Bobvis offers up a thought for a radical change in law enforcement: the elimination (or near-elimination) of prosecutorial and police discretion.

In looking through this, I see three basic complaints. I don’t necessarily disagree with any of them, but here’s a paraphrase:

#1 – The law is overcomplicated to the point of absurdity, to the point where literally nobody can say with any certainty that they haven’t ever (or even haven’t recently) broken some law. This becomes especially annoying when we apply the legal principle “ignorance of the law is no defense” – since most laws are written such that only a lawyer specializing in Field X really understands them (and even then, plenty of debate usually rages). Expecting everyone to manage to keep abreast not just of the content of all laws that affect them, but also the changes to that law constantly being made, seems pretty absurd.

#2 – “Police disproportionally choose to enforce certain laws against certain groups.” As I’ve said before, I don’t buy the whole “police are always racist” line of thought. However, I will certainly believe that certain laws are enforced more than other laws (and even to the point of “enforcing” when there hasn’t been a violation, see below), simply because it is more profitable (fines, etc) for the police to enforce those laws rather than other laws.

#3 – Where multiple laws become involved, prosecutors can too easily abuse the discretion they have to choose which charges to file. This becomes even worse as the system becomes more and more broken, too many people are coerced into pleading guilty when they are actually innocent by the disparity between plea sentencing and post-trial sentencing (see also here), and of course the system is designed to coerce you directly from the moment you first start talking to the cops. This is especially true when even taking the stand in your own defense becomes a punishable offense if you’re found guilty, under sentencing guidelines that will either (a) attempt to convict you of “perjury” (if you say “I didn’t do it” and a jury finds otherwise) or will bump up the sentencing guideline for your being “not remorseful” (obviously, if you testify in your own defense, you’re “not remorseful”) or “obstructing justice.”

On the flipside, I think there needs to be room in the system for at least some police and prosecutorial discretion. As an example: if someone’s taillight goes out, there’s a good chance they don’t know about it. A police officer pulling them over and giving them a warning (and I believe “warnings” should be logged so that other officers can tell if someone’s already been recently warned or has been simply ignoring the warnings and not altering their behavior) is not a bad thing; it helps get the vehicle repaired and keeps the streets a little safer. Likewise, there are times when the law is simply badly written or otherwise not wisely applied to a situation, and I’d like to think that – on average at least – the police officer would have sound enough judgement to recognize this.

As for the oversight option… we’re dealing with humans, here. If you start analyzing cops by a quota of how many tickets they write, then you give them a quota and we get into the problem of cops who ticket innocent people for imaginary offenses in order to meet quota. If you stick observers with them randomly, all you do is increase the number of eyes in the vehicle looking for crimes – and “missing” a crime can be as simple as having your vision obstructed while taking a sip of your coffee. If you run a camera in the vehicle, same deal; the camera may not always be where the officer is looking (though I DO think that dashboard cameras are laudable for traffic stops, and that retention of the video ought to be mandatory by law to prevent “he said, she said” problems between the cop and the citizen later).

Ben Casnocha suggests:

When you’re out on the town and want to solely optimize on picking up a woman/man for sex, travel with friends who are slightly less attractive than you. If they’re more attractive than you, you look relatively less hot. If they’re absolutely ugly, you might look relatively good but such relative benefits are outweighed by being associated with ugliness.

I’m not sure that I buy this. I think the comparative disadvantage is outweighed by the perception that you are a cool enough guy to hang out with cool-looking guys. Now if you’re all wearing Neon Genesis Evangelion shirts or are otherwise demonstrating weirdness, that could be true. Likewise if you’re all displaying utter conventionality But generally speaking it seems that one of the things that women look at when appraising a guy is whether he has friends and of what stock. In those early moments of being approached or exchanging glances to invite or discourage approachment, women have little information with which to go on which means that they have to go by their gut and a sense of the guy. Who he’s with informs that. That was the conclusion I came to, anyway, when I noticed that there was a difference in the frequency with which girls would smile at me when I was out with friends, with misfit friends, and out alone in a place where people usually go in groups.

