So on Thursday I listened in on a webchat that a friend was helping to organize about how users might benefit from some 'curation' of the blurtstream from new-web sources, especially Twitter but also Facebook and wherever else. Considering the shelf-life of information in that little world, I'm sure my musings are woefully out of date and irrelevant 48 hours later. Nevertheless, this stuff is gnawing on my mind, and I'm going to have to blurt about it just to quiet the internal noise.

So here's the letter I want to send to the governor & mayor. I've been cheesed off for a while about how they're trying to stitch together the budgets for which they're responsible from patches of parking fines, silly fees, and new & significantly increased penalties for all kinds of things. Your basic meter violation has doubled in price in the last couple of years, while the offensive nature of parking overtime has not appreciably changed. That's a clear attempt to cover a shortfall in the city's general budget, and I believe it's a dumb way to do the job. In particular, the penalties are onerous, because people often incur them because they could not afford to pay in the first place, so now they have to pay more, all so the official types don't have to risk an honest discussion of what everyone wants to spend and how much taxes will have to be to pay for that. Seems to me a crappy way to do the people's business, but I'm open to contradictory or contrasting opinions.

Note that the issue gained a higher priority because of my son's bonehead move that landed him in the penalty trap, but that's not really what I'm ranting about here. It's a story that illustrates a general point about how government structures its revenues.

Something's been bugging me since the ALA show, and I think I finally have my finger on what it is.

The once-wife emails me regularly about the yahoos, notably no. 3 who lives with her. She has my name in her email under the name I use here and with friends, which just irritates the piss outta me.

I'm thinking about when sociability becomes an obligation. Someone is friendly, and it's only 'natural' to respond in kind with a friendly smile or chat or whatever. Everyone has experienced situations where that became too much and a stranger, or worse some distant uncle operating under the color of family expectation, just talks your leg off and you simply can't escape. It's usually presented as a joke, but during the experience it's awkward as hell.

These lines get quoted all the time. Lots of posters have been printed and whatnot. The words are widely known, frequently quoted with approval, and just about universally ignored. It's a sad sentiment, I guess. It's true enough on the face of it, and quoted often enough, that it could be dismissed as a platitude. But that would be a mistake, I think. It talks about a place of acceptance that's maybe easy to understand (sort of) and real in a quite direct way. It's one of those plain truths that need elaboration, if at all, only in their effects, but not in the reasons behind them.

It's weird how opportunities are problems, just as problems are problems. Both sit there demanding responses, and both subject us to strain -- decisions clamor to be made, choices to be chosen to the exclusion & abandonment of other choices. Alternatives are always vague to some degree, and any option involves the risk that another would have been something called better. So genuine problems to be solved and new possibilites to be realized  both plunge us into anxiety of pretty much the same type.

Blogosphere

I mean blog already sucks six kinds of ass as a name, and that's even before it's repeated like some kind of stinky mantra by every clueless dork who wants to pretend to hipness. Then they compound the horror by amending that contraction/compression/crumple zone of a word with the fakey-ass reference to environmental science. I nearly puke up a kidney every time I read that Frankensteinian abomination, and hearing it spoken is many times worse.

Just don't ask me to pay for somebody else's healthcare.

People like to take that potshot at proposals for a government role in expanding health care coverage. But you know, that's what all insurance is. We all pool our needs and we pool our funds, and somebody takes a cut for handling the paperwork. That is insurance 101, right? The lucky ones pay more than they take out; the poor bastards with health problems soak up some of the difference left after the paper shufflers pocket their share.

So pooling cost and pooling payments is happening now, and it will continue. The question is what's the best way?