Responsibility in the Workplace (or, "Hitting a DevOops")

Things go wrong.

That's a universal truth. We can make plans and anticipate problems, but in the end, "Best laid plans of mice and men" will occasionally leave you feeling as if you have little consolation outside the use of salty language and a desire to crawl into the corner of a server room for a few hours.

The important thing to remember is that it's the reaction to things going wrong that will be judged. The fact that something went wrong cannot be be changed; what's done is done.

In terms of the workplace, here are the steps I try to remember:

1. Take responsibility. Own up to the mistake, if it was your mistake (or your area of responsibility.) Was the task yours to maintain? Were you in charge of managing whatever went south? Maybe you just plain screwed up...you were supposed to order something, and you forgot, for example. Passing it off on someone else or implying it was someone else's fault you didn't follow through just makes you an unreliable douchecanoe.
2. Apologize for the mistake. Not in a passive, blame-shifting manner, like those idiots that make a passive aggressive acknowledgement that you're sorry that XYZ feels bad in a crafty attempt to make a non-apology. Apologize in a way that acknowledges your responsibility in the situation.
3. Once responsibility is acknowledged, let it go. Responsibility is one thing. Dwelling on it is just wallowing in blame. Blame will not help the situation. You now have a problem to solve. Focus on the problem at hand.
4. Rectify the situation. Identify what is wrong, and do what has to be done to make it right. This could be as simple as ordering what was forgotten (expediting the order, if possible) or maybe you'll need to find a workable solution with someone in a team affected by the problem.
5. Identify the source of the screw-up. Why did you overlook this? What factors contributed to it? Of course there are times when the problem stemmed from you making a silly mistake. Other times the problem came from a series of failures that maybe you couldn't reasonably foresee. The important thing is to ask yourself if there is a point where this failure could have been reasonably caught and mitigated before it became a problem.
6. Revise procedures. Maybe you need to add an item to a procedure checklist. Maybe you need to rely on organized lists. Maybe it's time to overhaul a workflow, or work with others in a team to create a check and balance mechanism.
7. Communicate the changes. Tell your manager and others affected by the mistake what will be done in the future so that this mistake will hopefully not be repeated. This shows that you're proactive and taking steps to learn from your mistakes.

This is a basic guideline I try to apply to workplace screw-ups. There are variations to these guidelines, but I try to keep the goals in mind when something goes wrong. Some businesses codify the spirit of these items with some form of post-mortem analysis of a situation, other businesses seem to leave it up to the individual to form some solution and move on, happy enough that the problem has been (hopefully) addressed.


In the end, the goals are the same.

• Acknowledge your responsibility and apologize
• Rectify the situation at hand
• Analyze what led up to the mistake being made
• Prevent it from happening again, if possible
• Communicate the changes you're making to prevent future mistakes going forward

 Life is messy. Things happen. Things go wrong. Acknowledge, and move on. Just...try not to let it happen again.

Notes for Giving (and Hosting) Presentations

Our office space hosts what we call "Town Halls," during which our remote employees and offices connect up to share information in a kind of giant shared Skype session without using Skype. Cameras, microphones, and connections are set up so we can not only send video of a speaker presenting company information but also the display of a connected computer.

We have enough space for projected employment numbers in our presentation space. This means we have a nice space available that was only being utilized for Town Hall meetings and company lunchtimes. Rather than let that space sit largely underutilized, we have had a few groups (and our employees) use it for after-hours technology presentations and meetups.

The setup is rather sophisticated, if I do say so myself and has largely been automated by an employee with a history of working with audio/visual equipment. For the most part, he has abstracted the complexity of the AV setup to a selection of one of a few presets on a tablet touchscreen, which can be further refined using a few interfaces on the same tablet. It's pretty slick, and he's still refining the macros controlling the interactions among the video, computer, and audio systems.

Some of the presenters for the talks have requested that events be recorded; normally the employee with AV experience is on hand for these events. That's fortunate, since he has intimate knowledge of all the plumbing that interconnects the systems and is in a very good position to improvise and fix glitches that can occur during the system's shakedown.

Recently we hosted an event where this same employee was not available onsite, and the role of recording the event fell to me, the backup systems person. On the plus side, I do enjoy learning more about recording and presenting events. It's a chance to scratch an itch for amateur video creation (I watch the how-tos from Ryan Connolly and his videocast series Film Riot and think, "That looks like it could really be fun to do...," until I look at Final Cut Pro and think, "This must be what a fighter jet looks like to an orangutan.)

Side note - If you have any desire to create sophisticated films, I strongly advise subscribing to Film Riot. Special effects and filmmaking tips broken down into easily digestible lessons, Film Riot makes me think that even I could make a half entertaining movie short. Perhaps. With the right software and decent camera...

On the other hand, it's still an incredibly complicated system that is separated by a few layers of abstraction so a monkey like myself can operate it, but if something should go wrong, I'm left scratching my head. Being kind of an anxious person, I constantly fear the breakdown of the abstraction layers, and this presentation night would have me flying largely solo.

The postscript of any event should be retrospective. What went right? What could have been done better? What was overlooked? How can I improve?

Even if things went awesomely, what can we do to make it more awesome in the future?

I'm not an AV person; my background largely comes from reading rather than doing when it comes to making videos and doing presentations. Therefore I'm a student with a lot to learn.

One good thing was that technically, this presentation went rather well. There was a glitch in the equipment where a camera wouldn't start up. While this wouldn't kill the presentation, it would have been nice to have this camera working; it was getting close to showtime, and the options were to fly without the camera and make do, or do a complete shutdown and powerup, risking that something wouldn't come back up in time (or properly) so close to the presentation start. I'm more risk averse. A less risk-averse coworker made the call to do the power cycle when I asked for input on the situation; it turned out his was the right call. It brought the camera up, and the rest of the equipment powered up as well, although the projectors gave me a bit of a fright as they wouldn't project right away to prevent damage to the lamps.

Eventually I'll need to find out if there's a way to individually power something up without having to do an automated shutdown and startup of the whole system.

There was also an issue with sound, where for some reason the notebook computer brought by the presenter refused to be heard through the headphone jack. I think it's related to his use of the HDMI output for video while the audio cable was paired with the VGA output on our system, but I need to consult with our AV designer to confirm it. Otherwise it might have been something strange with the way certain laptops deal with DRM restrictions. I'm not completely sure. The fix was simply using the notebook's regular speakers with a microphone placed over it.

I also have to remember that I need to be aware of the background. The system we have in place is optimized for presenting a town hall; that is, a speaker at a lectern, with two narrow spotlights aimed to highlight that speaker. The presentation that night had speakers that wanted to do something more of a fireside chat, out of the way of our lighting system. Our lights in the room also seemed to have a new lighting glitch that created a "disco" effect when we hit a particular preset; so we tried to get more lighting by keeping the solar and blackout shades open and allow more natural light into the space.

During the filming I realized that the camera resolution was just high enough that you can make out movement in buildings with open blinds. I'm not suggesting you could see lewd acts and the captured imagery was completely unintentional, but nonetheless all future video taken by me in our space will be done with our own shades down, regardless of lighting issues it may present.

Later on another speaker came up to present, and partway through I realized he wasn't miked. By far, my biggest fail; I should have interrupted the presenter and reminded them to put on a microphone. As a speaker, I will need to remember to check for a microphone if I wish to be recorded.

While recording the video it occurred to me that if you are presenting for a crowd outside of a comfortable circle, it may be beneficial to do a sweep of the backdrop for anything out of place or something that could be removed if it doesn't belong. The presentation was bookended by a social meetup; food and drink can easily be left out in plain sight. If your goal is to have a casual video by like-minded individuals, this may not be a problem. If you're planning on making something that may be incorporated into something larger, you may want to make sure the background and material are as vanilla as possible so the material will be more flexibly integrated.

