I’m reasonably sure that Reuters is the second most irritating news network, at least.  I’m not sure whether it ties, beats, or loses to the Associated Press.  And their writing style, and what it attempts to imply, is what bugs me most. (It’s worth noting that the AP and several other news services are just as guilty of what I discuss here)

Let’s consider J. Random Example 1.  I suggest opening this link in Firefox or Safari.  Search for “.”; in Firefox hit “Highlight all,” and I think Safari highlights by default these days.  What you will notice in J. Random Example is that this 17 paragraph article contains 25 sentences.  In an astonishing achievement for their writers, one paragraph even has three of them.

The point of this writing style is that it sounds free of analysis or opinion.  When you’re just stating facts one sentence at a time, you don’t have room to express opinion or bias, right?

But wait; let’s look at some of the imagery here.  How do they descibe the recession/economy: accelerating, soaring, overwhelming, relentless.  What they’re implying: the recession is an unstoppable, sentient thing.  There is talk of the human toll, which summons images of plagues and wars; jobs are slashed, the drop in employment is “sharp,” and industries, already “weak,” are being “bled.”  28% of the sentences in the article contain the word “cut”, its plural or its active verb form. This is the language of violence, and it is being inflicted on us and our buddies, Industry. Remember? They’re the family down the block that pays everyone and hosts the church bake sales.  And that Walmart guy, with his glowing smiles and warm hugs! How much longer can they/we stay alive?  Manufacturing is “sinking,” the “crisis” is “deepening,” the situation is “deteriorating.” We’re “falling into oblivion, and it will only get worse,” the outlook is “grim”; there is “no sign of relief.”

Wow, this is like Lord of the Rings! Specifically, the battle of Helm’s Deep. We’re the frightened women and children of Rohan, powerless and hiding in the caves; industry are the vastly outnumbered soldiers pitted against the seething orc-horde of insufficient credit and our only hope will be the timely arrival off Obama the White and the Rohirrim of tax dollars.

Yeah, there’s some unbiased reporting.

I keep thinking that I have something to write about.  It keeps being wrong.  I get most of the way through something, or maybe even just started on it, and ask myself, “what do I have to say that hasn’t already been said to death?  Why would anyone want to read it anyway?”

These questions kill a lot of my output.  Really, the number of things I can call myself an authority on is shockingly small.  There’s a slightly less shockingly small number of things that I could say I’m decently well versed with, but I have a really hard time getting pedagogical on topics where I assume my readership—and I know all four of you—are as well versed as I am.

There was a time when I thought it’d be neat to be one of the thought leaders of the blogosphere, or at least an occasionally recognized contributor.  A B-list blogger.  Even C-list, maybe.  I was never thinking that I would make a living of it, but the thought of having some form of meaningful discussion was pretty exciting.  But I’ve slowly started noticing that there is no meaningful discussion, at all.

First of all, everyone really loves their ideas.  Libertarians, commies, free-marketeers, yogis, christians and other frightened masses: they all have their own ideas about how the world works, or how it ought to work, and they all have a sort of logic to them.  But they also have a big steaming lump of problems; issues that they ignore or assume would go away if their idea had its day in the sun.  As a result, most of the discussion I see involves chewing the news from different ideological standpoints or straight up preaching, and it’s very rare that something shockingly insightful comes out of the whole mess.

I’m also starting to think that a lot of the discussions are about issues that it doesn’t make sense for me to form an opinion on.  The last time I blogged was about the upcoming depression, and that news hasn’t really affected me yet.  I suppose people who put a lot of faith into “the economy” and “growth” and stuff are feeling it.  I’m sure we all have an opinion about the kerfuffle in Gaza, but how many of you has it directly affected?  I’m going to guess that among the people who read this, the closest it will come will be having a friend who has family in some other part of the region.

