1. Comments have a very low threshold for barriers to entry into discourse. This encourages thoughtless replies. I wanted thoughtful replies to what I’m doing.
2. I don’t have to handle comment spam. I mean, Akismet pretty well kills comment spam for me these days, but any time I spend fighting comment spam is time I’m not spending being creative [or, well, slacking off].
3. Relating to #1, I think comments get a lot of me-too-itis, and for the most part, that’s not worth it to me.

Let’s take a case study here on GFMorris.com: my entry about my iPhone music disappearing and showing up as other. This was a temporary problem for me, but it continues to be a problem for other users. [Whether they're lusers or people jailbreaking their phones, I don't know.] But read the comments for the entry: no one is addressing my original post at this point. Google is bringing people to my blog, which is nice and all, but the content that people care about is from other people, not me.

Is that a problem? Well, I think that it is, in a way. While I do use Alex King’s Comment License plugin to say, “Hey, I own your comments, thanks,” I have some problems with that, in a way. I use the license to say, “You’re licensing your thoughts to me,” mainly so I can say in kind, “I can police the comments if I choose, fella.” I’m not really doing it to aggregate knowledge. This place is about me spewing out ideas, not so much what you have to say about it.

I want to go back to my first point, though. It’s not so much that I don’t want to own the discourse [which, again, I don't], but I want a higher level of discourse. What comes to mind is my post about the recording rig I’m using here in early 2010. The following thoughts come to mind:

1. The initial comments I’m likely to get are “That’s cool” or “That sucks, go get better gear like X” comments. Neither of those are terribly productive.
2. Future comments are likely to be irrelevant, because my rig is continually changing. That post would’ve looked different six months ago [mainly, I was too stupid to have battery boxes in the rig, plus I didn't have all the cabling I do now for soundboard patching]. I’ve learned. I will continue to learn, and I will make followups.
3. I want to encourage discourse on what people do with their own rigs. I don’t want someone describing their budget rig in the comments on my blog—I want them writing their own posts. Is that too hard? With free blogging tools out there like WordPress.com, I don’t think that it’s too much to ask. Why do I want this? The comment box is awfully restrictive [as it has to be to avoid the comment spam problems---again, low thresholds and all that]. I want freedom of discourse.

That said, I’m going to leave the comments open on this post and see what I get. How very meta.

Those frustrated with Twitter are frustrated because they have a belief that a story needs a beginning, middle, and end. And that it should have all of those parts before it’s presented to them. What the hell am I supposed to learn from a tweet? The point of Twitter isn’t knowledge or understanding, it’s merely connective information tissue. It’s small bits of information carefully selected by those you’ve chosen to follow and its value isn’t in what they send, it’s how it fits into the story in your head. There are great stories to be found on Twitter, but you have to do the work.

I tell a narrative with my tweets—the narrative of my life, mainly. I announced my probable bi-polar II diagnosis on Twitter long before I posted it here. [And before I got some great feedback from friends who wanted to tell me that I'm not alone. That made it worth it.] My friends have an idea what’s going on in my life, because I share a goodly chunk of it on Twitter. Jonathan figured out that I had an obsession to eating sushi last week. My tweeps know I’m sick today. [Oddly enough, I didn't tweet where I went in to work for a couple of hours because I felt I had to do it. It was the right idea, but I'm paying for it now in feeling puny. I'll live.]

I’ve often said that I don’t know why someone who didn’t know me would read my Twitter. I’m largely the same way with Twitter—I care about the people that I follow, for the most part. I know about my friend Justin’s music school debt, how it creates angst for him and has him in a job he hates because it pays him well enough to get out of that debt. I know that some friends saw a lot of snow today, and some saw none. [And folks know that I saw very little at my house but a lot out by where Stephen and Misty live.]

Now, few of these little blips of information make a whole lot of sense if you don’t have some sense of the larger picture, which is why I write here. Why I share my life online, I’m never 100% sure, but the fact of the matter is that I do it. Part of me thinks that it’s self-expression. Part of me thinks that it’s narcissism. But I find value in it, which is why I’ve done it for almost a decade [!]. But these moments make more sense in the context of friendship, which is why I enjoy it when I go visit Rick and Jessica and don’t have to fill in gaps about what’s been going on with me since they last saw me, or how I’m excited when Mike Terry or Josh Stockment come to visit and roll on up to Nashville ['cause that's how we do], or when we meet Hubbs in Nashville.

