We all feel guilty about it. Eric wants to try meat from animals slaughtered in a more humane way. I brought up the time Vance and I cooked lobster, which was a traumatic experience to say the least. They beat on the lid of the pot as it heats up, just so you know. You have to hold it down while they boil to death. It was a meal eaten in awkward, contemplative, guilt-ridden silence.

Another conversation I had recently was at lunch with some coworkers. One was defending (in a purely logical, devil’s-advocate sense) Michael Vick. The rest of us charged at him on our high horses, also while eating hypocritically meaty lunches. He said he had to dismiss any criticism of Michael Vick if it came from people who eat meat.

The cruelty and suffering is hard to justify, regardless of whether it is due to utterly fucking sick subhuman pieces of shit like Michael Vick, or to the out-of-sight yet institutionalized, mechanized disassembly of living creatures that provide so many good, decent people with so much of the food we eat.

The problem is that we don’t want to make other animals suffer, but meat is so good!

There is a solution. But we don’t have the technology to implement it yet. It is years, perhaps decades away.

Synthetic Meat. Meat tissue grown artificially without a nervous system and therefore without a conscience, incapable of experiencing pain and suffering.

There are some challenges synthetic meat has to overcome in order to be a good substitute for the real thing. The texture is one of those problems. In order to get an authentic meat-like texture, the muscle cells must be stretched, broken and re-formed into strands. This requires mechanical manipulation. In nature, the growth and exercise of the animal provides this mechanism. In the laboratory, we’d have to duplicate this process.

Picture this: an artificial, robotic cow skeleton with synthetic meat grafted onto it. Walking and moving like a cow, but without skin or a brain or other organs normally found in a cow. Just the muscle tissue and some fat for flavor. The robotic skeleton stretches and exercises the muscle tissue until it is the texture and consistency of actual cow meat.

You could even have specialized meat robots that only produce certain cuts of beef. Imagine long tubes of filet mignon! Without ever hurting an actual animal!

Here’s the kicker Eric came up with: Because the robotic skeleton is metal, it can conduct heat. The artificial cow could cook itself from the inside out. You grow the “cow” for some period of time, flip the BBQ switch, wait till it’s done cooking, pull the delicious cruelty free BBQ off of it, eat your meal, clean the skeleton off and start all over again with some new meat cells.

Self-Barbecuing Cow!

This is inevitable.

Yesterday Pixie and I went to the Albany Bulb over in the East Bay.

It’s hard to describe. From what I’ve read, it isn’t officially a park per se. It’s actually a landfill for construction debris. Several years ago it turned into a Homeless Suburb of sorts. I saw several semi-permanent structures that appeared to be in active use as primary residences.

So there’s a lot of graffiti and Junk Sculpture, some of it quite large and complex. And tons of people were walking their dogs there. Families exploring the “exhibits” together. I wouldn’t have guessed a landfill could be a tourist attraction but it seems pretty popular.

This anarchic sculpture garden really is one of those “Only in the Bay Area” kind of things.

I recommend visiting this odd gem, especially if you have a dog. I know I’ll be back. Just watch out for the rusty rebar and occasional patch of broken glass.

I adopted a wild baby fox. I left it at home and went to work, but then got a call from my roommate saying animal control was there to confiscate the fox. So I went back home, planning to fight for custody until I saw that the fox had shredded my couch cushions.

I told the animal control officer “Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking. It’s probably best for me and the fox if you to take it away.”

I believe this was symbolic, but not of my relationship with my dog.

Was the typeface hand-drawn specifically for Chairlift, or did the designer choose it from the zillions of existing typefaces already out there? It’s so articulated, almost greebled, that I doubted it existed as a proper typeface.

Indeed it does exist. It’s called Dazzle Ships, designed by Ray Larabie.

Dazzle Ships is also the name of an album by Orchestral Manoevers in the Dark (OMD)*. That led me to this blog post (Seriously, go read it. The video is great. I love what happens when the two kids rip apart the Genetics textbook). Dazzle Ships was very avant garde, an odd record for OMD to put out at the time. But as Dazzle Ships (the camouflaged WWI vessels, not the album) were designed to throw the observer off, so it seems was OMD’s album.

I love it when bands put that kind of thought into their work. So back to Chairlift. In an interview, totally crushworty frontwoman Caroline Polachek said:

A chairlift is a long slow panoramic trip over changing terrain.

