If you attempt to explain why you should vote to help others while exempting morality and selflessness (which can quickly veer into the tautological) from your argument, you’d be left with an argument from selfishness:
Why are you “owed” a police force, why are you owed a fire
department, why are you owed clean water or electricity,
why are you owed laws that protect your ideas through
patents or copyrights, why are you owed anything you enjoy
through a civil society that makes your life demonstrably
better than a libertarian wet dream like Zimbabwe?
I’ll tell you why. Because as a civil society we’ve
decided what’s a part of the commons, that which we can
not individually afford but whose existence we recognize,
serves us all. I have news for you: my life is better and
more secure if you and your kids aren’t bankrupted by
medical bills. My life is better if everyone has safe
streets and food. My life is better when the next
generation is well-educated to continue the prosperity of
this great nation. No one is owed, but it is a gift we
give to each other as citizens and the price we pay to
enjoy the blessings of our forefathers. And it is the
height of hubris to presume to take that gift of a civic
society and act as if it never existed before you showed
up.
I’ve no idea who wrote that, it is from some screenshot someone took and then posted to Twitter.
The Future of Not Working is about a few things, among them the test of universal basic income as viable social policy. It touches on the continuing and seismic shift in labor from humans to machine automation. But what it really helped me understand was how to help those in poverty:
One estimate, generated by Laurence Chandy and Brina
Seidel of the Brookings Institution, recently calculated
that the global poverty gap — meaning how much it would
take to get everyone above the poverty line — was just
$66 billion. That is roughly what Americans spend on
lottery tickets every year, and it is about half of what
the world spends on foreign aid.
People at the bottommost rungs of the socioeconomic ladder know exactly, like surgically-precisely what they need and the best way to get that to them is simple: cash.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every
rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from
those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and
are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money
alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the
genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The
cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick
school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power
plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is
two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty
miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter
with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single
destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than
8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in
any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is
humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Some writers for children deliberately avoid using words
they think a child doesn’t know. This emasculates the
prose and, I suspect, bores the reader. Children are game
for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand
them over the net. They love words that give them a hard
time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their
attention. I’m lucky again: my own vocabulary is small,
compared to most writers, and I tend to use the short
words. So it’s no problem for me to write for children.
We have a lot in common.
If you ask Ess to say “snake” she’ll say “tank”. She usually drops the sibilant “S” sound at the beginning of words; if we really try to get her to say it, she’ll go with the “sh” phoneme.
If you ask her to say “Sammy the Snake” you get “Hammy the Tank”.
Also, she put six wooden people in her diaper and when Mykala asked what was going on, Ess was very honest: “…some people in there.” The people got a thorough cleaning and a few days off on the countertop. No further uses of diaper-as-pockets have been observed. Maybe a Bill Cunningham-esque French workman’s jackets — the kind with all the pockets — would be good for Ess. Lots to carry as a toddler.
A few nights ago, Mykala drove us around to look at Christmas lights. Ess sang Christmas songs in the back. She took off her boots and then her socks, like she always does. Then she told us about how one of her feet was cold:
“Mama foot cold. Mama foot not under the blanket. Mama foot is cold.”
“Ess, did you take off your boot?”
*30 seconds of silence*
This kind of straightforward holiday outing, to go see the lights, is so much more special when you are with someone who is experiencing it for the first season of their life. You feel more hopeful when you see this little person experiencing so much wonder and novelty and joy at the same time.
In the past eight years, I’ve done everything on my MacBook: finished school, wrote tons of code. Lots of graphics work in Photoshop; audio and video editing. I store over 40,000 scanned papers, notes, and textbooks from dental school, in addition to all of my videos, movies, music, and photos. It is my only machine.
This MacBook is great.
I understand my computer won’t live forever so, over the past year, I have closely watched the new MacBooks Pro go from rumored, to announced, to reviewed, to widely available. I have seen critiques of battery life, gratuitous thinness, port elimination, and memory maximums, and it is safe to say the general mood seems a bit less, uh, positive than I expected. John Gruber astutely picked up on this with his made-you-look post, which taught me to expect catastrophizing around any new MacBooks.
But here’s my point: only one article in the months and months of MacBook Pro coverage I’ve seen has picked up on an undercurrent. Only one piece has gotten at the heart of these complaints. You see, there is one theme behind the criticism of the new MacBook Pro, and I don’t think many of those who are complaining even realize what it is: money. That was what Vlad Savov at The Verge focused on here: The future of PCs and Macs is expensive.
