Two Memes I Doubt Our Readers Buy

Some here may be interested in the task Cafe Hayek sets its readers:

a contest to find examples from the web or the media that make the claim that our standard of living is stagnant or that the middle class can’t get ahead and so on. Or better yet that the middle class is falling behind. Or that all the gains of the last x years have gone to the top 1% or the top 20%.

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It Is Literature Nonetheless

The Chicago Boyz like to discuss the books we read. Usually these are tomes that concern History-with-a-capital-Aitch or Literature-with-a-capital-Ell. I thought I’d do something different.

io9 is a group blog where sci-fi geeks discuss their obsession. One of the recent posts that I found interesting was entitled The Twenty Science Fiction Novels That Will Change Your Life.

These sort of “Best Of…” lists are always ultimately unsatisfying, since the author will always deviate from your own tastes sooner or later. In this case, I agreed with the list of books that had been printed prior to the mid-1990s, and then pretty much disagreed with every choice that had been printed afterwards. Even so, it was astonishing that the author of the post and I would agree even that much.

One example of divergent sensibilities is the endorsement of Cryptonomicon (2000) by Neal Stephenson. This is a rich and multilayered book, certainly a worthy addition to anyone’s collection of science fiction, but it isn’t what I would have picked. Instead I would have gone with Snow Crash (1992).

Why is that? Because Cryptonomicon concerns itself with cryptography, data havens, international finance, and the genealogy of a very strange family. The book was interesting enough, but I really don’t concern myself with any of those subjects in my everyday life. It is rare that something happens to remind me of the tome.

Snow Crash, on the other hand, dealt with massive multiplayer online entertainments, music, physical security, sword fighting, and the eternal love and loyalty of a stray dog that is shown some kindness. These are things that I do spend time on during my daily grind.

Your mileage will almost certainly vary from mine, of course.

In closing, I would like to say that the science fiction I started to read as a young child has certainly increased my appreciation for being alive in this amazing time and place. Advances in technology and culture that have appeared in my own lifetime are readily apparent due to my constant exposure to speculative fiction, and I have embraced them with a great deal of delight instead of bemoaning how things change.

My car still can’t fly, though. Someone needs to fix that.

Quote of the Day

When it comes to things like NAFTA, there seem to be only two possibilities. Either Obama’s anti-NAFTA talk is a ruse to fool the rubes, or his coterie of distinguished economic experts is a ruse to fool a different batch of rubes.

Glenn Reynolds

(I usually don’t quote Reynolds, because I assume that almost everyone who reads this blog reads Instapundit, but this line was too good not to quote.)

UPDATE (2/29/2008): One of the reasons this quote hit home for me is that I watched Larry Kudlow interview Austan Goolsbee, one of Obama’s “distinguished economic experts,” a couple of times. On both occasions Goolsbee came across as a partisan hack, trying to square the circle of Obama’s socialist and populist economic policies by pointing out marginal pro-business positions Obama had taken — e.g., Obama favored accelerated depreciation or whatever. But on the big issue of marginal income-tax rates Obama favors raising tax rates by, at first, repealing Bush’s tax cuts. He also favors raising or eliminating the income cap on the Social Security payroll tax. Why would a competent economist such as Goolsbee favor such anti-growth policies? The obvious answer is that Goolsbee is a partisan. He may also be interested in a government position if Obama wins. Caveat voter in any case.

Features I’d Like to See in Blogging Software

How do you deal with disruptive commenters without transforming the comments section of your blog into what TMLutas called “bonsai comment trees” — overly controlled exchanges from which unruly digressions that might have led to unexpected insights have been trimmed?

I don’t think the laissez-faire approach works with current software, because forcing readers to view all comments gives too much power to jerks and trolls who monopolize threads for their own purposes if given a chance. (The perverse incentive for bad behavior increases with blog traffic, which is why blogs with more than a few thousand daily readers usually moderate comments, if they allow comments at all.) But centralized comment moderation, which I recently experimented with, is too burdensome even for the moderator of this modestly trafficked blog, and also for the vast majority of commenters, who are not jerks.

What would be better? Here are some features that I’d like to see in WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger, etc.:

  1. A Slashdot-style comment-rating system that allows readers to rate each comment on a 1-5 scale and to display only comments whose rating is above a specified threshold.
  2. Or, per this comment on another blog, a YouTube-style or Amazon-style system that allows readers to see deleted comments, either individually or globally, by clicking a button. (Such a system should also provide a clickable button next to each comment to allow readers to flag problem comments for attention by a moderator.)
  3. A clickable “hide/display all comments from this commenter’s IP address” button next to each comment.
  4. A clickable “hide/display all comments from commenters using this name/pseudonym” button next to each comment.
  5. A clickable “display all comments from this commenter’s IP address in a new window” button next to each comment.
  6. Granular moderation settings for group blogs, so that each contributor can set his own moderation preferences and can moderate comments on his own posts only.

Not all of these features would have to be incorporated into each version of blogging software. I would prefer a combination of Features 2-6. The main things are to make it easy for readers to 1) hide low-quality comments and 2) detect sock puppetry. This could all be done without requiring commenters to register, and would reduce the moderation load on group-blog admins, as well as on solo bloggers who receive many comments.

Gosh, Is There Anything Bush Can’t Do?

Now he’s responsible for ignorant teenagers:

… President Bush’s education law, No Child Left Behind, has impoverished public school curriculums by holding schools accountable for student scores on annual tests in reading and mathematics, but in no other subjects.

Really, what are these people going to do when Utopia fails to arrive next January 20th? What happens when you think all the world’s problems (and solutions) come from the White House?