“Checkout the trunk”
Web Developer: “Using svn, right?”
Zoologist: “Yeah, that’s an amazing elephant!”

“That back end is hideous”
Web Developer: “But it works and the front end looks good anyway.”
Pimp: “She ain’t worth my time!”

“This has ten tags!”
Web Developer: “So? Folksonomic tagging is more relevant than categorization.”
Mattress Salesperson: “It’s illegal for us to cut any of them even though the customers hate them.”

“Refresh”
Web Developer: “Well if IE actually knew how to properly manage cache…”
Deli Worker: “What do you mean? It’s either fresh or it isn’t!”

“Empty your cache”
Web Developer: “Server-side or client-side?”
College Student: “Already did. Damned tuition bills…”

“That’s a beefy server”
Web Developer: “It’s about time we upgraded.”
Restaurant Worker: “I bet he gets stuck in the door to the kitchen.”

“OOP”
Web Developer: “Oh great, here comes another procedural vs. OO argument.”
Non-programmers: “What did you screw up this time?”

“It’s freezing”
Web Developer: “Quit testing the beta version of that browser.”
Meteorologist: “And we can expect this weather to continue for the rest of the week.”

“F1″
Web Developer: “I assume that’s for help, but I have never needed it.”
Car Enthusiast: “Now that’s a real motorsport. Forget this NASCAR crap!”

“Did you hear about the new Opera?”
Web Developer: “Yeah, the rendering seems to be much faster.”
Millionaire: “Of course, I had front-row seats, but I did not attend because my limo driver was ill.”

What if the driver did not pay much for his car? Should I still put new brake pads on his car? You might say so, because it is the humane thing to do, or you might be more capitalist and say no. Perhaps the better answer then is to provide him with the proper drivers’ education to make the roads safer for everyone. Chances are that he has had some basic education, but didn’t grasp certain concepts (reasonable speed?) so his abilities were limited.

Now take those two paragraphs as an analogy for dealing with crime. Rather than a guy crashing into a tree, it’s a guy who is going to steal some bread. We could give him food (new brake pads) but that’s not the capitalist answer. We could provide him with a solid education, so he could earn money and buy his own food. What we actually do is the equivalent of putting up several smaller concrete barriers. Maybe he’ll get caught by one (hit one) or maybe not. We’ve been told that punishments are deterrents, and they are. They’re just not very good ones. We need to address the motivation for the crime directly rather than trying to just discourage a particular behavior. If the abstinence-only policy is taught as “Don’t have sex or society will shun you,” then it does absolutely nothing to address the reason for the behavior. Do you think that’s a successful strategy?

You might argue that we do provide schools, but we do not provide everything necessary to allow all students to attend school. Some children are taking care of their siblings. Some teens are having their own children. Some don’t have regular meals. The question is, how much do we provide (food, day care, housing, etc.) to give everyone a solid chance and how do we prevent abuse of the system? Somehow, asking “How badly can we punish people to force them to go to school?” doesn’t sound like a good question/answer.

Healthcare for all
I am in support of universal healthcare, and I don’t even like doctors (as mentioned previously). I think we have a duty to our fellow man (which means fellow human, in case you are someone who focuses on trivialities) and that includes providing reasonable medical care. I think we also have a duty to ourselves to avoid being taken advantage of. That means we need to regulate the universal healthcare (so for those of you who are astronomers, I’m using “universal” based on the idea that the universe is finite but pretty “frickin’ huge”).

Well, almost all
I propose that the healthcare has a certain logic-limit. In other words, if you are the cause of your illness, universal healthcare does not take care of it. You can pay out of your own pocket, but we aren’t going to give you liposuction if you thought McDonalds was a good meal 21 times a week. If you decide that smoking a pack of cigarettes a day is your right, then it’s our right to deny you healthcare for the lung cancer you develop. Any medical condition that is the result of poor actions on your part or is a complication of a medical condition that was caused by poor actions on your part is not covered. That means if you have health problems because of a thyroid problem, but you eat nutritious food and exercise a reasonable amount, we will provide care. Care can also be done in percentages, such as if your actions/inaction made the problem worse but wasn’t entirely the cause.

It might be tough to always determine how much a person was to blame for his/her own medical condition(s), but we could err on the side of caution. Ultimately, not providing medical attention for self-inflicted problems will either cause those people to die from their own stupidity/laziness/etc. or cause them to change their actions. Social pressures could also produce a change in behavior.