This is actually bringing me to a point.  I have an opinion on the events in Gaza: it’s none of my business.  I can’t take sides, because for the life of me, I can’t understand what motivates these people.  The history of the conflict is so full of savagery from both sides and so steeped in the arrogance of colonial Europe that I’d rather just leave it alone.  I do believe that the US should be acting as a peacekeeper instead of backing Israel, and that will probably happen now that Bush is out, but I’m not going to say either side is bad or good or better or worse because the issue is too complex for that kind of reductionism.

The modern world is full of examples where serious harm has been done because people who believed they were right stepped into something that was none of their business.  The imperial quest to “bring civilization to the savages.”  Every ostensibly religious war.  Banning drugs whose consumption doesn’t violate the peace (and oddly having no trouble with some that do).  Abstinence-only sex propaganda.  The list goes on.

I don’t know if there’s an evolutionary basis for not believing other people can form coherent worldviews and make sensible decisions based on them, but it seems to be endemic.  We have an almost striking inability to appreciate the subtleties of each other’s viewpoints, and we make strawmen of them just like we reduce everyone outside of our monkeysphere to a stereotype.  In fact, I would guess that the number of viewpoints we can appreciate in a detailed way¹ is considerably smaller than Dunbar’s number.  I’m going to guess it’s less than five.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it was usually one, sometimes perhaps even zero.  I can imagine tribes of apes having a dispute and forming shrieking, chest-thumping groups to intimidate the others into submission.  For some reason, it feels like our current discursive tools are the abstract descendants of this.

Now, if all of our discussions are boiling down to ideological chest-thumping, I’d rather opt out.  There are much more interesting things to do.

1) Let’s call this Reid’s Number.

With our looming depression, it makes sense to take a look at money, as an idea.  After all, what actually changed when the stock market crashed?  The same number of people were at the same jobs producing the same amount of stuff; there was the same demand for that stuff.  There was no change in the amount of resources extracted, and no change in its distribution.  Actually, nothing changed, except some numbers in a computer somewhere.  And somehow, this is going to have an impact on us.

Money Is Not Wealth

Once upon a time, people worked to feed and clothe themselves, to get or build or improve or maintain a house, etc.  Today, we work to make money.  The brilliant thing about money is that it symbolizes value: you exchange a good or service for some undetermined thing of equal value.  Say you sell an old paperback book for five dollars.  That five dollar bill represents about 2.5 bottles of pop, or an appetizer, or 1/80th of a pair of designer jeans; if you take the money out of the equation, the transaction looks like you traded your book for 2.5 bottles of pop.

In its pure “barter juice” form money guarantees that the trade will be more or less fair, and it’s definitely easier to carry around than a selection of barter goods.  Importantly, money in this form represents actual wealth, meaning a specific amount of goods and services.

Now, it gets hazier when we start talking about intangibles.  How much is electricity worth?  Or your time?  Or putting up with grumpy people?  Engineering skills?  Ideas?  Risk?  The capitalists would apply supply and demand.  There aren’t many engineers, but lots of stuff needs to be engineered, so their time is worth more than that of someone who lifts heavy things, because although there are also lots of heavy things that need to be lifted, there are also a lot more people who can lift them.  In fact, this idea of scarcity is the entire basis of how we decide something’s worth, and it turns out to be severely flawed.

Money Creating Scarcity

Consider the impending energy crisis: we’re running out.  We need to build more generating capacity.  There’s definitely no shortage of labour, and there’s no shortage of raw materials–who has heard of a cement or steel shortage recently, for example–and we know how to build new generating capacity.  But: power plants are expensive.  Who can afford to build them?  Not many people.  The supply is there, the demand is there, but they aren’t meeting up.

Also, to build all of this new generating capacity, we need a lot of engineers to design the plants.  But there’s a shortage.  Why can’t we train more?  Because there aren’t enough teachers.  Why aren’t there enough teachers?  Because schools can’t afford to pay them.  If we collectively need them, why can’t we afford to pay them?

Of course, we also need to learn how to harvest new forms of energy, and this needs researchers, which means people with Ph.D.s, and there are lots of them (still not enough), but a lot of them aren’t doing research because nobody will pay for them.  There aren’t enough positions available at universities or private labs to employ the ones that exist at the same time that there is a desperate shortage of research staff.

