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I have a contrasting opinion about this “SCREW YOU CO2″ bicycle t-shirt. Riding bikes increases the air’s carbon dioxide. More than a car? I highly doubt it, but certainly enough that riding a bike does not go as far as to say “screw you”.
Telling people to stop raising animals, to have smaller families, and that they must plant trees on their own property, are all non-starters politically, but those are the best answers.
See and print my photos at RedBubble.com (click).
Imagine a world where where:
Now replace “M$” with “Apple” and “computer” with “device” and you have exactly where Apple started-out with the iPhone. This behavior would be illegal if Apple dominated a market: they don’t. Microsoft got in trouble for giving volume discounts to computer-manufacturers, and bundling IE with Windows. Compare that to Apple’s list above. (Still not sure about the above? Read Daniel Lyons’ Newsweek.com article for more information.)
I don’t know where this image comes from, but it says Gizmodo on it, so I it is linked to Gizmodo.com Hopefully Gizmodo won’t mind.”
For-sure my problem here is 100% with the actions of the company, and not with the product itself. My friend brought an iPod with him when he came to visit us a few years ago. We watched TV shows on it, and it was really cool. I asked my manager (at my-last-position) for an Apple OSX box if one was available, because putting that UI on a *NIX machine is really cool, and I worked at a Mac lab while in college, and I ran a Mac emulator on my Amiga, and, I think that the iPad is a good choice for non-technical folks. My problem is not with the product itself.
But Apple’s choices are an attack on computer programmers. In some cases programmers spent incredible time-and-money creating products, only to have Apple say, “no you cannot sell your product for use on our handheld computer.”
In the video below, the folks from AllThingsD.com, a site that is associated with The Wall Street Journal, interview Andy Rubin, the father of Android, about Apple, sort-of. Would they expect Steve Jobs to defend Android? Of course not.
It’s otherwise a great video, that shows-off some of Google’s future products, including:
Etc.
This is what happens when the editor chooses to go off topic! This essay existed before this Web page became devoted to motorcycles. The current publish-date represents the latest edits.
If you are interested in The World’s Smallest Political Quiz, but not in my own results, and explanation, then go directly to The World’s Smallest Political Quiz.
Third-parties will always be a losing-proposition in this country. It is simply easier to collect the magic-number of votes if there are only two large parties. (The magic-number of votes is one-more than 50%.)
According to the Advocates for Self Government: a multi-dimensional model is needed as a replacement for the left-to-right-wing straight-line continuum.
Traditionally Libertarians are thought to be right-wing, but there are many Republican party values that aren’t Libertarian. David Nolan realized that a better model would show how much government control a person wanted over personal issues, and how much government control that same person wanted over economic issues. If we map these two dimensions, then we will have four quadrants.
(The block-quotes are from the “Advocates for Self Government’s World’s Smallest Political Quiz FAQ”. It is no longer available at its URL, so some links have been removed from this page.):
Conservatives tend to favor economic freedom, but frequently support laws to restrict personal behavior that violates “traditional values.” They oppose excessive government control of business, while endorsing government action to defend morality and the traditional family structure. Conservatives usually support a strong military, oppose bureaucracy and high taxes, favor a free-market economy, and endorse strong law enforcement.
Liberals usually embrace freedom of choice in personal matters, but tend to support significant government control of the economy. They generally support a government-funded “safety net” to help the disadvantaged, and advocate strict regulation of business. Liberals tend to favor environmental regulations, defend civil liberties and free expression, support government action to promote equality, and tolerate diverse lifestyles.
Libertarians support maximum liberty in both personal and economic matters. They advocate a much smaller government; one that is limited to protecting individuals from coercion and violence. Libertarians tend to embrace individual responsibility, oppose government bureaucracy and taxes, promote private charity, tolerate diverse lifestyles, support the free market, and defend civil liberties.
Statists want government to have a great deal of power over the economy and individual behavior. They frequently doubt whether economic liberty and individual freedom are practical options in today’s world. Statists tend to distrust the free market, support high taxes and centralized planning of the economy, oppose diverse lifestyles, and question the importance of civil liberties.
The Advocates for Self-government have a Web application called The World’s Smallest Political Quiz. (Mark Shroyer: do you remember telling me about this quiz!?) Here are my results:
The red dot shows where Paul is on the Nolan political chart.
