Day: October 20, 2000

Should Men Have A Right to Choose Too?

Cathy Young has a very long, very well written piece in Salon.Com about an idea originally propounded by the men’s rights movement that is likely to be tested in courts within the decade — do men have unequal rights when it comes to issue of abortion that should be solved via a legal remedy?

The basic argument simply turns pro-choice argument on its head. If women should be able to have control over entering in to parental obligations, why not men as well? The idea seems inane at first, but most of the arguments against it, in one way or another, rely on claims that abortion rights activists already say are preposterous when used by pro-lifers. Typically feminists reply that if men don’t want to have to pay child support they should keep their pants on, which is a crude version of an early argument against abortion — if women don’t want to get pregnant, they shouldn’t sleep around. As Young notes, there is a “willingness to liberate women but not men from the unwanted consequences of sex…”

Young quotes from a Planned Parenthood pamphlet, “9 Reasons Why Abortions Are Legal,” which says, in part,

At the most basic level, the abortion issue is not really about abortion. … Should women make their own decisions about family, career and how to live their lives? Or should government do that for them? Do women have the option of deciding when or whether to have children?

Young essentially wants to know that if they are serious about the rhetoric, why shouldn’t men have the same opportunities. And if not, why not?

Most people of the folks who support the so-called men’s right to choose typically have some scheme whereby either parent is able to forego parental obligations — women can obviously abort a fetus as a remedy, and typically the remedy for men would be to renounce parental obligations during the pregnancy.

Does this sort of thinking make sense? Up to a point there are some important insights to be taken away from this sort of argument, but ultimately it has no chance of being accepted by courts and is suspect morally. The problem for feminists, however, is that the reason most people will find the men’s right to choose arguments fallacious is the persistent sexual stereotypes which see men as economic providers for children. The idea of father simply being able to renounce their parental obligations is probably revolting non-feminists and feminists alike (who, when contemplating it, might get a hint of how pro-lifers feel about the idea of a woman being able to abort a fetus) largely because of expectations society has of fathers.

Personally I think that’s, on balance, a very good thing. Besides technological solutions on the horizon such as the male birth control pill are likely to put men and women on more equal technological footing when it comes to controlling reproduction, and a massive change of the sort proposed by those advocating for a man’s right to choose would be a very bad idea.

On the other hand there is a subset of cases of forced fatherhood which Young cites which probably does deserve additional looking into. Namely, how should the law handle the responsibilities of a man when he is forced into being a father thanks to nonconsensual sexual activity?

Young finds a couple of doozies that are stunning. In one case a woman seeking to get pregnant took advantage of a male co-worker who had passed out drunk at a party, and subsequently bragged to friends that she saved a trip to the sperm bank. In another, a woman had oral sex with a man and requested he use a condom. Afterward, unbeknownst to him, she used a syringe to retrieve semen and inseminate herself. In both cases, the mothers sued for and won child support payments from the involuntary father.

And of course there was a much-reported case of a woman convicted of statutory rape for having sex with a 12 year-old. Even though the state concurred that this was in fact a criminal sexual act, the young boy was forced to pay child support when he was 18.

Some sort of legal remedy is in order for those sorts of bizarre cases, but otherwise dramatic legal changes in the way parental obligations are established would be a very bad idea.

Source:

A man’s right to choose. Cathy Young, Salon.Com, October 19, 2000.

Microsoft Opens Mouth Inserts Foot (In This Case, PocketPC)

ZDNet has a story about Microsoft trying to bribe a few dozen Palm enthusiasts. Basically MS identified the most outspoken and influential handheld enthusiasts, invited them to Redmond, and then gave them $1,400 in free PocketPC PDAs. Each participant received a Compaq iPaq and a HP 540.

Apparently Microsoft hopes its marketing department can accomplish what its software division can’t — give large numbers of people a reason to own the PocketPC.

Of course it backfired. As one participant told ZDNet, “It was a cheap tactic to bring Palm users into the fold with freebies. And I think they did that because the device doesn’t stand well on its own.”

And apparently the Palm enthusiast learned why the PocketPC still has such problems, experiencing numerous difficulties in doing basic things like synchronizing the PocketPC with a desktop PC. As one person put it, “Here we were, a room full of handheld experts, and we had trouble figuring even the basic stuff out. This is exemplary of why the platform doesn’t work and Microsoft doesn’t get it.”

One of the people who replied to the ZDNet story put Microsoft’s problem succinctly. You can only bribe somebody with something of value, and a PocketPC machine ain’t it.

Why do big corporations think these sorts of things are good ideas? First Apple gets slammed for allegedly forcing people to sign non disclosure agreements to get their defective Cube’s replaced, and now Microsoft guarantees that even if they do eventually produce a decent version of PocketPC consumers will have to wonder if it gets good reviews because it’s really good or because somebody’s been bribed.

