Commenting management system Disqus has apparently degraded the “downvote” portion of its “upvoting/downvoting” system. For those of you who have never used Disqus or don’t comment on many blogs, a number of them include thumbs up and thumbs down options where you can sort of grade other comments.

Bayard Russell supports the move (and may have been the catalyst for it):

I have to say, I’m grateful not to have anonymous trolls using the down-voting system simply to attack, undermine, and annoy. As I told you all after NCR suspended its comments system some weeks back (you all know comments are back up and running there, right?), when a set of anonymous down-voting trolls migrated to Bilgrimage after that happened, I contacted Disqus to ask if they could turn off the down votes for this site or perhaps make it optional for blogs using Disqus.

If that request (which other sites may also have made) is the reason Disqus has stopped showing down votes here, then I’m surely grateful to Disqus. I don’t see this as any kind of suppression of free speech, but as getting rid of an unnecessary annoyance, since what kind of “speech” do anonymous down votes by people working together to troll a blog site really represent, in any case?

Warner Todd Huston, on the other hand, thinks this is an example of “feminizing America“:

Apparently, Disqus felt that so many Americans were getting their widdle feelings hurt that they had to take measures to return everyone’s self-esteem to tip top condition. Yes, America, each and every one of you are wonderful, smart, and gosh darn it, people love you and Disqus is going to make sure you don’t get your delicate mental balance upset.

Feel free to go through life with your badly spelled, idiotic comment forever emblazoned across the Internet tubes and given the Disqus seal of approval. You aren’t a brainless racist, a grammatical moron, a pointless troll, a dimiwtted liberal, or a knuckle-dragging conservative any longer. You are a shining light driving the world to truth, justice and the new American way where no one gets their feelings hurt.

I used to like the idea of upvotes and downvotes, but the more I saw them in action the more skeptical of them I have become. It was my hope, when I was introduced to the concept, that generally polite and well thought out comments would get upvotes and pointless snark would get downvotes. At least on the sites that I read and participate on which tend to have commenters that are more polite and thoughtful.

However, even “good” commenting sections have their bad apples, of course, who seem to be there to disrupt the discourse. They also tend to have lurkers who don’t comment but do vote who may veer hard on one side or the other. In either case, voting seems to attract people looking for “Boo-yah” comments instead of carefully considered ones, because the upvotes and downvote tallies I see tend to lean towards which side of the argument they’re taking instead of the actual content of their message.

This has a discouraging effect on (ideological) minority voices, which exacerbates echo chambers. I mostly stopped commenting on a particular site for a couple of reasons, but one of the biggest ones was how frustrating it was to write a carefully considered comment explaining that a situation is more complicated than it appears gets two upvotes and ten downvotes and is followed by a “Republicans are soo stupid and you are stupid for giving them cover!!!” gets ten upvotes and two downvotes. Which is, in my experience, how it generally works. Truthfully, the fact that people seem to agree more with “Republicans are soo stupid” guy and feel the need to downvote me is more discouraging than the comment itself, which I can dismiss as a crank. Except I can’t when his view is apparently more popular than mine.

The upshot of this, in a way, is that it does democratize commenting communities. It lets people say what kind of comments they want and don’t want. Yay democracy! The views of a particular commentariat can often differ, though, from that of the people who actually run the site.

That creates something of a problem for the latter folks. If wanting a more positive commenting atmosphere makes me a namby-pamby feminized dude or whatever, I am pretty okay with that. Heaven knows there are more than enough sites that are battle arenas. So eliminating downvoting makes a lot of sense from their point of view. Obviously, Hit Coffee doesn’t generate the sort of comment traffic to make such an endeavor worthwhile, though if it did I would try to go in the upvote direction.

It would be better if Disqus gave siterunners the option of upvotes only, downvotes only, or both. But absent that, I would prefer upvoting only over a requirement for both.

Clancy and I took a trip back home to go to her high school reunion at the Deltona Leadership Academy for Math, Arts, and Sciences.

Clancy went to a special high school, which exist across the south and elsewhere, that caters to the gifted and talented. These state-run schools are usually attached to a second or third-tier college, where the students live and attend class during the school year. Though not a happy time for her, high school was nonetheless a particularly special time for her. Gifted and talented students from all across the state descending on a single institution.

