Why the New Anti-Poker Law in Washington State Sucks

Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court in my old state of Washington ruled that a law passed in 2006 banning online gambling was perfectly constitutional. It was a 9-0 decision, and thus a pretty easy one for the justices to make, but the ruling carried enough weight for PokerStars, a popular online poker site, to ban anyone with a Washington State IP address from playing on it.

This is the kind of news that affects maybe only a few thousand people seriously, but for professional online poker players in Washington—some of whom I know personally—this was the worst possible news. Online poker has existed in a legal gray area for some time now, but this court ruling eliminated all shades of gray; playing poker on your computer, as opposed to in a casino, is a Class C felony. If all poker sites take this ruling as seriously as PokerStars had, it will become impossible to play online poker in Washington, meaning that online poker players who rely on poker to pay the bills will have effectively lost their jobs.

The more you consider the law, the less sense it makes. There is the old argument, “gambling is evil, all evil things should be illegal,” but gambling is legal in Washington State, and not just on Indian reservations. When I lived in Seattle, you could drive just outside the city limits and play poker in a number of card rooms. This document from the Washington State Gambling Commission says, “Gambling has a history of connection to crime and corruption and as a result is strictly controlled virtually everywhere. Just because gambling occurs on the Internet doesn’t change this potential or the concern.” But surely the converse of that last sentence is true too—just because gambling occurs in a brick and mortar casino or card room doesn’t make it any less addictive or prone to corruption.

So why was this law, which deprives a bunch of people of their formerly (semi) legal income, passed in the first place?

Well, duh, it was passed because a bunch of rich casino owners wanted it to be so. When people gamble online, presumably, they aren’t gambling in a casino, and this understandably outraged the Native American tribes who run large gambling enterprises like the Tullalip Casino. These tribes have boatloads of money and they’ve invested a lot of it in the one enterprise in America guaranteed to give you a good rate of return on your investment—campaign contributions.

The sponsors of the original bill--Margarita Prentice, Karen Keiser, Daniel Kline, and Paull Shin—all received substantial contributions from groups like the “Campaign for Tribal Self-Reliance” which have close ties to the Indian casino business. The Congresspeople did what politicians always do and help out the people who helped them out and introduced the online gambling law, which was quickly passed because the other Congresspeople likely wanted contributions from the tribes to keep coming, and also because passing laws against “immoral” activities like gambling is a fun and popular thing for politicians to do. Never mind that the anti-online gambling law was bankrolled by a bunch of people who make their living off of gambling addicts and suckers, and never mind that it hurts the professional and semi-pro poker players (who are the small businessmen of the gambling world). Gambling is bad, so anti-gambling laws must be good, right?

Gambling addiction is a serious problem, yes, but gambling addicts aren’t going to stop gambling because they can’t play online. They’ll just go to the casino instead—which is of course why this bill was passed in the first place, to benefit big in-state casinos at the expense of international poker sites and the people who make money by playing on them. (Not all professional online poker players can simply switch to playing in the casinos and the card rooms—that’s a long car ride for many of them, and many card rooms don’t offer the variety of games that the online sites do.)

The truly maddening thing about this law is not that it’s an arbitrarily oppressive law passed at the request of big-money interests. It’s that this law is an example of the system working pretty much perfectly. A special interest group wanted a law to be passed, they made the necessary (and legal) donations and the politicians did more or less what those groups wanted. Everything was documented, and although there was clearly a quid pro quo exchange, no one can be said to have done anything technically unethical. Everyone cooperated, and we got a law that puts people out of work so large moneyed institutions can thrive. Good job guys.
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Why Can't We Have a Robot Senate?

As election time approaches and the political junkies work themselves up into a state of almost sexual anticipation, the question everyone is asking is, will there be a bunch of new mostly wealthy, mostly white people in the Senate? Will these people succeed in the Republican party's mission to have the government to almost nothing? If Democrats can barely pass legislation with a nearly 60-40 majority, how in god's name is anything going to be accomplished if the Senate is split roughly 50-50?

If you read George Packer's New Yorker article published over a month ago, you'd know that barely anything gets accomplished in the Senate now. Senators spend a couple days a week in Washington and spend the rest of the time flying back and forth from their home states, where they fundraise, pretend to listen to constituent concerns, and occasionally fuck people they aren't married to. The groundswell of populist rage--I have no idea what that phrase means, incidentally--isn't just directed at Democrats, it's directed at Congress in general. People think that elected officials are doing a shit job, and it's hard to argue against that.

To be fair, criticism of Congress comes from both ends of the political spectrum. Right-wingers think the government is trying to take over every facet of their lives, while left-wingers think the government isn't doing enough. But everyone agrees that the people in Washington are clowns at best, and evil, homicidal clowns at worst.

The solution? Replace them all with robots.


I know you can't replace everyone with robots. The House should remain dominated by humans, at least until machines acquire the ability to feel pain and love, but the Senate would be much more efficient, and probably better supported by the populace, if they were robots. The advantages are obvious: no sex scandals, no embarrassing PR gaffs (unlike the late Ted Stevens, the robots would know the internet is not a series of tubes), and they would never make vicious attack ads. Best of all, there would be no filibustering.

