Street harassment in 1946

With the montage video of a woman enduring street harassment repeatedly while walking in New York City making the rounds, I'm reminded of a movie I watched with friends in 2004 and the surprise in cultural norms it presented.

In The Stranger, Orson Welles is a Nazi hiding as a professor in America. At 12 minutes in he speaks to a group of young, educated, friendly men when this happens:

Watching this ten years ago gave my friends and I a big, awkward laugh because of how absolutely inappropriate this was, yet it was treated as a normal everyday event. I'm not sure what the norm was in the mid 1940's, but this scene always appeared to me to be a dipstick for society's progress.

I've looked and it's been extremely difficult to find the demographic profiles of a modern street harasser, but I imagine it has slunk back to the uneducated and ill-mannered. This is a serious problem that we shouldn't accept or tolerate, and it shouldn't just be the feminists who speak out against it.

Read more...

Can Amazon accounts get married?

Imagine this: You're a 40 year who has been married for the past decade to another 40 year old. Over time you built up a cassette collection, then phases it out for a CD collection. You also built up a VHS library, then a DVD library. Now that it's 2014 you and your spouse stopped buying CD's and DVD's and are instead buying digital music and movies. You even stopped buying physical books and switched to e-books. You and your spouse share a single profile on Amazon, or maybe iTunes or Google Play.

Now imagine you are a 30 year old today, getting married to another 30 year old, and you both have digital collections on, say, Amazon. Two libraries, two different accounts. Streaming players tend to make room for one account, such as Roku, an Xbox or a PlayStation, but what if you want to switch to something only available on the other account? E-readers currently only allow one account. Logging in and out is a pain, and you can't make a music play list with songs from separate accounts. This is a real problem that needs a solution.

It sounds like allowing people to combine them would solve that problems, but what happens when a couple splits up? With physical copies you and your spouse can split the library up, but digital goods are not transferable. However, allowing the digital library to be split up means it could be split up in a way that one party doesn't like. That would put the company at risk of being dragged into divorce litigation. It sounds like something they'd want to avoid to be on the safe side.

But what happens if that 40-year-old couple divorce? It seems like the entire digital collection would go to whomever's name the account is in, but that seems destined to be challenged in court at some date. Someone will argue that digital goods are property that have value, and their custody needs to be split. What if the account holder didn't want eight seasons of Charmed and they'd rather sign over the full account than keep it? What if there isn't enough property between them to compensate the partner who does not get the digital goods?

The easiest solution to all these problems is to pressure companies to grant customers the ability to transfer digital goods. This is clearly something Amazon, Apple and Google don't want to do, as they haven't made it possible yet, but it's something consumers can press them into doing. The technology is there, but the will is not.

Maybe when more modern marriages and divorces take place the consumer demand will arise.
Read more...

Wasting food is a virtue

Most of the restaurants my parents took me to as a kid had free refills on soda and I found myself ending up in the same situation time after time.

I would get a soda during the appetizer phase and slowly sip it. I would try to pace myself, but fail, and it would be gone by the time my meal arrived. The waitress would see I'm out when she delivered my plate and bring me another one. After I finished eating and had no appetite left, I'd have two-thirds of a soda left and I'd force myself to finish it.

Why? Because I was told it's wrong to waste food.

People have a religious opposition to wasting food in America. Throughout the history of civilization starvation has been a major problem and there are still people in other parts of the world who go hungry. In those situations, one should see knowingly wasting food as an act of savagery.

But that has nothing to do with choosing to finish a glass of orange soda over allowing the waitress to throw it away. Soda is notoriously unhealthy and I was so stuffed that drinking it was unpleasant. I thought I was doing something noble.

But when one eats or drinks something just to avoid throwing it away, they are treating their body as a garbage can.

Food is plentiful and cheap in America, and the country has an obesity problem. I could stand to lose 20 pounds myself. Ideally, people should stop eating before they are full. That's why it pains me to see adults in a social situation plotting to eat unwanted surplus guacamole to save it from becoming trash. They have decided to become human compost heaps.

Food should never be eaten when one is not hungry, does not desire it, will not benefit nutritionally from it and is not socially obligated to try it, such as food prepared by an insistent host at a party.

Right now I have some cooked rice soaking in a beaten egg and soy sauce in my refrigerator. It's one of several things that I'm not sure I'll be able to eat before it goes bad. However, what I'm not going to do is eat extra meals to avoid the sin of letting food spoil.

The pushback I usually get from people when I try to break them of their food sacredness is that we shouldn't be taking on this much food to begin with and portion control will keep us from having to waste food.
Well, yes, we should. Prevention is usually the best solution for any problem, but what do we do when it's too late and the mashed potatoes are lingering on our plate but we won't be able to take any leftovers to the performance with us?

