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2024.04
minutiae
…though this is less a “2024.04 minutiae”
than an “I’ve had these items sitting around for months now
and might as well just publish them rather than waiting to slip them
into a more substantial compilation of minutiae”.
From January:
Okay, you all read the sign.
If you want service, you must wear a shirt, you
must wear shoes, and you
must shout “FUCK!” at least three
times before the end of the tour.
From September:
“Do I really need to wear a shirt on
the tour?”
“If the management requires you to wear a shirt on the tour,
you may need to wear a shirt.”
When I was in college, one of my roommate’s prized
possessions was a copy of a book called The
Cuckoo’s Egg (1989), in which author Clifford Stoll
describes how he had tracked down a KGB hacker while employed at
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The book was signed by the author, but not as part of an official
signing: Stoll had found his own book on the shelf at Cody’s,
signed it (along with the exclamation “GADZOOKS!”),
and put it back as a surprise for whomever ended up buying the book,
and that turned out to be my roommate.
Stoll later wrote a book called Silicon Snake
Oil (1995), in which he dismissed the Internet as a passing
fad, citing online shopping in particular as a bunch of hype that
would pan out about as well as cold fusion or Esperanto.
Never in a million years would people buy products off a web
site, he contended, because no one is going to spend money to buy an
item they’ve never held in their hand, never even seen with
their own eyes.
So for well over twenty years now I have used Logitech Marble
trackballs as the pointing device on all my computers.
The first one I got looked like this:
Subsequent models have had different color schemes and
switched from PS2 to USB connectors, but the shape has remained
consistent.
I have a couple still in service.
Recently I accidentally knocked one onto the floor, and when I
picked it up, it acted wonky for a bit.
Annoyed, I hopped online to pull up my most recent order from back
in 2019 and click the “Buy it again” button—only
to discover that the price had spiked from $20.88 to $219.95.
So, no new trackball for me.
It turned out that Logitech had discontinued all their non-thumb
trackballs and these were the last few that third-party sellers had in
their inventory.
Dispirited, I pulled up some reviews to see what the best replacement
might be.
There was no consensus, and the leading contenders all had significantly
different shapes.
I had no idea which would feel like the most natural way for me to
click around on my computer, i.e., to engage in the activity I spend
hours doing every day.
Now, there used to be an easy solution to this quandary: go to the
trackball aisle of CompUSA and try them all out.
That’s what I did to settle on the Logitech Marble in the first
place, after all.
Even at the time I bought this most recent one, I could have gone to
Fry’s Electronics to test out alternatives.
But now, if any of those sorts of stores are left, I don’t know
where they might be.
The closest thing I can think of is Best Buy, which sells two
trackballs, both of which are thumb ones, and I don’t even know
whether Best Buy has display models of either one—I
doubt it.
So, yeah, it’s easy to mock Stoll for being so wrong
that he thought people would never buy products online when now
there are whole ranges of products that you can pretty much
only buy online.
But his argument was that e-commerce would never get off the ground
because people would always want to physically inspect the items they
were thinking of buying.
What he seems not to have taken into account is that real vs. online
shopping wasn’t an either/or proposition—that
people could drop by brick-and-mortar stores, do their in-person
inspection of the merchandise to verify that it was in fact what they
wanted, and then go home and order it on Amazon.
Except maybe, over the long term, it is an
either/or, as the aforementioned practice has led many brick-and-mortar
stores to go out of business.
And maybe if people living in the “go to Fry’s, see which
trackball you like, buy it” world had been given the option
either to stay there or jump straight into the world where acquiring
most items means deciding between products by such trusted outfits
as LERGNA and SWOMMOLY with nothing to go on other than ChatGPT
reviews posted by bots, they might indeed have elected to stay
put.
But that period of overlap was just long enough to have routed us into
the future we wouldn’t have chosen.
One of the canards right-wing pundits, and the misinformed, trot
out against progressive taxation is that people will work less for fear
of moving into a higher tax bracket.
E.g., the California state income tax for single filers is 6% for
income over $38,959 and 8% for income over $54,081.
“So if I’m making $54,081, why should I want to earn
that extra dollar? I’ll suddenly be paying a third
more in taxes—that’ll more than cancel out my
gains!”
But that’s not how it works.
It is not the case that the tax on $54,081 is $3244.86 and the tax on
$54,082 is $4326.56.
Only the extra dollar is taxed at the higher
rate.
The tax on $54,081 is actually $1763.76.
The tax on $54,082 is $1763.84.
Unfortunately, in some cases Obamacare does work
the way the pundits suggest.
Since the U.S. apparently can’t find it within itself to act
like virtually every other developed country and just supply health
care or at least health insurance via tax revenue, we have this weird
Rube Goldberg machine (which is better than what we had before, which
was nothing).
You submit a projected income to the government, which adjusts those
projections based on recent tax stubs, salary offer letters, and the
like.
Based on that projected income, the government offers a subsidy to
help pay the premiums on a plan purchased through an online health
exchange.
If your income exceeds the projection, you have to pay back the
difference
between your actual subsidy and what your subsidy would have been had
the projection been accurate.