Fundamentally, I find that Twitter is a channel of that narrative, a way of taking your friend’s temperature. What has their eye? [when it comes to links]. What has their ear? [when it comes to music.] What has their ire up? Are they at GEOFCON TWO? Are they happy about something? Have they been in a car wreck? [Happened to two different friends this week. Found out via Twitter both times.] I care about Twitter because I care about people, both those I’ve met and those I’d like to meet.

I’ve spent a lot of time since the 2008 election cycle was well underway thinking about these things. Both groups are for social justice and the being made right of all things. Both groups come at it from the same theological foundation. To my mind, the only fundamental difference is this: whether you think that government, being an institution of man, can be used as a part of the being made right of all things. If you do, you’re probably with me on the Obama side of the debate; if you don’t have that faith in government, you’re probably in the Ron Paul camp.

As much faith as I have in government, I certainly have far more in God. It just seems to me that a belief in government as a positive or a negative is the differentiator here. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’d love to know your thoughts.

Isn’t it such a strange truth that so much beauty can come from pain? Personally, this is to me the most obvious solution to the problem of evil: in some mysterious way, it was actually “the best world possible” for evil to exist for a time.

That’s one of those things that seems both profound and utterly obvious. If nothing else, I guess this goes along with the Linford Detweiler quote, “Sad music … makes me happy.” It probably also drives home why I listen to Elliott Smith, Portishead, Bon Iver, et al …

An obvious point about stock market downturns always seems to get lost right after one of them occurs. Stock market losses are not losses to society. They are transfers from one person to another. … What happened to my money? It didn’t simply vanish. It was pocketed by the person who sold me the shares. The suspects, in order of likelihood: a) some Exodus employee; b) a well-connected mutual fund that got in early at the IPO price; or c) a day trader who bought it at $150.

Fundamentally, finance serves to make other things possible: IPOs were there to provide firms capital until they were routinely making money, in exchange for a percentage of future profits [as you ended up with a piece of the company]. Anytime, though, that the pace of the stock market is highly exceeding the growth of the overall economy—probably best expressed in GDP—you’ve got a bubble forming. Why? If market valuations are rising faster than true valuations, you’ve got speculation going on, and folks are likely leveraging to make those plays. How do you make more bets than you can afford? You borrow.

The longer I think about the stock market, the more I like the bond market—if you’re smart enough to appropriately assess risk. I think the full win going forward would be to somehow generate a market for bond risk assessment that is more independent of the financial institutions that currently underpin it. If that becomes reality, and bond rankings come closer to the true levels of risk, the economy should be more stable. Not stable, but more stable.

Conversely, when the stock market is falling faster than GDP, you then follow the other side of Warren Buffett’s maxim: be greedy when others are fearful. A market where capital is leaving faster than the economy is shrinking overall is overreacting to the shrinkage and betting that the shrinkage will continue—but it can overshoot easily.

My hit: I started running to try and do a 5k last year. I actually did it and have lost weight and will lose to Jill Phillips handily in another 5k this Saturday. (3pm at the Nashville Zoo, if you want to watch. Gabe Scott will also be there and will run a marathon in the same amount of time.)

My miss: I’ve never written a novel. Barely even a short story. And why? What’s stopping me?

Well, there are good excuses: I have two kids and a career that takes a lot of time.

And there are bad excuses: I’m tired, I don’t really want to do it anyway.

And then, THEN, there are the reasons: I’m scared and I’m lazy. (Lazy, of course, just means I’m scared again, but of hard work.) I want it to be fun, but when I try it’s not fun. It’s hard. Because I don’t know how to do it.

Practicing guitar was not fun. Playing guitar well is some of the most fun you can have on Earth. Why can’t I take that knowledge and move it to another medium? The Reason.

Hell, I’ve been scared of posting this for nearly two weeks. Why? Well, I’m lazy, plus I’m scared to admit it…

Isn’t it time for the sticks to stop and the carrots to start? Wouldn’t the obvious choice here be sitting down at the peace table with the Palestinian Authority and clearing up things in the West Bank? If Hamas, and not Palestinians, is the enemy, this sends the right message.

