The limits of manipulations for "their own good"

It's OK, because Duggee has his gas-lighting badge!

It's an endless question for parents about their children, isn't it? How much pressure and distortion can I, legitimately, use to teach them things,¹ to buy a little space, and so on? Some, I suppose, but it must be an ever moving target as the kiddo grows, develops, and just gets better at seeing through our BS. We try to keep in mind that the kiddo must one day stride forth to meet the world with her own skills, opinions, and point of view. We'd like that to go pretty well, so the scaffolding must be dismantled and some kind of model of good-person-in-a-hard-world needs to be offered.

I'll just get right on that.²

But, wait! There's more! My wife and I are smack is the middle of the sandwich, so it's also applies to interactions with our elders. And the answer to that, too, will be an evolving thing. Right now it's just one set, but there is every reason to suspect the others will need support sooner or later. So that's a whole different take on the same kind of questions.

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¹ In my prior, professional life, it even had a name: "lies to children".

²I wonder who in their right mind would sign off on our being parents in the first place?

Recycling categories

My wife and I try to take advantage of whatever recycling options are available to us (and we compost, too), and because I've dragged her around the country following my jobs for the past couple of decade we've lived in places with varied levels of availability. Travel has brought us in to contact with still more way to organize the process.¹

Now, I'm far from an expert on this industry, but I know it can be a challenging domain to work in. The work of sorting mixed waste into coherent categories is non-trivial and costs real money if done in bulk after the material is turned in or depends on ordinary people's willingness and ability to get the sorting right. And sorting errors are significant:² batches of material are often diverted to landfill due to "contamination"; a word which apparently covers a lot of sins from including food-waste (pizza boxes in your cardboard recycling, anyone), to mixing different categories of material together, or carelessly tossing plain garbage in a recycling bin.

Our local arrangements require individuals wishing to recycle to bring recyclables to a central facility³ and load them into dumpsters and big bins in six different categories (paper, cardboard, glass, plastic, aluminum, and ferrous metals⁴). Which leads us to some questions:

• Just what plastics are allowed?

  At least these are generally marked with the numbered recycling trefoil, but we're encountered places with an added requirement specifying only bottles with necks. Huh? And in most places I've lived plastic bags can't be recycled in the municipal system. You have to take those to the various stores that accept them.

• What is the difference between paper and cardboard?

  How do I decide? Does it matter if the paper is glossy or not?

• What aluminum items are accepted?

  In some places it's just cans; in others you can bring foil and disposable cookware (if clean). What about substantial pieces of structural meta?

• Glass?

  Does is need to be sorted by color? What if it's broken?

• About that food waste thing...

  Does it rule out greasy paper? What about bottles and cans with beer or soda remnants?⁵

• Batteries?

  These are a significant source of hazardous waste in landfill streams, but in most places they are hard to recycle. It's generally the case that you have to sort by chemistry and that cracked and leaking batteries are an extra pain.⁶

And so on and so forth. It's not trivial to know what is expected. You have to find, read, and indeed pay attention to the documentation supplied by your locality. Uhg.

Then there is the matter of what to do if you're not sure (or if, say, you and your spouse disagree about what the rules are). Should you submit things which you are unsure of at the possible cost of "contaminating" a load or contributing to a contractor terminating a contract? Or should you knowingly send things to landfill to insure that other stuff gets recycled?

I haven't traveled widely enough recently to have a good notion of how they do these things outside of the USA, but when I was going to Japan regularly in the noughties they seem to have a much more unified system (same bins and iconography in Tokyo and Osaka airports, JR station in several places, and in the small villages in Toyama prefecture. Europe was more varied than Japan but more consistent than the US.

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¹ When we attended a wedding on the big island of Hawaii just after the turn of the millennium the resort provided us with a laminated copy of the island's waste disposal guidelines card, listing approximately thirty different categories of trash, recyclables, and hazardous waste and detailing how/where each was to be disposed of (there were three categories of used batteries).

² In one place we lived the city recycling unit made yearly reports on actual the levels of waste in various categories and the target's their upstream contractors would accept. And you can learn something about the process just be examining those targets: they would accept a much higher rate of ferrous metals in the aluminum then other types of contamination, so you have to figure that magnets were employed to divert the unwanted metals to the correct processing chain.

³ At least the lot in question is open 24/7. In one place the lot was open about seven hours a days (except on Sunday) with some days of the week including morning hours and others evening hours.

