Lowering the Drinking Age

A collection of university presidents and chancellors are publicly calling for their states to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18. This has met with a tremendous backlash from groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and support from the interwebz (as evidenced by the comments that readers have posted on most of the news articles I’ve read). Unfortunately, those of us who actually like the idea of a change in the status quo don’t have a highly experienced and well-known special-interest group like MADD to churn out sound bites, so all the good quotes and publicity are against the change. I have to comment.

MADD is dodging their responsibilities and flirting with hypocrisy.

If you believe that people between the ages of 18 and 21 should be prohibited from purchasing and consuming alcoholic beverages, you need to have spent the last twenty years tirelessly campaigning against their being able to do other dangerous things or make other potentially life-changing or damaging decisions. To achieve continuity and avoid hypocrisy, you need to stand against the right of 18-year-olds to join the military to fight and die for their country, the right to purchase cigarettes (which more addictive than alcohol and actually shorten their users’ life expectancy) and the right to own and carry firearms. You need to crusade against 18-year-olds’ ability to enter legally binding contracts and financial obligations. And you’d damn well better argue against them being able to alter the course of our country by voting.

As a country, we the taxpayers and voters long ago decided that 18 was the age at which individuals have sufficient good judgment to make these kinds of life-changing decisions. There is no philosophically or morally viable reason that a right should be denied to an 18-year-old adult, but permitted to a 21-year-old adult, unless that right requires additional maturity to use effectively. I challenge anyone to argue that gun ownership, military service or voting require less maturity than responsible alcohol consumption.

And I do believe that within a few years of lowering the drinking age to 18, 18- to 20-year-old drinkers would be behaving responsibly in quantifiable ways.

During the years leading up to age 18, parents educate their children (most often by example) and prepare them to make the choices they’ll be faced with as adults – all of the choices I listed above. One huge reason for the preponderance of irresponsible drinking in college is that during the few years before age 21, parents are more distant voices in their children’s lives, and their children are far from their example. Also, as adults, college students are becoming more likely to make their own decisions, or to be influenced by their friends rather than by their parents. MADD calls the Amethyst Initiative an attempt by the University faculty to dodge responsibility. In reality, the responsibility to teach people to enjoy alcohol like an adult rests on their parents’ own shoulders.

HP Pavilion Notebook Graphics

HP publicly announced late last month that some of their notebooks had shipped with bad graphics chips. They’ve known this for about nine months now and have had an extended warranty in place at least since April, when I received a critical update e-mail.

The reason I write about this now is because I own an HP Pavilion dv2025nr – one of the laptops with a faulty chip. The dv2000 series generally uses the GeForce Go 6150, which is basically a slight step up from AMD-based integrated graphics. BIOS options let you assign 32 to 128 MB of the computer’s DDR2 RAM to graphics. It’s noticeably slower than the discrete graphics cards like the GeForce 8***M series, which currently ship in most of HP and Dell’s entertainment notebooks, and far less powerful, but it was sufficient to play c.2001 games like Deus Ex, Warcraft III and Diablo 2 at a decent framerate after I upgraded to 2GB of RAM. It even played World of Warcraft with all the graphics set to low and all of the notebook’s bloatware removed.

The bad chips basically cause a malfunction where if you turn on your computer, the LED Quicklaunch buttons light up, the drive starts to spin, you can hear the fan, but the screen stays dark. It seemed to happen more often when the laptop was hot, and less often after I’d let it cool down.

So I sent the notebook back under the extended warranty, which was fast and convenient. Received it less than a week later (they’d said seven to ten business days, so that was cool). Started it up. The screen started up perfectly, which was cool. But when the boot sequence was completed, the graphics were terrible – like 1987 terrible. My Nintendo Entertainment System had better color than this. Settings were locked on 800 by 600, 4-bit color. I tried downloading new drivers – sp33547 and sp 33549 (these are published by HP). No luck. Got on HP chat support and installed again, plus tried two of NVidia’s Forceware drivers – 169.21 and 175.19. Still no luck. Updated the BIOS to F.39 and THEN updated the drivers to sp33549, and still no luck. Now I get to send it back.

Will update when it returns.

UPDATE: I figured out that after installing the new drivers, rather than using Display Properties to try to change the settings, I had to go into the NVidia control panel.  Once I did that, it popped into perfect color and focus.  The dv2025nr is still not suitable to any 3D games released after about 2001, but it can play PC ports of original XBox and PS2 games, and classics like Warcraft 3.

New England Weather

Having lived in Boston for nearly two years now, I definitely consider myself a permanent resident.  I can give directions to tourists, use the T to its maximum efficiency, analyze the impact of the Red Sox schedule on my weekend plans, etc.

I am still astounded at how the weather can go from “Perfect Beach Day” to “Rain on a Biblical Scale.”

Today, it took about fifteen minutes.  And by the time 4:30 rolled around, driving was a matter of fording a series of large, shallow lakes while trying to see through the barrel of water that the jackass in the lane next to you kicked up onto your windshield.

In other news, I’m settling well into the new job.  I fell behind on my CFA studying over the past week or two (double whammy; the mental exhaustion of learning a new job and a new corporate culture, and the siren’s call of Half Life 2 on the new PC).  I’m starting to catch up.  The test is in December and I won’t be in panic mode for a few more months, but the more I can internalize now, the easier it will go.  From what I hear, Level 1 is actually not tremendously difficult for somebody who’s made it through a decent MBA program and puts in the study time – Levels 2 and 3 really separate the men from the boys.  I have some time for those, since I can’t be a true CFA charterholder until I have four years of experience with investments and securities under my belt.  Basically, I’m taking this test because it’s fun to learn about financial concepts, and because it’s a boost on the resume.

Also, the Bell in Hand is an excellent bar.  I have no idea what band was playing there last night, but they covered some good songs, and they put on a good show.