Hegira

Whatever their other problems are and have been, this one they got right. This is what an appropriate response to a "joke" rape threat looks like:



( Text below. )

This might as well be called "Dressing My Daughter" -- it reminds me of every special occasion dress I ever inflicted on her when she was too little to say no. I'll get over this floral kick soon, I'm sure! In the meantime, though, I need to go exorcise Tori Amos from my head: greeting the monster in our Easter dresses...

Again, pure Ultra Fractal.

I like that it looks so very simple; only I know how many layers and hours went into it. Show your work in math, but hide it in art.

Because it's been far too long.

Irritation of the day: I am shopping for goggles. I wear prescription eyeglasses, and since I have only one pair, I'd rather not lose them to wind the first time I turn my head to look at traffic while going 30mph. Since I expect to do a little night-time riding, but not nearly half and half, I do not want to buy two pairs of goggles. Photochromic ("night-to-day" or "transition") lenses have been around forever; it's easy to find a pair of regular sunglasses or goggles with that feature for $30-$40. Goggles that fit over prescription eyewear (but are not photochromic) are also ubiquitous, and around the same price.

Try to find a pair that combines the two features, however, and the options narrow to two offerings, both put out by the same company ... and the price inexplicably jumps to $100.

Why $100, you wonder? I did too, and then I did some math. As you know, Bob, disposable contact lenses are definitely an option for many people. In fact, they're an option for me. If you switch to contact lenses, you are then able to use regular photochromic goggles, for the aforementioned low price of about $30 ... but the six-month supply of contact lenses that is the usual unit for such contact lenses wil run you ... can you guess? Yep, about $70. And in 6 months, you'd have to order more contact lenses. Hmm.

Another option is goggles that are, themselves, prescription lenses. This might appeal -- especially if, like me, you have only one pair of eyeglasses and you'd rather not risk them to the road. (My spare very emergency pair are my last prescription eyeglasses, fairly battered and about five years old.) Prescription goggles, however, even without the photochromic lenses, will cost you $175 -- the equivalent of those non-photochromic goggles and a year's supply of contacts. (You do change your prescription every year, don't you?) Adding on the photochromic option to your prescription lenses will, ooh, add another $100 to the price. Just in case you don't change your prescription every year, you perceive, since you're now signaling that you plan to keep these things awhile!

I am thoroughly disgusted. And yet, pretty much out of options. There is no affordable photochromic alternative that doesn't mean risking my independence, since without my eyeglasses I can't see far enough in front of me to make it home from the corner store -- and my current prescription is rather more than a year old, so of course replacing the glasses would have to wait until I could afford a new eye exam as well as new glasses. The final decision? I'll be getting clear, non-photochromic goggles that will work both day and night, and hoping the two-inch visor on my helmet is really enough to let me handle the daytime glare. Less safe for everyone I share a road with, less comfortable for me, but then, if you can't afford to pay prices set arbitrarily high for technology available (in plastic lenses; glass ones are even older!) since the 90's, do you really deserve safety or comfort? Clearly not.

For those who like cheap, colorful, versatile skirt/dresses, or those shopping for those who do.



Co-op post is here.

That or knowing that things cost money is skewing my perspective.

I'm watching all the furor over Gene Cranick, and still wondering why it is I'm supposed to be crying over him.

• He doesn't live in South Fulton, so he's not entitled to their services unless he buys them; he pays them no taxes.


• When the fire departments tried charging after they put out fires, fewer than half the people actually paid them, and they had no way to collect.


• His rural community has repeatedly shot down the idea of paying a property tax for fire service.


• He was reminded by letter and by phone (3 times by phone!) that he had not paid the fee and would not be protected in case of a fire.


• His own grandson started that fire, burning trash in a barrel and then leaving it unattended in the middle of a dry spell.


• Cranick's family had more than enough time to get their pets out of that house; the fire started in the back yard, and was only at a shed when they called 911. It moved *slowly* toward the house.

So ... you absolutely don't want a tax, you don't want to pay the fee, but you do want service when your family starts a fire, and you do want sympathy and outrage when you don't get it? Good luck with that. If a human life had been at stake, sure, they should roll the trucks. But for your possessions and the pets you yourself couldn't be bothered to take outside (or open a door for) in the hour-plus time it took for the fire to actually reach your house? Not so much.

For the record, I think fire service, like police service and health care, is or should be a public good, available to everyone and paid for by mandatory taxes. However, you can't leave off the paying for it part.

Tennessee has NO state income tax unless you receive income from stocks and bonds. Fire departments aren't under federal jurisdiction, nor do they really need to be; federal oversight would be very unwieldy for something that needs to be there on a community level. So you can't say "where does his tax money go"; his federal income tax doesn't cover this any more than yours or mine does, and never has, and he probably pays no state tax at all.

Living outside the city, he pays none of the city's taxes. And, for the record, that's a selling point when people go buying homes; they deliberately look for houses on the outskirts of a town but outside the limits because of those low taxes. (By the way, those rural residents also account for more than their share of the calls to the FD!) And when the issue of a property tax was raised, precisely to pay for this service, the rural community refused.

You can't force them to vote it in, but you can't keep offering the service outside the city limits at the sole expense of the city residents who do pay for it with their taxes, either. How to make the rural residents shoulder their share of the cost, given that taxing them is right out? Well, the only way left is subscription. So that's what they have. It's ugly, but it's bound to be; they turned down the better options. And if, knowing that this is what's there, someone declines that subscription, it's not anyone's fault but his own when his house burns and the FD doesn't give him the service he's declined to pay for. They would have come if a person were in there, but with no human life in danger, why should they risk their lives to save the property that evidently wasn't worth a $75 fee to him? And why on earth should I be angry that they didn't?

A fix for the FB/Twitter reposting that doesn't involve giving journal owners the ability to turn off the comment crossposting in their journals would be to give each LJ user a page like their journal page where their own crossposted comments are reproduced in full, perhaps as posts of their own with the ability for others to comment to them turned on.

Or, better and perhaps simpler, to make a reposted comment show up automatically as a post in your own journal. Instead of pointing back to the original entry the comment was posted in, the FB/Twitter links should point to the crossposter's entry with the comment posted in full. It would entirely remove the comment from the context of the original journal, not reveal the identity of the original journal, and allow the crossposter to carry on the conversation sparked by their crosspost in their own space instead of someone else's. No more arguing over "whether" someone should be able to crosspost their own words (because they should) and no betraying link back to anyone's journal but the crossposter's.

Now, a jerk can still use that to break confidence by how they choose to word their reposted comment, but it's going to require a certain degree of deliberate malice that's going to be visible to everyone, including their friends following the link. As a bonus, if the crossposted comments show up as posts in the crossposter's journal, the original poster can presumably see which comment was crossposted, which is a vast improvement on the current system, where they get no notification that a crosspost has happened and no way to tell which comment was crossposted unless they follow the crossposter on FB/Twitter as well as LJ. That would drastically cut down on the opportunity for consequence-free mischief -- it's an entirely different matter when the person whose private business you're discussing will know.