Category Archives: Popular Culture

Economics, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Through The Looking Glass

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Samoans are in revolt over switching from right to left driving:

The main reason for Samoa’s switch is that two of its biggest neighbors, Australia and New Zealand, drive on the left-hand side, whereas Samoa currently drives on the right, as in the U.S. By aligning with Australia and New Zealand, the prime minister says, it will be easier for poor Samoans to get cheap hand-me-down cars from the 170,000 or so Samoans who live in those two countries. It could also help more people escape tsunamis, says Mr. Tuilaepa.

It all “makes common sense,” says Mr. Tuilaepa in an interview in his office overlooking the Pacific Ocean in the capital city of Apia. Mr. Tuilaepa, who sports a wave of fluffy whitening hair and wears flip-flops, has run the country for more than a decade.

Opponents and some outside experts fear the switch will turn many of Samoa’s already-dangerous roads into disaster zones. Roads wind through mountainous jungle terrain with sharp turns, few traffic lights and pedestrians and dogs sharing the lanes. Critics say the switch will add further confusion with drivers likely to forget which side they’re supposed to be on.

I’m assuming that this means that the cars are traditionally mostly left-hand drive (i.e., American or continental European), and that they’re concerned that if they start to import a lot more from ANZ that it will result in accidents because people won’t be able to see to make left-hand turns, not to mention the confusion by long-time drivers on the other side and the fact that most existing cars are set up for right-side driving.

This is one of those cases (like chirality) that it doesn’t matter which way you do it, but you have to be consistent. I don’t have that much trouble going to the UK or Ireland or Australia and driving, because I’m sitting on the wrong side of the car, which gives me a constant clue that things are different (and it’s interesting how the Anglosphere has split on this issue). While I don’t have that much trouble driving, I could easily get myself killed as a pedestrian, because I forget which way to look for traffic when stepping into a road. The most dangerous situation I’ve ever encountered driving is in the Virgin Islands (including the American ones, not just Tortola) in which the cars are left-hand drive, but you drive on the left, which makes it very dangerous to make right turns if you don’t have a passenger spotting for you (and it also makes it very confusing and hard to remember which side of the road to drive on).

If they go through with this, given how many legacy cars will remain on the island, I predict a huge increase in traffic accidents and casualties. It’s another misplaced leftist (in this case literally) program to help “the poor” that will end up killing a lot of them. And some rich people as well.

[Update a few minutes later]

It’s also interesting to note that Canada remains an oddball — using British spellings and measurement systems (first Imperial and now metric) but follow their southern cousins in their driving habits. But when you share a continent and an open border (though not so much as it used to be) it makes sense that this much more important standard is consistent across borders.

Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Facebook Etiquette Question

30 Comments

OK, I’m an antique. I’ve got a Facebook account, but I still haven’t figured out why, other than as another phone book for contacts with people that I want to contact. I was told by Burton Lee that I had to have an account to be in the 21st century but (again) he never quite explained why.

I can understand that it’s sort of a way to blog and have your own on-line community if you don’t have a real…you know…blog. And because I do have a real blog, and one fairly highly rated on Technorati, among other places, I don’t have time to build Facebook pages.

Anyway. What is the protocol for having Facebook Friends? What is a Facebook “Friend”? Because I get a lot of requests from people I haven’t met, and have never heard of, and don’t even have friends in common with, to become their Facebook Friends. I have several pending “friends” both with and without mutual Facebook Friends, and I just don’t know what to do with them.

I may be old fashioned, but in my day, the word “friend” meant something. Has it lost that meaning?

[Update a few minutes later]

You know, if someone of whom I had no previous knowledge requested to be my Facebook “Friend” with an explanation of who they were, and why, I’d be more inclined to at least consider it, but when it’s just a response from a click on a button that says, “Become a friend,” I’m not very inclined to say, “Great!” “More Facebook Friends.”

Is collecting FFs some kind of weird status symbol?

Business, Economics, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Landline Problem

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I’ll give up my landline when they pry the receiver from my cold dead hands, but many people are just fine going cell-only, which could cause big problems down the road for the telecom industry.

I think that we have a generation of people who have no experience with quality phone service, and think that when calls get dropped, or you have trouble hearing the other person, that’s just the way it is, so they don’t know what they’re giving up. It’s going to be interesting to see how we continue to improve broadband if there is no cross subsidization from voice.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

A Farewell To Reader’s Digest

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Lileks has some thoughts:

Reader’s Digest was a staple in our house, because Grandma gave it to us every year as a Christmas gift. Until I learned that it was required to make fun of it, I enjoyed every issue. Quizzed myself on the vocabulary test (It pays to increase your word power! Peter Funk was the author, I believe; the name was amusing then, and sounds like a BEFORE part of a Viagra ad now), learned to appreciate the difference at an early age between “Life in These United States” and “Laughter is the Best Medicine.” (Non fiction vs. jokes.) As a hypochondriac from an early age, I avoided “I Am Joe’s Duodenum” or “I Am Joe’s Throbbing Mass of Inevitably Non-Functioning Gristle,” and I never read the Condensed Books. By the time I came along they were mostly expanded articles, running under the “Drama in Real Life(TM)” banner, I think. We had some Condensed Books, which seemed wrong on every possible level, like compressed ice-cream or Star Trek shortened for extra commercials. What would you take out of a book to condense it? Did they just pick characters and subplots and tease them out of the story like a colored thread in a loosely-knit yarn scarf?

We used to have both the magazine and a lot of compressed books at our summer cottage in northern Michigan, and I read them voraciously as a kid. The magazine seemed to go downhill in the past years, though, and I haven’t read one since I turned an adult. I’ll always remember, though Susan Sontag’s speech to her leftist cohorts in 1982, in which she outraged them by rhetorically asking who would have been better informed about the nature of the Soviet Union, and communism in general — readers of The Nation, or of Reader’s Digest? What replaces it today as a purveyor of the truth against ideological lies (not that it itself had done that for many years)? The mainstream media doesn’t seem to think there’s much market for it.

Here are more thoughts on RD, and MBA consultants, from the other McCain.

Popular Culture, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Feeling Old

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The morning anchor (a twenty-something, by the looks and behavior) on Fox 29 in Palm Beach was reporting on a Star Wars story, and pronounced C3PO “See Three Poh.” She was ribbed by her co-anchor, and defended herself by saying, “I’ve never seen the movie.”

I was too old to be influenced by Star Wars (in my early twenties when it came out) — 2001, a real SF movie, was my cultural touchstone, but this is the first time I’ve run into an adult that is too young.