Letter to the Ethicist

Dear Ethicist:

I am a long-time reader of this column and I have never been as dumbstruck as I was by your response yesterday in E-Book Dodge. In both reasoning and conclusion your response was, in contemporary parlance, a great big bowl of wrong.

First, while an illegal act is not automatically unethical, as we live in a society of laws, deliberate law-breaking should be restricted to situations where ethics demand it. Mere convenience does not meet this bar.

Second, the comparison to “buying a CD, then copying it to your iPod” is invalid, since doing so for personal use is explicitly legal in the United States (see http://mp3.about.com/od/digitalmusicfaq/f/CDripping_legal.htm).

Most significantly, you provide no ethical justification for the statement that "buying a book or a piece of music should be regarded as a license to enjoy it on any platform." Indeed, it appears to be based on the dubious and – dare I say it – anachronistic notion that the primary value of content is in the physical media with which it is transmitted and not the content itself. A sounder ethical principle would be that the individual or organization that owns the right to distribute the content – ideally its creator – decides what the appropriate value is on different platforms. It may be short-sighted of Apple Records to not make “Abbey Road” available for me to download when I’ve already purchased it on LP, cassette, and CD, but ethically speaking it is their right.

Finally, the statement that “no potential pirate will actually realize” when someone downloads an illegal copy is simply incorrect. Basic web site logging enables the provider of pirated content to track the who, what, and when of access to such content.

Sincerely,
Daniel Glasser

My first new car

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It was twenty years ago today:  When I bought my first new car, that is.  At the time I was driving a beat-up Datsun B210 that I’d purchased 2 1/2 years earlier for $650, so with some savings in the bank I was able to afford something new.

I looked at a bunch of compact four-door sedans in the $15,000 range, like the VW Jetta and the Mazda 626, before settling on the Acura Integra.  I opted for the "high-end" GS model to get anti-lock brakes.  Acuras didn’t have a lot of factory options at the time (nor do they now) and the main dealer-installed option I added was air conditioning.  I also got my first real taste of the new car purchasing experience, which predictably wasn’t fun.

One of the creature comforts that this car lacked was map lights, which were introduced in the following year’s model (along with the Acura logo).  A friend who test drove my car and ended up buying a 1991 Integra reminded me about the lack of map lights for years.  I had another friend who bought nearly the identical car a few months after I did, down to the color — the only differences were that she opted for a sunroof instead of AC and had a different color dealer-added body stripe — and was afraid I’d be upset with her for copying me.

I drove the car for seven years before replacing it, at which point I shipped it to my sister, who used it for the rest of its natural life.  (The above pictures were taken from the shipping company’s lot in 1997.) The car I replaced it with and the car I replaced that one with both arrived in March, so there must be something about me and buying new cars at the onset of spring.

What Are Those Things Sticking Out of My Car’s Front Doors?

It’s not clear to me that most drivers use their car’s side mirrors.  What is clear is that those who do often don’t have their mirrors adjusted properly.  The notion seems to be that you need to be able to see the sides of your car in your side mirrors to ensure that you can see what’s alongside it.

The point was well made last year in the New York Times in Are Blind Spots a Myth?  People are now spending over $1000 to purchase an option to accomplish something that can be just as easily achieved but adjusting their damn mirrors properly.

More recently Car and Driver covered the subject, complete with helpful illustrations (left).  Like last year’s New York Times piece, it refers to a paper published by the Society of Automotive Engineers back in 1995.  The technique is to adjust “the mirrors so far outward that the viewing angle of the side mirrors just overlaps that of the cabin’s rearview mirror.”  In other words, you get a lot more benefit from your side mirrors when they don’t show you the same thing that your rearview mirror shows.

I don’t know what they teach in driver’s ed these days but when I took it, this was not something that was taught.  We were taught that large blind spots are inevitable and the only way to avoid them is to turn your head at least 90 degrees before changing lanes.  Admittedly, this lesson may have been a throwback to the days when many cars did not come with right-side mirrors.  Oh, yes, and I did take driver’s ed in Manhattan.

Years later I learned about proper mirror adjustment on my own, though when I took advanced driver training through BMW CCA PSR, I observed it taught in practice for the first time.  As the instructor put it, “You know what the side of your car looks like, so why do you need to see it in your mirrors?”

I am not Danny Glover

Because of the similarity of our names, I have periodically had people refer to me by name as “Danny Glover.”  For a time it was more common at work because of a historical artifact regarding my work email address.  One person in particular seemed to take particular pleasure in this.

In fact, it has sometimes been hard to prove to people that I am not Danny Glover.  Perhaps they believe I bear a striking physical resemblance.  If only, I thought, I could be in the same place at the same time as him, I would have definitive evidence.  Now, it happens that around thirty years ago he stood not ten feet from me, when I saw him perform Blood Knot in New York City, but at the time he was not famous and it did not occur to me to document the event.

Fortunately, fate provided me a new opportunity tonight.  I was out to dinner at Nishino and my dinner companion observed that Danny Glover or someone strongly resembling him had entered the restaurant.  We later confirmed via observing some fawning encounters that it was in fact the Danny Glover.  While I did not disrupt his privacy by asking him to pose for a photo with me, I do at least have a witness who can confirm the event.

True Nostalgia and False Nostalgia

Both of which are brought up by It’s Football in January, but Minus the Weather.

 

I have nostalgia for the days when the New York Times had editorial standards that wouldn’t let the word "Sigh" pass as a first-person expression of disgust, let alone as an entire paragraph.  It’s one of the evils of email communication that should never have been validated by the Gray Lady.