Those were my own notes for my own reference. For a first solo performance at the tech side, I think it went fairly well. There are some things I couldn't really help (i.e., we don't have box lights, to my knowledge; I also need better knowledge of handling the transition arrangements of the two cameras and computer outputs to switch what's being sent to the recording system on the fly so there's less hesitation of what buttons to punch when, but that can only come with time. The addition of a mobile camera with transmitter would also give more flexibility in setting up shots and getting better footage, but I'm not sure it would be something we'll get budgeted anytime soon.) The items I did note...backdrop attention and insisting in the future that if you're not miked when you take the stage that you stop and get miked...are things I can improve immediately. Familiarity with the system will come with practice.

Regardless, it was an opportunity to learn more about an area with which I am unfamiliar, and I enjoyed it (once I stopped being afraid of it breaking on me!)

Stack Exchange: Moving Day

Several months ago Stack Exchange moved offices from 55 Broadway. I was with the small group charged with helping make the move; I spent part of the last day taking a few photographs and recording video on my phone.

Reviewing that footage brought a sense of bittersweet nostalgia. I took a couple of hours to assemble, render and upload a short video of the moving footage to YouTube. I readily admit it's not the finest quality in the world, but I still tear up a little when I think about it.

 

Things change as time passes on. What's interesting to me is that we live in an age when capturing small snapshots in time has become simple and mostly accessible to anyone with a phone.

Firefox: Where's My Bookmark (From the Console?)

I'm a slightly OCD type person. I'll check something several times over so the state of said thing is burned indelibly into my memory, and I can recall it later to that specific moment and not mix it up with some other similar time. For example, I'll check the refrigerator door before leaving the apartment several times to make sure it's shut, lest I worry on the subway that the fridge is acting as an apartment air conditioner.

Sometimes I end up with an irrational focus on something that shouldn't be a worry. I knew I had worked out some vacation time on the calendar, but for some reason I decided I wanted to double check it was actually entered into the private company vacation list. I needed the URL, which I had saved as a bookmark in Firefox on my OS X workstation. On my desk. Which was about 150 miles away.

That workstation didn't have graphical interface access open, but did have SSH. So how can I extract the address from the console?

I VPN'ed into the corporate network then SSH'd into the workstation. Next I navigated to the Firefox profile, located in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/<something>.default.

Next I changed directories into ./bookmarkbackups. Is this automatically generated? I'm not sure. I just know there were several JSON files with dates in the filenames located in that directory.

As a quick and dirty operation, I dumped the text to my console then copy and pasted it into a text editor. The file was a list of titles, changed datestamps, URI's, etc...so a quick search within the text document for the name of the calendar turned up in the bookmark title lists. From there I copy and pasted the URI into the web browser...tada!

And that is how I pulled the address of a website from my Firefox bookmarks using the command line!

What is Documentation Done Right?

One of my new projects at work consists of revamping the checklists used when employees join and depart the company. My memory may be fuzzy...I actually have a horrible memory...but the incarnation that has been used was my own concoction from back when I joined the company nearly a year ago. For awhile, as each new person joined (or left) I would refine the action items so something overlooked the last time would hopefully not be missed the next time around.

It become something more than a checklist; it mutated into a checklist of action items with a set of how-to instructions under each entry.  We kept the final incarnation on an internal wiki system. A new person could tell that it was a dirty bit of work since the original checklist had a big old warning and link at the top telling the reader to go to another page that was updated and had more precise instructions on how to complete each step.

The finished list is one that I've been using for the past several months without much trouble. But things move on; more services are being added, the workflow for particular departments have added accounts they'd like added at hiring time, and as the company has grown the cross communication of who should be notified of what information for orientation has changed. The process has become on of the items that is a pain point, but only to the degree of an itch; people scratch it, are slightly irritated, but not irritated enough to warrant fixing the pain point...until next time, at which point the process repeats itself.

We also have a new system administrator in the team, and one of his central tenets to good systems administration practices is documentation, documentation, documentation. He's spent a good amount of time getting up to speed with our brand of Kool-Aid by revamping our internal documentation system; a side effect is reminding us of the technical debt we've created in our documentation practices. It's been a great motivator in getting my own checklist project updated. His work reminded me of something I'd lost sight of:

Your documentation isn't for you.

Adding new employees and disabling accounts had become something of my own niche. The documentation that had started out being a general list for anyone who would need to add employees became my own cheat sheet. The basics were there. But if someone new came along to do the job, the instructions didn't quite align with the exact steps needed to achieve the desired outcome. It was something I knew should be fixed but hadn't taken the time to do...until now.

To summarize a conversation Tom and I had one afternoon, "The goal should be to document and automate yourself out of the job. There's always something more to do."

My documentation wasn't really being used as documentation. It was a set of notes that I could refer to when trying to memorize the steps to reproduce a desired outcome. Gradually the steps became ingrained and the notes became more of a checklist that I would skim.

I also gradually gained a better understanding of what and why I was doing something. The documentation became burned into my head, and the notes masquerading as documentation fell into disrepair.

As I worked with the new and improved documentation I was surprised to see to what degree things were out of date. For example, our list of items to complete included provisioning a phone. We use Asterisk in-house, and each office has its own local server. Over the course of time, the newer offices had altered configurations for Asterisk, which automated more of the process and simplified the creation of accounts and phones.

I hadn't realized that at some point the New York system's documentation was out of date to the point of just being plain wrong; if someone else tried to follow those directions they would not have found anything resembling the sample entries they were supposed to follow.

I'm still in the middle of the checklist revamp. I'm trying to do it right, or at least better than before, which means it'll take some time; I'm doing an initial set of passes by literally documenting each step I take in creating new users and where appropriate I'm adding notes explaining why I'm doing what I'm doing.


Once I can follow the new instructions from start to end without a major hiccup, I'll identify points in the process where I'm missing information.  I'll look for things that are now consistent requests for modifications to accounts...such as, "Bob needs to be on <XYZ> mailing list"...and roll it into the initial setup procedure. Yes, this means having to communicate with people who manage various areas hiring new developers and salespeople.

Then I'll look for procedural refinements. For example, I've created a new badge for the user...who does it go to? Do I give it to the office manager? The new employee's manager? Do I hold on to it until the employee comes to me for it? We need to formalize this process so everyone is on the same page and knows, when asked for Bob's badge, where to look for it.

Once finished, I should have a list that is thorough enough for anyone in our technical staff to follow in creating a new employee entry with minimal mistakes.

An unfortunate side effect is how thorough it is becoming. I'm not completely through every step, and already the list and explanations is eight pages. Not the kind of checklist most people would like to deal with just to add an employee.

So what is the right way to do documentation "right?" The stuff I'm working on should be thorough enough that someone new to the job should be able to follow them, and the notes help augment an understanding of the thinking behind some of the steps. It should also pinpoint places in the procedure that need work, whether it's updating images rolled to machines or identifying where we might be able to potentially automate parts of the process. The problem is that this becomes less a checklist and more a procedural how-to, and as people become familiar with the process they start to ignore the checklist parts of the process much in the way billboards become simply visual noise I barely pay any attention to anymore when riding along the freeway.

Should documentation be adapted for more advanced users? Or should it keep some level of detail for people to refer back to, or for training newer users, despite meaning you may have to maintain various levels of documentation and keep them in parity?

Rules in a Fictional Universe

Star Trek: Into Darkness has been out for a couple weeks now. My wife and I had a chance to see it, and we enjoyed it.



Of course, there was a lot of speculation as to the way this second movie in the rebooted "Abramsverse" franchise would align to original Wrath of Khan; I have to say that the previews and photos released of the movie were a total red herring as to what to expect. In a way it was true to form from the original second movie; I remember reading that it was leaked to the public that Spock was to die in that film, and fans were whipped into a frenzy. Remember how Wrath of Khan opened? A simulated battle in which Spock, then captain of the Enterprise, "died."

Supposedly this was added to show fans, "Ha ha! You thought Spock was going to die and we totally tricked you! This was the scene that was referred to in the leak!" This also explained the reference to a line from Kirk after the simulation asking Spock, "Aren't you dead?"

Total misdirection. Into Darkness played that hand very well.


