Other things I did this weekend: er, nothing. And I don't mind! However, Chez and Ben have been having a long argument in the comments of my Hutton report whitewash entry which is worth a read...
Timothy asked:
Can someone explain why everyone is jumping up and down about wanting this fair trade stuff?You always read articles talking about how coffee market prices are so low that all these farmers end up selling the coffee for less than it costs to grow it. They imply that somehow this state of affairs is the fault of the developed consumer countries and that we should feel guilty about this and buy the more expensive "fair trade cofee".
But presumably this means that some coffee growers can afford to sell at this market price - or else the price would never get this low - and the others should quit making coffee and go do something else? Or is there actually some way that the evil starbucks & co manage to force all the growers to sell for below their cost price?
The students of edinburgh university recently voted by a very high margin to make edinburgh the UK's first fair trade university that will only sell fair trade drinks and food in its outlets wherever possible. Is this a steep thing to have done or is it dread?
To which I responded, and was subsequently backed up by Ed and Raymond:
The idea behind fair trade coffee is this: because competition in the coffee-growing world is fierce, coffee growing companies (who are Big Corporations™ and therefore automatically evil in the eyes of the people who tend to like Fair Trade stuff) sell coffee very cheaply. In order to still make a profit, therefore, they pay their employees very low wages (often remaining below the poverty line), or if they buy their coffee from independent farmers, they tend to pay them very low rates for the coffee (less than it costs them to grow).
So far, all of this is just market forces at work. If coffee is too cheap, you're right, the farmers should stop growing it or grow it more efficiently (perhaps by becoming part of a larger plantation, but good luck getting a good price selling your farm to them...). Where the problem arises is that for a lot of these people, options for other means of income are few or non-existent: the coffee industry tends to dominate the area as the only employer, and there is generally no labour shortage so unionising for better wages is also ineffective.
So the situation ends up as: rich white people cruise into Starbucks and pay a price for a single cup of coffee that's equivalent to a month's earnings for the really poor brown person who grew it. Despite this being market forces at work, it's kinda hard not to feel guilty about that as you sip your moccha latte. Fair trade tries to solve this problem by guaranteeing that these workers are paid a living wage (however low that might be) which assuages our middle-class guilt, while at the same time it means coffee growing corporations get to sell coffee at a higher margin than usual, so the coffee companies also skim a little extra money off the top (which is why they agree to Fair Trade in the first place).
The reason this is probably dumb is because all it does is perpetuate the coffee-growers' hold on life for these people. It doesn't solve the basic economic problem that there are too many people and not enough jobs. If we really wanted to help these people, the extra money we pay for Fair Trade would go into investing in the area and creating new industries to make use of the labour surplus. But -- surprise! -- coffee growers aren't too interested in schemes like that.
But in the end we're not interested in solving problems. We just want to pay 10p extra for our coffee-sans-guilt.
Today Richard sent me a link that made me realise that Fox News is even more ridiculous than I thought. Jesus, is that supposed to be fair and balanced? That guy even looks evil! Is he Cheney's younger brother or something?
Sorry about that everybody. Not my fault! Since somebody asked, the current list of MT blogs is (in order of founding):
According to this site that Colin sent me:
I am an Intellectual
Which America Hating Minority Are You?
Everything I know about upcoming movies I know from downloading two-minute clips from Apple's quicktime trailers site. And trailer-editing is an unsung art: even though a large number of the movies are clearly bombs or not to my taste, it's hard to find a trailer there that isn't entertaining in and of itself. This probably says bad, bad things about my attention span. Nevertheless, taking the practice of judging a book by its cover to the logical extreme, I prevent my reviews, in five words or less, of a selection of upcoming movies.
And no, I didn't watch all of these tonight; that would have taken hours...
So today, I had the same sentiment expressed to me by two very good friends, from completely different points of view. The first was in response to my long-standing habit of mentally classifying people I like as "gay", regardless of their sexual orientation, because I don't like straight people, so therefore people I like cannot be straight:
All I'm asking is that you accept that I am one of your best friends, who happens to be straight. Not one of your best friends who can't be straight because all straight people are shit so there for as to fit into some gay-but-not-lesbian-but-still-a-girl category. Being straight is as integral to me and my life as being gay is to you and yours. Just because some straight people have been shit to you (and no I don't know what you've gone through nor how it has affected you) does not mean we all are, in fact many of us are reasonable and worth while human beings (admitedly some of us aren't but then again I've met some gay guys and lesbians who aren't either).
