What happens when economists stop being nice and start being real? I end up terrified that my retirement is going to be spent pushing carts of rocks in a Chinese coal mine. We’re all doomed, people! (Via Kevin Drum.)

AND here’s a bonus link to the Economist’s View (your source for getting into flame-wars with Paul Krugman), courtesy of Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry Blog: why John Stossel is a moron. See also: this.

Thanks to the Nabob for alerting me to this week’s high levels of Express inclusion. It’s very flattering, and I couldn’t be more pleased about the world knowing I begrudge service employees their livings as I peer down upon them from my white-collar internet playground.

The only problem is that the Express misspelled the site’s URL both times. If this delays this blog’s acquisition by Yahoo or Google, I’m gonna be pissed.

1. I need to wriggle out of my T-Mobile contract. Well, one of them: I long ago escaped the one associated with my Sidekick, but I bought a separate number for DCist’s LastCall service. LastCall’s currently shut down due to some technical problems, and if I resurrect it I’d want to use a different SMS gateway. But I’ve still got over a year left on the contract.
   
   
   Of course, there’s a $200 early termination fee associated with quitting now. Bad. But T-Mobile has announced an SMS rate increase, which constitutes a contract change, which lets customers quit for free! Good! But I have unlimited SMS, so I don’t qualify. Back to bad. Now I have to keep calling their CSRs until I get one that’s especially sweet and/or confused.
   
   
   I suppose I should feel guilty about my planned deceit, but I didn’t get a handset when I signed up, and the ETF is largely in place to ensure that people don’t get subsidized phones and then quit the service before the money’s earned back. So my conscience is clear — it’s just the sweet-talking that I’m dreading. Sage advice on this point would be appreciated.
2. I’m with Julian on this: two dollars per cocktail seems very high. I am, I know, out of the mainstream when it comes to bar tipping: I’ve never really understood why bartenders are the best-compensated wait staff in a bar or restaurant when their jobs also seem to be the easiest and most fun. Besides, applying the same percentage (or higher) tip as when dining makes no sense: for drinks, the amount of effort the server has to invest in serving you is much smaller relative to the value of the total transaction (and therefore the tip) — the customer has to line up and wait to be served, there’s generally no follow-up attention paid by the bartender, and less knowledge of the menu is required.
   
   
   I suppose I feel this way because I prefer to drink cheap beer in dive bars. At Southwark a dollar tip per drink seems low — the gentleman on the other side of the bar prepared the beverage with such diligence, made such friendly, intelligent conversation and generally took such good care of me that it’d be incredibly crass not to tip generously in gratitude. But being expected to cough up a dollar per popped-top on $4 cans of Schlitz at DC9? I donno, man. Seems kinda dumb.

Via YANP, I see that the Polyphonic Spree is coming to DC after all (in late June, to be exact). Cool. Between this and Wolf Parade, it’s already shaping up to be a good summer for concerts.

Wow. Friday night was incredibly impressive. Josh, Emily and Lee decided to throw a party at a bowling alley in the basement of a church community center. They acquired large amounts of beer, pretzels and DJs, were written up on some Philly blogs, and had a ton of people show up to bowl, drink and have a great time. There’s a less-biased writeup here (some photos, too).

I don’t know if it’s just a lingering effect of my Big Lebowski ascii art project, but it seems that I really enjoy taking photos of silhouetted figures bowling. So, uh, sorry about that. I think this photo makes up for it, though.

Teo has put up an interesting post discussing the use of a/an and how it evolved along with pronunciation (complete with bonus UVA tie-in!). Misuse of a/an is a pet peeve of mine — when I come across “an university” or a similar formulation I immediately know that what I’m reading is going to become terrible, if it isn’t already. It’s a great tip-off that the author hasn’t made a connection between writing and speaking, and that spells trouble — a stream of “whilst”s is rarely far behind.

On the other end of the spectrum, of course, is Yglesias‘s neverending cavalcade of homophones — a case where speaking and writing are so tightly connected that all kinds of amusing minor typos result (see also: my constant overuse of colons, semicolons, emdashes and commas). I suppose you can err too far in either direction, but Matt’s is by far the more readable option.

Of course, none of this explains the dismayingly frequent “an historic” formulation. I can’t account for that one at all, except to say that I think our species is probably doomed.

