With apologies to my MBA-possessing friends: the case against MBAs.

Not that the degree’s really worthless, of course. As the above-linked transcript acknowledges, it’s an admission ticket to certain spheres of money and power. And the introduction to financial and economic concepts that the associated coursework provides is something I frequently wish I had. But while I won’t say that I outright dismissed any resumes because of it — that wouldn’t be very responsible of me — seeing the degree on a programmer’s resume has definitely prompted me to record a mental strike against them.

In that case it’s because I was specifically looking looking for focused technicians. But speaking more broadly, I think the folks quoted in the above-linked transcript are right when they discuss how the brand of generalism afforded by a business education — as distinct from the type produced by a liberal arts education — can be pretty grating to the rest of us, particularly when it’s wielded by someone unaware of its limitations. Fortunately, nearly all of the MBAs I know are quick to acknowledge those limits; most of them do have an education in something substantial; and none of them, so far as I know, willingly read management books.

Anti-business sentiment is obviously at its high water mark right now; other than our normal societal baseline of simmering anti-authoritarianism, we shouldn’t expect it to last. But for anyone who’s worked under a hapless b-school acolyte, the last few months have been something of a golden age. That they’re producing radio programs embodying this resentment (rather than just NBC sitcoms) seems noteworthy.

I have not been having good bicycle luck. Since Friday I’ve ruptured five innertubes and had two tire levers snap. The flats have forced me to walk through the cold, then the rain, then the cold again; I’ve had to skip appointments and be late to work and walk in bad shoes until my feet ache. My fingers are suffused with brake dust; my hands look like they belong to a Pompeiian mummy.

And yet! I am now so much faster at changing tires, and this feeling of accomplishment almost makes up for all of the hassle. The operation requires finesse, see, and you tend to accidentally hurt yourself and waste time and materials when you’re still getting the hang of it. But now I have the hang of it! I don’t do those things anymore! It’s great!

Well, alright, I’m still wasting materials at a phenomenal clip. But there’s a reliable and thoroughly pleasant honeymoon period of about forty minutes before the newly-installed innertube explodes, and that’s enough for basking. Tomorrow the offending rim goes back to the bike shop and people who objectively know what they’re doing; for now, for me, the subjective experience is going to have to be sufficient.

I’ve committed myself to getting something ready in time for Artomatic, and that probably means that my GTFS explorations will be delayed for a bit. It’s probably for the best, given the timing of the iPhone 3 SDK.

On the other hand, the folks who run the Chinatown bus frown on the use of soldering irons while in transit, so I did spend a little time writing scripts to chew through the dataset. At this point I have 85,921 CSV files delineating exactly where each bus or train is supposed to be on a second-by-second basis during a typical weekday. Well, alright, not exactly: when a unit is between two stops I just interpolate its position linearly — “as the crow flies”, in other words. Still, sort of neat. Fun fact: under the current schedule, the last trip of weekday Metro service concludes on exactly the 100,000th second of the day (which is actually part of the next day, but the trip started before midnight).

Anyway, by counting the lines in each file, I was able to generate the following graph. It shows pretty much what you’d expect: there are a hell of a lot of active trips during rush hour. Still, it feels good to have wrangled with a dataset of this size and produced an actual image from it. Also: there must be well over a thousand Metro and Metrobus operators out there! It explains a few things: given those numbers, you can see how it’s essentially a statistical certainty that on any given day one of them will punch someone in a mascot costume.

Gag me with a spoon from some little hole in the wall after-hours place in the LES that was supposed to just serve falafel but actually it started to have these awful high school bands sometimes and if you knew the guy he’d sell you big paper cups of Turkish beer and when I tell people this story now I usually say it turned into a Hot Topic because that’s funnier but actually I just started hating how young everyone there seemed to be.

Oh! Before I forget, I hope you’ll join me for my own symposium: “What was the feckless D.C.-based web developer who complains too much?” I mean can you believe those guys? So lame! Anyway, details to follow.

NON-SARCASTICALLY: A thoughtful after-action report on the aforementioned affair. Via Amanda.

Now that Ezra’s terrible secret has been revealed, it seems safe to say that the Politico article does a pretty piss-poor job of making JournoList sound like a dire liberal conspiracy. It did leave me wondering about another point, though: whether the availability of this sort of back channel is one of the factors that’s led to the blogosphere’s diminished vibrancy.