It’s not just about being smart, though. A lot of the students are there for a reason. They’re people who decided, along with their parents, that going to high school hundreds of miles away was preferable to going to their local school. This might mean that their local school isn’t very good. It’s often that they have social problem. There is a very high misfit quotient. Which, for a misfit like Clancy, can be Heaven on Earth compared to a more typical school.

Clancy’s class in particular was of the more revolutionary variety (their class song was, in fact, Revolution) and the school actually clamped down in direct response to her class. They started seeking out kids of a straighter lace. The pendulum would eventually swing back with a discussion about what the school was actually all about, but Clancy’s sister attended a very different DLA than she did. For all of the headaches caused by her class, though, they also boasted by far the highest alumni giving amount of any of the classes that were there. While the gifted and talented aspect of it was relevent, the fact that a lot of kids found themselves at home, in a way, may have been an even bigger deal.

The contrast with my own school, and my own reunion, was stark. At my reunion, they didn’t even bother asking for money. We had a conference room of a hotel where maybe a hundred or so kids out of a class of about a thousand showed up. Her school was an academy while mine was a warehouse.

I don’t mean to sell my own school short. We were largely the children of engineers, doctors, and businesspeople. We were collectively arguably more privileged than Clancy’s class. We didn’t have to go very far.

More to the point, I have always appreciated the sheer size of my high school. It’s one of the largest 100 in the country today, and it’s smaller today than it was when I went there. I was far more prepared for college than most of my college classmates, despite the fact that I didn’t take a single honors course.

But mostly, I appreciated the school’s size giving me the ability to fade into the background and find my sort, which will mathematically exist in some number. I tend to like my large high school like I like large cities. A smaller and tight-knit school is fine, as long as you are a part of the cloth. In a place like the Deltona Leadership Academy, I might have been. But there aren’t many of those. But while I had friends at my school, I actually found “my sort” online (in the form of BBSes). Even in a school that large, I had to look elsewhere.

Schools like Clancy’s get criticism as a stark example of tracking. Removing smart kids from everyday schools. Others question whether tax money should be devoted to schools that cater to people who are definitionally advantaged. I disagree with that, through-and-through. Some of that for personal reasons – my awesome wife wouldn’t be who she is without that school – and partially for ideological reasons (the same ones that lead me to support tracking).

The DLA has a program where, even if you don’t live in Deltona, children of DLA alums can attend that school. I was at once happy and sad to hear that. Clancy has said that if whatever state we end up in has such a program, and our children want to attend, she would want them to be able to. Intellectually, I agree. Sentimentally, that would mean losing the kids right at the point where they are becoming the most interesting! A little piece of me harbored the thought that such a decision may not be necessary because we may not live in a state where such a program exists. Now, it doesn’t matter where we live, and instead of hundreds of miles away it might be thousands.

If I were to argue against it, it wouldn’t be an argument that I would win. It shouldn’t be, really.

During the move from Arapaho to West Q, I listened to the audiobook of Atlas Shrugged. Well, in the 20-30 hours of driving I got through half of it, anyway, and the rest was heard after I arrived.

It exceeded my expectations, though my expectations were pretty low to begin with. A lot of people who are sympathetic to the themes of the book admit pretty freely that it’s not a great book. So I was expecting thing characters, wooden dialogue, and so on. That’s what I got.

I did actually like the story, though, including a lot of the parts of the story that a lot of people don’t care for. Specifically, I refer to the parts of the book about the running of the railroad and the conquering of various logistical challenges and legal/regulatory restrictions. I apparently have an affinity for books, as one of the few college books I have subsequently re-read more than once was Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. The story of which is about a plant manager trying to improve the production of widgets of some sort. Basically, a novelization to convey certain theories about business.

And so it was with Atlas Shrugged, and some of the parts of it I found most interesting.

The biggest weakness was, as I expected, the characters. Ordinary Times’s Jaybird describes the heroes as being ridiculous but the villains as being ripped from the headlines. That strikes me as about right. My interest in e-cigarettes has reinforced this point, as the FDA and CDC compete with one another to sound the most like Atlas Shrugged’s State Science Institute.

But the heroes were stale. They were supposed to be archetypes of all that is good and true and virtuous in the world, and there’s not much you can do with that. However, giving them just a little bit of a sense of humor (of the exasperated variety, if nothing else) would have gone a long way. Humor has a great leavening effect that this novel sorely could have used.

