Recently, a 15 year old girl in Ohio was arrested for taking naked pictures of herself with a camera phone and sending them to some classmates.

The girl could end up having to register as a sexual offender for 20 years as a result.

Just for the record, the age of consent in Ohio is 16.

Reading this story immediately brought to mind how ridiculous and overzealous this reaction is. I could write quite a bit about how these jackasses are using laws meant to protect children from sick adults to instead punish children for exhibiting sexuality during puberty.

But that wasn’t really what interested me about this story. What interested me was that this is an expression of what Clay Shirkey has been talking about. Technology is giving rise to society’s desire to not just consume media, but to create and share media. It’s a fascinating process in adults, but I think it’s even more interesting in our kids.

The generation this girl belongs to has a lower expectation of privacy than we do. They also have a strong desire to self-disclose to others through the use of websites like myspace, facebook and youtube.

It’s reasonable to expect that this generation will apply these same expectations to their sexual development as well. Some might see it as the desperate attempt of a lonely girl to gain the attentions of her mail class mates, but I think it’s probably more accurate to suggest that her externalization of her sexuality is an extension of this generation’s tendency to externalize every part of their lives into public forums.

In some ways, I think we’re going to have to adapt our social understanding about what are positive expressions of sexuality for young people in the face of a generation that thinks about itself in a fundamentally different way then we do. But knowing that a large segment of the population believes that there are essentially no positive expressions of sexuality outside of marriage, that seems unlikely. So we’ll struggle along with these stupid laws until enough rich people’s kids are being forced onto sex offender registries for things that should be dealt with in families.

Here’s a good bit from 60 minutes detailing credit default swaps, which are essentially a shadow insurance market for securities. I’ve only seen these discussed in a few places, but there’s good reason to suspect that they are largely the cause of the current meltdown.

Look into the derivatives market. It’s scary.

While reading this article about John McCain using Foo Fighters’ “My Hero” for his campaign stops, it brought up something I’ve found interesting about conservative marketing efforts.

Our local conservative talk radio station is constantly playing music clips from liberal rock acts including Nine inch Nails and Nirvana, and I’ve even heard them play Rage Against the Machine completely unironically.

Do these guys not know that the music they’re using to promote their ideologies is written and performed by people who hate their worldview?

It boggles the mind.

While talking to my mom yesterday, she mentioned that my Dad is thinking about retiring this coming March, and a move away from Alaska would follow shortly.

For some reason it made me kind of sad. It was really weird to think that the house I grew up in would belong to someone else. I’ve been conceptually disconnected from Alaska for a long time, but when I’ve gone to visit, it’s always felt familiar. When my parents leave, I don’t know if I’ll have any real reason to ever go back.

I hated living in Alaska, but I’ve always enjoyed visiting and it’s weird to think about not going back, even if it’s only every couple of years. There’s something really satisfying about connecting your early memories to new experiences.

I subscribe to a lot of blogs, and more than a few of them have been featuring photography taken by the respective bloggers. Pictures of kids, and dogs and your house, I’m completely okay with, but once it starts going into the realm of art photography, my “pretentious art dick” hackles start to rise, and I find myself feeling like Lars in “Some Kind of Monster” telling the rest of Metallica that their riffs sound “stock”.

So I apologize in advance.

I really started my own journey into photography casually, just shooting things that I found pleasing to look at. So I don’t blame casual photographers for posting art photography that is… casual. One of the great, and terrible things about art is that there really is no accounting for taste.

Everyone creates and consumes art for various reasons, so we have to resist the temptation to judge art solely on our own terms. Art exists within context, and it’s important to consider that context when we react to art.

But I personally find it very hard not to have “why bother” reactions to depth of field experiments on tree bark. I understand the process of developing an eye, and learning that the lens and sensor are a different tool than eye and brain. And with some individuals, (I don’t include myself in this group BTW) being exposed to that process of development is fascinating in and of itself because that artist’s innate sense of aesthetics makes their work interesting even while their knowledge of the tools and techniques of photography develop.

