Potato I have

It’s hard to post about the differences of living in France and in the US, endlessly fascinating though they may be to me: whenever I write something, I’m entirely preoccupied with how it’s being received by other Americans. I wish things weren’t so charged between the two countries. So I post with a disclaimer that if I seem provocative or defensive it’s not necessarily intentional, and dive right in…

Paul Krugman’s latest Op-Ed piece covers the part of living in France that fits me like a glove: that of economic choices. He reminds us that France is actually more productive than the US (this shocked me when I first heard it a few years ago), and then argues that the main difference in the economies is one of policy decisions. He mentions health care, schools, and significantly more vacation (personally this is ten weeks rather than four), but really the list is much longer. These things are expensive I guess, but I know the taxes I pay, I know the services I receive, and I’m very happy with the equation.

Krugman closes:

American conservatives despise European welfare states like France. Yet many of them stress the importance of “family values.” And whatever else you may say about French economic policies, they seem extremely supportive of the family as an institution.

So that is being provocative, and I already hear the “Yeah, but…”s, but it seems a shame that it’s impossible to imagine the current US administration even acknowledging that some of these things might work better elsewhere, let alone in France, let alone considering what might possibly translate to the American situation.

One of the American conservative complaints, I think, would be that it’s the government deciding, not the individual, and so that’s not a real choice. Referring to some recent research on differences in working hours (I think it is this study), Krugman says

[European] government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff - to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family - the kind of deal an individual would find hard to negotiate.

This touches an interesting shift in attitude about governments for me over the last several years. None is perfect, certainly not the French one, but at the end of the day I have (to pick just one specific item) ten weeks of vacation with my family and friends. The research above suggests this is primarily due to regulation, and from my viewpoint it’s highly consistent with the priorities of most French people. On the other hand, I know plenty of Americans who would like to see that shift in priorities in their own lives, but it’s very hard to do. Not impossible–very little is truly impossible in America–just highly unlikely.

I found a fine article about Miyazaki by Margaret Talbot, one of the few people to manage to interview him. Along the way, I discovered the New America Foundation, which looks like a place where I could seriously spend a lot of time reading; check out the list of the best articles of 2005. Its Board of Directors is chaired by James Fallows. And from its mission:

Now, more than ever, our nation needs a robust public debate, one that does justice to the complex challenges and opportunities of this unfolding era. […] The purpose of the New America Foundation is to bring exceptionally promising new voices and new ideas to the fore of our nation’s public discourse. Relying on a venture capital approach, the Foundation invests in outstanding individuals and policy ideas that transcend the conventional political spectrum.

The Talbot article was originally published in the New Yorker, but they seem to have very perishable links.

It’s been out for six months in France, but we three just finally saw the new Miyazaki film, Le Chateau Ambulant (Howl’s Moving Castle, Hauru No Ugoku Shiro) on Saturday. It’s the fifth Miyazaki title we’ve seen; if anyone knows of anything as wonderful as his films, please do share. The things sticking with me right now include: the collapsing of age through the shifting presentation of Sophie (somehow cubist for me); the crumbling, petering-out of the castle going up the mountain; the hilariously diminished Witch of the Waste (Sorcière des Landes); the green sticky ooze of pouting; the interdependence of the cursed.

Before seeing Miyazaki, but as an adult, I saw several animated films that I liked, that impressed me with their production qualities, that gave me a good laugh. But none that I wanted to watch more than once or twice, certainly none that left me moved and preoccupied in the way his more complex films do. And I’m delighted that they also captivate our five-year-old daughter, as they have much that I want to pass on to her: stories that are beautiful and magical and optimistic, in which the physical world is prominent, that show that how people treat each other and their world is important, with heroines who are real and imperfect and strong. Stories that will grow with her, cartoons that are not very cartoonish.

Today I showed my daughter a picture of the man who makes all these movies we love so much, and she spontaneously said “Thank you, Miyazaki!” I repeated after her, and said a silent prayer that his latest is not his last — he’s a huge part of our shared story world.

France was late to the internet, partly due to an already established online services network called Minitel. But lately it seems they’ve become quite a leader, at least in high-bandwidth offerings. My DSL provider’s plan is 30€/month and includes a connection of up to 20Mbit (in practice I get about 10Mbit), a VoIP solution that has free unlimited calls in France and is about 1.80€/hour to California, and >200 TV channels (>80 free, including the new digital-over-airwaves channels). The satellite content providers are now delivering over DSL too. Stability and service are not rock-solid — and they’ve been downright nightmarish for some — but I’ve had a pretty good experience overall. Connection-only, high-bandwidth (20Mbit) offerings are about 15€/month, from multiple providers.

