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Since there’s not really anything to talk about, I’ll just link you to this post I wrote for Jewschool.  Wouldn’t you know it, Alan Dershowitz is back again!

I’ve been using Apple products all my life.  I’ve always found them to be of terrific quality, and I’ve always been better treated by the company in sale and support terms.  I’ve also spent years as an Apple Certified Macintosh Technician.  I camped out for an iPhone 3G and spent a long time arguing AT&T into giving me a subsidized 3G S after the 3G was stolen.  I have just about as much loyalty to the Apple brand as anyone.

But I know which way the wind is blowing.  If Apple keeps going down the road of intense user control, doesn’t give up the exclusivity contract with AT&T, and continues to break with Google, I’m not going to stick with them.  Google Android, Chrome, and Chrome OS once it exists (not to mention more well-established software like Ubuntu, which I already consider second only OS X), are all completely viable alternatives.  I already have all of my email addresses (including MobileMe, which I get for free as a certified Apple Sales Professional) redirecting to Gmail, and it provides all the services MobileMe does, except for Find My iPhone, and for free.  See my general rule for computing.  It still applies.

So, while I think that Apple is still a generally moral company, one that is providing terrific services to its users, I hope they realize that down the road they are only going to be able to restrict us so far.  Google has done an incredible job of making it really easy to switch to their services, and as we offload more and more of our data storage and processing power to the cloud, that ease of transition and context-switching is a big advantage.  Either it will keep Apple honest, or I’ll switch.  I’m definitely not enough of a fanboy to stick with Apple when there’s a better alternative.  Until that point, I’ll continue to defend them as the best hardware and software provider, but I’m not blind to reality.

Thus, I publicly declare Apple not to be the infallible god that its fanpersons so often claim it is.  And I call on its directors and customers to take it in a direction that continues to provide good products and services, rather than one that treats its customers, as so many other tech companies have, as endlessly ignorant moneybags.  I, for one, will not put up with that.  We’re used to getting good value from Apple, and if we stop getting it, we’ll move on.

1. Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.
2. Collateral damage.
3. The Internet Freedom Act.

What do these things actually mean?  Answers:

1. Illegal wiretapping (courtesy of the Bush administration).
2. Dead civilians (courtesy of just about everyone ever).
3. For-profit bandwidth throttling (courtesy of Sen. John McCain, #1 beneficiary of telecom lobby money)

Honestly, I’m pretty pissed of at Sen. McCain.  Every time I think he’s reestablished himself as a paragon of GOP morality in an ever-more-decadent political climate, he slips up again.  Given the state of rural broadband, there are a lot of people who can get service from only one ISP, and the idea that that ISP should have the right to control what that person does and doesn’t see is just ridiculous.

Dear GOP: The only thing your insistence on absolute (there it is again) government non-interventionism does is let someone else do the intervening.  If you don’t make it illegal for someone to take away someone else’s civil liberties, rest assured that someone will find a way to do it, and to make money off it.  Healthcare.  Social Security.  Internet.

America, wake up and smell the coffee.  The people defending corporations and saying that they need protection from the big bad government are getting paid to do so.  The reality is that a culture of profit in this country is deeply entrenched.  Government regulations aren’t changing that.  We are not poised on the brink of communism, despite what John Boehner, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh would like you to think.  This country is more firmly capitalist than perhaps any other.

So now, can we make it a little more moral?  Or is that too much to ask of you right-wing GOP extremists who care about nothing but where your campaign money’s coming from?  Now, I know I’m sounding like just another left-wing nutjob, but Matt Yglesias was right when he said that Alan Grayson had broken an unspoken rule.  And Barney Frank’s comment about Grayson was just as accurate.  If the left would just stop bowing to the GOP’s attention to minute details and stick to the moral message, we’d win.  I happen to think we’re right on both fronts, so I fully support and engage in debate on financial details of Democrat’s plans, but I think that the reason we’re bogged down in that is that we’ve lost sight of the moral message.  If we worked to reframe the debate in terms of “whose political morals are in support of the people?”, we’d practically have won.  If we can talk to Americans in terms they understand about moral differences, instead of leaving that entirely to the GOP, they’d listen.  Democrats have never been good at this – Grayson is refreshing.