(If I were the Palm enthusiasts, most of whom are journalists or authors, I’d return the gifts ASAP. Never take a gift from someone you’re covering if you still want to be considered objective — or donate them to a friendly web site operator like myself.)

Steve Jobs Doing Damage Control

CNET has coverage of Steve Jobs conference call with Jobs trying to do some serious damage control after Apple’s disastrous earnings report.

The funniest part is Jobs saying that Motorola is going to have a 700mhz G4 chip, as CNET puts it, “toward the first part of 2001.” Given Motorola’s track record that means Q4 2001 if at all.

On the other hand, given the gargantuan task that faces a company in today’s market that tries to control both the hardware and OS ends of a major computer platform, it’s a wonder they manage to stay in business at all. The best thing Apple could do is take a cue from the proposed death antitrust penalty against Microsoft — split the company into two separate entities along hardware and software lines (converting Apple shares into shares in both companies), and let her rip.

My suspicion is the hardware company would fail pretty quickly while the software company would take off. The hardware end of things is just killing Apple and they need to find an alternative or it’s going to end up killing the OS end as well.

Some Excellent Lego Links

  • Christina Hitchcock posted a ton of photos of a very large Lego castle she built.
  • The Math Lego site is an awesome depiction of mathematical constructs in Lego form. There’s a Lego Mobius strip, a trefoil knot, and several minimal surfaces. Very cool.
  • While it doesn’t have the beauty of mathematics, Adrian Drake as a very well done bust of everybody’s favorite superhero, The Tick. As I told Lisa, something like that would look great next to a green lantern.

What Will You Do On November 7

Freemarket.Net has a page asking libertarians what they plan to do on November 7.. For those not familiar with the intricacies of libertarian positions, some libertarians tend toward shunning voting since they argue it merely reinforces state power (or as H.L. Mencken put it, “Every election is a sort of advance auction of stolen goods”), and on the other side are those who love to vote but think Harry Browne either can’t win or is a statist sell-out (in Arizona, science fiction writer L. Neil Smith managed to wrangle his way on to the ballot as the Libertarian Party candidate rather than Browne).

Personally, I’m going to vote against the Green Party. Browne’s not going to win and I’m indifferent between Bush and Gore, so my main goal is to keep the Green Party from getting 5 percent of the vote (not that I think my vote will make a difference even there, but I will enjoy voting against Ralph Nader so it’s worthwhile).

I’ll probably end up voting for Browne.

Money Changes Everything

There’s an interesting exchange at Scripting.Com between David Winer and Jamie Vornov over the value of money. Winer wrote the other day advising people to, “probe your dreams at a deeper level and see if you can’t find a way to do the things you want to do with your life, even if you have no money. You can save yourself a lot of years, learning the old adage, money doesn’t buy happiness.”

On the other hand from a strictly economic point of view, Vornov points out that there is no such thing as having too much wealth since unlimited wealth has unlimited utility.

As a writer, I’m a big believer in Dr. Ben Johnson’s adage that “nobody but a fool ever wrote for anything but money,” but on the other hand I agree more with Winer than Vornov. Vornov is certainly correct that unlimited wealth has unlimited utility. All other things being equal, it would be far better to have unlimited wealth than to not have unlimited wealth.

Unfortunately from a purely economic point of view one can indeed have too much money — you just have to not forget about the opportunity cost involved in obtaining wealth.

If I could obtain unlimited wealth by simply waving my hand, then certainly I’d want it. But the reality is that the creation of wealth typically requires a number of other inputs, the one that concerns me the most right now being time.

Wealth can only be converted into time in a very roundabout way. Certainly my ability to buy a faster computer or an appliance like a dishwasher allows me to do more things within the time I have, but it doesn’t allow me to manufacture more time. The general exception to this is medical advances where having enough money to afford say a liver transplant should I ever need one would directly translate into additional time. But for the most part, I doubt highly that a person making say $100,000/year is able to convert that into significantly more time than someone making $50,000/year.

And here’s the kicker — I’ve seen what people have to do to make $100,000/year, and I want no part of it. I’ve seen people wanting to climb the corporate ladder put in 70 hour weeks on a regular basis. Their entire lives were pretty much the company. They made a lot more than I did but I definitely did not envy them.

Regardless of what money can do, I suspect for most people time has far more utility than money once they reach a comfortable living standards. All of Bill Gates’ money, for example, can’t do anything to increase the amount of time he is able to spend with his child on a daily basis.

A few weeks ago I had a talk with my current boss that I’ve had with the last few people I’ve worked for — why the heck are you working here, they ask? Based on my resume I’m way overqualified for the current job I have now, but I clearly have absolutely no ambitions to move up either. Why? Because at the moment spending time with my family is much more important to me than making more money.

This doesn’t mean, by the way, that it’s necessarily wrong to decide what you really want out of life is to make a lot of money — unlike some people I actually think that’s a pretty admirable goal. Just be aware that you are explicitly making that choice because sometimes the pursuit of wealth does interfere with other values people hold more dearly.