Mole Day
Happy Mole Day.
I went to a Mole Day party in Berkeley and saw some people I hadn't seen for a long time. We also went out and watched the Space Station fly by overhead -- a post on interesting-people advised that it was going to be passing over the Bay Area at a certain moment, and sure enough, there it was, right on cue, and very visible.
This world is large, but parts of it are small, and people are connected to each other in such unexpected ways.
I tried to go see Sumana performing at the Comedy Night event at Blake's on Telegraph, but I was turned away for not having photo ID. The bouncer seemed surprised that I had none: "What happened to your ID?" Ahem.
I'm debating whether to write a letter telling them that they lost $10 (and some customer goodwill) by carding me. On the other hand, surely they wouldn't have carded me if they didn't expect to gain more than that, say through diminished liability. I want to say that litigious people -- parents? -- are making it harder for me not to have ID and still to do things that I want to do. On the other hand, terrorism could easily make it even harder.
Much as my sysadmin's intuition is to want to authenticate people, or to want to have the ability to authenticate people, my civil liberties intuition is that generating documentation (or a culture or technology which expects documentation) about people is not such a good idea.
Maybe it's a matter of "expecting me to have ID would allow you to make distinctions and divisions between people that I don't want you to make". But if I'm talking about bad guys committing genocide, this sounds reasonable, and if I'm talking about (l'havdil) bad guys preventing teenagers from going to comedy shows, this supposedly sounds ridiculous.
At night, I talked to Zack about how to make my arms get better. So now I have an agenda.
