Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Like my brownhouse:
   warehousing the bad
Thursday, March 3 2011
[REDACTED] The lecture was presented by Glenn Loury in a small lecture room at Bard College and was on the subject of incarceration policy in the United States, which relates directly to what Gretchen does for a living (many of her colleagues were also in attendance). Unfortunately Loury's PowerPoint presentation was corrupted somehow and he had to cobble together a presentation from disparate files. So we saw the graphs he wanted to show us: that the United States imprisons five times as many people as Great Britain, the most imprisonment-happy country in Europe. And if you're a black man who drops our of high school, you stand a 70 percent chance of spending time in prison some time before your 35th birthday. While many states have come to view their huge populations of aging prisoners as perhaps not the best use of taxpayer dollars, but Loury warned that if we don't fix the underlying moral attitude ("lock 'em up and throw away the key") then even if prison populations are reduced, we'll eventually drift back to our bad old ways as economic times improve. Interestingly, the huge increase in American prison populations is not as old of phenomenon as I'd thought; it began in the early 1970s, when politicians figured out they could compete with each other based on how much they wanted to stick it to the bad guys. It's likely that this attitude was just a new acceptable container for the placement of America's racist attitudes. After all, what makes America so different from the democracies of Europe? What is it that keeps us from passing comprehensive health care or building out the kind of social infrastructure that would actually end up saving us money? It's racism. It's a white majority not wanting to spend money on people unlike themselves. In places like Sweden, the poor traditionally looked the same as rich and thus people were more open to socialist principles.
Another issue Loury hinted at that makes the United States different from European societies is our strict geographic segregation and compartmentalized tax structure. Rich neighborhoods get good schools and poor neighborhoods get crappy schools. The old can move to enclaves in Florida where there are no children and pay almost no property tax while the people who mow their grass have to commute there to do so while sending their kids to crappy underfunded public schools. A society that really believed in giving everyone the same advantages would pool its tax money across the entire nation and fund schools in proportion to how many children are being educated. That alone would do much to give children in crappy urban neighborhoods a path to something other than imprisonment, saving us all tax dollars spent warehousing the bad.
After the lecture, Gretchen and I drove up to Tivoli and dined at Luna 61. I ordered a noodle-tofu dish that incoherently referenced both Italian and south-east Asian flavors. After two beers, a glass of wine, three appetizers, and a huge piece of chocolate cake for Gretchen, we ended up blowing nearly $100.
Tonight's outing had ripped me away from the latest improvement to the solar controller: a boiler data logger. When I returned to it this evening, I found that the logger had been successfully logging boiler firings in eight byte records stored in a little eight pin I2C EEPROM: four bytes for timestamp, two bytes for fuel level (not yet being measured), one byte for outdoor temperature (not yet being measured), and one byte for amount of time the boiler had fired (my algorithm had been a little off and I'd been measuring the amount of time the boiler hadn't been firing).


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?110303

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