Mindless Negativity

Yes, it's true. There are tons of people out there who are characterized by vapid, mindless optimism.

Yes, they are annoying. They are a turn-off. They don't actually accomplish much.

But it's a massive mistake to correlate their optimism with their vacuous mindsets. Negativity also has the capacity to be mindless. And it my experience, it often is.

Don't be overly negative in an attempt to appear smart. Usually, it has the opposite effect. And it makes you miserable in the process.

"Buy Me Dinner First"

I had to take my car into the auto mechanic earlier today. When I went into their office, I was given a form to fill out asking for my name, my phone number (information they already had), home address, and email address. Nothing on the form indicated why they required this information, and what they were going to do with it.

"What do you need this information for?" I asked him. He told me they would use my phone number to call me with an estimate, my mailing address to mail me updates and reminders, and my email address to email me service coupons and a newsletter. He was cordial enough about it, but when I gave him my name and phone number and left the other fields blank, he seemed perplexed. He stressed that I really shouldn't be concerned about filling out this form.

They were asking for information that they didn't need for any reason besides marketing purposes. He was a genuinely nice guy, and I could tell he was just following protocol. But when I broached the subject, he seemed surprised that I was being so shrewd about it.

I'm generally okay giving this information to people, but only after I recognize an incentive for me to do so. I wrote on the form "Buy me dinner first" and handed it back to him.

I think I might start doing this more often.

Up Next

I moved out of Michigan about three years ago. I did so for the perhaps overly-cited "personal reasons". In my case, it happened to be true. The economy was in decline as I left, and it really got about about a month after I left (in September 2008), but that had nothing to do with it.

I left because it dawned on me that I had a ton of unhealthy thought patterns. And a social circle comprised of people that, while they were awesome, mostly reinforced these patterns. I wanted to get away just as a control, to see if I would evolve my way of thinking.

I took the first tech job I was offered and quickly moved. Things got better. In a new city, around new people, a new perspective was forced on me, and I had to look at things in a new light. I had the chance to rewire my brain.

The one downside (and it's actually a huge upside) is that the first job I was offered was in Santa Barbara. It's an amazing city. The high cost of living is the only justifiable complaint I've ever heard about it, and even that is manageable. If this city has one export, I always say, it might as well be positive thinking, because it's difficult to spend time here and not be in a extended, doggedly persistent good mood.

I often wonder where my brain would be now if I had ended up in a more typical city, like Madison or Berkeley. I'm a positive person, and I tend to be optimistic...but it's too easy here in Santa Barbara. It's easier to remain celibate if you're surrounded by nuns in a convent.

I don't know where I move next, but it will probably happen within a couple of years. The true acid test of my optimism will come when I move away from here. Perception is reality, and I hope I can keep choosing to perceive things optimistically.

Why I Do Not Care What The Government Is Doing

I should preface this by saying that I don't have a dog in this fight.

Not really. I don't really think of myself as a Republican or a Democrat. I'm sure if you psychoanalyzed my dreams you could figure out which one I am, but I don't actually believe that would accomplish a whole lot. I don't call myself a moderate, because that term is essentially meaningless anyway.

But, for practical purposes, I don't vote. Never have, and until someone gives me a good reason, I'm not going to. Unfortunately, it's been eleven years since I sprouted wings and hit voting age, and I don't expect to be given a good reason anytime soon. So it goes. You people who are into politics can keep holding your Kool-Aid parties. I'm unlikely to cause any trouble here by shouting at this wall I'm writing on.

That being said, I had a thought the other day, and I felt the urge to articulate it someplace. I have a friend who I've known for the past three years, and I can say with full confidence that he favors a more liberal agenda. At least, I think he does. I deduced this from hours of him telling me how terrible the Republicans are. By process of elimination, I'm assuming he's probably a Democrat. I may be going out on a limb.

So, earlier this week, he was prattling on about some issue in Congress or something, and he's telling me how terrible the conservatives are. And while he's talking, my mind is doing what it normally does during these discussions: wandering. I think I was working through some computer problem in my head. (Coincidentally, I do this very same thing when my dad is bashing the liberals.)

But as he was talking, my mind thought back to my freshman year of college, when I was enrolled in some "Political Science 101" class. What I learned, in short: conservatives favor smaller government, liberals favor bigger government. I know that's an oversimplification, but that's what this asshole professor taught me, and I've heard it since then, so let's roll with it for now.