I am on the intersection of Liberal (considered to be left wing), Libertarian (considered to be right wing), and Centrist. Really. I am not a Democrat, and I am not a Republican, and neither of those parties will ever accurately represent me.
Following this introduction is a short essay that I wrote for Brooks’Rejection Emails Web site; where he critiques rejection letters. If you meet Brooks, then hire him.
My advice below eventually generated leads. That said, you never know where your next offer will come from. I met a Wal-Mart recruiter at a Diversity Job Fair during the dot-bomb implosion. (It’s not diversity without at least one caucasion man. Right?)
The Dallas Metro area lost over 78,000 IT and Telecom jobs during the 12 month period prior. Many of those folks were at this job fair. There were only two tech companies present. One of those two was interested in applicants with flight simulator engineering experience. The other said, “Go to our Web site. We are not taking resumes.” O… K… I was near the start of the line, so I let others know what I learned, and I heard a lot of, “Thanks, now I don’t have to waste anymore time here” in response to my news.
So, I introduce myself to a Wal-Mart recruiter at her empty booth. She took one look at me and said, “I am not recruiting computer programmers. I am recruiting night stockers in Dallas for the holiday season.” I reply with, “That’s OK I was a Night Stocker at Ames Department Stores. I like retail, and I like stocking shelves. Also, I would like to move to Bentonville Arkansas to be a computer programmer.” She took my resume, told me that she would bring it home, and give it to a tech recruiter, and that my-friends was the beginning of the highest paid position that I have held in my entire life. Heh, and people think that Wal-Mart doesn’t pay well… only better than everyone else!
OK, after this line comes the part that I wrote for the Rejection Emails Web site. Everything up above was just some additional rambling on my part:
I had this experience back during the dot-bomb bust. Obviously I need to paraphrase here, because this conversation happened long ago.
Recruiter:
“How are you doing your online job search?”
I then describe how I search for positions via friends, Monster, etc.
Recruiter:
“That will never work. Those ‘known’ positions potentially have hundreds of applicants. It doesn’t matter how good you are. There are just too many other applicants. Here is how I find potential applicants. One of my clients contacts me directly to fill a position. These are typically not positions that are widely advertised. My client wants to interview a small number of highly qualified people. I go to one of these Web sites (she then shows me Monster). Then I search on the keywords that are in the job description, the potential applicant’s location, etc. Then I contact the folks on the first page. I am almost always able to fill the position for someone near the top of my search results.
So, the most effective way for you to find a position is to be on that first page. You don’t look for positions, because too many other people are applying for those very same positions. You simply position yourself so that I can find you. See this? The results near the top were edited recently. Make a resume. Put it on here. Put all the technologies that you know on it, and update it every single day, even if you simply add a space somewhere. Editing it every day puts it near the top of the search results. This advice will help other recruiters find you. In the meantime I will see if any of my clients need you now.”
Needless to say, this turned everything upside down. My job wasn’t to look for a job. My job was to market myself.
For quite some time now I have been extolling the virtues of using actual data to estimate schedules.
Back when I was a young-pup I worked in sales-support for a massive consultancy. Most of our developers and software architects provided estimates for our schedules, but occasionally we would borrow someone from another group, and this other-group had a system for creating estimates. That system took actual-hours for doing certain types-of-tasks, crunched some numbers, and produced an estimate.
I needed to take a different approach, because my managers wouldn’t use that system.
As a sales-support-guy I had access to all of our financials, and I knew what the loaded rates were. As a developer I had access to the source code. I knew how to do division. So I made my own average-times based off-of those figures. I used those averages for my estimates. I regularly updated them whenever a project completed.
I kept estimates for different metrics: hours-per-table, hours-per-form, etc. I then made a gut-instinct-call about which ones were most relevant for a given project. I multiplied those averages by the new project’s expected number of each item, and then I averaged those averages.
The guy-from-the-other-team’s estimate was always a little low. Mine was always a little lower than that. But it was usually twice that of many other developers’. Which means that many other developers were off by more-than-100%
So, yes, I really believe in using actual evidence to create estimates. In fact anything less than what I was doing isn’t estimating at all. It’s throwing a dart at a small board. A board called “My Career” or “My Project” or “My Business”. With a blindfold on.
How does one do evidence based scheduling? Please read Joel Spolsky’s Evidence Based Scheduling essay.
Please note that the Joel’s company sells FogBugz. Please consider evaluating FogBugz.