And the second, in response to an article about Introvert Pride, was a bit more aggressive about groups who lash back at their oppressors:
I hate people with these kinds of views. It's like the fucking assholes at MIT who live in this dorm in Senior house. Basically, they're all a bunched of FUCKED UP weirdos that shave half of their heads, dye the other half hot pink, and pierce their eyes. In high school they were picked on and treated like shit by "normal" people. So now, they come to MIT, all live in the same place, finally have a "crew" and a society they fit in with and decide, in all their fucking hypocrisy, to be a complete fucking asshole to anyone else who is "normal". Fuck them.
The issue at stake in both cases is the same. Is it morally okay for a member of an oppressed group to respond to discrimination with discrimination of their own? If a group looks down on you, is it okay to look down on them? And if it's permissible, should it be encouraged or not? This is an issue I have also previously discussed with Bob and Ben as an aside in the comments for November 2003. I find myself for the almost the first time in the unusual position of holding a view in which I instinctively believe but for which I cannot find a real moral justification.
On the one hand, I can look at the situation dispassionately: if this group has suffered oppression, and they wish to end this oppression, the way to foster friendly relations with the other group is not to hate them back, but to treat them as you wish to be treated. However, on the other hand, I tend to look at the problem in terms of my own experience: throughout my life (especially when I was growing up) I was hurt physically, mentally and emotionally by a group of people who disliked me because of an innate characteristic about myself that I am unable to change. This group of people were straight people. They hated me because I was different: I wasn't doing anything to them, I was just gay. But my hatred of them is more rational: they've hurt me, over and over. Homophobia is an irrational fear of the unknown. But in the face of homophobia, heterophobia is merely a rational reaction: you hate what hurts you.
The result is that I am left with a surprisingly deep-rooted distrust of heterosexuals. I don't like them. They make me feel uncomfortable. Although I accept that I must live with them, I wish there weren't any of them around, and would prefer it if they weren't around. All these phrases come slipping readily out of my brain, but as I look at them, I'm horrified. I sound like a dyed-in-the-wool racist: not attempting to justify myself, but holding onto my discriminatory position nevertheless. I have lots of friends who are straight, and I love them dearly. But I have trouble reconciling that love with their membership of a group which, rationally, I despise. What I should of course do is narrow my definition of the group I despise to those who have actually hurt me, and remove the blame from heterosexuals in general. But instead I find myself classifying them as a "special" type of heterosexual. In fact, I tend to think of them as being gay: this slips out in conversation, when I say things like "I don't know any straight people" or "but we're all gay!" in the company of my friends. My friends are, apparently by definition, gay.
And I also, instinctively, before my rational mind intervenes, classify straights as inferior. Again, I'll give you the thoughts that bubble to the surface: "Boring. Unimaginative. Cowardly. Dull. Lazy. Too scared to do what they really want. Not brave enough to do something different. Just stupidly following what others have told them is the right thing to do. Pathetic." But what am I saying? I know this isn't true. Lots of people are straight because they just are. Lots of people act like "normal" people because it suits them just fine to do so. But because I had to fight both to accept myself and then to get others to accept me, I am jealous of these people who had it so easy. I regard them as soft. Because I had to fight to convince myself that the way I choose to live my life is just as good as any other, I have overcompensated. To make up for the fact that my life is (be it ever so slightly) harder than "normal", I had to convince myself that it has some advantages over "normal" life and this has filtered through into my perceptions of everything else.
I also empathize strongly with other groups considered not "normal" -- goths, punks, skaters (before Avril Lavigne took the soul of skater culture and wiped her perky little ass with it), and anybody who takes a look at the status quo and decides that their way is not just different, but better. Because that's what I did, that's what I felt I had to do in order to reclaim my self-esteem from the depths it plunged to when I sat curled, sobbing in the shower, whispering "face it... you're gay" over and over. I watched my picture of myself, my rock-solid knowledge of my place in the world shatter around me, the bright shiny rails of my future torn up and not replaced with anything but the knowledge that I was something terrible, and that I could no longer deny to myself that I was indeed part of that group. And that group was hated -- I thought -- by everyone; everyone knew it was something wrong, something perverse, something dirty, words that were a million miles away from anything I thought I would ever use to describe myself. It took me a long time to get over that shame, by converting into Pride, capital P, and then merely pride, the low-level kind that youthful exuberance boils down to after the excitement of discovering the brave, new, slightly naughty gay world has passed. So naturally I cheer them on when I see other people following that route, compensating for the fact that they're not really happy with who they are by shouting as loudly as possible how much worse off everyone else is. Shouting out their differences with pink hair and shaved heads. I know it's something they have to do to feel good about themselves again, eventually.
