Corporate Cynicism

November 27, 2009 under theology

Whenever I’m on the phone with a telemarketer or a customer service representative, I’m torn.

I’m on the phone with a person, but I’m interacting with a corporation.

I don’t know who had the bright idea to create an entity devoid of emotion and buffered from liability. It’s awful.

It’s awful because it brings me into conflict over what to do and how to act. Jesus tells us to love our enemies, to do good to those who persecute us, and not to resist an evil man. I can understand that. Maybe I can’t always do it, but I can understand it, a little bit. Because even if a person is doing something evil, they’re still a person.

But a corporation is… it’s like a *thing*. It’s like a machine.

And all good corporations make life harder by *pretending* to be people. They pretend to have relationships with their customers. I get admail all the time that purports to reward me for my friendship. It uses the language of friendship. Corporations pretend to do favors and they pretend to be kind and they pretend to have emotion. But a corporation is just a thought, and an idea can’t have an emotion.

And a corporation doesn’t care that it’s pretense is a mockery of something real.

But I’m sad, because I’m torn. I feel like I’m being forced into a world where I have to be mean and cold and calculating because I’m fighting against machines. It’s like when I’m programming and I have to be distant and abstract.

Because when Jesus talked about loving your enemies, I think he was talking about people and not mental constructs. And I’m angry because it’s polluting my mind to be forced into that nasty mode of thinking. How can I deal with people as people at the same time that I’m gearing myself up to deal with a soulless machine?

It’s not right and it’s not natural and I don’t like it.

comments: 1 » tags: , ,

Downtown crosswalks

November 25, 2009 under curios

Most downtown crosswalks have been upgraded from just a flashing red hand to a flashing red hand and a countdown timer.

I don’t know why.

If you watch people, it quickly becomes obvious:

The time on the timer doesn’t matter.

What matters is,

Did the person just before you start crossing?

comments: 0 »

Hattiquette

November 24, 2009 under tongueincheek
  • Does a mall count as indoors?
  • Does a baseball cap count?
  • Do you have to tip your hat to a lady if she’s wearing trousers?
    • Not if you were born after 1900
    • Exception – you do if you’re wearing a double-breasted pinstripe suit, on pain of ruining the impression
comments: 1 » tags: ,

I’m really not sure what to make of this…

November 23, 2009 under curios, theology

“We can change. There has to be hope.”

UPDATE -  I think perhahps the thing that bothers me is that what he is looking for *is* knowable, but it is not knowable in the way that establishing a field of study will change.

Or maybe it’s the implicit ‘ourselves’ in this statement.

“We can change [ourselves]. There has to be hope.”

I dunno.

comments: 0 » tags: ,

What was Jesus’s incentive?

November 13, 2009 under metablogging, theology

Freakonomics posed this as “The greatest question ever asked”

The economics hook is, of course, that people act according to incentives and it’s fun to try and examine a ‘selfless’ act.

It’s a polarizing topic; the post gets 200 comments where a more normal number would be around 30. But what kind of comments? I looked at this, and said, “Boy the opinions are sure to come out on this.”

It’s a chance to see a fascinating cross-section of viewpoints on an interesting topic.

jimi (#1)  starts off well with a balanced viewpoint. He thinks, “People are inherently selfish, Jesus is not.” but affirms altruism and acknowledges a spectrum.

charlie (#2)  points out the massive incentive of all the glory.

justin (#3) whips out a false dichotomy based on a poor understanding of Christian theology. “If you’re a Christian, then he isn’t a person…”

orphan cow (#4) “Eternal Life… or eternal fame… depending on your beliefs.”

superdave (#5) indicates Jesus was exceptional and is points out that he is now worshiped.

ben (#6) thinks the incentive was love.

nate (#8) concurs.

matt (#9) suggests that God is just polishing his image.

dolores (#10) cracks a joke. It’s an okay joke.

sai (#12) thinks we do things for the warm fuzzies we get; altruism doesn’t exist.

keven (#13) – he was maximizing utility.

jim (#14) blames  the Romans.

abhishek (#16) thinks Jesus was exceptional.

pierre-louis (#20) slips in a dig at religion while explaining altruism as long term selfishness.

howie (#21) brings forth the christian rhetoric.