I’m reminded a bit of some advice from my brother Mitch, who is smart as a whip, was kind of nerdy before college, and had to explicitly learn what a lot of popular people learned by touch-and-feel. He said that in a bar situation, the best place to look is at a group of women that has one extremely attractive person and then pick whoever in that group you find most attractive that is not that person. It’s kind of Roissiesque, I guess, but he found that women that expect you to approach the herd (or pick off a member of the herd) for someone else are more receptive when they find out it’s them. I never took his advice because I didn’t patrol the same sorts of venues that he did and I have always had an exceptional ability at detecting compatibility with people on scant information. In other words, I already have an idea of who might be responsive to my approaches and who won’t be. In the dating scene, I’m a niche-market product in a way that my brothers are not, so I have to take care of knowing my market rather than trying to shoehorn into a market that I am not ideal for. Whenever I tried to expand my market-presence, it rarely amounted to any good even if I did have some initial success.

I am also remember back in high school when my friend Clint and I would each lunch together. Miraculously, we found these two girls to sit with day in and day out. One was quite pretty and had a way that she dressed (stockings!) that maximized her appeal. The other would have been gorgeous wearing a paper sack and clown make-up just because she was that innately beautiful. What’s funny is that even though Stockings was perfectly suitable for either of us and indeed would have been a great catch, we both fell all over ourselves trying to impress Paper Sack. A rivalry was founded upon it, even though neither of us had even a remote shot. He would give her his pudding (which sounds hopelessly grade school, but she wanted it and he had it and he gave it to her) thus leading me to call him the Pudding-Pushing Bastard or, if she happened to be present, the PPB. Because of her proximity to beauty, Stockings only barely existed. We were dopes.

So I guess it varies as to how effective it can be to surround yourself with more or less attractive people. He’s probably right that it’s best not to surround yourself with people that will embarass you. That’s a separate lesson and one I had to learn the hard way.

Anyone here notice a difference in how long plastic milk gallon jugs keep milk fresh versus cardboard half-gallon cartons? I just bought the latter and I swear it’s been fresh for two weeks now. Or at least it neither smells nor tastes funny. Usually it seems that it starts to go bad after maybe a week after you open it, regardless of the expiration date. Anyone else noticed anything like this?

Ever since I was sixteen, I’ve spent inordinate amounts of time online. It started with BBSes though I eventually graduated to the Internet. When online dating services were getting going, I tried them out extensively as did a lot of my friends. Despite this, not a single person in my circle married somebody that they met on an online dating service. Of The Big Four girls in my history, only one did I meet through any matching service and neither of us had on our profiles that we were looking for significant others. On its face, online dating seems to be the most logical way to pair off that there is. You (usually) get to see a picture and get to know a little bit about them before you meet. When you do meet, you’re both ostensibly have the same goal in mind. So why is it that despite all this, it so rarely seems to pan out?

A lot of people are under the impression that it’s because only screwed up people use dating services. Even back in the old day that simply wasn’t true. The selection of girls that I met from online dating services was actually not all that different from ones I would have met anyway. Others point to the gender disparity with men using the services in much higher numbers than women. It’s true that forces a lot more work on the guys part competing with other guys and ladies filtering through a substantial number of responses… but the thing is that even once you get past that point, it still seems never to actually work out. Why?

