vivere parvo [translation]

Via This Modern World, tales of bank procedures for processing debit card fraud, which leads to a good conclusion:

I understand the extra convenience debit cards can provide, but after working in that place, I swore them off for life. You have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get an ATM-only card these days, but it can be done, and I'd never do anything but. If you carry separate ATM and credit cards, it means hauling around more plastic—but when they're stolen, at least it's not *your money* that disappears when the thief goes on a spree—and in a worst-case scenario, if everything goes wrong and you get held responsible for $10,000 of someone else's charges, with a credit card at least you just owe $10,000 and can declare bankruptcy, instead of just having that money already gone forever.

— Debit cards are pure evil

Last updated by eric Sat Apr 24 11:23 2004 | word | link

argumentum ad rem [translation]

I wanted to attend Michael Schudson's reading at UW's Kane Hall yesterday, but had some scheduling conflicts and couldn't make it. It's unfortunate; the topic of the reading ("The Ideal of 'The Informed Citizen': Why the Founders Didn't Encourage It, Why the Progressive Era Did, and Why We Should Move Beyond It if We Dare") is tantalizing, and what little I've found on the web of these ideas is rather difficult to boil down, though this quote seems to get to the conclusion rather succinctly:

In some ways, monitorial citizenship is more demanding than informed citizenship, because it implies that one's peripheral vision should always have a political or civic dimension. But it does not imply that citizens should know all the issues all of the time. It implies that they should be informed enough and alert enough to identify danger to their personal good and danger to the public good. When such danger appears on the horizon, they should have the resources — in trusted relationships, in political parties and elected officials, in relationships to interest groups and other trustees of their concerns, in knowledge of and access to the courts as well as the electoral system, and in relevant information sources to jump into the political fray and make a lot of noise.

— "Good Citizens and Bad History"

You'd have to be half-dead not to worry about so many simultaneous threats to established cultural authority. It is widely agreed that "The Simpsons" is one of the best things on TV. It is also among the worst, and is especially troubling because it is so popular and so potent. I watch it through the eyes of my children. In some ways, it is just Ozzie and Harriet, of course, and my kids can see the parallels between Homer and me. But it also trades on what Stephen Elkin, in a different context, has called our "unearned knowingness." Young children, at least mine, today, know a lot in this unearned way. My children are ready to ridicule institutions and individuals long before they've had an opportunity to admire them. "Simpsons" knocks pretense off its pedestal; fine, but my children are much more familiar with iconoclasm than they are with icons, they know more about satire than they do about what kind of honor or achievement led someone or something to be in a position to be satirized in the first place. There has been cultural irreverence before — MAD magazine, for instance, in the l950s in its mass marketed form, or Lenny Bruce or Mort Sahl in a more esoteric version. But today, irreverence is not a rebellious choice but a cultural baseline. It is more current than it is undercurrent, and the consequences are untold.

— ibid.

Last updated by eric Sat Apr 24 06:12 2004 | thought | link