Nicholas Fine

Undeprecated Blog

Tue, 18 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Back in business. More to come.

Probably lots of dead links still around.

Find me on Twitter @yrgoldteeth for now.

Deprecated Blog

Mon, 12 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Pulled the blog off the main root of my primary domain as I don’t really use the thing. Decided to archive it here.

Some links might be dead. Such is the internet.

Venal, Selfish, and Essentially Monstrous

Tue, 26 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Elites tend to believe in a venal, selfish, and essentially monstrous version of human nature, which I sometimes think is their own human nature. I mean, people don’t become incredibly wealthy and powerful by being angelic, necessarily. They believe that only their power keeps the rest of us in line and that when it somehow shrinks away, our seething violence will rise to the surface—that was very clear in Katrina. Timothy Garton Ash and Maureen Dowd and all these other people immediately jumped on the bandwagon and started writing commentaries based on the assumption that the rumors of mass violence during Katrina were true. A lot of people have never understood that the rumors were dispelled and that those things didn’t actually happen; it’s tragic.

…

There is no such thing as a natural disaster. In earthquakes the architecture fails. If you’re out in a grassy meadow, it doesn’t matter how big the earthquake is: it might knock you down, but if nothing falls on top of you and nothing catches fire from broken gas mains or power lines, then you’re probably okay. Architecture is the first casualty of earthquakes, and human beings under the architecture are the casualties of the architecture. Even with a wholly natural disaster, whatever that might be—a tsunami, maybe—who gets help, who has resources to rebuild, who is treated as a threat or a malingerer—those are not natural but social phenomena. With Katrina you need to talk about the role of climate change in making the hurricane; of the crappy levees built by the US Army Corps of Engineers and not adequately maintained; of the lack of evacuation resources for the poor; of the demonization of those left behind; of the transformation of New Orleans into a prison-city preventing evacuation…nothing could be less natural. The natural disaster was the least of what happened to the people of New Orleans, if not the rest of the Gulf, that week.

The Illogic of Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance

Tue, 01 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The ruling raises the question of why, uniquely in the industrialized world, Americans have for so long favored an arrangement in health insurance that endows their employers with the quasi-parental power to choose the options that employees may be granted in the market for health insurance. For many smaller firms, that choice is narrowed to one or two alternatives – not much more choice than that afforded citizens under a single-payer health insurance system.

Furthermore, the arrangement induces employers to intervene in many other ways in their employees’ personal life – for example, in wellness programs that can range from the benign to annoyingly intrusive, depending upon the employers’ wishes.

And what kind of health “insurance” have Americans gotten under this strange arrangement? Once again, uniquely in the industrialized world, it has been ephemeral coverage that is lost with the job or changed at the employer’s whim. Citizens in any other industrialized country have permanent, portable insurance not tied to a particular job in a particular country.

Big Hobby and Lobbying Power

Mon, 30 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I haven’t even gotten around to reading about the other SCOTUS decision regarding public sector unions that was released today, as Big Hobby and its lobbying powers vis a vis our federal judicial system has dominated the conversation.

I do agree that the ultimate foundation of the whole contraception case is religious in nature, though I do not believe it is over any deeply-held belief that certain forms of contraception are abortifacents. It’s over the religious belief that women are subordinate people and should not be in control of basic medical decisions. That the decision is specifically limited to contraception and not, say, a Jehovah’s Witness owned company that wants to not cover blood transfusions is the giant ringing bell identifying this is as specifically anti-woman. It is a monstrous belief, a toxic belief and it’s one that should not get public policy preference.

Tying health insurance to employers with tax preferences has long been bad public policy. It has obscured real compensation numbers for employees and is now even worse that corporations can dictate the terms of the insurance coverage based on their religious belief. The insurers want to cover contraception but now they’re obligated to sell group insurance plans to companies that don’t cover basic medicine because some jerk has a supposed “moral” objection to it.

Make the tax policy preference benefit the individual insurance market and not the employer/group market and it takes away the power of jerks to make decisions not based on actual medicine for their employees. It would make compensation and pay numbers more transparent, it would increase the size and thus the risk pool of the individual health insurance market, and it would make it easier for people to change jobs without fearing gaps or reductions in their health coverage.