We enjoyed the movie, but I started musing aloud to my wife some things that didn't quite make sense to me. She sort of nods and ignores me, since I'm thinking about sane elements in a fictional universe, but these are the sort of things that kind of irk me in a universe that has established rules.

(Warning, some things that follow would be spoilers. If you cared, though, you've already seen the movie by now...so...warning, otherwise, don't complain.)

Yes, this is fiction. Science fiction. Where some plot holes are waved off with techno-jargon the way Harry Potter films can be explained through adequate explanation of magic if necessary.

But in an established universe, there are rules to follow. Rules that if broken, for a fan, this means the suspension of disbelief necessary to follow the story can break. Science fiction fans are notorious sticklers for rules, and this in turn leads to the roadblocks that turn into online bickering over details in the movies that risk alienating a loyal fanbase.

Let's draw a parallel. Man of Steel, yet another reboot of the Superman franchise, will no doubt create a new spin on Superman's origin. It will probably have the basic elements that have been rehashed with every movie and comic...planet Krypton, explosion, baby in space, raised in the middle of ideal America, the Kents.

The thing is that Superman has been around for a long time. A really long time. He premiered in 1938, back when comics tended to have some really absurd things incorporated into the storylines. Basically whenever the writers need a new ability, they sort of just gave it to him. Things that "worked" became permanent. Things that didn't, they conveniently forgot about.

For instance, in the early days superman didn't fly. He could jump really far (ever give thought to the whole, "leap tall buildings in a single bound" thing describing Superman?) He had other abilities, like Super Ventriloquism and Super Telepathy. He even had Super Muscle Control that he used to pretend he was dead by stilling his heart and reshape his face and body so he could imitate an alien.

Most of these abilities faded away, lost to comic history. Sometimes they reappeared in other forms (like the Super Kiss that gave Lois Lane amnesia in the movies, or his ability to throw his Super Saran Wrap "S" at his enemies when fighting other Kryptonians in the second movie.)

Adding these abilities detracted from the character; they were convenient ways to wrap up a story without having to actually deal with the conflict (Super Deus ex Machina, I suppose.) The DC comics universe has a roster of characters that are, relatively speaking, gods, with Superman being the pinnacle example. He is invulnerable. He lifts mountains. He has an aura that helps protect things near his skin (the example given is his suit's resistance to damage). He flies. He can fly into space, and since his cells are charged by our yellow sun, he can fly into the sun. Some comics have depicted him as hardly aging, or even being in the center of our sun. He's as fast as the Flash. He shoots heat beams from his eyes, and freezes things with his breath.

Stories require that the hero must overcome adversity. There must be a challenge; a possibility that he (or she) will lose. How can you make an audience worry about the protagonist's life when your protagonist can withstand a nuclear bomb?

Oh, we'll throw in an Achilles heel...Kryptonite. Exposure to this radiation from his homeworld is a poison to this otherwise invulnerable race of god-aliens. But even this was eventually used as a plot point, where depending on what color of the rainbow the Kryptonite it would affect Superman in a different way.

Over time it got really ridiculous, the variations of rule bending that was applied to Superman just so they could have some kind of conflict that would challenge him. That's part of the reason DC decided to reboot their universe, resetting Superman (and many other storylines) with the Crisis. Superman now had more sane, consistent rules applied to his powers and abilities, with everything more absurd being wiped away from the timeline (they essentially pulled a reboot before the term "reboot" became popular in Hollywood.)

So even in a comic universe, establishing rules is important. As a fictional universe grows, new rules...and sometimes stupid ones...are established, and sometimes something has to be done to wipe them out with an in-universe explanation. A reboot, if you will.

Fictional universes are usually based on our own "real" universe, with some elements altered or twisted for dramatic purposes. In superhero universes, we accept that most people are like ourselves; average people going about their business each day, but there's an exceptional person that lives by a slightly different set of rules. Once we know those rules, we settle in to enjoy the story presented.

Star Trek doesn't have the long-running history of Superman, but it does have a longer-than-average history, given that it premiered in 1966. As the storylines progressed, elements that were introduced for practical reasons were given in-universe explanations (for example, shuttles and transporters were invented because they were cheaper than the effects needed to land a starship on a planet in the early episodes, but in-universe they became part of how the future had evolved, and a starship was just too physically large to land.)

Later some rules were altered. The Intrepid class starship (Voyager) is able to land on a planet; it's energy intensive, it's rarely done, but that ship does have landing struts and a procedure that allows it to do so, thanks to the "structural integrity field" that keeps the ship from buckling and flying apart from the stresses of flying through an atmosphere.

The structural integrity field, much like the inertial dampeners, was invented for practical reasons; there's a popular story that when the Enterprise-D was being designed, someone in the art department superimposed the design over the parking lot and realized that something that size would never be able to withstand the forces placed on something that big when moving through space. Inertial dampeners were created because when you have something moving fast in space, even "tiny" changes in velocity would result in large changes in the forces placed on the inhabitants of the ship...in other words, people would be turned into pudding on the walls whenever they tried to turn the ship at a rate that wasn't glacial.

Why were people thrown around when in a battle or during sudden maneuvers? Because there was a slight delay between the change in motion and the computer compensating with the inertial dampeners, of course. Dramatic tension melding with technobabble!

And these rules were established and refined over time. The fact the story producers would address these kinds of technicalities drew geeks with a passion for technology and some way to embrace pedantism. These people will question the effects of relativity on people traveling at warp speed, and how warp speed actually translates to factors of the speed of light. They can, and do, call out producers for getting technical aspects wrong on the ship; remember, these fictional vehicles have had their designs refined to the point where there are cutaway models and posters available of the various Enterprise incarnations showing where things are located on each deck. There have been people who wrote in to ask why rooms had certain markings, knowing that the particular facility was located on <insert correct deck>, and all the producers could do was admit they screwed up.

Yes, the fans in some cases know more about the layout of the fictional ship than the people making the series.

Then came Abrams. Abrams created a new universe, one where he's said that this Star Trek could be the kind of Star Trek he would have enjoyed as a kid (he couldn't "get into" the original Star Trek series and consequently hadn't followed much of the original storylines.) He made it more accessible. He also had the benefit of more advanced technology, so their aliens didn't have to consist of painted paper plates stapled to the actors' faces and spaceships that looked like dangling hubcaps and hot-glued refuse attached to fishing line.

Abrams has created a universe wherein he focuses on the characters rather well. Dramatic tension. He's rewriting and exploring the relationships of these established characters, and doing so rather well. But I think he's also forging new rules within the Star Trek universe, and that creates an odd sense of confusion, or unease. Unless these things are addressed at some point, there will continue to be a sense that something isn't quite right in the Abramsverse.

Does warp speed work differently there? As depicted, it's almost like warp is a corridor through which a ship travels. In the movie, the Enterprise was attacked, and it was suddenly jerked to the size as if it were a skidding car, and "broke" through the corridor to "real space."

In the old series, something like that would have, at a minimum, turned everyone in the ship into biological wall decorations.

For that matter, how is it possible they were fired upon while at warp? Phasers are a light-based weapon, essentially a modified laser. The only thing that could blow up while at warp would be a torpedo, as it could have a small warp-capable casing for short traveling short distances. Are these ships also equipped with some kind of mini-railgun cannon? Or is warp speed using some kind of bubble of non-warp space that would allow for non-relativistic speed weapons use? (The movie would hint not, since they thought they were safe at warp speed right up until they weren't.)

The use of shields are also slightly different. Originally shields were like a second skin, providing an invisible armor that enveloped the ship, and once they had taken an adequate pounding their failure meant the hull was exposed to damage. Over time they seem to go through a few modifications, such as overlapping generators that could be selectively powered (rear shields fail while forward sections were protected) and the use of particular frequencies as a plot point to allow properly tuned weapons to easily breach shields (rotate frequencies to stop the Borg weapon!) The Abramsverse seems to make it abundantly clear that shields don't stop damage so much as they help reduce damage, since the hull was taking a beating throughout the fights and no one seemed a bit surprised as the shields just gradually reduced in power.