⁴ They mean iron and steel. I've checked because, the bin is labeled "tin cans" even though no one has used tin for cans in many decades. Linguistic habits can linger long after they are no longer strictly applicaable.

⁵ Not rinsing is a pet-peeve of mine. Not so much because of the smell, but because the aluminum bins at our local places are often swarming with bees. But I've met people who argue (not without a point) that we live in a desert currently experiencing a drought and they don't want to waste water on the effort.

⁶ I've had at-work arrangements for batteries when I worked on-site at national labs, and in my last job where we had an environmental health professor who knew all the right people and maintained a drop-off site in has departmental office. Which gives you some idea of how arcane that process can be.

I shouldn't have to ?*(<|#% register to do that!

The house we bought out here is not only bigger than any we've had before but it is bigger than we actually needed. There just wasn't anything smaller that met our needs on the market when we had to buy, so we had to take what was available.

The shear size of the place has been a problem from a WiFi perspective.¹ There has been signal and bandwidth everywhere, but in some corners both sometimes drop pretty low. One of those corners is the guest bedroom which is where I work-from-home.

Well, complaints from my better half finally got me off my duff. I bought a couple of meshing extenders. Nice ones that maintain the same SSID none-the-less. The instructions included in the box tell me to download the app and use it to configure the widgets. I grumbled a bit, but fine. Except that once I have the app I learn that it requires me to set up an account with the manufacturer's web site.

Are you kidding me? Why would I want to do that?

It's a serious question. What makes them think I want to register?

In a word: No!

Now, it turns out these widgets support a WPS pairing mechanism.²

However, that wasn't mentioned in the material in the box and was pushed to the very bottom of the help web page: a tiny paragraph of plain text under screen-fulls of colorful pictures and enumerated lists of steps supporting the two ways to register with them to get it done.

I can only assume that this is done in bad faith. It is a malicious act in the service of the company to the detriment (admittedly small) of their customers and it makes the world a tiny bit worse.

Worse, I think the printed docs included the no-registration instructions at some time (the controls for it are labeled on the diagram but never referred to). At some point a marketing jerk told the tech writers to make the documentation worse and the tech writers complied, but they didn't take the time to scrub all the traces of their lost efforts.

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¹ The house actually has some kind of wire-in-the-wall-and-RJ45-jacks system from Honeywell pre-installed, but we didn't get the printed docs from the previous owner and I have never figured it out. Naively it looks like some kind of star topology that assumes you're putting the control next the main panel (i.e in the laundry room). So we're living with wireless. Besides there are relatively few ports and most of them are in inconvenient places.

² Just as well for them. I'd have sent them back rather than register. And so should you. Fight this nonsense.

Duty and painting oneself into a rhetorical corner

Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect

Robert Heinlein

"Duty" in the sense of an obligation is a politically contentious idea. I am personaly a fan of Heinlein's definition, but it suffers for some people's purposes from not being something that you can dictate as in "Doing [this thing I'm interested in] is your duty". The best you can do is explain to them why you think their self-respect should depend on doing it.

As a legal reality a few "duties" are required and you can be punished if you don't comply. If you are summoned for jury duty and neither provide an excuse the court finds acceptable nor show up you can be held in contempt and subjected to fines or jail time. If you are a young but adult male in the US and don't register with the selective service you can get in trouble. In the same vein, many people were punsihed during the Veitnam war era for draft dodging, which brings us to the culture wars.¹

The political right in the country largely partakes of a long standing view that military service is and should be required of men "in times of war" (which really means at the discretion of the political leadership). Some who don't go quite that far feel that there simply shouldn't be a way for a "real man" to not want to join the fight which is a slightly different take. In either case the point is that the community needs defense at times, and the costs should be widely borne.

The political left, on the other hand, mostly feels that it is the right of every citizen to question the motives behind and necessity of military action and to demur from participating if they find them unsavory or unecessary. Some go so far as to consider it an obligation to make such judgements. Some have even held unwilling particpants in military misadventures responsible for the failing of the political and military leadership under which they served.

That is a stark divide, and has been the cause of much dislike and mistrust between people on opposing political teams for the whole of my lifetime.

Then comes Covid19 and the issues of wearing masks in public, social distancing, enforced closures of some kinds of business and so on...

Suddenly there talk from the left of a duty to protect others by respecting these rules and talk from the right about their right to judge the urgency of the threat, the effectiveness of the suggested measures, and the motives of the leaders.

Laugh or cry.

