The personal is not always political

After much dithering, I have decided to use three separate Twitter accounts: @arks_remarks for political or philosophical observations, @Koenig_Software for comments about software, and @andrew_koenig for personal stuff.

Here’s why. I know that many of my friends do not share my political opinions, and I don’t want to interfere with my interactions with them in other regards, such as photography or music. Similarly, I don’t want to bother people interested in conversing about software with, say, my bodypainting photos.

I think it’s a bit of a shame that I have to partition my thinking this way, but every time I’ve thought about returning to this blog without such partitioning, I’ve become uncomfortable enough that I’ve turned away. So we’ll see if it works this time.

Insight from the Wall Street Journal

Mr. Obama's great political talent has been his knack for granting his admirers permission to think highly of themselves for thinking highly of him.

The Left and the Tragedy of the Commons

There is a limit to how much grass you can harvest from a field each year. Remove more than that, and what remains doesn't capture enough light to sustain even its former rate. If several farmers want to use the field for their herds to graze, a problem occurs when the field cannot produce enough for all the herds: Each individual farmer wants to get his dibs in first, and the decline accelerates. Similar problems happen whenever a resource renews itself at a rate that depends on the previous quantity: Consume too much, and the amount available for the future declines.

We've seen such problems in situations ranging from lobster fishing in New England to cork harvesting in Portugal. The only solution I know to such problems is for all parties to agree on limits, which they then enforce.

The political left normally prides itself on recognizing such situations. For example, the whole "climate change" movement is based on the notion that there is a limit to how much additional carbon dioxide the earth can tolerate per unit time. I've seen similar arguments about logging, oil, and other natural resources.

Here's what I don't get. Change "farmer" to "government program," "field" to "economy," and "grass" to "GDP," and the analogy holds: There is a limit to how much a government can "harvest" in the form of taxes. If each government program tries to get its dibs in, the result will stifle the economy to the point where less is available overall. The only solution I can think of to such problems is for everyone to agree to limit the total amount of money the government consumes.

This analogy seems flagrantly obvious to me. So how come it is the Right that is making it, not the Left? The only reason I can think of is that for carbon dioxide, logging, fishing, and so on, the solution involves making government larger, and for the government problem, the solution involves making it smaller. In other words, the Left doesn't really care about the tragedy of the commons at all; they're just using it as an excuse for enlarging government, and they don't notice the cases when their own arguments favor making government smaller.

I'm afraid that this isn't a particularly charitable view, but I can't think of an alternative.

A quiet revolution

I've bought a few products recently that have failed soon after purchase. Each time, the manufacturer has arranged to ship me a new one at no cost and minimal inconvenience: Either they sent me a return label (by email) that I could use to send it back to them at their expense, or they sent me a new product, the shipping box for which I used to return the old one to them.

It's interesting to think about how many technological inventions, in how many fields, were needed to make this mode of repair possible.

Dance music is different

I learned something important recently: Dance music is its own species. Music that is intended for dancing goes by too slowly if you're sitting in one place and concentrating; music that is intended to be listened to carefully flies by too quickly when you're dancing. Which means that if you're a composer, and you're writing dance music while sitting still, you have to adjust your sense of time.

Do different times make different people?

I've been scanning negatives from the early 1970s, when I was in college. Some of them are of people who were involved in the then-new computer chess world. Makes me wonder: How would my life have been different if computers were everywhere when I was in college, rather than being expensive, specialized devices that could fill a house?

Wisteria is like collectivism

Wisteria is a climbing vine native to the northeast USA and east Asia. In small doses, it is a pleasant addition to its surroundings. It produces pleasant-smelling flowers, has no thorns, and appears, at least on the surface, to be capable of thriving with little attention.

However, appearances are misleading. Left to its own devices, a single wisteria plant can send out 30-foot-long runners in a single season. These runners root wherever they touch the ground, and if left undisturbed, become very hard to remove. If they touch a vertical surface, they climb it, and again, if left alone, they will thicken into woody stems capable of tearing down a house.

Moreover, if left unpruned, wisteria puts all of its energy into expansion and stops flowering. The only reliable way to get it to flower is to cut it back hard each year—much harder than would appear necessary at first glance.

There is no lack of collectivist ideas that have enriched our society. For example, a few days ago I attended a wonderful theatrical performance, at which one of the actors claimed that the performance would have been impossible were it not for government support, and implored the audience to write to their state legislators to urge them to increase that support. I do not know whether his claims were true, but I do know that live theater is an expensive proposition, and we would all be the poorer were it to die out.

But even if collectivism springs from noble impulses, it will take over if not kept in check. Georges Clemenceau once said: "If a man is not a socialist in his youth, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 30, he has no head." Few people would want to live in a society with no heart, but even fewer would want to live in one with no head.

And so I smother my temptation to take a backhoe to the wisteria in my yard, preferring instead to go out every day with my pruning shears and remove the shoots that keep appearing, leaving only the main plant and encouraging it to concentrate its energy into producing flowers, not runners.

How times change

So I signed up for this blog, then didn't do anything with it for nearly a year and a half. I think I'm one of those people for whom logging into, and using, a web interface is just enough of a hurdle to give me an incentive to do something else instead.

But a few days ago I upgraded my word-processing software, and lo and behold it has a "publish to a blog" feature. Not only that, but it claims to know about Blogger's interface. So if you see this message, it means its claims are correct.

Hello, world!

My name is Andrew Koenig. The R stands for Richard, though I don't usually use my middle name in print (so as to avoid duplicate junk mail). You may have read one of my books.

I'm active in several Usenet newsgroups (particularly C++ and photography), but Usenet gets chaotic sometimes, and I want to try writing in a more coherent, less reactive way.

Bloggers like to call others' attention to things they find interesting, and my interests are scattered all over the map. So I hope to write about technology (particularly as it applies to art), art (particularly photography and music, and technologal aspects thereof) and politics (I consider myself a libertarian with a small l).

I'm new at this game. We'll see how it goes.