Vanishingly few of the concerns above can not be addressed with money. Battery life? Buy a new computer as soon as processor improvements allow improved battery life. Fewer/different ports? Buy what you need to connect your new computer. RAM limitations? Buy a workstation. Buy buy buy.
Thing is, I find myself siding with the critiques more than the endorsements. In an attempt to clear up my unsettled feelings, I decided to take my emotions out and replace them with numbers: dollar amounts for what it used to cost to own a MacBook workhorse and what it will cost in the future.
MacBook, 2008
I tallied the initial cost of my beloved MacBook, then I added in all the power bricks, hard drives, RAM, and OS upgrades I’ve made to my MacBook since I purchased it:
01/2009 $1300 Purchased
01/2010 $44.99 5400RPM 250GB HD
01/2011 $95 8GB RAM upgrade
10/2011 $79 Apple charger
07/2012 $21.54 OS X 10.8
09/2012 $99 Apple battery
10/2012 $169.99 256GB 830 SSD
10/2015 $99 NuPower Battery
03/2016 $160.68 500GB 850 SSD
04/2016 $79 Apple charger
================================
01/2017 $2148.2 Total for 8 yrs
That’s every penny I’ve spent to purchase and then keep this thing running for eight years. That comes out to $22.38 per month. Remember that number.
Now, let’s buy a new MacBook Pro!
MacBook Pro, 2016
A 13" screen makes sense, I have one of those. 16 GB of RAM — I want to future-proof this as much as possible. A 500 GBSSD hard drive because that’s what I have right now. Touch ID on the Touch Bar, because I’m increasingly storing my entire life on my machine and Touch ID makes securing all this easy. Ok, so that comes to $2,355 (with tax) for a replacement MacBook Pro.
Hey! That’s not bad, all I have to do is get eight years out of that hardware. And you know what? Given how much processor advances have slowed, how amazing that screen is: I think that is doable. Except, well, two things: battery and storage.
How do you feel about spudgering out a glued-in battery after it dies (generally after about 1,300 load cycles, as I have needed two new batteries in my current 2008 MacBook). Well, I’ve opened up my share of iPhones and replaced batteries and screens, but even I don’t like that idea! Ok, pay Apple to do it. Battery costs for two replacements over eight years: $400. And you better hope that, after five years, when Apple declares your machine vintage and drops support for battery replacement, that you can pay a third party to do it. Cross your fingers they don’t bump the logic board, because everything is soldered on. Which brings me to my next point:
iPhones generate enormous amounts of data to which I have an intense emotional attachment. I’m referring, of course, to pictures and videos of my daughter. You really think that one soldered-in 500 GB hard drive is going to be able to store all the pictures and videos an iPhone 7 (shooting 4K?!) will throw at it for eight years?
This returns us to my thesis: owning these computers is becoming more expensive. I am going to set aside my ideology, my past experience of always upgrading all my computers, and accept this: admission to the Apple garden requires I give up my ability to upgrade. Taking that as fact, I will need a place to store many many gigs of videos, photos, and music.
What do you do when you run out of space on your laptop and you can’t upgrade it? You move to iTunes Match at $25/year and Photos storage to the cloud for about $240 a year. (A note on network attached storage: it is great for Plex streaming, mediocre for iTunes, and apparently borderline impossible for storing your macOS Photos library. You can buy a Mac mini and attach a storage array to it. This is not cheap. So, as much as I am loathe to state it this way, it really is all or nothing: all the benefits (and costs) of Apple, or none. Or, stop taking adorable videos of my daughter.)
$2355 Purchase MacBook Pro
$400 Two battery replacements
$1920 iCloud photo/video storage
$200 iTunes Match
==================================
$4875 Total for 8 years
So this is what it looks like to be all-in on Apple: I can’t upgrade the storage on my device and so am faced with a choice. Do I give up all the conveniences of integration between devices using Messages, Photos, and iTunes and in exchange spend days of time to set up a real RAID 6 NAS with essentially unlimited storage? Or do I just pay more?
I still don’t know the answer to that question.
Monthly Cost of Ownership
2008 MacBook: $22.38 per month ($2,148.20 for 8 years)
2016 MacBook: $50.78 per month ($4,875 for 8 years)