I've finally started reading through The FairTax Book (by Neal Boortz and John Linder) that I bought two years ago, and it's gotten me rather angry. The worst statistic:

"For several years, the Tax Foundation has calculated the costs of complying with the increasingly complicated federal tax code. They estimate that in 2002 individuals, businesses, and nonprofits spent 5.8 billion hours complying with the tax code—an effort that cost an estimated $194 billion. Think about that number for a minute: 5.8 billion hours. If the average life expectancy is seventy-six years, then the 5.8 billion hours it takes to comply with our tax code in just one year would equal the combined lifespan of 8,700 Americans. That ought to get the point across. It's as if we're throwing away the lives of 8,700 Americans every year, just to make sure we've all complied with the tax code. What an incredible waste of human potential and productivity."

In the world of software design, I keep a constant mind to balancing programming ease against speed for end users. Information theory is all about efficiency, really. Any Turing machine can solve any solvable problem, and any competent programmer can write some code for it. The cost of a software product depends on how long it takes to produce, and the quality of a correct product depends on how quickly it runs. Correctness concerns can only be fixed by throwing more man-hours at the project. The point here is, human time is essentially the only expense in an information system, and I spend a lot of time thinking about efficiency in some way or another.

I got a check in the mail today in accordance with Act 110-185 of the US Congress. Apparently the good folks in Washington decided that they had taken $600 too much from me, so they would do the nice thing and give it back. (While many grateful citizens forget that this was their own money in the first place — which I'm sure is just an unintentional side effect of well-intentioned legislation. Remember your good congressmen in 2010!) I do not feel this gratefulness. Because it occurs to me that I, and millions of others, now have to make a trip to the bank. Congress has given me only what was mine in the first place, and an errand.

First of all, this never should have happened. A government takes what it needs. It is not in the busines of taking arbitrary sums of money, and then giving arbitrary sums of money back. But let's look past that, for a moment, and examine the boneheaded manner of this action. Instead of just letting me put a credit on my text return, or withholding less from me next month, I have this check. Delivered with what I can only imagine amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars in postage stamps, wasting the time and resources of countless citizens, their accountants, and the employees of their banks who must process the transactions. All for nothing: Just a mindless madness of paper-pushing.

What an incredible waste.

There is no problem with labeling and stereotyping people, but labeling yourself is dangerous. It can provide a deceiving sense of acceptance. Once you have a name for something, it can seem more normal or unavoidable. It may even encourage an unintentional tendency to obey the expectations of the classification. As Clerks wisely notes, behavior should not blindly follow title. With this warning in mind, however, a label can be a powerful explanatory tool. And a little self-acceptance is not entirely harmful.

I just stumbled upon something on the Internets from a man by the name of Jonathan Rauch. I found it to be, not marvelously insightful, but a good expression of an abstract thought I had earlier today:

You asked about shyness versus introversion. My limited reading on the subject suggests that, psychologically speaking, they're regarded as different things. That reflects my own experience; I'm not particularly shy myself. To me, shyness implies a real reluctance to be socially aggressive or assertive. It's very difficult for shy people to put themselves out there if they need to. For introverts, it's never easy to do, but it's more a matter of reluctance to expend the energy, because it tires us out. That's what I feel most strongly. If I have to go to a party and then a dinner afterwards, I'm completely ruined for the evening. But if I'm called upon to run a business meeting or something, I don't feel any reluctance or anxiety about it. So, in my mind there's always been a fairly clear distinction between introversion and shyness.

What I was thinking about is the difference between my preferred social interactions at home and and work. In the office, we have a project that needs to get done, and a reason for every task. I have conversations because I can help someone, someone can help me, or we need to collaborate on some decision.

In social situations, I feel that my goal is to waste time. The longer I can keep you talking, the better I've managed to fulfill my societal role as a maker of small talk. When I'm asking someone about software requirements, my job is to get the information I need, accurately and quickly, so we can both get back to our jobs. Associating with new people in the social world is difficult for me, because I generally have no legitimate reason to be speaking with you. I have no such reservations, however, about meeting a new coworker. I need to talk to you to do my job. There's nothing awkward about that.

When I am spending my free time in the world, I like being around my friends with whom I am comfortable. But I have no desire to go out, do things, meet people. I like Rauch's phrasing when he says "it tires us out", because that describes the sensation exactly. Being around gratuitous socialization is mentally exhausting, and it gives me a strong urge retreat back to the sanctuary of home. And having a physical home is incredibly important to me. I'd love to buy property, to be somewhere without depending on anyone else, but it doesn't make sense because I have no guarantee I'll stay in this area for more than a few years. So I've been looking for a place to rent, and my main criteria are space, isolation, and no more than two bedrooms. And my one roommate, I believe I can safely say, is an introvert himself.

