boonville blog, by jeff egnaczyk - you are listening to me talk

Why Does God Let Bad Things Happen to People

If god is all powerful then why does he let bad things happen to people?*

I believe I can stop prefacing my posts about religion with this but "as you know I don't believe there is a god". Let's assume there is one though. There are two possible answers to this question as I see it. One answer is that god is an asshole. This is what people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson think. That's why they say horrible events are god's will. If you think god does horrible things to teach people a lesson then you believe it to. You believe god is a total asshole.

The other possible answer is what I wanted to talk about. The answer as I see it would be that god allows bad things to happen to people because without adversity life is meaningless. Without struggle we cannot, will not attain. We would be stagnant and complacent, a theme I liked in Isaac Asimov's Foundation novel. The logic is a bit circular. We need to cure cancer because it exists. Why can't god just eliminate all the bad things in life. Still though, if we didn't have the most dangerous regime of the 20th century, the Soviet Union, we probably wouldn't have sent a man to the moon. There's no real reason human beings couldn't live in a wondrous utopia without ever sending a man into space. Struggle is horrible but it does lead to advancements in human civilization.



* My favorite quote from Philip K. Dick's VALIS is similar in structure but much more derisive (though the book is not as antagonistic towards religion as that implies):

If God can do anything can he create a ditch so wide he can't jump over it?

I laughed for three days after I read that.

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Message or Medium

At our company meeting today a presenter displayed a notebook that one of his relatives used a century ago. He used it to demonstrate the relationship humans have had to technology over the years. Leading into a new product of ours he noted how humans used to have to go to technology but now technology goes with humans (think of the evolution of the telephone). It was well done and actually quite poignant.

Looking at the words written on the yellowed pages of this old pocket notebook got me thinking about content. Most of the time a day planner wouldn't be saved whether it was in 1910 or 2010. The content, though probably banal, does give insight into the individual life of its author and, with other such documents, helps to build a picture of life at that time. Historically it holds value.

Nowadays our letters are stored in emails. Our journals are typed and stored in content management systems on a blogging platform. The content can be saved much easier but does it hold the same value? I was just talking to my mother about scanning old newspaper clippings she kept of my brother and me. Being able to bring up an image of an article of me for my son would be a lot of fun. I wonder though if I will have lost something by ditching the original document. What significance does the medium hold in viewing historical content? Further along that thought line, what happens when the content is easily ported to another medium? Will historians look back at the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database someone's early blog was stored in? Probably not because the data will get moved to the 2005 edition* followed by the 2008 edition and then on to the next version - if it persists at all.

I have always believed that content is what matters. On top of that I am generally not a nostalgic person. When people seek to save historical buildings I think about how that space could benefit the people living today. I loves me some human progress. History does hold value though. It's tougher to understand history the farther you are away from witnessing it. Original documents and buildings bring you closer to (though never all the way to) the past.



* Loyal reader Doug and I will have a laugh at this inside joke.

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Winning and War

If you are going to fight a war it is obviously in your best interest to win it. However, war is a destructive, wasteful endeavor so it's best not to fight a war. You want to get what you want though so what do you do? A couple of examples of ways to get what you want are diplomacy and deterrence. They're not mutually exclusive but let's view them as separate for the sake of argument (and because this is my blog and I want to). Broadly, diplomacy makes everyone think you don't want war while deterrence makes everyone think you do want war. In order to successfully deter your enemies you want to scare the crap out of them by building up your armed forces. As you may know I advocate for diplomacy more often than not. Even so I think deterrence is a good strategy in many cases - and as a general policy - even though it promotes the idea of militarism. The problem with advocates of a large, scary military are that they want a large, scary military run by an aggressive civilian government. They think it's a good idea to build a big, scary military for the purpose of fighting wars when in fact the real reason you build a big, scary military is so you don't have to fight. The big, scary military is most cost effective (in terms of lives, money, time, resources, etc) when it's not fighting a war.

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Ways to End a Beautiful Movie

Joe* and I once devised several ways to end a movie. Our goal was to one day create a magnificently beautiful piece of art and then completely ruin it. This only works for the greatest, most thoughtful and important movies of all time. I don't wish to make light of great, important, thoughtful movies but I have to use one of them as an example in order to illustrate my point. For this I will choose a movie that is beyond aspersion: Schindler's List.

1. The Superfluous Title. This one's easy. For instance:

   Survivor in liberated camp (to another survivor): I can't believe we survived that. I'm sure glad we were on ... Schindler's list.

   It helps if the speaker looks directly at the camera.
2. The High Five. Wikipedia tells us of the high five:

   The gang in Saved by the Bell would frequently participate in a group high five at the end of the show. The camera would typically freeze on the high five right before the credits started.