Back to my friend, bashing Republicans. I interrupted him and said, "Just a second, I want to ask you something."

"Sure," he said.

"So, you're a liberal, right?" I asked him. He replied that he was. "So, you think government creates positive good in society, that we should have more of it, as opposed to Republicans, who view government as a necessary evil and think we should keep it to a bare minimum."

"That sounds about right, yes," he said, accepting the line I had just drawn in the sand.

I went on. "So, next question: in the past three years I've known you, and you've spent all this time talking about the federal government, have you ever once said a single positive thing to me about what they're doing?"

He didn't seem to have instances he could offer. I honestly couldn't remember a single one, and neither could he.

"All right," I said, "so, if everything that's happening in Washington D.C. is terrible, why would I ever favor a more progressive agenda?"

My friend responded by saying something about (I'm paraphrasing here) hating the playas, but not the game. Which I get; the current Congress is conservative.

But there's a fundamental problem here, and it's simple in concept:

The more liberals complain about government, the more they further a conservative agenda.

I don't care which side is doing what in Congress, I don't care which side is at fault, or what the issues are. Yes, the few of you who are actively involved in politics care deeply about the issues, and you're firmly decided. But the rest of us, the masses you're trying to reach, we're not interested in following along that closely. We're in the nosebleed section of the stadium, straining to get a glimpse. We're just watching the headlines and reading the occasional news article. We're trying to get a sense of how we should feel about things. We're trying to form an impression based on a limited trickle of interest. And based on this superficial, incomplete, fuzzy picture in our minds, we make a decision about what our core values our. And we vote these core values.

And if it's all bad news coming out of D.C., then tell me this: doesn't that mean government comes off as nothing more than a necessary evil? Do not tell me it's a conservative government at the moment! When you say that, I'm not hearing that. I'm hearing, "Government is bad, blah blah. The bums in Washington suck, blah blah." That's the impression you're leaving on my brain. Why should I ever vote to increase taxes if the political system is such a plague on our society? Why should I even care?

Now, I'm not that smart, and I'm not that well-read (politically), so I'm 100% certain that I'm not the first person to recognize this as a problem. But I've yet to find anyone who's doing anything about this.

Even during all of the debt ceiling hullabaloo that happened a couple of weeks ago, I was sure that someone had done something good during all of this ruckus. What it was, I didn't know, but I figured at least one U.S. Senator had introduced and passed a bill giving some aid to some war veterans. Or some tax break for a nail polish manufacturer that was going to be used to hire more workers in Philadelphia. Or maybe legislation helping coal miners with their rights. Something.

I entered "U.S. Congress" into Google News. The first 10 pages of results were all articles about the debt ceiling debate. After that, I stopped looking.

I understand why we always report on what's timely. But I have yet to hear anyone say they were happy with the debt ceiling resolution. Again, all bad news. And if it's all bad news, then once again, I posit: why should I pay attention, and why should I ever favor adding or increasing the size of any government programs? After the 600th or 700th crisis I've heard about in my life, I started tuning out. And for some reason everything is a crisis.

This is a problem. And to be clear, I don't see it as a progressive problem. I don't see it as a conservative problem. I honestly think that civic disengagement is a problem for both parties, because it reduces voter turnout on both sides. I'm pretty disengaged myself, and I've been waiting over a decade for someone to get me to care. Not because society owes it to me, but for another reason entirely: if someone can engage me, they're probably engaging almost everyone else, too. Because I honestly, passionately don't care, but I keep an open mind. So I'm lying in wait.

I've yet to find a news source that consistently looks on the bright side. "Here's what happened in Congress today, and here is why it's awesome."

You do read news stories like this on occasion, but they're usually reporting partisan victories. Republicans defeat a Democrat bill, or vice versa. The problem with these victories is that they aren't mine. They're party victories, and they're celebrated / reported as such.

I have a half a mind to clobber together a blog of my own that would report such things. I would find a few good, positive pieces of news per week that would offer people a more favorable view of what governments, both federal and local, are doing in the United States. (I'd stay away from hot button issues.) I know that each and every day, there are hundreds of elected officials doing small things that matter, and they're not given a voice, because nobody cares. So it goes.