Even the size of the ship is called into question; this was a huge sticking point on the Internet when the first rebooted Enterprise was unveiled. People analyzed the ship from graphics, comparing deck sizes to the original ships and using windows and shuttle bay doors as anchor points when figuring out how large it really is and what this would mean for the series. I think it's telling something when at this point, a few years after release, there still aren't "official" technical drawings for this ship.

(If you think I'm just being strange in speculating on this, Google "Enterprise size comparison" to see what work other people have done when sleuthing the stated ship size versus the visual comparisons in the movies. The "original" ship size was over 300 meters, less than 400 meters, and the size of the Abramsverse Enterprise is over 700 meters...which is kind of freaking huge, given that it has an ability to casually land on planets. Someone out there will no doubt eventually do the math to figure out what kind of stresses this would place on a vessel of that kind of mass, even with structural integrity fields and other technobabble to compensate.)

And there still has to be some explanation given as to how the new transwarp transporters, pioneered in the first film and utilized again in this one, work. Or are limited. Because really...if these can be used to beam from one planet to another, why are you using starships? Just send out drones to other places in the galaxy, use beacons to signal back that you can beam there, and beam to that planet. Even Stargate SG-1 had to compensate when gates moved through space over time; somehow this transporter is able to beam to other solar systems and reconstitute living matter on a planet moving relative to your place of origin without worrying about little things like beaming inside the ground (or more likely, into the middle of space.) The implications of this type of technology are really kind of big (much as when people started questioning replicator technology...why not replicate a ship? To which people came up with an answer...more rules of how a universe works, so the universe stays consistent, and can balance dramatic tension with limitations of a magic hand-waving technology.)

I'm hoping that there will be more explanations given as the series continues, especially in relation to how the ship works. In the original series, the Enterprise was more than just a vessel for traveling around the galaxy; it became a character, an extension of the crew. That was part of the reason it was so shocking when the Enterprise was blown up in Star Trek III, paving the way for new ships to continue the name, but it was a shock for the audience when it happened.

Given time, I can get used to many of the changes. Sure, the bridge looks like a futuristic Apple Store. And for some reason engineering looks like it should be brewing batches of beer rather than propelling a ship through space. But I'm really hoping these new rules better defined. I'm kind of worried that in focusing on characters, the technology in the Abramsverse will become simply an extended form of deus ex machina, wherein everything non-character driven is sacrificed in the name of being a convenient plot device that can be thrown away later or explained as if the technology were driven by magic. Star Trek doesn't meld well with that kind of logic. We're talking about fans that debated whether food eaten on the holodeck disappears from your stomach when you leave the simulation (answer: no, since the holodeck uses force fields and replicator technologies, the food you eat is created as any other replicated food while using force fields to create objects you aren't ingesting.)

Magic can be waved away with spells and incantations. Trek fans will want a plausible explanation for how things work...and expect them to keep working within those limitations later.

Are People, At Heart, Horrible?

Science fiction has long been used as a cloak to wrap social commentary so the producers of content can claim that the comments are just...well, part of science fiction. Classic science fiction shows and movies are a snapshot of the times in which they were created.

I was home recently, in part, for my son's birthday. When I'm home I try to set aside time to focus on doing things with my boy, since I'm away in the city so often. I got up one morning and asked him if he'd like to play a video game, and instead he suggested watching a movie. He proudly proclaimed that he found a movie that "you might like, Daddy!," so of course I agreed to see what he unearthed in the Netflix queue.

The movie? Godzilla. Not one of the campy Japanese Godzilla, but the 1998 American Matthew Broderick film. One of the few movies I've seen where Matthew Broderick's performance managed to make me cringe when he delivered lines.

My son is young, so action and effects can carry a bad film well in his opinion. I tried to use it as a teachable moment and brought up the idea that Godzilla was originally a way to express concern about nuclear weapons and experimentation.

"We used nuclear bombs on Japan during World War II," I said. "The radiation causes mutation to people's cells. Cancer. Godzilla was a monster created by nuclear radiation, because that's what people were worried about."

I went on to tell him that if he looked at Spider-Man, originally he was bitten by a radioactive spider. Today's reboots of Spider-Man's origin have him bitten by a genetically altered spider, reflecting our society's concern with experimenting on genes.

This got me thinking about some trends in what comprises popular themes in horror and sci-fi in the past few years.  I know it's not a comprehensive study, and it's purely anecdotal, but this still gives me something to pause and think about.

Example; zombies. My wife and I were discussing Walking Dead and she said that if there were some kind of zombie apocalypse, she'd want to die right away.

"You'd only have to survive a certain period in the beginning...zombies would rot, and in winter they'd freeze, depending on where you were," I said.

"Have you seen what happens to people who survive?," she said. "They aren't running away from zombies."

She had a point. Worse, I read the comic series, so I know what happened there. Walking Dead isn't about zombies. It's about people. And people become very, very horrible in the Walking Dead universe. The acts committed in that series are not so much about survival, but in many cases are an expression of what people will do when they have the opportunity to do the things civilization reins in.

People can justify just about any behaviors, despite being harmful to others.

I watched a movie this weekend called Hell. It was a German film about a near-future where solar flares damaged our atmosphere, raising temperatures and exposing the planet to more damaging sunlight. Water becomes scarce and people begin fighting for resources. The movie focuses on the efforts of 4 survivors to head to the mountains where water and vegetation are rumored to exist.

Along the way they encounter a group of people who were farmers; I suppose in a way they still are, even after the livestock have died, if you catch my drift. I found the scene where they are seating Marie, whom they plan to marry off to their son, at the dinner table for their...meat stew....cringe-worthy, as they say a prayer thanking God for their bounty, much as some families today. In a future where food becomes scarce I'm not sure this scene is outside the realm of possibility; desperate people have done things like this in the past. This was at a point where there was no regret or hesitation in what they did; it was all justified and had become normal to them, making it all the more horrifying.

People can justify just about any behaviors, despite being harmful to others.


Star Trek was originally a vision of an optimistic future, where humanity was at peace and people pursued interests to better themselves. Money was no longer a driving force in our lives, as replicators apparently did away with the need for acquiring material wealth. Medicines prolonged lives. Races lived in harmony. The original series had many blatant commentaries on society, from races that were painted black on one sie and white on the other to Kirk kissing Uhura on screen, something sure to upset the more "traditional" minds of the period with strong opinions on mixed-race relationships.

But even in this series set in a backdrop of peace, there were elements of hidden agendas. Star Trek VI, The Undiscovered Country, focused on the hidden agendas of certain elements in Starfleet, the Romulan and Klingon Empires and the Federation to perpetuate war. It was meant to be a reflection of fear of change, set against a commentary of the cold war between the Russians and the US ending. High-ranking officials in positions of power were maneuvering to continue the war between the two groups rather than move towards peace.

That movie was released in 1991. Today, the US is still at war (though not with our Cold War counterparts) and Congress is lobbied by companies with military interests to continue spending more money on our armed forces than the next 10 major military powers combined.

People can justify just about any behaviors, despite being harmful to others.

I recognize this is anecdotal. People have a wonderfully developed sense of confirmation bias, and we see patterns in otherwise chaotic systems. Something in these non-patterned anecdotes makes me wonder if we, as a society, don't see a person's potential to always be looking for ways to take advantage of others and justify it through whatever cognitive dissonance necessary to gain the moral high ground. Many of our stories have the "bad guy" able to ruthlessly exploit and manipulate others for their own ends, sometimes with horrifyingly sensible reasoning.

I see it in advertising; we are barraged by messages for beauty products, clothes, weight loss pills and vitamins, herbal remedies, snack foods, fast food promotions and home business ideas. Children are hit with twice as many ads for toys and cartoons (although you might be able to argue that the cartoons are just extended-length advertisements for toys.) Our society is largely consumer based; we judge each other by what toys we possess and what brands we wear.

But what happens when you actually buy these things that you're told to buy?