The War Nerd - Here’s everything you need to know about “too extreme for Al Qaeda” I.S.I.S.

Wed, 18 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In fact, ISIS’s quarrel with Zawahiri was a lot like a corporate boardroom feud. It’s always worth remembering that Jihadis are just friggin’ people, and their disagreements tend to be about very ordinary organizational issues. Granted, it’s a little harder to see that when they solve those disagreements with public beheadings and overly-cinematic rituals, but at heart this is just standard human behavior—primates squabbling for rank and power, Game of Thrones with Islamic voiceover.

…

But when you have 1,200 different factions to deal with, you have at least 1,200 egos to massage, and every damn one of them has a few dozen, or a few hundred, men ready to kill, and die, at his command. These nay-sayers were not in the mood to let some Iraqi interloper take over the Syrian revolution, and insisted on localizing what ISIS saw as the inherently universal mandate of jihad. The local/universal tension is deep in Islam, which borrowed Christianity’s universalizing mandate. In theory, a Chechen who knows the Quran is as entitled to tell a Syrian what to do as anyone else. In practice, he’s a jerk, and if he tells you to do things a different way than your family has done them for generations, you don’t care how many verses he can quote at you. You’re pissed off

…

So out of all this chaos and blood comes something like a vindication of the laws of physics, as expressed in ethnic turf wars. But with one modification of those laws: Some things really don’t abhor a vacuum, especially transnational ethnic militias. They love a vacuum more than Alice did on the Brady Bunch.

Armed Resistance in the Civil Rights Movement

Fri, 13 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I was in Birmingham a few years ago, speaking with some civil-rights-movement veterans there. One of them told me that whenever Martin Luther King Jr. was in town, he helped to protect him. That’s all he said, so I asked, “How did you protect him?” And he said, “With a nonviolent .38 police special.” Everyone laughed and nodded these knowing smiles.

…

There’s the story of Annie “Mama Dolly” Raines, in southwest Georgia, up in the window with her shotgun protecting Charles Sherrod, the nonviolent organizer who was staying with her. She was a midwife and she told him, “I brought a lot of these white folks into this world, and I’ll take ’em out of this world if I have to.” That’s what people overlook in discussions of this period. Yes, there was tremendous oppression, brutal oppression. But there was also strength, which is part of what oppression generates. There were good grounds for fear, but that fear created a kind of toughness that wasn’t limited to the men. I can certainly testify that without the women, I might be dead.

PGP Key

Thu, 12 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

If you need to send me anything via email that only I can decrypt, you can encrypt it with my public key:

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You can also find it linked here.

Programming Sucks

Sun, 27 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It’s a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.

This file is Good Code. It has sensible and consistent names for functions and variables. It’s concise. It doesn’t do anything obviously stupid. It has never had to live in the wild, or answer to a sales team. It does exactly one, mundane, specific thing, and it does it well. It was written by a single person, and never touched by another. It reads like poetry written by someone over thirty.

Every programmer starts out writing some perfect little snowflake like this. Then they’re told on Friday they need to have six hundred snowflakes written by Tuesday, so they cheat a bit here and there and maybe copy a few snowflakes and try to stick them together or they have to ask a coworker to work on one who melts it and then all the programmers’ snowflakes get dumped together in some inscrutable shape and somebody leans a Picasso on it because nobody wants to see the cat urine soaking into all your broken snowflakes melting in the light of day. Next week, everybody shovels more snow on it to keep the Picasso from falling over.

The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie

Tue, 15 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

He asked about everything, not just music but recipes, dances, games, ghost stories, and in his note-taking, he realized that the county itself, as an organizing geographical principle, had some reality beyond a shape on the map, that it retained in some much-diminished but not quite extinguished sense, the old contours of the premodern world, the world of the commons, how in one county you would have dozens of fiddle players, but in the very next county, none — there everyone played banjo. He began to intuit a theory of “clusters,” that this was how culture worked, emanating outward from vortices where craft-making and art-making suddenly rise, under a confluence of various pressures, to higher levels.