Rhinocrisy

Fuck Negroponte, man. My roomie has an OLPC XO. I played with it a bit, recently. It’s a beautiful device. The applications are ingenious, simple, and extremely powerful. They’re the kind of thing that anyone could enjoy using. The few apps I played with seemed designed for growth - you can start off merely fooling around, but if you want to go further, the sky’s the limit. What’s more important is that the XO was FREE. Of course, it cost $150, but it was free in the important sense of that word - free like air and water, free like sunshine and mother’s milk. Now, it’s another brick in the wall. Well, can’t have those emerging markets polluted with non-Microsoft products, I suppose.

Lately I’ve been reading John Perkins’ “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”, which I heartily recommend if you are anxious to get steamed up about imperialism and debt slavery and the like. Anywho, therein Perkins says the following:

I recalled an economics professor from my business school days, a man from northern India, who lectured about limited resources, about man’s need to grow continually, and about the principle of slave labor. According to this professor, all successful capitalist systems involve hierarchies with rigid chains of command, including a handful at the very top who control descending orders of subordinates, and a massive army of workers at the bottom, who in relative economic terms truly can be classified as slaves.

This is a pretty powerful indictment of capitalism, if you have any kind of commitment to anti-poverty, equality, social justice, etc. And certainly many capitalist cheerleaders will promise you that capitalism will, indeed, inevitably lift everyone out of poverty and provide us all with the stable, eco-friendly utopia we’d all love to be a part of.^* This led me to construct what I call “The T-shirt Argument”, which goes as follows:
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This article in the Financial Times really must be read. It’s astonishingly forthright in its discussion of how, although it has been a “great time for capitalists”, “workers” “demanding their share of the pie” may start eating into profits. I’m always amused by the fact that the most devoted Marxists are the fat-cat capitalists.

Please, please, PLEASE, can someone explain to me the appeal behind an iPhone? Here we have a $600 device - the equivalent of a modestly-priced laptop computer - that, as far as I can tell, succeeds at providing the following services:
* Phone
* Internet
* Camera
* Music
Now, many devices have provided these before in combinations of twos and threes. I suppose the iPhone might be the first to provide these in one package, and has the usual Apple stylish design and the propensity to break. And yet, YET, the iPhone is being hailed as a “revolutionary” device!

Here is where I put on my “what the fuck” hat.^*

I am unclear exactly what revolution the iPhone is supposed to precipitate. People being able to listen to music on the go? No, no, this was accomplished some twenty years ago with the Sony Walkman. People being able to answer the phone on the go? No, no, this was accomplished some fifteen years ago with the first cell phone (whatever it was). People being able to access the Internet on the go? No - dozens of different sorts of devices are doing this even as we speak. In fact, it seems like a large minority of phones are now somehow ‘Net capable.

As to the iPhone’s stylish design and (putative) ease of operation: if this is revolutionary, then the world is in sad, sad shape. First, bad design is not something that requires advanced technology to overcome. Bad design should not happen, period. There is only one reason why you should release a badly-designed product: because you can get away with it. Is this the revolution? That someone has circumvented the fact that people are willing to tolerate crappy products, merely because NO ONE, to date, has bothered to make a passable one? I am skeptical. In any case, making it slightly easier to enter text into a phone does not qualify as a revolution in my book.

So, what, exactly is the revolution the iPhone has allowed? As far as I can tell, it lets us do one thing: it lets us (after spending $600) throw out our iPods.

As a geek, what I want from my phone is the ability to futz around with it. My current phone has some amazingly bad presets - button bindings, for example. Why can’t I change those button bindings? Surely that would vastly improve the appeal and usability of the phone. Every phone, additionally, is equipped with a very crappy, low-baud bluetooth modem, and usually with an equally crappy IR port. This is an absurdly powerful functionality that is completely underutilized. Why do I still have to tell people my phone-number, for example? Why can’t I just squirt out a bluetooth signal to their phone, announcing who I am? Why can’t I set my phone to respond automatically to a bluetooth transmitter in a movie theater, putting it into silent mode the moment I enter the hall? Why can’t I easily patch into my neighbor’s conversation via bluetooth? Why doesn’t every fricking cell phone let me control my TV?