But what makes most artists art uninteresting for me is a lack of a voice. It’s easy in photography to simply document pretty things, partially because what gives a scene or event it’s meaning is something you experienced while you took the image. But that meaning is almost never captured in your image. It will always be there for you, because of the memories you created while taking the photo, and which are evoked when you now view it, but the rest of us don’t have those memories. Viewing the image has to be an experience in and of itself.

Developing a voice in your work is the ability to start making a still image reflect what you experienced while taking it, and then beyond that, having your work evoke the specific reactions you intend it to. This ability makes the image yours even if it’s of something that people see every day. You can shoot the mundane if you have a voice. If you don’t have a voice, the images are not only of the mundane, they are themselves mundane.

Humans are extremely visual, and dedicate a large portion of our brains to processing visual information. We are specifically wired to respond with favorable emotions to specific colors, specific shapes and dimensions, specific placement of objects and a variety of other factors. We have specific ways that we expect different subject matter to be presented. Knowing how we’re predisposed to react to this visual information will help you deliberately see things in a way that connects people to the meaning you feel when you see a scene naturally.

Humans also have reactions to other people. We search for the intent of another human in human-created objects. When you make an image, the viewer is not just trying to connect to the subject of your photo, they are trying to connect with you, almost certainly because you are forcing them however briefly to experience the world as you experience it. When they can detect your presence in a photograph, it helps them feel like they are connecting with another person, positively or negatively. Either can be compelling. Simple documentary photography doesn’t connect artist to viewer.

Now don’t get me wrong, great documentary photography as pursued by photo journalists absolutely achieves art as it certainly contains the voice of the photographer. The documentary photography I’m talking about here is “I see a cool flower, let me get a shot of that”. Compelling photographs aren’t scenes captured, they are scenes created. And I don’t mean creation in the sense of unreal or manipulated, I mean created in the sense of imaged with intention. These are images that consider not only the subject, but the viewer at the time of capture.

This is why some photographers still advocate the use of large format cameras. They slow you down, they make you spend more time considering the scene. How do I want it framed? How do I want it focused. What is the most important thing in the frame, what supports the importance of that thing and what takes away from it? How is the scene lit?

It’s easy as we capture things these days to simply react to a scene personally, bring our camera up and shoot, assuming that we’ve captured what made it compelling to us because our tools are so quick and offer us instant feedback. It’s easy to loose our consideration of the scene.

So I guess my bottom line here is, if you want to take a photograph to do something beyond serve as a record that you were someplace, or saw something, consider the subject a little more, and consider the viewer a little more. Read up on color theory, framing, and art history. They will improve your art.

I’ll try and squish together some time to write a semi-coherent overview of the proposed $700b bailout of the financial industry, but first I just wanted to dispel a nice piece of spin that’s been accompanying it.

Namely, that the taxpayers are actually going to make money off this deal. The thinking here is that all these mortgage securities are really worth some money, and the only reason banks are needing to sell them off is that they are illiquid, not insolvent. Given more time, the banks would sell these off themselves, and make a lot of green.

Well, no. The securities backed by these toxic sub-prime mortgages are certainly not worth face value, and without unraveling the securities and tracing back to the people and properties actually involved, it’s going to be hard to tell what they are actually worth.

This is sort of the situation in a nutshell.

A guy with a $30k annual income was sold a house worth $150k for $300k while the market was insane. He was given a low payment on a teaser loan for 5 years. He was told that the house would appreciate so much in those 5 years that he’d be able to refinance and keep the same payment, or maybe even lower!

The bank that sold him this loan, packaged it up with a lot of other loans and sold it to someone else.

Well, whoops! Housing prices crashed.

So this guy doesn’t get to refinance, because his house is now worth substantially less than what he paid for it. So he’s going to get foreclosed on.

Along with millions of others like him. As all these foreclosed houses show up on the market, housing prices will continue to fall.