“Man, what’s up with that paper clip and rubber band splint on your finger? Are you trying to be like McGuyver?”
“No, I was mad so I punched a concrete wall.”
“Oh, you’re an idiot. Glad I’m not paying for it.”

Now maybe I’m just using this as an excuse to give myself healthcare, because I just spent nearly $800 out of pocket on an eye exam, glasses, and a year’s supply of contacts (no health insurance is awesome!), but consider the current situation. We might very well have millions of people driving around with bad vision, because it costs too much to buy glasses. Isn’t it worth knowing that the driver who cut you off can at least see you flipping him/her off?

I’m pretty sure at this point it is obvious that I’m referring to the word “nigger.” If you’re offended by it being written out or said, then you are giving more power to it and you probably shouldn’t read this blog post. So many issues are tied up in this word that it means a lot of different things to different people and in different situations. White guys are always feeling awkward when they quote a Dave Chappelle sketch with “nigger” in it. Why? It’s okay if a black guy says it but not a white guy? I’m talking about direct quotes with no malicious intent. Being okay for one ethnicity and not another sounds racist to me, and that’s the very heart of this issue. Making this word grounds to die on is giving it power through racism.

I do understand how/why blacks can call their friends “niggers.” It’s a lot like saying, “Hey Asshole!” If you know the person and you are good friends, then it isn’t an insult (culture-depending, of course). If you don’t know the person, then it is. The significant difference is that many blacks will call others whom they don’t even know “niggers” and that’s okay. It is very rare that a white person, no matter how close to his/her black friends can ever do the same.

We shouldn’t censor this word (I’m not advocating that it should appear on Sesame Street, but that we shouldn’t dismiss any form of media purely on the usage of this word). Doing so ignores the history of it and why it has the connotations it does. The more that we barricade it, put it behind barbed wire, and destroy reputations based solely on this word, the more power we give to it. We’ve changed it into the holy grail of insults.

Ultimately, we decide if we are insulted by something. Consider that in America it’s “okay” to call someone “the skinniest person I’ve ever seen” but horrendously insulting to call someone “the fattest person I’ve ever seen.” Underweight and overweight can both be unhealthy, but it’s all about whether you want to be insulted or not. Culture tells us that being called “fat” is insulting, and most of us believe it.

If someone calls you an “asshole,” you’re obviously not the body part s/he is referring to, so it is not particularly meaningful other than being an insult. If this person doesn’t know you, then why care? If someone calls you a “nigger,” it can’t mean more than “black person” (which you obviously agree with or you would simply raise an eyebrow at the insult) unless you let it. It never originally meant more than that. I’m not saying you have to cheer every time the word is used; I’m just suggesting that we give power to words that are spoken not the other way around. Don’t give it power if you don’t want it to have any.

Here’s a few more to get you thinking:

T: Buying someone a birthday present
M: Reminding an older person it is his/her birthday

T: Offering to pick up a heart-clogging, fast food cheeseburger for someone
M: Suggesting someone starts exercising more to improve his/her health

T: Telling someone who looks bad that s/he looks good
M: Telling someone who stinks that s/he stinks

T: Telling someone s/he is smart for doing a simple task
M: Telling someone s/he “isn’t the smartest person in the world”

I guess people don’t want the tools to make things better. They want the tools to deceive themselves into thinking things are better.

One day a really ditzy girl decides to wear a black bra and a white t-shirt. She is ditzy, so she has no idea that the white shirt is practically see-thru and the black bra will be really obvious to everyone. All the normal people realize that this was a really stupid choice, but ditziness is often tied with looking good, so people start to see it as a “hot girl showing off what she has.” Since she is already popular for being good looking, the new “style” will pick up.

Soon, the trend is followed by the girls who don’t look quite as good but think that they will be popular because they follow the styles that the popular girls follow. Of course, those girls soon find the support of the latest pop music videos.

Another example is guys wearing sagging pants. Somehow a trend got started that makes certain people think that they should wear their pants six or more inches below where they should be, while wearing boxers at the normal level. This is very different from the trend where girls wear low jeans to show off a thong, because the three strings that make up that thong probably cost more than the whole pack of WalMart boxers the guy is showing off. If you have to constantly pull up your pants, they’re the wrong size!

