Transparent Campaigns

I've been trying to decide who to vote for in next week's municipal election.  It's a lot more difficult, since there seem to be a lot more candidates.  Elections here have often been the incumbent and a few other candidates who don't seem ready for prime time.  But now there are a lot of candidates who seem quite serious and professional.  So I've been going through newspaper write-ups and candidate web pages trying to make up my mind.

I'm pleasantly surprised that few of them are running on the angry-letter-to-the-editor platform.  That is, most candidate make a token reference to defending the taxpayers' money, but there were no angry tirades about throwing out the bums on the gravy train.  Actually, way more people were highlighting poverty and affordable housing as important issues.

But one trend that I have noticed is that Transparency and Consultation have become extremely overused.  Every candidate makes a big deal about talking to the people, being available, and having meetings open to the public.  Obviously those are all good things, but they're also bland, unquantifiable, safe promises that anyone can make.  They are to municipal politics what a promise of a suggestion box is to student council.

It's weird that at a time when we can barely find the time to vote or read a newspaper, we demand closer interaction with our politicians than ever before.  I make an effort to keep informed about politics, but I don't really feel the need to get any more involved.  I'd be happy to vote for a candidate who's slogan is, don't worry, I'll handle it.

Bragging About Length

I figured I should eventually back up this blog, in case, you know, Google goes bankrupt or something.  So I've cut and pasted all the entries into a word processor file.  Of course, I was also curious as to how much I've written altogether.

The answer is: 354 pages, single spaced. Or in words, 193,632.  Or to put it in terms more people can understand, that's somewhere between Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Or, close to the length of Johnathon Franzen's The Corrections.  I should get around to reading that; maybe it won't feel so intimidating now.

Or, it's around a third of Infinite Jest or War and Peace. Or it's the Bible almost to the end of Judges.  So that's pretty good for a little over two-and-a-half years of part-time writing.  But still, don't expect my Great Canadian Novel soon, unless I go in to NaNoWriMo.

Local Vote, The Cola Wars, I Can't Take It Anymore

We saw a proliferation of newsletters and pamphlets when desktop publishing software and laser printers caused a massive drop in the cost of printing professional documents.  But what technological change made it cost-effective to make dozens of lawn signs for small-town city councillor races?  Did plastic sheets and wooden stakes suddenly become cheaper?

I grew up with the idea that lawn signs for only feature of provincial and federal elections.  (Those of you from big cities might have different experiences.)  But now it seems that all but the least-funded candidates for civic office have them, and even some of the school board trustees.

I have to wonder if they actually work in smaller races. For one thing, there's a much lower voter turn-out. That means that the herd-mentality types that might be swayed by quantities of signs make up a lower portion of the electorate.  Whoever it is that votes in municipal elections manages to withstand letters from cranky taxpayers in the newspaper and re-elect most of the same people each time, so I don't think that a sign on a vacant lot is going to sway them.

Part of the problem is that in elections with parties, we already know all the stances of the candidates, they're just trying to remind you of their presence, the way Coca-Cola keeps advertising even though everyone knows who they are.  But if federal and provincial elections are like the Cola Wars, then municipal elections are like buying small artisan creations: you don't know the brands, you're not even sure what you're buying, and you want to get to know the people behind the product.  So just seeing their name over an over doesn't tell you much.  I wouldn't by a hand-carved sea turtle from someone because I've seen their name lots of places, and I won't put them on city council either.

Changing The Status Quoth

If you follow football, you know there are only a few patterns for helmet styling.  By far the most popular is "Logo on the Side":

(All these graphics are from The Helmet Project)

Less popular is "Projecting from Front":
Or there is "Around the Back":
And rarest of all is "All Over":

That's kind of limited, given how many football teams there are across Canada and the U.S., professional, college, and occasional short-lived rival league.  So I'm glad to see the new helmets for Carleton University:

Photo by The.Rohit, who also has some adorable animal photos

That's right, they've introduced the "Over the Top" helmet, with a big mysterious raven on it.  Just think what they can do with this now.  A big mane for the Broncos, a red crest on the Cardinals.  Introducing this and other new helmet paradigms is the least we can do, given that I, as a child, assumed we'd have holographic helmets by now, looking like there are wings or horns sticking out the side.

Get Cracking

I remember the "Bored Elon Musk" parody twitter making a good point:

Taking a photo of a check with our phone? This is the solution we've come up with?
— Bored Elon Musk (@BoredElonMusk) March 1, 2014

Based on past suggestions, I'm sure this fictionalized version of Musk would suggest brain implants that let us think our money to another person. But really, he does have a point that this isn't the optimal solution.