This is another version of my “The Real ‘An Inconvenient Truth’”.
Carbon gets transferred from the atmosphere to plants via photosynthesis. This is the ONLY way that it gets into living things. Carbon gets transferred from plants to animals through eating. This is the ONLY way that it gets into animals. Therefore ALL of the CO2 that we could possibly put into the atmosphere came out of the atmosphere in the first place. That is the source of CO2. All of the carbon in fuel came from the atmosphere.
Almost nobody is willing to stop having children in order to “save” the earth. Trees ARE the CO2 containment and capture system. All that wood is a carbon sink. As long as we keep having babies, then we will keep cutting down trees, and needing more energy. But wait… if our population growth were to slow, then the economy would slow, and people will be even poorer, but if the population keeps growing, then burning of carbon-based fuels will continue to rise.
Almost nobody is willing to stop eating meat in order to reverse this trend. Almost everything that can be said about fuel is also true of meat, and growing meat is very inefficient.
Almost nobody wants the price of fuel to get higher as an incentive for people to find other forms of energy.
The folks that don’t want to burn fossil fuels, also don’t want nuclear.
Many people think that ethanol is OK, because the CO2 that gets put back into the atmosphere was removed from the atmosphere, so there is no net gain, but that is true for ALL fuels. ALL CO2 came from the atmosphere. Besides, it takes more than one gallon of oil to create the nitrogen based fertilizer needed to create less than one gallon of ethanol, let alone the energy used to transport it, process it, etc. …and ethanol has a lower energy content than gasoline.
People do exactly what they are economically incented to do. Not what their values tell them what to do.
I love properly designed electric vehicles. Powerful electric motors move diesel trains, so they can sure move an automobile, or a motorcycle, but electric vehicles are still much more expensive than gasoline-powered vehicles. I have electric motorcycle articles here:
Who killed the electric car? You don’t need a movie to answer that question. The batteries would have cost more than a new car to replace, yet needed to be replaced too often. Did the movie mention that? No? (I actually got to see GM’s electric car, the EV1, before it was unveiled. I worked at the GM Powertrain Engineering Center in Warren MI.)
I like wind farms, and solar, and geothermal.
But I refuse to act like CO2 is poison, and I refuse to pretend that I can change things by whining.
Ben Luce told me about this global warming thing back when I was in college. I said, “An ice age is a normal event on Earth even without human intervention.”
If you choose to discriminate against one group, then you can discriminate towards all. I really don’t believe that the people in California realized what they were doing. The reason that the courts had to recognize these marriages, wasn’t due to some political agenda. It was do to the fact that the arguments in every single case used to procure civil rights for women and minorities are also applicable to rights for gays. When you followed all of California’s interpretations that have protected women and minorities you had to also extend those rights based on orientation: especially in-light of their Constitution.
The voters aren’t lawyers and judges. The voters possibly weren’t sufficiently educated about what they were doing. Now, am I saying that every lawyer would have voted against Proposition 8? No. For one-thing Mormons have lawyers too.
It always amazes me that groups-of-people that have been historically treated badly by-others show the same bigotry to other groups-of-people in turn. After all that the Mormons have been put through over plural-marriage (which isn’t marriage at-all) they did this?
What am I talking (err writing) about? This is a church where the men decide whom the women marry (yes, even in 2008; these are the types of things that you learn when you have Mormon relatives). The women in their church don’t have civil liberties. Why wouldn’t they attack gay’s rights? This might actually be a Mormon beach-head. They lost the opportunity to impose their values on non-Mormon women, and dagnamit they are not going to make that mistake again!
Marriage is two completely unrelated things:
These two things have nothing-at-all to do with each other. Congress should ammend the Constitution to define marriage as #2, and do-away with #1as-far-as-laws-are-concerned. Your church won’t recognize same-gender marriage? Fine. That’s OK, because your church only has dominion over #1 above.
When it comes to things like shared health care benefits and-the-like I believe that the laws should equally apply to everyone. If I can share my health care benefits with my wife by putting her down as my one adult household dependant during open enrollment, then you should be able to do the same with one other related adult. That adult could be a mother, brother, spouse, child, whatever. Just take the concept of marriage totally out-of the picture when it comes to work benefits. That’s not fair you say? Well, why should a single-person’s insurance payments subsidize your spouse? THAT is what’s not fair. Why should a gay person’s insurance payments subsidize YOUR spouse, when you will not allow he-or-she to even have a spouse?