Throw it out and be gone with it, then smile at yourself for having the integrity to buck tradition. When I waste surplus food I am prioritizing my own health over a cultural obligation to dead plants and cooked meat. In a society that overeats, the ones who reject eating unwanted food show true virtue.
Read more...

Burning Man doesn't scale

The Burning Man festival, where artsy pyromaniacs, techno-hippies and wealthy hipsters converge in a faux-counterculture desert festival each year in Nevada.

But as the event has attracted more attention, it's run into a major problem on how to choose who gets in. Emphasis added in bold:

The problem has left perhaps 75 percent of the longtime participants who traditionally provide the creative spark for displays and activities without a ticket. The event is held annually at a remote site in the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada.

The crisis resulted from attempts to solve issues from last year, when, in addition to the normal problem of computer servers crashing as thousands of people rush to buy tickets online, the event sold out for the first time.

With the event increasingly becoming a bucket-list activity, organizer Black Rock City LLC set out to create a more egalitarian method for distributing tickets and thwarting scalpers.

Black Rock's solution was to distribute 40,000 of the 58,000 tickets through a lottery. Applicants had two weeks to apply for up to two tickets. Demand far outpaced supply.

The result: "A full-on fiasco," said Steve Jones, author of "The Tribes of Burning Man."

The new system made it easier for folks not willing or able to sit at a computer for hours. But many say that same convenience also made it easy pickings for scalpers...

It's unclear how many tickets are in the hands of scalpers and how many are in the hands of new participants. What is clear is that many longtime participants, or burners, are ticketless.

"Nobody knows where all these tickets went. But since they didn't go to regular burners, the thought is they must have gone to professional scalpers," said Jim Bowers, who spearheads the Placer County-based collective of burners called The Tribe.

"It's a fiasco. They don't have any idea what they are going to do," said Bowers.

"Of the 80 people in our theme camp, five got tickets. Everyone else got rejection letters," said Bowers, whose group helped build a precision laser light clock tower and decorative hour markers last year.

Unlike music festivals like Coachella, Outside Lands or South By Southwest, Burning Man depends on participants to provide the entertainment, erect the art projects, operate free bars, lead parades and host forums. Most of the major offerings are created by clusters of people called "theme camps" or "tribes..."

The organizers' published plan is to sell the final lot of 10,000 tickets through an open sale (first-come, first-served) in March, but there are rumblings that they will give the leaders of major theme camps, artist groups and performers first crack.

That would be welcomed by established groups, but would likely infuriate participants who attend regularly but aren't part of a group.

"It would be essentially saying they value one type of Black Rock citizen over another," Jones said.

What's happening here is that tickets to Burning Man are priced too cheaply. The lottery winners paid $420 and the open sale tickets go for $390, but they're already listed on eBay for $700 to $5,500.

Burning Man didn't have a problem when only a few people wanted to attend, but now that it's become such a trendy destination, organizers have to choose between several possible solutions to distribute the limited admission slots. Lotteries are never a good solution, and organizers seem too stubborn to consider raising prices to reflect the true value.
Read more...

Youth rebellion takes dressy turn

A New York times piece on young men dressing better than their parents outside of work raises an interesting question.

Today the well-off 55-year-old is likely to be the worst-dressed man in the room, wearing a saggy T-shirt and jeans. The cash-poor 25-year-old is in a natty sport coat and skinny tie bought at Topman for a song...

“I think it’s a reaction against the homogeneity of casual wear,” said Gordon Henderson, the design director of Topman. “There’s nowhere to go with that in terms of personality, whereas a suit sets you apart. And now there are suits that are cut for young people. There’s never been that before, so it’s new to them.”

Why has youthful rebellion always been restricted to a narrow template of automatically rejecting societal norms and the signs of achievement?

I remember a class in high school categorized our political views and I was shocked to find myself in the dreaded republican camp. I didn't know any of the positions the different parties or philosophies took, but I had it in my head that Republicans were the bad guys in Washington. It was just the natural thing to believe after hearing all the jokes and snide remarks over the years.

As I came to terms with this, I realized that youthful rebellion was sort of stupid and predictable. Instead of taking it in the direction MTV wanted me to go, I ended up rebelling against my generation.

In college I started wearing suits, ties and vests for fun. I got it into my head after watching the scene in Trainspotting where Sick Boy dresses up for the big heroin deal. After college, I was the one guy in my newspaper office who regularly wore a tie. I now own more suits than pairs of jeans.

It's interesting to me that more of my generation has come around on this issue, although it took them a little longer to get here.
Read more...