Some guy had been wandering through my neighborhood for the last 20 minutes or so yelling what I assume is the name of his dog. It’s sad, and I wish him luck. But seriously: “Anton”? I can’t say I blame it.

In other news, I’m kind of exhausted. This weekend has involved 450 miles of travel (spread over four legs) and a grand total of seven scheduled events. All but one of those involved drinking, so I suppose I shouldn’t really complain. Yet I’m clearly doing it anyway — sorry about that.

But right now I have an hour to myself, a sunny couch to lie on, and the presumably-excellent Chronicles of Riddick on TV. Time to upload some photos and begin the process of forgetting to do my timesheet. Ahh, Sunday.

There’s still time for you to quit your job, steal a car, drive to Philly and consume beer, pretzels and bowling all night long. I’m just sayin’.

The beginning of the end.

Both via BoingBoing.

This morning Slashdot linked to a piece over at Ars Technica quoting Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of Harvard’s Kennedy School (whew!) on the subject of digital forgetfulness. The problem, he says, is that anyone participating in online society will accumulate an ever-larger tail of embarrassing cruft. It’ll be trivially easy for us to confront one another with beer-belt pictures and Inuyasha fanfic written at age fourteen. “Gotcha!” will move out of the realm of politics and into the office.

I can already see my friends’ concern over this manifesting itself. I think that their (partial) blogospheric exodus toward Facebook is motivated, to some extent, by these sorts of worries. Clients and coworkers read their sites, and they don’t like the constraints that imposes. No offense to the clients and coworkers reading this, but I don’t always like it either — it’s disappointing to feel like there are limits on your personal writing. I’m unwilling to flee to Facebook, but that’s just my own hangup — if your online creative output includes technology, it feels like a straightjacket (and, of course, its founder is a thief, which makes my web-developer self loathe to endorse it in any way). But I can understand why others would want to.

Still, fleeing to proprietary communities is just a stopgap measure. My completely-neglected Facebook profile currently has at least one friend request from a client waiting. Of course I could decline to approve it, or grant limited access to my profile (so I’m told, anyway). But what are the social implications of doing that? Is it considered a snub? If it isn’t, how long until it will be? No, it seems inevitable that your activity in any given online community will eventually become part of your publicly-known personal history, limiting the sorts of ways that you can comfortably express yourself.

Admittedly, all of this is sort of peripheral to Mayer-Schönberger’s point. Social circles will no doubt continue to flee across the internet as the grown-ups (so to speak) encroach on them. Staying one step ahead of your professional contacts is, by and large, a viable strategy for not poisoning your work relationships by exposing your horrible true self.

Mayer-Schönberger doesn’t seem concerned with these ongoing public/private struggles. Rather, he’s worried about the potential for finding embarrassing information about a person’s history at a single given point in the future. It’s bound to happen: there’s real utility to be had by, say, exposing Facebook information to a search engine. If Google refuses to do it, someone else will. And of course there are plenty of other sources of potentially embarrassing information out there (http://www.flickr.com/photos/YOUR-NAME-HERE/tags/drunk). If anyone dug up digitized copies of the short stories I wrote for my high school literary journal, I’d fully expect to be penniless and living on the streets by nightfall (it would be well-deserved, I assure you).

M-S (if I can call him that) suggests a legally mandated technological system that would, by default, cause data to be deleted after a period of time. I’m sure his heart is in the right place, but this is dumb for all the same reasons that DRM is dumb. You really, really can’t control the spread or persistence of publicly available digital information. Efforts to do so are a waste of everyone’s time.

But it’s a real problem nonetheless. I see two likely solutions: first, increased adoption of Darknets, invite-only communities and largely-anonymous forums like Unfogged (although the protective namelessness of that community is pretty much gone). But that’s not a complete solution, for the reasons listed above.

The real answer is just for us, as a society, to get over ourselves: to stop pretending that no one ever gets drunk in college, ever says things they don’t mean, or has a sex drive. It’s wildly optimistic, I know. But we’ve gotten over needing our politicians to be undivorced teetotalers who never say anything dumb (and how!). Maybe the generations that have been online their entire adult lives will have a diminished capacity for puritanical self-deception. I hope so, anyway.