A last minute scramble

I am flying off to Seattle on Wednesday for an important family obligation. I think this will be the first time in two years that I’ve been on a plane. I’m not looking forward to it.

Especially since my laptop died yesterday, totally and irrevocably. It’s a shame, too, since it was a beautiful razor thin MacBook with a 12″ screen. Once upon a time I would have said that was too small, but man, it has been such a sweet lightweight computer that I was won over. Sometimes small is good. But then again, that compact efficiency is the reason I can’t repair it. Instead, Mary found an antique netbook in a closet that is horribly clunky and ugly, and runs (it runs! That’s good enough for now) Windows XP, so I’m going to be suffering with that for a few days. I guess I’ll be trying to find some pennies in the budget to get a replacement — I’m thinking I may go the Mac Mini route.

The other important mission today was to get the spiders comfortable for my absence. Everyone got new clean cages! I paired up a lot of the males and females, so they’ll have something fun to do while I’m away. They’re all accommodating themselves to their new digs, and tomorrow, once they’ve decorated with nice sheets of cobweb, I’ll be throwing in a lot of flies and a mealworm for each. They’ll be fine without me for a few days. They might miss me terribly, but we’ll all cope.

I may not have much of a computer, but I do have a nice camera and a lot of SD cards. Maybe when I get back I’ll upload a flood of photos of Beaches! And Ocean! And Marine Organisms!

We need to plan for the happiness of nonexistent people?

This is a bizarre article: titled Spare a Thought for the Billions of People Who Will Never Exist, subheading “As world population growth slows, the never-conceived are the ultimate forgotten ones.” I thought the anti-choicers were unbelievable with their nonsense about “unborn children”, but this takes it up a notch to “unconceived children”. Really? I have to give a thought to hypothetical people whose defining characteristic is that they will never exist? The author says we should consider this scenario:

A couple decides to have one child instead of two, or none instead of one. This happens all over the world. Billions of children are never conceived. How real is the loss of a life that never began? Is there a right to exist? Is there an ideal size of the world population?

There is no loss of a life that never began.

Things that don’t exist don’t have a right to exist.

The ideal size of the human population is a harder question. I don’t think there is an absolute, fixed size; it’s going to be variable, dependent on the environment, and also an “ideal size” is going to depend on your goal. Do you think the largest human population is ideal? Or do you think there should be some accommodation for non-human populations? I need to know your assumptions.

I’m unimpressed so far. It’s a lot of wrestling with abstractions. We should consider the plight of people who do exist before these kinds of weird hypotheticals. Apparently there is some serious philosophical work on this one, though.

The late University of Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit wrestled with the question of the world’s ideal population in an influential 1984 book, Reasons and Persons. He didn’t delve into the carrying capacity of the planet, and he stayed away from the issue of abortion, which occurs after conception and thus raises a different set of concerns.

In an abstract, theoretical way, the British thinker presented what he called the “Repugnant Conclusion.” Here’s how he stated it: “For any possible population of at least 10 billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better, even though its members have lives that are barely worth living.”

Fine. So if you’ve got X billion people living comfortably, could you handle X+1 billion people living slightly less comfortably? Which would be better? I can imagine this being a relevant concern if you are planning population policy — but the purpose there would be to figure out how to guide the reproductive choices of people who exist. The amount of thought you should give to people who don’t exist is zero. It’s very twisty to expect people to not forget the never-conceived, since there was no one to remember.

This is some real “every sperm is sacred” shit.

Everything must be done as awkwardly and inefficiently as possible!

That seems to be my university’s motto. This morning I completed “Preventing Sexual Misconduct, Discrimination and Retaliation for Employees”, an online and required training module that ate up a few hours. I am entirely sympathetic with the purpose of the exercise, and I appreciate the reminder, but sheesh, it was awful. Cheesy animations, irrelevant clip art, bad acting in skits, pointless interactivity (click on the card, it spins!), all interspersed with bad audio and bad cinematography of talking heads, and worst of all, pop-ups of state and federal laws that you had to scroll all the way through in order to progress on. Imagine a EULA that was punctuated with recorded zoom calls from executives telling you how important it was to pay attention, with occasional stiff, wooden, but colorful cartoons where figures just stand there wiggling their arms. I cringed. I moaned. I wept at how bad it was at presenting important information. If I taught a course this badly, I’d deserved to be hauled in and rebuked.