However, the payback amount is capped at different levels based on
income.
Up to 200% of the federal poverty line, the payback cap is $350; if
your income at least 200% but less than 300% of the poverty line, the
cap is $900; from there to 400%, it’s $1500; and at 400% of
the poverty line, the cap disappears and the full difference is
due.
What does that mean if you’re currently getting your premium
fully paid by the subsidy?
I coded up a program to do the calculations, and here’s what
it came up with:
The x-axis represents gross income from $0 to $100,000; the Y-axis
represents gross income minus the Obamacare payback amount.
The larger sawtooth there represents the tax bite caused by the removal
of the payback cap at 400% of the federal poverty line—for
individuals in 2023, that meant $54,360.
The top of the sawtooth represents the point at which you’re
better off not making that one extra
dollar.
Specifically, if you made $54,359 in 2023, then after the Obamacare
payback, your net income was $52,859… but if you
made $54,360, then your net income was $49,740.
You would need to get up to $57,770 to get back into positive
territory—and at that point, you could update George
Harrison’s lyric to “Let me tell you how it will
be / There’s one for you, four thousand nine hundred
ten for me”.
I first encountered Tom Lehrer watching The Electric
Company as a small child, though not by name—it
wasn’t until many years later that I learned that he was
responsible for two of the most
memorable
cartoons on the show.
I think I also encountered his song about the elements in a class
before I ever heard his name.
But in high school I discovered Dr. Demento’s radio show;
he made sure to credit the creators of the songs he played, and Tom
Lehrer’s name popped up quite a bit.
At one point he played the entirety of An Evening
Wasted with Tom Lehrer, and I taped it, so I know those eleven
songs far better than the rest of Lehrer’s oeuvre.
The album kicks off with
“Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”, in which
Lehrer sets an account of his protagonists’ avian murder spree to
a jaunty tune: “When they see us coming, the birdies all try and
hide / But they still go for peanuts when coated with
cyanide…”
One class in my AP Literature curriculum back when I taught in a
public school was about comedy—specifically about the
jokes in Hamlet, but also about what makes
things funny more generally.
What makes us laugh?
Some of the options I hoped would come up in our discussion each year
(and which I planned to throw in if they didn’t) were:
“comic relief”: a respite
from a tense or downbeat portion of a narrative
incongruity: as in the “rule of
three”, when a pattern is set up and then violated (e.g., a late
night host during the social distancing stage of the pandemic saying
that what he misses about having a live audience are “the laughs,
the energy, and keeping the lost wallets”)
transgression: from “benign
violation” of societal norms (e.g., fart jokes) to edgelord
humor
recontexualization: e.g., puns
the odds against something: I talk about
this in a prior Chuckle Box
associated pleasure / the shock of recognition
and belonging: key to in-jokes—I talk about these
in this article
power dynamics: the main answer offered
up by philosophers from Plato to Hobbes, and key to the jokes in
Hamlet, since so many of them are based on
the idea that Hamlet, as a prince, can insult the courtier
Polonius with impunity
However, I was astonished to find that students generally offered up
none of these.
I’d ask them to think of something they had found really
funny—from a comedian’s routine, from a TV show,
from real life, from anywhere—and explain
why they thought it was funny.
And almost without exception, their answers were that “it was
so random”.
I flipped through the quickwrites they’d turned in and it was
just page after page of “We were eating dinner and my dad
kind of half-sneezed and my mom looked confused and looked over at
him and said ‘Did you say something about giraffes?’ and my
sister and I laughed and laughed because it was so random.”
There would also usually be a couple of students in each class who
would protest that humor was inherently random—that
something either made you laugh or it didn’t, and there was
no way to predict whether it would or wouldn’t, so there was
no point in analyzing it.
For ages I had thought that “Poisoning Pigeons
in the Park”, while funny, was also pretty random.
Yes, it was transgressive to write a song about the delights of animal
cruelty.
Yes, it was incongruous to present killing birds as a pleasant
springtime activity, and to pair it with a sprightly melody.
But mainly the song was wacky.
Poisoning pigeons in the park?
What a random thing to do!
Except quite recently I learned that it wasn’t wacky or random
at all.
It turns out that in the 1950s the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
did try to control the pigeon population in
Boston parks by feeding the birds corn laced with strychnine.
Lehrer’s song was satire.
And when I learned this… to me the song was retroactively
much funnier!
I hadn’t realized it, but the feeling that Lehrer was just
making up some wild scenario put a ceiling on how funny I could
find the song—and discovering that he’d been
commenting on the ghoulishness of an actual government program
removed that ceiling.
And for a fact I learned in the 2020s to add to the perceived comedic
value of a song I’d committed to memory in the 1980s… I
mean, when I post a Chuckle Box or include a Chuckle Box-type paragraph
in one of my articles, I will often deadpan that “jokes are
funnier when you explain them”, the idea being that I am
ironically acknowledging that I am ruining the joke by taking it
apart.
Except that’s really a “ha ha just serious” type of
line.
Having the reference point of
“Poisoning” spelled out for me goes
to show that, to me at least, jokes are funnier
when you explain them.
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