Not that I expect this.

It had been a terrible year: The Tet Offensive, the assassination of MLK, and the assassination of RFK. [We wouldn't know that Nixon would be an unmitigated disaster for a few more years yet.] And up until August of that year, we didn’t think Apollo VIII would be any different than the other warmup flights for the Apollo series; but then the decision was made to have Borman, Lovell, and Anders transit to the moon and orbit.

Can you imagine that mission briefing? “Okay, boys. We’re going to send you [millions, er, ]hundreds of thousands of miles form Earth, right at Christmas, but you can’t go land on that hunk of rock. Have fun and ad astra per aspera.” I’d have been both honored to go and disappointed that I couldn’t go all the way.

Anders, Lovell, and Borman didn’t read American propoganda during their broadcast. They read the first few verses of the KJV translation of Genesis. I think they had it right—this was a moment for all of mankind, not just the American taxpayers who’d footed the bill to send them there. One may quibble that Borman’s move [it was his idea], repeated today, would go over like a lead balloon in this politically correct culture; I would instead argue that Borman was simply being true to himself and his faith.

I urge that you do likewise.

As I won’t be near a computer tomorrow … Merry Christmas from me to you.

I found myself at dinner on Thursday night with a table full of libertarians, all friends of mine from college who were shocked that I am an Obama supporter. But let me tell you what I think could happen, weaving all those threads together …

President-elect Obama suggested that his public works project would be the largest effort since the Interestate system. When you think of the Interstate, what do you think of? Me, I think of this nation’s very arteries, a circulatory system to help move people and cargo around our beautiful country. Yes, the Interstate system cost around $130B to produce, but … compare that to the financial bailout. You’re nodding your head, right? “We got a lot out of the Interstate system, over decades, and what have we gotten out of this bailout?” Well, we’ll never really know the answer to that question, will we? It’s not a natural experiment by any means—no man is an island, etc.

When I think about the Interstate system, I not only think of arteries, but how we’re wasting space. What about those medians, the rights of way, the easements? If you needed to develop a national infrastructure—say, the laying of fiber optic cables to transmit data over the Internet—wouldn’t that be a perfect place to lay them? Known good land, well-surveyed, easily reachable.

The best spending choices that a government can make are infrastructure that benefits the greatest good. Roads, bridges, et al are great choices for this—so, too, would be developing suitable interstate routes into high-speed rail paths. Kill Amtrak—monocultures are bad!—and provide the opportunities for business to come in. Some folks will choose to develop the high-speed rail business; others will work on the endpoint infrastructure [rental cars, etc.] to allow people last-mile access when they get there.

I’m thinking about going to see UAH play at the Badger Showdown after Christmas. I’d love to drive an electric car, but man, those things don’t get good mileage at all. Now, we could have an infrastructure with rest stops every 25 miles to allow you to swap batteries and keep going, so you could just keep going and not stop to swap, but that’s not a very efficient system for me as an end-user. But if I could drive an electric car from my house to a high-speed railway along I-65, which would carry me all the way to Chicago … well, then, I just have to change trains to get to Madison, then drive another electric car on the far end around town [unless I head to State Street, in which case I should be taking a taxi]. Rather than the crazy amount of gas I’d spend, I could do that trip pretty easily without burning a single bit of fossil fuel [presuming that we weren't generating electricity in conventional ways].

The way government can pull some crazy dream like this off is in a two-part system: building it out, and then letting people and businesses use it. If you build it, the ecosystem will form around it—just look how commerce in this country flocks to our nation’s highways. Mass transit is the way to go, but it’s so dependent on population density to be fully worthwhile. The highway system, though, already has plowed the ground for these pathways.

Obviously, a system like this takes transition. I’ll tie the Detroit thread in like so: the only way that it makes sense for Washington to give Detroit money is as a consumer. You say to the Big Three, “Hey … we’ll replace the entire government fleet of vehicles, but only with hybrid electric vehicles that meet these specifications.” That would create enough of a marketplace that Detroit could economically retool their factories and retrain their workforces with a guaranteed customer base, driving down costs where these vehicles would be similarly cost-effective for consumers. Hybrids stop being so much about green as they are red, white, and blue.

