Within Reason

• The real tragedy of this election is that far too many Americans believe that the other side is not just wrong about the issues, but fundamentally deceived by one of the candidates. This may be the most prominent symptom of an unhealthy democracy.
• For a long time now, I’ve taken idea of villains who fought solely for evil and destruction as sign of more simple time. But such villains would be plausible nightmares for a people who believed in the inevitable, tremendous progressive power of goodness and believed that such power had been demonstrated in history.
• “Murder” is always immoral, but “killing” may not be. “Charity” and “donating” have the same kind of relationship. Undermining such linguistic connections can have drastic effects on society. This is why Gordon Gecko’s “greed is good” is so insidious.
• The Logitech MX1100 may very well be the ideal mouse for OS X.
• The idea of a development cycle that goes through a “public beta” stage seems incredibly useful in many areas. Criminal justice seems to resist it on pretty deep grounds, though, and in the long run that may be a problem for a building a good society.

This is pretty funny. I’d credit where I found it, but I’ve seen it all over the net today:

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

So in the last four years, we’ve lost Hunter S. Thompson, Vonnegut, Carlin, and now David Foster Wallace. Would all the people we need stop dying please?

[This post is a continuation of Kantopias, Part 1]

So before we look at the details of these Kantopias, there is one last thing that Kant could have said in the third formulation of the Categorical Imperative, and didn’t. He could have argued that we should “act in accordance with universal laws for a merely possible kingdom of ends”. Such a formulation would suggest that we should obey the kind of laws the people of such a kingdom would enact. And certainly we should, but it’s central to Kant’s project that we do not merely follow the laws of morality, but we “construct” them or give them to ourselves.

If the first two formulations make it feel like we might be held hostage to universal laws, or the law to treat others as ends, the third formulation makes it clear that we must be in the driver’s seat of morality. Fortunately, this doesn’t mean that anything goes. Rather, the only laws we can fully and freely give to our rational selves are those of morality — those that others could consistently give to themselves and others as well. In addition, the idea that we give ourselves laws to follow as opposed to following the laws of nature (Aristotle, Hume, and others) or God (Christianity) makes it plausible that the will is acting freely. To be moral is to be rational is to be free.

But what does a kingdom of rational, moral, free individuals look like?

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One of the principal technology problems that a lot of academics face is dealing with keeping files current on more than one computer. Most of us have a computer at work and at least one computer at home. In my case, I have a desktop and a laptop I use for conferences (and, well, in front of the television). Often I’m editing a paper at work that I’ll want to work on at home or on the road. In the past, I’d email the document to myself or stick it on a USB drive or upload it to an ftp server, then retrieve it at home.

These all suffer from a common flaw, though. Because I never really know whether I can trust the email to get through, or the USB drive to stay unlost, or the ftp server to stay alive, I don’t delete the original file on my computer. So when I arrive home, copy the file to that computer, edit it, and start the process in reverse, I end up with a lot of files. Of course, the low-tech solution is to adopt a naming scheme for the files based on the date and time last edited so you know which version is most current. But aside from being a colossal pain in the ass, I found that my desire to actually work rather than worrying about naming resulted in files that had names like “marketing_ethics_paper_latest.txt”, “marketing_ethics_paper_new_version.txt”, and “marketing_ethics_paper_noreallyusethisone.txt”. And I figure that as academics go, I’m actually pretty organized.

Most recently, I’d been using the iDisk portion of Apple’s MobileMe. This kept all of my files on a central server in the “cloud” somewhere at Apple. But the server was so slow that it usually made me want to jab a fork into the ethernet port of my computer rather than work. Plus, there was no local copy unless you wanted to roll the dice on syncing your entire iDisk to your computer. More often than I’m comfortable with, that would fail.

Enter Dropbox.

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