Let’s follow his example.  No more dodging points and hiding behind euphemisms.  The right does out of dishonesty.  The left does it out of  inaptitude.  If we both stopped, we’d have one person saying “I want to ensure that corporations continue to profit” and another saying “I want to ensure that you have money to stay healthy”.

The choice is clear.

It’s pretty different, to say the least.  Living on my own poses some definite challenges.  I have a nasty cold, and there is no one to bring me soup or tea.  And I realized that I didn’t know where the Health Services building was.  That’s no good.  I had to go out and buy myself a thermometer and cough syrup.  I mean, in normal life, these are just things that I expect to be there.  But I guess someone had to buy them at some point.  Which is an interesting thing to think about.  At what point in your life, living on your own or with someone else, do you buy household things?  Plates, Advil, soap, etc.?  I guess I’m more self-sufficient now.

I’m swamped with work.  And that’s even after I switched out of the basic freshmen Chem class down to an introductory one that is more appropriate to my level.  I’m in a math class that’s intended more for math majors, so it’s very theoretical and proof-based.  I like it, but it’s definitely my most difficult class.

I also don’t really like having huge lecture classes.  There are so many people in them who have so many interesting things to say, but I don’t get to here most of them.  It’s a bummer.  It’s also demoralizing, and a hard thing to pay attention to first thing in the morning because of how impersonal it is.

I’m adjusting to the whole experience in some ways, but in others I think my Western-MA, small-homey-school mentality that I’ve been operating within my whole life is pretty deeply embedded in me.  And I’m okay with that.  I find myself feeling lost in such a huge place as this.  Not to say that I don’t have friends or feel comfortable around people.  I just don’t like not knowing everyone.  It’s weird that I see people I don’t recognize every day.  In my dorm, even.  I feel like if you live in the same building as people, you should know them.  It’s weird.

I’m definitely learning a lot.  I do have one class that’s a small seminar, on Talmud, which is great.  I mean, all of my classes are, but this one’s just very personal, and the other people in it are really smart and talkative.  We’re going to cover various aspects of the Talmud, including historical background and context, legality, morality, ethics, and others.

Also, I am swing dancing weekly.

It’s going to be a good four years.  Tiring, but good.

First of all, I should say that I’m a bit ashamed to call it a debate.  I’m tired of trying to include in discussion those who don’t wish to be discussed with.  And I fully support the notion of decrying them as such.  Good job, Congress.

We’re letting the policy discussion on this issue be co-opted.  I know I’ve written about this before, but it’s an issue that I continue to see additional sides to, additional angles from which to approach it.

I’ve moved past the “no cooperation” phase, but I’m feeling more and more strongly about the GOP’s essential hypocrisy: claiming to support reform and oppose the slew of Democratic plans for moral reasons, but failing to generate any serious proposal based on those so-called morals that supposedly resonate so strongly with the American public (as if a lawmaker has the right to make blanket statements about what “Americans” want).

And another thing: GOP attempts to portray this as a scientifically hasty and baseless move should be looked in the same light as climate deniers: lying.  Because they’re wrong.  If they know that (which they must), they’re lying.  If they don’t, they should, and that’s a serious enough breach that they deserve to lose their elected positions.

No one is “ramming” a health care bill through Congress.  Obama’s disengagement from the legislative process up until his speech was, I believe, responsible for how slowly the whole thing moved.  And in practical terms, we’ve been “studying” this phenomenon for half a century.  I don’t think Obama’s going to get his wish of being the last president to take up health care (although I fully intend that this should be the last time such a major overhaul is required), but he’s right that this is not a new problem.

Joe Wilson, you’ve now been formally reprimanded.  Chuck Grassley, you voted for the same thing you’re now calling “death panels”.  Michelle Bachmann, you expect us to take you seriously when you say stuff like this?  To you, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and every other fear-mongering racist xenophobe out there: sit down.