I’m not sure how this one started. It could be that someone thought plumbers were really cool, but their cracks were not. It might also be related to the male tendency to buy clothes without trying them on. Some fairly popular, dyslexic guy bought jeans with a waist of 43 inches instead of 34. He didn’t want to admit his mistake, so he opted to wear them anyway and pretend he bought that size on purpose. Next thing you know, other guys are thinking, “Well, I’d love if *insert model’s name here* would wear her pants that low, so I bet girls will be all over me if I wear mine like that too!” They don’t realize that the girls notice the cheapo, inside-out (because they’ve been worn 10 times without being washed) boxers and are turned off. Nor do they realize other guys are plotting going around with staple guns and fixing the sagging problem. Remember, it’s called underwear.

Then there are face piercings. Some guy named Bubba was licking his fishing hook (don’t ask me why, he should have stuck to shrimp) and it slipped, passing through his lip. He didn’t want to just yank it out and he wasn’t smart enough to work it backward, so he kept it in there while he finished his fishing. Bubba forgot about the hook and slept that night. When he woke the next morning, he saw the hook in his mirror and realized the wound had healed over, so he just left it in. Bubba is a big guy, so people started associating metal crap on someone’s face with toughness. Next thing you know, everyone is getting metal jammed in their lips, tongues, eyebrows, and noses. The noses are especially great because you can have a “pretty” diamond that comes with the added benefit of always looking like you have a silver booger up your nose.

I brought $3.75 in quarters, thinking that would at least get the comforters started and I could put my $5 bill into a quarter machine when they needed to dry. It took some time to find out that I was rather incorrect.

Washers
Walking into the “business,” I noticed the complete lack of signs. As a business owner, I would have large signs saying things like “Dryers,” “Washers,” “Heavy Duty Washers,” “Scum of the Earth Stand Here,” etc. hanging from the ceiling. Instead, I had to take a moment to look for the various washers, trying to find which ones the comforters would fit into. Finally, I found a couple large, side-load washers and started to look for the price. I saw a little label on one machine that said, “Quarters Only,” so I knew they were at least fifty cents. Then I saw another label that said “18.” At first I didn’t think that could mean eighteen quarters, but I saw one machine that was labeled $5.50 on the other side of the laundry area (the ones next to it were “22″), so I guessed that must actually be $4.50. Quite a bit for a single wash… especially when using a machine that has green mold in between the plastic pieces that make up the window on the door.

I had to change my $5 bill into quarters and ask the person at the other end of the business (the dry-cleaning section) to swap two dimes and a nickel for a quarter. At last, I had enough money to feed two mold machines and get the washing started.

ATM
My girlfriend went across the street to a store, so I went with in order to use the ATM. The screen said, “I’m sorry, the time for you to remove your card has expired. The machine will now keep your card. Please talk to the financial service representative,” or something that basically told me someone has a far worse memory than I do. There’s no button that says, “Acknowledge the previous person just got owned by an ATM.” I resorted to hitting all of the buttons (well, I tried “cancel” first and it didn’t do anything). At some point, I entered the magical combination similar to the Konami code, and it went back to the regular screen, so I made my transaction. As I was finishing, I removed my card from the machine and a lady came over asking if I found a card at the machine. As much as I wanted to tell her, “Yes, and after I pushed some buttons, the machine started giving me lots of money,” I decided to tell her the truth. Damn you morals!

Dryer
I went back to the laundromat while my girlfriend bought what she needed from the store. I exchanged one of the $20 at the counter for smaller bills to get quarters from the change machine. Finding a dryer that was large enough to fit both comforters in, I put them in and began the task of looking like an idiot, while trying to see if any machine in the vicinity had any kind of price listing. Of course they didn’t…

The machine had four white buttons that were labeled for each temperature setting, one red button with no label, and a red LED next to the temperature that had been selected. I put a quarter into the machine and it beeped. The LED didn’t change. The LCD that showed time on some of the machines that were running showed nothing. I kept feeding it quarters, thinking that the LED would turn green or the LCD would show numbers or the machine would beep differently. Since the machine was large enough to fit both comforters in, I figured the price had to be similar to the washing machines. $5.50 later, I decide the machine must be screwed up or something, so I hit the red button to cancel/stop and expect to have my money returned to me. The machine starts. Okay, so red means start in laundromat world. The LCD displayed 99:99, and I knew the comforters would be getting very, very dry.

The Regulars
Deciding to try to read during the wait, I found a seat and opened a book that I had brought with me. Barely a sentence into the novel, I found myself distracted by two of the “regulars” talking. One lady was saying something like this:

So then the cop pulled up next to me when I was walking home and he started asking me these questions. I told him, ‘I just want to eat my [fun word] burger, man.’ He kept acting like I had drugs on me or something, but I wasn’t high anymore. That’s just harassment!