To some degree, this scarcity is maintained intentionally, because if there were all the researchers you needed, supply and demand would dictate that the price would go down, and there would be no reason to pay physicists and engineers more than you paid, say, a fast food worker.  Similarly, the reason nobody is rushing to make geothermal power stations is because if power were plentiful, it would be cheap, so its trade value would decrease and the people who built the plant wouldn’t be able to make their money back as quickly.

Oddly, the reason scarcity still exists is because supply and demand punishes abundance.  We have the capacity to make a house for everyone, and to furnish it, and put a computer with access to the internet in it, and even to provide some sort of mode of transport with it.  We don’t because if everyone had these they would have no trade value, and no trade value means no potential for profit.  We have the capability to solve our energy problem, but we don’t because abundance means no profit.  In fact, I challenge you to think of a single thing that we need that we can’t produce in abundance (oil doesn’t count, because we don’t actually need it for anything, we just use it for everything).

This is the central problem of the idea of supply and demand today.  If we were to produce stuff at full capacity, we would exceed demand for everything, and since abundance means no trade value and thus no profit, the profit motive holds back progress.

The Ass End Of The Deal

Now, there is one abundance that our society consistently maintains: an abundance of labour.  If you consult an economist they will talk about the devastating impact to profitability of low unemployment: if you’re running low on unemployed people, you start having to pay the employed ones more and treat them better because they start to have bargaining power, and that hurts profits.  Most people in low paying jobs put up with them because for every ten of them, there’s one person who is unemployed and would gladly replace them because they desperately need money to exchange for food and shelter.

This point bears repeating and elaborating: poverty in the developed world is deliberately maintained.  If there were no desperation, individual people would be better able to set a fair value for their work.  The total value that a corporation outputs is the sum of value of the work of its employees and the resources they work on, and the value it consumes is the value those resources.  Therefore, the only way a corporation can profit is by paying its workers less than the value of their work¹.

On the other hand, you can get a glimpse of what abundance looks like if you imagine being a capitalist who produces things to sell.  As soon as you have a design, you can farm it out to some factory in China, where there’s such abundant labour that it’s rotting in the streets, and you can get that design built into an actual thing for next to nothing.  Anything you want!  Chemicals, electronics, machinery, weaponry, all the decadent booty of the modern age!  It’s all there for a tiny bit more than the cost of the materials, if you buy a decent quantity.

Try to imagine this sort of thing, but applied to everything.  Better yet, imagine if we were able to forget about money, and just apply our resources to solving our immediate problems.  Imagine armies of bureaucrats with nothing better to do than oversee coal plants being retrofitted with clean burners, just because, you know, that smoke sucks.  Imagine landfills being replaced with things like the Toshima Incineration Plant².  Electric cars, using those patents that the big car companies would have no motivation to sit on anymore. Hell, cities on the moon, if anyone still cares.

Anyway, enjoy your bailouts. Cheers!

1) They could also technically charge more than their product is worth, but no rational entity would buy that.  Imagine, charging $70 for a pair of shoes that cost $1 to make.  Ridiculous!

2) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/17/AR2008111702968.html

“If you wear shoes, the world is made of shoe leather.”

I read this a while ago, written by an old yogi quoting an older yogi.  They seem to have this irritating habit of making statements that derive their profundity from being trivially true.  The annoying thing, though, is that it’s hard to gauge the magnitude of that truth.  And since I was definitely in the mood for taking metaphors too literally, I wound up spending the better part of a month not wearing shoes unless I was leaving the neighbourhood, going to work, or going out.

I had never really gone barefoot before.  My mom had a bad experience with a rusty nail when she was younger, and her fear rubbed off on me.  To boot, a favourite pastime of small-town Albertans is to get drunk, do donuts in a pickup and smash the empties everywhere.  So this thing was pretty new to me.

