Thursday, May 28, 2009

Meatfest 2009

Our neighbors signed up for a meat-share service. Every month, a load of assorted meat was delivered to their door. But they couldn't handle it. Soon their freezer was overflowing with meat. Meat was everywhere. So they rounded up their neighbors to help. Here is a seven minute video documenting what happened when a community came together. To eat. Meat.

High- and low-resolution versions of the video are available. The low resolution version is grainy but can be viewed instantly. The high resolution version is of much better quality, but takes about five minutes to download.

MEATFEST 2009 - HIGH RESOLUTION - CLICK HERE

MEATFEST 2009 - LOW RESOLUTION (click play button on box below).

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Keno and the Shitfaced Gambling Addict Junior High School


There was a big night in Boston sports last week. The Celtics and the Bruins were both in the playoffs, and both games were being broadcast at the same time. So I went to my favorite bar down the street (I still don’t have a TV) to check out the action. 40% of the bar was focused on the TVs showing the basketball game, about an equal percentage was staring and yelling at the TVs with the hockey game, and the last bunch was transfixed by the colorful, bouncing balls on a smaller TV tucked away in the corner – the Keno screen. Keno is a Massachusetts lottery game piped into bars across the state. Every four minutes from 5AM until 1AM, you can choose numbers by filling in bubbles on a card, which you give to the bartender, along with some cash, to process. The more numbers you’ve chosen that correspond with the numbers on which the bouncy balls on the TV land, the more you win.

So I’m still on the fence about whether this next story makes me a kind, public-service oriented good Samaritan or a horrible, despicable bastard. I’d be interested to get your input. Suppose two women sitting next to you at a bar have been obsessing for hours over Keno, one gets up to go out for a smoke, and the other asks you for help filling in the bubbles on her Keno card because she’s too wasted to do it herself. Do you lend her the benefit of your relatively unimpaired motor skills and help her chase the dream of riches and fame? Or do say, “lady, you know, you might be kinda throwing away your money here, and maybe you should just go home.” I ended up helping her out (not to brag, but after the SAT, LSAT and bar exam, I'm a pretty damn competent filler-inner of no. 2 pencil scantron bubbles). But I couldn’t help but think that this whole setup was just so, so wrong.

Here’s why it’s so wrong. It’s not just the gambling part. That gambling, while sometimes a genuinely rational, fun way to spend time, is often way over on the other end of the manipulating-human-psychological-frailty end of the spectrum, egging people on to make irrational decisions that they know deep down (or maybe they don’t) are really not in their best interests. And it’s not even the gambling combined with drinking part. That however rational or irrational gambling may be on its own, I’m pretty sure people don’t generally become increasingly appreciative of the odds of the game when they have the benefit of 15 Bud Lights on their side. What, to me, makes it so, so wrong is the fact that the whole thing is run by the very institution that’s supposed to be taking care of us – the government.

I know that, very often, when you hear people start talking about the government trying to manipulate us, you’re getting into that nutty (though sometimes quite amusing) conspiracy theory realm. If you think the government is listening to your phone calls or brainwashing you with chemicals in the drinking water, there’s a pretty good chance that the issue is actually based on just a wee tiny bit of your own emotional baggage. But the Massachusetts government conspiracy to take away peoples’ money through lottery games is all spelled out very matter-of-factly, and with nice color slides to boot, in the 2008 Massachusetts State Lottery Commission Information Packet.

The information packet notes that over the past three decades, the Mass lottery, which is charged with coming up with “innovative games with entertainment value to players in order to further grow revenues available to the Commonwealth’s cities and towns,” has “returned” over $15.3 billion dollars to the Commonwealth. The returned dollars were used for “everything from improving roads and schools to hiring police and firefighters.” The bar where I helped my shitfaced compatriot fill out her Keno card had a colorful certificate from the lottery commission hanging on the wall congratulating the bar patrons for having won a total of over $260,000 from Keno last year.