In fact, if robots were the only Senators, there would be no campaigning at all. Here's how an election would work:

1. Instead of voting on candidates, voters would go into the booth and decide how they feel about a number of issues. Are you pro-gay but anti-abortion? Do you want your children to pray in school but also support cap and trade? Just check those boxes, and leave a box blank if you don't know what it's talking about--or in the great American democratic tradition, you can let your opinion be known about issues you are totally uninformed about.

2. The Senate robot for your state would be reprogrammed after the election so its views would match those of its constituents, and it would vote accordingly. If you wanted to, you could also introduce a home-state bias so the robots would try to get military bases and corporate headquarters to move to their states, just like the fallible fleshy senators do. Or leave all of that back room politicking to the humans in the House and have the Senate be a realm of pure issues.

3. That's it. The only problem with this system is that if 51 percent of people in 51 percent of the states believe something absurd and dangerous, like "We should go to war with Iran right now," the robot Senate might try to make that happen. So maybe we institute a rule that 55 Senators have to agree on something in order for it to pass. It would still allow more pieces of legislation to be passed more efficiently than the current arrangement, where you apparently need 60 out of 100 Senators to agree on something for it to become law.

The advantages are too numerous to list here, but some benefits of a robot Senate would be an extremely short legislative session (they could decide on every bill in about a minute), and best of all, people wouldn't elect candidates without knowing their positions first. In the current situation, voters elect one party to Congress because they hate the other party and are shocked and dismayed when the new party in power attempts to enact the policies it said it was going to attempt to enact. (I'm talking about the Democrats and their health care policies, in case that wasn't clear.)

What would be the downside to having a robot Senate? Can anyone think of one? Keep in mind that the House would still be human, so legislation and the amendment process would go on as usual, just not as much in the Senate. I guess the robots could suddenly acquire intelligence and force all humans into death camps, but that probably wouldn't happen. Almost definitely not. Read more!

A Series of Tubes Sucks Us Down the Drain: Facebook and the Lost Potential of the Internet

Facebook is one of the most useful, most popular websites in existence. It offers, free of charge, a number of services that nearly everyone wants—services that weren't even imaginable 20 years ago. You can let all your friends know what you are doing at any given moment, or you can tell them all a joke, or you can post a link to something and comment on it. You can post pictures of yourself or your cat or other people and share them with all your friends, or the entire internet if you want. You can post links to blogs like this one, or videos, or anything at all that has a URL. You can voice your support of a cause, politician, music group, or abstract idea by hitting the “Like” button or joining a group whose members can share relevant content and have discussions about that cause/artist/idea. You can invite your “friends,” many of whom you don't know very well or actually hate, to parties, political rallies, and flash mobs. You can play a variety of online games, some of which are not even disguised marketing schemes. And you can watch all of the people you share tenuous social connections do all of these things in real time. I'm on Facebook right now, and maybe you are too.

So why do so many people hate it?

Maybe “hate” is too strong a word, but many, many people have voiced criticism of Facebook in the last few months, mainly over the site's privacy polices. Wired ran a disturbing article about the site censoring the content of private messages, as well as a somewhat rambling op-ed railing against Facebook; Gizmodo listed 10 reasons to quit Facebook; Time published a somewhat critical profile of the company; and quitfacebookday.com is exactly what it sounds like. There have been other attacks from more obscure sources as well, like this blog entry, which I read because my friend linked to it on Facebook.

Some of the criticisms are, too my mind, pretty minor. The author of the last post, for instance, describes a case where his friend got his account deleted for posting a picture of his cock, which is clearly against Section 3.7 of the Terms of Use Agreement. The author didn't notice his friend was kicked off and the friend missed out on some parties because he wasn't invited to them on Facebook—this shows that terms of use agreements are not merely randomly selected strings of syllables and that you should have ways of communicating other than Facebook. I'm also not convinced by attempts to portray Facebook as a Big Brother-esque monster who is logging our every keystroke—the site may have access to our personal information, but only because we put our personal information on a website whose stated purpose is to share personal information with others. No one forces you to use Facebook, although the way some bloggers talk, you'd think that was the case.

The meatier concerns over Facebook involve the site's privacy settings, which are complex and change every few months in response to user complaints. The basic problem is simple and practically unfixable under Facebook's current rubric: people want to pick exactly which of their “friends” sees what. If I want to share a status update that says, “Damn, I am really wasted considering it's not even noon,” I don't want my mother to see that. And I don't want my boss to see photos of me partying in a different city the night before I call in sick. But to Facebook, everyone is either a stranger, a “Friend,” or a “Friend of a Friend;” there's no way to differentiate between my family members, my coworkers, my oldest friends who now live in other cities, and the people I don't really know but friend anyway. We want to filter the information we give out on Facebook the way we do in real life, but we can't. Or to quote Marlo of The Wire, “You want it to be one way, but it's the other way.”

