Became a US citizen yesterday (yeah!) at the same time that immigration enforcement is once again a hot issue due to new laws in Arizona. My, as usual, uncontroversial 2 cents: clearly police should need more reason for “suspicion” of illegal immigration than “looking foreign” and the law should demand this, but illegal immigration is a crime and should be treated as such. I spent over 5 years and hundreds (thousands?) of dollars navigating the various agencies and processes to get to the finish line and people who blatantly ignore the system seem to have very little chance of “getting caught”.

Something is clearly broken in the system when a law is so blatantly flouted. Take speed limits: ignored every day by a large proportion of people, only strictly enforced in a small number of places and so your chances of getting a ticket for speeding is actually very, very low given the number of times we violate the traffic laws every day. Also, enforcement at an individual level will have little to no effect on other offenders - a cop pulls one guy over and maybe the traffic slows down as it passes the cop, but the next hour and next day, plenty of cars will still be speeding past. Immigration laws share many of these characteristics: you arrest one guy working illegally and deport him and the deterrent effect is low: there’s still plenty more immigrants willing to take the chance and work illegally. Yet, like removing speed limits, simply throwing up our hands and allowing illegals a free pass would clearly be disastrous.

That’s why, in my opinion, the only real way to tackle this is to pass laws that make hiring illegal workers painful enough for businesses and the demand for illegal workers will drop dramatically. Plus you get easier enforcement as instead of trying to build cases against and deport 100 individual workers at a factory, you can just take on one case against the factory’s owners.

Man, I need to work on some more controversial viewpoints, I’m just too middle of the road…

Tasting the Apple

Just after Christmas I was able to successfully “Hackintosh” one of my PCs at home and so for the last few months have been attempting to give Apple’s OSX a fair shake.

First of all, clearly the switching costs are going to be high in terms of just getting used to the look and feel of something different when moving away from something you are used to working with 40+ hours a week. That meaning it needs to give me significant advantage to be worth switching over. My ultimate feeling about it: close to unusable for someone who has spent 20 years using Microsoft Windows.

What I liked most: it was quite a bit faster and more stable than Windows on the same hardware - less random freezes, less delays loading applications. What I hated most: the seemingly random process for installing applications - some install themselves into your applications directory and others apparently run from where they are downloaded to, which means that my Downloads folder fills up with Apps that I cant tell whether they are the installer of an app that is already installed and so can be deleted or if they are the program itself.

The only other big advantages to me were Final Cut and GarageBand, which are massively better than their nearest Windows rival and are the only 2 reasons I would consider trying a Mac again in future.

I really did give it a chance, but after gradually realizing that the UI differences were really causing me to work slower I finally gave in and wiped OSX off the machine and went back to Windows. I can see why people would love Macs but the truth is the computer using part of my brain is just too wired into the Windows way of doing things and I can’t see that ever changing.

2012

After having to leave class with a migraine, I decided that the best cure was to watch the world end in Roland Emmerich’s 2012. I fully expected to hate it, but (maybe it was my pounding head) I basically enjoyed it despite large chunks of the movie seemingly being created to be part of a motion simulator ride at Universal Studios. Overall it was entertaining nonsense but it’s no fun to say what i liked, so here’s what was awful:

John Cusack playing a mediocre author who has apparently been blessed (or cursed?) by supernatural forces with the ability to be present at every disaster and yet survive by the skin of his teeth. Whatever mode of transport he is in will be inches away from being swallowed by the Earth.

SPOILER 1: The ability of the tidal waves to propel cool objects into the path of our heroes: President Danny Glover is killed by an aircraft carrier that is seemingly floating inches from the ground, the US ark is attacked by a floating Air Force One.

SPOILER 2: If the arks ability to survive the disaster is solely based on them being ships with a roof that can float on the tidal wave why didn’t they warn everyone to start building unsinkable boats? Perhaps they also stored food on the arks but couldn’t others do the same?

Finally, the Russian accents were beyond awful and in the realm of not even trying to sound anything other than ridiculous! I know people say “I could do better than that”, but really. I could. The Russians in 2012 make the comedy cosmonaut in Armageddon look like an insightful character study into the Russian psyche.

box for sale - $6000 obo

Like a mash-up between the box from “The Box” and an embryonic Skynet, Artist Caleb Larsen’s latest piece “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter” is an internet-enabled black cube that is permanently for sale on eBay by whoever happens to own it, and the owner is contractually obliged to sell. This might be an interesting idea: self-propagating products that force true market values on themselves by literally always being for sale. However, its current auction is on eBay has an asking price of over $6,000 so seems like this is going to be firmly placed in the world of high-art, not consumer technology.

i have a cream?

