Tag: random

Modest swimming costumes

I read an article on BBC News last night that asked a question I’ve often wondered why people ask: Why do some people find the burkini offensive? I remember news stories in the 1980’s and 1990’s about the scandalous thong bikinis showing up on beaches near you with all the near-nakedness and permanent mental scarring. Communities banned these strings with a few patches of cloth amid debate about the offense such attire engendered. Cannot say I was personally offended by any near-nakedness … but I understand that there is a social convention that failing to sufficiently cover oneself is undesirable. Rarely is the convention reversed — apart from compulsory nude beaches, and to me that’s more of a “you are not wearing the proper uniform” than “ack, CLOTHING!” thing.

Ostensibly, the offense some people seem to find in a “burkini” — which is about as far away from a thong bikini as one can get – is perplexing. When I was in Egypt, people at the beach in Alexandria had everything from thongs to long sleeved shirts, long slacks, and hijabs. Not wanting to embarrass my host, I wore fairly modest surfing apparel – a long sleeved rash-guard and neoprene leggings. It’s comfortable. You don’t have to worry about reapplying sunscreen all over your person. You don’t get sand in places you would much rather not have sand.

The whole “offense” discussion is a red herring. I doubt anyone is actually being offended by not seeing enough skin at the beach. Otherwise surfers out in SoCal would have been harangued to stop wearing exactly what I purchased to swim in Egypt. The real offense, such as it is, is that (1) someone is displaying anything that identifies them as Muslim and (2) people do not want to admit their own prejudices. Like don’t-ask-don’t-tell, they’d be comfortable with a Muslim at their beach as long as they couldn’t identify the person as such.

Now the legal justification is secularism … which is at least reasonable sounding. The potential disproof of that notion reminds me of the short-lived school prayer initiative in my senior year at High School. Instead of the legal battles that went on in other districts, I simply asked the Superintendent how many subversive teenagers he thought I could find to sign up to read prayers from non-traditional religions – and, sure, you could get a bunch of kids to read Christian prayers … but it’s a sign-up to read one thing, and we’ll get in queue too. How long will parents support having their kids exposed to Pagan, Wiccan, Satanic … there sure are a lot of religions out there to which people take offense, and as soon as you tell me *my* religion cannot have a prayer read but yours can, we’re out of the murky free speech realm and into clear separation of Church and State territory. We had exactly zero prayers read in our morning announcements. I would love to see a line of beachwear reproducing the stations of the cross, Star of David prints, Buddha prints. Oh, a different outfit for each of the Hindu Gods. How many people wearing those would get fined? And how many people would support the ban after people start getting fined for their religious iconry.

 

Programming in Unknown Languages

I’ve often thought that the immersion method of learning a language was setting yourself up for failure – it isn’t like knowing the fundamentals of grammar and pronunciation in English helps you in any way when you find yourself in Karnataka trying to communicate in Sanskrit. There are rather complex algorithms that attempt to derive meaning from an unknown language, but apart from body language, pointing, and gesturing … that’s not something I can manage in real-time as someone speaks to me.

*Programming* languages, on the other hand, I am finding are rather easily learnt by immersion. I know several programming languages quite well – C/C++, F77/F90, perl, and php. I know a dozen or so other languages well enough to get by.

Some of our home automation scripts are written in CoffeeScript (which is evidently a way to write JavaScript without *actually* knowing JavaScript) – and I would never be able to write the program. But to come into the middle of the conversation (i.e. to take someone else’s non-functional code and try to fix it), I can glean enough of the language to debug and fix code. And there’s always Google for any syntax I cannot guess.

I wonder if someone who is fluent in multiple disparate languages (knowing half a dozen Romance languages doesn’t really give you a good base of knowledge – I mean someone who speaks Italian, Hindi, Cantonese, Swahili, and some Levantine dialect of Arabic) is able to do something similar — they know enough words to pretty much guess what words mean & enough different language structures to guess words in their context.

Great again?

We’ve been seeing a lot of political ads and campaign rallies – and I am constantly struck by Trump’s slogan. Make American great again. I know there are people who dispute it because “we’re already great”. Whatever, never been a big fan of exceptionalism in any country. What I want to know is … to which “great” time period does he want us to return? Just before Obama – embroiled in two military offensives that were doomed from the start? The 90’s – wait, that was Clinton. 80’s – run away deficits and a nuclear arms race? The 70’s with the oil embargo? The 60’s – well, they’ve got good music, good drugs … but they’re also about as close to nuclear annihilation as we’ve ever been, a president who was assassinated, and a lot of racial turmoil. The 50’s – not the TV fantasy, but the reality – Brown v Board of Education was a good step, but the actual desegregation process was ugly. Outside of schools, it isn’t like Rosa Parks sat down and ended segregation. Women – well, we were allowed to vote, but didn’t have a lot of options that provided economic independence. Maybe back to before women could vote? Or how about when people could be legal possessions? Maybe he thinks we went wrong breaking away from England and we should request our colony status back?

His slogan, at least to me, has an a priori assumption that you are a white dude. Old white dudes gave up a lot — more voters mean less power per vote, more people vying for jobs means it is harder to get a job, independent women mean you need to be more cognizant of your partner’s needs. Young white dudes didn’t get to experience the “great” before, but I could see wanting to return too. But, seriously, half of the country isn’t a dude. Some other significant percentage isn’t white. Maybe you’ll get lucky and a large proportion of white dudes will show up to vote. But how can you govern an entire country when your entire platform is focused on the needs of maybe 40% of the population?

