Rad Geek People's Daily

I hate to make this the third posts coming soon--no I really mean it this time post in a row. Unfortunately, it seems that I will have to.

We've been having short-lived storms and power fluctuations for the past few days; and the result is, apparently, that sometime during the morning a power surge proved too much for our wireless router's delicate sensibilities. Until a new one arrives, this means that L. and I have to take turns on the Internet, and I can't use it from anywhere further away than an Ethernet tether on my laptop. And that effectively means that I won't have much of an opportunity to post at any length over the next several days. (If you'd like to speed the process of my getting back up to speed--or just like helping out a hardship case--a new router is going to cost us about US$50.00; feel free to toss a few coins in the hat here.)

Whenever I complain about the annual tribute exacted by the State, one of the first responses that I always get is that the State has every right to demand taxes, because of all the public infrastructure services--roads, water, electricity, and all the rest that the State gives me access to. Of course, that is not quite an answer in the first place: since I never asked the government to provide me these things, it seems a tad rude for them to come up and demand payment or else. But let's grant, for the moment, the legitimacy of the reply: if tax burdens are justified by the degree to which the government supplies useful services, then what have I got? Thanks to the leisurely pace of monopolistic road maintenance, the street in front of my house has been reduced from pavement to muddy dunes for the past three weeks; in the course of the roadwork my water has been turned off at unpredictable intervals for hours at a time; and now the electrical service that my hard earned tax dollars were extorted to underwite has fried my router.

But since these are all government-provided or government-underwritten services in a liberal democratic polity, and since that means they are accountable to the public rather than to the bottom line, I'm sure that I can just take my complaints down to city hall and, as with any responsible service provider, they'll handle all my concerns in a polite and timely fashion. The troubles will, no doubt, be dealt with soon and I will be given compensation for any damage or inconvenience that their screw-ups may have caused--because, hey, it's the government, so the people call the shots, right?

(And if you believe that, I have an 802.11b wireless router in tip-top shape that you might be interested in buying...)