Thanksgiving Day 1860 - Two Great Classes of Society

Click on the image above to see Winslow Homer’s cover for Harper’s Weekly for December 1, 1860.

According to the New York Times, in the left panel, “two overdressed, supercilious socialites peer through opera glasses from an ornate theater box.” In the right panel, “a boy scampers home to his widowed mother and invalid sister clutching a loaf of bread, possibly ill-gotten.”

The New York Times article describes what was going on around Thanksgiving, 1860:

As national disunion loomed that Thanksgiving, so did hunger and misery for many Americans. Still rickety from the depression of 1857, the stock market had begun to collapse almost immediately after Abraham Lincoln’s election; Wall Street worried that debts owed by Southern planters – many of them mortgaged up to their eyebrows – would become uncollectable. Northern textile mills, fearing a disruption in cotton shipments from the South, began laying off workers by the thousands.

I think we are moving back to a two-class society as depicted above. A few days ago I saw the movie “Inside Job” which brilliantly outlined how this recession is making the rich richer and the poor poorer (NYTimes review for Inside Job). Even more troubling, this storm surge which erodes the middle class is not going to stop. Nothing has changed except the rich are even richer this year than the 2008 financial meltdown.

I think we are moving back towards feudalism. An upper class of rich, educated, powerful nobility, and a lower class of workers without much education or political leverage; wage slaves living from paycheck to paycheck. Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations and the wealthy can contribute as much money as they want to elections, without revealing their names or intentions, I realize that we the voters have done it to ourselves.

Do you think that the middle class is being eradicated by the financial system?

Whole Foods just opened in our neighborhood, after being “on hold” for more than a year due to the economic downturn. The food ranges from glamorous to near-erotic. Prices are high. I have to unload my own cart. It is difficult to see what is being rung up.

Shopping at Whole Foods makes me feel slightly disloyal to my regular grocery store, Raley’s. Raley’s manages the shopping cart at the checkout stand. It seems so much more ergonomic and efficient. It is easy to read the checker’s screen, and the information is also available on the credit card screen. I like that they don’t charge extra for postage stamps. I like their prices and the quality of their conventional produce. I the low-turnover in personnel. They handle bananas better than anyone.

Will I be seduced away by the glamor of Whole Foods?

A friend just received a big, honkin’ flat-screen TV as a gift, and she asked me if TiVo was right for her. She describes herself as a “software person,” so I explained that the the basic model is
TV > computer with remote control > Internet.
Everything else is software.

Tivo is a computer with a remote control. It accesses Tivo and NetFlix, and maybe some other things. Roku is a computer with a remote control. It accesses NetFlix and Amazon, and maybe some other things.

A laptop is a computer WITHOUT a remote control. It accesses the Internet. It can play YouTube, Hulu.com, ABC.com, CBS.com, USAnetwork.com, TV.com and so on. If you can connect it to your TV, you can play that stuff on your TV. It DOES NOT access Tivo, so you can’t get your computer to record first run TV easily. (It can be done, but it’s a hassle.) And you may not want to fill up your hard drive with that stuff.

A laptop DOES have a DVD player. You can play DVDs using your laptop if you connect it to your TV.

Tivo is not a laptop. It is hardware (a hard drive and a remote control) and software. The software allows Tivo to know all the programs on TV that are available to you, and to record (a) the ones you select and (b) the ones Tivo recommends for you. Tivo does the same thing with TV that Netflix does with movies. It tries to figure out what you will like, then it records it for you.

The big question is: what do you want? I want to watch exactly what I want, when I want. Tivo records TV when it airs (remember, I go to bed early) and I play it back when I want entertainment (7 p.m.). For movies, I get ordinary DVD’s from Blockbuster or the library. And I go to movie theaters like the Roxy for independent movies, and the Rialto for major studio big budget releases.

If you want something different, you may want a different setup. I love broadcast TV. Some people only like movies. Some people hate going to the movie theater, they want everything in their living room. What do you want to see on this big honkin’ TV?

This is the new Fox comedy by Matt Nix who created one of my favorite dramas, “Burn Notice” on USA. I had great hopes for it and it is silly without being stupid, but I find myself losing interest. I think too much of Bradley Whitford’s intelligence seeps out. Let me explain.

Johnny Depp’s reckless pirate is said to be modeled on Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. There is an untethered quality to his performance. Bradley Whitford seems to play Dan Stark with a tongue-in-cheek quality that undercuts the show’s premise of “unearned confidence” as showcased in the movie “Talladega Nights.” He needs to play it more as Lt. Col. Oliver North; brilliant, effective, amoral, ruthless, charming and irresistible. A loose cannon who can get the most astonishing things done. Ollie North was so charming that the ACLU got his felony convictions vacated, even through many Americans thought he was a traitorous drug smuggler and others considered him a national hero who saved Central America from communism.