There are several obvious observations.  Sidewalks are ironically the least comfortable thing to walk on after gravel and sidewalks with gravel on them.  Old concrete is uncomfortable because the top layer has worn off, leaving the gravel poking up.  Older concrete is more comfortable because most of that little gravel has worn off, leaving only larger rocks.  New concrete is totally smooth, but very rare in East Vancouver.  Asphalt has gentle lumps and depressions, and forms potholes before it gets uncomfortable to walk on; potholes are obvious things to avoid because they accumulate small sharp things.  Sidewalks with gravel are especially bad.  Dry grass is crunchy and tickly.  Green grass, moss and dirt are amazing.  Laminate flooring and carpet are freaking divine, especially after walking on rough concrete.

Over the entire period, I was cut once.  I didn’t even notice it for half a day, and then with a bit of attention it didn’t bother me at all.  At the start of my experiment, I couldn’t walk more than two blocks on sidewalks.  At the end, I could walk on the crappy sidewalks for a mile without batting an eyelash.  My arches started aching again—this time because they seemed to be improving.

Most significantly, there was a sensation that arose about a week into the experiment, after the tenderness went down.  The best adjectives I can think of to describe it: solidity, energy, connection, focus.  It’s what hippies would probably call “earth engergy”.  I suspect it’s the same fundamental thing as the sensitization that people who practice BDSM experience.  Either way, it’s amazing and energizing.

It turns out that shoes are a tradeoff.  They’re less likely to be cut by glass and I wouldn’t want to skip them if it was really cold.  They’re required for service at some establishments.  They prevent sweat from evaporating, so your feet get hot and stinky.  They spare you the mild discomfort of cement, but deny you the pleasure of grass.  They numb you out.

A recent article in Scientific American Mind discussed a link between the increasing frequency of non-physical work without clearly visible results and the corresponding sharp rise in depression rates: “By denying our brains the rewards that come from ­anticipating and executing complex tasks with our hands… we undercut our mental well-being.”  And this makes me wonder: the idea that our perception colours our reality is far from new.  Could it also be that by numbing our perception, we’re also numbing our reality?  How much of this do we do and take for granted every day?

Normally, I don’t like virtuoso guitar pieces. They bring to mind too many players like Yngwie Malmsteen, Michael Angelo, and Steve Vai. There are a rare few pieces that are genuinely amazing though, and one of them is Stevie Ray Vaughan’s adaptation of Hendrix’s “Little Wing.”

Stratocasters are unforgiving instruments. They catch everything. The difference between a picked note and a legato note is completely clear. If your pick scrapes as you’re picking a string, you can hear it. A lot of times, this is a bad thing—try watching some people’s performances of this cover—but here, it’s something really special. Everything about Stevie Ray Vaughan’s performance is perfect. The dynamic range is abnormally broad, with delicate and perfectly articulated pieces as well as the screaming bent notes that the guitar is famous for. The trills are buttery, and some of the faster picked passages seem to melt into legato that drips off the fretboard. The way notes are picked is used to as much effect as whether they’re picked: quiet sections using the middle or neck pickup¹ are picked cleanly, giving a bubbling articulation, and the screaming sections have more scrape to the picking, which combines with the overdrive and the noise from the vibrato² to give a more Janis-Joplin-made-of-wood feel. Every single note in the recording, and how each one is played, is completely deliberate.

If you can, I suggest listening to this straight off the CD or in the best quality you can find on a good stereo. The amazing thing about this performance isn’t just that it’s beautiful or that it’s hard to play, it’s that it’s played in a way that uses every nuance of the instrument to its advantage, and that’s the mark of a true master.

1) The strat has three pickups, one close to the neck, one close to the bridge, and one in the middle. Since the neck pickup is closer to the peak position of the fundamental, its tone is dominated by the fundamental and the first overtones and sounds warm and slightly muted. The bridge pickup is much further from the peak of the fundamental and so picks up higher order overtones and sounds much brighter.

2) It’s audible on every setting, especially on a strat, and especially on the bridge pickup: the sound of the string scraping on the fret. The most famous example is the beginning of Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady.”

