Fugu Talk

Well, the day after Labor Day was a bit of a letdown for me. First, I read the news about the Christian nut job in Florida who’s trying to inflame the Muslim nut jobs of the world by burning copies of the Koran. Then I stopped by a used bookstore and heard yet another white Californian complain about Mexicans. And then when I got home I turned on the television and saw a replay of Huntington Beach’s 100 year centennial documentary, which described the Japanese-American internment of World War II as being a “difficult decision” affecting Japanese “residents” and “immigrants”, the question of their loyalty having “no answer”. I was afraid that if I looked at the clock, I might see it turning backwards.

Based on the recent poll showing an increasing number of Americans who think Obama is a Muslim (did everyone forget about that crazy pastor of his?), I’m not optimistic that people are going to get smarter, but I have a plan B, based on a whimsical idea I had years ago, inspired by a sci-fi story in which everyone was forcibly relocated every five years so they wouldn’t get complacent. My idea is to require everyone to intermarry – I was thinking originally along racial lines but religion would work, too. I’m only half-joking – I have Christians, Jews, Muslims and at least one atheist (yours truly) in my family. If we saw those “others” as our in-laws instead of some nameless, faceless threat, we could work things out in the real American way – as family arguments over Thanksgiving dinner.

There’s been furor in the past over flag-burning, but to me, the real desecration of the flag occurs when people co-opt it for their own causes. I was recently nauseated by a Facebook campaign against the proposed Muslim worship center in New York, largely by the use of the American Flag as their logo. But I should get over it – the tactic is pretty much a cliche by now.

For example, here is an over-the-top logo for the Huntington Beach Police Officers Association:

A more clever use is on the “about us” page of the Video Game Voters Network:

Nowhere does it explain on that page that the group is founded and run by the ESA, the industry group representing game publishers. That type of omission leads the conspiracy theorist in me (and I didn’t even know I had one) to wonder who was behind the anonymous mass mailings in the IGDA that led to Tim Langdell’s ouster. Anyway, for my civil liberties advocacy, I’ll count on organizations like the ACLU – at least I know who they are.

And liberal groups are not immune, either. MoveOn exercises this tactic (and others normally attributed to Fox News), but with a bit of subtlety here – they have some stars and stripes sneaking in around the borders and background:

It’s an unseemly replacement for discourse. Which flag is bigger, yours or mine?

A few years ago I attended a talk at the Santa Ana Digital Media Center given an executive from an online gaming company. Someone asked for his opinion on net neutrality and I was startled that he 1) didn’t know what it was, and 2) answered anyway that it didn’t concern him and that the free market would take care of it anyway. I’ll just pose a simple scenario – let’s say Time Warner cable strikes a deal to give broadband preference to a particular game, say WoW or Starcraft, or one of the games developed by a Time Warner studio, and conversely downgrades performance for your game. You’re hosed.

Here’s a nice quick-start graphic on net neutrality, including the latest news of Google once again stepping on and off the moral high ground.

[Via: Online MBA Programs]

In A Long Way to Go, Alice Taylor laments the lack of women listed in Gamasutra’s The Game Developer 50, provides a number of women who could have been included, and suggests splitting the format into 25 men and 25 women. That last idea is an example of going a step too far (although featuring a Top 50 Women list is not a bad idea – then we can debate whether any of them should be in the global Top 50). But it shouldn’t detract from the basic point. Why no women?

To find out why, you really just need to look at the responses, particularly from Gamasutra. We-profile-women-in-other-features is like saying we gave a woman director an Oscar, so everything’s fine in Hollywood. And the defense that those honored were selected specifically for accomplishments last year sounds like a last-minute defense picked out of the air – the inclusion of Jason Della Rocca is essentially a lifetime achievement award (unless they’re rewarding him for stepping down) And then there’s the usual capper – we-work-with-a-lot-of-women-so-we’re-clearly-not-prejudiced. That’s like saying “I’m not prejudiced, some of my best friends are…”

The only way to solve the problem is to admit the problem. Here, I’ll start – when I first read the list on Gamasutra, I didn’t notice that it included no women until I saw Alice’s blog. I’m a guy in a male-dominated industry, I hang out with other guys in the industry, and I’m influenced (programmed, really), by the media (those in the media, you can’t say you’re having a cultural impact and then say you’re not, when it’s convenient). So call me a sexist, I won’t deny it. But I recognize the problem. Put the shoe on the other foot. While I may not be alert as I should be to the ill-representation of women, as an Asian-American, it’s maddening for me to see TV California towns with just one Asian, or a white-populated San Francisco, or Hawaii shows where the leads are all white, or even a sci-fi series set in a future where everyone speaks Chinese but no one is actually Chinese. This happens not because of a lack of talent or we-don’t-have-the-right-role-for-that-type-of-person – it happens because the people in that industry from the top to the bottom will by default select people like themselves, whether it’s scriptwriting, casting, or greenlighting.