Ultimately, these mortgage backed securities are tied to the price of housing, because no one can pay these mortgages. We know for sure the houses aren’t worth what’s on the mortgage. But we don’t know what they will sell for today, or in the next two years as we sort out the mess.

The big question is: Will the government be buying these securities at a value that exceeds their actual worth? The proposal has no stipulation for the government to pay fair market price, and there’s a good chance that the plan is to pay a premium to stop asset sale offs that are causing a downward spiral in pricing.

Needless to say, there’s no real expectation that the government will come out ahead in this deal. These securities are not undervalued.

But above and beyond that, from what I’ve read, this really won’t solve the problem of all of these banks being undercapitalized, and over-extended.

here’s the proposal.

You’ll notice a couple of things: 1. No obligation to follow federal contracting law. No bid contracts! 2. Absolutely no review by any federal agency or court 3. Includes commercial mortgages, not just residential - want to wipe out your commercial bad debt too? Just chuck it in.

This is a really bad plan. Having no oversight is just a recipe for disaster.

So not only is there not a clear understanding about how this will help the financial markets, there’s also essentially zero oversight into how it’s actually carried out. This is a bad, bad deal for the American people.

To understand how bad it is, please consider the following links.

One
Two

In conclusion. the CDS market is a bomb waiting to explode.

Jonathan Haidt writes a great article on why people choose political parties that align with their moral beiiefs. There is a lot here to digest and understand, and a lot of it aligns with how I’ve recently been thinking about society and governance systems.

I’ve got some strong feelings about some of the items he writes about, and they’ve been on my mind quite a bit. Things like the value of individuality and how individuals make up societies. The need for “productive” individuals, etc.

I’ve been thinking about how to write a post about a wide variety of social topics that I feel fit around this general topic. Every time I try it seems overwhelming because there’s so much more I need to understand before I will feel I have my head wrapped around all the issues involved.

So instead of trying to put together a magnum opus, I’ll just quote and respond to what I found interesting.

But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer “moral clarity”—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate.

I know there’s been more than one study of actual functioning difference in the brains of liberals and conservatives, but here’s one that I found that provides a decent synopsis. I’d love to see more of the research he’s summarizing here though.

…it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats.

I’d like to know what is leading Jonathan to this conclusion. Obviously a lot of things go into making political decisions, and moral dimensions are certainly one of them. Jonathan is making a case in the article that conservatives believe that moral order is in some ways foundational to social order, so I’m willing to let this slide. But there is a good point here. Conservatives have been offering a very attractive view of the world to their voters. They tell a story that reminds you of the most nostalgic parts of our lives, and they do it very well.

But I think it’s important to note, that at least amongst the liberal folk that I hang out with, liberals don’t generally offer much of a moral order. I almost never think of the world in terms of morality. I often consider treating people fairly, and about not hurting others, but I honestly don’t think about those things as morals, and I don’t know many liberals who would. I would also never judge someone as immoral or moral. I often think about social order, justice, governance, but never morality. It’s just not a lens I view the world through.

First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation.

If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion.

Turiel’s description of morality as being about justice, rights, and human welfare worked perfectly for the college students I interviewed at Penn, but it simply did not capture the moral concerns of the less elite groups

It’s important to note here that the “elite” (often a synonym for highly educated) are capable of overriding their unconscious desire to justify their disgust and instead use reason to temper their emotional reaction. Presumably they are capable of this because they have been trained to do so

I would contend that democrats have been all too aware of the issue, but have lacked both the science and discipline to deal with it constructively. They treated everyone like they would like to be treated, but the gap was just too large, and the dirty tricks played by the other side kept people too charged with emotion to engage those parts of their brains.

I was able to see a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family (including its servants) are intensely interdependent. In this world, equality and personal autonomy were not sacred values. Honoring elders, gods, and guests, and fulfilling one’s role-based duties, were more important.