   Above that section there is a warning:

   This "In popular culture" section may contain minor or trivial references. Please reorganize this content to explain the subject's impact on popular culture rather than simply listing appearances, and remove trivia references.v

   So if you read this blog post in a couple of months it's probable that that "trivia" will be removed. If it's not worthy of a Wikipedia article then it's certainly indefensible in any thoughtful movie.
3. Man in the Mirror. Finally, in honor of the King of Pop:

Low volume instrumental of Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror" pervades the scene. A man steps up to speak to a crowd of fellow survivors:

This horrible experience has made me realize something. We can't go on like this. If civilization, if humanity, is going to continue on we need to make a change. (volume of music rises, lyrics come in) I'm telling you that I'm starting with me. (Michael Jackson's voice breaks in loudly)

That's Why I'm Starting With Me
I'm Starting With The Man In The Mirror
(Ooh!)
I'm Asking Him To Change His Ways
etc.

Given the movie industry landscape which is less conceivable: that this could happen or that this hasn't already happened?

I hope I wasn't too offensive. Really I'm giving the highest praise to my example, Schindler's List. The only way these techniques work is if they are added at the end of the most unequivocally beautiful movie, a class of art that I will never create. It is by far the most thoughtful and important movie I have ever watched.

Please feel free to add your own suggestion. You, the aspiring filmmaker, should feel free to steal my idea if you are capable of making a beautiful movie. Be warned that you will probably be chased down the street with torches and pitchforks if you do though. Your killers will probably not be prosecuted.

*Joe may not want to be associated with this post. In that case it was all me.

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In The Ground

I and, I would guess, most atheists believe that when you die you get buried and that's it. No heaven. No hell. No reincarnation. Just dead. That's a tough thing to accept. The problem is that you see the world through your eyes. If you're shut down for good when you die then the only view into the world that you've ever known is gone. It doesn't matter if it keeps going for the rest of the world. For you the world essentially ends. From your perspective that's all that matters.

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NBC-Comcast Merger

I've been doing some basic relearning of my understanding of antitrust law with respect to the NBC-Comcast merger. When I first heard of the merger it struck me as a vertical monopoly. Then again, I thought, I learned this in high school. The merger certainly looks like a move towards "vertical integration" what with Comcast now owning a large content producer as well as its extensive existing content distribution capabilities.

The question I have is whether this is a big enough deal to trigger the Department of Justice to stop the merger from an antitrust point of view. Does the DOJ put as much emphasis on vertical monopolies as it does horizontal ones? I just don't know. The FCC could also step in and stop it on the grounds that it represents too much media consolidation. What historical cases set the precedent for this? While I think I understand the basic economics of it I don't have clue about the legal aspects.

The whole issue in my mind is kind of related to the struggle over net neutrality. Net neutrality is a important because we don't want ISPs to favoring certain kinds of websites and applications over others. That slows innovation because new services are not sure if they'll be given preference. In essence it boils down to discrimination. We don't want content distributors to discriminate against producers. Well Comcast already has an incentive to discriminate since it creates some content. If they buy NBC Universal they'll all the sudden have one of the four major networks plus a whole host of other cable networks. They'll now have a much bigger incentive to discriminate against other content producers.

If you're worried you might want to send your Congressman an email via this form that Free Press provides. I edited mine a little because, like I said, I'm not sure about the issue; I don't just want to say "kill it" without a little more information. At the very least a hard look should be taken at the issue from both the DOJ and the FCC. If there is a good chance that anti-competitive behavior - either with internet or cable distribution - could come out of this merger it might make sense to kill it or put some big restrictions on Comcast.

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Losing Control

Reports from a few years back about the positive contributions of torture to intelligence gathering turned out to be lies. So we know that our government has egregiously tortured suspects. This comes on the heels of the revelations that three reported suicides at Guantanamo Bay were most likely homicides covered up by the government. Not only were the crimes covered up by the Bush administration but it looks like the Obama administration is not attempting to prosecute any crimes either. The ACLU rates Obama's progress on civil liberties as a mixed bag at best. Obama is barely turning back a few Bush administration policies, keeping others, and failing to look into crimes committed in the past.

Obama's unwillingness to prosecute crimes of torture is eerily similar to his seeming unwillingness to prosecute or increase regulation of members of the financial industry who put us into our current recession. It seems that no one is willing to hold government officials or corporations accountable. Compare this to what happened to ACORN when videos came out showing a bunch of low level employees in an unfavorable light. (From what I've read the videos are pretty sketchy to begin with and now the filmmaker behind them is under arrest. Still, wrongdoing did take place.) The responses to the crimes I've listed are not proportional to their weight. In fact I'd say the responses are inversely proportional to the gravity and, more importantly, inversely proportional to the prominence of the perpetrators. I think I always knew this but this year more than ever I don't feel like we have control over our government. I'm stopping short of being a doomsayer but I feel it slipping away.

Update: (1/29/2010 12:33:11 PM) Looks like the ACORN video filmmaker has a plausible story that will absolve him of wrongdoing. The videos still strike me as pretty sketchy.

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RIP, Howard Zinn

Since reading and loving Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States I have read some criticism that tempers my love for it. Despite that, there continued to be something about Zinn, more than other radicals, that made me believe he cared about the people he purported to want to help. Zinn's most famous work will be remembered by me as a work that attempted to tell the story of the history of America from the perspective of the people, rather than the leaders. That's not something you often see. The book may be what Zinn is remembered for but his activism for civil rights and against war cannot be forgotten. His open acceptance of his own biases and his own agenda in writing a history book was also illuminating at a time when objectivity was put on a pedestal. I always think of him when I hear a media critic saying that everyone has biases that leak into their work. For Zinn this was a feature of his work, not a bug in it.