The best characters were actually the female characters. Which is remarkable because there are very, very few of them. The lead is a woman, Dagney Taggart, of course, but she wasn’t the interesting one. Rather, the ones I was fascinated by were wife characters, Lillian Rearden and Cherryl Brooks Taggart.

Lillian was the wife of Hank Rearden, the secondary protagonist. She was obviously a villainesque character, but had an interesting mysterious quality about where she was going from and what was going through her mind (in a book where you find out, at great length, what is going through most characters’ minds). Cherryl Brooks Taggart was a grocery clerk who married Dagney Taggart’s brother (a villain, of sorts) who sort of played the up-by-the-bootstraps mindset in a world with little use for such things (and who, by virtue of her marriage, was actually on the wrong side of the book’s primary struggle).

As far as the ideology of the book goes, I agree with some of it and disagree with a lot of it. But I knew that going in. Nonetheless, I actually enjoyed the perspective presented a great deal. In part because of its relative novelty.

When the movie came out, somebody accidentally or not-so-accidentally referred to it in marketing as “a story of self-sacrifice” when it is, in fact, a story very much against such things. A part of me wonders if basically it was an act of subversion on the part of someone who was hired to to market a product they detested. But a part of me wonders if it was actually an honest mistake, that signals got crossed, and that pretty much any book that involves self-sacrifice is going to be in favor of it to some extent. Which is actually a reasonable expectation when it comes to fiction. One of the things I did really like about the book is that it did turn it on its head.

I enjoy the different, and whatever else I might say about it, this book was.

This weekend was Leaguefest, which was in DC. I won’t bore you with the details of having met up with various people you all don’t know. Instead I am just going to write about DC for a bit.

One of the conveniences of living out here is that my sister-in-law Zoey lives in DC. Which, for those of you who don’t keep track, is not too far from where we live.

She moved there shortly after getting back from abroad and settled in as it’s a great place to be a young person. I was not all that surprised that she chose to sell her car, but after this weekend, I am convinced that I would sell my cars if I lived there. Public transportation never looked so attractive.

We drove there on Friday night and spent about an hour looking for a parking spot, which we found in a garage about a mile away. That turned out to be the best parking situation I’d have all weekend.

I went out by myself on Saturday. Retracing my steps, I ended up walking 8.9 miles. After my bad experiences on Friday, I don’t know what possessed me to wear anything but tennis shoes on Saturday, but I did and have a blister on my foot the size of Delaware. Retracing my steps, I determined that I walked at least 8.9 miles.

There are a number of parking garages in the area, but they’re surprisingly hard to find and Google is of comparatively little help. A lot of them are inexplicably closed on weekend. Actually, it’s quite explicable, I suppose. They cater exclusively to commuters and I am guessing that renting them out to others on the weekends is just not worth the hassle. At a parking garage I ended up in, someone had laid a pie-sized dump on the floor. Ahhh, the majesty of our nation’s capital.

There’s also nothing like spending time in a city to make me appreciate certain aspects of living far outside of one. Besides things like parking (back in Callie, I hated walking three blocks), the lack of public restrooms (hence the poop pie, I guess) and public amenities in general is pretty noticeable. The low-trust environment leads to convenience stores and grocery stores closing earlier rather than later, no restrooms if they are open, and so on.

I was at least a half-hour out of town on my drive home when I stopped off to get a soft drink, and even there the most convenient convenience store had to buzz me in. The others stayed locked and you had to talk to them from the outside, through probably bullet-proof glass.

All of that said, I enjoyed myself until my feet became inoperable. I missed two museums due to the parking situation. I did get to see the Spy Museum, which was pretty cool. I had good – although outrageously expensive – food.

I’ve been wanting to take some trips to DC for a while. Now I realize the extent to which I am absolutely going to have to plan ahead of time so that I don’t spend all my time looking for parking spots.

Yahoo has taken to sending me a lot of emails I didn’t ask for. They have an unsubscribe option, but I have to unsubscribe to each category of mail they send me separately. So they send me something for Sports, I unsubscribe, and ten days later I am no longer receiving “digests” from Yahoo sports. Then I start getting them from Yahoo Fashion, and the process repeats itself. Now they apparently have a new digest to tell me about the features of their mobile email app.