Life sucks for voters. For most, the extent of their power is casting one puny ballot every four years. Some are considerably more empowered by taking the time to write their representative-critter¹, but even here, it is unlikely that they can make a dent in any kind of government policy. Corporations and other things with lots of money have a much better time: they can make campaign donations which will help a campaign buy voter’s ballots. Not only does this have considerably greater impact than any action an individual voter can take, it also further diminishes the voter’s power by attaching a (small) monetary value to their individual vote. The end result is that lobby money decides policy, because that money can buy votes.

Here’s an idea that can change that: voters unions.

You set up a non-profit organization and draft a set of principles that define the group’s ideology. At the head of the organization is a group of people who examine issues which are brought to the organization and decide which action, if any, would be ideologically appropriate. To ensure proper scrutiny, the transcripts of these discussions are made publicly available, and individuals who presented issues discussed and suggested actions considered are notified. The group then lobbies the government to enact their decisions.

Why does the government listen? When people join the organization they sign a sheet of paper making the organization the legal trustee of their ballot, giving it the power to vote on their behalf. If the government doesn’t listen, it doesn’t get the votes. This is similar to the power of lobby money—getting votes—but it bypasses the money and campaigning part, and its certainty gives it even more power.

Here are a few reasons why this is a good idea:

1. It gives voters the same power to affect immediate change that corporate lobbyists currently enjoy. There’s no reason for the union to wait for an election year and demand campaign promises: it can go straight to the government, and say “do this now and you’ll get votes next election.” The degree to which a government cooperates determines how much support they will get from the union.
2. It blunts the power of corporate lobbying. More votes secured behind a union means fewer votes that campaign dollars can buy.
3. Aggregating voter power behind an ideological organization will give more force to ideologically motivated policy, since this is what the organization would be lobbying for. These policies are also decided by discussion on a case-by-case basis, so they’re likely to be well thought-through, and the public transcripts provide documentation of the justification.
4. The organization keeps a running tally of who it likes and doesn’t like, otherwise it wouldn’t know where to deposit its votes on election day. This means that in addition to remembering who went along and who didn’t, it remembers scandals, bad bills, and everything else that should affect political careers which individual voters tend to forget. Since ballots are being cast with this knowledge, scandals are more likely to end careers and representing constituents more likely to improve them. The lack of forgetfulness also reduces the effectiveness of campaigning and therefore further defangs corporate lobbies.
5. It simplifies political participation. Joining the organization is fire-and-forget. If an issue comes up that you are concerned about, you raise it and see what happens. If you don’t like what the organization does, you can drop out by sending a notarized letter revoking their trusteeship².

Creating and running an organization like this would have been extremely difficult years ago, but these days it would be a piece of cake. Submitting issues to be discussed could be done via the web, and meeting agendas could be generated by taking the frequently submitted issues. Discussions could even happen over email or web forums, allowing easy documentation, and notification of discussions could easily be sent to everyone who submitted the issues. The software would be easy. The organization would require a staff of perhaps 20-40 to operate on a national level; probably less for provincial and civic levels. It could be done.

1) It increases the voter’s power 100-fold, putting it evenly at 0.

2) Most professionals can act as a notary public, so this isn’t as tricky as it seems it might be. Still, developing this idea further would require finding a simpler way that still carried proper legal force.

As I mentioned previously, a lot of the projects I’ve been working on over the past year have been largely uncommented. This wasn’t viewed as an issue by the people working on these projects because the company had a heavy focus on using a “self-documenting” coding style. I’d like to take a moment to explain in somewhat greater detail why this is, frankly, very stupid, especially on any non-trivial project that doesn’t have a permanent team.

I’d like to start with an english language example of self-documenting code. It’s for building Lego.

