Rants And Quick Hits

 * There really ought to be a law forcing firms to make their IT systems accept names that many current databases do not, such as hyphenated names, names with apostrophes, names with accented letters, single names with two words and a space, and names with only one or two letters in them. It is such a godawful pervasive form of discrimination against a specified class of people (that includes me, my son's girlfriend, and my wife and in-laws even before we married). It is also very easy to fix with only a modest amount of non-laziness.

* I similarly hate the limitations on file names in many Microsoft Products (One Drive/Sharepoint, here's looking at you) that other programs lack. This is one of Microsoft's many sins that is a persistent pain in the ass.

* There ought to be a defense to disabled parking offenses for someone who doesn't have a tag or license plate but is actually assisting a disabled person in their car on a particular trip.

* The construction trades really ought to be regulated at the state level, rather than having separate licenses for every municipality and for the unincorporated part of every county, usually without even any reciprocity system.

* Building codes should be a copyright free part of the public record. So should the Restatements of Law. It is unconscionable for authoritative sources of law to be available solely on a pay per view basis. If necessary, have the government use the power of eminent domain to buy out the copyright holders.

* Hurray for the iPhone abandoning under E.U. insistence, the lightning power connector in favor of a USB-C connection. The U.S. government should have done the same thing.

* I dread the potential merger of Kroger and Albertsons, which would put almost every "regular" grocery store in Colorado (in contrast to niche organic or gourmet grocery stores with higher prices) under common ownership except a few stores divested to Win-Dixie in an effort to appease regulators (which could easy close down a few years later). A grocery store monopoly in Colorado would be horrible for consumers, and would likewise be horrible in other states similarly impacted.

* Unpopular opinion, but 1950s houses and "mid-century modern" are extremely fugly, far more so than the new homes criticized for that today.

* U.S. cities really made an early strategic mistake in classifying sidewalks as easements that property owners have to maintain to a certain standard of maintenance and snow removal, rather than as public roads for pedestrians which would be maintained by the city as part of its general expenses from property tax and other revenues the way that city streets are handled. Sidewalks are a "network" asset that work only as well as the worst link in the network, and collectivized snow removal would be vastly more efficient (and prevent a lot of injuries and deaths of the elderly and infirm trying to do it themselves) than the status quo of homeowner clearing of sidewalks.

* Someday, when I am not dealing with more urgent repairs like the remedying of the removal of a structural wall that a contractor said wasn't a structural wall, I will get around to replacing the last couple hundred square feet of conventional lawn in my home with a lower maintenance xeriscape alternative. Bluegrass lawns make absolutely no sense in the arid western U.S. I really like the Western U.S. centered Sunset magazine aesthetic and cultural movement that is responsive to its local conditions in that regard and I am pleased to learn that is hasn't gone out of business even though it suspended publication for a number of months and isn't as widely available in grocery store magazine stands anymore:

In March 2020, with the magazine struggling financially due to loss of advertising revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic, the company put most of its employees on unpaid leave. During the pandemic, the company briefly ceased printing the magazine but returned to print with the December 2020 issue.

* In the same vein as xeriscaping, the Western U.S. should transition to something like the Old Mexico daily schedule that is quiescent in the hot midday, but has more public activity in the evenings. 

* Similarly, the American business and professional class should continue to recognize that business suits and ties invented to meet the needs of professional in London, Berlin, Paris, and Northern Italy are ill-suited to sweltering summers of most of the United States which are virtually unknown in Europe (most of which doesn't even routinely need air condition in the summer). French and British colonists themselves didn't feel so constrained when they presided over colonial governments in tropical Africa and India in shorts and short sleeves. Americans need not straight jacket themselves into Ataturk's mandate that businessmen and professionals in Turkey wear wool, European style suits and top hats in the early 1900s in an effort to "modernize" (even though his basic insight that cultural change in inseparable from modernization and economic development wasn't fundamentally wrong). We need to think more like the Japanese on the verge of ending a long period of isolation, whose Emperor sent emissaries out all over the world to see how other countries more advanced than them at the time did things and then picked, chose, and adapted Western ways of doing things in a way that was sensitive to their own local conditions and culture.

* The big picture is that we should be changing our culture to be in better harmony with the conditions of the world we live in, rather than being so tradition bound culturally, whether its yards, the hours we have dinner and work outside, or our clothing.

* The U.S. has backfilled its falling total fertility rate a.k.a. TFR (i.e. number of children per women per lifetime) with immigration to keep its population stable as it has undergone demographic transition with its economic development. The capacity of China, Japan, Korea, and Japan to do the same, in a manner that is within the realm of the politically possible is much more difficult. None of these cultures is very receptive to immigration. This is true even between these East Asian nations with a lot of shared history and culture. Korean migrants are ill treated in China and Japan. Chinese people aren't too welcome in China either. Korea has an officially sponsored pride in its national homogeneity although South Korean farmers who can't find wives are starting to secure wives from Southeast Asia especially. China's 1.4 billion people with dramatically falling TFR has a need for people to refill its workforce that greatly exceeds the supply of people willing to relocate there. Maybe it is good to have a smaller global population as we are approaching peak global population, to place less of a strain on our planet's carrying capacity, and maybe the demographic transition that comes with economic development reflects a buried hidden wisdom that a higher standing of living ideally supports fewer people.

* The similarities between much of the Islamic world and the Victorian era and early 20th century are striking. It suggests that the Islamic world may sooner or later experience a cultural transition similar to the West from the Victorian era to the present. In the fights over the hijab in Iran, we see echos of the 1920s flappers. Most Islamic countries are treating women a lot better now than they did half a century ago even though it can be hard to see when comparing these countries to the modern West. Even though Islam allows polygamy, Tunisia and Turkey have banned it as a matter of secular law that doesn't force anyone to do something that Islam bans. The death penalty and corporal punishment are much more common in the Islamic world than in the West (and this is also common in communist countries for some reason), but apart from holdouts like Iran and Saudi Arabia, its declined a lot just as it did in industrial era Europe. Countries like Iran and Turkey are genuine, if flawed, Islamic democracies, although Afghanistan seems to have regressed. What does the Islamic transition to modernity look like? How does a global transition to a post-petroleum economy impact that?

* The nation's legal system is really digging into Trump. On the civil side, he had to settle the Trump U. case, he lost the rape/defamation case, he lost a major motion for summary judgment in a case in New York related to asset value fraud. And then he has the New York criminal fraud case, the January 6 case, the Georgia election fraud case, and the Florida classified documents case, all on track as the election comes in. And, the insurrection disqualification cases are pending.

* In 1970s the G-7 countries contained 67% of global GDP, today it's only 30%. There is every reason to think that this trend will continue. It is easier to have a higher GDP growth rate percentage when you are copying economic solutions and technologies that someone else has already proven to work successfully than it is to come up with new ways to grow the economy from scratch. So the percentage gap between G-7 countries and non-G-7 countries in GDP per capita should narrow and at the same time, less economically developed countries are growing as their population grows at a higher percentage rate than more economically developed countries whose populations are often shrinking or stagnant. As the G-7 countries dominate the global economy less strongly over time, all sorts of things change, among them the character of international trade and the feasibility of an across the board export based economy like the U.S. had post-WWII because WWII destroyed the economic infrastructure of the rest of the world more than it did the economic infrastructure of the U.S. which just had to shift its factories from making swords to making ploughshares. Probably, we'll see more orientation towards domestic production and more specialized export markets in each country.

* Intellectual property laws and privacy laws need reforms. IP laws need to be weaker. Privacy laws need to be more manageable - our current reactions are too cumbersome and overrate privacy against other values, including free speech.