1. Pressure. After a series of disappointments, I set up a rule where I had to try to set up a meeting with someone before no more than a week or three emails had passed. The main reason for this was that if there’s too much build-up, the meeting is bound to disappoint. The better the pre-meeting goes, the rockier the net-to-life transition. The more you know about them before you meet, the harder the meeting is. The correlation was about linear. Expectations get raised beyond the realistic when things have gone well before the meeting. You have this vision of what they will be like and they won’t ever match it. Not always because the vision is unrealistic, even. Sometimes they’re not worse in person, they’re just different.
2. Mannerisms and presence. We are more than a profile-and-pic. We are more than we can write on a profile or in even in a blog. We are more than our picture. We are a hundred thousand little things that we do that have the potential to endear or agitate someone. There are so many little subtle things that affect how it is that someone comes across to us. We make all sorts of assumptions as to how they think they will be and then when they’re not that way at all we won’t even be able to easily explain why. “I… uhhh… expected more of a nightly way about her” was how I described one. Nightly? What the hell does that mean? I’m a pretty articulate guy and I still can’t entirely explain it without resorting to comparisons with other girls I know. Not even comparisons like “She’s more ______ than the last girl I dated” but more “She’s more like Girl A than Girl B even though her profile and actual personality is more like Girl B.”
3. Raised standards. I know that I did this and I think a lot of guys do and maybe girls, too. Oddly, I think that we raise our standards when in a situation expressly designed to meet somebody. Particularly when we have someone to compare this person to. As guys glide through profiles, we see a lot of attractive girls that are out of our league. We’re naturally drawn to contact them first. With the limited information you have, the picture becomes a lot more important. Here are all of these quite attractive girls (and as a guy, those are definitely the ones that you notice the most) and they’re looking for a guy! and you’re a guy!! So you set your sites higher. You try to present yourself as being more impressive than you are so that they might meet you. Then of course they’re disappointed. Meanwhile, had you met the same exact selection in the office place, you would more naturally have gravitated towards people of your own stature if only because they’re the ones that smile at you from behind the receptionist desk while the hot girl at the copy station doesn’t even know you’re alive. Generally speaking, you have a better assessment of “How likely is it that a girl that looks like that would pair with a guy like me.” Lastly, you also don’t have the 100,000 little mannerisms to endear you to them, so you go with what you know, which is the picture, which expresses mostly more conventional beauty.
4. Intellectualizing attraction. When you meet someone explicitly in order to pair off, you’re looking very deeply at this person from the start. You’re looking at every potential pitfall. Everything they want from life that is the slightest bit incompatible with what you want. You’re asking from the get-go, “Is this something that I want to devote time and energy into making this permanent?” I think in more natural pairings there is a lot more of a mystery about whether or not the other person is thinking in that context and how. With online dating, you’ve established a lot of that. You’re put in the position of deciding whether you want to fall for this person rather than simply doing so. It turns a lot of it into more of an intellectual exercise. I think a lot of people are more likely to find problems early on from an intellectual analysis than the emotional experience that unfolds when it’s entirely personal.

The thing that all four of these items have in common is that online dating (and personals of other sorts) create an unnatural environment for one of the most natural of instincts. It applies a lot of pressure to figure things out before you’re ready. It puts too much out there before you can process it. I mention above that only one of my Big Four were met online and that none of my friends married someone they met from online personals.

That is true, but it’s not the whole truth. Evangeline is the only one of the four that I got to know online, but the truth is that I fell in love with her across a room over a year prior. I just didn’t know that I had because I didn’t know who she was. As for the other three… the Internet played a roll in all of them. Clancy and I met through a friend I met on the net. Julie and I met through a job that I got by meeting a friend on a BBS. Tracey and I met simply on a BBS and got to know one another there. My friend Tony met his wife in AOL chatrooms. Even though meeting online carries some of the above risks — particularly if potential romantic interest is declared before you actually meet them or have spent any significant time with them — there is still more of an opportunity for things to unfold naturally.

I got a GPS device from my father as a very late birthday present a little while back. I never plan to go without one again. The GPS is to Google Maps what Google Maps is to Key Maps and Atlases. It can change the way that you think about getting from Point A to Point B. This is particularly true if you live in a new part of the country, as I do.

It used to be that if you wanted to go somewhere, you pretty much had to draw a little map and then take a map with you. For someone like me that forgets everything, it is also crucial to note that it required you remembering to take your little map with you. Or you could try to wing it, but that results in having to pull over all-too-frequently to figure out where you are going. Even if I had a map printed out I would usually have to pull over at least once. Then it was worse for me because I have no internal compass that tells me which way it is that I am actually going. I lived here for a full month before realizing that I drive west once I get off the Interstate to get home rather than south. For previous birthdays I would sometimes ask for a compass for my car, but they seemed relatively unreliable for a device that works mostly on magnets and water.

The GPS provides a compass on steroids even if you’re not asking it to tell you how to get somewhere. You always know what direction you’re going. Even more helpful, you know what streets are about to come up. Whenever I had to make my own maps or print them out from Google or Yahoo I would always have to make note “If you’ve reached X-Street, you’ve gone too far” to prevent myself from driving half-an-hour too far. In addition to having no internal compass, I also have nothing in my mind that informs me common sensically that I’ve gone too far. “Sure, I’ve crossed the state line, but maybe I’m supposed to and the next turn will take me back?”