Take an 8×2 red brick. Now take four red bricks which are 2×2 on the bottom and 1×2 at the top (slant pieces, as I called them when I was a kid). Put them on top of the 8×2 in two pairs with the thick parts together. Take two red upside-down slant pieces (2×2 on top and 1×2 on the bottom) and put them on the bottom of the 8×2 at the far ends with the thick parts facing inside. Put a 6×2 red brick between them. Take another two red upside-down slant pieces and put them so the thick parts are on the outermost bumps of the 6×2 with the slope facing outwards, and put a 4×2 red brick between them. Repeat this, but with a 2×2 brick in the middle. Finally, put two red upside-down slant pieces on the bottom, with the thick parts together.

If you followed these instructions properly, and if I wrote them properly, you’ve now made a red heart, because I love you.

So here’s the thing about self-documenting styles: they document what’s being done to solve a problem, but not the problem that’s being solved. If the self-documenting code above had appeared after a comment that said “this makes a red heart,” everyone could have saved their time.

Here’s the fundamental point: code is a solution to a problem. To use code, you need to know exactly what problem the code solves, so you can find a way to express your problem in the same terms. If you have a digestive system (a solution to a problem) and a sandwich (data) and you’re hungry (a problem), you can solve the problem¹ by breaking the sandwich into pieces that are suitable for your digestive system (this is one problem that the mouth is a solution for). But self-documenting code does not explicitly document the problem that it solves; it only documents how it solves it. If it’s clear enough, you can figure out the problem from the solution, but it takes a while, sometimes longer than solving the problem took—as is probably the case in the lego example above. If you’re given a disembodied digestive system and all you know about it is that it’s a bunch of funny tubes, you’re not going to be able to do much with it. You might make sausage.

Even in cases where most of the problem can be immediately figured out, say a function called DisplayImage(), there’s still the issue of figuring out how the problem should be expressed. Say you’re passing it the pixel data and the length and width: is the pixel data an array of rows of pixels, or is it just a lump of pixels that gets divided up given the length and width? Is it one image where every value is RGBA, or is it four images, one for each channel? With a self-documenting implementation, you still need to read the code and figure it out from how the data is used. A Doxygen header here could answer would answer all of these questions concisely.

Now, self-documenting style is still vitally important, as anyone who has gone bug-hunting in a pile of spaghetti code² with one letter variable names will tell you. It makes bug-hunting infinitely less painful. Everyone should always use it, but if your code is meant to be used as a library or elsewhere in the application, it should never, ever, ever constitute “documentation.” It should become a black box with labels on it. “Chips and pop go in, web sites come out.” This part can only be done with documentation that is separate from the code.

1. You can also solve the related poo-generation problem.
2. The disembodied intestines are spaghetti code in several ways: they’re tangled, uncomfortable to debug and they solve the problem of what to do with spaghetti.

I found this article on “Employment Branding” when I stopped to do some tinkering with this blog on Technorati, and I was immediately fascinated.

We’ve all heard by now that there’s a desperate shortage of skilled people in most sectors—recent graduates don’t count—but I don’t know if we realized the extent of the desperation and the degree of introspection it’s causing. The summary of this latest craze in the recruiting world: “we need to look like places that skilled people want to work.” Now, this is the kind of clever, unexpected thinking that I love to hear. The bulk of the article itself is a list of benefits that come from looking like a good place to work, which are largely very obvious.

The best part, though, is the comments. Namely the second—”How?”—and the third—”First, become a place where skilled people want to work. Then, show people.” As one of those skilled IT people, I wish it would go like this. My inner cynic is afraid that the first comment is more accurate, though:

[...]In my eyes, this represents the future of employment branding – a progression from placing overarching values on a website or marketing brochure to actual targeted value proposition management (VPM) initiatives that are supported by the Sourcing function of corporate recruiting units. Targeted VPM is what I’m seeing actually occur within ‘Candidate Development Teams’ . . . it’s just the marketing messages (employment branding tools) used to support the recruiting effort are more overarching than targeted.[...]

Really, why do I enjoy dissecting stuff like this? I lost interest in what was being said at the first sentence, but read on with the assumption that something useful might be gleaned from how whatever it was was being said.