One of the best pieces I ever read from Zinn was an excerpt of The Southern Mystique that I read in The Zinn Reader. I read it almost a decade ago so my recollection may be fuzzy. Zinn made the point that more contact between whites and blacks the harder it was to continue a system of racial superiority and segregation. I found that to be a powerful message that can be applied to many of the conflicts we see today, most notably America's feuds with Iran and other parts of the Islamic world.

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More Yankee Moves

I have made the greatest animated gif of all time:



I have to say that since my last post on the Yankees' off season moves the Yankees have improved their team even more. I said in that post that I would love to see Nick Johnson back in pinstripes; Brian Cashman did not disappoint. In another great move the Yankees picked up Javier Vazquez and lefty reliever Boone Logan from the Braves for fan favorite Melky Cabrera, lefty reliever Mike Dunn, and well touted prospect Arodys Vizcaino. I love Cabrera and would love to see him succeed. He's still young but you have to wonder if he can consistently be an above average hitter as an outfielder or will he just be a solid league average player. The Yankees decided on the latter. Vazquez's last stint with the Yankees made me hate him but I've read that he has the second most strikeouts in the naughts. If he can continue to put up 200 innings even with a higher ERA he'll be a great number four and make the rotation about as good as Boston's. Logan and Dunn are a wash so the evaluation of the trade may hinge on how good Vizcaino ends up being. He's only 19 now so that'll take a while.

I thought with the trading of Melky that Damon would be a lock to come back. The problem is that Cashman says he only has a couple of million left in the budget and Damon wants about $7 million. I have a feeling that Brett Gardner will not be starting in left field though and, as the market slowly closes up, the Yankees sign Damon to a $5 million deal.

Finally, it looks like Chien-Ming Wang won't be coming back. Along with Hideki Matsui this will be one of those decisions that you like from a business perspective but hate as a fan. I loved watching both of these guys play and will really miss them.

Update: (1/27/2010 6:16:10 PM) It looks like the Yankees have signed Randy Winn as a right handed left field option. Even though Winn can't hold a candle to Damon at the plate this seems to indicate an end to Johnny's stint in New York. How about a Johnny Damon remembrance thread. While we're at it here's one of Melky Cabrera, Hideki Matsui and not a remembrance thread but a thread full of Wang jokes. You'll all be missed.

While we're at it Eric Hinske signed with the Braves and Jerry Hairston Jr. went to San Diego (his brother plays there). Both were solid pickups who contributed well during the season and a little during the playoffs. I wish them well and will always remember their spots on the 2009 team. Hairston scored the winning run of game two of the ALCS and Hinske started a rally in the Yankees game 5 World Series loss.

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Public Domain

Unfortunately the narrative of "freedom" in this country centers around how much tax an individual pays on his income. The small government ideal, touted most recently by last year's "Tea Party" protesters, is ignored when it comes to, among other things, the concept of copyright. The party of small government bends over backwards for corporations while the supposed anti-corporate party does the same.

Copyright absolutely has its place. The constitution gives Congress the ability "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". That is the argument in simple terms. Copyright exists to help advance the arts and sciences, which in turn provide numerous benefits to our nation - by helping authors make money. It even has its place if the author is not the sole or biggest beneficiary. Allowing artists to create and then sell off their works provides incentives to create. Giving the purchasing corporations a chance to make money off what they acquired sweetens the incentive to buy it in the first place.

The problem is that subsequent amendments to copyright law in the United States have lengthened copyright terms of new and past works. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act was the most recent. Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, one of my favorite books of all time, is one such example of a work caught up in term extensions. In a must read post, James Boyle succinctly explains what extending copyright terms after the fact means. This paragraph below hit me like a ton of bricks. This is the argument, simple as can be:

For Bradbury’s book, this means that the reading public, the braille printer, the budding playwright, the school library face either higher prices, or legal restrictions on reuse or both. And they get no benefit from it. Clearly, the incentive of 28 + 28 years was enough to encourage him to write the book and the publisher to publish it. The evidence is that.. it happened. Retrospectively extending copyright is deadweight social loss — harm without benefit. But at least the book is available.

While extending copyright for new works to 95 years is excessive it is at least logically defensible. At that point you are just arguing length. Extending it after the fact is illogical because the incentive was already there. You can't go back in time to goad someone to create. The only reason to extend copyright on past works is to enrich owners who are (I'm guessing) the majority of the time not the creators.

You have to admit that the proliferation of copyright terms has limited our freedom without giving any more benefit to producers of art. Even more scary is the criminalization of copyright that has occurred with the DMCA and the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act. Limits on freedom must be justified with a gain for society. Copyright originally helped society by giving artists a time when they could exclusively make money off of their work. Now the possible increase in incentive is marginal while the restriction of freedom is palpable.

Update: (2/3/2010 8:08:57 PM) Matt Yglesias says copyright is intended to help the consumer.

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