So what what’s so horrible about the government providing entertainment, which returns money to the Commonwealth to be used for hiring firefighters? What’s wrong is the how and the who. The how is by taking advantage of people who are drinking and gambling. Whatever you think about why people gamble, as any psychologist, sociologist or addiction counselor will tell you, it is almost never simply because people simply enjoy innocent “innovative games with entertainment value.” The who, in a nutshell, is poor drunk people. There are, of course, hoards of rich, non-alcoholics who go to bars and play Keno, but I know from my years of extensive research – sitting in bars and checking out what the folks around me are up to – that the affluent, sober crowd is not, by and large, the one “returning” its money to the firefighters.

The crux of the main argument in support of taking money from poor drunk people is that it’s their choice, they’re going to spend it anyway, and if the government doesn’t do it, someone else will. And this may well be true. But there is a fundamental difference between the government and other people. As individual actors in a capitalist society, we’re all playing the same game with one another: trying to come up with clever ways to get other people to give their hard earned dollars to us while, at the same time, being vigilant in not giving up our own dollars except for the things we think will provide the most value to us. We know that other people want our money and that we have to be careful not to give it to them irrationally. The government is different. Reasonable people can disagree about how much government is the right amount of government or how active or passive the government should be. But I don’t think anyone would agree that the government should be in the role of preying upon human frailties to manipulate people into giving away their money. Old ladies who walk around bad neighborhoods at night may get mugged. If it’s going to happen anyway, maybe the government should mug old ladies itself so that at least the money will be put to good use.

The lottery certificate at the bar talking about how much people won last year is a manipulative statistical lie – a purposeful substitution of top line for bottom line, gross for net. People at the bar “won” $260,000 in the same way General Motors “earned” $149 million in fiscal 2008 – i.e., by spending exponentially more in order to bring in that amount. I understand why the lottery would not want to highlight how much was spent to “win” the $260,000, but the $15 billion “returned” to the Commonwealth was not made from net winnings at every bar.

If this is really how we want our government to treat our fellow citizens, then so be it. Voters in a democracy can decide to tax whoever they want and redistribute wealth in any way they like. But if this structure is really what we want as a society, then the concept should be explicit and voted into the tax code. Describing Keno in friendly, market-driven terms and decorating bars with purposefully misleading numbers is not the way to go. If we want more good things like schools and firefighters, and we want the poor, the drunk and the gambling addicted to pay for them, we at least need to be clear about it (maybe even name things after them: Shitfaced Gambling Addict Junior High School). Then, at least the next time the person on the stool next to me wants to “return” some cash to the Commonwealth but is too trashed to do so on her own, I’ll be able to help out with a clear conscience.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

The Debate Over the Debate Over Twitter


I sometimes think it would be nice if people stopped complaining. But then, upon further reflection, it occurs to me that if people stopped complaining, there would be very little to talk about. The opposable thumb. The ability to make use of tools. Complaining. These are the very essence of what makes human beings human. So, OK, complaining stays. But maybe some limitations on what people complain about. Here's a suggestion: how about if people tried to complain about only things that had some actual bearing on their lives?

One particular, recent hot button issue is Twitter. In case you haven't opened a newspaper or web browser in the past six months, Twitter is a website where people can post short messages that can then be followed by readers who have signed up to follow the writers. The messages - "tweets" - are usually of either the "does anyone know how to do some thing I want to do" variety, the "holy shit; I'm trapped in a burning building" variety, or, probably most commonly, the "I am considering scratching myself" / "what I ate for breakfast" variety.

A lot of people love Twitter and a lot of people hate Twitter. No big deal. A lot of people also love and hate collecting porcelain pony figurines. But while you can go for years - decades sometimes - without reading a single op-ed about porcelain pony figurine collecting, an incomprehensibly huge number of people seem to feel the need to write, voluminously and passionately, about why, and the extent to which, they love or hate Twitter (and just to be clear, I am not going to write here about why I love or hate Twitter, but rather about what I think about people writing about what they love or hate about Twitter).