If you aren't of a wealthier class in society, there is an instant backlash of judgement that you are living beyond your means. It's your fault you're poor.

What stimulates the economy?

The government, along with the businesses that blame you for your economic status, wants you to go out and spend. That message was louder than ever in the post-9/11 economy, ironically around the time people were told they were getting into crap mortgages (that banks knew full well these same people were huge risks to give loans to, but profited from them in the short term) because they should have known better than to get a mortgage they couldn't afford in the first place.

(Keeping in mind that the businesses that controlled the purse strings...taking the risk to make a profit...later blamed them for taking the money they were willing to loan.)

These are groups that work on making a profit to the detriment of society in the long run.

People can justify just about any behaviors, despite being harmful to others.

I previously posted that there's a long tail of poverty, and the wealth gap is growing. The middle class is slowly disappearing into the tail under the poverty line, while the top 1% continues to gain more money than they could possibly spend in their lifetimes. There won't be enough people to keep spending enough money to keep the economy sustainable.

I also noticed a new trend emerging as policy makers talk of "job makers;" usually these job makers speak up in fighting labor reforms or proposals to increase minimum wage. I also heard the term thrown around quite a bit with healthcare reform, in that new "Obamacare" regulations were too expensive for businesses to afford for their employees.

It struck me as I read articles about minimum wage workers...people working in fast food, or Wal-Mart, or other service industries that serve to skew jobless figures...that these people are often living under the poverty line. The usual image portrayed of the poor are people that sit around reaping free money from the government while watching TV and taking free rides in ambulances because...really, who wouldn't want to spend hours in the hospital in their copious free time?

What happens to the working poor when they have health issues? Taxpayers have to make up the difference.

What happens when the working poor can't afford to feed their kids? Taxpayers make up the difference.

There's a stunning number of working poor, and I fear that number will continue to climb as the economy pushes the middle class farther down in the wealth gap. But it becomes a bit darker when you see that the classic "job creator" lobbying Congress relies on our socialist assistance nets to subsidize their workforce while maximizing profits. They actively lobby to keep regulations and reforms from giving their workers a better standard of living that could help get them off taxpayer funded assistance.

For a certain class of people, Gordon Gekko said it best..."Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works." The problem is that this only seems to work for a narrow class of people.

People can justify just about any behaviors, despite being harmful to others.

Moments of Clarity Relating to Skill

I am rapidly approaching my first year with Stack Exchange. I know this because the management company that collects my rent sent me notice that my lease can be renewed for another year, and I signed when I first came to the city to start my new job.

I have been trying to look back and get a feel for what progress, if any, I've made. There are always things that could use improvement, and I think that the knowledge of just how much I don't know is part of what feeds my feeling of inadequacy. I try to keep perspective by reminding myself of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Unfortunately that's not always effective.


It's especially hard when I work with a number of young, intelligent, highly competent people. They are a reminder that had I taken a different path, instead of deciding to go into the IT department in a public school system, I may have more marketable skills and experience.

I do have a tendency, surrounded with a pool of talented younger people, to focus on the skills I am lacking in and they excel in. And that is why, upon reflection of the past nearly-year, I have at least two moments of clarity that struck me square in the melon.

First, one of the more routine tasks I've been performing involves ownership of the tape backup rotation. We have logs of every hit our balancers get, and these logs get pretty large pretty fast. Despite having an 8-tape LTO-4 jukebox, we're hitting low-tape alarms in the course of about a week or so. Usually I'm the person that heads to the data center, about 25 minutes from the office, to perform a tape swap.

We recently hosted a summit wherein remote community, system administrators, and developers came to our office. Several of the technical people spent their first days playing in the datacenter, and one day coincided with the need to swap tapes. "Hey, while you guys are there, could you...?"

They needed a cable brought out to them from the office, and the sysadmin who mentored me on the backup system volunteered to take it out to them. When he came back, he said that they were having...issues...with swapping out the tapes.

These are people I hold in high regard. Very high regard. They're very good at what they do, and tape backups are not what they normally handle as an everyday task. So having issues with figuring out how to work the tape system is not something to hold against them. But he had no idea how much pride that gave me to know that there is something I'm able to do as a routine task that people I look up to with envy could not.

I have a skill that is useful and fills a niche to them. He had no idea how much this made my day.

Then there was a more recent example of skill development.

We have several hires coming in. I'm working on getting equipment and accounts set up. I was setting up a phone (Polycom VOIP phone) for one of the new hires.

I brought it into the build room and thought I'd get the configuration done in Asterisk (The sysadmin that owns the phone management has it mostly simplified through macros in the config files) and test the phone.

I ran through the checklists. Updated phone numbers and extensions in documentation. Started the phone...no configuration.

I double checked the phone's MAC setting on the server. Matched.

I checked that the FTP server was running on the server. Running.

Asterisk was running after the service reload for changed configurations.

I then went into the phone and reset it to factory defaults, thinking something was "stuck." It reset to defaults...and wouldn't pull the new settings.

Next I went on the switch. It saw the phone's MAC in the address table.

I looked at the port it was plugged into; that port, for some reason, was missing the phone VLAN. A couple of lines added and running config saved, the phone pulled its configuration without a hitch.

I was finally able to close the loop on a troubleshooting issue that before coming here I wouldn't have been able to do; I would have been stymied at the Cisco switch. I simply haven't been buried in the Cisco infrastructure enough to know the necessary configuration and diagnostic steps to take without the fear of screwing something up or knocking the office's Internet access offline.

That ability to close that loop...troubleshoot from start to finish something that a few months ago I wouldn't have been able to do...that's progress. And it was a moment of clarity for me.

I am improving.

I now can tell if a remote office has a computer or phone plugged into the network by looking for the MAC in the address tables of a switch across the country or on the other side of the ocean. I was mapping out what ports are active in a remote office, as well as checking what ports aren't configured for any devices. I'm confident doing this now, something I wouldn't have done before.

I'm always afraid that I'm not improving enough, or not showing skill enough to be worthy of working at a startup with so many great people. My goal now is to keep improving, while accepting that improvements don't come in sudden waves so much as a series of smaller steps that build up over time.

My first year is coming up. With it I believe there will be a review of my progress; I am hoping my peers have noticed improvements over time, and I look forward to guidance of what really needs tuning. But if they ask if there's something I feel I am proud of, I can say that I can swap tapes at the datacenter and I configured a phone without resorting to bothering other people for help.

Look for moments of clarity in your work life. Reflect on what you have done, and how you've improved. Perhaps you're like me and you get caught up in the frustration of things you can't do right or things you screw up, and forget the things that you are doing right and the skills you are learning.  If you really reach a point where you go weeks at a time without any such moments of positive clarity it may be time to reach for a change.

Slut Shaming

Slut shaming. This is a strange term for me. It's one of those things that when I hear it, my brain tingles, like a veil of cognitive dissonance is resonating between places I don't want to be yet am comfortable being labeled. If that didn't make sense, imagine what it's like to be a supporter of science in a classroom deeply entrenched in an area of the US that believes creationism should be a classroom topic; you feel you should own the label, but know you're in deep trouble if you're outed for having it.

That just describes the feeling I get with this term, because, I think, there is some part of the term that I am guilty of yet I don't know if I should feel guilty for it.

It doesn't help that socially hot topics aren't something that encourages conversation. Most people with strong opinions in this area tend to judge by emotion and have trouble relating to people with my type of brain wiring; to not simply understand or empathize with them means I'm stupid or ignorant, or worse.

What I really would like to do is solve what it is about the term "slut shaming" that rings that cognitive dissonance bell in my brain; what am I not understanding? Or do I have an opinion formed, but am missing a key aspect of the topic to have an informed opinion?

I've had this topic in my Trello list of Things To Possibly Blog About for awhile; I'd glance at it, and think about it, turn it over in my head a bit and end up thinking, "Let's save this for later" once more to let the topic ferment in my brain a little longer. I'd re-watch Laci Green videos, like her Jenna Marbles video response to Jenna's Slut Edition video.

