Ojisan Seiuchi

Patricia Cohen’s piece “Middle Class, but Feeling Economically Insecure”¹ published yesterday in the New York Times raises several discrepancies between the economics of the middle class and one’s identification with that group. Reading the comments on the article I was struck by how divided Americans’ points of view are when it comes to the middle class and the causes of its distress. Clearly middle class wages have stagnated in the years immediately preceding and following 9/11. As the article points out, the median income in the US has not risen since 2000. Many of the commenters point to this and the feeling of insecurity and dispensability as a source of middle class angst. Others, fewer in number, point to a change in the baseline spending level. One commenter sums it up this way:

Private virtues v. public life

April 08, 2015

Politics

Politics is hopeless arena in which to enact individual values. Commercial interest will always win because of the enormous cost of modern politics. As I’ve written before¹ I think that voting is an inefficient way of effecting change in a way that aligns with personal values. Persons can only be elected when they affiliate themselves with a package of values whose source is largely commercial interest. For example, if I placed the highest values on a balanced federal budget, low defense spending, universal health care, and inclusive rights, who would I vote for?

Perhaps the key to living with one’s own conscience isn’t in choosing among imperfect political choices at all. What if we simply decided that the political process was an inferior way to live peacefully with one’s choices. What if the answer isn’t found in trying to compel others to believe and act as we wish? What if we all decided to ambiguous choices to the individual, for the vast majority of choices are ambiguous. (The question isn’t whether they should or shouldn’t be ambiguous. Take a look outside your bubble and you’ll see that they are.)

What if we all stopped trying to use a political process to force these ambiguous choices on others and started living according to our own private virtues - something akin to Benjamin Franklin’s thirteen virtues. Early in adulthood, Franklin resolved to live according to a list of virtues such as temperance, frugality, moderation, tranquility and resolution. What would happen if we all cared a little less about using politics and public policy to foist our moral precepts on others and simply practiced them ourselves in a committed organized way? Humans have a strong and universal moral sense about impermissible activites. Murder, for example, is proscribed under most circumstances in nearly all societies. Apart from these universally-held moral instincts, what use do we have for politicizing and legislating the myriad values that aren’t universally-held? The size and commercial bias of our governments has made it all but useless to engage in a political struggle over moral interests. We would all be better of if we simple clarified our own individual personal values, lived as faithfully to them as we could, and went on with our lives.

Voting and Efficacy, April 2, 2014 link ↩︎

This is how I do it. YMMV.

I’ve used DEVONthink since its early days. If you’re unfamiliar with DEVONthink, it’s a knowledge management tool that allows you to save information, tag it, cross-reference it and classify it. Since I use both a laptop and a desktop Mac Pro, I need to synchronize databases across machines. There are several ways to go about synchronization:

Direct connection This is not a bad option when both machines are turned on simultaneously and are connected to the same network.
Dropbox Obviously, you need a Dropbox account for this. Since databases can grow quite large, you may need a paid Dropbox account for it. I don’t like having my personal information in the cloud; so I don’t use this option.
WebDAV I don’t run a WebDAV server, so that was out.
Local sync store This was the best option for me, since I use BitTorrent Sync to synchronize certain content between machines using peer-to-peer connections.

Here’s how I do it.

Those darned Republicans just can’t catch a break these days. In the latest cultural eruption, the Indiana legislature passed a bill which its governor signed into law. The bill allows places of business to refuse to serve persons if doing would conflict with their sincerely-held religious beliefs. An avalanche of public outcry has Indiana’s governor making a hasty retreat.

Charles Blow of the New York Times weighs in about how we should deal with the juxtaposition of free exercise of religious beliefs and discrimination:

I use the excellent, dependable Pinboard service for managing my bookmarks. A one-time fee gives you lifetime access to the service; and there is an API that has fostered an ecosystem of desktop and mobile apps that interact with the service. Of course, Safari can synchronize bookmarks among devices; but it doesn’t allow tagging. Since tagging is a major part of my workflow, Safari bookmarks don’t work for me.

So, here’s where pinboardspotlight.py comes in. It’s a relatively simple Python program that downloads your Pinboard bookmarks, writing them to local .webloc files and applying the tags you’ve used in the Pinboard metadata to the local files. Now you’re Pinboard bookmarks are searchable locally.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just released a draft summary of a report to the UN. Unsurprisingly, the panel concluded both that the Earth’s warming is unequivocal but now expressed near certainty that human activity is the cause of the observed and predicted climate shifts.

Given the near universality of scientific opinion on climate change, I’ve begun to wonder what motivates climate change deniers. After all, on most topics, reasonable people who are inexpert in a discipline look to the opinions of experts to gain a better understanding. So what’s behind the extreme rejection of scientific consensus among climate change deniers.

TIL how to use anchors in Markdown documents. I needed to use this in a long blog post in my Octopress blog and was stymied.

As usual, I found the answer on Stack Overflow.

Beam me [up](#enterprise), Scotty

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It’s a great way to move around in longer content.

2014-03-03: I no longer publish using Octopress; but this should work in most cases where Markdown is used. Bitbucket is a notable exception. For Github wiki, you’ll need something like:

I’m working on launching a high-altitude balloon later this year with a Raspberry Pi serving as its flight computer. The Raspberry Pi is an excellent tool because it allows you to do most common tasks at a higher level of abstraction than other MCU platforms. However, it lacks at least one of the major conveniences of MCU’s like the AVR that I’m accustomed to working with - the analog-to-digital converter (ADC). In this article, I’ll describe one solution to the missing ADC, albeit a little complex. For this project, I’m using an ATTinyx61 to serve as the ADC, communicating with the RPi as a slave on the I2C bus.

Middle class economics and false dichotomies

Private virtues v. public life

Synchonizing DEVONthink databases across machines

This is how I do it. YMMV.

Commerce and discrimination

Spotlight-searchable pinboard bookmarks

What motivates climate change deniers?

Markdown anchors

ADC for Raspberry Pi