Posts by Berck

Why our Democracy Sucks, perhaps.


by Berck

Awhile back, I asked why our Democracy sucks. Here’s a piece of the answer, and a hint at the solution.

As it’s on the agenda for Sydney’s cyber/info/tech law reading group tomorrow, I just watched this presentation by Lawrence Lessig. (I’ve long been a Lessig fan, you might know him as the guy who started Creative Commons.) In any case, I think he makes a very compelling point on issues I’d not previously considered to be all that important. And if he’s right it’s not so much that it’s the most important issue, just that it’s the first issue.

In the later post, I expressed a lot of dismay about the candidates in general, but I think that I can pretty safely endorse Obama. He’s made a lot of substantive statements since my earlier complaints, and as time goes by I find that I like the idea of an Obama presidency. I think it’s actually possible that he’s man of real character with positions on issues closer than most. As we’re quite potentially headed for the worst economic recession we’ve seen in a long time, we could use someone who talks pretty and could restore international confidence in the dollar–something that I don’t think any of the other candidates could do.

I’ve done some thinking about the looming “recession” in the last few weeks, and perhaps I’ll post about it later. There’s a lot of very loud speculation as to the cause, which I don’t think is terribly important. What’s more important is the severity, and there’s a few things that have happened lately that could make this very bad for us. For instance, since 1994 the rapidly expanding practice of financial institutions using sweep accounts to effectively lower the reserve requirement for demand deposit accounts has led to significant monetary inflation that may just now start showing up as price inflation. Couple that with festering international mistrust of US monetary policy, and we could be in for a rough time.

I’ll write more later, but I must sleep now and do some reading, since I’m going to class tomorrow. Again.

Posted in Nonclassified Nonsense | No Comments

New York!


by Berck

I decided to spend one of my last free weekends in New York. It’s a long way away. I left my apartment at 9am on Thursday morning and got to the law school at 7:30pm. I’m not looking forward to regularly giving up a day to get to and from work.

I like New York much better when it’s not hot. In general, I like New York. I’m not sure why. I feel like I should hate it, and perhaps I’ll learn to, but for now, I’m too amused.

On the subway back to Brooklyn after getting a beer with Kelsey, I remembered how many people you get a chance to see on a daily basis in New York. Quite a bit more than the half-dozen I’m likely to interact with in a less urban setting.

A group of people got on, and had a long discussion about which of them should sit down in the two spots on the seat next to me. Only one of them eventually sat down, and the others kept standing. A fellow behind them politely asked if any of them were going to sit there, and they said no. Uncannily polite for the Subway–you don’t ask, you just sit. It was obvious the guy was a New Yorker; out of the millions, there’s bound to be a few polite ones. After a little while he asked me if the C train stopped at Fulton. Since it goes down Fulton for a long way, there’s a dozen stops “at Fulton”, so I wasn’t sure what he meant. I told him I didn’t know, but pulled out my map and handed it to him. He laughed and consulted it. He asked if I were a New Yorker, and seemed surprised that I wasn’t, but allowed how that explained why I had a subway map in my pocket.

I manage to not stand out as a tourist, but I don’t look like a New Yorker. I certainly don’t dress correctly. BDU’s and a flannel shirt is just not acceptable attire. New Yorkers seem to put quite a bit of effort into how they dress. They wear double-breasted coats, not gore-tex shells.

Tourists, on the other hand… I walked down 42nd street today and heard two tourists talking to each other about catching a cab to Times Square, since they weren’t having any luck finding it. They were standing at the corner 42nd and Broadway. Apparently the billion watts of lights weren’t enough for them to catch on.

Sweatshirts. Tourists wear sweatshirts. I don’t think anyone else here does. Course, they also wear gore-tex shells and stand on street corners with streetwise maps, something I do often.

Posted in Wanderings | No Comments

I passed.


by Berck

It ended up being a joke, and took only about 10 minutes.

The guy before me took 2 hours. He said it was pretty tough when he got out.

The examiner is a self-proclaimed redneck with cowboy boots. Generally a jolly fellow who appears to have been giving check rides for quite some time. When he met us that morning, he asked if we knew how to spell success. “S-U-C-C-E-S-S,” my classmate said. “Nope. Not even close. S-C-O-T-C-H.”

I started by filling out a weight and balance form from a dispatch release. I realized I’d messed up when I went to plot the CG of the zero fuel weight, and got an index off the chart forward. About that time, the examiner walked back in, looked at me looking at my form, laughed, said, “I know what you did wrong!” “How could you know that quickly?” I asked. “You used basic operating weight in pounds, not adjusted weight units.” I fixed it, and he asked me some questions off the dispatch release. I didn’t know what the first two things he asked about were, but got the rest. He seemed content and got out the study guide I’d made. “Oh, you got my study guide?” I asked. “You made this?” “Yup.” He talked about how it was pretty good. I told him there were a few errors on it, and asked if he wanted an updated copy. “Oh, yes, please!” I emailed it to him right there. “Well, shit, if you made this damn thing there’s no point in me asking you questions off of it. What am I going to ask you now?”

He spent a couple minutes asking me General Operating Manual questions, but after I was able to rattle off the answers quickly, he decided I knew that and went to the walk around slides. There were 160 redundant slides in a power-point presentation. He started going through them. “These slides are bullshit,” he said, “I can’t stand them. 20 pictures of the same damn thing, and it’s not even the right airplane–look that’s a 700.” He stopped at a few points and asked some preflight questions. Asked a lot of questions like, “Can this thing be missing?” To which I answer, “I don’t know, but if it were, I would consult the CDL and notify the Captain.” “Yeah, yeah,” he’d say, interrupting my totally correct but useless answer, “No that thing can’t be missing…. Here, what’s that for?” After another couple minutes of that, he spent awhile printing out paperwork for my training folder, marked me down as “Oral complete,” and sent me home.

Posted in Flying | No Comments