I know that Jon isn’t advocating for these values, but I’m a little surprised by how strong my reaction to this paragraph is. And it’s not because I have a problem with the moral model presented. There is value in cohesive groups serving a higher purpose. The problem is, who gets to say what the purpose is? Who gets to make the decisions and who has to follow them without question? There is a reason that our country was founded on the idea that all men are created equal. This moral model is the model of servants, subjects, serfs, and slaves. There is a reason that “Elites” don’t subscribe to it.

I would also wonder how many of the participating members of this world he describes wouldn’t leave it immediately given a genuine opportunity.

Here’s my alternative definition: morality is any system of interlocking values, practices, institutions, and psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.

This is an interesting definition, and I think selfishness is an interesting choice of words. There’s a basic assumption at play here, and one that in some ways I agree with: Individualism decays social cohesion. Another way of saying this is: … that work together to suppress or regulate expression of individual difference in the interest of social order.

Makes it sound different huh?

In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally

This in part plays to another article that I’ve been thinking about writing. You’ll notice how many of the above dimensions are considered by US courts. Granted, as Jon says, our system is largely based on european enlightenment principles, but I think it’s instructive that we place the majority of our serious conflicts in the hands of those considering only those two dimensions.

Why is that important? Because the US is wildly diverse. Almost everyone from any culture can agree on the fairness and harm/care dimensions. But imagine being judged against the standard of some strange tribal grouping that the other three create and encourage. If you want diverse cultures, you can’t have those three.

Jon then goes on to talk about how liberals can appeal to people who value these three principles. I think the next step is to actually try these techniques out in a scientific test to see if those who vote conservative can actually be made to vote liberally.

The responses page is great. James Fowler’s piece is an important one to read. One of the core questions is why do people vote in the first place. He goes on to talk about both genetic and social influencers of voting, and it’s fascinating.

But I also encourage you to consider Sam Harris’ response as well, as it almost perfectly echos what I was going to originally write, but does a far better job. The title of the original article could have been accurately extended to be “What makes people vote republican… when it’s so demonstrably bad for their well being”.

As Sam says, we can most certainly test the outcomes of social policy, and by almost any measure dedicated to the well being of people in general (individual or collective), this conservative vision of morality is clearly inferior. There are many reasons for this, but partially it’s because great evil almost always comes out of believing that people aren’t equal. And as Jonathan has observed, that belief is at the core of the conservative morality he has described.

Ultimately this is a daunting topic, and as Scott Atran points out on the commentary page, we have probably evolved to create societies that include individuals who encourage sacrifice of self interest in the short run, and people who encourage individual interests in the long run. One very real answer may be that we have a wide variety of inclinations toward social structure because it’s helped us survive and thrive as a species.

I’ve been going back and forth between being disgusted with politics and being fascinated by it. There’s a lot of things to be genuinely interested in, but all in all, I hate the presidential election process.

I know it shouldn’t, but the whole thing depresses me. I hate talking points. I hate character assassination. I hate the cynical pandering. I hate swing voters. But most of all, I hate the distortions and outright lies of politics, which are proudly on display from both parties.

But I know that only a very small percentage of voters will be making up their minds based on a cool assessment of facts. Politics is an emotional game, and campaigns are designed to manipulate our most base and powerful emotions. It insults our intelligence, and clouds the real issues we face, but it works, and it works extremely well.

Disgust aside, I’m with Obama. His voting record despite voting for FISA is pretty consistent with what I’m looking for. Biden has had some votes that I’m not very happy with, but that pretty much reflects most of the democratic party.

I wish the nominee was Kucinich, but it is what it is.

I’ve said it before. I used to like McCain, and I really wish I could still like him. But as time goes on I’m more and more convinced that he’s already in the throes of dementia. He seems confused and uncomfortable most of the time, and I don’t think that’s from a distaste for party politics.