The directions are even better, if not wholly reliable. There is an Interstate near where we live that makes it rather difficult to cross because there aren’t any access roads (Cascadia in general doesn’t seem to believe in access roads, alas) and a lot of streets end at various points before the Interstate. The GPS has taught me each and every cross-point in various directions that it’s given me. So now even when I’m driving my wife’s car, I have a much better idea of the fastest way to get somewhere.

Alas, GPS systems are not perfect. They haven’t sent me over any cliffs or anything, but they have left me awfully confused once or twice. Sometimes it thinks that two roads connect when they don’t or it will inexplicably tell me to take three rights rather than a left. It thinks that the Walmart in Uniontown is roughly a block over from where it is. It kept telling me to turn right into the parking lot of a Dollar Tree. Unfortunately, miss a couple turns and it assumes that you want to go somewhere else sometimes. Or that you don’t want to go there at all and want to just go home. It also thinks that there is a Walmart in Soundview that isn’t actually there. That’s not the GPS’s fault, though, because Google Maps thinks that it’s there, too.

By and large, though, it provides good directions except whenever Clancy is in the car. When she’s in the car, I’m in “showing off my cool new gadget” mode and it invariably lets me down. Whenever she’s not around, though, and whenever it’s not involving a Walmart, it seems to work pretty well. It’s worth remembering that in the old days Yahoo Maps used to be pretty unreliable. I expect that the GPS will get better with time.

It’s kind of funny how it freaks out whenever you want to take a route other than the route it wants you to take. The unit is good at compensating for what it perceives to be wrong turns. It recalculates your route for you and you keep going. Unfortunately, sometimes it doesn’t get the message. For instance, whenever I go to work by way of Zaulem, there is a never-ending stream of directions telling me to take the next exit and turn my butt around. Around the fourth exit it finally concedes that I’m going by way of the big city against its advice.

It lets me know usually about .6 miles ahead of an exit that I need to be taking it and when the exit arrives it tells me again. There is also a little feature that gives me an arrival time, but it doesn’t compensate for traffic levels at all. Otherwise it’s pretty accurate. Moreso than Google Maps, at any rate. There is also another feature that tells you your average speed (either the speed you go when you’re moving or counting times when you’re stopped at lights and in traffic and whatnot). Somewhat importantly, though, there is a little thing that tells you the fastest speed that you’ve gone since you last reset it. If I’d had this thing during a particular spitstorm in rea-life Wyoming, I may have been able to contest the officer’s assertion that I was going faster than my car was seemingly capable. Or maybe I would have been able to see that he was right and I was wrong. Any time I have a “high speed” significantly faster than the universal speed limit around here, I make sure to reset it. Even so, it’s an interesting little statistic. Even in the absurdly low speed limits of the area, I almost never go more than 10mph over.

When my family was taking a trip through Europe, the tour bus was pulled over in Italy. European tour busses apparently contain some sort of record of maximum speeds and they’re admissible even if the cops can’t prove that you were going that speed on your current road. In other words, if you were going 60mph in one place where that’s the speed limit and they pull you over on a stretch that has a 45mph speed limit, you essentially have no defense. Further, the cops can check your records without any justifiable cause. It’s apparently a racket out there. The tour guide says that you just pay the officer the “fine” and get on your way.

It makes me wonder if the GPS could be used in the same fashion. In the US the officer doesn’t have any right (that I’m aware of) to force me to turn the GPS device to the screen that might incriminate me, but if it’s plainly visible he might be able to use it under certain circumstances. It might be up to me to demonstrate that there were enough miles on it that I could have been going the speed limit somewhere else, but since I don’t think I’ve seen a single speed limit over 60mph in the entire area and never anything above 65, and since I’m not close to any state or province I’m aware of that has the sorts of high speed limits that Deseret and Estacado do, that could be tough. I wonder how admissible my GPS would be in my defense. I’d somehow need to be able to have a record of what was on the GPS right that minute and be able to demonstrate to the courts that I hadn’t tampered with it. That’d be a pretty tall order.