The way it is is this: Facebook is one of the first websites to take advantage of the internet's incredible, essentially unlimited capacity as a tool to share information. “Information” being not just academic papers, as in the days of ARPANET, but everything. Text, videos, photos, games, software, music--whatever the fuck you want, you can share and spread among friends, strangers, and people you've had sex with exactly one time, using a service not unlike what Facebook is now. The total, perfect, probably unrealizable form of the internet is communism on servers—everyone being able to access anything, all the time. Information is so plentiful it becomes free. The world's greatest library in history downloadable to every laptop without money changing hands. We could have that right now without any new technologies, except as the case of Facebook shows, we aren't ready.

For starters, users still regard information as private property. In the Time article, the author casually notes, “There's something unsettling about granting the world a front-row seat to all of our interests,” without further analysis. He's not talking about personal details like phone numbers, addresses, and other tidbits that could aid identity thieves, he's talking about a concern people have that people he doesn't know will know what he likes. What forbidden desires does he have that he doesn't want broadcasted? Similarly, Ryan Singel of Wired wants to “support an anti-abortion group without my mother or the world knowing,” which he thinks is a problem Facebook should be able to solve. Mr. Singel: if you want to donate money to anti-abortion cause, that is not something you need to tell Facebook. And if you fear that your peers will ostracize you for your political beliefs, maybe you need new peers. And are you really that afraid of your mother? I personally have no problem with giving the world a front-row seat to all of my interests, and I know a number of people who feel the same way. I like the Flaming Lips, sandwiches, and heterosexual intercourse, and I'm not afraid to let everyone know. One interesting question is whether the babies being born right now will have the same hang-ups concerning the sharing of interests that Mr. Singel and the man from Time have. Or will they use social networking sites as naturally as we use toilets?

I don't want to let Facebook itself off the hook though: it's not as if Mark Zuckerman and co. give a shit about my information-sharing utopia. The censoring of private messages between users is disturbing, but it comes from the attitude that they own the data that users choose to share with one another. This is spelled out specifically in Section 2.1 the User Agreement (linked to twice because if you use Facebook, you should read it), which says: “If you upload something, our company owns it just as much as you do.” The way Facebook chooses to use the information they own is to share it with advertisers, which allows them to make unspecifiably large amounts of money without charging its grouchy, constantly complaining users anything. The internet, despite its theoretical potential to become an anarchic hacker's wet dream of information-sharing, is run by for-profit companies like Facebook, and those companies generally make their by selling your personal information to other companies.

(This project offers hope to disgruntled Facebook users. I advise those folks to donate to the cause, but I'm holding my breath until I see a detailed explanation of who is going to be paying for these “seed” servers and how.)

The Time article warns that without more “transparency,” Facebook will become “the web's sketchy Big Brother, sucking up our identities into a massive Borg brain to slice, dice and categorize for advertisers.” That Borg model, of course, is exactly the model that will make Facebook and part-owners Microsoft the most money. Transparency and openness are for hippie programmers who don't conceive of the web as just another money-making machine. And what, really, is wrong with ads that target me based on my stated interests? If we're going to have advertising on the web, I'd rather see ads for things that I might actually use rather than ads for new cars I don't want and can't afford.

Like the Borg, Facebook is constantly adapting and seems impossible to kill. The recent changes to the privacy settings have made them (I think) fairly intuitive and easy to use, and whatever points Facebook's critics have, they haven't been very persuasive (quitfacebook.com has 23,000 committed quitters as of this writing, compared to over 4,000 Facebook users who want Slavoj Zizek to host Saturday Night Live). The truth is, there isn't a single website that does everything that Facebook does, except for maybe the still-imaginary Diaspora project linked to above. Someday, I imagine Facebook will be replaced by a sleeker, hipper replacement just as Friendster and MySpace have been replaced. But if that replacement site is just another for-profit service that regards information as a way to make a buck, and the population at large still imagines information to be the same thing as private property, expect exactly the same thing to happen.
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Making Monday Worse: Sucking Up Oil Edition

Good news everyone! Remember that damaged drilling operation that is now constantly leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico? The one where no one knows how much oil is being leaked? Yeah, well, problem solved, sort of, according to British Petroleum. But not really, since the tube that is now attached to the leak is a “stopgap measure” at best. Since the leak started, it's become increasingly clear that there wasn't really a plan for this scenario, and all sorts of increasingly absurd-sounding solutions have been publicly mulled over. Can we put a dome over the leak? Fuck, guess not! Can we use disgusting logs of hair (pictured above) to soak up the oil? What about hay? Hey, let's ask the general public for ideas! (My favorite: “Is setting the spill on fire an option?”)