Sigh. Move over, Natalie, I want to have Caroline’s babies now.

So yeah anyways, if you were wondering what font Chairlift used on the “Does You Inspire You” cover, it’s called Dazzle Ships.

*When I was in high school I dated a girl who was really into OMD. They came to Houston on their Sugar Tax tour in 1991, but they played a 21+ club on Westheimer and we were both under 21. She wrote a letter to Andy McCluskey and he personally got us into the show. That was kind of awesome.

Like, if they’re too busy having sex all the time to work, maybe they don’t do so well economically. Or if they’re repressed and don’t get laid enough they aren’t motivated to work.

Still curious a couple of days later, I gathered some data available freely on the web to answer these very important questions.

Data on sexual frequency and satisfaction are from the 2006 Durex Sexual Wellbeing Survey.

Data on 2006 GDP for the same 26 countries is from the World Bank.

Sorry the data is kind of old but at least they’re both from the same year. And my guess of Brazil having the most sex was almost right- they’re #2. Greece is #1.

I combined the data sets manually into a google spreadsheet (the Durex survey data is served up in a flash app, which is, like, totally annoying, so please appreciate my work here :). You can view the combined dataset spreadsheet here. 26 countries are covered.

Without further ado, some charts:

Quality of sex doesn’t seem to correlate.

Quantity doesn’t either.

There appears to be little correlation between frequency and satisfaction too, especially if you take out Japan (the lonely one in the lower left):

Anyways, I’m glad we had this little chat and I hope you learned something you can share with the other kids at the playground.

UPDATE: Chris points out that it makes little sense to compare overall GDP since the population sizes vary so greatly. So here are the same charts, corrected for per-capita GDP:

Still no correlation.

I used a hydraulic jackhammer. I helped make at least 100 crepes. I became desensitized to the sight of breasts. I tried magic berries with the camp across the street, Bat Country (that crew would have made Hunter S. Thomson proud :). I rode a giant birthday cake art car. I rode a double-decker bus. I slid down a six story astroturf ramp. I sat in a metal teardrop and experienced a brief moment of silence. I found Waldo. I jumped on glowing colored discs under a full moon. I got used to hugs instead of hand shakes. I did more bike riding that week than I did the rest of the year combined. I danced to techno music. I don’t even like techno music!

I saw and did things I couldn’t explain even if I wanted to.

I lost four or five pounds.

One thing I didn’t do was take a lot of photos. My still camera, it’s third trip to burning man, was jammed with dust. I do have video clips I shot with my Flip cam though!

The weather was pretty mild at night. I slept in a t-shirt. The dust during the day was insane though. Dustiest year for me so far.

On to the videos!

Here’s a shot of Sebastian (violin) and other members of EQLateral playing inside the Robosapiens dome:

More violin!

The Robosapiens robot sculpture in action, touch screen and all:

This year one of the camps brought a double-friggin-decker bus, like they have in England. The Nowhere Omnibus actually ran on time and had several stops around the Esplenade and the open playa. I shot this from the top of the bus while it was parked in front of center camp. You get a taste for how the dust storms interact with the art pieces out there, shrouding and then revealing.

More bus ride. You can see some of the larger pieces on the open playa, such as the Rocket (video of liftoff below).

I don’t think I can explain this. I think it was broadcasting DNA sequences or something.

This ramp was covered in astroturf. I heard from one of the safety inspectors (yeah, who knew BM even had those?) that it was the leading cause of injuries this year. It was basically the Rugburn Express. I rode down it on a trashcan lid, but this guy kept riding is bike down it over and over:

The rocket “launch” was a pretty bad-ass pyrotechnic display. Stick with it through the multi-colored mushroom clouds:

And finally the Man burning:

I didn’t stick around for the Temple burn sunday night so I have no video of that, unfortunately. I did spend a lot of time there while it still existed and it was quite beautiful. I’ve never been anywhere so soaked in emotion. Massive kudos to Adam and the rest of the Temple crew for such an amazing structure.

I had dreadlocks by the end of the week so when I got home I just got a mohawk instead of untangling them.

I feel compelled to keep the absurdity going.

[Wow, slideshare's embed code is MASSIVE]

I did some reading thanks to some tips from friends and colleagues. In hindsight, my previous post on Health Care and Free Markets is just one more contribution to the noise.

What are blogs for, if not to bloviate? :) Moving on.