More to the point, why isn’t there a phone with an open API that lets people build such applications? Cell platforms should be minimal operating systems that third parties can add onto. Such a cell phones could do all sorts of awesome nonsense with relatively trivial effort. THAT would be revolutionary. I suspect, however, there’s too much money to be made nickel-and-diming us, so we’ll have to please ourselves with the likes of the iPhone. As far as I can tell from the frenzy, fake orgasms are better than the real thing anyway.

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^* You know the one: it has a large stuffed vulture on it, last seen on the head of Neville Longbottom’s grandmum.

Forget black lung. Popcorn worker’s lung.

… a group of California food-flavoring workers recently diagnosed with bronchiolitis obliterans, a rare and life-threatening form of fixed obstructive lung disease. Also known as popcorn workers lung, because it has turned up in workers at microwave-popcorn factories, the disease destroys the lungs. A transplant is the only cure…. Flavoring manufacturers have paid out more than $100 million as a result of lawsuits by people sick with popcorn workers lung over the past five years.

In this morning’s paper I read that the Saudi Binladen group is constructing a giant hotel/shopping mall complex called Abraj al Bait across the street from the Masjid al Haram, the “Sacred Mosque” of Islam which houses the Ka’aba, the black stone building which is believed to be the first human house, constructed by Adam and later rebuilt by Abraham. The Abraj al Bait shopping center is a 600-retail outlet mall which includes a Tiffany’s, a Starbucks and an H&M.

As you might imagine, upon reading this story my hair curled and turned the color of ash and I vomited fire and blood all over the page and the room. But in case you cannot appreciate the reason for the violence of my reaction, in case some lingering doubt or foolhardiness prompts you to ask, “But, Saurabh, what’s so wrong with building a shopping mall there?”, let me elaborate.

One of the most prominent historical ironies was that which led to the Great Schism and the Protestant Reformation, the practice of selling indulgences. By allowing the sinner to escape punishment merely by dint of purchasing forgiveness, the Church created an additional, eighth Sin. Viz., Indulgence: wallowing in your own turpitude and loving it. This is the Sin that makes up the mortar in the construction of every shopping mall in the world. This is really what capitalism excels at. The clean, packaged product presented in a glass case, or framed by handsome stained wood furnishings. There are no bones or bits of skin, no drained, festering pits, no pools of foul liquids with only polysyllabic names. There is no guilt. Just the smiling face of the attendant who takes your money, and the satisfaction of your newly acquired pleasure.

Indulgence. Pay, and fear not.

And as with the corrupt Church that Martin Luther railed against, there is the opposing side: pay not, and be damned.

This is the world view that is making its introgression into Mecca, into the most sacred site in all of Islam, where millions of people come every year in the spirit of brotherhood. The hajj is the great equalizer - all Muslims must make the pilgrimage, if they can, and they should help those of their fellows who cannot. All are equal in their humility before god. Except, apparently, those who have money.

I am not a religious person, and I do not believe man should humble himself before god. But I do believe in culture. And while I might celebrate some reversals of culture in the Muslim world, this particular one cannot possibly appear to me as anything other than a retrogression.

Ah, but the salivating dogs have caught the sharp, metallic scent of coin. So let them build, and feast. We can have the bones.

Victory!

One New York wife is getting a $50,000-plus diamond ring thanks to hubby’s Wall Street bonus. An executive is giving $1 million in private jet time, or 150 hours, so his family won’t have to fly commercial. And plenty of $7,000 mink coats and $20,000 necklaces are being boxed up, too.
“I haven’t seen such excess displays of wealth and extravagance during the holidays since the 1980s,” said Samantha von Sperling, a New York-based image consultant and personal shopper. “This is the most prosperous, most lavish, most extravagant season I’ve ever seen.”

My sis points me to this post about GM bentgrass designed for golf courses making its way into the wild. In the past I’ve been pretty heavily involved with anti-GM activism, including participation in some Greenpeace and Rainforst Action Network campaigns. Their focus has always annoyed me, especially as a biologist.