You don't have to be a hemp-wearing environmentalist to think that this whole “Extracting poisonous chemicals from the ground” thing is overrated. But unless you want to go back to the pre-combustion engine days when everyone was churning butter, killing whales to get lamp oil, and worrying about the massive amounts of horse feces clogging city streets, there really isn't a way to stop drilling for oil. A bunch of you just said, “Wind power!” but that's not an option yet, as right-wing asshole Robert Bryce points out. Denmark, which is one of the “greener” countries in the world, gets 15 percent or so of its electricity from wind, but it also engages in a ton of offshore drilling, so much so that it actually exports oil. (Left-wing asshole Matt Wasson notes that CO2 emissions have been reduced in Denmark, but doesn't mention Denmark's drilling and coal importing.) And if one of the most wind-power-reliant countries in the world is getting less than 20 percent of its energy from wind, well, shit.

Update: More good news everyone! The Supreme Court decided (barely) that we shouldn't send teenagers to prison for life if they haven't killed anyone. I for one did not know the US was doing that. Are we still pretending that prison is a place to rehabilitate criminals?

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Why iPhones Apps Suck

Sometimes, an advance in technology is so strange and exciting that you can't help but get your hopes up. When the TV networks started covering political campaigns, some commentators predicted that since ordinary people would see more of the candidates, it would be harder to fool them and more serious, issue-driven campaigns would result—ha! Similarly, the idea of cell phone “apps” is pretty cool, in practice: a whole lot of independent software designers working on shareware that will turn our phones into space-age Swiss Army Knives. The possibilities appear limitless, until you realize that, like with TV and the internet, cell phone apps will basically just allow us to watch bad movies, look at porn, and buy stuff. Any attempt to color outside of the lines will not be tolerated.

Case in point: Atari Teenaged Riot, everyone's favorite German electro-punk group, tried to include a feature on their new app that would cause riots, sort of, only not really—the “Riotsounds” feature would make the phone produce “noise sounds which trigger hysteria and panic within the audience." Sounds kind of ominous, but all the app really does is play some grating techno music. It's not like ATR have access to supervillian-level technology; “Maximum Carnage” is not likely to result. (Although the group did actually start a riot one time.)

Still, ATR's app smacks of intentional anti-authoritarianism—they advise people to play the Riotsounds on the largest speakers they can find—and that made Apple nervous. Acceptable uses of the iPhone apparently include finding restaurant reviews and giving people a multiplicity of ways to purchase music on iTunes, but not encouraging people to take up arms against the police, which is too bad. We already have apps that let capitalists track stocks and buy extraordinarily expensive iPhone cases—where are the apps for the hard-core leftists? It's good to be reminded that no matter how many ads Apple runs with cool, bourgeois hipsters endorsing their products, they don't really want you to rock the boat, which is why some people prefer Microsoft these days—at least they don't pretend to be the good guys.

(Via Pitchfork)

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Why Umbrellas Suck

We had a wet weekend here in New York City, with gray clouds hovering spitefully overhead for three days and occasionally spitting sheets of rain down at us. If you had to go out in that weather, you walked as quickly as you could, dodging the puddles pooling at the curbs, gritting your teeth against raindrops that seemed to be coming at you sideways, huddling under your umbrella and feeling, perhaps, like the hero of a Horatio Alger novel who has yet to climb the corporate ladder through hard work and ambition and is therefore still stuck selling newspapers in the cold, wet rain.

Then again, maybe you didn't feel so bad because you had an umbrella with you, keeping the rain off of your head like an ingenious portable roof. Did you know that the umbrella has been in use since ancient times in the Middle East? And that they are sometimes called “gamps” in England, after a Charles Dickens character? You should click the “Random Entry” button on Wikipedia more often! Then you would have found out that umbrellas throughout history have been more often used as status symbols or to protect against the sun's heat than they have been used against rain, the way you are doing right now.

If you're unlucky, a wind will pick up suddenly and you'll discover why your use of the umbrella is historically inaccurate. If yours is a sturdy umbrella, one with a sturdy “double-canopy” design and one that has been tested in wind-tunnel conditions—like this one—you'll have to grip it tightly to keep it from flying away, but nothing too terrible will happen as a result of a sudden gust. But if you're like me and aren't inclined to spend 30 dollars on an umbrella, your cheap drugstore-purchased gamp will pull away from you, the canopy will make that nasty fluttering sound, and then the whole contraption will turn inside-out, and the ribs will get bent out of place so the stupid fucking thing (which is what you call it) will never protect anything from getting wet ever again. You can try to get the umbrella to go back to the way it was, but you'll wind up feeling like the person at the black-and-white opening of an infomercial who is demonstrating the problems with a traditional knife or lawnmower. “Is your umbrella giving you problems?” the voiceover asks you. “Did the wind kill your umbrella yet again?”

There are no statistics on how often this umbrella homicide occurs (although there should be), but it happens a lot. Now that the rains had ended, there are dozens of piles of colored canvas and metal rods that were once umbrellas wedged in the gutters. Most of them were poorly manufactured, but some of them are the fancy umbrellas with the double-canopy designs or the endorsement of Rihanna. Umbrellas are the material embodiment of entropy. The clasp that keeps them tightly wrapped up breaks, then it gets harder to open the umbrella, then the metal ribs get bent, and eventually all umbrellas realize their ultimate destiny and become stupid fucking things one windy day or another. And when that destiny is realized and the unlucky umbrella owner is suddenly shelterless, you can bet that it's the sort of miserable day when the umbrella was needed the most.