That said, I don’t expect much of this to happen, but I welcome any investments in infrastructure, as long as it’s done in such a way that you don’t create monolithic producers. That’s another matter entirely…

[H]ow does the broken windows theory apply to online spaces?

Kottke answers it in three parts: ownership, unchecked negative actions, and design. I think design is largely irrelevant to how a community interacts, but then I’m a technically-minded geek and don’t have much flair for aesthetics. The first two are, though, terribly important. Members of a true community must own their words, and abusive actions must not go unchecked. I personally have a policy on forums that I run: one person, one account. Catch someone running two accounts, and you confront them about it—publicly. The community has to know that they can’t game the system or be asshats, and multiple accounts per user is the most common form of asshattery.

As to the spam issue, I know that spammers check for success and pour resources into successful channels. That’s why I run Spam Karma and Akismet as a belt-and-suspenders approach to spam capturing on blogs I run.

The other day, EP wrote about Mocha Club, which I found worthwhile, so I’m gonna soapbox a bit.

Let’s quote EP:

• $7 can feed a family of four in Kenya for one month. I can’t eat at McDonald’s with my family for a single meal for $7.
• $7 can provide malaria medicine to literally save a human being’s life from the threat of disease-carrying mosquitoes.
• $7 can enable the digging of fresh-water wells in Sudan.
• $7 can go to educate former child-soldiers in Zimbabwe for a one-year school term.
• $7 can help fund an orphanage of 400 children that have fled as orphans, as well as provide care and rehabilitation for former sex slaves in the war-torn region of Darfur.

Look, Starbucks (RED) is a great effort. Fantastic. I applaud them. But just as the Advent Conspiracy folks, in naming it “conspiracy” and working to drive buzz with that, I feel like I’m being marketed to. Would I be sure to drop by the ‘bucks tomorrow if I regularly consumed their stuff? Bet your ass. Am I making a special trip to get them to give Africans in need a few cents? Nope. I’d rather support Mocha Club—not a profit redistribution, but an expense redistribution.

To quote John quoting Friedrich Hayek: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

[Perhaps I am biased by being in an industry with very few players.]

I’ve seen stuff like FriendFeed do this as well: conversations about content done by third parties. And while this is, at some level, no different in you writing a response on your site to something I wrote and the discussion happening over there [which can and does happen; my favorite recurring one of these is when Mark T links to something Karyn wrote, and his entry gets 10x the comments his does], but then you’re making me work to keep in touch with the conversation.

Chris pointed out that the new Disqus model isn’t that at all.

Whenever I find myself reacting in such a knee-jerk manner, I try to remember that, hey, maybe I need to re-think these things. [Not all the time, mind you. I'm forever in danger of blowing out an ACL with all the knee-jerk responses I have in my life.] This re-thinking brought me to a point I’d like to note and amplify for a wider audience:

Hm. I should not criticize that which I haven’t test-run, I guess.

And as long as comments reference back to the URI, I guess that’s fine, right? I mean, all comments are remarks about a URI, whether or not they’re appended inline or left elsewhere.

Dammit, now I’m re-thinking this.

I’ve been thinking about this at idle times. What is a comment? A comment is a reflection—positive, negative, or otherwise—about something. If Chris writes a reflection or a rebuttal on his blog in the morning when he reads this, it’s a comment, but just one not posted on my site. What’s the difference in a comment that Chris posts on his blog versus a comment that he leaves here? It’s merely the control I have over that comment’s publication. I can leave his comment be, edit it [possibly reversing his point, if I'm feeling nefarious], or delete it altogether. These are all understandable responsibilities for me to have as the person providing the place for the commentary. After all, when you’re posting your comment on my place, I become responsible for it as the owner of this domain. This is why I use Alex King’s Comment License plugin.

Extrapolating from this: pingbacks and trackbacks are merely automated systems for notification of externally-hosted comments, prone as they are to spamming. But if we went to a world where we leveraged the power of GOOG and others to find all URLs that reference our source URI as commentary, well, that list is gonna get spammed. Highly-influential articles are going to get smacked and linked to in the hopes that people see the incoming links and think that there’s commentary there [and the GoogleJuice that comes from that], and low-traffic articles become ghettos for comments. In other words, nothing changes.