I’ll close with one more recent example. Last year I watched the Huntington Beach centennial documentary on HBTV, which was a real snoozer until they unexpectedly waded into serious waters and described the Japanese-American internment of WWII as a “difficult question” of their loyalties “that could not be answered” and only described them as “Japanese residents”, not mentioning that everyone of Japanese descent on the west coast was interned. When I complained to city hall, the response I got was that a “diverse” panel had approved it, and the CD’s had been sent to the local schools! (I can only hope they slept through it). I thought maybe I overreacted, saw it a second time, thought it was even worse than I initially realized, sent another complaint and this time they said they’d ask a Japanese-American member of the Orange County Human Relations Commission to look at it. Six or seven months later, they finally stopped showing the piece and distributing the DVD’s. I would have preferred that they acknowledged the inadequacy of that segment and just included some additional info with the piece directing viewers to resources such as the Japanese American National Museum. But I understand the desire to cover up an embarrassing mistake. Still, I would have appreciated a “Our bad, thanks for pointing it out”, or even better, taking the issue more seriously the first time and doing a little research and introspection.

In the midst of a rant conflating drug cartels with job loss, KTLA’s version of the angry white man radio show had this response to the argument that requiring local police to actively enforce immigration laws will reduce reporting of crime by illegal immigrants:

“Illegal alien criminals victimize mostly illegal aliens so illegal aliens should be glad to see illegal aliens driven from their neighborhood, particularly the criminals.”

This is from memory, so the wording might not be exact, but I’m pretty sure the idiocy is intact. I generally don’t find radio talk shows appealing so I only caught this because KTLA invited these deep thinkers to give their opinions on the broadcast news, and lest you think it an aberration, KTLA has been promoting the radio show with an excerpt about “illegal-lovin” something or other. It’s not even a complete sentence, which is out-of-context even for an out-of-context business, but I guess they just wanted to emphasize the fun words. At least they haven’t followed the CNN path of making them news anchors. Yet.

I noticed a few weeks ago that the City of Huntington Beach made good on their promise (threat) to rename every north-south minor street to “Lane”, so now I live on Sims Lane nee Sims Street. One of my conspiracy theories was that this was a way to get stimulus money, but they just taped over the “St” portion of the signs with “Ln”, so if federal moolah  is involved, then they’re not working very hard for it.

I think the real mundane reason for this change is that someone thought it just sounded better. The city officials pushing for the change said it’s required to remove inconsistencies in various street databases that pose a public safety issue (aren’t you actually introducing inconsistencies?)  Well, it’s really to conform to an old city specification that north-south streets be named lane (what about all the curved and diagonal and L-shaped streets in my neighborhood?). And every other city has similar specifications (they all have the same convention?).  And if we need help from the Long Beach fire department, they’ll be confused if we don’t have this street naming convention (again, they all have the same convention? and isn’t it more confusing that we change street names running from outside into our city?) And these specifications are necessary for the computerized dispatch systems to work (you’re kidding, the computer actually cares if a street is named Lane or Street) And don’t worry about your mail, the post office computer system doesn’t care about street suffixes (well, the fire department should use their computer). The specification is really needed for public safety new hires who aren’t familiar with the city (so you were making up that stuff about the computer?) And you can change your financial information gradually over time (thanks!).

Watching the city council meeting where this was discussed and just about rubber stamped (no discussion of cost or how it would be executed), I thought, these guys really, really want this change. It reminded me of all of my workplaces where management made a fuss over coding style conventions and just said all kinds of stuff to justify it. It’s really important for code safety. It’s important for new hires or others visiting the code. Every company has a convention. It’s not bad, you’ll get used to it. So someone goes through and changes everyone’s code and introduces bugs, and I still end up looking at three-page long functions making improper use of the language and API’s. But it must be good code, because it’s following a coding convention. And it’s got design patterns (coding conventions masquerading as software architecture). And from that point on, I don’t believe anything more from the powers that be, since they made a fuss about this instead of focusing on important matters  (there’s a coding style guidebook behind every worthless startup stock certificate on my wall). Same with my civic leaders – next time I watch a city council meeting, I’ll be sure to disbelieve everything they say.

Some friends of mine were joking about the inanity of the Census letter alerting us to the upcoming Census letter. I’ve seen dumber – just off the top of my head, I recall the MIT student loan office sending me a letter saying they didn’t have my mailing address (and yet I got it), a half-hearted apology (quarter-hearted would be more accurate) from Healthnet saying they “lost” my check into another account and terminated my insurance because I wrote my name “illegably”…and then they addressed me as “Ralph”. And recently, there was the series of letters from the City of Huntington Beach emphasizing the public safety importance of maintaining consistent street address names, so they were going to rename my street and expect all the utility, mapping, government, postal and financial institutions to adjust their databases.