I’m pretty sure they’re just making categories up at this point. I subscribe to this one, and there will soon be a digest for Yahoo digests for their iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone apps separately. Heck, they’ll probably create an app for Tizen just so that they can send me ten days worth of digests for it.

(The obvious solution to this is that I am going to have to work harder on filtering.)

The Press-Enterprise looks at the future commuting.

Is the oil in North Dakota leading to a cultural blooming?

Will the future of nuclear energy revolve around tiny power plants?

Popular Mechanics looks at myths surrounding natural gas drilling. As is often the case with these sorts of articles, they use the word “myth” liberally. Interesting stuff all the same.

The Dutch approach to disaster management may be something we can learn from.

Energy estimates are often wildly wrong. The most high-profile example in recent years has been the unforeseen fracking boom. It works the other way, though, with far less recoverables in California than previously estimated.

According to HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, the housing market is at risk because people down the food chain can’t afford them.

Nobody does listicles like Cracked, and their piece on things people who grew up in Communist regimes know is no exception. Also, how VHS tapes fought communism. And Dr. Zhivago!

Michael Brendan Dougherty makes the conservative case against capitalism. John Paul Rollert writes about how there was a time before pursuit of money became an admirable trait.

Google cars? Try Google Golf Carts. Even so, Edward Niedermeyer says it’s a big deal.

What do they do with the clothes that are produced at the end of (or too late in) their fashion cycle?

James Fallows says there is a new industrial belt in the American South.

Remember The Wonder Years? It’s coming to DVD. Here’s pictures of what the cast looks like now. Most of them really kind of fell off after the show. Fred Savage went behind the camera. The brother got caught up in the HealthSouth tornado. The sister was pretty fantastic in her run as Vincent D’Onofrio’s nemesis on Criminal Intent.

Girl Meets World premiers next month.

From Wikipedia:

277 is the 59th prime number, and is a regular prime.[1] It is the smallest prime p such that the sum of the inverses of the primes up to p is greater than two.[2] Since 59 is itself prime, 277 is a super-prime.[3] 59 is also a super-prime (it is the 17th prime), as is 17 (the 7th prime).

I had to change a number of passwords thanks to the Big eBay Hack (and may have to change them again).

One thing I found really interesting, though, is a back and forth between Charles Hill and Jack Baruth about eBay. Here’s Jack:

It’s fair to say that I am deeply ambivalent about eBay: it’s raised the price of old books into the stratosphere while simultaneously adding a $250 transaction fee to most vintage guitar sales. On the other hand, it’s enabled me to find and purchase items that I’d have never found otherwise. You have to take the good with the bad; yes, you can now actually find a brand-new Atari 1200XL, but it will cost you.

Charles cops to raising the prices of used books.

I find this interesting because of the effect it has had on comic books. While there has been a lot going on in the world of comic books since eBay got started, I am convinced that eBay has shredded the price of older comic books. Most specifically, the unfamous ones. It used to be that Mile High Comics would sell you a batch of comics for twenty-five cents a piece, but it was a random lot. Now you can get whole runs of series for around that price if it’s a relatively unremarkable series or at least under a dollar for some good old stuff. Even newer stuff is relatively affordable.

Again, a lot of this has to do with the state of the industry, but not all of it. A lot of it instead has to do with the market being flooded with people with old comic books they’re looking to get rid of. You used to have to find a seller who had old issues of Blue Beetle as you tried to piece together your collection. Now you have some collector who wants to reclaim his garage.

I find it interesting that this hasn’t happened with old books. Or maybe it’s that Jack is looking for classics. I would not be surprised if highly desirable comic book prices fell only in accordance with the shape of the industry, or may have fallen less so due to a concentration of interested buyers.

Something I did not know: UPS trucks don’t turn left.

North Dakota’s economy is sailing along, and not just the mineral-rich western part.

North Dakota finds itself dealing with radioactive waste.

Slate has an article about Germany’s Coal Pits and the nation’s difficulty in kicking its coal habit.

James Schneider revisits the Ehrlich wager (involving overpopulation). I’ve been listening to Isaac Asimov lately. One of the more interesting bits from Caves of Metal was the criticism of Malthusianism accompanied by a story of a world collapsing under the weight of eight billion people.

Sixty pictures that are reported to “perfectly capture the human spirit.” I don’t know about that last part, but there are some really great pictures in there.

