Productivity

Evidently, time was a wastin'

The woman in the Lexus SUV behind me kept looking down at something while we were on the one ramp this morning. It was rush hour, so the ramp was metered. We'd sit, roll forward a car or truck length, sit, roll forward, wash, rinse, repeat. And when I'd stop, I'd glance in my rear-view mirror. The woman behind me was dividing her time between watching where she was going, and whatever it was she was fiddling with - texting, reading e-mail, whatever. If she'd only looked down when stopped, it would have been better, but she'd let her car roll up behind mine, while her attention was seemingly fixed on her lap.

I know that I seemed obsessive about it, but I'd once been stopped been stopped at a red light, and the person behind me had better things to do than keep his mind on what he was doing, he'd rolled into me, putting a football-sized dent in the back of my car, and consigning me to several weeks of being folded into Origami by a sadistic chiropractor. So I was very attentive to her. But no so much that I didn't realize the irony that on the radio, at that same time, was this story: Government Eyes Crackdown On Texting And Driving.

I understand bans on Texting and Driving are becoming more popular, but I don't think that it's really the way to go. Mainly because I don't think that it really hits the target. Think of the last time you heard or read someone saying that the time you spend in a car, going from one place to another, as "wasted," "unproductive" or an "under-utilized resource to be reclaimed" - even when YOU'RE the one doing the driving? Not that long ago, was it? Why do we deride time used watching where we're going on the the road as misspent? The woman behind me was clearly of the opinion that whatever it was she was doing was too important to wait. So, she divided her time and attention between driving, and the other activity - much to my consternation. (By the way, she didn't wind up rear-ending me.) But she was doing something that garners a lot of respect in today's world - "multitasking." She was doing something "constructive" in time that we currently have little respect for.

In an earlier story on Texting and Driving (which I commented on at NPRs site), one David Strayer, a psychologist at the University of Utah, is quoted as saying: "When it becomes stigmatized and you have the legislation and education and science all together as a package, you'll change people's behavior. And until you have that package in place, you're not going to see systematic changes in driver behavior." This is helpful, but it might miss the greater point. To make the roads safer, perhaps we should stigmatize the entire idea that time devoted to nothing other than controlling a moving motor vehicle is somehow wasted - a "gap" in which other, more important things can be done.

I know that I'll spend less time looking in my rear-view mirror.

Offroading the Moral High Ground

"Hummer Owners Claim Moral High Ground To Excuse Overconsumption, Study Finds"

How's THAT for a headline? Unfortunately, I haven't read the study myself - mainly because, so far, I've been too cheap to pay the University of Chicago ten dollars to download a PDF copy. But from the short Science Daily article and other peices I read concerning the study, I didn't see anything that indicates that the authors of the study explicitly defined owning a Hummer as "overconsumption," or that the people they interviewed lived lavish lifestyles as a whole.

"Our analysis of the underlying American identity discourses revealed that being under siege by (moral) critics is an historically established feature of being an American," write the authors.

You think? But here's the thing. People who own Hummers DO take flack, and a lot of it, from "(moral) critics." Some of this is because it's pretty easy to use one's personal understanding of morality to be a jackass. But it's also inherent in the idea of morality. Once you define an action (or inaction) as a moral imperative, criticism and condemnation of people who do otherwise is a pretty simple next step.

"Hummer Owners Take The High Ground, Defend Overconsumption With Patriotism"

Of course, those people who like to aim their weekly Two Minutes Hate at Hummers and those who love them had no problem taking aim at the 20 subjects (yep, the study covers just 20 Hummer owners*) and savaging them in blogs and online message boards didn't seem to realize that they were busily validating the very feeling of "being under siege by (moral) critics" that the study described. It seems that utter blindness to blatantly obvious irony is another side effect of strongly-held moral beliefs.

* I find it difficult to believe that 20 people would honestly be considered to be a representative sample of Hummer owners. Self-selection bias in respondents aside, as of 2008, the H3 alone had sold just North of 150,000 units. Not to mention the fact that when you're doing a study on "Consumer Identity Work as Moral Protagonism," you kind of have to rule out everyone who sees their auto purchasing decisions as having the same moral weight as the shoes they wear to work that day.

Coffee and a Hot Bun

The Seattle area, as you may have heard, has coffee places about every 12 to 15 feet. You can't toss an empty Starbucks' cup without it landing on an espresso bar. Given this saturated market. operators have been using sex to sell caffeine, as I've mentioned before.

Well, it seems that in addition to selling coffee, one can use sex to sell, well, sex - or something like it. (Who knew?) It seems that in the city of Everett, north of Seattle, "Bikini Baristas," as they're commonly termed, have been taking money to let patrons touch them on the breasts or buttocks, or to flash a little more skin than the law allows. From the descriptions, it doesn't sound much different than a Spring Break party - which given the ages of the baristas, makes perfect sense.

The surprise here is the legal implication - the young women involved are being charged with prostitution. While I understand that jurisdictions are free to create their own definitions of crimes, this sounds a bit like charging the participants of the bar brawl with attempted murder. So this raises an interesting question. How much latitude do jurisdictions have in defining their terms? Also of interest is the fact that this case has prompted Everett to update its laws. Not the laws on prostitution, but lewd conduct, presumably to make it easier to rein in the Bikini Barista establishments. I'm sure there will be plenty of volunteers for enforcement patrols.

Itsy Bitsy

The itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the water spout,
Six months of rain, then washed the spider out,
Then sometime next year, the Sun dried up the rain,
But the itsy-bitsy spider had moved to sunny Spain.

Hey!

What?

That's not the way the song goes!

It is here in Seattle...

Sunday Driver

Fortunately, there wasn't much traffic.