Palin… wow. Having grown up in Alaska, I’m pretty familiar with people like Sarah, and I have to hand it to her that she’s been able to splash onto a national scene so quickly in her political career. I’m not so concerned about her lack of experience as I am with her already clearly demonstrated propensity for covering up things that could look bad for her. Her handling of the firing, announcing her daughter’s pregnancy only after rampant speculation that she was in fact the mother of Trig, ugh. Transparency would not be the first word I would associate with her. She also has shown that she’s more interested in cronyism than qualification with her appointments, and I don’t think that’s something that America can take for another 4-8 years. I don’t believe the reformer or maverick rep for a second. Every example they’ve put forth seems like calculated political maneuvering, not principled policy decisions. The choice of her as a running mate is very clearly pandering to both women and the evangelicals, and I think it’s a desperate move. It’s very clear that McCain’s campaign didn’t vet her, and I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if something incriminating enough came out to kill her candidacy. Alaska is the wild west man.

The tone of the republican convention beggars belief. I was actually, physically stunned when they rolled out the “we need change from a democratic Washington” line of shit. That just takes tremendous brass balls to try and pull off. But of course the party shills nod their heads and hope if they repeat it enough, people will eventually buy it.

There is a profound stink of death to the republican ticket, and it says a great deal that the guy they’ve fielded is one that they all hate. I really think they’re phoning it in this time around because they know they need time to strengthen the base again. They know Bush has bankrupted the party of all its credibility and they need time and distance in order to start talking to the american people again with a straight face.

Even in the face of his experience criticism, Obama is an incredibly strong candidate. Far stronger than either Kerry or Gore were. The republican attempts to paint him as an elitist are trying to take the shine off of his likability. If John Kerry was robotic, and Gore was boring, then John McCain is your crotchety second uncle who can’t stop telling you war stories that you’ve heard time and time again in order to feel like he’s still relevant at thanksgiving dinner. Even the republicans want to face his chair into the corner and just get on with things. And leave it to the republicans, who have long been calling Hillary Clinton bitchy, to bring in a woman who’s nickname is barracuda to try and sweep up her disaffected voters. Stay classy repubs.

A couple of weeks ago on right wing radio the topic was oil industry profits, and how insane it is that people are angry over how much money oil companies make. The defense being offered is that the gross margin of oil companies is actually in line with most other forms of production in the US at around 13%. Seems commonsensical, why are people getting angry?

Well, as it turns out, margin on sales is not a reliable way to compare profits across industries. Some industries are high volume/low margin, some are high margin/low volume. Both can be extremely profitable. A better way to compare is “return on capital employed” which is simply the amount of money earned divided by the amount of money invested to earn it.

Given a fair way to measure profitability across industries, it turns out that oil company profits are almost 30% higher than any other industry at the moment. Presenting only gross margin is extremely deceptive as is outlined in this article.

Another way to think about this is: If the oil industry was a money machine, I could put $100 dollars in, and get $127 out the other side. There’s no other money machine that’s even close at the moment.

But all this accounting trivia aside, none of this is what makes people mad. People are mad not because oil executives are becoming richer and richer. It’s because they believe they are becoming richer and richer off the broken backs of common americans. Which is completely true.

Those increased profits are coming directly out of our pockets, for no corresponding increase in value in our lives, and directly into the coffers of oil companies. And everyone understands that we can only reduce our own usage so much to alleviate the pain. We still have to drive to work. Add to that price increases in almost every consumer product including food and it’s easy to become resentful of those who profit off of our misery. Who cares that oil companies themselves aren’t driving up prices? They certainly aren’t doing anything to reduce them.

For the record once again, I don’t personally begrudge the oil companies for the profits they’re bringing in. They didn’t drive up the price of oil, we did. We’re the ones who invaded the middle east and destabilized the whole region. We’re the ones who have spent 30 years since the last oil crisis talking about reducing our dependence on foreign oil and doing nothing about it. We’re the ones who deregulated the trading markets and allowed for speculation to drive up prices.

But let’s not pretend that all this anger is baseless and non-sensical. It’s completely justified to feel anger when oil companies make record profits while you struggle to pay your bills. It’s a natural reaction to feeling helpless and abused. And let’s not lie to ourselves that oil isn’t currently a ridiculously profitable business. It is.