Robinson Meyer explains how maps go viral.

One way to subsidize the arts, I guess: “Buy” them in lieu of taxes.

The eternal question of whether we seek out partners like ourselves or complimentary personalities has been answered, according to 538.

The Census Bureau has a good report on adoption in America (PDF). I’m honestly a bit surprised that adoption remains as common as it does, and the regional variations (map) are fascinating.

Aircraft carriers are apparently obsolete, but we’re not quite ready to let them go.

Burt Likko pointed me to a really interesting article on rotisserie chickens and why they’re so relatively inexpensive:

Though supermarkets are loath to admit as much, likely for fear of turning off the squeamish, the former CEO of Trader Joe’s cheerfully confirmed in a recent interview that meat and produce are recycled into prepared foods. And the vendor of one of the leading commercial rotisserie ovens offers, as a complement to its wares, “culinary support” that, among other things, aims to “develop programs to minimize food shrinkage and waste” and “improve production planning to optimize the amount of fresh food that is available during both peak and down times.”

Rotisserie chickens aren’t even the end of the line. When unsold, fresh meats, fruits and veggies that have passed their sell-by points can be “cooked up for in-store deli and salad counters before they spoil,” per no less a source than a consultant to the supermarket industry.

We’ve become big fans. I bring home one more than half of the time I go to Walmart, in part because theirs are better than the other place I shop at. It provides for at least a couple of meals, just you can tear it up and put it in other things to add a little more meat. My preferred brands of turkey chili, for example, are pretty light on the meat. Also, soup. You can put some in beans and make a pretty good little contraption.

Even better than the rotisserie chicken is the rotisserie turkey breast. That’s straight meat with a whole lot of different things you can do with it. In addition to breaking my mouth and bowels, my recent illness broke my heart. I had just purchased a whole lot of turkey breast before I got sick. But I couldn’t eat it (or anything). I was afraid that it would go bad.

My favorite thing to do with the turkey is to cut it in slices and make the perfect sandwich. The perfect sandwich, to my mind, is a turkey, cheddar, and mayo sandwich on white bread. I have no idea why I like it so much, but it’s the perfect combination of everything. The tastes just bounce off one another in yummy goodness. And I’m not much of a sandwich person. It was one of my favorite parts of Thanksgiving.

Unfortunately, even when I moved on from my distaste of eating anything, I still couldn’t eat mayo. Which meant that I had to do something else with the turkey. Clancy went shopping and got some southwestern mustard, which is a substitute. But instead of yummy perfection, it tasted like… turkey, cheddar, bread, and southwestern mustard. The magic was gone.

There is apparently a trend among posh restaurants to google customers with reservations:

The maitre d’ in question, Justin Roller, says he tries to ascertain things like whether a couple is coming to the restaurant for an anniversary, and if so, which anniversary that is. If it’s a birthday, for instance, he wants to wish them “Happy Birthday” when they arrive. He’ll scan for photos of the guests in chef’s whites or posed with wine glasses, which suggest they might be chefs or sommeliers themselves.

It goes deeper: if a particular guest appears to hail from Montana, Roller will try to pair up the table with a server who is from Montana. “Same goes for guests who own jazz clubs, who can be paired with a sommelier that happens to be into jazz,” writes Grub Street.

The natural response to this ranges from horror at the invasion of privacy to thinking it’s awfully cool. I actually fall into the latter camp.

When the government eavesdropping and invasions of privacy recently came to light, a lot of people suggested that we really have no standing to complain given how we freely we let private companies have and keep this information. My response is that the private companies want to use it in order to find out what I want and sell it to me, while the government has different things in mind.

Every now and again I will see arguments about how well Facebook and Google allegedly know me with the implication that I should be freaked out. Facebook, after all, knows if you’re in a relationship with someone or not perhaps before even you do.

I would be worried about it quite a bit more if the advertising that Facebook and Google pitch in my direction weren’t so rudimentary. I mean, when I look up laptops it’ll try to pitch me laptops. But sometimes it is famously, silly wrong. Several months ago Facebook was convinced that I was in the market for divorce attorneys.

Now, once they start becoming more accurate, like the restaurants who google, perhaps there will be more reason to be concerned. If it weren’t for the fact that once they’re that good, they will be more helpful than ever.