It’s the bigots’ fault that gays can’t marry. Then they turn around and criticize gays for not being married; which is exactly what the “doesn’t have stable relationships” criticism is about.
One adult that is not a close blood-relative should be able to share your life with you, and be afforded all of the rights and responsibilities that go with that regardless of gender.
I keep hearing on-the-radio about how negative political ads are made because they work. This is absolutely not true; negative ads are made because the people who pay for the ads are negative.
Do I have any proof that negative ads don’t work? Is this election season enough proof? No, I don’t have proof right now, but I just want to get this out there before I never-get-around-to-ever-writing this essay.
(If you are a recruiter, then please read this paragraph only: just kidding!) One of my “superpowers” is my ability to see patterns in people’s behavior where nobody else can see them. Those managers that have worked with me in stressful problem-solving situations have lauded my ability to problem-solve during problem meetings. I intuitively understand each person’s motivations. I discuss them in a way that doesn’t offend anyone. I keep the discussions to what we logically can prove, and then we get things done. Anyway, this is how I learned about what advertisers really do well; I saw the patterns during actual meetings with clients.
Disclaimer: none of the opinions below are those of any of my past-or-present employers. Please do not assume my explanations are true of any particular company. I have worked with people that have been members of the advertising community at-large at many companies other than the two marketing firms that I have worked-for, and I have learned by observing those experienced individuals.
I worked in the advertising realm for a few years (at Internet marketing consultancies), and I saw over-and-over again how advertisements get made to fit the sensibilities of the guy, or gal, that signs the checks. There is this belief out-there that advertisers know how to subconsciously control the buying habits of the general public, but the truth is this: that new toy’s advertiser knows far less about selling new toys, than they know about selling advertising services, and no, they don’t really use science to improve their techniques. Although most advertising firm’s employees deep-down believe that their company is highly skilled at selling products.
Man, if I were a magician I would be kicked-out of the guild for revealing my tricks.
People remember history different with time; the unbelievable becomes the I-expected-that. Here is an example; young people believe that Ronald Reagan was one of the greatest Presidents. Here is the memory of a 40-year-old: we were all afraid of Reagan. Even his supporters feared that his retoric would kick-off Armageddon. His supporters also believed, or at least claimed, that Reagan was the best person for the job. My memory was that Reagan, and in turn all of us, was simply lucky, but young people see all the good changes that occurred during his tenure, and simply cannot imagine how negative our-world was because of Reagan, and how dangerous Reagan was.
So here is a prediction for you: in the near future each person is going to believe that he-or-she knew that Mr. Obama was going to win by a landslide all-along (it is still October as I write about the election in the past tense: that’s how sure I am). Here is the reality: all folks are talking about is how close the race will be, how the economy will affect voters, how John-McCain-said-this will affect that voters, how Sarah-Palin-said-that will affect the voters, how the Wilder-effect-our-version-of-the-Bradley-effect will affect the voters, how negative campaigning will affect the voters, etc. The truth is that none of these things are as important as the fact that most people can see what a good-man Barack Obama is. The big news today- in both local, and national news- is how some racists are admitting that they will vote for Obama because of the economy. These polled people may say that, but the reality is simply that they know deep-down that he is a good man. Republicans: “Please calm the trucking-a down. You did not loose this race to the Democrats, but you will lose this race. We simply chose a good man to run the country. It’s not personal.”
Eight years ago I believed in John McCain. I told friends that I would vote for him when he made it to the general election. I respected John McCain because his decisions, while he was a prisoner-of-war, illustrated that he would do what he believed to-be-right no matter what the cost. I respected John McCain, because of the straight-talking honesty that he exhibited during-and-after the Keating Five Scandal. In John McCain I finally found someone that I could vote for.
I no longer feel that way. Here is why:
In spite of these reasons, I did not vote against John McCain. I voted for Barack Obama (during early voting on 2008-10-21). This is the first election where my vote has not been a protest vote.
You-too should vote for Mr. Barack Obama. This is the only election in our lifetime where a smart, good, and nice person has run for President. This isn’t about a black man running for President; it’s about a great man running for President.
Also: Mr. Barack Obama will get things done as President, because he knows how to compromise with others. That’s why he supported the proposed energy bill, which included off-shore drilling. He has a history of working towards appropriate compromises.