 I also watched Laci's appearance on Dr. Phil in an attempt to understand the topic better. I've watched that episode several times, as a matter of fact. And yet...something about it left me feeling more lost than educated.

The Dr. Phil show no doubt was considered, for the general audience that watches his show each weekday, an educational source. But what do you learn from it? Let's break it down.

The episode is called "Girls Who Bash Girls Who Dress Sexy." I'd link to an episode, but a few have already been pulled by television networks claiming copyright infringement, so nothing guarantees my links won't go stale within days so you may have to look it up yourself.

The episode opens with Phil bringing up the latest news headlines regarding the Steubenville rape of a 16 year old girl, where he then ties "blaming the victim" to the term "slut shaming." Both of the terms are already emotionally charged, so I suppose this is an early warning of what the show will be aiming for in terms of what the viewer should conclude lest they are obviously deviant of Dr. Phil's viewership.

He introduces his first guest, a teenager who posted a meme that ended up going viral. She thought her peer age group were often dressing "inappropriate" and decided to post a picture expressing her opinion.

Dr. Phil touches on spoofs of her post as well as people who have given her death threats and insults as a result of her opinion.

This, he said, was kind of the genesis of slut shaming, judging others for their choice of dress. I'll file that away as an aspect of slut shaming:

Telling someone to not show so much cleavage is slut shaming. You're seeing someone's choice of dress, you carry the opinion they should not do this, and make them feel bad for it. The show also labeled this as judging them which is both true and emotionally charged so if you don't necessarily agree, you're made to feel like the bad person in the narrative (can you tell I'm more sensitive to emotional bias when it seems to be more for manipulation purposes instead of education?)

Next up was someone he obviously threw in as the villain in the show. Jason carries the opinion that slut shaming is not only okay, it's a noble pursuit. He doesn't think you should respect people who have no respect for themselves, and slut shaming is about taking responsible for your actions and the consequences of spreading your legs for all sorts of people.

Jason maintains that he judges people by their behavior, which Dr. Phil counters with he's judging people without knowing that is what they're doing. When pressed, he tacitly admits it's based on their dress or rumor. He tries to make his point that if Lady Gaga wears a meat dress in the savannah and a lion eats her; maybe the meat suit isn't the best choice of apparel. "We judge people a lot by what we wear," he said. Dr. Phil counters by showing a picture of he and his wife at a social event (I assume, since he's wearing a suit jacket and open-collar button up shirt and his wife was) wearing a low-cut dress, to which Jason says she's dressed "very tastefully." This was another manipulative moment to define him as the bad guy; what else could he say?

He was going to introduce his next guest, so what did this segment tell me about slut shaming?

Slut shaming is based on seeing people's choice of dress and drawing conclusions about them. There's obviously more I'm supposed to draw from this because it was so blatantly transparent that Jason was cast as the villain of the episode, but I'm trying to enlighten myself a bit about slut shaming, not get sucked into the dramatic aspects of the show. Jason was trying to say that people have conclusions drawn about them because, in part, of the way they dress; he then labels them as sluts given their "uniforms," and assumes more about their behaviors, which is the part he really is taking umbrage to. Their behavior, in turn, is what he disapproves of and sees as irresponsible.

The next guest was Laci Green. Dr. Phil defined slut shaming as women being made to feel inferior because they are dressing, acting, or engaging in inappropriate behavior that connotes sexuality. He then introduces Laci Green saying that slut shaming is about controlling women, not teaching self-respect.

She is quoted from her video talking about promiscuity being a "bad decision" for women, being called slut, losing respect, or asking to be raped. Meanwhile, "dudes" being promiscuous is a "good decision." She goes on to say that, from society's view, dudes are expected to make bad decisions so it's okay.

Dr. Phil and Laci then attack Jason, where Dr. Phil compares his view as bullying. ("Bullying" is a wonderful hot-button word to use.) Why he took this opportunity to attack Jason right after introducing Laci I'm not sure...what was the point of having Laci on? Her viewpoint was entirely summed up by the video, then her chance to talk (on the broadcast) was basically to echo that she disagreed with Jason, then another guest was introduced.

So what do I take away from Laci's segment?

Slut shaming is about controlling women and being sexist, because men aren't shamed for slutty behavior.

His next guest was Trisha, who is shamed by women for the way she dresses. She talked about people anonymously attacking her, then referencing Jason by saying people like him were cowardly when they couldn't hide behind a computer screen.

(It's really hard for me to even pretend you're trying to have a dialog or educate someone when you demonize the person you're trying to convince of the error of their ways. You're doing little more than stooping to a level of childishness and...what, trying to shame them into seeing your side of the argument?)

Trisha talks about sluts, when she was growing up, were the girls who had sex with a lot of people; they screwed half the town or many people in school. Now they were calling her a slut because of the way she dressed.

Jason was pressed for his opinion, and he said she was dressing for attention. She denied this, saying she's all about being "girly" and she's proud of being curvy. She said she's not even interested in men right now.

Laci adds that even if it were for attention, she doesn't see what's inherently wrong with dressing the way you want. It says something more about the person who's judging them rather than the person wearing the outfit. Jason tries to say that most men don't really care what women are wearing but other women seem to judge each other for this, which Laci interjects that many people do care, but then seems to agree that it is a problem because women judge each other for this and not men. She seems really angry that there is a perceived double standard...and the fact that they both seem to say that women are harsh on other women more then men is never pointed out; it's a rule that you don't concede a point to the villain.

Trisha added that she hadn't had sex in three years, yet Jason concluded she was loose and said as much on national television, so he shouldn't be judging her by what she was wearing.

This marked the end of Trisha's segment. What did I conclude I was supposed to learn from this?

Sluts are girls who sleep around, not dress in a provocative or revealing manner.

Phil's next segment was highlighting the "Slut Walk," protests against victim blaming in rapes. Scantily clad women march to reclaim the term "slut." He then introduced Kira, who is an "advocate of modesty" and said that slut shaming is a term used to silence people like her. People are engaging in a competition to sexualize themselves, and she thinks it's an issue of wanting attention. "Women need to put a little more thought into the image they are projecting."

Kira talks about promiscuity having consequences that can follow you for the rest of your life, and that concerns her. She also said that slut shaming is a term to shame people who feel others should be more modest.

Dr. Phil says that you cannot criticize, humiliate, censor, or hold them up to public ridicule and not consider yourself a bully.

He keeps finding reasons to bring that word into the conversation..."bully."

Kira just replies that she's not advocating Jason's position (another slam!) but is advocating modesty and she shouldn't feel ashamed for advocating this.

Phil says it's a leap to go from thinking this person is dressing in a way you wouldn't, to assuming this person is sleeping around and exposing themselves to STD's and such. He also talks about how he has two boys that dress very different, one a rocker, one a preppy Wall Street type, but talking to them they are alike.

This marked the end of another segment. What did I take away from this?

Slut shaming encourages you to draw conclusions about people from their choice of dress, and it doesn't necessarily reflect the truth about who they are. I say this because Kira made a point of advocating for modesty and feeling that slut shaming was a term made to label her as unreasonable, but the host of the program instead discussed how deceiving looks are, which doesn't seem relevant to the guest's point. He talked about his similar-personality yet differently imaged boys, and he discussed someone who had backlash after pointing out Miley Cyrus had been in a 3-year relationship but was labeled a bitch and slut, while Taylor Swift has been with 13 guys in 3 years but is labeled inspirational and sweet. He didn't seem to address Kira's point at all other than the comment regarding bullying...implying she was a bully.

Next up was a guest speaking on behalf of Felicia Garcia, a teen from Staten Island, jumped in the path of a train after she ran a train on four football players and a few girls and a couple of guys harassed her about it mercilessly. "Words don't hurt, but they kill," Alissa, her friend, said. The segment was little more than telling the story of how she was bullied until she killed herself. "She made a mistake" (referencing having sex with four guys.)