I care. But to be honest, there's a lot of news out there, and every time I've tried to wade through it, it just gets depressing. It seems our whole media is based on "send your representatives an angry email every time you're pissed off", instead of "thank them for the hard work they did last week passing legislation that positively affected you." In light of this, curating the content for such an "optimistic" news site as I'm proposing would be too big a task for me. I'd build some kind of software to crowdsource it, but I figure then people would start submitting stories about partisan victories (e.g. "We passed Prop 8!") and arguments would start in the comments and it would devolve into something resembling YouTube without any videos. A grim prospect indeed.

I actually am optimistic. I don't know what party that means I belong to. I think this country has great days ahead of it. Will there be difficulties? Yes. Is the federal government dysfunctional? Yes. For the 222nd year in a row. They're going to have to try a whole lot harder than they are to worry me, because this "madness" or whatever people are calling it is just business as usual.

But as long as it keeps on being perceived as "madness", the steps we take forward are going to be slow.

Next Generation

When I was a teenager, there are tons of lessons my parents, my teachers, and elders tried to teach me. Many of these went in one ear and out the other. I wasn't ignoring them. But a lot of knowledge comes from direct experience, not from "Here's the way things are, because I said so." I learned most of these lessons later, on my own, from the world when I became ready to learn them. And it was the world that prepared me.

Teenagers are running around today with their cell phones, texting while walking, so distracted by the device in their hands that they almost run into other people on the sidewalk. They pay more attention to their mobile devices than other things that might matter. They act with a sense of entitlement, which, while it's what they've learned, maybe isn't the best mentality with which to carry yourself.

Grown-ups point to these as indicators that kids take too much for granted, and that they're not grateful for what they have. That's a fair point. But when the teenager asks in response, even internally, "Why should I be grateful?" Well, that's also a fair question. They don't know because they haven't learned. And I'm not convinced that we're always capable of teaching them.

We have created a society that shields (some of) our teenagers from a lot of the uglier side of things. Giving kids a safe environment in which to learn and grow is perhaps the greatest thing we've managed to do as a nation, even if we don't always do it well. But there is a trade-off: we, as adults, have seen and know the real world. Some know it much better than others. Teenagers don't. And as a result, their actions and attitudes reflect their experiences.

I'm not offering parenting advice here. I don't have kids, and I firmly believe it's every parent's prerogative to warp their kids however they see fit. (Provided your kids don't come to school shooting, of course.)

Fun fact: I haven't kept an exact count, but I estimate that the number of middle aged adults distracted by texting on their cell phones who have almost walked into me on the street is about the same as the number of teenagers who have done it.

Stretch

I'm pretty sure that websites are profiling me.

This isn't a bad thing. Amazon clearly knows my book browsing and purchase habits so well, it does a better job of picking books for me than any of my friends and family. Algorithmically, it's complicated, but they're basically just cross-referencing what I've bought and looked at with other people who have looked at and bought the same things. So when I land on the homepage tomorrow morning, they'll consult the profile they have on me and build the homepage I see based on that.

Provided they aren't sharing this information without my knowledge, this seems like fair use. What they know about me is fairly limited, because they just know which books I'm buying. (I buy almost everything else offline.)

Facebook is a little bit different. It's not an accident that there are now "Like" buttons all over the web. Provided that we're all logged into Facebook in the same browser we're using to surf the web (most of us are), when you load that news page with the Facebook buttons on it, the data about this page you're visiting is sent right alone for Facebook to store.

So, Facebook is trying to figure out who I am. They're profiling me by compiling a history of every page that I've visited. And, of course, Facebook isn't the only company that's trying to do this.

Should we be worried about this? Maybe. Me, I've been aware of this for quite some time, and I have a little trick that I use to throw them off: I try to look up information about everything.

It's one thing to read a news article with a liberal bent, then to seek one out with a conservative one on the same topic. I do that, but I try to take it further. I look up articles on pottery, sewing, marketing, mathematical models for stock market investing, software for managing a dental practice, computer science, criminal law, publicity, civic engagement in city governments, sales training, the educational system in Europe, urban planning, botany, US companies moving their manufacturing from China to the US, how fireworks are made, how to take care of a firearm...etc.

I would do this anyway, since I'm a pretty curious person. It doesn't necessarily make me smarter, but I hope that it makes the signals I'm sending to Facebook a little bit noisier than they might otherwise be, and make it more of a challenge for them to pigeonhole me.

