da weekend, and dreams

We got back from a camping SCA event at 9:30 PM Sunday, unloaded the car but mostly just piled things in the kitchen. Monday morning I put away most of the stuff in the kitchen. Walked dogs in the park. Cleaned and oiled my use-knife. Oiled my ankle-boots. Cleaned and oiled the treenware plates we used at the event. Emptied the dishwasher. Watered plants on the porch. Started a batch of sourdough bread. Eventually shalmestere got out of bed and we both did some gardening: she weeded things while I picked the first two wild strawberries of the season, and adjusted the bird-net over the cherry tree. While I was trimming dead raspberry canes in the back yard, the next door neighbor said he had a mail-order box that had arrived for us over the weekend, he went and got it, and we had a good conversation about working at Google Maps. His wife works at an organization that needs data about the footprints and heights of individual buildings, so they might be a good client for the Maps Platform.

Had a dream about reading and writing music/software that depended on writing words in cursive, rotating them 180°, and reinterpreting them: for example, "lookup" becomes "dpngooy", more or less.

hostage situations

So the bad guy has captured your child or spouse or whatever and is holding a gun to its head. Fortunately, the scriptwriters have given you a gun of your own, which you're pointing at the bad guy, at close enough range that you're likely to do serious damage. The bad guy says "Drop your gun, or the kid gets it." What do you do?

If you drop your gun, the bad guy still has a gun pointed at the hostage's head, and will next demand something else from you, and something else, and something else again. You haven't actually gained anything: the hostage is still alive, but only as long as the bad guy feels like it -- which is also true if you don't drop your gun. Indeed, the hostage was keeping the bad guy alive; if he kills the hostage while you still have a gun pointed at him, he won't live very long either.

Now, what if you don't have a gun? The bad guy will instead order you to do other things that strengthen his already-strong position and weaken yours. Again, the hostage is alive as long as the bad guy feels like it, regardless of whether you go along with the demands. If you refuse and he kills the hostage, he's just given away his most valuable asset and made the playing field more level than it was, which is not in his interest. (Killing the hostage isn't in your interest either, but the bad guy, if at all rational, makes decisions based more on his own interest than on yours.)

If somebody threatens you to encourage you to make a "deal", and the deal doesn't come with the verifiable and irrevocable elimination of the threat, it's not a deal; it's a protection racket. The price will keep going up and up and up as long as the bad guy has the power to threaten you and you keep giving him what he asks for. If the price eventually gets too high, you refuse, and he makes good on his threat, you're no better off than if you had refused from the start. (Delay might be a good strategy if you have reason to believe reinforcements will arrive soon to help you, but not if you're on your own.)

This has been a public service announcement, in case you happen to be a University or a law firm or a city, state, or national government....