Category Culture

Representative of the coming generation?

Richard Burn­ing:

I chat­ted with some of my kid’s friends — cur­rently @ uni­ver­sity — they paint a pic­ture of their gen­er­a­tion as being totally dis­trust­ful of gov­ern­ment, politi­cians, the media and the fin­an­cial sys­tem. They view com­pan­ies as only out to take as much money off them as pos­sible and they see those in power as cyn­ical, self-interested people who don’t have their best interests at heart.

Most don’t read a news­pa­per and get their news online from a wide range of sources — blog­gers, social media etc. Those who are on the escal­ator to a job and a career are pretty damning about youff cul­ture — the Chav gen­er­a­tion — of real­ity TV, obssessed with celebs and football.

They fully expect the fin­an­cial sys­tem to col­lapse sooner or later and seem to rel­ish this pos­sib­il­ity so that they can fun­da­ment­ally remould soci­ety when it does — more just, less pol­lut­ing, less viol­ent seems to be the aim.

Last-place aversion

The Eco­nom­ist:

A new NBER paper finds evid­ence for an even more intriguing and pro­voc­at­ive hypo­thesis. Its authors note that those near but not at the bot­tom of the income dis­tri­bu­tion are often deeply ambi­val­ent about greater redistribution.

Instead of oppos­ing redis­tri­bu­tion because people expect to make it to the top of the eco­nomic lad­der, the authors of the new paper argue that people don’t like to be at the bot­tom. One para­dox­ical con­sequence of this “last-place aver­sion” is that some poor people may be voci­fer­ously opposed to the kinds of policies that would actu­ally raise their own income a bit but that might also push those who are poorer than them into com­par­able or higher pos­i­tions. The authors ran a series of exper­i­ments where stu­dents were ran­domly allot­ted sums of money, sep­ar­ated by $1, and informed about the “income dis­tri­bu­tion” that res­ul­ted. They were then given another $2, which they could give either to the per­son dir­ectly above or below them in the distribution.

In keep­ing with the notion of “last-place aver­sion”, the people who were a spot away from the bot­tom were the most likely to give the money to the per­son above them: reward­ing the “rich” but ensur­ing that someone remained poorer than themselves.

Which might go some way toward explain­ing why some of the rel­at­ively poor in Amer­ica often oppose rais­ing taxes on the rich.

Strangler Fig bridges

Clip from the BBC’s Human Planet, Rivers — Friend and Foe.

Why we shouldn’t wear bicycle helmets

Mikael Colville-Andersen’s TED talk on why we shouldn’t wear bicycle hel­mets. Click through for the video.

What U.S. “justice” signifies around the world

I’ve long been a fer­vent critic of the U.S. but it wasn’t always this way. The fer­vour came about from a real­isa­tion that much of what I was led to believe about Amer­ica as a child was a lie. I don’t have the same fer­vour when it comes to abus­ive powers like China and Rus­sia. I wasn’t con­stantly bar­raged with the notion that these coun­tries are the greatest nations ever to have graced the planet with their pres­ence. It’s a high expect­a­tions, low out­comes kind of a thing.

And so to the latest example of Amer­ican hypo­crisy. While the U.S. preaches to the world about justice and free­dom it is renowned for the opposite:

It’s quite not­able that the mere threat of end­ing up in Amer­ican cus­tody is con­sidered (at least by Assange’s law­yers) to be a viable basis for con­test­ing extra­di­tion on human rights grounds. Indeed, this argu­ment is not unusual.

Indeed, almost every per­son I’ve spoken who has or had any­thing to do with WikiLeaks expresses one fear above all oth­ers: the pos­sib­il­ity that they will end up in Amer­ican cus­tody and sub­jec­ted to its law­less War on Ter­ror “justice sys­tem.” Amer­ic­ans still like to think of them­selves as “lead­ers of the free world,” but in the eyes of many, it’s exactly the “free world” to which Amer­ican policies are so anti­thet­ical and threatening.

My one criticism of Inception: the architecture

You’re a tal­en­ted archi­tect, one of the best. You’re in a deep dream (“Limbo”) where your mind can make drastic alter­a­tions of any kind. The only lim­it­a­tion is your ima­gin­a­tion. You’re effect­ively a god. And you choose to cre­ate a stark 20th cen­tury inspired sky­scraper world to live in?

Very important day today

Avast, ye scurvy dog, it’s Inter­na­tional Talk Like a Pir­ate Day.

John Fugelsang on The Tea Party

John Fugels­ang:

The Tea Party — thou­sands of hard-working middle-class FOX view­ers fight­ing to make sure the rich pay less in taxes.

Boy racers taking Christchurch earthquake in their stride

Photo of boy racers posing over crack in road after Christchurch earthquake

Apple’s attention to detail

People often falsely assume I advoc­ate and use Apple products because I think they’re trendy or because I’m some kind of gad­get freak.

The truth is our world is awash with badly designed, badly craf­ted things. Apple is one of the few havens in a sea of people and organ­isa­tions that don’t give a fuck about the details. Atten­tion to detail is why I use Apple products:

In July 2002, Apple filed a pat­ent for a “Breath­ing Status LED Indic­ator” …They described it as a “blink­ing effect of the sleep-mode indic­ator in accord­ance with the present inven­tion mim­ics the rhythm of breath­ing which is psy­cho­lo­gic­ally appealing.”

The other day, I noticed that my friend’s Dell laptop had a sim­ilar fea­ture but with a shorter fade-in-fade-out period. Its rate was around 40 blinks per second, or the aver­age res­pir­at­ory rate for adults dur­ing strenu­ous exer­cise — not very indic­at­ive of some­thing in sleep-mode.

It’s inter­est­ing how a lot of com­pan­ies try to copy Apple but never seem to get it right. This is yet another example of Apple’s obsess­ive atten­tion to detail.