I expect that the GPS companies would vigorously oppose the GPS being used in courts. Estacado was planning for a little while to use the Estag, the little thing you put on your dashboard so you don’t have to stop at tolls, to ticket people. They already use those things for signs that tell you the expected time between certain landmarks so the technology is there. However, the Estag people freaked out because they rightly believed that if the Estag invited tickets nobody would use it. The idea was quashed.

I can’t say that I wasn’t warned. The neighbor who gave them to me said that they were the hottest chili peppers in the world. I’d heard that before, so I was a little skeptical. Still, she grew all sorts of peppers in her back yard so I at least knew it was hotter than anything in her stock.

Then, as I was tearing apart one of the peppers and putting it in my soup, I was warned again. This time by Clancy. Maybe you should put in a little at a time?

“How much damage can a single pepper do?”

Within the next twenty minutes, I’d had three large cups of diet coolaid.

Within the next thirty minutes, I was throwing out the last third of the soup that I had eaten. I have never in my life thrown out something for being too spicy.

Within thirty five minutes, I filled my mouth with ice for the fourth time just to try to keep the temperature in there down.

Within forty-five minutes, my nose hurt from breathing. Not because I got any chili seeds or whatever up there, just because of the exposure.

Within fifty minutes, it hit my stomach. I started scarfing down cheese and milk and drinking some stomach agents to try to mitigate the coming damage.

Within an hour, I must have scratched right above my eye because it burns like the holy fires of hell.

Within an hour and a half, I realized that the burning sensation on my lap had less to do with the fact that I had a laptop on it while writing this post than it had to do with the fact that the same hands that burned above my eyes helped aim the barrel to hit the figurative target at the bottom of the toilet bowl when I needed to unload that coolaid.

Shortly after that, I look up the pepper on the Internet. Find out that yes, in fact it is the most spicy pepper on the planet. And that Indians use it, ironically for a medicine. In between churns, my stomach is extremely skeptical of that assessment of its healing value and believes that Indians are crazy.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, a separate ghost that smokes in the back there as it conspires against me wonders what I’m going to do with that other pepper…

With some hesitation, I would like to announce that William Sherwood Truman, known around these parts as Trumwill, has gone hip-hop.

No, it still remains one of the musical genres that I have little or no use for.

Rather, I speak of the underwear that, when I’m not careful, peeks out above the pants that are resting too lowly.

No, I still think it’s utterly stupid that so many young men are wearing their pants so ridiculously low.

Rather, I don’t have a whole lot of choice because gravity is dragging them down.

In short, my pants don’t fit so well anymore. My belt, too, has become too large. Not ridiculously large, but enough so that they don’t hold my pants up for a couple hours unmonitored. And when they fall, they fall lower than they used to. And if I want to, I can now pull them straight off without unbuttoning or unzipping. Still a bit of a struggle.

So the good news is that I’ve gone down slightly in pant and belt size.

The bad news is that my pants don’t fit anymore.

And I’m too white to go hip-hop.

Once upon a time, the hero of our story, named Will Truman, received a notice in the mail that his cable bill had not been paid. He immediately got online to make an immediate payment. The following is the record of what occurred next. Will our hero be able to give the cable company money for the goods and services that they have provided? Or will Will’s head explode from repetition? Who will give in first? Only those that read on will know!

Comcast: Could I get your username and password, please?

trumwill: trumwill76, ********

Comcast: Alright, what would you like to do today?

trumwill: I’d like to pay my bill

Comcast: Okay. To do that you need to set up an account.

trumwill: What? Isn’t that what this is?

Comcast: …

trumwill: Okay, so I need a separate account to pay the bill? Or I need to enable it on my account or… something like that?

Comcast: …

trumwill: Okay, fine

Comcast: Username and password, please

trumwill: trumwill76, ********

Comcast: Okay, how can I help you today?

trumwill: I’d like to pay my bill

Comcast: Okay. To do that you need to set up an account.

trumwill: Okay, fine.

Comcast: Please give me your credit card information

trumwill: Visa, ****************, 11/10, 297

Comcast: Okay, what can I do for you today?

trumwill: I’d like to pay my bill

Comcast: Okay, I need your username and password

trumwill: trumwill76, ********

Comcast: Excellent. What can I do for you today?

trumwill: I’d like to pay my bill

Comcast: Okay, the information we have for you is: Visa, ****************, 11/10, 297. Is this correct?

trumwill: Yes.