Umbrellas break when they're needed, they can be cumbersome to open and close, they sometimes refuse to close altogether (an alternate route to stupid fucking thing status), they ensure that you won't have two hands free when it rains, and on a crowded sidewalk with a lot of umbrella-bearers they'll get in one another's way. Yet a great many people seem to think that they're the best way to shield themselves against the rain and I have no idea why this is. Is it an umbrella-industry conspiracy? Is it really good advertising? Is it a holdover from the days when rich society ladies would use umbrellas as a stylish accessory? Is it a Freudian phallic obsession? Or is it that Rihanna song?

Whatever the reason, I'm—as the kids say these days—over it. No more umbrellas for me. Yet I stayed relatively dry this weekend, and not because I sat inside all day eating donut holes. No, I had to go to the store to get those donut holes and my head stayed miraculously dry, thanks to that newfangled invention, the Jacket With a Hood. Read more!

Why Canned Music Sucks

One of the oddest, least remarked-upon features of contemporary civilization is that we are almost always listening to music. In our cars, on the bus, in elevators, while we sit inside coffee shops, restaurants, and bars, while we shop for groceries, while we try on clothes in changing rooms, while we stand around at clubs waiting for the band to come on and play, even while we sit in front of our computers and read or write blog entries--we are listening to music. People make out to sexy music, fall asleep to soothing music, and get high to every kind of music imaginable. I would say that we are listening to music from birth until death, but this would leave out the practice of playing classical music to foster a child's development while it's still in the womb. This is an exclusively twentieth-century phenomenon. Before the advent of recorded music--when you had to track down a guitar player in order to listen to “Stairway To Heaven”--listening to musical instruments was a luxury. Now, it's practically a requirement. Thanks to the proliferation of music in public places, we've reached a brave new era of human history, where groups of people are routinely forced to listen to music that none of them have requested, and many of them don't enjoy.

Take Starbucks, for instance, where I used to work serving coffee and overpriced sandwiches. As any Starbucks-frequenter knows, there is always non-offensive, non-challenging, easily ignorable pop music being piped in through the store's sound system. This is mandated by company policy. Some executive decided that it would make people more comfortable if extremely bland songs were played all the time—at the very least, it would drown out the customers' objections that their skinny vanilla lattes didn't taste skinny enough—and now it is impossible to turn the music off. On a couple occasions, customers who were having business meetings or reading books asked the employees to turn the music off, but our hands were tied—if we had been able to smash the speakers that the schmaltzy cover of “Blackbird” was coming from, we would have.

The problem with canned music that you hear in Starbucks, or in your local diner or bookstore or supermarket, is that no one really hates it. It's all too middle-of-the-road to inspire any strong emotion whatsoever, that's the point of the song selections. No one is offended, everyone ignores it, and we hardly ever bother to ask who is enjoying it. If we did ask, the answer would most likely be “no one”--or if someone was actually enjoying the songs, it would be in a passive, kind of enjoyment. “Oh, this is okay, I guess,” is about the best thing anyone has ever said of a canned song.

We've created a soundtrack to our lives, in the worst possible sense. There's always something else going on, and we never devote our full attention to the notes. It's background, the sonic equivalent of wallpaper. We are training ourselves, essentially, to ignore music.

This is awful. Music should not be ignored, it shouldn't be ignorable. Music should grab you by the ear and force you to listen to it—music is art, after all, or at least it should be. But when it's pumped into every public space, music isn't art. It's just like silence, just a little noisier.

Silence would actually be a fairly radical alternative at this point. Imagine if your local bar or restaurant turned off the stereo. All you'd hear would be the clink of glasses, the sipping of drinks, the sound from suddenly-audible conversations. No one would have to yell across the table to be heard and the waiters wouldn't be shouting the specials over a Hold Steady song in the background. And if music came on after this period of silence, people might listen to it, instead of just hearing it. Read more!

Why Razors Suck

Has technology made our lives better or worse? That's quite a big question, one of those questions that earnest young philosophy undergrads discuss when they get hammered. Some technologies, like the airplane or the cock ring, have unquestioningly made our lives better and without any technology at all we'd still be wandering the African savannah looking for food. On the other hand, thanks to technology that savannah is now is danger of being flooded by rising sea levels or blown into oblivion by advanced missiles.

And then there's the technology that is simply inexplicable, neither a giant leap forward or a step down the path leading to our own destruction, but a little hop that gets us nowhere in particular. If you want proof that these technologies exist, just watch TV after 2 a.m. and take a gander at the array of devices that you can use to vaccum your floor or slice tomatoes extremely efficiently. Or you can go to your local chain pharmacy, head towards the razors, and look at all the different ways a man can go about removing hair from his face.