…only kidding. I used to sit on the other side of this contraption. It’s part of a 101 Dalmatians Halloween Costume, that someone thought was a good idea, but I thought, “It looks like they have those poor office workers working in cages.”
A lot of what you probably think about Wal-Mart is wrong.
My “quotes” (below) are paraphrases of things that I have heard or read recently.
“Those Walton Family members made [insert number here] dollars and they are not giving anything back.”
You see Wal-Mart people giving back to society a lot in Northwest Arkansas.
“But they give nothing back to my state. All of that money goes out of state, and none of it comes back. There is this guy named [insert name here] that goes around and talks about this. He holds up a [insert brand name here] sweater and says, ‘This sweater has $0.75 of labor, and $1.00 of materials, and Wal-Mart sells it for $20.00.’”
I don’t know what Wal-Mart’s markup currently is, and if I did, then I couldn’t tell you. Let me say this though: back when I was training to be an Ames manager (My training store’s picture is on Wikipedia!) I was taught that discount department stores typically shoot for 10% markup in aggregate, and that large chain grocery stores typically shoot for 3% markup in aggregate. You can bet that Wal-Mart is shooting for the lowest number possible. The above sweater example isn’t close to either of those numbers. Also, materials and labor aren’t the only costs of doing business, but all of any given retailer’s costs of doing business are typically covered by a small margin.
“But Wal-Mart is making all those products. I know, because you can see their name on them in the store.”
They buy the products from all of the same vendors that every other company does. Each mature industry typically only has a few big players. That’s where Wal-Mart gets the products from: mature companies in mature industries. The folks that work in the Wal-Mart distribution centers could probably tell you who those companies are if they weren’t so loyal, and/or didn’t all sign non-disclosure agreements. And no, store-brand products aren’t lower quality. It’s not like factory foremen are running around saying, “We gotta do a worse job on this batch of soap: it’s going in a store-brand box! Do worse work!”
Another aspect of “they buy the products from all of the same vendors that every other company does” is that Wal-Mart is the wrong target for your anger about how things are made. If you don’t buy a given company’s product at Wal-Mart, then you will probably end up buying it somewhere else, because there are very few large companies in any mature industry.
“But Wal-Mart uses price pressure to force those companies to lower their quality!”
Price pressure begins when a product becomes commoditized. This happens with, or without, Wal-Mart. That’s why XBOX 360 games have almost the same exact price at every retailer. Xbox 360 games are not a commodity. Yes, I know that Microsoft sets the price of Xbox 360 games, but that just proves my point.
“But companies like Wal-Mart have made it so that manufacturing is moving overseas.”
Wal-Mart cannot have stores overseas, but refuse to purchase products oversea, and yes, Wal-Mart does have stores in China, Mexico, and many other countries.
Besides: manufacturing is not all moving overseas. In 2005 the U.S.’ share of global manufacturing was still 21.1%. That’s right: more than 1/5 of manufacturing revenues world-wide go to the U.S.A. How much does China manufacture? 8% (source: FP Quiz, Foreign Policy Magazine September/October 2007)
As a matter of fact our trade deficit shrunk by $100 Billion over the past year. That means that US exports are increasing dramatically relative to imports.
But what about all of those closed textile mills in North Carolina?
The jobs are somewhere else in the U. S. of A. Obviously: that’s no comfort to the folks that want to stay in their current hometowns.
To be continued: next I will talk about the stock market and how the money made there has nothing to do with any company’s markup: they are two separate and distinct things.
I don’t know how many times I see green=biodiesel. No it does not. Perfect combustion produces C02 and H2O. Bio diesel is very inefficient, but even at its most efficient, it would be adding more CO2.
CO2 is required by the photosynthesis process. Breathing and burning put more CO2 in the air, plants take the carbon out of the air, and return the Oxygen to the air. Burning is done to provide things to animals. Both processes that add CO2 (burning and breathing) are done by, and for, animals. The only natural process that removes carbon is done by plants (animals get the carbon by eating the plants). If you assume that global warming is real, then the only logical conclusion is too many animals, not enough plants.
The real cause of rising CO2 levels? Population growth. Not even Al Gore is willing to talk about that, but that’s what it is. Al Gore showed us those sharply-rising graphs in An Inconvenient Truth, he even showed the corresponding population growth graph, but he didn’t suggest that we lower the population.
