Live from Austin!

You should try The National Cynical Network.

More stuff at i.am/dapper.

I was in Best Buy today, looking to see if they had any cheap DVD-Rs, when a guy walked up and asked me if I knew about laptops. I said that yes, I did, but that I didn’t work for Best Buy.

To my surprise he said that he knew that, that the people who worked at Best Buy didn’t know what they were talking about, and that I looked like I might be the kind of person who did know stuff about laptops.

I ended up chatting to him for quite a while about PC laptops, features to look for, and tradeoffs between factors like price, size, speed, and battery life. I mentioned that I used Macs at home, and he said that he had an old Mac, but hadn’t been using it much recently. I told him about OS X, and he was really excited to hear that it was based on UNIX. Turned out he was keen to ditch Windows, so long as he could continue to do what he needed to do on Mac or Linux. He was also interested in web development and multimedia, so we talked for a while about what came with Mac OS X in the way of development tools and media applications.

Anyway, I told him where he could look at laptops (both Windows and Mac), told him that he really didn’t want to run XP or OS X in 128MB of RAM no matter what they said, explained the problem of not being able to buy laptops with Linux from the manufacturers, mentioned that it installed pretty well on ThinkPads, explained what he needed to get to set up a secure firewalled home network, and gave him my personal card so he could e-mail me if he had any more questions…

I sometimes wonder if I could pay the rent this way.

Having already gone from boom to bust, many dot-commers are coming to something worse. Unable to make payments, they are selling luxury cars, canceling home renovations and returning jewelry by the box.

Indeed, unable to make payments, some former dot-commers, and others whose income swelled with the bubble and shrank when it burst, are selling Porsches and BMW’s on consignment. They are unloading second homes and canceling renovations.

—New York Times

One of the nice things about the USA is that every food package has a handy table on the back listing the proportions of various nutrients it contains. (It looks like the one on the front page of my web site.) This makes it very easy to look at two cans of soup, and say “Jeez, this one is 34% of my recommended sodium intake for the day, and 20% of my recommended fat… but this one is only 10% sodium and 2% fat.”

The sad thing is, of course, that it doesn’t make any difference to the obesity epidemic.

What we have in food is a failure of the idea of the free market. The problem is, humans evolved in an environment where certain nutrients were difficult to obtain, food supplies were severely constrained, and certain tastes were rare. We therefore evolved particular food preferences. An example is the craving of sweetness, which was once a really good way to motivate us to eat fresh fruit, which is very nutritious but hard to find and retrieve.

Unfortunately, increasing knowledge has allowed us to find other ways to stimulate those desires—so now almost all foods have sugar in, to continue the example. The cravings which used to work so well, now result in us bingeing on the wrong things. We no longer need to store fat to make it through the winter, but potato chips stimulate the “mouthfeel” our primitive ancestors evolved to motivate them. We get plenty of salt and have air conditioning to keep cool, but we still love salty snacks.

So, the free market encourages competition to bring us the most desire-stimulation at the cheapest price possible. The end result is McDonalds. Cheap, nasty food; but oh, so stimulating. For many people it becomes an affordable addiction.

What should we do? Well, we really ought to regulate the free market. If I were supreme ruler, I’d probably decree that no single serving of food be permitted to contain more than half a day’s fat, sodium, cholesterol, and so on. I mean, it’s possible to make delicious pizza that good for you, so why do we let people make the Pizza Hut Stuffed Crust With Extra Cheese pizza?

A single slice of Cheesecake Factory carrot cake contains more saturated fat and cholesterol than you’re supposed to eat in an entire day. Ditto for their chocolate cake. Yet this afternoon I had the most incredible slice of chocolate cake that came in at 18% of a day’s sat. fat. Why are they allowed to get away with it? Aren’t they being as cavalier with our health as the cigarette companies who put in unnecessary nicotine?

Mind you, at least there’s not much danger of passive chocolate cake…