Once upon a time, if a man wanted to shave, he had two options: go to a barber or shave himself. Either way, the device used was a straight razor, basically a blade with a handle attached to it. If there are any pretentious young men out there who've ever tried to shave with a straight razor, you probably didn't try it twice. You end up with a bunch of stubble still on your face and there's so much blood in the sink from your cuts your mom thinks you're suicidal and calls the fire department. Not that I would know.

Then, getting back to our history, someone invented the safety razor, which is pretty much what it sounds like. All of a sudden, you could shave your face (or your legs, if you were a woman or a nontraditional man) without cutting yourself up. Voila. Problem solved.

Then razor technology became, to quote Joe Biden, more fucked than a whore at the Republican Convention.

Razor manufacturers, apparently bored out of their minds, thought: it one blade was good, two would be better. And if two blades are better, three would be the best. And four would be supermega awesome, and five would be the motherfucking shit-king, master of the house, keeper of the inn, boss hog supernova excellent. And somewhere along the way, we got electric razors, then battery-powered razors because you don't always have an outlet when you need to shave. There are now razors that dispense shaving lotion (check out how the on/off switch is a "feature" in that listing), razors that pulsate against your skin , razors that have microchips, and for the ladies, a razor that will literally give you orgasms. Clearly, razors are evolving at an incredibly rapid rate. We can only hope that they will never become self-conscious.

Attention, R&D department heads of major shaving product companies, who I assume are avid readers of this blog: WE DO NOT NEED ANY MORE RAZORS. WE HAVE MORE ALL THE RAZORS ANYONE COULD CONCEIVABLY WANT. Nothing more is required of you. We can get close shave without cutting ourselves and that's really all we want. With the energy required to manufacture and power these devices and their microchips, you are probably hurting the world more than you are helping it. The only people who buy your products are people who aren't sure what their dad wants for Father's Day. Your industry is so stupid The Onion mocked your five-bladed razor before it even existed. If you want to help us, maybe you should turn your attention away from our beards and figure out a way to stop the savannahs from flooding. Read more!

Why Fake Nails Suck

I saw one of the wonders of the world a few weeks ago, when I went in to a bank to deposit a check (my having a check to deposit is a wonder in itself, but never mind that). The teller took my check and began typing in whatever information tellers type in upon receiving a check and that's when I noticed her fingernails: bright red, several inches long, and as fake as a lesbian Russian pop duo. Somehow, she was able to type accurately on a standard keyboard with these grotesqueries attached to her fingers, and I couldn't help staring. It was off-putting and awe-inspiring at the same time, like watching a two-legged cat throw itself towards its water bowl.

People dress in so many bizarre and logic-defying ways that one hardly ever questions the reasons behind another's fashion choices, especially in large cities like New York. You can pass a man wearing a puffy-sleaved pirate shirt and lime green hot pants on the street without thinking anything except, "Wow, what unusually hairless legs he has!" But in the case of the bank teller, I wondered, and I wonder to this day: why was she wearing those nails? Does she think it looks good? DId she have to practice a lot before she could type with them on? What in God's name is the reason behind fake nails?

Twentieth-century humanity has produced many products that are fundamentally impractical; it has also produced products that are hideous to look at. But fake nails are that rare item that is both useless and ugly at the same time. They increase the difficulty of ordinary tasks like dialing a phone or typing and are expensive and time-consuming to put on--you would think that all that hassle would pay off by making the women who wear them much more appealing as potential mates. But fake nails don't make them more attractive, at least not to men. I've had plenty of friends with relatively depraved sexual attitudes, but not once has a man said to me, "You know what really gets my motor running? Two-inch long fingernails that have yellow and magenta stripes on them." Guys are not interested in fingernails. If a certain kind of woman wears tight enough clothes, we won't even notice if her nails start falling off.

After some consideration, I've come up with three reasons to wear fake nails:
1. You are a drag queen.
2. You have a disease that has caused your nails to fall off (in which case maybe cosmetic appearance shouldn't be your number one concern).
3. You want to look more attractive in front of other women.

Men often assume that women dress up to impress us, which is arrogant and blatantly wrong--if a woman wants to impress a man, she can just wear an extremely short skirt and no bra. The real challenge is winning the approval of other women. So I'm assuming that women wear fake nails and get elaborate manicures because other women are impressed by them. Right? Is a a sort of arms race where the woman with the longest nails wins? (If that's the case, my bank teller is definitely ahead of the field.) Do women show their ornate nail patterns off to each other like some men do with their cars? Is it like the old Chinese practice of foot binding, where the woman emphasizes her high caste status by her inability to perform household chores? Is the idea to use these pointy extensions as weapons against competing women?

I don't have enough X chromosomes to answer any of these questions, although I hope the answer to the last one is “yes.” All I know is that if you are a dyed-in-the-wool free marketeer, if you believe that capitalism is a collection of rational traders, if you believe that advances in beneficial technology are driven by consumer demand, if you think that the absolute value of something is whether people buy it--you should visit my bank. Read more!