Evan Handler is totally right.  This thing’s going to happen sooner or later.  To the Democrats: how much more time will you waste?  Let’s get something done, and, come 2010, let’s not be afraid to remind people who it was who did it.  GOP, either become advocates of progress, or stop labeling yourself as such.  Really, I have no problem with supporting a status quo in a vacuum.  It’s not like everything always has to change.  But saying that you support change while stubbornly working against it is dishonest.  You might gain some seats in 2010 for it, but does that matter?  Obama’s already been quoted as saying that he wouldn’t mind being a one-term president if that’s what it takes to get meaningful health care reform.  Democrats, this puts the ball in your court.  If you don’t sell the package well enough, then the GOP can ride in on a white horse in 2010 and 2012 and repeal whatever does pass.

It’s up to us now to prevent that from happening.  This is something that the vast majority of Americans will benefit from.  Lawmakers, don’t let your opponents shout you down about that.  They’re loud, but wrong.

And as for we the people?  The pressure can’t let up.  Every person in this country with misinformed opinions, who gets their analysis from rich white people and has never bothered looking around at the rest of society, or who stops short of condemning people like Glenn Beck for what they are is going to cost us down the road.  Economically, as we shoulder the bill for emergency room care for the illegal immigrants those people want excluded (out of some pathetic sense of patriotism even when it’s to your direct financial advantage not to exclude those people).  Diplomatically, as we lose even more credit in the eyes of the world.

And ultimately, morally.  I’m not threatening my opponents with some kind of judgment in the world to come.  But if we fail to do this, we, as a society, slip further away from our already tenuous grasp on the claim of high moral standards.  That alone is enough to make this fight worth it to me.

So, a summary of the argument.  Progressives: Health care reform is a moral imperative.  GOP: But it’s too expensive.

Seriously, guys?  Get your priorities straight.

“In a functioning civil society, people take care of each other.”  Elizabeth Smith, the 27-year old Kansas waitress who was laughed at by her Representative (Lynn Jenkins) and told to “go be a grown-up” when she told Jenkins that she’d lost her insurance and her son hadn’t seen a doctor in almost two years (receiving only ER care) because she couldn’t pay for insurance or check-ups, said it best.  Would any GOP lawmaker dare disagree with that statement directly?

And if they would, what the hell are they doing in the federal government?

I’ve been at Brown now since yesterday morning.  I’ve met SO many interesting people, and there are so many more to meet.  One of the biggest transitions has definitely been class size.  PVPA, all six grades, is less than a quarter the size of just the incoming freshman class here.  It’s SO BIG!  I’m coming to terms with the fact that I will not know everyone.  But I am making some good friends.

People are really friendly.  Especially when you remember that they’re all in the same boat as you; they’re nervous about meeting people as well.  If I suspend my judgment long enough to meet someone, I usually find them to be interesting and really engaging.  So it’s been a really rewarding experience so far.

Orientation programming continues essentially through Tuesday, when our first academic meetings with advisors occur.  I also have two job interviews on Tuesday and another on Thursday, all for on-campus jobs.  They are all really interesting positions, so I will be figuring that out pretty soon.

Things are coming together.  There’s certainly a lot to keep track of, but I feel pretty on top of it, especially with the help of the advisors and orientation committee, who’ve been awesome.

So far, a big thumbs up.  College is pretty fun.

Driving south on I-880 from San Francisco to Alameda, we ran out of gas.  I pulled over to the shoulder, turned on the hazards, and took a breath.  I tried starting the car again, and was surprised to find that it worked.  So I pulled out, and continued on, planning to get gas at the next exit.  About a quarter mile later, it started coughing again, and I figured “Uh oh, this is really it”.  Now, of course, there was no shoulder to speak of, and we were going uphill.  The engine gave out completely, and I got as far to the right as I could, still blocking the lane entirely.  Since we were right in front of an entrance ramp, a large traffic jam ensued.  Most people were polite, pulling around us as I waved them by.  I was considering my options as far as Triple A and the like, when I felt a bump, and then another.  I turned around, and there was a man in a pickup truck repeatedly backing up and bumping into me.  I waved him by, but he wouldn’t stop.  I was getting worried for my safety (my sister was in the car also), so I decided the best thing to do was to call 911.  Of course as soon as I did, he pulled away, and I couldn’t see his license plate.  So much for him.  The dispatcher told me he’d send a tow truck over and an officer in the meantime to check on me.  No sooner had I hung up with him than a man tapped on the window, with a large Mack truck idling behind me.  ”I’m a tow truck on break,” he said.  ”I can give you a push to the nearest exit if you want.”  This was a very generous offer, but I had to turn him down, since I already had an officer and a truck on the way.  So I told him thank you so much for the thought, but I’ll be fine.  No sooner had he pulled away, than a Triple A truck pulled up in front of me.  Now I was confused.  The 911 dispatcher had said the truck would be from Micky’s towing in Oakland.  What was going on?