Comcast: Okay, what’s your username and password

trumwill: trumwill76, ********

Comcast: Excellent. How can I help you today.

trumwill: I’d like to pay my bill

Comcast: Okay, the credit card information we have for you is: Visa, ****************, 11/10, 297. Is this correct?

trumwill: Yes

Comcast: Your current bill for installation and the first two months of service is this $219.63

trumwill: Okay, proceed

Comcast: How much would you like to pay today?

trumwill: How much do I owe again?

Comcast: I do not have that information for you on this particular screen.

trumwill: Can I go back to the previous screen?

Comcast: No.

trumwill: Okay, fine, I’ll just pay $225. I remember it was under that. Let’s go back to the next screen.

Comcast: I’m sorry, we’re going to have to start all over. Could you enter your username and password?

trumwill: trumwill76, ********

Comcast: How can I help you today?

trumwill: I’d like to pay my bill

Comcast: Okay, the credit card information we have for you is: Visa, ****************, 11/10, 297. Is this correct?

trumwill: Yes.

Comcast: Okay, how much would you like to pay today?

trumwill: How much do I owe again?

Comcast: Inexplicably, I’m not going to give you that information right now.

trumwill: Fine, I’ll pay $225

Comcast: Are you sure?

trumwill: Yes.

Comcast: Okay, could I get your username and password?

trumwill: Oh, for Pete’s sake

Comcast: That is not your password.

trumwill: trumwill76, ********

Comcast: Okay, what would you like to do today?

trumwill: I’d like to pay my bill.

Comcast: Okay, the credit card information we have for you is: Visa, ****************, 11/10, 297. Is this correct?

trumwill: Yes. Are you going to tell me how much I owe now?

Comcast: No. How much would you like to pay.

trumwill: Sigh. $225.

Comcast: Are you sure?

trumwill: Yes.

Comcast: Excellent. You have made two payments totalling $450 today. Your original balance was $219.63 and now you have a credit of $230.37.

trumwill: You couldn’t have given me this information before my second payment. Or my first before that matter.

Comcast: No need to be rude. Could I have your username and password, please?

When I was in early college I had to take a Defensive Driving course. At the beginning of the course, they had a little video where then-President Bill Clinton expressed the importance of driving safely. There was a woman in the audience that spent the entire three minutes of the movie groaning. Nothing was more important to her, apparently, than registering her disgust with the president while he was talking about something about as uncontroversial as you can get. The rest of us, on the other hand, were there because we wanted lower auto insurance rates. Politics wasn’t supposed to figure in.

—-

Free speech is one of the hallmarks of democracy. Further, it’s important that issues are discussed and candidates are adequately appraised. Even uncomfortable issues need to be discussed if for no other reason to know why people think the way they do. Also important is to clear up misperceptions about candidates, reveal their flaws and extol their virtues so that we as a people make the better decisions come election times. While I would say that the tones and rhetoric often used to discuss politics is counterproductive, it’s nonetheless important to have the conversations in the first place.

But there is a time and place for these conversations and a time and place to avoid them. For instance, I have various friends that I refuse to discuss politics because there is nothing to be gained by it. Some people that I agree with 75% of the time I can’t discuss anything with and some that I have 25% in common I can. I don’t want politics on sports news networks. Unless it’s an intrinsically political act, I don’t want it at music shows either. Even if I agree with what the dude is saying, I cringe for the guy in the audience that went there to hear a song and instead heard that the singer thinks that he voted for an idiot. I almost never discuss politics in the workplace. You get the idea.

—-

Once upon a time, I used to be a political blogger. I enjoyed it a great deal for a while, though as time passed I began to enjoy it less and less. Early on there were a lot of discussions about policies and even politicians and you could find reasonable people of every political stripe to talk to and even find common ground with or at least a better understanding where, precisely, you see things differently. Over time, though, those friends became opponents because we stopped trying to find common ground or a sense of understanding. Then they became enemies as we stopped believing that the other person was acting with honesty and good faith. By the time I closed shop, there wasn’t a single issue that I didn’t already know who was going to object to my view, what incendiary figures they would bring up to discredit my view, what anecdotes that proved their case they would find, and what sorts of selective facts they would use from selective Internet surfing between sites that were more sympathetic to their point of view.

