It's Dangerous To Go Alone

So I went to an informal dinner party the other day. It was close by, perhaps only 250 yards or so as the crow flies. With flashlights and a decent knowledge of Morse code, we could converse from our windows without needing cell phones. There are no other residences between their condominium building and our apartment complex. But since we're on opposite sides of the expressway, the total walk is about 1 half mile.

In the wake of the Zimmerman verdict, my girlfriend expressed concern about me making that trip after dark.

Now, she didn't follow the whole Trayvon Martin case closely, and wound up getting most her information about the whole affair second-hand. And, in doing so, came away with the idea that the end result of the verdict is that it's dangerous for me to be on the street once it gets dark. Given that we live in the Seattle area, we're about as far away from Sanford, Florida as you can get without leaving the lower 48. Still, my girlfriend has an increased concern for my safety after dark. This strikes me as worrisome.

Florida's "stand your ground" law is, as nearly as I can tell, being neither a legislator or a lawyer, poorly written. As I understand it, a person may pick a fight and then resort to deadly force to extricate themselves if it goes badly, and attempt to cover themselves with the law. But, it is Florida's law. Not Washington's. While the Zimmerman case may or (more likely) may not be a springboard to a national conversation about race, the legal system and justice, one effect that it is having is to make certain segments of the population feel unsafe. Which is ironic, because the whole point behind "stand your ground" was to combat a feeling of being unsafe while out an about - even if that feeling of "unsafety" was courtesy, at least in part, of National Rifle Association fear-mongering, given that violent crime has been trending downward recently.

The smaller the segment of the population that feels safe, the smaller the segment of the population that tends to be safe, as people who feel threatened often come to feel that the best defense is a good (and proactive) offense. Laws that simply shuffle insecurity around, or worse, increase it, don't help deal with that.

Laundering the Pie

This is the sort of thing that results in angry customers. And it should.

"[Tide] Pod is killing the laundry detergent category," [James] Craigie, [chief executive of Church & Dwight Co.,] said at an industry conference in February.

New products ought to expand the revenue pie for manufacturers and retailers, not shrink it, he said. That is what innovation always did in the past, he said.

And just what are Tide Pod capsules doing to "kill" the laundry detergent category? They're eliminating customer overuse. Many people, it turns out, tend to use more laundry detergent when necessary when washing their clothes. And many industry players, Church & Dwight included, count on that overuse to drive profitability. But when Procter and Gamble's Tide Pods began to take off, other detergent makers felt that they needed to follow suit, entering the "unit dose" market, and sales (and profits) started to decline.

"Now, what kind of a new product is good when it's hurting the total category?" [Craigie] said.

Translation: Who do Procter and Gamble think they are, creating a product that doesn't help drive more profits for everyone else?

Now, businesses are in business to make money. I get that. After all, it's the point. But part of the point behind competitive markets is to drive efficiency, which benefits customers. It's one of the few ways in which the Adam Smith ideal of people benefiting others through looking out for their own interests is realized. Craigie, on the other hand, is calling for a certain level of what can be thought of as a sort of backdoor collusion, where a business's first loyalties are to the people who are supposed to be the competition - just not enough to get themselves into legal trouble.

Granted, Procter and Gamble aren't doing this out of the goodness of their capitalist hearts. Tide Pods cost about a nickel a load more than liquid Tide, a premium of about 25%. And they say that Tide Pods are drawing customers away from rival products. So it's not like they're hurting themselves to help out the customer. But, on the large scale, anyway, it does come across as a win-win for Procter and Gamble and their customers, at the expense of other industry players.

So score one for both Big Business and the Little Guy. And let's see if this inspires more companies to look for innovations that operate in this fashion. Granted, there will be obstacles - as Adam Lowry, co-founder of Method Products Inc., points out, a format that completely eliminated customer "overdosing" would lead to anger among shareholders. Of course, when new innovations help the bottom line at the expense of the competition, they don't mind so much...

Ghost

The question had been a simple one: "Is Cancer a "Gift?" Although the author's answer had been no, I had expected that someone in the comments would take the opposite view and answer, "yes."

But not quite in this way.

"I would consider it a gift. I cannot take anymore of this wretched life but am too cowardly to commit suicide."

It's hard to know what to do, when confronted with such obvious pain from a total stranger, but sometimes, it's just as hard to do nothing. So, I did the only thing that I could. Even with throwing proofreading to the wind, it felt like painfully slow going. I am an indifferent typist at best, and, unlike so many other Things on the Internet, this wasn't something that could simply be dashed off and entrusted to the "cloud." It felt more important than that, and so I measured every word, and considered it carefully (And even so, I made some missteps.), before clicking "Reply."

And finding that I was too late.

The post you are trying to reply to has been removed by a moderator.