I also got in for a check-up of my back agonies. On the negative side, Mary just had to pipe up and remind them that I was also due for a colonoscopy, and I’ll probably get to do that in July. On the positive side, I’m getting an appointment for physical therapy and a prescription for some good drugs. I’m going to celebrate completion of my obligatory painful training course by spending the afternoon all mellowed out and high.

You’d think I’d learn

Every year this happens. I spend the winter and spring snowbound, shackled to my desk trying to keep up with classes, and then May arrives. Classes are over! The snow has melted! I leap up to bolt into the field, and…<SPROOOIING>. My body falls apart. If it’s not my knees, it’s my back. I have to curl up into a little ball of pain until the muscles and tendons readjust, and then move out gingerly, hoping none of the cables snap when I exert myself to, for instance, walk up some stairs.

So this morning, it’s off to the doctor, who I’m hoping will send me off to do some physical therapy, where I will finally learn how to avoid treating this pathetic body stupidly. It’s really wrecking my plans for the summer, too — I have a fair bit of fieldwork planned, but now I’m rethinking and developing some projects I can do sitting down in the lab, just in case.

What’s that smell in the air? It’s the reek of Bill Gates

Finally, the touch of Bill Gates is being recognized as the taint that it is. The New York Times, the Daily Beast, the Guardian are all writing about his terrible ideas, I talked about it yesterday, and Rebecca Watson has a video on it.

I’ve despised him since the late 1970s, when he wrote his paean to capitalism, a letter berating the Homebrew Computer Club for pirating his version of BASIC. Don’t you know that because he wrote a BASIC interpreter, he now owned BASIC and you all had to pay him for his two months of work…forever? That’s been his philosophy ever since.

Now he has written a book (I think; did he have a ghostwriter?): How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need. The hubris is impressive. Does he have any expertise at all in climate science (or epidemiology, or education, all topics he has pretended to have mastered)? No. He’s a college dropout who spent most of his life marketing a monopoly. Now he’s so obscenely rich he can throw all kinds of money around to get reviewers to publicize his stupid book.

Why would anyone buy a book by an unqualified rich person on a complex topic? Go read Michael Mann’s book instead. He knows what he’s talking about.

I expect Jeff Bezos to come out with a bestseller on labor management now.

Finally, Bill Gates gets called on his BS

All the philanthropy in the world won’t erase his character — especially when all that money is coming from the accumulation of excess wealth. Bill Gates is getting scrutinized rather intensely, and it turns out he was the subject of internal investigation at Microsoft over his philandering. And there’s more! A while history of coming on to women in his employ!

And while it’s unclear whether the revelation about or investigation of the affair in question was a contributing factor to Gates’ recently-announced divorce from his wife of 27 years, philanthropist Melinda French Gates, it is an example of a longstanding pattern of questionable behavior by Gates. According to the New York Times report published on Sunday, Gates pursued multiple women who worked for him at Microsoft and at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2006, he attended a presentation by a female Microsoft employee. As soon as she wrapped, he reportedly emailed her and asked her to dinner. “If this makes you uncomfortable, pretend it never happened,” Gates wrote in the email, which was shared with the Times. The employee said she did feel uncomfortable and ignored the request.

What could make this worse? Let’s throw in his entanglement with Jeffrey Epstein!

Her concerns over Gates’ priorities were only compounded when the New York Times published the 2019 article “Bill Gates Met With Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past,” which detailed the men’s meetings together. While Epstein was connected with many wealthy and powerful people, “unlike many others, Mr. Gates started the relationship after Mr. Epstein was convicted of sex crimes,” the Times said. At the time, Bill told the publication, “I met him. I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him.” But The Daily Beast reported on Sunday that “the billionaire met Epstein dozens of times starting in 2011 and continuing through to 2014 mostly at the financier’s Manhattan home” to discuss Gates’ “toxic” marriage.

A Gates representative denied the allegation: “Bill never received or solicited personal advice of any kind from Epstein— on marriage or anything else. Bill never complained about Melinda or his marriage to Epstein.”

His only salvation: give away all of his money and retreat into obscurity, where he’ll never again be able to meddle in affairs beyond his competence.