But what’s the result of this different thinking on my part? Merely that it doesn’t really matter where the conversation happens—just that it happens somewhere. So any third parties that seek to intermediate this, you have two responsibilities to producers:

1. Limit the spam. [Good luck.]
2. Make it dead easy for me to find the commentary.

That’s it. No other responsibilities are really necessary.

I did get it to stay up and running for a bit earlier this evening, so I forced a Time Machine backup. As I did so, I considered this: what if, when I took my mini in to my local Apple reseller tomorrow, they handed me back an equal or lesser mini to replace it? I could take it, load my Leopard DVD, and restore from my most recent Time Machine backup. BOOM! I’d be up and running while my other machine was in the shop.

Consider this: I’d not have any downtime while I worked on a loaner. I’m at no more risk of data privacy with the loaner than I am with the machine being in the shop in the first place. If someone at my Apple reseller wants to fuck with my personal data, he can do it with the loaner that I return just as easily as he could with the machine I’ve given him. There’s nothing that says they can’t power up the in-for-repair machine, clone the HDD, and then try to buy some sweet rims for their souped-up Chevy Cavalier.

I was inspired for this concept by two things: 1) Time Machine, with regular full backups, makes this a feasible option in my mind, and 2) this is functionally what Apple does with AppleCare fixes for iPhones. Have an iPhone problem? They loan you a spare handset while they fix yours. After the repair’s complete, you return the loaner, which they wipe in preparation for handing it to the next guy.

Think about the win that Apple [and its resellers; my nearest Apple store is almost two hours away, either north or south] gets from this:

1. Customers don’t have downtime. If your PC is in the shop, do you have that option? No, you’re up a creek without a paddle.
2. The repair folks don’t have to work as tight of a schedule. Just ask the repair guys at Mac Resource about how much I was up their ass about the AppleCare repair they did of this last time. [I'm giving them one more shot in doing this, and I will be paying their reasonable expediting fee to get it back if they tell me how deep their queue is tomorrow. If they burn me this time, I'm never using them again.] This is a win for resellers as much as it is for Apple, because they look like heroes.
3. You’re validating the strength of your Time Machine platform, which is a big selling point over Windows these days.

Seems like a no-brainer to me, but you may disagree. I’d love to hear what you have to think in the comments.

Entertaining Thoughts

I’ve been entertaining thoughts
Of what I wanna say to you
I’ve been entertaining thoughts
Of what I’m gonna do
I’ve been saving what I got
And wondering who to give it to
I’ve been entertaining thoughts all over you

The way this works is so mysterious
If it gets much worse it’s called delirious
If I were mad I would be furious
But this could be so much more than
Just another euphemism for…

I’ve been entertaining thoughts
Of what I wanna say to you
I’ve been entertaining thoughts
Of what I’m gonna do
I’ve been saving what I got
And wondering who to give it to
I’ve been entertaining thoughts all over you

You smoke your cigarette
And wonder if it’s happened yet
The heavens slowly part and you ascend
I wish that I could say that I’ll have no regrets
But I may have one of two
Or three or four more than you…

You will never even know
Till it hits you fool
Ooh, but I’m entertaining thoughts
All over you

– Over the Rhine, “Entertaining Thoughts“, The Trumpet Child

And, like always, there are multiple ways in which this can be taken. You may choose to do so however you like.

[Also, on a personal note, sorry to have broken the site for a while to the point where comments wouldn't go. I really need to revamp GFMorris.com and breathe new life into its design so I'll feel like writing here more.]

Today’s Washington Post has an anecdotal story about the failure of No Child Left Behind to force any improvements at tiny Como Elementary in Como, Miss., a school that has been the state’s worst at a time when Mississippi is coming in last in standardized testing. [Dangit, what happened to "Thank God for Arkansas"?!] The story discusses all what you’d expect: those who can afford it have gone to the local private school, a common occurrence in Mississippi that’s created separate and unequal [although my experience with most of these private rural academies is that they're worse at teaching than the public schools]; the difficulty of bringing in teachers, leading to Como taking on faculty generally considered unqualified or incapable by other districts; and the general issues of getting lost in the system. Most days, I would have read this, shaken my head slowly, and said, “Yeah, NCLB didn’t make much inroads, and it’s made a lot of things worse.”