Tommy in the beanfields (#22) thinks Jesus was a madman and not rational.

richard deliberty(#23) figures Jesus never saw it coming

gerv (#25) points out that responding to incentives is not necessarily selfish. Good point, gerv.

tim (#30) has a big problem with religion.

petteri (#33) says you can’t apply statistical economics to individuals.

rishi (#36) also blames the romans

mike d (#42) is eloquent.

“There are no economics in heaven.

Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources. Because scarcity exists, incentives exist. Jesus’ promise – the promise of heaven – is the end of scarcity and an eternity of abundance. Jesus’ choice, then, was between ruling a world of scarce resources and completely transforming it into a world of abundance.”

PsiCop (#43) thinks altruism is a good story-telling device.

joshua (#46) brings the Bible into it – Hebrews 12:2 aka he did it for joy.

PaulD (#48) mentions the mother-child relationship. I’m surprised it took so long.

caca feugo (#52) gives a solid breakdown that he did it for love.

#57 takes #3 to task – Jesus was fully human

#58  – Jesus was fictional

#60 – Jesus was crazy

#62 – He didn’t have a choice

#65 – For the legacy

apok #70 “…But incentives mean that had the price of going to the Cross increased, he would’ve not done so, and I think it’s likely the Cross was inelastic with respect to price.”

#72 – it’s a good story about love.

#80 – Jesus was a jewish nationalist who was killed by the Romans but who never intended to redeem people’s sins.

#83 – He didn’t exist

#88 – Jesus was being tricky and unconventional

#91 – Jesus knew what he was doing.

#92 doesn’t like religion

#97 – soldiers die for their comrades and get medals for it

#122 – we make choices according to how we interpret our current experience. Spiritual/enlightened decision making is better.

#130 – the West can’t understand Jesus

#136,7,8 – Jesus isn’t human so it doesn’t count

#154 – we don’t know that church provided records are accurate

Observations and Conclusions

There were a great many (different!) honestly held beliefs about who Jesus was – they ran the spectrum from entirely fictional to a Jewish nationalist to a madman to a cult leader to a teacher to the Son of God. I was surprised by the number of people who believed Jesus was purely fictional.

I was also surprised by the number of people who viewed Jesus (and his experience) as fundamentally unlike them and their experience – the ‘Jesus was exceptional’ stance. It feels like it’s being used to justify a more ‘reasonable’ set of expectations for every one else.

Comments on a blog are a terrible place for discussion. They encourage shallow, quick retorts. There’s the pressure to post before the discussion moves on past you and your comment never gets read. There’s quite a bit of empty zealotry, although not nearly as much as on CBC message boards.

The couple people who labeled themselves ‘agnostic’ seemed to be able to describe the Christian position fairly well and without undue malice.

I don’t know what I intended to learn from summarizing the discussion; but I’m suddenly convicted of my own tendancy to live a life defined by scarcity – “I must do XXXX because…”

comments: 0 »

Perspective

November 11, 2009 under wholenessinreallife

Perspective is a funny thing.

I’m sure there are thousands of little German boys who would have given anything to be in Robert Enke’s place – the first-choice goaltender for the German national football team.

But on Tuesday, he threw it all away when he walked in front of a train.

Thousands of people are willing to point at something  like that: “There is the most valuable thing.” but to him it didn’t mean that much. To him there was something more important… but tragically, it was missing.

What he saw must have been vastly different from what everyone else saw. More likely is that things were crowded out of his vision – that he couldn’t see what everyone else did, because he was preoccupied with something else.

Have a prayer for his widow and for his daughter.

comments: 5 » tags: , ,

News Anchors

November 11, 2009 under tongueincheek

Why do we still have TV news anchors?