We need less people:
Plants breath CO2: yes, that “evil” carbon footprint is potentially good for plants. The natural carbon-sequestration solution isn’t all of this sci-fi, it is more plants, but more plants means less room for other things that people want. Raising livestock uses more energy than raising plant-produce. If we raise less livestock and more plant-produce, then the plants will be sequestering CO2, and less energy will be wasted creating food.
I love electric cars, and I would really like an electric motorcycle. I have been replacing our crazy Lutron switches (these things give new meaning to the words “poor user interface“) with ones that are compatible with CFLs, and using the CFLs. I would rather get electricity from wind, solar, and hydro.
Carbon dioxide is not toxic though. It’s a natural part of our world that is absolutely essential for life on earth. No CO2 means no plants. No plants means we all die. Admittedly too much of anything can be bad for you, but I don’t want to hear about my “carbon footprint” from people that aren’t willing to do what’s necessary to change their own.
Originally published on Dec 9, 2012, but then sent back in time.
Would you buy a:
I have just described the average single family home real estate investment.
The best reason to buy a house? You want to live in it! If you love your house then by all means BUY IT! But don’t buy more house than you want as a way of saving money. There are much safer ways to save money.
Lots of folks think that this housing market is a fluke, but might actually be a return to more appropriate valuations.
Earlier I mentioned that you only get a 1% rise in price. How can you check this? Use Zillow-or-similar to do your own real estate assessments. Compare a new house to a 200-year-old home. In most cases, if the homes are comparable, then the price per square foot will be extremely close.
Originally published on Dec 9, 2012, but then sent back in time.
My how things have changed since I wrote this essay in 2009. Governor Romney pandered to the voters in the 2012 Presidential Election—by continuously insulted the President of the United States for adopting a national health care plan—that is almost exactly like Governor Romney’s plan for Massachusetts. Massachusetts’ plan works, and Romney knows it; that’s why he signed-it, and that’s why it the United States adopted it.
Our country has adopted Governor Romney’s and Massachusetts’ health care plan, and Governor Romney pandered to the Republican voters by insulting the
This is a new version of my contributions to Are emergency rooms really that big a drag on the medical system? on The Straight Dope board (A message board for fans of The Straight Dope). I highly recommend The Straight Dope. If your favorite newspaper doesn’t carry it, then go here. Everyone knows Snopes.com. The Straight Dope has a different purpose, but it is Snopes equal in the fight against ignorance.
Emergency rooms shouldn’t be free, but they must help everyone, and some never pay the bill. If a patient doesn’t pay her bill, then who ends up paying it? The hospital does at first, but ultimately we all do. As Shodan said, “If you are mandated to treat everyone whether they can pay or not, you have to charge those who pay more to cover for those who don’t.” We now have a national health care system without a detailed policy for those that cannot pay. The patients, the insurance companies, and the Physicians have little means of controlling those costs.
I was in poverty for many years. I am certainly not against care for the poor. Being “against” national health care is meaningless. We have had it for some time (whether we are talking about Medicaid, Medicare, or yes, those that simply don’t pay). The question is whether we want control over what is happening, or not, and “not” is just bad business.
How bad is the problem? Go here to read Malcolm Gladwell’s Million Dollar Murray. Here is a teaser quote: “Culhane estimates that in New York at least sixty-two million dollars was being spent annually to shelter just those twenty-five hundred hard-core homeless.”
Being against national health care is unreasonable. We have it, we just do it really badly. Lets stop doing it badly.
Originally published on Dec 9, 2012, but then sent back in time.
The word “star” and “angel” were once synonymous, but our understanding of what “heaven” became more accurate when we learned what stars are: heaven wasn’t the literal sky, it was someplace else. Interestingly we continue to say things like: “up in heaven,” “the heavens above,” and “the angels watching over us,” even though we now understand that they aren’t literally in our sky.
We did not throw religion out because science encroached on it. The meanings of the words become more accurate instead. Ideas that evolve like this are called “memes”. Dr. Richard Dawkins invented that word to account for ideas that evolve. (“Meme” is from the words “memetics” and “gene”.)
Religious scientists, at various times, have used well-designed experiments to prove that prayer works, and they always end up with the same answer: prayer is exactly as effective as talking to a loved one, or a therapist.
How could our understanding of religion change in light of this? Maybe God is hands-off until after we die? That would work.
In the meantime actually helping people is more effective than praying for them.