Dr. Phil talks about promiscuity being about pain, lack of self worth, need to be accepted, lack of self esteem, basically a number of things that aren't sex. So the label of slut ignores the actual issues and just adds to the issues that may have driven that behavior in the first place.

The next segment continued the Felicia story, but then he introduced Gabriella Van Rij, author of an anti-bullying book, and a small discussion on getting help for kids being bullied. The only thing I remember of her contributions were that 85% of the girls she talked to in schools claim to have been bullied (is that a real statistic, or anecdotal?) and that people don't need their mistakes pointed out to them repeatedly, they know they screwed up and are humiliated enough.

This segment, I suppose, is supposed to tell me that slut shaming is a form of bullying that can lead to suicide. Especially if you're a teenager where everything is a major, universe-changing incident, from being picked on to having a pimple break out before prom.

Here's the summary of what conclusions I drew from the show:

• Telling someone to not show so much cleavage is slut shaming.
• Slut shaming is based on seeing people's choice of dress and drawing conclusions about them. 
• Dr. Phil defined slut shaming as women being made to feel inferior because they are dressing, acting, or engaging in inappropriate behavior that connotes sexuality. 
• Slut shaming is about controlling women and being sexist, because men aren't shamed for slutty behavior. 
• Sluts are girls who sleep around, not dress in a provocative or revealing manner.
• Slut shaming encourages you to draw conclusions about people from their choice of dress, and it doesn't necessarily reflect the truth about who they are.
• Slut shaming is a form of bullying that can lead to suicide. 

I think those are all the conclusions I drew from the segments. It seems that the majority of them have to do with how women dress. If I had to summarize, I'd think that "slut shaming" is primarily about seeing a woman dress in a particular manner, then telling them they shouldn't do that (or make them feel inferior for their choice of dress.)

I had a few problems with this presentation of slut shaming that I think impedes my ability to properly understand the argument. At the very least, there are some issues that I don't think were addressed.

Several times, the point of the choice of dressing style carrying the connotation of behaving in a certain manner or believing in a certain lifestyle had come up but was not addressed beyond dismissing it as being misleading, or at most having the label of "judging others" slapped on the act so as to shut down the subject (since judging others carries a negative connotation, therefore you're performing a negative act and should be ashamed of yourself for judging someone.)

Yet we choose our image every time we get dressed and go into public. In the segment where Phil shows a picture of himself with his wife, I guessed he was at a social function; it was outdoors, there were other people around, but he's wearing a suit jacket with button up shirt, she was wearing a low-cut (but elegant!) dress. It's never brought up why he is hosting the show in a suit coat, trousers and tie. Why does he wear this outfit? Is it just what he is most comfortable wearing? Or is it because he won't be taken seriously wearing pajama pants and tee-shirt, something I've seen more than once in high schools and in Wal-Mart?

Come to think of it, the guests on the show were all wearing outfits that, on the average spectrum of clothing, would be considered less casual and more dressy. Even Trisha, the one criticized for her outfits, wore something that didn't show much cleavage.

Why? Why did they choose the clothes they wore?

How can you claim that outfits don't mean anything when there was obviously some shared theme to the choice of outfits worn for appearing on TV?

We do judge people at some level when we see them. Snap judgement act as a shortcut for our brains; it's a simple way to evaluate how we should react to people around us.

Is it realistic to pretend we don't acknowledge that we do certain things to project a certain image? Many people will say they don't care how people see them when they dress; it's their own style, or it's just an expression of themselves. SO DON'T JUDGE ME!

But...how are you expressing yourself without those styles having a certain meaning? Otherwise you're expressing nothing. It communicates nothing. Even the act of communicating nothing is a form of communication, much in the same way as the people in high school who go against the grain by actively trying not to fit in with the pre-labeled social cliques become, themselves, their own group.

Right or wrong, your clothes do draw certain judgements from others.

Think people might be a little more hesitant talk about their beliefs, if they're not Christian, and you're wearing a cross on your neck?

You think teens didn't get backlash if they wore a trenchcoat to school after Columbine?

Even Phil talking about his son wearing rock musician outfits said there were unusual looking kids at the concerts...implying they tend to wear a particular style of clothing to fit in with a certain crowd.

The rational part of my brain will say that the outfit doesn't necessarily reflect who that person is in other ways; looks can be deceiving. But on the other hand, the outfits are still a reflection of how they want you to see them. They are projecting an image that you're expected to understand. And it's a disingenuous joke to expect people to not draw conclusions based on your outfit, whether it's to tell others you're a 'Don't mess with me' biker in a leather jacket or a 'Respect me' business suit.

Is it realistic to expect people not to draw conclusions about the image you project?

You can choose to reject their judgements or conclusions. You can choose to put the onus of changing opinions on yourself, and change the image you project. But you really shouldn't whine about it; I fully expect strange stares if I wore a spiked red mohawk, or a garishly multicolored muumuu to work, because these are fully outside of society's norms to the point where it would be considered strange. There are already the occasional odd look from people when you're strolling into a building in the financial district, populated by bankers and traders and other expensive suits, while wearing a tee-shirt and jeans.

I also think that there was another point of possible irony that was glossed over. When Laci's video was being played, there was a bit blipped out; "Women, you don't give away your precious <blip> gift until you're under the ownership of a man!"

Watching her actual, unedited video, the word blipped out was "vagina."

When showing the montage of images for Trisha during her introduction, there were a number of shots where her cleavage was fuzzed out. Basically, censoring her body.

...if these things aren't inappropriate, if these are things that shouldn't matter, why were they censored?

Isn't that a non-verbal slut shaming, saying that whatever outfit she was wearing in those images cannot be shown on television?

And keep in mind that not only was Phil humiliating and criticizing Jason, which would fall into the purview of his repeated call of bullying, but his show censored Laci and Trisha.

There's some irony, if not cognitive dissonance, to that.

In the end I'm seeing hypocrisy in the show's message, and never having the point of how appearance draws judgements from others (and engaging in dressing in a certain manner for the show, implying that outfits do project a certain image and adds to the legitimacy of the idea that there are "appropriate" outfits) properly addressed or acknowledged.

I'm confused in this.

The idea of social shaming is also never addressed, and the relationship of social shaming to slut shaming. Social behaviors reinforced through collective social shaming has been a strong force since...well, societies existed. Why is social shaming allowed, and in many ways encouraged, yet slut shaming is somehow special and needs to be excluded?

Perhaps the big difference is whether you make your disapproval known. You can disapprove of a behavior or outfit without telling the person, although then I am lost as to where the difference is that this isn't the same as a chilling effect, discouraging you from expressing an opinion.

Perhaps my mistake is trying to understand this concept through the lens of a daytime TV show. It seemed pretty obvious that it was less about educating and more about forming a dramatic narrative; Dr. Phil's show had a definite "here's what you should believe" instead of a "here are the facts" approach.

Or maybe this is a topic governed largely by emotion and less by rationalization, so it's a little more nuanced and complex than I can easily empathize with. I'll probably continue to turn this topic over in my head, trying to understand it better...but if I've gone this long without understanding it, I'm not sure I ever will.

A Reason Wealth Inequality Matters

I intended to follow up on my previous post regarding wealth disparity much sooner than this, but sometimes life gets in the way.

I rent an apartment in Manhattan. If you know anything about the five boroughs of New York, Manhattan is the borough the Muppets, Jason, several superheros and Cloverfield have all either taken or destroyed, and is also known as one of the most expensive places to live despite the several times it has had to be rebuilt. Well, the non-Hollywood part is true, at least.

I work in a part of Manhattan called "The Financial District," a very small area of real estate where each weekday enough money flows through the virtual coffers of the banks and trade floors to fund small countries.

Last Friday I was sitting in the back seat at the coffee bar with some developers who, despite having Internet access cut off at the office, decided to stick around and socialize a little. A small part of the conversations involved a nearby apartment building whose rent, they said, ran around $40,000 a month.

That's $480,000 a year. Nearly half a million dollars.

I said I couldn't imagine what it's like to have so much money in the bank that I could afford to spend that as rent. I'd love not to have that kind of financial worry in my life...and then I wondered, what is it like for people who do make that kind of money?