But as I was in the airport yesterday, I read “How to be top” in the 20 Oct 2007 issue of The Economist. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment studies what makes education actually tick:

Are students well prepared for future challenges? Can they analyse, reason and communicate effectively? Do they have the capacity to continue learning throughout life? The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) answers these questions and more, through its surveys of 15-year-olds in the principal industrialised countries. Every three years, it assesses how far students near the end of compulsory education have acquired some of the knowledge and skills essential for full participation in society. The results of the PISA 2006 survey will be released on 4 December 2007.

–OECD.org, 28 Oct 2007

There are many things that make other countries’ educational systems perform well, but how they do recruiting is, to me, one of the most important:

In Finland all new teachers must have a master’s degree. South Korea recruits primary-school teachers from the top 5% of graduates, Singapore and Hong Kong from the top 30%.

They do this in a surprising way. You might think that schools should offer as much money as possible, seek to attract a large pool of applicants into teacher training and then pick the best. Not so, says McKinsey. If money were so important, then countries with the highest teacher salaries—Germany, Spain and Switzerland—would presumably be among the best. They aren’t. In practice, the top performers pay no more than average salaries.

Nor do they try to encourage a big pool of trainees and select the most successful. Almost the opposite. Singapore screens candidates with a fine mesh before teacher training and accepts only the number for which there are places. Once in, candidates are employed by the education ministry and more or less guaranteed a job. Finland also limits the supply of teacher-training places to demand. In both countries, teaching is a high-status profession (because it is fiercely competitive) and there are generous funds for each trainee teacher (because there are few of them).

South Korea shows how the two systems produce different results. Its primary-school teachers have to pass a four-year undergraduate degree from one of only a dozen universities. Getting in requires top grades; places are rationed to match vacancies. In contrast, secondary-school teachers can get a diploma from any one of 350 colleges, with laxer selection criteria. This has produced an enormous glut of newly qualified secondary-school teachers—11 for each job at last count. As a result, secondary-school teaching is the lower status job in South Korea; everyone wants to be a primary-school teacher. The lesson seems to be that teacher training needs to be hard to get into, not easy.

I have friends who are teachers or are studying to be them: Adam, Jeremy’s wife Hallie, Brian, and Kari’s husband Mike. All of them are smart folks who have chosen teaching over other careers where they could make more money or have more prestige. That said, I don’t think that any of them would feel that there was much competition for them to get into their educational coursework. At many universities, including my alma mater, the education department is the 90-pound weakling; as an engineering major, I arrogantly considered most of my liberal arts peers to be slacker punks, but I at least knew that the kids majoring in English or history or whatever were working their asses off. It never felt like the education majors were pushed all that hard, and it was widely known at UAH that education majors had the lowest average incoming ACT and SAT test scores.

And sure, we all know an Adam, a Hallie, a Brian, a Mike—a smart, dedicated student who chose education. But are those folks the norm? The statistics nationwide say that they aren’t. Why is education not considered a high-prestige major at UAH, where nursing is? I’ll argue along with the PISA folks and McKinsey: at UAH, nursing is a selective major. The upper division slots are limited—more folks are trying to get into them than spots exist. Do nurses make more money than teachers—certainly they do. But at UAH, nursing majors were respected because there was competition; conversely, education as a major seemed like a last resort, the degree you got if you weren’t smart or hard-working enough to stick in some other major. Sure, we all know the smart folks who choose to become educators, but they feel like the exception, rather than the rule.

Smart students today in America have a lot of educational and vocational possibilities. Medicine is still considered an ideal, despite the hours and workload, despite the time commitment of medical school, internship, and residency. Even in a time when our nation needs desparately needs more doctors, our nation’s medical schools refuse to lower their standards; instead, we import top talent from South Asia. The statistical evidence of other nations, as taken by PISA, would argue that we might see the same network effects if education suddenly became a difficult school to get into. Just as with highly-selective educational institutions themselves, smart kids seek the selective places not because they’re demonstrably better than anyplace else—most studies show that undergraduate education is generally good at most any nationally-recognized university—but the best of the best want to go to the toughest places not only because they are good, but because there is prestige merely in making it there. Education doesn’t have that cachet these days, and so I believe that smart students generally pass it by in favor of more prestigious, challenging, and lucrative prospects.

