Patrick Cahalan

Post image for Comment Rescue: The Right Answer?

On the well-traveled thread on the front page that I’m not really following because I just spent a chunk of my day writing on the sub-blog, Ryan says:

Here. Let’s put it this way. Say you’re at a restaurant and someone comes up and tells (your wife) that she shouldn’t be there because her job is to be at home making babies and dinner. Are the only two acceptable responses from you these ones?

1. “THAT’S AGAINST THE LAW! SOMEONE SHOOT HIS DOG!”
2. “Oh well, free country.”

I should think not.

I’m curious as to what people may think are acceptable responses, and what one means by, “acceptable responses”.

What do we mean by acceptable?  Is it acceptable to punch the guy’s lights out?  Socially, that is?  Whether or not we believe that this ought to be legal or not, is violence an acceptable answer here?

No?

Is getting into a shouting match acceptable?  Is this more socially acceptable than punching the guy’s lights out?  (Greater society may say “yes”, but the fellow diners in the restaurant might actually prefer a short violent altercation in the parking lot to having a couple of guys yelling at each other and ruining their dinner).

Realize that any answer other than, “Oh, well, free country” on the part of the guy whose wife was just harped on is probably going to lead to violence.  Is engaging with this idiot on any level acceptable, when you know it’s likely to lead to a violent altercation in the parking lot?  If so, why is arguing with the guy *more* acceptable than just decking him in the first place.  Saves time, yes?

Is it acceptable to even ask this question?  Doesn’t it imply paternalism of the worst sort?  If the answer is “I let my wife punch the guy out” is that acceptable husbandly behavior?  Does it matter if she would want me to play the defender or not?

Because here’s where I come down: I don’t see any response in this sort of scenario other than, “Oh, well, free country” that leads to a non-neutral outcome.  Anything you do is likely to provoke a much worse scenario.  Too beta male?

{ 62 comments }

Post image for A Note About Restraint

On the redoubtable Mr. Thompson’s last post, there is a counter-point to be made.  I shall now make this point, standing in for the law enforcement community.

Firearm accuracy is notoriously bad in stress scenarios.  The links are too numerous to aggregate at the moment, but for the purposes of this post I’ll just use this report by the NY Times:

Continue reading this post…

{ 122 comments }

Kodak’s bankruptcy filing includes a tidbit that reveals… something. FNORD. Continue reading this post…

{ 45 comments }

Post image for Sounds of the City

Right now  as I start this post, out on the street, the same somebody who comes by once a week is creating the clink-clink noise of bottles being sorted out of the neighborhood recycle bins.

They go back in.  The cans net $1.57 a lb at one local recycling center, the bottles are under $0.10 a lb.  You have to be careful sorting out the bottles to get at the cans, or the people that own the house get angry when they find another broken bottle near their driveway and they get one of the bin locks that are becoming more common in my neighborhood.

A cubic meter of aluminum is 2,700 lbs.  That’s obviously much denser than a bag of crushed cans, there’s a lot of air in there; the point is that any decent number of cans is going to be a lot bigger, in volume, than a cubic meter.  I figure you can probably get, what, thirty pounds of cans in a plastic bag, maybe?  And maybe fifteen or twenty of those bags in your car?  One of these days I have to get on the horn and call the local curbside pickup guys and ask how many cans they pull out of the average recycling bin, but it can’t be that many.  One soda can is about 15 grams.  So it takes 1,000 of them to make a kilogram and a half, which is $3.45.  I figure the average recycling bin probably has, what?  Hm; two adults per household in my immediate area, not too many teenagers (mostly younger kids), so two cases of cans is probably a generous load for a week.

So maybe 30-40 cans, at most, per recycling bin.  Let’s call it 20, I’m feeling pessimistic tonight but the neighborhood is mostly upper middle class so beer usually comes in bottles and soda is so… gauche.  So, 50 recycling bins need to be scoured for 1,000 cans.  At about a minute or a minute and a half per can, rummaging around, plus walking to the car to unload your bag… what’s that?  Maybe an hour and a half to net 1,000 cans?  They start at about 10, if they work until 5 in the morning, that’s 7 hours.  Let’s call it seven and a half, just to jibe with the hour and a half baseline… so 5,000 cans in a night.  That’s much less than the volume problem, sorry… I’m working this out as I go.

