-hosted on the same machine it's hard to tell. But the barrage of Spaminator messages appearing at the same time as the site becomes inaccessible is a bit of a coincedence.

I'll have a look-see at renaming wp-comments.php tonight. Any other suggestions for combatting spam without chewing up resources to run it through WordPress and plugins and etc.?

For now, comments from "new" commenters will go into the moderation queue. If yours fails to appear right away, please be patient.

yami · 13:22 · 29 Mar 2020 · #
Filed under: Announcements

iConsume

Okay, so I'm buying myself a laptop. And an iPod. For quasi-reals, yo, they're sitting in my shopping cart at the Apple store. But Apple, not knowing that any moment of indecision will send me and my checkbook scurrying back under the bed, is offering free engraving on the iPod. Aaaagh!

  • iPolka
  • I'm a consumer whore
  • this machine kills fascists
  • ???
yami · 14:39 · 27 Mar 2020 · #
Filed under: Crap

Poppies

Sure, I'm blogging on a Saturday night, but that's because I went outside today and picnicked while the sun sapped all my energy. Look!

yami · 22:06 · 26 Mar 2020 · #
Filed under: Photoblog

Iimage Gallery Test Post: Seattle

Though most of the WordPress-related dust has settled, the problem of What To Do With The Photoblog remains. This post is mostly to test out IImage Gallery - which could be a swell plugin. And I still have a few pictures laying around from my visit to Seattle, sooo...

yami · 21:09 · 26 Mar 2020 · #
Filed under: Photoblog

Friday Rock Blogging: Died for Your Sins Edition

Look at the pretty things made from dead marine micro- and meio-organisms! First, a ridge of limestone formed from crushed-up foraminifera:
Oligocene foraminiferite, Morcate, Cuba

Second, a couple pretty laminated diatomites:
laminated diatomite and diatomaceous shale with ash bed and drag fold
laminated diatomite and diatomaceous shale

Third, partial silica replacement of a foram shell in a porcelanite matrix:
chalcedony and quartz filling a foram shell in porcelanite

yami · 11:27 · 25 Mar 2020 · #
Filed under: Friday Rock Blogging

Cyclic Extinctions?

As you might have guessed, I'm in nerd mode tonight. And somewhere in the chaos of multiple tabs of earth scientists I found a parade on which I would really like to pee:

With surprising and mysterious regularity, life on Earth has flourished and vanished in cycles of mass extinction every 62 million years, say two UC Berkeley scientists who discovered the pattern after a painstaking computer study of fossil records going back for more than 500 million years.
[...]
Perhaps, [the authors] suggested, there's an unknown "Planet X" somewhere far out beyond the solar system that's disturbing the comets in the distant region called the Oort Cloud -- where they exist by the millions -- to the point that they shower the Earth and cause extinctions in regular cycles. Or perhaps there's some kind of "natural timetable" deep inside the Earth that triggers cycles of massive volcanism...

Oh, to have a functional super-special proxy server in Caltech's privileged IP-space! It's very hard to pee on anyone's parade without at least reading their article first, and in this case probably also learning a whole bunch of new crap about statistics. But. Um. The smell of data-mining, it is as pheremones to a fluttery moth! So I flutter!

But fluttering takes energy, and it's really very past bedtime. Sigh.

yami · 23:10 · 23 Mar 2020 · #
Filed under: Science