 

Unlike the author of this article, however, I have little nostalgia for the cold weather playoff games of yore.  What I remember is:

Northern Team + Weak Division =>
Artificially Good Regular Season Record =>
Home Field Advantage in the Playoffs =>
Northern Team hosting Southern Team for the Conference Championship in Bitter Cold =>
Overrated Northern Team going to a Warm Weather Super Bowl =>
Top Four Teams in the Other Conference Competing for the Right To Beat Northern Team in the Super Bowl

As evidence, consider the Minnesota Vikings (0-4, defeated by four different AFL/AFC teams from 1969-1976) and the Buffalo Bills (0-4, defeated by three different NFC teams from 1990-1993).

More reasons to love Costco

[As if I needed them.]

1. I ordered something from Costco.com.  Between when I ordered it and when it shipped, they dropped the price by $30.  I called their customer service line and they agreed to refund the difference, no questions asked.  OK, two questions:  They asked me the order number and they asked me to confirm the price difference.
2. I purchased a three-pack of HP inkjet cartridges a while ago. I used up the first cartridge and installed the second cartridge and discovered shortly thereafter that the second cartridge was defective.  I went back to the warehouse with the packaging (including the third, unused cartridge) and the defective second cartridge but no receipt.  They said that because I’d used “less than half”, they would give me a full refund. Again, no questions asked.

Alleged H1N1 vaccine distribution unfairness

I don’t understand why people are so bent out of shape about the notion that rich folks might get priority access to the H1N1 vaccine*.  Don’t they realize that this is a big part of the reason that the United States has the world’s best healthcare system?

 

* – A concern, by the way, that seems largely blown out of proportion.  Sure, large NYC employers like Wall Street banks are getting doses of the vaccine, but at least in theory they’re supposed to be giving it to the portion of their employee populations that are in high-risk groups for medical reasons.  Like owning a yacht.

What I Want In My Next Mobile Phone

I’ve had my current mobile phone (a Samsung Blackjack) for nearly three years, and while it has served me reasonably well, I’m overdue for an upgrade.

Here are some of the things I want in my next phone that would improve upon my current experience:

1. Not taking two or more minutes from the time I turn the phone on until it’s actually useful.
2. Not freezing on startup (occasionally more than once per day), requiring me to remove the battery and restart.
3. Not being unable to connect to the network after startup (also occasionally more than once per day and usually associated with a stuck ATU_NITZ and/or clocknot process), requiring me to turn the phone off and turn it on again.
4. A battery that lasts long enough that I’m not always carrying around a spare battery.
5. The ability to be charged via its USB connection even if the battery is completely drained.
6. A Bluetooth stack that is compatible with Microsoft Voice Command.
7. A web browser whose default home page is accessible.
8. A web browser that can view rich web pages reasonably well.
9. A higher quality camera.
10. Built-in GPS.

Does the United States need a CAT?

Having recently read David Kessler’s book The End of Overeating and Michael Pollan’s essay Big Food vs. Big Insurance, I have a proposal for how to address a major health care issue.  Create a “Calorie added tax” that applies to prepared food served in restaurants.  Whether it’s based on the number of calories in the food served or is truly analogous to a Value added tax, it seems like it would be a relatively straightforward way to address the issues that Kessler and Pollan raise.

It appears that the biggest issue with our public health in the United States today is that we are consuming too much unhealthy food – for which calorie count is a useful proxy – and this is leading to a whole series of obesity-related problems.  In addition to Kessler’s observations about the food-production industry’s role in engineering food for maximum palatability, leading to overconsumption, I’ve heard Adam Drewnowski observe that while historically less healthy food had a higher cost per calorie, today the reverse is increasingly true (as Pollan notes about government corn subsidies leading to the increased use of high fructose corn syrup).  Generally speaking, healthier food now costs more per calorie, so people acting in their economic self-interest have a less healthy diet.

If a calorie tax rewards both producers and consumers for fewer calories being served and eaten, or the tax on those increased calories is used to offset the associated health costs of our societal overconsumption, then perhaps we can reverse in some measure the current cost per calorie relationship.

In practice there would be many details to work out:  What’s the definition of “prepared food”?  Is it just restaurants, or does prepared food purchased in a supermarket count?  Does cola purchased in a restaurant get the tax and cola purchased for consumption at home not?  How do you prevent it from being a regressive tax for low-income people who don’t have convenient access to healthier food?  While these may sound hard, states deal with these issues today on a regular basis when assessing sales tax.  It’s not perfect, but it can be made to work.

Is this likely to happen?  I doubt it.  I imagine that Coca-Cola, McDonalds, and many other industrial powerhouses would fight it vigorously.  But if the predictions of the experts are true, we could be on track for a major health-care crisis in the United States and other developed nations.

If you read this and are inclined to be judgmental about people who are overweight or eat too much unhealthy food, I encourage you to read Kessler’s book.  He makes a compelling case that overeating is a by-product of our food industry’s exploitation of humans’ evolutionary history, and that blaming people for this is not much more sensible than blaming people for the color of their hair.

Back to School Remarks 2001

Having read Obama’s prepared remarks to school students, I’m trying to imagine what George W. Bush would have said in a similar context.  Probably something like this:

"… and so, my advice to you students is to be born rich, white, and male.  And it doesn’t really matter how hard you work in school or how many times you screw up, as long as you can rely on your family connections to keep getting you out of jams."