This is not what I would call fulfilling work, a seven and a half hour shift to haul in seventeen dollars and twenty-seven cents.

And someone’s doing it.  Not just here, I have it on some credible reporting that this happens in every neighborhood in the Los Angeles basin where curbside recycling goes on.  Leaguesters from other locales can report their own mileage.

That’s an awful lot of people busting their hind end at what is essentially a full-time job (albeit one night a week, unless they run different neighborhoods with different collection times, of course).  For seventeen dollars and twenty seven cents.  If you could do that job 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year, you’d be bringing home a whopping $4,490.20.  Less expenses.  Well, it’s tax-free, so you’ve got that going for you, I guess.  I don’t know about you, gentle reader, but you couldn’t pay me $17.27 to look at your computer.  I’d either do it for free, or charge you a hell of a lot more than that.

There are people who really get bent out of shape that someone’s running through their trash.  There are other people who get upset that those cans aren’t making it into the city recycling program, and thus they’re cutting out revenue that helps pay for the program.

I guess I find that odd.  Not necessarily wrong, or a bad way to look at the situation, or a bad way to look at the world.  Just odd.

All I can think about is seventeen dollars and twenty seven cents.

{ 50 comments }

Over!

by Patrick Cahalan on May 7, 2012

Post image for Over!

Cross-posted at Mindless Diversions.

Since Jaybird is busy bailing out the basement, I thought I’d throw together something just to provide our breathless readership with something to read on Monday, other than a post about how the guy who does all the heavy lifting around here isn’t lifting today.  No games today, but it definitely qualifies as a nerd hobby.

My vanity call sign came through this weekend.  I’m officially Whiskey Niner Papa Sierra Charlie (W9PSC) in the FCC database. Technician class, radio operator level one.

I know, the purists will say, “But you’re not in area 9!  California is area 6!  And *Whiskey*, west of the Mississippi??”  To which I respond… dude, Whiskey Niner is so much more apropos than Kilo Six.  It’s a vanity call sign.  Sue me.  But I digress.

Amateur radio (HAM radio) in the U.S. has been around since the late 19th century. The first listing of amateur radio stations was listed in the First Annual Official Wireless Blue Book of the Wireless Association of America, in 1909. Uncle Sam got into the regulatory business in 1912, restructured the licenses in 1951 (replacing A, B, and C with Novice, Technician, General, Conditional, Advanced, and Amateur Extra), and then again in 2000, reducing the number of overall licenses to three: Technician, General, and Amateur Extra. The main difference between the three licenses is available frequency bands for transmission… you can do almost everything you’d want to do with a handheld radio with just a Technician’s license.

Continue reading this post…

{ 17 comments }

248 Small Government Party Members Vote “Yea” on CISPA

by Patrick Cahalan April 27, 2012
Thumbnail image for 248 Small Government Party Members Vote “Yea” on CISPA

(Edited to add) Erik and I crossed the streams.  From there: One important thing to glean from this, especially when held up in contrast with the defeat of SOPA and PIPA, two bills aimed at combating online piracy, is that once you tack the word “security” onto a bill it becomes far more toxic to oppose. The Tea Party may be the small government wing of the Republican Party, but when it comes to national security suddenly limiting the state ...

92 comments Read the full article →

Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law, Again

by Patrick Cahalan April 24, 2012

Another story. A quandary for some?

32 comments Read the full article →

Back to the Salt Mines

by Patrick Cahalan April 18, 2012

The Infamous Brad distills the independent report of the UC Davis pepper-spray affair.

21 comments Read the full article →

Intellectual Property: Abstract vs. Natural Right, Part V: The Conclusioning

by Patrick Cahalan April 12, 2012
Thumbnail image for Intellectual Property: Abstract vs. Natural Right, Part V: The Conclusioning

I know.  People have been asking themselves for weeks, “So, what were all these posts about, anyway?  What’s your conclusion, Pat?” Well… two people, maybe?  Okay, here’s my distillation of them, for those two people. It seems evident to me that in the traditional language of either natural right or abstract right there’s no fundamental right to “intellectual property”. “Intellectual property” is a misnomer, but it’s one of those misnomers that we’re probably stuck with as there is no better ...

