A miscellany

Unlike many other Southern towns its size, it boasts several excellent museums, street art and a large public arena. An arena large enough, in fact, to attract the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus this month. That’s when someone shot Carol, a circus elephant, in what seems to be the first elephantine drive-by ever. Carol is recovering, but Tupelo Police Capt. Rusty Haynes said his investigation has stalled. “Because, to be honest, there are a lot of possible perpetrators.”

Yes, the exchange she’s describing is “fair” — everyone involved is willing and happy to engage in it. It’s also “fair” to pay someone minimum wage for work that makes you millions, and fair for a male musician to spend every night having sex with starstruck, consenting young fans, but fairness is not the same thing as nobility, and neither of those arrangements is something you’d present as a revolutionary new relationship.

The classic example is the string quartet; performing a 15-minute quartet took a cumulative hour of musician time in 1850, and takes that same hour today. This is not true of the production of food, or clothing, or transportation, all of which have seen massive increases in value created per hour of labor. Unfortunately, the obvious ways to make production more efficient—fewer musicians playing faster—wouldn’t work as well for the production of music as for the production of cars.

(From Napster, Udacity, and the Academy)

Worse still, [privilege checking] emasculates political activity. A very talented blogger friend of mine read Owen Jones’ Chavs and said it made them “very aware of my middle class privilege”. Personally, it made me want to burn down the Department of Work and Pensions.

Every time the site goes down or degrades (even short blips), write down the start and end times for the outage and then label it with any applicable causes (bad code review, insufficient monitoring, log overflow). Then when you look at the list you can objectively answer the question “what can I do to minimize the most minutes of downtime right now?” by figuring out how to cover the most minutes.

At this writing, Gallup also reports that nearly 60 percent all Americans today feel happy without a lot of stress or worry. On the other hand, according to the Center for Disease Control, about 4 out of 10 Americans have not discovered a satisfying life purpose. Forty percent either do not think their lives have a clear sense of purpose or are neutral about whether their lives have purpose.

I’m astonished it’s as low as 40%. You mean those of us staring into the abyss are a minority? That’s almost more terrifying than the pointlessness of existence itself. I mean, I thought we at least had camaraderie.

Most transatlantic cables head straight for deep water, to get away from sharks. In what some might consider a case of karmic justice, sharks threaten the financial industry by biting its cables, attracted by the electromagnetic fields generated by the wires that power the amplifiers at intervals along their length. Along the continental shelf, cables must be expensively armored against sharks.