Concern

I bought a new car. It’s a 2006 Volkswagen Jetta GLI, 6 speed manual. It’s really quite nice, and I am quite happy.

Does anyone else use SSHKeychain on OS X? Does the preferences window stop working for you all of a sudden, too? See, twice now it’s gotten itself into some kind of state where you can’t edit your tunnels with the “preferences” window, and the text fields will randomly change to different values.

Nice that this looks like it’s abandonware now, too. Yay open source!

My recent run-in with the highway patrol, and the nastygram email I just received from my ISP because _ ___ _____________ _____, has really irked me.

We are, to a large degree, being watched. If you understand how your credit score works, you can understand this. This sounds like hyperbole, but big brother isn’t something to fear the coming of, it’s something we fear as we live with it. Police monitor you while you drive; corporations monitor you while you surf the web, while you walk through stores and buildings, while you watch T.V., when you make phone calls.

The thing is, big brother doesn’t exist because of power, or because of the self-righteousness of those in power. It’s all economics. I’m sure traffic laws exist primarily to raise funds and to prevent expense in cleaning up auto accidents. All copyright law and the current bruhaha over it is about keeping corporate profits up.

So what you end up doing, is living in fear. Because the government wants to engineer your behavior, and because corporations want your money, you have to fear transgressing silly laws instead of living (and we can argue over whether or not speed limits serve the greater good; with my nut-libertarian hat on, I might argue that the system will naturally take care of itself, and artificial limits don’t do anyone any good). And it’s a terrible thing to have to live in fear, whether it’s watching your speedometer, or watching what you write because — god forbid — you publish something similar to or derived from someone else’s work.

(Am I annoying you yet with the ________ bits? I do apologize, but no, I’m not going to stop. Sometimes you want to write something to get it out, but don’t want it public. That’s the deal; take it or leave it.)

I’ve gone over the line twice this past week; or rather, I was over the line this past week, and got caught at it. I:

1. Got a speeding ticket.
2. Got pukey drunk.

(not at the same time)

I don’t suppose I really mind that either happened. I still think that I’ll still be doing some serious behavior modification, though, and I think to a degree I was going beyond safe bounds because I __ _____ _ ______. Anyway, payment was required for both, and I can see that I don’t want to keep paying that toll, even if I have the means.

This is awesome: on the implausibility of the explosives plot.