213 comments Read the full article →

The Internet is Awesome

by Patrick Cahalan April 11, 2012
Thumbnail image for The Internet is Awesome

Nine-year old Caine Monroy spent his summer vacation building a cardboard arcade inside of his father’s used auto parts store. And then the Internet got involved.  I don’t know how I missed this story last September, but if you haven’t seen it, take 10 minutes.  It will make your day.

56 comments Read the full article →

More Facebook

by Patrick Cahalan April 3, 2012

Tom wrote a post a while back about employers demanding that employees turn over their Facebook passwords.  My opinion was that this is a very bad idea, and Tod pointed out some salient reasons why:

8 comments Read the full article →

Who do you like in the second?

by Patrick Cahalan March 30, 2012

Presuming that Mitt is indeedy the nominee, which seems to be locked in at this point… … who’s the Veep pick? I will say it’s not going to be Santorum or Newt or Perry… or any of the other candidates that have come along so far.

117 comments Read the full article →

Reasons to Have A Kindergartener in the Family, #1

by Patrick Cahalan March 23, 2012

Reported via the wife’s facebook update: Hannah says, apropos of nothing,”I can’t see that because I don’t have too many eyes. I don’t have an eye in my stomach because then I would be an alien.”

17 comments Read the full article →

Sad Songs

by Patrick Cahalan March 21, 2012

they say, so… so much. This is the saddest “sad sack” story you will ever read if you’re a sports fan.  Mets fans don’t have anything on this.  Nobody has anything on this. CLIPPER fans don’t have anything on this. To quote my nephew, ‘This is why I’m a Laker fan”.

18 comments Read the full article →

The First of the Law

by Patrick Cahalan March 16, 2012

And the Padraig spoke, and he said unto the people, “For upon these days, men will come to you with fermented grain beverages that will be the color of the grass in the field. Should the color of the beverage be that of the wheat at the time of the harvest, thou shalt imbibe of the beverage with great joy and celebration. However, should the beverage be the color of the grass eaten by the beast of cloven hoof in ...

10 comments Read the full article →

Ethics v. Morality

by Patrick Cahalan March 14, 2012

Round one… ready… FIGHT.

36 comments Read the full article →

Poll!

by Patrick Cahalan March 7, 2012
Thumbnail image for Poll!

Just finished the Game Theory midterm (I did just fine).  I have the rest of the day off.  It’s 30 minutes on the road to get back to Chez C. In honor of Mr. Thompson’s excellent suggestion, here is a harmless post: tell me what to have as my post-examination cocktail when I get home. Poll closes in 45 minutes.

38 comments Read the full article →

Trust, Standing, and Communication

by Patrick Cahalan March 7, 2012
Thumbnail image for Trust, Standing, and Communication

The week’s “Almost All-Rush-Limbaugh” posts got me to thinking about language and the use thereof, and this of course always makes me think of Mr. Carlin (requiescat in pace).  Needless to say, this post will refer to some colorful language, reader beware.

304 comments Read the full article →

Intellectual Property, Abstract v. Natural Right, Part IV

by Patrick Cahalan March 1, 2012

The fourth post in a series.  In post I, we outlined a 10,000 – okay, 100,000 – foot view of the legal history of intellectual property in law.  In post II, we covered some of Hegel’s writings from “Elements of the Philosophy of Right”, the Cambridge Text edition… specifically the first three parts of Section I: Property.  Part III covered the last section of Property and Hegel’s chapter on Contract.  Today we’ve set the wayback machine a bit farther, and ...

5 comments Read the full article →

Intellectual Property, Abstract v. Natural Right, Part III

by Patrick Cahalan February 29, 2012

The third post in a series.  In post I, we outlined a 10,000 – okay, 100,000 – foot view of the legal history of intellectual property in law.  In post II, we covered some of Hegel’s writings from “Elements of the Philosophy of Right”, the Cambridge Text edition… specifically the first three parts of Section I: Property.  Today we pick up where we left off, with the alienation of property. The Alienation of Property §65 through §67 begins the discussion ...

9 comments Read the full article →

Surreal

by Patrick Cahalan February 29, 2012

Sometimes, the nuttiness of the world goes from making me shake my head to making me shake my head until I stop and then… channeling my inner teenager, I muse… “Hey, that’s actually kind of weirdly awesome.” This is one of those times.

10 comments Read the full article →