Because of this experience, I decided that I did not want Hit Coffee to be a political blog even though I am just as opinionated as I’ve always been and just as interested in politics and policy. This creates a bit of a problem for me because I am constantly thinking about politics, tracking the latest polls, considering the latest policy proposals, and weighing the stances on all sorts of issues. But for the most part I bite my tongue. When I do write about politics I try to maintain as neutral a tone as possible and represent both sides even if clearly coming out on one side or the other. I avoid contentious debates over which there is no compromise and nobody’s mind is going to be changed. I also avoid issues like race where things have the ability to turn very nasty very quickly. I try to avoid talking about the candidates directly either to endorse them or to denounce them.

The main reason I do this is because I want people to be comfortable coming here whether they are Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, or Independents. Or if they don’t care about politics at all. Politically contentious issues have the ability to suck the air of a room, so to speak. So politics would be a distraction towards the life issues and personal posts that I want to focus on. I don’t want to come home and think to myself “I wonder what political point I’m going to have to refute today…” as I did years ago and I don’t want a post about my immigrant neighbors to get hijacked into a conversation about immigration with broad stereotypes, selective statistics, accusations or racism, and so on.

Yesterday I wrote a post quoting Barack Obama about how he professes to have come by his faith and how he was initially suspicious of it. Maybe his entire account was a fictional creation to explain away an opportunistic conversion. Maybe it was the honest truth. I don’t really know and you don’t, either. Yet I think that there is a part of us that will always want to pin down the specifics in order to demonstrate that Obama is an honorable or dishonorable man, depending on what our politics are compared to his. I quoted the passage, though, as a thought about faith. Even if it was purely fictitious, it spoke to me and so I shared it as well as how it resonated with me. It took less than three comments before it was a referendum on Obama.

I have in the past put up pre-emptive notices on where I don’t want the comment thread of a post to go. People seem disinclined to say anything when I do so I think because nobody wants what they say to be misinterpreted as the aspect of the post that I don’t want to talk about. So I tried going without on the Salvation post and that really didn’t work. I don’t want to dictate the parameters of the comment section of every post that could fall prey to a political axe that someone wants to grind. So I’m not entirely sure what to do.

But for now I’m going to ask this: Hit Coffee is a venue to relax, think, and be entertained. If your comment will not help people (including me) do one of these three things and it has the potential to make people angry, reconsider posting it or at least how you post it. Calling somebody names or accusing their preferred candidate, party, religion, or whatever of being fraudulent, asinine, or stupid is not going to make someone reconsider their position. Implying that nobody intelligent or moral could take a position other than your own… well, same deal.

But in addition to wanting discussion to be thoughtful, I also would like discussion. If nobody commented on this blog I would have stopped writing it a long time ago. I consider most of you to be friends that I’ve never met (or that I have met, in some cases). So please don’t take any of this to mean that I don’t appreciate all of your contributions to this site which in many cases outmatch my own. More than anything I actually want to avoid the kinds of subjects that suck the air out of the room and prevent us from having the kinds of conversations that we ordinarily do.

A discussion broke out a while back on Comcast’s decision to limit users to 250GB of file transfers a month. My Beneficent Webmaster took the position against it, arguing that these companies promise unlimited downloads and now they’re putting restrictions on it and the problems that they cite are the product of infrastructure problems that they refuse to correct. Brandon thinks that Comcast’s decision is extremely reasonable because nobody should need more than that kind of transfers and anybody that does is costing Comcast money.

At the time I leaned more towards Brandon’s point-of-view. The big thing for me was (and is) that Comcast and other providers at least be honest about whatever restrictions that they’re doing rather than using backdoor methods to restrict usage to profitable levels. That sounds right to me.

The more I’ve been thinking about it, though, the more concerned about this policy I am becoming. I’m not concerned insofar as 250GB is not beyond reasonable and that for current usage anybody using more than that needs to be on a business account. That’s all right. What concerns me, though, is that these policies will affect usage that I think may be harmful in the long run and that they will affect usage in ways that prevent Comcast (and other providers) from making decisions to improve infrastructure that would improve things for everyone. In short, I’m worried that applying severe economic pressures against heavy usage will prevent future commerce.