Middlemen, or lack thereof

How the Internet has changed business constantly amazes me. I made a cape for Anya over the summer, and we didn’t want something tied around her neck … so I wanted to use a magnet to hold the cape closed. It gets caught in something and the cape breaks free. A single pair of magnets, at the site where I was purchasing the fabric, was 7$. I’m sure they are *REALLY* nice magnets (or, rather, at 7$ for two maybe 1″ diameter magnets they better be really nice magnets), but that price seemed somewhat outlandish.

Enter the Google search for magnet closures (most of which seem to be for purses and have a snap in the centre of them). I happened across Alibaba — where the exact same thing could be had for 2¢ per piece. With a minimum order of 1,000 units. And, yeah, 20$ is a lot more than 7$ … and I wasn’t actually sure if it was 1,000 pairs of magnets or not. But even if I only got 500 pair for 20$ … that’s 4¢ a pair for something retailing for 7$. I could sell half of them on eBay or something, have a lifetime supply of magnetic button closures, and probably have paid less than 7$. Except — I don’t really have any idea how to ship something out of China. A lot of listings on Alibaba (probably because it is more geared toward B2B transactions) require you to sort out the shipping from whatever foreign port.

I wasn’t willing to put the effort into figuring it out — although it looks like being an importer with an online store could be a fairly lucrative endeavor. In poking around the Alibaba site, though, I found AliExpress … same companies offering the same products at a slightly higher price, but in smaller quantities and with someone else sorting the shipping. Ten pairs of magnet buttons for 3.55$ Buying something posted from China means you cannot be in a hurry — estimated delivery is 4-6 weeks out … but jewelry findings (especially clasps) are a quarter the cost, sewing bits, housewares (I got some of the plastic cutters to make ‘animal crackers’ for a tenth the price @ Williams Sonoma).

Maybe I’m not getting the exact same thing — since the 7$ magnet says it is made in China anyway … that’s debatable — but buying something you don’t need for a few months sure saves a lot of money. I can see why Alibaba — basically a broker that connects manufacturers with retailers and end customers — makes so much money Yahoo wants to divest their money losing search engine / e-mail business and just ‘live’ off of their investment in Alibaba.

Federal Spending – And Opportunities For Savings

Whenever I hear debates about reducing the federal deficit, I think of the saying “penny wise and pound foolish”. It means making efforts to save pennies without watching the larger amounts — someone who drives a H2 fifty miles to work each day but foregoes a cup of coffee to save a buck.

We want to reduce the federal deficit; but we cannot touch military or social security and Medicare spending. And Medicare is 15% of that 28% for “Health And Human Services”. If we start our savings plan by declaring over 50% of our spending off-limits, we are either looking at HUGE cuts in the remaining not-quite 50% or we’re going to fail before we’ve even started.

We could abolish entire departments — say HUD, EPA, NASA, Education, and Labor — and eliminate all foreign aid and only reduce our total federal spending by 9%. Now 9% of 3.4 trillion dollars is still a lot of money (although an interesting academic experiment is to get a group of people together and discuss what you’ll cut in the federal budget. You may find yourself saying, with all seriousness, that we’re only looking at ten million dollars. It isn’t worth the time we’re taking to discuss it.).  But we could reduce Health & Human Services, Social Security, and Defense by 3% each and save the same 9%.

Looking at discretionary spending, the picture becomes even sillier. This means we’re ignoring obligatory payments like social security and Medicare. Defense and homeland security is 54% unto itself!

Whenever someone tells me they won’t cut entitlement programs and won’t touch military spending (or will increase it!), but they’re still going to balance the budget without raising taxes … I assume they are outright lying. Wishful thinking that incomes will increase and thus increase government revenue is sound budget planning. I know the Republicans dislike the CBO because they don’t include “revenue increases we think will happen” as income … but until you start to see those returns, I don’t think you can stake your financial solvency on them.

Save The Humans

I am continually astounded by people who think industry should have the right to spew whatever cocktail of toxic chemicals. Bully for you, you’ve got a load of cash and can just move somewhere else. Empathy for others aside, unless you are preparing your own biodome , eventually you are going to run out of “elsewhere”.

I remember reading an article from the American South-East coast somewhere – maybe a Carolina. A local law enforcement officer was discussing how voluntary evacuations work (or don’t), and he said the most effective tool he’d found was an indelible marker. Asked anyone who wanted to remain on site when a hurricane was headed their way to use his pen and write their name on their arm. So their bloated, floating corpse could be identified. Just writing your name is morbid, and a lot of people would start packing. But the mark served as a constant reminder of your poor decision, and people would clear out a few hours later too.

We need to adapt the same idea to environmental protection. Because, let’s be honest, the planet will still be here. A lifeless rock orbiting around the sun maybe, but short of vaporizing a good chunk of the planet … it will be here. I’m not sure what the equivalent of floater ID markings would be for creating un-breathable air or caustic water, but I suspect that type of save *you* approach would be far more successful than trying to engender concern for animals, plants, or grandchildren in people who obviously have no such concern.