Nonetheless, I filled out and returned the census form when it arrived, because all these people on TV, like the mayor of LA and Ed Begley, JR., say it’s important to make sure resources go where they need to go. But they don’t really explain how that works, and in particular they don’t explain why they ask the questions they ask, many of which are legally forbidden in job interviews.

I especially am tired of answering the which-race-are-you question (and the really weirdly specific are-you-hispanic-and-which-kind). It reminds of my interrogations over the years – “Where are you from? No, before that. No, before that. I mean, where are you really from?”, “How long have you been in this country?” (I used to answer with my age, but then they just respond, “wow, that’s a really long time”, which is starting to make me feel old), and in Oregon recently I got a couple of “Welcome to America!”s.

And I don’t see the point. It’s not as if the census asks what languages I speak (or don’t speak) and will apportion language services accordingly to my area (although what Huntington Beach really needs are better Chinese restaurants, at least something without “Panda” or “Wok” in the name). Maybe they’re just making assumptions based on the race selection. Like that woman at the bottom of the MIT steps who saw me and walked all the way up to hand me an English-as-a-Second-Language flyer. Or the Boston locals who asked me if I spoke English (what am I supposed to say – “No. I don’t speak English”. But at least they asked).

I looked at the IGDA diversity survey recently and thought, while well-intentioned, it looked like it had been done by a college intern (I think it actually was). Now, I think that work is right up there with the professionals’. So, what happened to this “post-racial society” I heard of?

During my trip to Toronto this summer I was struck by the nature of the health care debate there. Well, there were two debates – the one that a cab driver wanted to stage with me comparing the Canadian system to the US system, and the one I read about in their newspapers. In the latter, health care news centered around issues like citizens who wanted to opt for private insurance and doctors who wanted to conduct more screening not approved for coverage by the government. Conspicuously absent was any angst about anyone not receiving any coverage at all or anyone not receiving routine or preventative care. This is markedly different from the debate about the US system. Or at least, it should be. I used to watch discussions on health care on CNBC and they were pretty aggravating. One group discussion included a bunch of big-time CEO’s and they all just talked about free market and choice. When Starbucks Howard Schultz (who grew up in a housing project) expressed the need for making sure everyone has health care, the others just gave him a blank look. During the CNBC special on Walmart, the interviewer grilled Lee Scott on how Walmart ruthlessly drives supplier prices down, but didn’t ask why Walmart couldn’t do that with potential employee health benefit providers (at the time, Walmart expected employees to just go out and get it themselves, citing free market and choice, again)

For people who just take health care for granted, e.g. the wealthy, those in government or academic or otherwise secure employment with established health care benefits, it’s hard to imagine not having health insurance (I certainly never worried about it while I was working for big companies). But it is an employer-based health insurance system, after all, so draw the logical conclusion. Just try quitting your job (or losing it involuntarily). When I went freelance, it turned out my employer had never offered COBRA coverage to exiting employees before (not the first such employer I encountered, either). Fortunately, I had no preexisting condition, so I ended up picking the lowest-cost, high deductible insurance I could find (which by the way was the same provider as my previous employer, so I figured there’d be some continuity and familiarity with my history), never exceeded the deductible, and yet my premiums quadrupled in five years. And I’m single and healthy!

But availability of coverage is only part of the story. Even if you have coverage, you can never be really sure you’re covered. Again, my own story – my coverage was abruptly terminated when my provider said I hadn’t paid my premium, even though my check was cashed. It took a few months, an email stating I was going to the police to find out who cashed my check, and a letter to the California consumer insurance agency to get an “apology” that effectively put the blame on me.

Here’s an OC Register story that recounts how a woman lost her COBRA coverage, retroactively, because her first premium check was off by six cents. Or rather, it was correct, but the “computer” read it incorrectly. So on the next bill they showed she was behind by six cents, she paid it, and then they cancelled her coverage. The story didn’t go much further into the issue, but it seems to me there are some obvious questions – why didn’t they contact her immediately if it looked like her coverage was in jeopardy, instead of billing her again and then cancelling it. You’d think a company wouldn’t want to arbitrarily lose customers, but her family was incurring signficant medical bills at the time, so you’ve got to wonder if maybe once the claim forms were submitted they automatically look for some way to dump her (I recall there were some recent California state lawsuits against insurers who did just that). And the story doesn’t say anything about whether they refunded the COBRA premiums when they retroactivally cancelled her policy. If they’re going to say you were never really covered, they should return the money. After all, you’re gonna need it.

I’m used to seeing big words misused on ESPN, but on C-SPAN last week I saw one member of the Center for Immigration Studies (apparently better named as the Center for Anti-Immigration Studies, and the use of “Studies” is questionable, too), while commenting on the uneducated nature of Mexican immigrants, use the word “misnomer” in place of “misconception”. (I wonder if I should create a new blog category titled “Irony”)

A misnomer is a misapplied term. For example,

It’s a misconception to think that “misnomer” has the same meaning as “misconception”.

“Misnomer”  is a misnomer when used to indicate a misconception.