There’s an obvious advantage to moving the social and argument-refining functions of online conversation to a venue where participants aren’t exposed to the risks of misinterpretation, prudishness or unreasonably high expectations. Opting for a listserv post instead of a trackback means no public castigation for stupid mistakes and no worrying about an occasional thoughtless (or just really funny) remark getting you in trouble with your employer. And, as Ezra points out, it’s better to have wary experts offer their wisdom in private than not at all. Besides, it’s not like participants are giving up much by foregoing the contributions of the slack-jawed commentariat during this process (aside: I remain baffled by well-meaning web triumphalists’ calls for the use of technology to enable more direct participation in the policy process — have they spent any time in blog comment sections?).

It’s hard to begrudge anyone this sort of professional conservatism, particularly when their industry is in turmoil. I certainly engage in similar behaviors when I find them advantageous. But it does seem likely to me that there’s a homogenizing effect that comes from blog-labor-saving devices like mailing lists and memeorandum. As a fan of these writers I’m glad for anything that makes their work easier, but as a member of the reading public I have to admit: it’s kind of a drag to know that the blogosphere’s efforts to improve itself have led to its audience being protected from so much interesting content.

On the off chance that you missed it, let me encourage you to go read Matt’s post about our economic shift toward producing wealth that doesn’t generate revenue. This is a topic that fascinates me — I’ve poked at it before, but of course Matt’s take is considerably smarter and more rigorous than any conclusions I’ve ever reached. His perspective also happens to be cheerier than my own — I remain somewhat pessimistic about the ultimate economic consequences of these changes, even as I find myself looking forward to their effect on our society.

The good news, though, is that I don’t actually know anything about economics, so for now let’s all just assume that everything will be fine.

Small complaints that I will file here instead of on Twitter:

• Installing MS Office 2008 seems to have affected the default line height of text on this blog when viewed in my browser. I know, you think I’m imagining it — but consider the fact that all text disappeared from the browser during the installation process (and only came back when I restarted Firefox). Weird, right?
• Russian dressing seems to me to just be a flimsy attempt to approximate cheese while keeping reuben sandwiches kosher. This is understandable, but we shouldn’t let cultural traditions that are relevant for only a small subset of the population hold the rest of us back from scientific progression in the field of sandwiches.

  (It’s true, of course, that you can find non-kosher reubens, but I still feel that the historical burden of religion has prevented the quest for a superior reuben condiment from receiving the attention it deserves.)

I’m a day late, but still want to congratulate the folks at EchoDitto and the MJ web team for successfully launching the new Mother Jones.com. I worked on the new MoJo site for my last few months at EchoDitto, and leaving the project incomplete was one of the major qualms I had about leaving — I got to work with a lot of cool clients at ED, but it’s hard to think of one I was happier about than Mother Jones. I know it’s been an at-times painful process (it always is), but it’s great to see what I left behind turned into the new site.

Beerventures at the IFA. Then someone says he doesn’t like my writing and I curse at him! Ah, to live a life of letters.

The one thing that the warring experts agree on is that the proposed stimulus is extraordinary. One side shouts: “It’s outrageous! It’s unprecedented! In terms of economic and political theory, it’s odious!” The other replies that yes, you’re right about all of that, but if we do nothing the alternative will probably be worse. We’ve already tried all of the less objectionable things that we normally do, but now we’re out of alternatives and so the only options we have left are nationalizing banks or giving handouts to financiers or, god forbid, cleaning up the National Mall so that our great American commons isn’t a disgusting barren mudpit.

So yes, it’s a bad situation, but a lack of ideas seems to be at least part of the problem. And then last night it struck me: a bold, novel solution, which I offer here in the humble spirit of citizenship.

We need more money flowing around, right? But we can’t just print more money because of the inflationary risk, right? It has to be short term — new money that disappears after a while. The answer is simple: chocolate gelt. Edible currency. Fiat finger food! It’ll circulate for a while, then gradually disappear as people consume it. For those of you who still believe in economics, I think the technical rationale is that the currency will be consumed once its marginal deliciousness (or whatever) exceeds its face value. Personally, I think it’ll probably just be consumed by the drunk, hungry or drunk & hungry. Either way, there’s a built-in safety check against long-term inflationary effects.

There are of course some practical concerns. The foil would have to be significantly upgraded to make regular handling of the currency viable — perhaps some sort of carefully engineered tin design would be necessary. Also, it may be that chocolate is too cheap (or melting-prone) a commodity to turn into a useful form of currency. Or perhaps forgers would refill empties with Hershey’s chocolate — presumably inferior to delicious federal chocolate. But there are solutions to these problems. Maybe we could use ampules of liquor. Or, simpler still, the government could storm Hidden Valley, seize its ranch-producing operations and make the Treasury Department the only source of our precious national condiment.

Whatever the specifics, I think this is an initiative that would be welcomed by the public. Certainly I’d be a lot happier about it than I was when I received five one-dollar coins’ worth of change from the Chinatown bus people last night.