Daily Socotra

05 June 2006

Unintended Consequences

I was watching “60 minutes” last night, which is an unusual occurrence, an unintended consequence of the transition to the summer season. I emerged from the pool a few minutes before closing and padded across the deck with my towel. I said goodnight to Igor, the lifeguard, who looked a bit tired.

It had been a long weekend for him, cloudy and cool Saturday with few bathers, and today had been better, but still fairly light in attendance. There had been a magic hour when Marty 2, Ms. Hamilton and Maggie had been poolside in their bikinis, and Mrs. Hitler had made an appearance to show off her new cast and walker.

But still, a mixed day, and the passing clouds and cool temperature precluded the effective burning of another layer of skin.

The entrance to the lower unit at Big Pink is only a few feet from the gate to the pool. It is delightful to be able to finish a good towel off and throw on dry clothes right there, rather than walking down the long corridor to the marble foyer, dripping, and take the elevator up. I got dry and decided to work for a while, turning on the computer and the digital scanner. The weekend that was simply not long enough to get everything done.

That is how 60 Minutes came to be playing in the corner. I only have a few channels downstairs since I cut off the paid cable service. It was just too expensive to keep that, and the land-line phone and the high-speed internet connection. All told, the media connection ran close to $200 a month between the three, and it was just too much.

That is when I began to simplify. The cable modem for the computer had been fantastic. It permitted me to download meaningless images with ease, even the streaming video clips that people send so casually these days and choke the computer on a dial up connection. But I use the southern units as an office and changing room now. Most of the work I do is e-mail, and I figured dial-up speed would do.

So I turned it off. The company was a little indignant, but I hope they get over it. The day the cable modem went dead, I was trying to figure out how to configure the connection to my phone. It had been a long time. I idly clicked the infra-red switch on the side of the lap-top, and discovered to my amazement that three of my neighbors had established wi-fi hotspots. It was like living in a parking lot next to a Starbucks.

>From the privacy and comfort of their own homes, my neighbors were inadvertently broadcasting wireless hot-spots into mine.

I took a look at the network properties. One of them required password access. Two did not. I picked one at random and established a connection. I checked my e-mail and smiled. There was no need to keep the telephone connected to the wall at all.

I called up my cellular service provider the next day and found I could save my phone number, for which I have a certain fondness, over into another cell phone line which I could purchase for $10 a month, saving fifty. Everyone who had that number could still call me it. It would just not be connected to the wall.

Not having cable television was a little more problematic, since it went dead when the cable modem did. I was not completely prepared to fall back to the radio age. But there was a solution. Big Pink has an in-building solution to cable TV that dates back before the emergence of the cable monopolies. There is an antenna array up there that collects the local channels out of the air and routes them through the building on cable runs. So I have a little television that shows few channels, but it is perfectly free, just like it was in the old days.

I was scanning photos of a Moscow trip from another decade onto my mass-storage digital device, reading the NY Times, and half-listening to the television in the background. It happened to be set to “60 Minutes.,” through no conscious choice.

Dan Rather is now a correspondent for the long-running television magazine, replacing Mike Wallace who is now in his late eighties. Andy Rooney must be nearing ninety, I thought, and remembering when I would be glued to the set each Sunday night, and the lead story would determine the Washington headlines for the next week.

I haven't watched in years, except by accident. The lead story caught my eye, or ear, rather, as I fed
photos into the scanner. Apparently 500 or more migrants had died in the Arizona desert over the last year, and there were likely more bodies out there left to find.

That was sobering, and got my attention. I turned to watch as a 60 Minutes crew filmed a party of illegals stepping over a low barbed wire fence in a remote area of Mexico, and the men began to file off into the sagebrush of America, confronting the prospects of death to get money to send home..

It was a curious story, and at first I did not know how they wanted me to react. Ed Bradley interviewed the local coroner, who did not have enough freezer space for the corpses found in the desert, and a Border Patrol agent whose main job was trying to locate and rescue the hikers who ran out of water and were in extremis.

I am generally opposed to death, and came away from the segment with a certain admiration for the plucky migrants, who were risking so much for the economic opportunity to the North.

Then they showed some file footage of the same vintage as the photos I was feeding into the scanner. The video showed the San Ysidro border crossing in San Diego, and mass breaks of illegals who used to storm the vehicle lanes daily at the crossing, hundreds of men and women rushing the checkpoints at once. There were way too many to stop, and most of them got through to safety.

It was so appalling that the Clinton Administration had to take action, which as you recall, meant the situation was pretty bad. The Great Wall was constructed from the ocean to the desert waste southeast of the city.

A former official from that Administration came on to talk about the unintended consequences. He said that making it harder to get into the US had just pushed the problem into the desert, where the harsh conditions were killing people. The difficulty in getting back into Mexico further increased pressure on the illegals to stay north and burrow in, bringing their families, rather than go home when their jobs were done.

The tag-line to the story was a haggard Border Patrol official, obviously tired of the struggle. He said all the money spent on fences had been wasted, and it was probably better to just let people come and go as they pleased.

I remembered at that moment why I quit watching 60 Minutes. The premise of the concerned officials was ridiculous. The fence doesn't keep people from going South, unless the Mexicans have dramatically changed how they patrol the border crossing. When I lived in San Diego, I once missed an exit on I-5 and discovered myself in Tijuana. And besides, in Mexico, the undocumented have plenty of documents. They have a right to go home.

It is not hard to go south. In fact, it is so easy that sometimes you get there inadvertently. But that is not what this is about. It is apparently about being able to come and go as you please, taking what you can get and not paying for it.

I sighed and shut down the borrowed wireless link, which was an unintended benefit of one of my neighbors. Setting up an in-home network really was a benefit that helped me simplify my life.

I just hope they don't figure out they are providing a free service. They might change their network security and make it harder to get in. Then I would have to go back to paying for it.