Why the moderator had removed the post, I don't know. There was nothing else under the user's profile. No trolling, no flames, no cynical and malicious political baiting. Only the single lie, "[User Name] hasn't commented yet." And the forlorn "1" for her "Comments" count. Whoever she had been, and whatever her intentions, she was gone, her digital presence persisting only as long as the window. Clicking a link, clicking "Back" or refreshing the page would scatter what was left of it to oblivion. And so, I scattered her, destroying her ghost. Mostly. An image remains, plucked from the screen and frozen in place. Forever unchanging, a still life of reaching out, and finding no-one there.

Everybody Needs a Hobby

Am I the only one who finds this fishy right out of the gate?

 In the time it took me to walk back to my office after seeing this ad on the side of a Metro bus, I was able to turn it over and over again in my head. I knew, from having tangentially kept up with such things, and having seen some of the earlier salvos in this teapot tempest, that this was a response to bus advertisements put out by a pro-Palestinian group. One which had called for Equal Rights for Palestinians. (It's a position that I have a certain amount of sympathy for, although I'm convinced that in the Grand Scheme of Things the Palestinians are screwed. Israel has little to gain from making concessions, and the Palestinians have little to offer to incentivize them.)

Curious as to whether or not the group sponsoring the ad, which calls itself "The American Freedom Defense Initiative" (not a good sign), was simply being disingenuous or downright dishonest, I quickly Googled them later, and found that this was an umbrella group run by one of the people who'd lead the opposition to the "Ground Zero Mosque" (another not-good sign). When I found out that one of the groups under this umbrella, "Stop Islamization of America" has been called out by the Anti-Defamation League as a hate group, my suspicions that this ad was not to be trusted were confirmed. (Just in case I'd forgotten about a push for a two-state solution, or something.)

But I wonder - what real purpose do these ads serve? After all, I wasn't alone when I saw this. There were nearly two dozen other people walking along as well, and none of them appeared to even notice, let alone take any interest in, this particular ad. It seemed unlikely that they would convince anyone that way. And it's not like the Seattle area is exactly a hotbed of pro-Israel activism. And spending thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars simply to be able to say "I can do this too," seems odd, especially in light of the fact that the older, pro-Palestinian ads had more or less been forgotten. (I'd forgotten them myself, until I saw this.)

Oh, well. I guess it beats being bored...

Pawns

One thing that I've often noticed with mutually antagonistic groups is that they have a distinct tendency to talk past one another, even while they seek to refute each other. Last month, one Larry Alex Taunton penned an article for The Atlantic in which he prescribed that churches be more authentic in their dealings with young people if they wanted to stem the flight of youth into apostasy. It was an interesting enough article, even if it raised some red flags for me. Apparently, I wasn't the only one with concerns. To wit:

When Larry Alex Taunton talked to young atheists about why they left Christianity, he interpreted their objections as matters of style, not substance. That's not accurate or fair.

Jeffrey Tayler then proceeds to lay out why he feels that Mr. Taunton's "deeply problematic findings" serve to "peremptorily dismiss these atheists' valid objections and present snippets from the interviews in such a way as to insult the sincerity of their nonbelief and foreclose other possible explanations for their apostasy."

But there is an assumption there, that Mr. Tayler cannot, since he does not know the people in question, back up; namely that Mr. Taunton arrived at an incorrect understanding of why the particular subset of atheists that he speaks of left Christianity. The fact that that a nonbeliever may understand Mr. Taunton's conclusion (as presented by Mr. Tayler) "that if church services had been more 'meaningful' or if preachers had preached more convincingly, these lost sheep might never have strayed from the flock," to be conveniently self-serving does not mean that it was necessarily insincere. Or, more simply, we can't know, given the information at hand, that it was inaccurate.

To a degree, both Messrs. Taunton and Tayler make the same error - they treat the small handful of people that Mr. Taunton speaks of as being representative of a much larger community of people. Mr. Taunton may be absolutely correct about that small group. That doesn't mean that theirs is a majority or even a plurality opinion. As I noted at the time, "The young woman who decides that the Christian God is non-existent because a specific prayer wasn't answered or disavows a belief in the afterlife because she wants a hated relative consigned to oblivion, is not the same as someone who doesn't believe in something because the burden of proof they ask for has not been met." Perhaps what's at work is as simple as self-selection bias - the group of people who would find it worth their while to speak to someone who actively seeks a way to prevent others from following their path just may be those who would rather not have walked it in the first place. Personally, I felt that Mr. Taunton, the Fixed Point Foundation or both had likely engaged in a bit of cherry-picking, focusing in on those people, out of the "flood of enquiries" that were received, that were most likely to tell them what they may or may not have realized that they would be receptive to.

In any event, I'm not sure it makes a difference, except to the degree that, just as Mr. Taunton finds atheism "historically naive and potentially dangerous," Mr. Tayler finds that Christianity requires one to believe "improbable and troubling stories." For each then, they are playing a zero-sum game, where any member of one camp is to be jealously guarded and protected from the destructive blandishments of the opposition. Otherwise, is it at all relevant what (or why) Mr. Taunton, or anyone else, believes or disbelieves?