Right now 250GB is extraordinarily reasonable for a month. It’s really difficult to imagine anybody using more than that unless they’re doing something business-oriented, illegal, or both. But that’s right now. That’s with products and services that are currently on the market. By improving infrastructure, they could be opening up more and better services and because they don’t need to make improvements for the bottom line these services may be delayed or never come to pass.

Everyone has a story like this, but I’ll tell it anyway. Once upon a time, a 20GB HD was all that I could possibly need. I really couldn’t imagine what I’d do with more than that. Then came digital music and suddenly 80GB was required and eventually it was not enough without making sacrifices on the quality of audio that I wanted to listen to. However, hard drive costs kept going down as the drives became bigger, and so not only could I go buy a HD with the space that I wanted, but I could improve the quality of the music that I was ripping. Then, when they went down even more, I could start saving my video to HD the same way that I had my music. Suddenly it became hard to find ways to fill the amounts of space that I could get.

Demand sometimes follows capacity. Had the HD never become larger, I would have stuck with relatively low-quality music rips and all of my movies would still be on DVD and VHS and burned media. I would have been fine with that because I wouldn’t have known what I was missing out on. But increases in capacity have given me more than I ever could have dreamed of. I am worried that if infrastructure does not improve, Internet capacity will not improve, and we’ll start missing out on things that don’t really occur to us.

Of course current capacity allows us to stream videos during most or all of our waking hours without having to worry about running into Comcast’s imposed limitations. So having conquered video and audio and games, what’s left? Well, for one thing, higher quality videos. The videos that we stream over are okay, but they’re not going to look good on the latest televisions. Nobody expects them to, really. That’s not what they’re for. But why not? Why can’t we do that? More to the point, why must I simply get used to these low-quality videos periodically skipping and goofing up when I’m using during peek hours? The short-term solution is “Don’t use during peak hours”, but wouldn’t it be better if we could use the Internet as reliably as we use the telephone and cable television? We accept less and unless things improve technologically I’m not terribly sure that we’ll ever get more.

It’s pretty presumptuous for me to say that Comcast should take it in the chin so that the Internet can become a lot more than it currently is. A lot of the money that is going to be made by content providers won’t be made by Comcast and definitely won’t be made unless they they’re getting reimbursed for the improvements that they invest in. So in that sense I think it’s fair that providers take in more money from people that use their services more heavily. The problem that I have with Comcast compared to say Time-Warner is that Comcast’s approach is entirely punitive. It’s not that they want more money for more usage so much as they don’t want high-volume users at all. That’s at odds with what I think everyone’s goal should be that everybody becomes a high-volume user. It’s too much to ask a provider to take a financial hit in service of that goal, but at least with a tiered system there’ll be room for expansion.

A great comparison is with cell phones. Cell phones really started taking off when companies could start offering large volumes of minutes so that people didn’t have to worry about the meter running every time they use it. There are still excess fees, but it’s been expansive enough and the competition has been fierce enough that it hasn’t gotten in the way of increased usage. It would have been very different, though, if cell phone companies had announced “Anyone who uses more than 1,500 is kicked off of our plan.”

Of course, the cell phone companies couldn’t have done that because if Verizon were to have instituted such a policy then Cingular would have seen a great potential market and would have catered to high-volume users. Unfortunately, no such level of competition exists in the Internet World. The services offered by cable, telco, and satellite companies are too different to be in direct competition with one another and putting in your own line is not realistic for large segments of the market. So they could theoretically just focus on milking whatever money they can from the current infrastructure without any substantial improvements.

What gives me hope is that some ISPs do seem to be still investing in infrastructure. AT&T was continually improving their package back in Estacado and were boasting speeds a lot faster than the DSL I was getting in Colosse. In fact, Comcast itself has just unleashed a new service with faster connections. I see it in my downloads times which are now faster than ever. That’s not enough to alleve my concerns, though, because despite the improvements with Comcast there is still quite a bit of variation and during peek hours it is still moving slowly and despite the wizbang new technology even things like watching videos can still cause problems. All of that tells me that the improvements are well shy of what they need to be.