Context
I ran across this article in the Shreveport Times this morning about the Federal Reserve and Congress trying to determine the best method for regulating debit card fees, as mandated by last year's financial overhaul bill. The difficulty appears to be in getting merchants and banks to share the pain equitably.
Commentary
As far as I can tell from the article, the banks are saying they shouldn't be limited on how much they charge merchants for debit card swipes because they play an important role in the economic recovery effort and merchants are saying they need a break on these fees because they play an important role in the economic recovery effort. Taking this bait, federal officials seem to be trying to decide which of the two factions' role is more important. I think this approach is wrongheaded because both the merchants and the banks make compelling cases in this regard.
Here's another thing both parties are doing: they're trying desperately to hide these fees from the consumer. The merchants are saying when they pay high debit card swipe fees, they have to either charge customers more for goods, which may lose them customers, or cut their profit margins, which means cutting jobs. Bankers say if they have to cover the costs of fraud protection, etc. themselves, they'll have to eliminate free checking accounts which, you guessed it, may lose them customers. Neither seems to want to say directly to the consumer, "The convenience of using a debit card at the grocery store has a cost; please pay it."
Ellen Ruppel Shell, in her excellent book Cheap: the high cost of discount culture, says this is a common problem in our current culture: we have become so obsessed with "getting a good deal" that no one wants to pay the fair price for anything. Shell mostly talks about how we ignore substandard goods and/or substandard working conditions in order to fuel this overriding need, but I think the paradigm applies to other situations as well.
So I would like to propose that we take the honest approach: the Federal Reserve should determine how much a debit card swipe at a merchant costs and the banks should charge the consumers that amount per swipe. Then we could actually make (Gasp!) informed decisions about whether the convenience is worth that price instead of everybody trying to fool each other about what's going on.
What did you see today?
2/15/2011
I saw responses to unwelcome opinions
Context
Today I saw two similar things in different places. First on PUBLIB, an e-mail list for public librarians, I saw a series of inflammatory posts (one example here, but you can find others if you browse the February entries by the same author, Matthew Price), followed by some equally inflammatory responses and several well-considered ones, including this one by Robert Baillot. Then on Slashdot, I saw another discussion initiated by quoting Glenn Beck in one of his more outrageous moods and evolving into a metadiscussion of how to respond to outrageous opinions. By the way, that last link is a little tricky. You may have to do some collapsing and expanding of comments to see what I'm talking about.
Commentary
Almost since the inception of the internet, people have been using it to exchange opinions. And almost since the start of that activity, there have been trolls, which are defined as people who take an inflammatory stand just for the sake of being inflammatory, not because they actually believe it. The perception is that trolls get off on attention or on getting people upset because they think it makes them superior.
The conventional wisdom about this phenomenon is "Don't feed the trolls," i.e. don't encourage their bad behavior by responding, but I was intrigued by the two responses I saw that seemed to fly in the face of that. "Ephemeriis" takes a civic responsibility approach, saying that since Glenn Beck is taken seriously in some quarters, the opposition is obligated to craft a serious rebuttal. Robert Balliot goes him one better by quoting Aristotle to make the point that every idea deserves consideration, even the rantings of a troll.
These responses are challenging to me. I often believe in operant conditioning, or at least the principle I learned from my mother: "If you ignore someone, he'll go away." But is getting someone to go away really my goal? Or is it engagement, where I continue to grapple with the people who drive me crazy in the belief that the God who loves all of us might be trying to tell me something?
What did you see today?
Today I saw two similar things in different places. First on PUBLIB, an e-mail list for public librarians, I saw a series of inflammatory posts (one example here, but you can find others if you browse the February entries by the same author, Matthew Price), followed by some equally inflammatory responses and several well-considered ones, including this one by Robert Baillot. Then on Slashdot, I saw another discussion initiated by quoting Glenn Beck in one of his more outrageous moods and evolving into a metadiscussion of how to respond to outrageous opinions. By the way, that last link is a little tricky. You may have to do some collapsing and expanding of comments to see what I'm talking about.