This is one of the reasons I blog. I try to obligate myself to find new ideas and share them with others. I hope this has the side effect of getting people interested in other random disciplines, and gets them browsing about a few random unrelated tangents. Maybe they in turn blog about a few of them, and the serendipity spreads.

Does this actually happen? I have no idea. In life it's often difficult to tie the effect to its associated causes. I think that's what we're all trying really hard to do: be the cause, unseen or otherwise, of the effects we want to see in the world.

The Age of Privacy is NOT Over

In late 2009, then-CEO of Google Eric Schmidt was asked by CNBC about Google's policy regarding privacy. He responded with a somewhat alarming quote: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

Whenever he's asked about it, Mark Zuckerberg seems to take the stance that the age of privacy is over in a world permeated by Internet connectivity.

That the heads of these companies don't seem to respect the privacy of their users is an interesting thing to note here...but it isn't the real story. The posture of these companies seems to be an attempt to remain objective in the face of the legal reality that privacy laws don't cover Internet activity they way they protect what you keep in your home. That they don't seem to be pushing to maintain the privacy rights of their users also makes for interesting discussions, but it's not the real story here, either.

The Fourth Amendment is one key piece of U.S. law that regulates how law enforcement agencies conduct investigations against citizens. It protects against "unreasonable searches and seizures" by government without warrants issued upon probable cause. This amendment was created in an age without much technology. Government investigated individuals by physically entering someone's home, so protecting against "searches" was sufficient.

In 1928, in the landmark case of Olmstead v. United States, federal investigators sought to convict a notorious bootlegger by tapping his phone lines, recording hundreds of hours of conversations, and incriminating him using those conversations. They got their conviction, but Olmstead appealed on the grounds that his phone conversations were recorded without a warrant, and therefore in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. The Supreme Court disagreed with him, claiming that there was neither search nor seizure involved in the wiretapping.

This would be a dangerous precedent for the age of the Internet, but it didn't stop there. In 1967, the FBI sought to convict a man named Charlie Katz for violating federal gambling statutes. Katz made calls to his bookie in a phone booth outside his apartment. The FBI bugged the phone booth, and eventually, they accumulated enough evidence to arrest him.

Katz was convicted, and like Olmstead, he appealed. The Supreme Court heard the case , but this time, they reached a different conclusion than they had in Olmstead's case. Regarding the case, they said:

"The Fourth Amendment protects people, no places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected."

In essence, the Court now applies the "reasonable expectation of privacy test". If a person acts with a reasonable expectation that they're actions are private, they should be protected.

Let me repeat that last part, because you have dozed off in my tedious recounting of this history: if there's a reasonable expectation of privacy in a person's actions ("reasonable" being defined by society's expectations), those actions should be protected by the Fourth Amendment.

With that in mind, I'd like to quote the headline of the article I linked to above:

"Facebook's Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over".

This headline, by itself, is creepy. Why is that? The more they erode the public expectation of Internet privacy, the more they erode the case to be made for privacy law to apply to the Internet.

Regardless of Facebook's privacy policies, the fact that this is the sentiment that Zuckerberg echoes almost every time he discusses privacy and Facebook is troublesome. I'm picking on him because he's easy and his name is well-known, but he's certainly not alone. It's a familiar story in Silicon Valley: that privacy is simply a thing of the past. We've entered a new technological age, in which the online privacy rights of citizens are deterministically going to vanish. There's nothing we can do about it, they claim, because the forward march of technology further and further into our lives is inevitable, so we might as well embrace it.

This is an easy thing to accept. And it's tempting to accept it, because if that's the case, we don't have to do much. But it's a dangerous mindset.

It makes sense that companies like Google and Facebook would want us to think we, as a society, have no reasonable expectation of privacy. Even ignoring the effect this might have on future legal precedents, it keep would keep us from demanding more control over the data and information that we're providing to them. It frames the issue in a way that suggests that any future harm that befalls an individual based on these companies irresponsibly sharing that person's data is the fault of that individual, and absolves the company itself of any responsibility.

The age of privacy is not over. As a matter of fact, it's more important now than it has ever been in the past. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think you should let anyone tell you otherwise. Your right to privacy online might depend on it.