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RaptorMagic

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Callimachus
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 Friday, May 21, 2004
Thoughts from the Road: Talk Radio

I like long solo road trips. I find them mentally cleansing.

But whatever it is that my brain gets from all those hours of driving in silence, by about mid-Oregon it had gotten enough of it, and I turned to the radio. Thus I got my first experience of Air America, a radio network recently created for the express purpose of providing talk radio with a liberal political tilt. (For some reason, talk radio is overwhelmingly conservative.)

The first thing I heard was the tail end of an interview with William Kristol. I'm not sure if that was on Air America or not. It sounded more like National Public Radio. That was interesting, and I wish I had heard the whole thing.

Later, I listened to about an hour of the talk show hosted by Janeane Garofalo and her partner Sam Seder. It was horrible. When the radio signal started to fail, I switched to another station where I found Bill O'Reilly, and O'Reilly was more satisfying to listen to than the liberals. That's how bad they were.

In my view, the problem with conservative talk radio, is that it's stupid, narrow-minded, ignorant political name-calling with little or no substance. Air America was supposed to be an antidote to this sort of thing, but their idea of a proper response is to provide stupid, narrow-minded ignorant political name-calling which is liberal. The main difference between Air America and O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Savage, etc., is that the conservatives call those who disagree with them traitors and crazies, whereas the liberals call those who disagree with them idiots and "douche bags". What is this, grade school? I don't want to hear liberals talk like that.

Also, Garofalo needs to learn when to shut up. She babbles on and on, even when Seder is talking, with the result that you can't understand either of them. It's just bad radio.

Maybe the others are better. I've liked Al Franken in some speeches on C-Span.

I've been home for almost three full days now, and I still haven't gotten around to turning on the TV. I guess I'm out of the habit. The house in California is TV-less now.

7:06:22 PM  [permalink]  comment []  



Thoughts from the Road: Gas Prices

I'm back in Seattle now. I drove back on Tuesday, but it's taken me a couple of days to get settled in.

I see from newspaper headlines that people are getting excited about the high price of gas. Given that I just drove 800 miles with gas prices at an all-time high, you'd think I'd be as indignant as anyone, but I didn't even notice.

Or rather, I did notice, but I can also do basic math. Looking through my receipts, I see I bought 36 gallons of gas along the way. I don't know what the indignant public thinks is an acceptable price, but suppose the price was 25 cents per gallon less. In that case I would have saved nine dollars on this trip. Nine bucks, big deal. I saved that much by packing a lunch and dinner and not stopping at a restaurant.

And that's for a 15-hour road trip. If you're a truckdriver, or in some other business where gasoline is a significant chunk of your expenses and is not easily passed on to your consumers, then sure, it's a big deal. But the newspaper stories are making it sound like its a major crisis for ordinary Americans, which it's not.

It's interesting that prices matter only when they go up. If an increase in the price of gas is a source of such consumer outrage, shouldn't an equivalent decrease in the same price be a source of consumer celebration? But we never see journalists or politicians telling us how much better life is when the price of gas comes down. For that matter, take a look at some other price. In the same few months that the price of gas has gone way up, the price of beef has come way down. Do American families who wring their hands about higher gas bills unwring them for the lower grocery bills?

Of course the media attention to gas prices is due largely to candidate Kerry trying to make a political issue of it, as if higher gas prices is somehow a reason to vote against President Bush. I have my doubts about this strategy. I don't know exactly how much the Bush administration can effect short-term manipulation of gas prices, but surely Bush is more able to do it than Kerry is. From Kerry's point of view, the best case is that prices of gas are random fluctuations, which means it's a crap shoot whether this issue is going to backfire on him when gas prices come back down in September and October and Bush can claim credit for it. At worst, Bush can actually tilt the odds in his favor by playing with the supply in whatever way is available to him.

Maybe the Kerry campaign thinks that if voters make up their mind now to be mad at Bush they'll keep the attitude even after the prices change. Or maybe this is all just set-up maneuvering for October. I see that, in response to the Kerry campaign's insinuations, Bush is announcing that he won't "play politics" with the strategic oil reserve. Maybe the Kerry team wants to plant that idea in voters heads so that if the price of gas does go down in October they can accuse Bush of playing politics. Maybe they think Bush is going to try to score points by bringing down gas prices in October in any case, so they want to get their response in place now. Or maybe they want to be in a position to attack the President about gas prices whether they go up or down, regardless of whether he had anything to do with it.

Still seems like a risky strategy to me. Ultimately, Bush has more control over gas prices than Kerry does. To me that suggests that in the long run Bush has more to gain by making an issue out of it, even if Kerry can score a few points in the short term.

That's aside from the fact that it's just a stupid issue. Surely there are better criteria for choosing a president than whether gas prices go up or down.

My complaint about Bush's treatment of the strategic oil reserve is not that he's manipulating prices to "play politics". My complaint is that he seems so determined to buy buy buy when prices are at an all-time high. Isn't the whole point of a reserve to guard against price fluctuations? Seems to me that the time to fill up the reserve is when things are stable and prices are low. That way you have something on hand for a rainy day and don't get stuck paying a big bill when things get like ... well, like they are right now. You know, buy low, sell high.