Not about Socialized Health Care

I now believe that my assumption that this is going to be a Free Market vs. Socialism debate was false, and regrettable. Nate Silver’s post Not all Socialist Countries are Alike clarified for me the difference between Single Payer and Socialist Health Care. They are not even close to the same thing.

It’s very unlikely that universal socialized medicine would even be proposed let alone enacted in the US. Congress is too scared by Angry Old White People Who Scream* to even suggest it. And structurally, it would be a major upheaval to implement government-run hospitals on the scale necessary to take care of every one. Various Veterans Administration scandals over the past few years don’t help promote the idea either.

Linking Insurance to Employment

The problem of bundling of health insurance with employment was created by a loophole in (federal ?) wage caps during WWII. Conservative and liberal friends of mine both agree about this origin. It started out as a job perk so companies saddled with wage caps could compete for talent, but persisted after the wage caps were lifted. I don’t know why that is, but I’m sure it’s complicated, juicy material for policy geeks. I’ll try to read up on that.

Lighting Candles Instead of Cursing the Darkness

Aaron asked about the existence of a “Credit Union” model for health insurance. Ivan points out some interesting free-market/collective solutions in the form of Captives – a form of insurance gaining popularity with small business and wealthy individuals that works a lot like a credit union. This sounds promising. You pool your financial resources with other individuals into a fund for paying out claims. The money is invested while it’s not being payed out, so you could actually make dividends if claims don’t put a huge dent in it.

My initial impression is to like the idea, but the fact that many Captives are created in the Bahamas and Belize makes me worry that it’s not entirely legit. Shades of Enron. More reading to do on Captives for sure.

Meta

About the spirited healthcare debate itself: Curiously for all the noise, there is currently no bill in congress to debate. The administration has basically recognized that health care is a huge problem and would like to do something about it, but no concrete proposal exist yet. Only speeches.

*All the Death Panelers are either protesting out of complete and utter ignorance of the issue, or (my gut feeling) using the issue as a cover for something much sadder/more sinister: they object to having a black president. Angry old white people want “their” America back, and conservative leadership has latched onto health care as the conduit for their rage. It’s an unfortunate situation if that’s the case, but I can’t think of a simpler explanation for their actions.

I posted a link to You Do Not Have Health Insurance on facebook and got an interesting response from a friend who’s spent a long time studying the subject. He seems to have a very different viewpoint than I do, which makes me question mine. What to do, when smart people disagree with you?

So here’s my position, at the moment:

The current regulatory system may be utterly flawed in its wording and execution, leading to us spending more yet being sicker, to there being no real choice in healthcare, and to there being millions of completely unprotected US citizens. I see that as more of an argument for fixing the regulations than throwing them away completely, though.

My problem is with the idea that the free market will fix this mess if we just stop trying to check its power.

The free market is amoral. It excels at maximizing shareholder value, but that is its singular goal. It has a poor track record of taking care of people. In fact, its wealth-accumulating mission leads it to exploit and control people unless they are checked by government, collective bargaining or other non-corporate power.

Furthermore, it is only accountable to you to the extent that you have lots of money. I’m one of the majority who don’t.

Without healthy people, we have no economy, and no market, free or otherwise. To make healthcare subordinate to the free market to me seems precisely backwards, and in the long run disastrous. Markets have bubbles and crashes and wild rides up and down. Forgive me if I don’t want that greedy, stumbling drunkard telling my doctor what to do. Or rather, having even more of a say in what my doctor does.

What we have right now is a muddled mess, right? Not totally socialized and not totally privatized. So it’s a bad example to use for arguing either side of the privatize/socialize debate. More of a worst-of-both worlds example. The thing is, there are plenty of examples of successful socialized health care systems in other countries. Where are the examples of successful privatized healthcare systems?

So right now, I lean heavily in favor of socialized healthcare.

</sophist-marxism>

Maybes:

Maybe the act of regulation (not just the particular regulations currently in place) caused all of these problems. Something about the relationship between government and the market creates an inevitable, malignant feedback loop. I’m doubtful of this because of cases where regulation has improved things (e.g. forcing automakers to install seatbelts), making me think nothing’s inevitable about that relationship.

Maybe free markets are the natural order of things and we’ve been ignoring or fighting it to our detriment. Like insisting that the world is flat.

Maybe Obama actually is out to control every aspect of our lives.

Maybe there are examples of successful completely privatized healthcare systems in other countries.