Now I consider the main reason I tend to find myself alone and dwelling on my relations with other humans, which is of course the females. Extroversion does not work well with me. I seek only companionship, not excessive interactions. Rauch says his favorite line is a quote from Waiting for Godot:

Don't talk to me. Don't speak to me. Stay with me.

And I find myself wondering why I end up attracted to extroverted people with whom I do not actually get along. I have no answer aside from the obvious one - It's hard to meet other introverts because there aren't as many, and they don't want to talk to you.

The reason I discuss the function of labels in cognition should now be fairly clear. I have, of course, done my best to be normal, because so much in the real world is solved by compromise. So I've tried to shove myself into the usual mold, but I've found with certainty that it doesn't fit. If I dub my situation as introversion, I am a member of a socially oppressed minority, which I may choose to embrace. It justifies this position in which I find myself. If I reject the classification, I conclude that my difficulties are the result of my own defect.

It can be considered reasonable for me, as a human, to base my decision on some degree of self-serving bias. I cannot be expected to completely condemn my own personality. What works best, even if it doesn't work very well, is to follow my own instinct, and I find another fitting quote in this article:

Do you ever wish you were an extrovert?

Not really. That may be because my "faking it" skills are pretty good. But I do think a lot of us are tired of being told that there's something wrong with us—of this lazy assumption that if you're not an extrovert, there's something wrong with you. I think my article may speak to people in part because of its defiant message. It says, "No, I don't wish to be an extrovert. Not everyone has to be one. And why don't you people get it?"

Sometimes I like fighting losing battles when I know I'm right. This has never before been one of them. All I've wanted was to appease others, fit in, and never be an imposition. I've done all I can to compromise with the extroverted world - but it's beyond compromise. In any crowd, if I'm not extremely uncomfortable, I'm drunk. This is a subject on which I'm now willing to be stubborn - or, at least, on which I refuse to be ashamed - because I no longer accept that I should be forced to be what I am not. There is a large subset of human interactions which I do not enjoy, and that will not change.

And that's fine. It's not optimal. But it's an accurate assessment, and I will not lie about it. I'm introverted, and there is a very good chance that I do not give a shit about what you have to say.

I don't handle excessive free time very well anymore. I thought it would be a good idea to take this week off, but it hasn't worked out well. Without some work to do, I end up not doing anything at all. When I have too much time to dwell on my thoughts, they start to turn depressing.

I have been catching up on a bit of gaming.

I rediscovered Total Annihilation, a classic '97 RTS. Strategic, challenging, fun. Built for Windows, runs beautifully with Wine.

On a whim I purchased Katamari Damacy, one of those strange things that come from Japan. Imagine a sticky ball that picks up objects as it rolls. Now let that ball grow as it continually collects larger objects, starting with small trinkets and ending up with people and buildings. This is the gameplay. Rolling a small object around to increase the size of the thing. Replay value is not high, but I've already gotten a sufficient amount of joy out of the experience.

And, of course, Mario Kart Wii, obligatory due to my love of Double Dash. I'm reserving official judgment on this game until I have more experience with it. I was hesitant at first to accept a replacement for Double Dash, but I've become happier with it over time. It may turn out to be superior to its predecessor.

4.0, bitches.

I like what I wrote for my 2340 survey comment. So I'm sharing it.

I would like to write an essay on why Cincom Visualworks should not be used for this course, but I'm sure everyone else is also saying this, so I'll keep it brief.

Smalltalk's "everything is an object" idea sounds like it makes the perfect 2340 language in theory, but it's really not that much different from any other OO language. The only difference is that it has no literals - which only affects a handful of data types. So, the statement that Smalltalk is "more" object-oriented than, say, Java, is not significantly true.

I cannot imagine why a type-safe language was not chosen for this course. It was interesting every time a code example in the lecture had to be given in Java, because it would not make sense in Smalltalk. "Program to interfaces" is great advice, but it's not something we can see in our projects because the language doesn't have interfaces!

The IDE is what made me dislike this project the most. It forces code to be spread out over countless windows, panels, and tabs, making it very difficult to find code that other group members have written. Version control, which would be incredibly easy with SVN and flat text files, is a chore under Visualworks Store. I think a lot more people would give Smalltalk a chance if it could be edited in a decent program. We all have our favorite environments and text editors, and Visualworks replaces all of that with aliased fonts, no syntax coloring, few key shortcuts, and plenty more fodder for a negative design review. Cincom has reinvented the wheel, and it is shaped like a square.

Course reviews are fun.