It must be very hard to play a character with the emotional abandonment of Johnny Depp’s pirate.

The 17 year old girl in “Winter’s Bone” learns that they are about to lose their shack in the Ozarks where she takes care of her younger brother and sister and her mentally-ill mother. Her meth-cooking father put it up for bail and he just missed his court date. She and the kids are broke and hungry, and soon they will be homeless. The girl is relentless in her effort to care for them.

The movie is without a false note, and draws you in the way “Hurt Locker” did. You find yourself walking the chilly paths with her as she stubbornly looks for a solution. I found myself saying, “she’s only trying to keep two kids alive, without any help from her mentally ill mother or absent dad,” but what really struck me was the love in the household. She tenderly brushes her mother’s hair and the kids try to take care of her when she is hurt.

It gave me a chance to notice how this would have felt in a household of danger, chaos, and shame. The feeling of a lack of resources, that we’re all gonna die. Of no help or bad advice from adults who hurt you and others, yet insist they love you. The cold gray palette, the skinny trees, no feed for the horse.

The Kansas City Star review captures the movie, and the reader comments to the NYTimes review are very meaty. I hope you see the picture. If you do, let me know what you think.

I am happy to announce that, after an expenditure of $1178 for a custom linux computer and 18 months effort in my spare time, I now have linux on my desktop computer.

What did it take, you ask? The custom computer never worked properly with linux, and spending over $1000 for a Windows XP computer is like buying a Porsche and using it to store Tupperware! At WordCampSF on May 1, Richard Stallman spoke about open source software. He is a winner of the MacArthur award and the leader of the team that wrote the GNU operating system. Linus Torvalds wrote the kernel, hence, linux.

What is Linux?

The kernel is like an engine that can be used for a car, ship, harvester, etc. The operating system is like the chassis you put around the engine. The paint in the flavor of linux, like Ubuntu or Debian. I am running Ubuntu 64-bit Studio which is a combo of programs for design people rather than technical people.

On Sunday, yes the Sunday in the middle of Memorial Day weekend, I drove to SF with my CPU, two monitors, my keyboard and mouse for the InstallFest scheduled for 11-5. I reached Mission Street about 11:45 and all the roads were barricaded for Carnivale! the annual daytime Mardi Gras filled with scantily-lad dancers on the back of flatbed trucks filled with calypso and salsa bands. Parking was… well, I got the last spot in a $20 pay lot, 3 blocks from the InstallFest site. Three LOOONG blocks. Imagine how calm I was (not).

Noisebridge

The Linux 10.04 InstallFest was held in a permanent shared space for hackers and builders called Noisebridge. It is on the third floor up a seedy staircase in a seedy part of town. The “elevator” is one of those funky things with the steel sliding doors in front of the steel accordion cage that bites your fingers if you’re not careful. There is a walkie-talkie to request sending down the elevator. Luckily, some guy in his 70’s walked in and showed me how to use it.

I offered them the apples and cookies I brought, and asked for help carrying the equipment. I got three people, and it was the gallant gray haired gentleman who carried the heavy CPU with the sharp edges. I set it up and for the next SEVEN HOURS they worked on it. They had to take it apart to install Ubuntu (four hours) and another three to determine the cause of the hardware problem (bad slot four on the motherboard). They gently told me where to buy a better computer for less next time. Words do not express how thrilled I am to have it working.

The wonderful linux community

I am very grateful to Lyz Krumbach, her partner Mj, his colleague Michael, and Leif Ryge for working until nearly 8 p.m. on my computer. I am so impressed by the knowledge, tenacity and generosity of these folks and the linux community.

As a business owner, I know that the “rewards” you get on your credit card are paid for by me. Banks skim those “rewards” off the top of your payment, sending me what’s left after they take their cut. So I am thrilled to learn that the Financial Reform Bill might allow shopkeepers to offer a discount to those who pay in cash by keeping the bank’s percentage out of the transaction. See NYTimes article.

This misleadingly titled Facebook application shares your information with Microsoft and others. Here is a link to a Facebook fan page on privacy and how to OptOut of Facebook sharing your info w/ Microsoft and others . Also take a look at the article at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

• Account > Privacy > Applications > (scroll to bottom) Instant Personalization
• When you try to uncheck the box, you are asked “Are You Sure?” Click the final link “Learn More”
• Scroll to the bottom of the SECOND section “How do I block… my public info my friends share?”
• Click link to block Microsoft at http://facebook.com/docs