Commentary
Almost since the inception of the internet, people have been using it to exchange opinions. And almost since the start of that activity, there have been trolls, which are defined as people who take an inflammatory stand just for the sake of being inflammatory, not because they actually believe it. The perception is that trolls get off on attention or on getting people upset because they think it makes them superior.
The conventional wisdom about this phenomenon is "Don't feed the trolls," i.e. don't encourage their bad behavior by responding, but I was intrigued by the two responses I saw that seemed to fly in the face of that. "Ephemeriis" takes a civic responsibility approach, saying that since Glenn Beck is taken seriously in some quarters, the opposition is obligated to craft a serious rebuttal. Robert Balliot goes him one better by quoting Aristotle to make the point that every idea deserves consideration, even the rantings of a troll.
These responses are challenging to me. I often believe in operant conditioning, or at least the principle I learned from my mother: "If you ignore someone, he'll go away." But is getting someone to go away really my goal? Or is it engagement, where I continue to grapple with the people who drive me crazy in the belief that the God who loves all of us might be trying to tell me something?
What did you see today?
2/07/2011
I saw an unfamiliar medical condition
Context
I was reading an e-mail from Help a Reporter Out (HARO) today and it referred to a condition known as gluteal amnesia. As mentioned previously, the rules of HARO don't allow me to quote the actual message here. Since I had never heard of gluteal amnesia, I did a quick internet search for it. I saw it mentioned and defined on several sites, but when I sought more information on either WebMD and PubMed, the term was not found.
Commentary
I can't tell you what gluteal amnesia is, because once I found it wasn't mentioned on the two internet sources I consider most authoritative for medical information I was no longer interested in the condition itself. Instead, I came to wonder why a great many people outside the medical establishment wanted to talk so much about it.
I've come up with three possible reasons:
1) Gluteal amnesia doesn't really exist at all and is just a scam started to convince people they have an exotic ailment.
2) Gluteal amnesia is a very real medical problem, but health professionals call it something else.
3) What is labeled gluteal amnesia is a set of symptoms that could point to a variety of other widely recognized medical conditions.
Whichever of these three reasons explains the discrepancy in the discussion of gluteal amnesia (Could we really just be talking about your butt falling asleep?), it must drive physicians up the wall. It may also illustrate, in part, why doctors sometimes hate it when patients get medical information from the web. Think about it: a general practitioner has to keep up with all manner of real medical problems, and then people come in complaining of a problem that doesn't exist. Or does exist, but is called by another name or indicates another type of problem.
It doesn't help in the slightest that there are probably some people who believe in a fourth potential reason for the relative silence about gluteal amnesia: it's a very real, very serious medical condition that the medical establishment doesn't want us to know about for some nefarious reason. So now we have skilled professionals (and, in my experience, generally nice people) being told, "I don't trust what you say because the internet, (where nobody knows you're a dog), says different."
For the record, my doctor often encourages me to look up information on my medical problems on the internet, but that's after she tells me what they are. And it's possible she does that because I'm a librarian and I let her be a doctor.
What did you see today?
I was reading an e-mail from Help a Reporter Out (HARO) today and it referred to a condition known as gluteal amnesia. As mentioned previously, the rules of HARO don't allow me to quote the actual message here. Since I had never heard of gluteal amnesia, I did a quick internet search for it. I saw it mentioned and defined on several sites, but when I sought more information on either WebMD and PubMed, the term was not found.
Commentary
I can't tell you what gluteal amnesia is, because once I found it wasn't mentioned on the two internet sources I consider most authoritative for medical information I was no longer interested in the condition itself. Instead, I came to wonder why a great many people outside the medical establishment wanted to talk so much about it.
I've come up with three possible reasons:
1) Gluteal amnesia doesn't really exist at all and is just a scam started to convince people they have an exotic ailment.
