Life Stories: January 2005 Archives

The second part of my appearance on the Full Disclosure program is now available online. Both parts one and two will air throughout Los Angeles on channel 36 on Monday, January 31st (today!), and Friday, February 4th, from 7pm to 8pm (refer to the channel guide). For the streaming video, follow these links: part one, part two.

I love Los Angeles, but I hate downtown. It totally and completely sucks. The streets were laid out by retarded dyslexics who liked to drive in endless circles. The freeway junctions are ridiculously useless -- you can't get back to anything you pass, and there are lots of places you can see that you can't get to at all. There are innumerable exits with no corresponding entrances, so if you get off the freeway in the wrong place you're basically doomed. Traffic everywhere for no reason; people crossing the street at 0.00001 miles per hour; intersections you aren't allowed to turn at, in any direction; signs that purport to you lead to the freeway, but don't; streets that are one-way in some places but not in others. I hate it.

The first installment of my appearance on the Emmy-winning Full Disclosure program is now available online. I'm informed that parts one and two will air throughout Los Angeles on channel 36 on Monday, January 31st, and Friday, February 4th, from 7pm to 8pm (refer to the channel guide). If you don't have cable service (as I don't) then you can watch the streaming video here: part one.

I went to the Laker game tonight and it was pretty good. I'm not a huge basketball fan, but I follow the Lakers (during playoffs anyway) and it was fun to watch them beat the Timberwolves live. While I was there I had three thoughts.

First, I always forget to leave my knives in the car when I go to sporting events or concerts, but it's always trivially easy to sneak stuff past the guards. They just aren't very motivated. I hope they're enough of a psychological deterrent to minimize the number of other people on the premises with weapons.

Second, exclamation points should not be used in pairs, even on jumbotrons. Exclamation points should be used singly, or -- in exceptional circumstances -- in triples. Two is right out.

Third, one of my friends remarked that he wanted to buy a Laker girl, and it made me wonder how much one would cost if slavery were legal. I'd assume that most humans would be priced similarly to real estate and other income property. Most human slaves would have a price determined by the amount of revenue they could earn for you in a year, multiplied by some market-determined P/E ratio. For example, an engineer who can earn $50,000 a year might be worth $500,000 as a slave. Age and health would be factors as well.

It gets tricky when you consider non-monetary uses for slaves. Slavery is essentially a form of specific performance contract, and except in rare cases courts are very reluctant to enforce specific performance. For instance, if Jane signs a contract with John and agrees to clean his house for a year but then refuses to do so, a judge is unlikely to order Jane to perform the task she agreed to do; instead the judge will simply order Jane to pay monetary damages. With slavery, specific performance would either be enforced by law, or by physical punishment or incarceration meted out by the slave owner. The point is, you could get your slave to do things by force that could not be adequately represented by a monetary payment. For instance, a slave artist could be forced to create a work of art that may have value to one person but none to another.

So how much would it cost to buy a Laker girl? Even though I doubt they earn much money, I expect they'd be rather expensive simply because people with the qualities of Laker girls are rare, and presumably in high demand. My guess is that a pre-prime Laker girl would be worth around $1,000,000 as a slave, but since she would be valued primarily for her physical attributes I expect that value would drop rapidly as she aged. In contrast, an excellent handyman could become more valuable as he aged and gained skill and experience.

Update:
The knowledgable Clayton Cramer give some historical information about the price of slaves and indicates that my estimation of value was quite high.

To convert antebellum prices to the current state of affairs, use gold prices then and now as a rough approximation. Gold cost about $16/ounce in 1850, so a prime field hand was about 50 ounces of gold. At today's spot price, that would be about $21,400.

Still, just like the stock market of the early 20th century, I expect P/E ratios were unrealistically low for slaves in the 19th century.

I've been keeping pretty busy while I've been looking for a job. Over the past few days I've:
- built a fence,
- fumigated two houses,
- exterminated a bunch of ants,
- installed smoke alarms,
- installed Venetian blinds,
- started installing a shower door,
- scraped a bathtub,
- swept and scrubbed,
- weeded and gardened,
- returned calls to potential renters,
- shown property to potential renters.

All that, and I've still found time to play Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, which is a super game that's mighty addictive. Still, I can't wait to find a new job and get back to work!

If you're like me then you're always frustrated that car turn signals blink at different rates, but today was my lucky day! I found my Honda's turn signal twin in a Nissan truck! What are the odds? I was just driving to church when I pulled up behind the truck at a red light and put on my signal... and can you believe it?! Our signals blinked in perfect synchronization for over a minute!

So what's the deal with turn signals? Will cars of the same make and model blink at the same rate? Does age have anything to do with it? Does the timing change over the life of the car? What factors affect turn signal speed? The world may never know.

I'll post a link to the video once it's online, but for now here's a picture of (left to right) Leslie Dutton, myself, and Ken Reich from my recent appearance on Full Disclosure.

Yes I'm excited, why else would I keep mentioning it?

I hope everyone is having a wonderful day. It's 80 degrees and sunny here in Southern California... the kind of day that makes me pity the rest of the world. More later.

I just returned from taping Full Disclosure and I had a great time. I'll put up a link when I know the broadcast time.

Sorry if I've been quiet today, but tomorrow I'm appearing on the Emmy award-winning Full Disclosure program with Ken Reich, a 39-year veteran of the Los Angeles Times turned blogger. I just hope I can hold my own as we discuss blogging, the media, Dan Rather, and so forth. I'm studying up.

I got a very frustrating email from my PhD advisor last night. I spent three months working on my dissertation between the last version and the one he just saw, but based on his comments it looks like it got worse. I really need to finish this thing so I can move on to other areas of life, but at this rate it seems like I never will.

Well, I did my first call-in to talk radio, hitting the Al Rantel show around 6:37pm on the topic of Amber Frey. I said that while it's obvious that she's an idiot, her greatest offense isn't that she's stupid, but that's she's boring. Her interviews are shallow and insipid and entirely unenlightening. I also mentioned that it's implausible to suppose that she never heard about Laci Peterson's disappearance until contacted by police. I suggested that Andrea Yates' next date would be smart to look her up on Google before getting too serious.

I really think I could do a radio talk show. Does anyone know how to break into that business? I can't afford to go be an intern somewhere... but I can afford to host a late-night or weekend show basically for free. Anyone have any connections?

Those of you inclined towards prayer, say one or two for me and my job situation. It appears that I might have to start looking for a new place of employment soon. If anyone in the LAX area is looking to hire a brilliant writer with (almost) a PhD in artificial intelligence and lots of experience with embedded software, spacecraft, and bureaucracy, shoot me an email. I'm good with all things technical, I know just about every programming language, and I've led software development teams for everything from embedded systems on defense satellites to web-based distributed applications. I play well with others, and I enjoy long walks on the beach.

I was just driving home down the 405 in torrential rain and I came up behind an SUV with no lights, swerving across lanes. Figuring this to be a pretty dangerous situation, I decided to call 911... and I got a busy signal. So I tried again. Busy. Tried again. "You have reached 911. All our operators are busy. Please be prepared to explain the nature of your emergency..." and I hung up.

This is why I own a gun.

I've got the first blog post of 2005! Booyah! All the rest of you bloggers can go cry like tiny infant baby girls. (And spare me the nonsense about time zones, we all know they're just communist propaganda; you're not a communist, are you? 2005 is bad news for commies, I can tell that already.)