The fact that I still cling to these proclamations of superiority, these casual remarks that denigrate other groups even if only slightly and half-jokingly, indicates that maybe I'm not as far along the road as I like to think that I am. I have almost completely banished from my mind the thoughts that used to haunt me: that being gay cuts you off from life experiences like kids and family. The subtle shame of not being able to casually mention my signficant other to co-workers without carefully changing pronouns, or not at all, without an awkward introduction to the fact that my love life is not quite the same as theirs. The sneaking suspicion that I am an evolutionary dead-end, an accident, a genetic mistake. The knowledge that biology didn't design it to go up there -- it just happens to fit. These used to drive me to tears, to thoughts of suicide. Nowadays they merely make me briefly unhappy. There are counter-thoughts. I know that my struggles to face myself and to face others have made me stronger person, a more fundamentally honest person, more aware of myself. I know that the problem of acceptance is their problem, not my problem. I know how good it feels. I know that family can have many more definitions than just the one I learned in school. And I know that my love is no less strong and no less true because of the biology of the person it's directed at. But perhaps I don't find them as convincing as I wish I did. Perhaps I wish I didn't have to struggle in the first place. Perhaps I wish that my life had happened to be the kind that didn't require me to be strong and in touch with myself. Maybe my low-level disdain hides a deep-rooted jealousy. Maybe not maybe.
So when you hear me call you a breeder, or when you see a goth with pink hair and a face like a pincushion sneering down at you, don't take it to heart. We don't hate you. We don't think less of you, not really. It's not a real point of view, and so it doesn't need to be justified. This is just something we have to do, to feel okay. We're used to being weak, to being unhappy, and we raise ourselves up by pushing down on those around us. Occasionally we hit someone weaker and unhappier than us, and for that we apologize. We didn't mean to hurt you. And although that doesn't make it acceptable, we hope you understand anyway.
Create your own South Park character! And yes, I nicked this idea from Dan who may have nicked it from Matt.
On 17 February 2004, Simeon Douglas wrote:
Hi,
My name is Simeon Douglas a citizen of South Africa but we base in Nigeria. I am the first son of the Late former President of Nigeria. Before my Late fathers death, he left the sum of $1,500,000 US Dollars in in a coded bank account here in Nigeria. And right now my family members don't know about the money. except me and the bank manager. And I don't want my father's money to waiste just like that in the bank. So on this ground the Bank manager and some other officials of the Bank who wants to approve the Transfer of the money are demanding $6000 US Dollars to to prepare documents for the legalisation of the Transaction. Because I am already making arrangements with the Bank manager. All I am just seeking from You right now is to join me in raising the money for the legalisation of the documents of the transfer of the money, And they also want me to get a trust worthy person abroad who will provide an account to receive the money. So that there will be no suspicious eye on us.And if you are interested in joining me in this deal I will even show you the bank where the money is and I will also give you the account number and the pin code so that you can access the money in the account. All I have right now in my bank account is just $3000 US Dollars, so if you can join me in raising the remaining balance which is $3000 US Dollars I will be very greatful in doing business with you. For your assistance your share will be 30% of the whole money. and 60% will be mine. And 10% will be set aside for any expenses that me and you will spend before the transfer of the money as successfully gets to your bank account. So therefore in your reply please send down your phone number for easy communication. Here is my contact phone number 234-8055125224. Immedidtely the money get to your account I shall come down to your country for the sharing of the money.I will be expecting you r reply.Your quick response wil will higly appreciated, Thanks very much for your understanding.
Your's Faithfully
Simeon Douglas
Dear Simeon -
Thanks for your message. What a coincidence! I, too, am the son of a deposed dictator (Augusto Pinochet*) who left me a large sum of money in a code-locked bank account here in London. I do not have $3000 to lend you, as my own bank account has only £1000** (US$2000) in it. However, the transfer fees here are much more reasonable, and I need only another $1000 to unlock my money (a sum of £400,000, or US $600,000 ).