“Back in the day” (the early 1990s) I occasionally played music with Ben Luce. Ben is one of those brilliant folks that trained in physics/mathematics, music performance, and music production at Fredonia. I think that’s what’s known as a Tonemeister.
Ben’s dad Dave Luce was one of the primary engineers of Moog Synthesizers. A Google search of “Luce Moog“ produces this interview that really bothers me. Why? These guys as the ultimate Moog fans. Ben even built his own Moog. The interview appears to have inspired a number of critical, mean-spirited flames.
His father was a huge influence on Ben. I went on a trip to Ben’s parent’s house, and visited his father’s office one time. It was interesting meeting a real inventor. He had this 3D printer. You sent a CAD file to it, and it would sculpt the object, and this was in the ’90s! He seemed like the type of person that could get along with anyone.
I think that Dave Luce also invented those eye-puffer things that check for glaucoma. (Ben, feel free to correct me here, or anywhere else.)
Anyway, Ben reinvented himself a number of times throughout the years. He taught Physics in college, earned a PhD., did research at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and became a lobbyist at the state level in New Mexico. As a lobbyist he was fighting for renewable energy: mostly solar. This is in contrast to many lobbyists that are funded by big business: mostly coal and oil.
The 2007 Subprime Mortgage Financial Crisis is well underway, and what does MasterCard do? Present me with an ad about using a friggin’ credit card to get busy with some big-time housing market speculation (see a cobbled-together version of it below). Priceless.
To be sure I don’t see many enemies there. The market is non-evil. It just is. Real Estate has always been a very risky business. Why? …because buildings aren’t liquid capital, and houses eat up a large part of one’s income, so one isn’t diversified when one buys a house. What do I call a non-liquid, non-diverse investment? I call it a gamble. Still, if you really want to live in that house, and that house is for sale, then you will need to buy it.
Me? I tend to prefer to go the Coliag route, which is to rent, while putting the difference between what I pay for rent and what I would have paid for a house into diversified funds. Coliag (not his actual name) did so well this way that he was buying things like cars, computers, and photographic equipment with cash… before the age of 44, and he stilled had a great retirement stash. The man was frugal and it paid-off, plus he didn’t need to worry about mowing the lawn.
Yes, some folks have done really well buying and selling their houses, but guess what? It’s still a gamble, and the baby boom that drove the long-term-run-up is over.
My first house purchase was in Plano Texas… just North of Richardson’s Telecom Corridor… just before the Dot-bomb-bubble-burst. IT is a luxury, and spending on luxuries slows down when the overall economy slows down. Yes, I know, “But computer jobs are important.” …but they are not. If I run a foundry that makes car parts, and business is slow, then do you think that I am going to buy more aluminum, or complete my new HR IT project? That’s the real story of the dot-bomb implosion. The media focussed on the failing dotcoms, but that didn’t account for most of the layoffs. We had too many computer programmers, working on too many projects, at too many companies, that were still needing to “buy their aluminum”. In a slowdown-like-that the luxuries go first. My industry went first.
I survived one-layoff-per-quarter for 5 years at two different companies, but when I finally was “affected” it was certainly not within my control: the company that I worked-for went from around 2500 workers to less-than 250 during my period with them. No-one is safe when the cuts run that deep. Folks said, “Why aren’t you looking for another job?” and then looked at me like I was some kind of freaky alien when I said: “There aren’t many available jobs for what I do, so I am going to focus on doing the best job that I can at my current position.”
How much did I lose by “owning” that house for three years? It cost me $100,000 more (two closings, two residences, and a 30,000 loss in value) than I would have paid for renting one apartment, but hey, my (former) spouse wanted that house, so we bought it. I now had no job, no family, and no savings. Swell.
My plan was to work as much as possible, while spending my free time either looking for better work, or riding my motorcycle to Wendy’s for that great dollar menu. Really.
I followed every lead. I went to a Diversity Job Fair like this one (because how diverse would it really be without at least one white male? That’s a joke. Actually, it was because I was going to every job fair.)
So I go to the hotel that’s hosting the job fair, and they have 30-or-so companies arrayed around a large conference room. Two of those companies were tech companies. Hundreds of people were in line to speak to those two companies. One of the companies was looking for Math folks with top-secret government clearance to work on a flight simulator or something (not a good fit for me), and the other one wasn’t taking resumes. They simply asked every person to go to their Web site. Well… Well, why not talk to everyone else?