[And hey, I'm one of these people that argues that it's not all about the money. I could make a lot more money in middle management in fully private industry than I do working as a government contractor. But dadgummit, there just aren't that many people who get to put stuff into space, either.]

1. What’s with the strong skewing towards women? 33,000 of the 38,000 people sampled were women. That’s … not a good demographic balance.
2. The data comes from the surveys taken “in 1982, 1988, 1995 and 2002 for the federal National Survey of Family Growth”. “What’s the nature of this study?” is the question most asked by the people I’ve sent this to via email. [Especially by all my librarian friends.] We all wonder: is this study demographically skewed? Anytime you see federal studies of this sort, you wonder if they’re aimed at a demographic: we were all left wondering if it was perhaps something done with individuals who use Federal insurance safetynets [Medicare, Medicaid, etc.], stuff that skews towards low-income families and single parent households. I guess that I’m being prejudicial in assuming that low-income families are going to be more promiscuous, and if you want to skewer me for that, go ahead. But single mothers are often unwed mothers, so … that’s just the very definition of what we’re getting at here. But in any regard, I think that the larger point is that there’s concern on my end for the demography of the sample as to how it relates to the public as a whole. The AP story doesn’t give us much data on this.
3. Lastly, if you believe demographers that argue that, on the whole, people who identify as homosexual are 10% of our population, you’re accepting that there are twice as many self-identified homosexuals as there are self-identified premarital virgins. Now, I admit that, as a religiously-inclined engineer living in the American South that I’m surrounded by a population that one would presume to be more likely to count among its number the 5% minority, much less knowing folks who openly admit their homosexual identity, I … think I know a whole lot more people who claim to have stayed virgins until marriage than who identify as homosexuals.

I wouldn’t have blinked if this study had said 75%. I might not have spent much time thinking about it if it was 80-85%. But 95%? Doesn’t that just seem a little high to you?

[I'm aware that I'm allowing my own individual anecdotes affect my perceptions of this research. I guess I'm wanting to see the actual paper and the methodology to cure my skepticism.]

Buzzwords aren’t all bad, 37 Signals. The examples cited typically seem to indicate a desire to be anti-elitist and inclusionary. Well, not all communication is meant for outsiders! A great example is all the communication we do at work: we have a lot of shorthand for a lot of the work we do. The only time that we really have to break out of that shorthand is when we have to communicate with people outside of our group—and doing so then is quite, quite vital. A lot of buzzwords come from insider shorthand—it’s only bad when it escapes the insiders!

As an example: I’m quite sure that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had his fair amount of shorthand. If nothing else, he was a seminarian, and those folks are prone to the development of lots of conceptualizations that are best expressed in theological terms—on the inside.

But this “buzzwords are always bullshit” stance is, in and of itself, bullshit. If you closely watched the 37Signals Campfire room, I’m more than willing to bet that you’d find a lot of internal shorthand that could, at some point, be buzzworded. [Ruby on Rails, for instance. Rails is their framework, their name for their system. Rails is short, quick, and to the point. But now it's a buzzword. My point exactly.]

When making sweeping statements, be care to note context. This writer failed to adequately do so, which brings about this response.

1. Bush’s veto to deny Federal funding to research on embryonic stem cell research doesn’t mean that the research can’t be performed at all; rather, Federal funds just won’t go towards it.
2. Bush made a mistake in how he pitched this politically: going for the pandering to the right-to-life base [a group that I'm only peripherally part of---I personally don't believe in abortion, but I'm just not that chuffed on what the Federal government allows the citizenry to do, within reason] rather than saying, “My science advisors tell me that very little embryonic stem cell research has shown promise to date. Given the nature of the moral issues involved and the lack of progress on that front, I see no reason to change the Federal government’s stance on funding for this research, when we can choose instead to fund other research areas, such as adult stem cell research, that are producing results today.” Now, you can argue that, perhaps, Federal funding opens the door to embryonic stem cell research producing results, in the “throw enough money at the problem and it’ll work out” kind of way. I get that; I work in the NASA sphere, and that’s how we got to the moon. But Bush is working with a radically strained Federal budget, and he could have pitched this more as a fiscally conservative position rather than a moral stand. But that’s more nuanced than Bush tends to be, for better or worse. [Usually worse, especially as it regards to domestic policy.]
3. Scientists looking for funds on this need to stop looking to the Feds and going after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. With BillG’s money combined with Warren Buffet’s, they have nation-state level funding capabilities. They both have shown a willingness to fund promising technologies that will produce good returns on investment. If you can convince them, maybe you get results and you can kick at the Feds’ door down the line.