Wow. “Targeted value proposition management initiatives.” This is one of those long, “smart-sounding” noun clumps that William Zinsser loves. Although it seems to mean trying to figure out how much money to offer a prostitute, that’s not quite it. Thanks to google, I now know that a “value proposition” is a summary of why what you’re marketing has value. So I suppose targeted management of them would be the act of making your proposition look valuable to your target market. Since in this case the target market is people who might work for you, this phrase takes “making yourself look like a good employer” and removes all the verbs.

Now, the Taoist principle of non-action is well and good, but this comment simplifies to “the future of employment branding will be employment branding.” I would feel like I’d wasted my time reading this if it weren’t the product of a recruiting manager who will inevitably share some professional traits with people who will offer me employment and try to make me want to offer my skills, ideas and time. And what this person has shown me is fancy marketing talk with no content, and I can’t help but be concerned that his value propositions would be the same thing.

Now, I’d like to give some ideas from the trenches. On valid-sounding assumption from poster #1 that corporate image work like statements of corporate values are part of employment branding, I’m going to use a pick from a Google search for “corporate values” as fodder. The one I clicked on first was for Williams-Sonoma, and it has the stock crap that I’d like to point out. If you are reading this and happen to be an ultra-busy recruiting manager, I suppose you may skip the list, because you’d obviously never make these mistakes, nor would anyone in your company.

1. Williams-Sonoma is not in the business of enhancing the quality of life at home, it is in the business of selling home furnishings. Furnishings, in turn, do not improve quality of life. A fancy couch may make you look rich, make your home more tempting to burglars, increase your insurance premiums and just maybe let you feel a brief glimmer of satisfaction that you got one before your friends did, if that is indeed the case. What would impress me: a company that admitted what it did without trying to sound saintly.
2. The environmentally friendly stuff is obviously tacked on because people suddenly care about the environment. Why is it obvious? First, because it appears below the part about making superior returns for shareholders, which violates the otherwise consistently implied least-to-first ordering. Second, because they’re all two paragraphs long, while the others are at most three sentences. This makes the entire thing look like an opportunistic marketing document.
3. About that last-to-first ordering thing I mentioned: if Williams-Sonoma honestly puts product quality ahead of shareholder returns, even implicitly, their shareholders should be suing them. If their primary goal isn’t to make money, then I doubt their viability as a business and probably don’t want to work for them. After all, I take jobs because I want money for my expensive couch—otherwise I could find dozens of better things to do¹.
4. A note about the overall composition: the first half of the document are bold statements, and the last environment related ones suddenly sound like an official cover-your-ass statement that typically gets made after some sort of PR disaster, with ridiculous verbiage and non-words like “healthful.” If Williams-Sonoma are so “People First,” maybe they could improve the “quality of life at home” of a few poor English majors by hiring them to write their freaking marketing documents. Maybe they would rewrite their “Environmental Paper Procurement Policy” as a part of the “Recycling” point below it. Maybe it would read “We will only use recycled paper. We like trees.”

Be honest, and be clear. Everyone has seen friends or parents who were loyal to a “good, honest company” get unceremoniously, coldly, even humiliatingly dumped, often without the pensions that they worked most of their life for. You may be a good, honest employer, but the last three decades have set people’s expectations to about zero. If you can’t express that goodness and honesty unpretentiously and plainly, no one will believe you, least of all the smart people that you want to hire.

1) Writing, painting, drawing, playing guitar, playing piano, joining a band, taking a walk, watching a good documentary, cooking, enjoying dinner with friends, snorkeling, travelling, hiking, programming video games, playing video games, learning a new instrument, learning more about harmony, reading a good book, cuddling, listening to music…

Today, I accidentally happened on the existence of the movie The Darjeeling Limited. I suppose I’m something of a Wes Anderson fan, so I decided to look it up on Cinemaclock and see when it is playing.

