Monday, December 20, 2004
Becker–Posner Blog III: Kill Yr. Idols (With Apologies to Sonic Youth)
by Tom Bozzo
By way of probable cause — apologies to readers if I'm mixing my legal metaphors — I offer the following statement:
The Microsoft Exchange server at work has been automatically sending me threatening messages for months telling me that I'm asking for Big Trouble if I don't do something about my hideously clogged inbox. (I tend to take the view that if my inbox and/or physical office were too orderly for too long of a time, it would be Bad News for my ability to pay my moderately outsized mortgage.) This morning, Exchange made good on the threat by preventing me from sending a brief e-mail until I cleared some stuff out. So I piled into the messy business of deleting enough stuff to get back into the e-mail server's good graces for the longer haul: I spent most of the workday shoveling the digital sh*t, trying desperately to stay awake while doing so.
Becker–Posner did not help maintain consciousness this afternoon. Posner led off this time, with another undergraduate topic paragraph leading me to conclude that the likeliest explanation behind the B–P "comedy gold" remarked upon by Kieran Healy at CT after the first round is uncredited research assistance. They agreed that radical climate change would be rilly bad, less so on the probability of a disastrous outcome. Policy recommendations return from the Gamma Quadrant, and are in fact so pedestrian (carbon taxes, tradeable CO2 emissions rights) as to not constitute superior entertainment to cleaning out one's inbox.
Becker–Posner installment three is up, on the subject of Global Warming, and after this one, I'm getting out of the business of commenting on — and barring a high-placed recommendation, even returning to — the Becker–Posner blog. I'll indict them on the charge of assuming that their (relatively) brief colloquies on topics of immense complexity are interesting because they are who they are. While this assumption was not unwarranted a priori, even adaptive expectations will catch up with it sometime.
By way of probable cause — apologies to readers if I'm mixing my legal metaphors — I offer the following statement:
The Microsoft Exchange server at work has been automatically sending me threatening messages for months telling me that I'm asking for Big Trouble if I don't do something about my hideously clogged inbox. (I tend to take the view that if my inbox and/or physical office were too orderly for too long of a time, it would be Bad News for my ability to pay my moderately outsized mortgage.) This morning, Exchange made good on the threat by preventing me from sending a brief e-mail until I cleared some stuff out. So I piled into the messy business of deleting enough stuff to get back into the e-mail server's good graces for the longer haul: I spent most of the workday shoveling the digital sh*t, trying desperately to stay awake while doing so.
Becker–Posner did not help maintain consciousness this afternoon. Posner led off this time, with another undergraduate topic paragraph leading me to conclude that the likeliest explanation behind the B–P "comedy gold" remarked upon by Kieran Healy at CT after the first round is uncredited research assistance. They agreed that radical climate change would be rilly bad, less so on the probability of a disastrous outcome. Policy recommendations return from the Gamma Quadrant, and are in fact so pedestrian (carbon taxes, tradeable CO2 emissions rights) as to not constitute superior entertainment to cleaning out one's inbox.