So here's the deal: if you send me US$1000, I will unlock my money (you will receive the standard 30%, as you suggested). I can then use it to send you back $4000, which you can use to unlock your own money!
Do we have a deal?
Sincerely,
Laurie Pinochet.
* Yes, I know he's not dead.
** As if! If I'm only that much into overdraft I'll be lucky.
By far the most scarily accurate personality test I've ever done, it describes exactly how I work and the problems I have when working, in particular spending far too much time trying to categorize and work out problems methodically, and the panicky feeling I get when trying to make design decisions in the face of multiple options.Just like it says, I tend to solve these problems by working out the details and then letting them form a pattern for a solution.
Laurie, you are somewhat left-hemisphere dominant and show a preference for visual learning, although not extreme in either characteristic. You probably tend to do most things in moderation, but not always.Your left-hemisphere dominance implies that your learning style is organized and structured, detail oriented and logical. Your visual preference, though, has you seeking stimulation and multiple data. Such an outlook can overwhelm structure and logic and create an almost continuous state of uncertainty and agitation. You may well suffer a feeling of continually trying to "catch up" with yourself.
Your tendency to be organized and logical and attend to details is reasonably well-established which should afford you success regardless of your chosen field of endeavor. You can "size up" situations and take in information rapidly. However, you must then subject that data to being classified and organized which causes you to "lose touch" with the immediacy of the problem.
Your logical and methodical nature hamper you in this regard though in the long run it may work to your advantage since you "learn from experience" and can go through the process more rapidly on subsequent occasions.
You remain predominantly functional in your orientation and practical. Abstraction and theory are secondary to application. In keeping with this, you focus on details until they manifest themselves in a unique pattern and only then work with the "larger whole."
With regards to your career choices, you have a mentality that would be good as a scientist, coach, athlete, design consultant, or an engineering technician. You can "see where you want to go" and even be able to "tell yourself," but find that you are "fighting yourself" at the darndest times.
If only it told me how to solve these problems... I guess I should just stop trying to classify things?
Get your own left brain/right brain profile. (Via the consistently excellent Colin, who keeps blogging things I wish I'd blogged myself...)
Is my Blog HOT or NOT? This is SUCH a good idea...
I've been toying with ideas for a redesign to this site. The main goals of the redesign, in order:
However, I can't decide what I want to do. So here's a selection of scans of doodles of the design I've been playing with. Please comment with suggestions and feedback!
(Key: the diagrams feature some abbreviations to indicate what kind of content goes where. These are:
This first one was just a series of off-the-wall possibilities for funky layouts, none very practical, drawn in the margin.
Another early one, very organic but too curvy to be practical I think. Let me know if you disagree though.
Immediately after looking at a load of art-deco, I came up with this directly. It's very deco but there's just too much decoration and not enough content, I think
Another "style over substance" design; it looks very pretty in my head (the background is shades of dark marble, the thick lines are gold inlay) but where the hell does the content go?
These aren't web pages. They're just stuff I drew in the margin and I think they're kinda purdy.
Having now decided what content will go on the front page, this was my first attempt to fit it all into a deco shape
Another attempt to fit things into deco, a bit more coherent this time, but I don't like the three different shapes -- they don't seem to mesh well at all.
This one looks a lot more coherent -- it's just one shape -- but it wastes too much space.
All one type of shape, in different directions. No good.
Deco features the winged motif, the interlocking, and the fibonacci-sequence style of spacing between elements a lot. Preliminary idea, developed into the following one:
I'm seriously considering this one -- it's very very deco, and yet doesn't waste too much space. The central piece needs to be a lot wider relative to the two outside columns.
Tried to go simple but deco. Horrible.
Produced by letting my mind wander and just draw stuff where it seems to fit. This is a method that has worked before. It wastes not too much white space and is suitably deco, but doesn't seem bold enough.
So, let me know what you think...
Here's another idea for the design of the front page, which I liked a lot more before I uploaded it. Points to note:
This design is supposed to float over a very ornate deco background. Instead of trying to place it in the background as I have previously, here it is roughly as I imagined it. I'm not sure what size this will be relative to the page elements; it may become huge, as I don't want it to stop suddenly in either direction.