Why PowerPoint Sucks

Schools have always been terrible places, from the seventeenth-century Puritan schoolhouses where the kids had the Bible beaten into them to the clique-ridden high schools of the 1980s which—if The Breakfast Club is as accurate as I think it is—were inhabited primarily by walking cliches who broke out into dance montages at the slightest provocation. But it's usually believed that schools are improving gradually. Hitting children with rulers is not common practice anymore (except maybe at Catholic schools) and everyone in America has access to public education (which sucks, but it's probably better than nothing).

However, there is something that has been infiltrating schools for the past several years, a teaching tool that is spreading like swine flu, only more damaging. It requires a bunch of money, wastes everyone's time, and might be actually making our children dumber—if the United States fails as a country thanks to the next generation, this practice will be at least partly responsible. I'm speaking, of course, of PowerPoint.

PowerPoint is basically a glorified slideshow. Actually, it's not even “glorified”: it's a computer program that lets you display slides, just like an overhead projector, only more complicated and less useful (you can write on an overhead projector with a marker, for instance). As a technology, it's right up there with the motion-activated paper towel dispenser. Putting a boring or poorly conceived presentation into PowerPoint does not make it better. In fact, it usually makes it worse—everyone has had to endure a meeting where someone stands in front of the room and simply reads from the screen (which the audience can see and read for themselves) in a monotone voice. The best thing that can be said about PowerPoint is that it saves time compared to writing things on a blackboard, unless the computer or projector has a problem, in which case PowerPoint turns into an enormous time waster. Essentially, schools are spending money on equipment and software in order to teach kids how to give boring presentations littered with clip art, graphs and bullet points, always more bullet points.

I had to “learn” PowerPoint in a tenth-grade Health class so I could give a presentation about calories or some other such bullshit. I put “learn” in quotation marks because if you're even remotely computer-literate, PowerPoint is incredibly easy to figure out. It's not some complex machine that takes years to master, or something that will help students later in life, for that matter.* But the bureaucrats on whatever sub-sub-committee decides what schoolchildren will be learning are computer illiterate and stuck in jobs where they have to deal with PowerPoint, so they figure that PowerPoint is both a difficult skill and a necessary one. (That's one theory for why PowerPoint is on the curriculum. Another idea is that these people simply hate children.)

Educators have gotten more forward-thinking in the teaching of PowerPoint, however. My little sister had to learn PowerPoint in middle school, and by this point, some poor kindergarteners are huddled in front of a monitor making a PowerPoint book report on If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

But hey, classes have always been boring, and we've always taught our children worthless skills (like calculus), right? PowerPoint would be fine if it was merely boring, but it's actively destroying the brains of children.

For instance, instead of writing a report using traditional methods (just writing one, on paper), students might now be expected to make a PowerPoint presentation. They don't have to think about connecting their ideas using transitions and paragraphs, since they can lean on bullet points. They spend time looking for interesting images instead of choosing correct words. They fuck around for hours with fonts and layouts and use unnecessary “wipes” between slides like George Lucas. Then a bunch of class time is wasted by everyone presenting these slideshows individually while their classmates stare at the clock and have depraved sexual fantasies about one another.

And I've never had a teacher who bothered to teach how to make presentations interesting, a skill that has nothing to do with technology. Talking in front of groups of people is a useful skill, but more often than not students just learn how to read from a screen, and teachers won't bother to correct this behavior. The boring student presenters of today are the terminally boring adult presenters of tomorrow.

Recently there's been some positive signs of rebellion against PowerPoint. A Dean at Southern Methodist University is trying to eliminate technology, especially PowerPoint, from his classrooms because, big surprise, everyone hates having computers in classrooms. Older professors have to learn useless bullshit like how to hook up a computer to a projector and students get bored to the point of insanity watching slide after slide go by. The linked article references a recent survey of students that found "The least boring teaching methods were found to be seminars, practical sessions, and group discussions," things that are squashed when teachers use PowerPoint.

This guy, who wrote a book on PowerPoint and who looks like an asshole, says that boring presentations aren't PowerPoint's fault, but the fault of boring presenters. Well, duh. Homicides aren't the fault of handguns either, but handguns certainly don't help, and we don't allow handguns in our schools. That should go double for PowerPoint.


*Actually, learning to use and put up with PowerPoint might actually be useful, but that's only because businesses and institutions have stupidly adopted it as the main mode of discourse. For instance, the Pentagon has switched over to PowerPoint and has started making (more) faulty decisions as a result. It's possible that PowerPoint is responsible for the Iraq War. That's how much it sucks. Read more!

Things That Don't Suck: Sandwiches

Despite the title of this blog, we must admit that not everything sucks. Some things simply defy all attempts to criticize them, and we must reluctantly declare them not "good," exactly, but not completely terrible. Today's entry: the sandwich.

Wherever you are, whoever you are, I bet you ate a sandwich today. I know I did: turkey, lettuce and tomato on a roll. It was so good, I might go out and get another sandwich after I finish this post. That's not an unusual day for me either: I've eaten at least a sandwich a day since elementary school, when my mom was making them for me. Since then I've doubled in size, grew facial hair, graduated from high school and college, moved across the country, and discovered sex and recreational drug use. But sandwiches remain a constant presence in my life.