I keep seeing Mayfield trucks around town with MILK in huge letters on the back with the placement of the hinges makes it look like it says MLK. I can’t get the connection out of mind and I keep imagining them intentionally trying to get a beyond-the-grave endorsement from Dr King: “All men are created equal. All milk is not. Drink Mayfield.”

why are great films so rare?

I seem to have a harder and harder time finding good movies to watch recently, despite the ever increasing choices open to me. With Netflix I can get 1000s of movies either by mail or on my computer yet I still have a pretty bad hit ratio of good to bad films. Maybe half the movies I watch are bad to mediocre, probably another 20% have something good going for them (either decently acted, good ideas, good design etc) but are generally uninspired, leaving another 20% that are enjoyable and maybe 10% (if that) that I would genuinely call “good films”. The hit ratio of 1 in 10 seems way lower than you would expect - I read a lot of books and way more than 1 in 10 books I read are good. You would expect it to be the other way around, any dummy can get a book published buy with the huge cost of producing a film, how do so many bad ones get made?

It’s not even like I’m some huge film elitist with high standards, I don’t need Citizen Kane, just an entertaining, well-made movie. Some examples of those films over the last few years that I would say achieved this (in no particular order): Adventureland, Dear Zachary, Gran Torino, Anvil, In The Loop, Inglourious Basterds, Iron Man, Valkyrie, The Dark Knight, The Killing Room, District 9, The Hangover…

Short book review: How to Rig an Election

How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative by Allen Raymond.

A page-turner of a memoir, it details his (short) career as a political operative for the GOP, really peeling back the skin on the process of elections in modern America. Much of it is stuff that we already suspected/knew but it’s really gripping to see it all laid bare: From straightforward negative campaign ads to leaked personal attacks to downright distortions and the authors eventual conviction for illegal tactics. The author is pretty honest that he never cared too much about the politics of the candidates and never stopped to consider the morals of the process (as those who did tended to lose). Written in a straightforward, lean manner, its a short but riveting read that I recommend to anyone interested in the political process.

do something

I’m a realist, not an idealist. I have some ideas about some subjects but I’m not particularly beholden to a particular point of view on most issues. Though I am stubborn, I will change my mind on some things over time or be willing to give something a try even if I think it’s a bad idea if the alternative is spending an hour arguing about why my way is best.

Which is why the current deadlock in Washington DC and the way the (allegedly) irreconcilable differences between the major parties are portrayed has me uncharacteristically upset. Both sides clearly agree that their are real problems in the US that need solving but even more clearly cannot agree on the best way forward. Like an elderly couple standing on the deck of the Titanic arguing about whether to head to the port or starboard, they are more interested in sticking to their beliefs than getting off the boat.

Much of this is due to the constant election cycle and the strategies that both parties now use of painting huge gaps between the parties. Democrats and Republicans are not portrayed as two very centrist parties with slightly different philosophies and a couple of major issues they disagree on in theory, if not in practice. Election advertising and party pundits paint huge gaps between the two parties, even where none exists. Republicans claim they will lower taxes, but where’s the pledge from the Republicans to introduce the FairTax? Democrats promised to fix healthcare but won’t propose a single payer system.

In reality, Republicans might lower taxes *slightly* for *some* people, and the Democrats might extend a government healthcare *option* for *some* people, the differences between the parties are nowhere near as large as they would have you believe. However, given the political climate, if a Republican did happen to throw up his hands and side with the Democrats on an issue so that real changes could start to happen his opponents would seize on that, not as a pragmatic attempt to solve a problem, but, at best, a “flip-flip” and, at worst, a “capitulation to the enemy”.

Giving an inch is just not an option for these people who care, above all else, for their careers. Which sadly, is most of the politicians, not just in this country, but the world. Politicians who, for fear of the death of their career, are willing to take us all down with them as they stand there and do nothing…

another year, another blog

Way back in a previous career I was given the somewhat disparaging nickname of “Half-Job Jon”, due to my habit of getting bored with one task and moving onto another. It’s a character trait that persists today: This is at least the 5th blog I will have started with the full intention of making an effort at keeping it up to date. Needless to say, the previous 4 have lasted varying lengths of time, all ending in a complete lack of updates.

I think one thing that causes me to be an unproductive writer is some weird cousin of perfectionism (because I’m clearly not an actual perfectionist, I’m more than happy to get things 80% done rather than spend the extra effort to polish the last 20%). What I have is more an upfront lack of confidence in myself: “Why bother writing this idea down, people won’t care…” It’s the same over thinking of things before I commit to them that caused me to have a really clear idea for a screenplay but wait for 5 years before I put it on paper.

So, why will this blog be any different? Well, it most likely won’t and if in 6 months there have only been 3 posts here then I can say “I told me so.” But if it is any different it will be because I’m past the point of caring. I’d rather have something to show and look back on than a head full of ideas I never expressed.