I remember when the Republicans were the party of frugality. Today's Republicans don't seem to care about prudent management of government finances. I wonder if that isn't a collateral effect of all those years of Reaganite tax-cut sloganeering. You know, stuff like "let Americans keep more of their own money". The implication is that government money isn't our money, it's someone else's. That would explain a lot of the current economic thinking that looks at only one side of the equation. Programs which invest in public wealth are just plain "spending" because the benefit goes to "the government" not to "us". On the opposite side of the coin, policies which run up the public debt to put dollars in consumers' pockets are considered advantageous because they turn a "profit" and the deficit is someone else's problem.

Let Americans keep more of their own money, but don't let them keep more of their own debt.

6:12:31 PM  [permalink]  comment []  



Letters: Catching Up

Mike Barno (May 12)

On the other hand, I'll read anything by Larry Niven. Not sure why.

I'm a fan of Niven's collaborations with ex-Diplomacy-hobbyist Jerry Pournelle, and of some of his works alone, mainly in his "Known Space" universe. "Why" for me is that most of the hard science behind the stories is valid, most of the human (and other sentient) interaction feels real while telling the story, and most of it works out to be fairly entertaining. Even his huge multithreaded novels like Lucifer's Hammer don't devolve into unreadable sludge, as does L Ron Hubbard's big stuff or Quicksilver/The Confusion or even Heinlein's unpublished-until-lately For Us, The Living.

[The only Niven-Pournelle collaboration I read was The Mote in God's Eye, which I like a lot and reread about once every two years. But even there it's very easy to see what is Niven's (basic concept, the Motie culture, the interaction between the cultures and its large-scale ramifications) and what is Pournelle's (the human culture, especially the military; most of the individual characters; the heroics at the end). Of these, I much prefer the Niven.]

Friday

I liked this book more than some people did. It explored some big ideas but it did so in more subtle ways than most books about "artificial people", or terrorism, or post-breakup North America, or the same interlocking web of directors controlling all the big corporations, or future secret agents, or familyless people, or liberty. It's not thin, but it's not the weeks-to-read tome that most of his post-1970 books are. I'll read it again in the next couple of years. Still, the Heinlein book I would recommend to someone like yourself is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Hardly any of what most critics dislike about his books is in there, leaving room within a fairly short novel for a good straightforward science fiction story, and for the best revolution novel I've ever read.

I have only two other SF authors from the last couple of decades to recommend, and they're both well-known: David Brin, and Spider Robinson. For Brin you might be better off with an older book like Earth than with his Uplift series, which seem like mere fantasy fluff unless you know the meta-story of why that planet and its societies are as they are. For Spider, even if you're going to read his novels, you should start with the Callahan's Crosstime Saloon collection of short stories. Funny as hell, insightful, and pun-filled SF. I'm sure if you Google their names or search the appropriate newgroups you'll find reviews of works by both authors. Brin's won the Hugo, and Robinson's won the Nebula.

[Lest anyone think otherwise, I'm really not looking for sci-fi recommendations. I have little desire to get any deeper into sci-fi. I'm content to just reread the small collection that is already familiar.

[One other book in my small collection I forgot to mention, a fairly obscure one, I think, is The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers. (I once tried another book by Powers and it did nothing for me at all; I never even finished it.) I'm not sure how I came across Anubis Gates, but it appealed to me. I like the cross-over with 19th century British literature (which perhaps isn't a familiar subject for many sci-fi readers...), and it's one of the few time travel concepts that makes logical sense. I really like how he squares the circle on the whole go-back-into-the-past-and-change-the-present conundrum, which in the standard treatment (eg, Star Trek) doesn't work for me at all. There's a Niven short story that does a nice job with that, too -- the one with the astronaut who loops around some sort of singularity so that he returns in the past, then visits his past self to assist him in getting hired for the flight in the first place, just as the he himself was visited by his future self before making the trip.]

Pete Gaughan (May 14)

a subdivision or other development is always named after whatever natural feature (animal, vegetable or geographic) was destroyed in the process of building. ... Pleasant Hill, Walnut Creek (possibly even Concord!).

But those are cities, not subdivisions, and were named long ago when the features still existed. Walnut Creek was still freeflowing 75 years after the town was founded. (Concord got its name out of disagreement, as it happens. The families who founded Pacheco and Todos Santos were feuding. The Todos Santos crowd realized they would get broader attention and more business with an English-language name, so they simply picked and published one.)

[OK, I take your point about named long ago, but I did say -- in the part you ellipsed -- "I wonder if the rule can't be applied to towns as well".

[A few days ago Karen mentioned a subdivision in the Midwest named "Indian Hill". Hmm, would that be the hill or the Indians or both?]

these areas, to which Garreau gives the infelicitous name "edge cities,"

I've heard and prefer the term "satellite cities".

The junk at the back of the book -- what's the opposite of prefatory material? "postfatory"?

In the book biz, it's frontmatter and backmatter.

Pete's observation that real bloggers report on events they attend

You did realize it was a joke, right? Many of the blogs I read post notes from conferences or other meetings related to tech -- sometimes live. My posting notes from a kids' event was to highlight the distance between my domestic world and their professional ones.

[Oh, OK. No, I didn't get the joke. Does that mean I don't need to report on concerts anymore?]

6:01:56 PM  [permalink]  comment []