2) Gluteal amnesia is a very real medical problem, but health professionals call it something else.
3) What is labeled gluteal amnesia is a set of symptoms that could point to a variety of other widely recognized medical conditions.
Whichever of these three reasons explains the discrepancy in the discussion of gluteal amnesia (Could we really just be talking about your butt falling asleep?), it must drive physicians up the wall. It may also illustrate, in part, why doctors sometimes hate it when patients get medical information from the web. Think about it: a general practitioner has to keep up with all manner of real medical problems, and then people come in complaining of a problem that doesn't exist. Or does exist, but is called by another name or indicates another type of problem.
It doesn't help in the slightest that there are probably some people who believe in a fourth potential reason for the relative silence about gluteal amnesia: it's a very real, very serious medical condition that the medical establishment doesn't want us to know about for some nefarious reason. So now we have skilled professionals (and, in my experience, generally nice people) being told, "I don't trust what you say because the internet, (where nobody knows you're a dog), says different."
For the record, my doctor often encourages me to look up information on my medical problems on the internet, but that's after she tells me what they are. And it's possible she does that because I'm a librarian and I let her be a doctor.
What did you see today?
2/02/2011
I saw an obituary
Context
As mentioned earlier I got my B.A. from Rice University. I received an alumni e-mail today that contained a link to this media page on the university website, containing obituaries for two young men who died over the winter break. The cause of death was only listed for one of them, Brandon Cook. After a local media search on the other, Dexter Gannon, I learned his death was ruled a suicide.
Commentary
Suicide was a touchy subject while I was at Rice. There was a widely-held perception that at some times in its history, Rice's emphasis on academic achievement had led to an unhealthy hypercompetitiveness and, in its turn, a high suicide rate. During my undergraduate years, the administration sought to fight this trend by keeping both the scholarship standards and the level of emotional support high. They also blocked off student access to the balcony of the bell tower.
So why did they keep mum about the cause of Dexter Gannon's death twenty-five years later? I suppose you could argue that it was to save his loved ones pain, but that seems flimsy, given that his loved ones presumably knew about the coroner's ruling.
Another explanation might be that Rice wanted to save ether the family or itself embarrassment. I find this idea disturbing, as I would like us to get to a point in our culture where we no longer consider mental difficulties shameful.
Regardless, I think it was a bad decision. I don't think covering up the tragic aspects of life really helps anyone. I believe light and air are far better cures for what ails us. After all, the It Gets Better project was started in the wake of gay teen suicides. But we had to talk about the suicides first.
What did you see today?
As mentioned earlier I got my B.A. from Rice University. I received an alumni e-mail today that contained a link to this media page on the university website, containing obituaries for two young men who died over the winter break. The cause of death was only listed for one of them, Brandon Cook. After a local media search on the other, Dexter Gannon, I learned his death was ruled a suicide.
Commentary
Suicide was a touchy subject while I was at Rice. There was a widely-held perception that at some times in its history, Rice's emphasis on academic achievement had led to an unhealthy hypercompetitiveness and, in its turn, a high suicide rate. During my undergraduate years, the administration sought to fight this trend by keeping both the scholarship standards and the level of emotional support high. They also blocked off student access to the balcony of the bell tower.
So why did they keep mum about the cause of Dexter Gannon's death twenty-five years later? I suppose you could argue that it was to save his loved ones pain, but that seems flimsy, given that his loved ones presumably knew about the coroner's ruling.
Another explanation might be that Rice wanted to save ether the family or itself embarrassment. I find this idea disturbing, as I would like us to get to a point in our culture where we no longer consider mental difficulties shameful.
Regardless, I think it was a bad decision. I don't think covering up the tragic aspects of life really helps anyone. I believe light and air are far better cures for what ails us. After all, the It Gets Better project was started in the wake of gay teen suicides. But we had to talk about the suicides first.
What did you see today?
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