Sitting in Ringo Starr Concert

I'm sitting in the a Ringo Starr concert in Bend, OR and realizing that the Boomer's greatest achievement is not completely reversing six thousand years worth of advancement.

Way to go guys.  You barely didn't do it!

Canceling my iContact account

All these people who talk about how hard it is to cancel their iContact accounts... I don't know what they are talking about.

My cancellation was a two-step process:

1. Send them an email informing them that I wish to cancel.
2. Confirming that I wanted to cancel when they asked if I was sure.

My total investment in the entire process was less than forty-five seconds.  The cycle time on the process was about ten hours, most of which were during the night-time.

Maybe there are some circumstances where it is hard to cancel with them but I certainly didn't experience it.  All in all, I was happy with the service they provided.  I would recommend it to anyone who needs to build and maintain that kind of mailing list.

The Fermi Paradox is ridiculous

If it serves a purpose, it is just to illustrate Man's hubris.  There are so many fallacious assumptions and assertions in every version of it that I've heard.  It's not even worth debunking.

I know the Fermi Paradox is all the rage, right now.  Please, people, try to retain a little intellectual dignity when evaluating this kind of garbage.

We Don't Need Campaign Finance Reform, We Need Campaign Audience Reform

People bitch about campaign money all the time.  An argument that is regularly made can be paraphrased as follows:

The campaign with the most money can buy the most votes so we need to modify how people get funded to ensure their interests align with the people's.

This is a specious argument.  The problem is not that we must control who has the money to buy the opinion of the voting public so that the right opinion is bought.  The problem is that we let people vote who are so easily influenced that an insubstantial, 30-second advertisement can change the course of their actions.

Think about it.  Is it really reasonable that someone who, essentially, votes in accordance with the last advertisement they happened to hear should be given the power to choose who lives and who dies?  Of course it isn't.

...and don't kid yourself.  That's nothing short of what voting is: the power to kill someone who disagrees with your choices strongly enough to not comply.  Sure, it's filtered through dozens of layers of indirection - judges, juries, laws, cops, et cetera - but that doesn't make voting any less what it is: the power to compel under threat of death.

Most people - even really, really stupid people - would agree that one guy shouldn't be allowed to take whatever he wants and kill whomever tries to stop him.  Nearly one-hundred percent of that group would agree that the power should no more be granted to two or twenty such people.

In fact, the public response to organized crime - groups of people who compel under (ultimately) the threat of death - seems to indicate that many of us have an implicit grasp on the non-linear nature of this kind of problem.  That is, everyone seems to know that two thugs are a little more that twice as bad as one thug.  Most of us know that a large organization that takes what it wants and kills those who try to stop it is a really dangerous, bad, and - dare I level a value judgment? - evil thing.

So why is a group of four-hundred million people doing the same thing somehow magically better?  Why do we care about the opinion of someone who just wants to vote themselves money?  Their vote certainly shouldn't count.  Why do we care about the opinion of someone who is persuaded by arguments like "Yuh-huh!" and "Nuh-uh!"?  Isn't that person's opinion noise at best and, at worst, and amplifier for the person who can buy the most ad-space in their field of view?

My dad likes to complain about how we live in a marketing-driven economy.  We all see some huge number of advertisements every day.  Corporations are using those ads to drive people's behavior.

How the hell is that the corporations' fault?  You see the ads.  You choose how (or, I guess in some people's cases, whether or not) to interpret them.  If you elect to be a subject of the media's sway, that doesn't make the corporation at fault.  It's your fault.

If I was playing chess with you, you'd not fault me for exploiting an enormous opening you left me, would you?  It's no more wrong for a company to exploit the weak minds of its potential buyers.  It's no more wrong for a politician to buy an ad spot that says there's no proof his opponent isn't a lizard man who worships the devil and eats puppies.  It's no more wrong for a major lobby group to fund that ad.

If there is any fault to be assigned - and, given the current state of affairs, I believe there is - it must be on the people who are influenced by such things.  If someone is too simple to vote properly, it is their own fault, not the fault of the people who take advantage of that fact.

A simple thought experiment can demonstrate this.  Imagine this scenario:

Ninety-nine percent of the voting public bases their decisions on their own thoughts.  That is, they take their own experiences, values, and judgments and synthesize a model of the world then base decisions on that model.  One politician's promises and track record jives with the model developed by fifty-five percent of those thinking voters - more than half of all voters.  His opponent has ten times as much funding but they both have enough funding to reach basically all of the potential voters.  Who's going to win in that scenario?

Naturally, it would be the person whom the thinking people believe will accomplish what they want accomplished.

Now flip it around.  One percent of the population thinks and the remainder votes in accordance with the number of advertising dollars to which they've been exposed.  In such a case, funding would be almost the only thing that matters.  If you imagine the same funding bias, it's pretty obvious who is most likely to win that election.

Both cases have a huge funding bias but only one has a corrupted election, the one where corrupt and weak people are allowed to vote.

We don't need better campaign financing rules.  We don't need better rules around advertisements.  We just need to start taking responsibility for our actions - including the act of voting - and peeling off the mantle of power the sticky fingers of anyone who can't or won't do that.

Another Generally Positive Review for Test-Driven Database Development

I would be a fool to think that my first book would receive only positive feedback.  This review, I think, is excellent.  I like it for three reasons:

1. My own self-interest
2. The reviewer clearly understood what he was reviewing
3. It contains actionable criticisms that will benefit a 2nd edition, if there is one

Vanity of the Database Authors

Mr. Carlson's review is, I think, generally positive.  This means that it will cause more people to buy my book, which is nice.  It also means that it fans the flames of my own vanity, which is really nice.  Most importantly, though, it means that more people are likely to actually read my book which, in turn, means more people are likely to take a sane approach to database development.

Deep Understanding

The author of the review in question clearly took the time to read, understand, and evaluate the concepts in my book.  I think a lot of people who buy books do this but, for some reason, only about half of people who write reviews appear to do it.

Mr. Carlson didn't necessarily understand all of my motivations or what I know about outside the scope of Test-Driven Database Development: Unlocking Agility but... hey... who's fault is that?  Right?

Actionable Criticisms

Not everything Mr. Carlson has to say is positive but those bits which are negative are highly actionable.  He says I give the appearance of not understanding normalization.  I do understand how to do it and why people do it in addition to why it actually should be done.  However, looking back, I can see how someone might get the impression I don't if they were basing their opinion solely on my book.  In the 2nd edition, I will remedy that by adding material that addresses those kinds of concepts.

Likewise, he makes the point that I don't address object-relational-mapping at all.  He rightly guessed that it is because ORM runs contrary the message I send - databases as instances of classes with tightly-controlled and rigorously-tested sets of exposed behaviors.  Nevertheless, his argument is that ORM is a very popular concept in designing interactions with databases is true.  If I ever get to do a second edition, which I happily think I might, and ORM is still popular, which I sadly believe it may be, then I will address it at that time.

I may address those concepts sooner, too, in the form of blog entries or articles.