In the past I've complained about technological solutions that don't think through the implications of their own innovations. For example, suggesting that you could replace conventional mail with with mail that is sent electronically, then printed out and delivered to the recipient. Well, there is a related flaw, one demonstrated in the picture-cheque complaint: using technology to get around an existing problem, instead of removing the thing that caused the flaw. It's like people who spend hours on the phone while driving: if you can communicate with anyone, anytime, why the need to travel so much? And if we can move money around purely electronically, and everyone has a device they can use to do all the things that used to require a bank branch, then why bother with physical cheques at all?

I thought of this today as news went around that Facebook and Apple would pay female employees to freeze their eggs so they can work for those tech companies without giving up on having children. Yes, in a world where we have the ability to make work incredibly flexible, we instead use technology to rearrange our lives so that we can stick with the old fashioned way of working.

Mysterious Pays

Earlier I criticized the move to give away U2's latest album to all iTunes users. I reasoned that it was a bad idea from the perspective of U2 or Apple. Well, not so fast.

It turns out that about 26 million people downloaded the entire album, and 80 million downloaded at least one track, or streamed some of it. That's not many compared to the total number of iTunes users (about half-a-billion) but it is a lot when you consider that up until then, only 14 million iTunes users had bought anything by U2. Keep in mind that doesn't mean the band has suddenly acquired more fans: they had only released two albums since the iTunes store opened in 2003. So one can assume that most of the downloads were old fans with no need to buy their music off iTunes unless their cassette of The Unforgettable Fire falls apart.

The amount that Apple paid for rights to the album hasn't been released. I’ve seen amounts between 5-30 million dollars. Even if it’s the lesser amount, that’s still a good payday, since artists don’t make much off of music sales anymore - for a band of their age, concerts are where the money is. Some articles are saying Apple spent $100 million on this, but that’s their total promoting this project, not the amount paid to the band or their label. But still, that’s a big expense to have taken care of.

But here's the unexpected part: U2's old albums have seen an increase in (paid) downloads. As I write this - a month later - The Joshua Tree is 39th in iTunes album downloads, one ahead of Katy Perry's last album. Achtung Baby and their singles collection have also made the top 100.

So I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it was actually a good deal for U2. They may have received some bad publicity, and been the butt of late-night monologues, but in terms of getting their music to people, and making money doing it, the scheme was much better than any ordinary album launch. So Apple can expect other established artists to ask to get in on their next promotion.

I'm Going To Comic-Con As The American Middle Class

The Week magazine recently did a story implying that the rise in cosplay is evidence of how poor the economy is. The idea is that people are turning to escapism because of how disappointing their reality is. That may seem like the sort of thing that only a myopic business journalist would think, seeing everything in economic terms. Perhaps they need to find a hobby. How about cosplay? They could dress as a Ferengi, it'll be fun. Or they could be more creative and dress as the invisible hand of the market.

But seriously, I think they actually do have a point. It was simplistic to think of it in economic terms, but the fact is that lots of people are disappointed with many aspects of their real lives. I'm reminded of a quote from one of the Trekkies movies (documentaries about Star Trek fans.) A member of a Klingon-themed rock group, when asked how long he'd continue, said, "When the real world stops being lame, I'll stop doing this." That's one of my favourite movie quotes, and I remember it whenever I feel any shame in my geekhood.

Because that Klingon has got a point: reality does suck. We don't realize it because there's a real prejudice against fantasy, and an assumption that reality is inherently good. The trouble with that assumption is that the line between reality and fantasy isn't as clear as we think. If you're a hunter-gatherer living in the Great Rift Valley of Eastern Africa, presumably reading this on a laptop left by missionaries, then fine, you're living in reality. Anyone else out there is living in a world that we've created. And there's really no reason that your created reality is any better than the one that Klingon rocker lives in. As an example, it's often noted that there's a parallel between the fantasy world of sci-fi & fantasy, and the fantasy world of sports.  When you think about it, there's no reason for dressing as a fantasy character to be less acceptable than putting on a sports jersey.

The modern world is disappointing a lot of people in a lot of ways. I don't want to sound like a pessimist claiming that everything is terrible all the time. I think you can attribute a lot of that disappointment to the changes society is going through. Some of that is economic: we've been promised a lot of things we haven't received, whether it's a stress-free technology job or a decent living from a manufacturing job. But there's plenty of non-economic dissatisfaction too. At your local convention, you'll probably see a woman cosplaying to escape a world where she's been objectified and disrespected, and a man cosplaying to escape a world in which entitlements and expectations have changed to become unfamiliar to him.

So it's not surprising that many people use popular fantasy to escape from an unpleasant reality.  And once you abandon the assumption that our society is somehow inherently good, it's not even troubling.