I understand the natural tendency to want to blather and gush about the things you’re into. If you love something, you want to spread the word (see, e.g., why I love running). And I understand the equally powerful need to rant and huff about things you don't like that, for whatever reason, are a part of your life. Like mosquitoes. Or taxes. Or when the minimum wage-earning high school kid at Taco Bell gives you a chalupa, all slathered in guacamole, instead of the gordita, with guacamole on the side, that you ordered. When you’re confronted with something that bothers you, it feels good to get it off your chest.

But something about Twitter really hits a nerve. In editorials and newspaper columns, and just in talking to people, I have seen people get so worked up about Twitter you'd think they were talking about a new government plan to tax toilet paper or to require people to tattoo their infants. For some, the idea that someone would want to read about what someone else just had for breakfast is somehow deeply offensive and blisteringly infuriating. And while I understand completely why people need to rant about mosquitoes and taxes and messed up Taco Bell orders and the infinite variety of life’s other impositions, what confounds me is why people bother to spend the time and effort to rant about things they have the power to completely ignore.

The power to ignore is what makes Twitter different than mosquitoes and taxes and messed up Taco Bell orders. While there is almost no way of escaping these other irritants (short of staying in the house, living off the grid and renouncing fast food – obviously not tenable options for most of us), all you have to do in order to live the entire rest of your life without ever having to read one single tweet is to: NOT open your web browser and go to Twitter.com; NOT choose a unique user ID and twelve character password; NOT enter a bunch of personal information; NOT agree to the terms and conditions; NOT choose all of the fellow Twitterers whose posts you want to follow; and then NOT check back to the website every day to see what new updates have been posted. Not doing all of this is very, very easy. By way of demonstration, try closing your eyes and counting to three. See? Just like that, you have NOT enrolled in Twitter and will never, ever see a single tweet.

So, if Twitter can be completely shut off, and if no taxpayer dollars are being used to subsidize it, and if no one is being bound and gagged and dragged from his home and forced to set up an account, then why all the fuss? There are only two ways I can fathom why you might feel like Twitter was imposing on you even if you have successfully NOT followed the enrollment steps described above.

First, maybe you feel like the reason your Taco Bell order got all screwed up in the first place, and the reason you are now back at your cubicle with a guacamole-soaked chalupa you don’t want, is that instead of giving your order the benefit of her undivided attention, the kid behind the counter at Taco Bell was busy Twittering her friends (perhaps about how lame it is to spend all day hawking chalupas to luddites). But Twitter, in this scenario, is an unfair bogeyman. Since the dawn of human commerce, customers at counters have been receiving sub-par service from underpaid employees on the other side of said counters because said employees were preoccupied with something else. 50 years ago, when guys wanted help buying, say, fedoras from the fedora counter, the fedora seller guys were probably reading the horse racing pages and talking to little kids about getting their 2 cent bets over to the bookies. 11 million years ago when Neanderthals were trying the exchange piles of rocks for ripped off hunks of antelope meat, the kids at the antelope meat cave (this was before counters were invented) were probably busy flirting with Neanderthal-ettes or trying to start fires. And, in the not too distant future, when Twitter has been long forgotten and when kids all have wifi connections hooked up directly to their brains, while it may be less obvious what exactly it is that the kid behind the counter is distracted by, rest assured that he will not be giving you his undivided attention.

The second way in which Twitter may affect people who do not read tweets is just having to hear incessantly about how much people love or hate Twitter. If this is what is getting people so upset, all I can say is that it’s the people who hate Twitter who started it.

So here is my two cents on the debate over the debate over Twitter. If you’re a big fan, then right on. Good for you. Tweet your days away to your heart’s content. Perhaps compose some tweets about the joy of Twittering. And if Twitter is not your bag, do not sign up for Twitter and do not spend any further time recounting to anyone the reasons you are not interested in Twitter. Go get interested in something else, and spend time on that. Come to think of it, it might not be a bad idea to apply this concept to just about every other issue in the world. If someone else likes it, and if it’s no skin off your back, maybe just let it slide. I know I’m not the first person to come up with the live-and-let-live idea. Maybe it just needs to be reiterated. Maybe I’ll tweet about it.