Someone said that they knew someone who had lived near there a period of time and said it was a nice apartment, but the location sucked. My first reaction was, "How?" but someone else reminded us there aren't really any supermarkets nearby.

That's true...groceries would almost exclusively be delivered.

(I know there are some markets in the financial district; they tend to be small and pricey, though, even for Manhattan.)

This isn't to say that if you have groceries delivered in Manhattan that it means you are wealthy. It's quite common; there are several people I know that are getting various grocery-type items delivered who aren't what I would consider top income earners. But it is an added luxury that does add up over the course of a year, especially when you add in the cost of having laundry picked up and delivered (it usually costs a dollar or two a pound, although pricing for dry cleaning and specialty treatments can quickly increase costs. The convenience of having grocery and laundry items delivered as a service is, to me, like cable or satellite television...nice to have, but something I can do without, especially after actually sitting down and doing the monetary math.

Manhattan is a kind of illustration of the wealth disparity in America. There are pockets of affordability; it's safe to say that my apartment is nowhere near forty grand a month in rent. But it certainly is far north, for what I get in relation to what I pay, to what I could afford back home with the same amount of cash. Other people get by finding roommates on Craigslist to afford rent, or making do with tiny studio apartments that suits a more frugal lifestyle.

And by tiny, I mean 500 square feet or less.

And by pockets of affordability, I mean I can cross a street or two and there are apartments that will cost the upper side of four figures, or possibly five figures, per month. Even near our office I've heard rumor of apartments that are slightly below $3,000 a month in rent being a block away from apartments that are tens of thousands per month.

The cost of living isn't getting any cheaper, either. Rent costs, along with transportation, and service industries, are creeping higher. Couple that with the news that middle class income is essentially stagnant, and you end up with the most common option for people who work in New York and need to afford housing; they have a longer commute.

The truly affordable housing tends to lay in the concentric zones farther from Manhattan; on the far north side of the island is Harlem, or people move into Brooklyn or Jersey, across the river. The rent is lower, but the commute tends to jump from a 25 minute subway ride in train-dense Manhattan to 45 minutes or an hour once you factor in multiple train hops, or in some cases and hour and a half. That's the tradeoff for affordable living if you enjoy your job (or in this economy, just want to keep the job you have.)

In the course of the conversation I recounted an account I read in a book on New York "tunnel dwellers," people who lived in the subway tunnels. It was remarkable; it described how you could walk within three feet of someone, and not even know they were there. One fellow interviewed worked more or less full time at McDonalds, and said his coworkers had no idea he lives in the subway tunnels. It was sad and surprising given the amount of spin and vitriol, especially during our recent presidential campaign season, towards the laziness of the poor who are portrayed as lazy ne'er-do-wells sucking tax dollars in exchange for sitting on the couch watching daytime TV.

Here's the thing; much of the city thrives on the poor and middle class to do the jobs the upper (and upper middle class) rely upon, but wouldn't want to do.

I don't see too many bankers who would want to be out in crappy weather delivering Seamless and GrubHub orders to hungry folks. Or doing laundry or custodial services, or waiting tables. Even the artists performing on Broadway often share rooms with multiple roommates to make ends meet. These are people eking out a living, hoping they don't become ill or badly injured lest they end up going bankrupt with a visit to the hospital or ending up not being able to go into work from illness, meaning no income since many of them are hourly workers (which, by the way, is a terrible way to prevent the spread of disease, when you think about how many people come into contact with someone who had to go to work in order to make ends meet while still contagious...think about that when you are commuting on the subway or eating prepared food.)

If prices keep rising, more people move farther away, until the strain of the commute will basically price them out of the city. They move on. It's a process that is basically an extreme form of gentrification, only with the economy being what it is, it's not only pushing out the poorest people. The lower middle class and middle class feel the strain as well.

Of course there is a counterbalance to this that econ 101 teaches us; prices will level out at a point where people will pay what they can afford. The pendulum is supposed to swing to a point where once it is noticed people are moving away, the overall economy suffers, jobs aren't being filled, and the politicians and businesses start offering incentives for people to come in again, hopefully in the form of "this apartment is pretty crappy so we'll make the rent affordable."

Only I wonder if that's what is actually happening. My employer is actually paying a very decent salary, and I'm still wondering how long it will be before I will have to look at moving to Brooklyn. The city has raised transportation fees, which doesn't affect me personally (thank you again to my employer offering Metro cards as a job perk) but does cost money when my wife and son come to visit; most people on the island are beginning to notice the nickel and diming adding up for them to get to work.

So what happens?

I wonder if you'll see a push of poor and middle class out of the city. Jobs will become more difficult to fill as people move away; at least, the jobs that keep trash cans in offices emptied, clothes laundered and food delivered. Business will end up having to pay more in order to get workers, squeezing small businesses closer to going out of business.

Quality workers may become more scarce. I see this effect in education; as the job perks slip away and the negatives become a heavier burden, teachers who are good teachers, people who care about the work of being a teacher and not a cog in the education system, they leave. They see that the reality of teaching is far removed from the job description and certainly doesn't match what they thought was happening when they were sitting at the desks on the receiving end of an education.

Instead I saw, over time, more B-stringers getting their chance to become teachers. These are people who are less passionate about teaching and more fitting into the dysfunctional system that is in place; real teachers become disenfranchised and demoralized, and soon enough begin looking for work outside the education field. The B-stringers just stop caring or are comfortable working at a mediocre level within the broken system.

Ever notice how hard it is to find teachers who are passionate about their jobs? The people who would be passionate are driven away from the field.

So what happens if a city becomes largely dysfunctional, and the people who would be passionate about it leave? Does it end up become like Detroit?

I doubt that a place like New York City will ever be like Detroit, but then again, it wasn't long ago that you wouldn't have thought Detroit would become today's Detroit. I hear stories about what has become of the Vegas suburbs after the economy tanked, and California, as a state, is having larger scale issues that are creeping into the lives of its citizens. Florida is having interesting economic effects on its citizens largely in part from Tea-Party political ideas put into effect, and Florida already has an economy heavily funded by retirees and spring break tourists.

Only time will tell. But one thing I'm sure of is that as long as people look only for themselves, there will be looming problems. The myth of the job creator paints a picture of a wealthy citizen waking in the morning and feeling the burden of keeping his employees employed; the truth is we have more people who are willing to step on whoever is in his or her path to financial gain in order to have more financial gain. There is a disconnect wherein the wealthy can't relate to the middle class, let alone the poor. I read an article outlining tips to save money for bankers and their wives, and the disconnect couldn't be more stark; it made what was common sense for middle class families sound almost novel or shocking. If these ideas hadn't occurred to them before, no wonder they don't care about the financial situation of people around them. And worse, the advice felt like the equivalent of, "Instead of driving the Ferrari, take out the Benz!"

I read the tone of the article summed up in the lines,
“I still go to New York  five or six times per year, but now I forego business class to travel in premium economy,” he said. “With the new flexibility to plan ahead – which was impossible when I worked for a bank – you can get good fares. And if you’re smart about it, the airlines still give you all the perks.”

 and,

“The wife is doing the ironing,” another banker told us. “She’s not loving it, but she doesn’t want to get a job herself so is having to accept it.”

It's a novel idea to have to scale back and still have perks many people will never have.

We need to care about our neighbors. We need to understand that when people become miserable and stressed, there are repercussions. This doesn't mean handing out free checks to everyone (although this is done in Alaska...) to boost incomes but it does mean acknowledging that maybe a single minded pursuit of everything that's best just for ourselves will come back to bite society in the ass. Benefiting everyone still means everyone will benefit, not just the poor or middle class. And we need to stop stigmatizing the desire to help others.

Otherwise you end up in a system where only the most connected and financially powerful will call the shots, and gradually they get into positions where laws are created that will only benefit the most connected and financially powerful, snowballing their accumulation of wealth until there's nothing left for anyone else.

Sound familiar?