The fact of the matter is, the danger posed by GM crops is not really that substantial. It’s possible that GM bentgrass will run wild and overrun the world, but in truth it’s far LESS likely to do so than ordinary bentgrass. GM traits are maintained by selection - artificial selection. If they confer any fitness advantage, it is usually only in a narrow context. In the case of the above bentgrass, it’s that it was engineered for increased glyphosate resistance (which is done by expressing an alternative version of the protein whose action glyphosate normally blocks). In fact it’s likely that this would prove disadvantageous compared to normal bentgrass in the absence of maintenance and the application of RoundUp, since it’s more or less wasting resources expressing a redundant protein, and probably under much more poorly-controlled gene regulation than normal bentgrass.

So if this bentgrass gets out into the wild, chances are it’ll die out quickly, or at least that the offending GM segment of the genome will be bred out. All this talk of GM super-weeds taking over the world is therefore quite overblown and probably not something we need worry about. Sure, volunteer GM corn might occasionally turn up in a field downwind, and there’ll be some degree of contamination in the wild, but no cataclysm will result.

Food safety issues are a bit more problematic, but still I think exaggerated. RoundUp-ready tomatoes probably aren’t some sort of pestilence, and although some genetic modifications may produce unanticipated responses, especially allergenic responses (as has actually been observed), the stuff isn’t poison. Not compared to, say, Twinkies, which is not a major environmental issue.

These are the issues that get pressed because this is what draws (or drew, rather, since these days the movement is somewhat muted) popular attention. The real issues, as I see them, however, are corporate control of agriculture and biodiversity.

Remember that this is cutting-edge technology, and farmers are beholden to the seed companies that produce this stuff; they must buy RoundUp-ready seed from them every year, not to mention RoundUp itself. GM technology is a powerful way for corporations to insinuate themselves deeper into the agricultural process; the infamous “terminator” technology developed to prevent farmers from saving seed at all is a prime example.^*

And by far the greatest danger is the loss of diversity. GM crops are a very close monoculture; being engineered, they are completely lacking in genetic variation. Not only does this make for a remarkably boring and uniform food supply, it means that there is no standing genetic variation to serve as grist for breeding future strains. This is how agriculture is possible, after all: the selection of desired attributes from amongst a vast pool of available variation. The loss of this variation is a loss of accumulated wealth; we as a species worked hard to develop great varieties in our food crops. It decreases the security of our food supply to reduce it.

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^* Also a good example of ignorance of biology being used to foist arguments; many opponents of terminators complained of it wreaking havoc by spreading and creating a plant holocaust. But this is nuts; obviously, it would breed itself out of any population within a generation and cease to be a bother.

Another conversation I had in my kung fu class produced this idea:

Consider the possibility that Paris Hilton does not exist. There never was any such person, nor is there a younger sister Nicky Hilton. There IS an actress who plays Paris Hilton. Her name is Claudia Farraday, and she is employed by a small and obscure production studio. A few years ago this studio paid a large and undisclosed amount of money to the Hilton family to make use of their family name. They would create a character, a true-to-life character around whom they would build a brand. Television shows, videos, clothing lines, makeup - you name it. All built up with far more verisimilitude than any screen creation could offer, because this one would actually BE real - as far as anyone knew.

They engineered their creation perfectly: she would start quietly, appearing as a model here and there - to establish credibility. Then she would blow up big, with instant notoriety that would fuel the growth of her prime-time television show. If it went well, they could move on from there… maybe maneuver for a book deal. Pepper her life with curious and scandalous incidents that would attract the attention of the appropriate consumer brackets. Quoi? Paris Hilton’s private phone book was hacked and published on the Internet? How salacious! (”Yes - Danger paid quite a bit for that little piece of promotional theater.”)

It was the perfect mechanism, for a public jaded by threadbare, aging forms of entertainment. Those old dog-and-pony shows wouldn’t work on this tough, calloused public. But a sucker-punch, a fake - a dose of concocted reality. Ah. That would catch them unawares.