I was soon to find out.  The Micky’s truck appeared next to me, and honked its horn loudly.  It pulled up closer to the Triple A truck, and honked again.  The Triple A truck skulked away.  I, of course, was ecstatic.  I had just witnessed a tow truck battle!  Over the right to tow me!  What a sight!  Now the whole thing was worth it.  I felt so proud, to be the subject of a confrontation between two grease-covered burly men with chains and pneumatic lifts!

Except that then the tow truck driver told me there was, by virtue of a state contract between the Highway Dept. and any service truck, a $175 fee for being towed off the freeway.  This was an issue.  I dropped a whole lot of money on fixing my dad’s car the other week, after a minor scrape that did some serious damage to the steering (although no one nor any property was hurt at all), so I didn’t really want to pay.  Fortunately, the police officer arrived at the same time, and extremely kindly offered to push me off of the freeway.  So, with my sister hyperventilating in the passenger seat and the Micky’s truck preceding us with flashing lights, the cop bumped and shoved our beat-up Nissan pickup all the way off of the freeway.  From there, the tow truck brought us to a gas station.  And when I asked him what we owed him for the tow (expecting to have to bargain down from $175, since he had essentially towed us), he said “Don’t worry about it”!  I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

And now it gets interesting.  After shelling out $50 for a full tank of $3.15/gallon California gasoline, I got in the car, and was ready to head back to the house to rendezvouz with my aunt and uncle and head out to their purportedly-really-awesome friends’ house for dessert.  ”Don’t worry,” I said jauntily to my sister as we buckled up.  ”We’ll be home in five minutes.”  Everything was just fine.

Just fine, that is, until I turned the key.

The engine sputtered.

It coughed.

But it wouldn’t turn over.

I was flabbergasted.  The other night when I took this ancient jalopy out for the first time, we had had to jump it first, but since then I had been using it to drive back and forth between my aunt and uncle’s place in Alameda and my grandparents in San Francisco with no problems.  I asked the gas station attendant for a jump.  They didn’t have one.  I asked security (we were in inner-city Oakland).  They didn’t have one.  So I called my uncle, who was on his way home from a late day at work, and he said he’d come by.  So we waited.  I tried cleaning the battery terminals with a cardboard coffecup thermal holder, but to no avail.  That Nissan wasn’t budging.

Eventually, of course, he arrived, and we jumped the car with no problems, and drove home.  So ended the saga.

It was a damn long night.  We had to cancel the dinner plans, and were unable to reschedule them for tomorrow as had been hoped.

So it goes.

The saga of my purchasing of the new iPhone 3G S began yesterday, when my mom asked why I hadn’t camped out for the new iPhone.  I explained to her the upgrade eligibility requirements, which resulted in my being unable to buy an iPhone at the unsubsidized price until December 12th.  She tried to find a way around it, and we spent a while on the phone, somewhat unsuccessfully.  The result was that I went to the Apple Store in Holyoke today to try to badger them into giving me a phone for the cheap price.  They couldn’t for any of the reasons we had thought of, but it turned out my father’s line (on the family plan) was eligible for an upgrade, so we bought the phone through that line, and then went to the AT&T store and had them switch it.  This took two full trips back and forth, but it got done, and the result is that I have the new iPhone, which is awesome.  I’m still working on a case for it, but the new features seem to be pretty great.