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¹ There is, of course, some tension between this notion and that of religious liberty. Quackers, various Menomnites and other conciencious objectors have been a bone of contension on this matter since the beginning of the nation.

On nerds and not ruling the world, after all

Warning: wild, rambling, and only vaguely supported opinion ahead. Take it as you will.

Also, some of this addresses the reader in second person; in doing so I am envisioning my peers: people who have mastered (or are in the process of mastering) some arcane technical art but might have to work up a head of steam just to manage a proper mingle at an office social.

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I have always been a geek/nerd/strange-introverted-kid. My high school experience sucked (it was both better and worse in various ways than is depicted in popular media, but that story is probably more interesting to me than to my readers). It didn’t help that I was uninterested in the kind of socializing that most of my peers enjoyed and inept at what socializing I did participate in, but it was also a simple fact that I was an outlier in a system ill equipped to do much for such people (despite real effort and interest on the part of some of my teachers.¹) and didn’t have a lot in common with most of my school mates.

Unsurprisingly I resented the “cool kids”. Somehow I convinced myself that knowing how to “do things” I was going to end up running their world.

Right. Sure, kid. Good luck with that.

In reality, of course, it is mostly a lucky few of the cool kids that run the world² and the geeks are just the most able of the henchpeople. The geeks are valuable to the bosses because they are harder to replace than some other job descriptions, but all it buys you is a higher salary and a looser dress code.³

Tech skills run the infrastructure, but people skills run the world.

So it’s high school forever, then?

God, what an Orwellian image, eh?

No, for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, you are not bound to the artificial community of your school. You can (and should, and for the most part naturally will) find a set of social settings where you fit in.⁴

And secondly because your intellectual and personal development is not circumscribed by the program of the institution, and you have the personal where-with-all to take it as far as you care to go.

Where am I going with this?

Geeks don’t run the world, but they do run the infrastructure, and when you do that there are consequences. Some of them are good: the infrastructure knits the economy together and makes us all richer. Some of them are bad: some of the bosses are (intentionally or not) driving toward a slightly different Orwellian future in the name of glory or riches.

You may be bound to the wheel of life as a keyboard poking wage slave, but you don’t have to do it for anyone in particular. And many techies are in a better position to change jobs than other office workers.

You have, to some degree, a choice about who your work for. It may take some time to get away after you make the decision, but the option is there. Polish up your paper and get it on the street.

I decided some time ago to not work for jerks; call it my long delayed and largely ineffective revenge on the cool kid’s table. In any case, it is why I am a not doing Stack Exchange right now: I concluded that I had good reason to think that the managers were treating their top-flight technical talent badly, and that is good enough that I won’t do any free work for them.

But … hope!

Now, we just had the most promising smoke-signal from the secret lair in weeks, and I’m trying to not be impatient because I know these things take time. But … we’ve had previous reasonably promising smoke signals that presaged what appears to be highly jerkish behavior.⁵

Not sure what I will have to say if they send me the promised survey.

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¹ I wish I could find and apologize to a few of them. And in one case I also owe props to a woman who played my youthful resentment like a virtuoso and led to my markedly reduced suckage in her field despite my best efforts.

² Of course many of them don’t make the grade and end up even more expendable and less respected than the geeks. For a unlucky few high school might really be their glory days, but I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

³ If you are thinking about tech giants and thinking that the geeks really did end up in charge, think again. Those guys had to develop the same “people” skill set of the popular kids. They’re might have been too late blooming to have a seat at that table in the lunch room, but they have as much in common with the cool kids as they do with the nerds.

⁴ If you are unfamiliar with the concept of a “third place”, look it up.

⁵"Appears to be" is as good as it’s going to get. The company isn’t telling and those most affected are too professional to tell tales out of school. But they don’t get to blame us for making do with what we have., because it is what we have.

Written with StackEdit.

Scrapers and non-particpation

I'm trying very hard to not support Stack Exchange until I see where they are going. Where they are really going. I mean, they made nice sounding noises in a meeting with a highly regarded user recently to match the ones they've made online. Which ought to be encouraging, but I'm not getting my hopes up. Time will tell.

In the meantime I stumbled across a site scrapping Stack Exchange content without attribution today. (I know that link is Stack Overflow content, and a cursory search brings up a couple more candidates.)

Which leaves me in a bind: I am not working for them right now, but I feel strongly that open source licenses need to be publicly defended to establish a strong social norm around them. Strong legal precedents exist, but sufficiently widespread violation could undermine that.

Anyone who is still participating want to take it?