The Wal-Mart recruiter that was there explained to me that she was hiring night stockers for the Christmas rush, and I told her that I loved doing night stocking when I worked in retail, plus that I would really like to move to Bentonville Arkansas to work for the IT department there. She told me that she would take my resume back to Arkansas. I assumed that it would just be tossed. It wasn’t.
Wal-Mart called me up. I had a few interviews. They asked me to fix something that couldn’t be fixed in the way that they wanted it to be fixed (this “something” happened to be listed on my resume). I told them what could, and couldn’t be accomplished. I have integrity, so I was clear about the situation.
During one of the interviews Jeff (the manager) spins around in his seat and types “W. Paul Caligiuri” (my old name) into Google and finds the Web site that I set up to sell my house. He laughs and says: “Did you put this up yesterday in order to impress us about how confident you are about this job?” or something like that. “Well… No.” I didn’t explain that the Web site had been up for years. Bentonville Arkansas had a booming economy. So that’s how I ended up in Arkansas: the best motorcycling-place in the US of A.
I had to pay for the Texas house for 1.5 years of my stay in Arkansas. It was simply that hard to sell. I would go down there every other weekend, and work on it.
I suspect that lots of folks are being burned by the mortgage crisis, but that we only hear about the fringe cases, because the fringe cases make for better stories (just like in the dot-bomb days). Also, Real Estate is:
Oh, and the MasterCard ad was a really bad idea on someone’s part.
There’s lots of bad ads out there. They don’t get made “because they work”, they get made because advertising firms know more about selling their own services, than they know about selling their client’s products.
THE END
Many people don’t realize that the pledge was originally inclusive of all beliefs. Here it is:
I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Kay sent me a link to Jon Meacham’s New York Times editorial: A Nation of Christians Is Not a Christian Nation. Jon is the Editor of Newsweek, which has become very open to discussions about faith under his watch, and the author of American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation. Here is Jon’s Newsweek article about the subject: God and the Founders.
Here is a quote from Anna Quindlen’s: Indivisible? Wanna Bet?
So let’s go to the history books, as citizens of this country so seldom do. The Pledge of Allegiance started in 1892 as a set piece in a magazine, nothing more, nothing less. It was written by a man named Francis Bellamy in honor of Columbus Day, a holiday that scarcely exists anymore except in terms of department-store sales and parades. The words “under God” were nowhere in it, hardly surprising since Bellamy had been squeezed out of his own church the year before because of his socialist leanings. His granddaughter said he would have hated the addition of the words “under God” to a statement he envisioned uniting a country divided by race, class and, of course, religion.
Those two words went into the pledge nearly 50 years ago, and for the most deplorable reason. It was the height of the Red scare in America, when the lives of those aligned or merely flirting with the Communist Party were destroyed by paranoia, a twisted strain of uber-patriotism and the machinations of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, after whom an entire vein of baseless persecution is now named. Contrary to the current political argument that “under God” is not specifically devout, the push to put it in the pledge was mounted by the Knights of Columbus, a Roman Catholic men’s organization, as an attempt to counter “godless communism.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill making this law, saying that the words would help us to “remain humble.”
If this bigotry had occured in [insert arbitrary name of state here], then I wouldn’t think twice about posting it without an explanation, but it occured in Oklahoma, and I used to live there. I met some good people in Oklahoma. Have no doubt that I respect them.
When people say things like, “This is a Christian nation. 92% of Americans believe in God, so atheists should be quiet” they are saying a hateful thing. If you don’t recognize that as hate speach, then try this version on for size: “This is a [insert arbitrary skin color here] nation…”
“Now the argument that America is a ‘Christian nation’, created by Christians for Christians and traditionally, therefore rightly, dominated by a Christian majority, could just as easily be extended to calling America a ‘white male nation’ and a demand to once again disenfranchise women and minorities. I’m sure we could find a biblical basis for that, as was done in the past, as well as plenty of precedent in law, so long as we went back before the 20th century for our rhetoric” … “No difference in the basic bigoted impulse, or the structure of the argument.” - Bruce Springsteen, Lawrence KS,
SOMA listserv, 2007-08-06
My interest in this video is not religious; if it inspires anyone to recognize and confront their own prejudices, then that is a very good thing.
So, with all that out of the way, “enjoy” the film.