So far as I can tell, good news anchors embody the following:

  • Bland and inoffensive
  • Willing to endure a yuppie haircut
  • Pretty face
  • Ability to adhere to standard intonation pattern
  • Don’t make racist jokes in front of a live camera(see ‘bland and inoffensive’)

Umm… I think I just perfectly described a CGI avatar.

Let’s look at how CGI anchors make things better in the news room.

  • Perfect hair, perfect teeth
  • Perfect intonation
  • Perfectly scripted
  • Don’t water down the newscast with sub-par reporting as part of their desire to perform ‘real journalism’
  • Don’t make the rest of the staff upset about their disproportionate wage (“I could do that job. Anyone could do that job.”)
  • You can turn them off.

Now…

If news stations were in the habit of putting real people in front of the camera, I would retract this post.

But why do things halfway?

comments: 1 » tags: , , ,

Yuck. Just Yuck.

November 9, 2009 under technical

If there’s English hidden in here, I don’t know where to find it.

Context

The presentation-tier request handling mechanism must control and coordinate processing of each user across multiple requests. Such control mechanisms may be managed in either a centralized or decentralized manner.

(from the Core J2EE Pattern Catalog)

comments: 2 » tags: , , , , ,

Umm… A little predictable, I think

November 9, 2009 under curios

I guess I really don’t have to tell you, ’cause you could have guessed it anyway…

The decline of video games sales.

It’s obvious, but it’s worth mentioning, if only to learn a couple lessons. You would hope that these lessons are self-evident, but… apparently not! The article is pretty good.

Lesson 1: Don’t rely on selling the same thing over and over again to the same customer.

At a fundamental level, a first-person-shooter is a first-person-shooter. An RPG is an RPG. It’s very comfortable to sell people something where they know what they’re getting. People won’t get mad at you. They will already know how to play the game you’re selling (they’ve played it before in some form or other).

The problem with selling the same thing over and over again to the same people is that you really struggle to find some sort of hook, some sales pitch that will convince people it’s worth buying again.

The crutch that has kept modern gaming hobbling along to this point is Better Graphics. Next Generation games look better.

Or, on a more general level, Production Quality. Next Generation games are more polished.

This leads us to Lesson 2:

Lesson2: Invest in areas where you get a return on your investment.

“Although the graphical fidelity of video games increases with each generation of new games console, it takes increasingly more people and resources to utilise the power of the new machines.

“In this current generation a tipping point has been reached where some games development has become almost prohibitively expensive.”

Polish is really expensive. It’s really expensive because instead of shipping something merely different you are forced to ship something demonstrably better. If you just shipped something different that had a comparable level of polish, you’d be okay.

But no, you’re trying to do the same thing, except you have to polish it enough that people will pay full retail price for it again.

And you hit the point of diminishing returns very quickly.

It’s a spiral. More polish means higher expectations the next time, which means higher costs, which means more at stake, which means innovation is not an option because you need to guarantee success.

Hmm… sounds a lot like Hollywood.

Why I’m Ranting

I don’t really care about video games. What really got me about this article is that it highlights something I see a lot in my day to day – We’ve lost the concept of ‘good enough’.

The need to sell more stuff pushes us way past the optimal cost/benefit point of ‘good enough’ to design things that just aren’t worth it. They’re too complex. They’re environmentally unfriendly. They’re 200% of the price for 105% of the value.

And the kicker is… we believe that things *have* to be this way because things *are* this way. Game producers will cry that they have to spend more on pixel-pushing because that’s what gamers want.

No… That’s what they’ve *taught* gamers to want.

If it’s a cycle of stupidity then it’s a self inflicted cycle of stupidity.

Nowhere is this more true than in gaming.

The final conclusive evidence

You don’t need a million man hours to make a great game. You just need a few great man hours.

Try it out.

comments: 0 »

The long night has begun

November 5, 2009 under tongueincheek

For the next four months, it will be dark when I go to work and dark when I get home.

Oh Goody.

comments: 2 » tags: ,
« Previous