Cinemaclock’s ratings come from users. This is a profoundly interesting thing, because the numbers that are attached with the film are granted a different kind of objectivity from the normal work of film critics. For example, it seems that Resident Evil: Extinction is a more highly rated movie than The Darjeeling Limited. In a more general sense, this number reflects the gut response of people who went to see the movie, filtered by the attitudes of the people who are likely to write about it.

The ratings are helpfully broken down by age group and gender, which provides some insight: the best ratings for Resident Evil come from the 13-17 age group, followed by the 18-25, and the reviews sink to a 6.something by the time it reaches the 50+ point. There are also written reviews along with the rating, and more information about the responding demographic can be gleaned from them. The Resident Evil reviews are generally sparsely punctuated and poorly spelled, and glowing for very specific reasons: it has zombies, it’s set in a desert, the lead girl is hot.

Now, Darjeeling has considerably fewer reviewers. The ratings start off in the 8.somethings at 18-25 (no reviews from younger viewers) and fall over the precipice into the 4-5 as soon as we leave the 26-35 range. The reviews here tend to form complete sentences but are still surprisingly short on punctuation. We also see an appearance from that wonderful internet bird, The Consummate Consumer of Culture. This one is unlikely to impress a mate; his word choice is sophomoric and awkward, and demonstrates only an introductory level of connoisseurship. Interestingly, reviews from the older demographic all focussed on issues related to parenting and skimmed over the main plot.

So in terms of what to expect from the Darjeeling Limited, I’m still in the dark (except for the part of the plot revealed by one elderly reviewer talking about parenting; thanks!). Am I more likely to agree with the pretentious 18-25 year old, the Frasier-ish sounding 50+, or the worshipful and agrammatical 26-35? Judging from the nature of the poor reviews from older viewers, it is not a movie for Hermann Hesse fans, nor is it a movie for people who take depictions of bad parenting seriously. The most likely case is that the dramatic shift in reviews is due to a dialectical shift that seems to take place in one’s mid-30s. What I’d be interested in seeing is whether this shift is tied to having children or to some significant generation gap between the boomers and the gen-xers.

Oh, I guess I’m interested in seeing the movie, too.

First of all, this isn’t breaking my partial reading fast. It can’t be complete because of the text-based nature of work, and the internet keeps imposing with its important, time-critical emails. But other than these couple of things, I’ve been doing pretty well.

Tonight was thanksgiving dinner for my sister and I and at least 10 friends. We had a big turkey, plenty of mashed potatoes, cabbage rolls, a big pot of borscht, alcohol and more. It was an absolute blast. I haven’t enjoyed myself that much in quite a while.

When Regan and I returned, it didn’t feel like the night was quite over. We were still too wound up to call it quits, so we gathered beverages (water and orange juice) and headed towards the park/schoolyard to the north. We were there the night before as well, but this time we noticed the swings, including two of the kind with just the black rubber band seat that is capable of holding an adult bum.

Kids have it lucky. They have it tremendously lucky. First of all, swings are a surprisingly good form of exercise. After about an hour on the swings, I can fairly say that my abs and quads have not been worked that hard in a while. My biceps are, of course, too macho to complain. I’m sure they’ll do it tomorrow under the guise of bragging about how hard they worked.

Second of all, swings feel great. There’s just enough constant acceleration to keep a mild flow of adrenaline, and just a touch of a speed rush as you pass the ground. It’s tremendous, and almost feels like evidence that, at one point in its not so distant evolutionary past, humanity brachiated.

It also resurrects feelings and memories that you’d swear had died away for good, like that little bit of exhilaration when you get going high enough for the seat to start to fall away under your bum, the stutter in your faith in the integrity of the swings when you first feel the bar jiggle under your mighty arcs…

So why did we all stop? It was the point when we stopped wanting to play physical games and started wanting to be adults, and we made a game of the joyless, grinding workday that our parents lived through while we went on, largely oblivious. This turned into the little primate dramas of junior high school and into the more sophisticated tribal dramas of high school and then modern life. The swings and what they represent were lost, folded in with all of the other puerile, childish things that we left behind when we grew up and accepted subjugation.