My provider has been aggressive with new services, and I especially like this free one; it’s based on the free and open-source (GNU GPL) VLC media player project, and means I can stream video from any computer on my LAN (Mac and PCs for me, but most OSes are supported) to my TV without any additional hardware. No computer in the living room. DVDs, mpgs, etc all presented as playlists which can be selected with the TV remote. Well, any multimedia can be streamed, but video is the interesting one for me.

I’ve found PersonalWiki a good way to keep a lot of information that was previously distributed in text files, outlook, jabber histories, etc. It’s a single, low-friction, hypertext place, with lots of good search capabilities, and my implementation is based on a free and open solution with a great support community (MoinMoin).

Now that I’ve got MultipleDesktops working smoothly for simple things using Subversion, the obvious question is can I use it to keep my PersonalWiki synchronized across machines as well?

Yes, and I’m rather happy with the result; see this experience paper for details (a wiki page at MoinMoin itself).

I mentioned in an earlier post about groove and synchronization that I was more interested in using subversion to synchronize my work on multiple computers — an idea I first saw in this Martin Fowler post.

Adding a mac to our home has finally forced the issue, and I’ve now got a subversion repository on the mac for synch’ing my stuff across different machines. I’ve not pushed the Multiple Desktops idea very far yet — I hope to report back on that later — but I took some subversion setup notes in case you’re trying to do something similar.

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The Economist has an article that illustrates the complicated state of affairs in environmentalism: Texas rancher John Cain Carter is

the driving force behind Aliança da Terra, a new NGO that aims to be a “bridge” between producers and environmentalists, promoting standards of good practice that both sides can live with”

That NGO’s partners “are betting that as Brazilian agriculture becomes more corporate and internationally oriented it can be made to behave more responsibly.”

“What is novel about Mr Carter is that he sees things from the point of view of the producers, and is rooted in ranching—a bigger threat to the Amazon even than soya [or the logging industry].”

Things are bad and not yet getting any better:

In the year to August 2004, according to data released this month, 26,130 square kilometres (10,000 square miles) of Amazon rainforest were destroyed in Brazil, mostly by ranchers, farmers or speculators who cleared land in anticipation of ranchers and farmers coming. That is the second-highest level of destruction on record.

There is a fine photo of Mr Carter, and this is worth a chuckle: “[Carter] indulges in a bit of Texas swagger, as if George Bush had not made it the world’s least fashionable sub-culture.” Heros sometimes come from very curious quarters, maybe this Carter is another of them.

Roger Ebert and Daniel Woodburn have a fruitful conversation about the words for little people. Like Ebert, I had No Idea about “midget,” and would have thought “little people” derogatory. There is an added bonus: some subculture-related cockney rhyming slang towards the bottom.

Being an American living in Europe, I’m sometimes jokingly reminded by others of how “extreme” political correctness is in the US. Maybe so (that wiki entry and especially its talk pages remind me just how broad and controversial that topic is), but what I often find lacking in the easy PC dismissals I hear is any awareness or even interest in how the so-labeled feel about the term. The Ebert/Woodburn correspondence is an especially nice counterpoint.

(via rebecca’s pocket)

I took this survey a few years ago, but don’t find my score at the moment (it was pre-blog). Taking it again I don’t think there is much of a change from that one, but I sure wish I had scores from my teens/20s/30s.

Today it is:

• Economic Left/Right: -4.88
• Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.33

There are a graph and a rough “scatter table” of bloggers’ links on this Tim Lambert page, from late 2003; there is heavy clustering in the same lower-left quadrant where I find myself, but who knows what that means, the sample is anything but random. There is also some discussion of whether the survey is accurate/useful/etc.

Here is a self-described “better political compass;” those scores are not directly comparable, though I was much more centrist here (numbers in parenthesis are -1/1 normalized):

• left/right: -2.8628 (-0.1723)
• idealism/pragmatism: +0.8226 (+0.0495)

Both of these surveys were like almost every survey I take, in that I get caught up in trying to understand what the question is “really” asking, everything seems to depend on some definition or other, and I wonder how the heck these things can really account for all my mental jumping around. Though strangely, page six on the first survey was very black-and-white for me: I clicked right through those without hesitation, thankful for something simple.

Last October in Monterey, California.