This evening I was in Natick seeing Cadence with two other members of 5-Alone.  The show was excellent.  They did a lot more jazz standard and barbershop type stuff than I was expecting.  It was all good, but some of it felt a little recursive after a while.  Except for the Cole Porter.  Cole Porter is really the best.  You just can’t beat him in terms of standards.  Fabulous.

It has been an extremely successful day.

I have four books that I need to read right now, five if I count one for Brown (summer work!).  One is not in the library yet – Seeds of Terror, which is about the connection between Al Qaeda and the Afghan opium poppy trade.  I saw the author being interviewed on The Daily Show, and she was one of the smartest people I had ever seen.  So I reserved the book right then, and am waiting to read it.  I have with me The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I’ve been meaning to read for a while and I think will start tonight, The Cluetrain Manifesto, which is about the way the Internet is changing business, and a book by the Motley Fool about direct investing.  I think I will write reviews of each after I finish.

Lacking the motivating force of school as a timekeeper is making it difficult for me to coalesce my thoughts into an actual blog post.  I still have plenty to write about, but it’s less natural to write about it.  I think this will be responsible in part for some shifts in the way I approach this site in the coming months.

That being said, I do have some pretty interesting stuff to write about.  Today me and my friend presented our honors project to the Rise and Fall of the Great Powers class back at high school (remember that place?).  It was cool to be back there – for the first time since graduation.  I felt out-of-place already.  I’ve moved on, and new people have taken my place.  And that’s as it should be.  People shouldn’t waste their time and effort hanging on to lingering memories.  I want to be remembered, but I don’t want to be canonized (not that I expect to be) or overly retained.  So I sort of felt as though I was injecting myself back into the lives and routines of people who I should be leaving alone.  But it was nice to see them, and people were happy to see me, so I felt okay about it.  Also, the presentation went really well.  Originally, it was going to consist of a lecture by the two of us, and a simulation we designed to demonstrate some of the economic principles we dealt with in the project.  However, we ended up doing the project later than we had expected, and we only had about an hour for the whole thing.  So, last night we designed an extremely stripped-down version of the simulation with the intent of demonstrating Gresham’s Law, a simple but extremely important principle.  The simulation worked PERFECTLY.  We hadn’t had time to test it out on our own by playing it a couple times, but it went exactly as we had hoped.  We created a small system for buying and selling commodities (corn and iron [represented by corn kernels (intended for burning for ethanol) and steel hex nuts]) and a system for switching between gold and silver bullion (raw metal).  The commodities could be bought and sold in either gold or silver, creating a ratio between the two (simulating the effect a government-regulated currency would have), but the bullion exchange forum (representing goldsmiths, a historically accurate and important figure), operated on its own terms (historically speaking, according to the amounts of bullion available).  This creates an imbalance, and allows people to make a profit by exchanging currencies.  By manipulating the prices of the commodities and the bullion ratio available at the goldsmith station, we were able to force one currency entirely out of circulation.  We did this both ways; we first started with silver being hoarded and gold spent, and within the span of about two turns, we turned it around entirely.  We also employed paper currency for silver at the commodity stations, adding a twist, as it could be used to buy and sell, but not to exchange for bullion.  Also historically accurately, the winner had an extremely wide margin, almost three times the amount of money as the loser.  Our simulation elegantly proved Gresham’s Law, and also sort of proved capitalism too; that the more money you have the more you can make.  So that was a great success.

Also speaking of money, now that I have a debit card, Mint.com, which I was already using, has become vastly more useful.  I am starting to be able to track how much money I spend on what, and set budgets.  Within the next few months, I think I’ll gain a lot of insight into where my money goes, and how to spend it more effectively.  I also figured out that you can add your PayPal account to Mint, which is nifty.

I have been submerging myself in resources on investing.  Right now, I’m leaning towards ShareBuilder for a brokerage, because of their low fees.  Since I’m doing long-term investing, it doesn’t matter that they’re executing trades only once a week at maximum.  However, I’ve realized that I should research direct investing before committing to a brokerage account.  If I can do that effectively, I can avoid a lot of fees.  I would then have to keep track of my own investments, but with the help of Google Finance that shouldn’t be too hard.  I hope to have a substantial amount of money invested and in my planned Roth IRA within a few weeks.