So yeah, I might be biased in this case. But look me in the eye and tell me that sandwiches are a bad idea.

Unless you're even more of a contrarian than I am, you probably aren't inclined to argue that point though. I have no data to back this up, but putting meat or vegetables between two pieces of bread (or wrapping it in a tortilla, or using pita bread--same difference) has to be the most popular idea in the world. Sandwiches are bigger than Jesus: there are only 2.1 billion Christians in the world, but at least that many sandwiches (again, no data) are eaten every day. You can eat them on trains or buses or while walking to work, you can make them in minutes, or buy them at any restaurant or deli. In some big cities, like New York, you have dozens of places per block where you can buy sandwiches--and you'll hardly ever be let down.

Sandwiches have been around for a long time, too. According to Wikipedia, Hillel the Elder, the ancient Jewish sage, was the first to figure it out, putting bitter herbs and lamb between two pieces of matzah, making him the direct ancestor of the modern Jewish deli. Thanks to cultural hegemony, however, we don't ask for pastrami hillels. The naming rights were stolen, like everything else, by the English--we call them after this guy, who didn't invent anything but ate a lot of hillels, like a 18th century Jared. I've always thought that the myth of "Lord Sandwich" was a little unfair, as it claims that the English came up with a culinary innovation that people around the world enjoyed.

But whatever their origins, sandwiches remain cheap, portable, relatively nutritious, and adaptable to any situation. The possibilities are endless--what can't you put between two pieces of bread? You can class things up with a filet mignon and portobella mushroom panini, or you can make peanut butter and jelly and spend seventeen cents. You can overload a reuben with corned beef and sauerkraut or put some hummus to a sundried tomato and roasted zucchini sandwich. The sandwich cuts across all class lines, sexual persuasions, religions, and nationalities. With the right kind of meat, even cannibals can enjoy a sandwich.

This doesn't mean that sandwiches don't suck individually. Some sandwiches are bland thanks to bland ingredients, you can get food poisoning from undercooked meat in sandwiches, the bread can be moldy, or a disgruntled Subway employee can spit swine-flu-infected spit into your sandwich. Or KFC can come out with a disgusting abomination that will kill anyone who eats it. But the idea of a sandwich is good. And I'm about to go eat another one.
Read more!

Why Motion-Activated Paper Towel Dispenser Suck

I first saw the device on the left two years ago, when I was interning for a newspaper. I remember watching my boss wave his hand uselessly back and forth in front of it and cursing. "Goddam thing!" he said. "It never gives you enough paper. I'm trying to dry my hands. Cheadle, why won't it let me dry my hands? This is America, isn't it!"

"I don't know sir," I said, because that's the kind of thing you say when you're an intern. "Yes sir, this is America, last time I checked."

"If this is America, why the hell can't I get enough paper towel?"

Good question.

The way motion-activated paper towel dispensers work, for those of you who are lucky enough not to have encountered them, is you wave your hand in front of a red light and either a paper towel comes out or nothing happens at all. These machines have become increasingly popular, so presumably this system is considered more efficient than using "hand crank" towel dispensers, which practically guarantee that you get enough paper towel.

These machines wouldn't be so frustrating if they filled some need--if we were having trouble with our old-fashioned paper towel dispensers, if there was a public outcry against having to turn a crank after washing our hands. But there wasn't. There is no reason for this thing to exist. It costs money to replace the old machines, it costs money to make sure the dispenser has electricity, it costs money to repair them when they break (I assume they break more often than regular dispensers). This guy says they aren't even ergonomic.

So I scoured the internet, searching for a reason these things continued to squat uselessly on our shared bathroom walls. I found this. It says that with the hand crank model "forces the customer to touch the crank with wet or dirty hands." And we wouldn't want that. After all, paper towel dispenser hand cranks are notorious cesspools of germs. What could be more disgusting than a hand crank that has been touched by another human being that has just washed their hands? You might as well shoot yourself in the head before using a hand crank paper towel dispenser.

I strongly suspect that the above link is actually a plant by the motion-activated paper towel dispenser lobby, which is more powerful than we realize. Why? The last line: "When a customer waves a hand beneath the dispenser, it ejects the perfect sized paper towel" (italics mine) . No one who has used these contraptions would say such a thing. The paper towel is too small, unless you have a genetic abnormality that makes your hands unusually tiny, like this woman I saw on the subway one time. Tell my old boss that the paper towel is the "perfect size" and he'll wring your neck with hands are still wet from the bathroom.

But there's some good news I came across while combing the internet for this entry: you can buy your very own motion-activated paper towel dispenser! Yes, you can have the thrill of waving your hand under a red light without having to go to a public restroom! How much for the latest golden egg the magic goose of Modern Technology has laid? Why, only 250 dollars, or 300 if you want the infinitely more sleek stainless steel model.

This is America, all right. Read more!