And later the great pearl of wisdom:

You can’t trust your homeys, man. I [fun word] trusted mine and they took all my [special word] and sold it for [fun word] drugs.

The conversations continued like that between the two ladies and I had a difficult time reading with words like “idiot” and “useless” popping into my head regularly. There are some people who have genuinely hard circumstances and have to use the laundromat, but there are apparently quite a few who are willing to openly tell the world how they spend all their money on drugs and have to scrounge up the change to wash their clothes. Fortunately, they can always find ways of obtaining cigarettes and other necessities of life.

Somehow, I don’t think a moldy washing machine would clean off the dirty feeling I had from being in that place.

You can certainly make arguments for either view. In that regard, it’s similar to views on stem cell research. I can only guess that people who are entirely against the medical use of stem cells are against it because they think all stem cells are created by aborting fetuses. These kind of situations make it so obvious that ignorance often leads to prolonged suffering. In this case though, not modifying the genes could cause the death of the fetus or baby. It makes sense to modify genes to prevent significant diseases and other health issues, but what about “choice” genes? Should you be able to choose your child’s eye color? Should you be able to pick to have a more athletic body or a more intellectual mind?

Religious people might argue that we should not modify genes because that is “God’s work.” Of course, if we truly separate church from state, genetic modifications would be a personal choice. In that case, we would end up with super-smart, exceedingly fit atheists and genetically inferior, die-hard Christians.

You might take the stance of genetic change being the responsibility of nature via Darwin’s take on things, but we have already interfered with that. We’ve used medical technologies to go from “survival of the fittest” to “survival of the richest.” The near-blind can have corrected vision. The fat can have bypass operations. The meek can buy their meat. The vegetarians can take their nutrition supplements.

In this way, we have affected genes, albeit indirectly, and we have caused a stagnation of genetic advancement. These technological improvements have given hope to the genetically inferior and freedom for us to make choices. As we become able to directly modify genes, we can make these choices in a more concrete way, but, being more concrete, people will actually realize their actions. Generally, when people realize what they are doing, resistance comes in (compare how long people would drink, smoke, etc. while pregnant, endangering the fetus to how resistant people can be to abortion).

It’s hard to imagine saying “no” to fixing the genes that make people stupid, but the things that make us special will change. If everyone can have a perfect body and incredible intellect, how will our societal values change?

Right now, we still base a lot of our decisions on what we personally know or what our friends know. A friend saying, “I heard that restaurant isn’t very good,” might sway you from a particular choice, but real information will be available in the future (e.g., easy access to restaurant ratings like many online stores have product ratings). Consider how people used to give directions (especially when they claimed to have the fastest route); now you can just pull up a map to give you very detailed information.

Dating is still largely a “game” of meeting someone randomly or dating a friend of a friend, but maybe the world will steer toward match.com-style services. Imagine if a computer could give you a list of possible people to date based on both people’s interests, and I’m not just talking about blonde/brunette preferences. If you always wanted to go to Diego Garcia, it might match you with someone who has been there, who also plans to go there, or who goes there regularly. The little things (like food preference) would be considered, but, really, anything could be considered. It might seem strange to have a computer “hook you up,” but it seemed strange to have a computer tell you “veer right in 2.3 miles” at one point too.

Information will bring accountability. Politics is the best example. When our country was founded, no one knew what congress was doing. Now, we’ve seen people upset at the “do less than the do-nothing congress” congress and suddenly the balance of powers took a major swing. It’s a start toward the answer. Politicians will think twice about the actions they take when they know the public has easy access to that information. The same is true for any business. When the shady shop on the corner installs generic speakers in someone’s car and claims they are Boston Acoustics, everyone will know and the business will fail. When a mechanic just resets the check-engine light and charges for it, no one will go to that mechanic. Honesty based on personal integrity is preferred, but honesty forced by business necessity is fine by me.

The hard part about moving forward is where you draw the line. At what point is the loss of privacy more significant than the benefits gained? A huge number of people went crazy over the Facebook feeds because they felt it was an invasion of privacy, but what about the people who were able to reconnect with friends by accessing the information in the feeds? If we know where everyone is all the time we gain security and lose privacy. Is a lower crime rate better than a higher privacy rate? Information is only going to become easier to access as we progress into the future, but what losses will we incur?