Okay, something here for most everyone to assail if they want. Thankfully, you have to have an account to comment. Mmmm … barriers to entry.

1. Mayhem gets a fair chunk of time to code on MB and make it lots better. I think this will definitely happen.
2. Google’s clear interest in MB will draw the interests of both donors and users alike. MusicBrainz is something that I very much believe in—I’ve added nearly 300 items to the database [mostly bootlegs]—and I think that it deserves a ton of attention.

Thanks, Google!

Photo courtesy of my dad’s first cousin, Dora, and her husband, Arnold.

Things got fixed, and Alex and Scott addressed everyone’s concerns fairly well. If you read through the replies, you see that most everyone was pretty level-headed about it. Why? I think it’s because Alex and Scott have learned—probably the hard way—that they have to be personable, real, and open with their customers. Now, Alex might be looking at this and blinking a little, but I’d encourage him to read the gamut of responses that he’s made to folks as time’s gone by … and he’d see that his earlier sharp edge has definitely been broken.

Seth Godin’s entry about the culture of dissatisfaction hit home as I considered all this in retrospect:

The problem with this emerging culture, aside from the fact that we’re unhappy all the time, is that it doesn’t give marketers a chance to build products for the long haul, to invest in the processes and products and even operating systems that pay off over time. The problem is that when brands fizz out so fast, it’s hard to invest in anything except building the next hot brand.

Is there an answer?

Talk to people who live in Vegas and you’ll discover that most of the hard-working folks who have been here more than a decade (the cab drivers and the doctors and the rest) aren’t so swayed by the billboards and the promises. Instead, they embrace the qualities that come from relationships. A relationship with a front-line worker (ask for “Bob”) or a relationship with a provider or an organization that has come through for them.

It seems to me that insulation from discontent comes from building a relationship. From real people. Relationships that make us feel counted upon, respected, trusted and valued cut through the ennui of dissatisfaction. We got ourselves into this mess by acting like smart marketers, and as marketers we can get out of it by acting like people.

Consider also the case of Six Apart: back when it was just Ben and Mena, flubs and false starts were greeted with mild dissension and understanding. Then, when the MT3.0 licensing scheme was announced, the growing corporate vail around 6A ended up making the backlash easier to spew.

I think the lesson to be drawn here is damn simple: it pays to stay personal, because it’s a hell of a lot easier to be mad at “the man” than it is any individual. Note that, in every entry I write about FeedLounge, I always write it as “Alex and Scott”. If they keep on being successful, it’ll be because they continue to develop a good product and continue to be personable with their customers.

It’s a hard balance to strike, to be sure—time spent building relationships with customers is not spent quashing bugs or coding features. Users have to accept that the relationship time is fleeting, but they have to work to cultivate as they can, because any relationship is a two-way street. However, I’m fairly convinced that personality trumps commoditization. Hasn’t Apple been teaching us that all these years?

See, honestly, I’m high maintenance. I won’t lie to you. [Well, I would lie to you if you'd let me ... yes, I'd be the worst kind: high maintenance, but pretends he's low maintenance.] I seek approval and affirmation. I can be manipulative. I’m self-aggrandizing and all those really horrible character traits that we associate with being high maintenance. It is not enough for me to know that I’m smart—I have to show you, and I need you to tell me!

Societally, though, we don’t lob the “high maintenance” pejorative at the male of the species. I wonder why…

I submit to you, humbly, that not knowing is the hardest part. I’d rather know than not know, but I’m okay with not knowing when I consider that some things are unknowable.

Yes, I’m being cryptic. Sorry. But I know where I’ll be tonight, all right?

If you’re frustrated with everyone’s inability to realize when you’ve switched from serious to sarcastic to not giving a damn, here’s a hint: your communication skills, they suck.

While this might not be a big deal to you, it is to some of us. It’s not that we’re sensitive [because we are], it’s just because we care.

:sigh:

Love,
Geof

P.S.: Responding with anger? Yeah, that doesn’t help things at all.