Thoughts and Prayers

When something bad happens, someone always says, "Our thoughts and prayers are with those affected by this horrible blah blah blah."

The idea of praying for someone who has experienced something bad, I get. There is an agency there; well-meaning people are praying TO someone, with a belief that this prayer communicates a request or sentiment to their god praying on behalf of this suffering friend.

But what the heck are "thoughts" going to accomplish in such a situation. If I have suffered a loss or experienced a tragedy of some kind, why should it be a comfort to me to know that someone else is thinking about it?

That phraseology is a politically-correct cop-out, I contend. . . a concession that people make in times of trouble in order to not hurt the feelings of non believers (among the suffering or among the onlookers). We don't want to make a collective statement saying that everyone is praying, because many are not. And we don't want to offend non believers by only offering them prayers in their time of need, because they may think that prayers offered on their behalf are wasted effort.

So we say "thoughts and prayers" as a way to keep everyone happy, or to at least not offend. I get that, and I see the value in not offending needlessly.

I personally have some very dear friends and relatives who are non believers. When they're in trouble, I'm likely thinking about them and their plight, but the sad reality is that I'm probably also thinking about football and my job and whether the grass needs to be cut and what's for dinner. My thoughts at times like that aren't worth all that much, and don't really accomplish much.

What matters is that, when those around me are in trouble, I pray for them. Not as often as I should, probably, nor as fervently. I don't think I'm great at prayer, but I try. And I humbly hope that others do the same for me.

The Hypocrisy of Sin Taxes

States heavily tax tobacco products. . . because they can.  

Everyone knows that tobacco use is harmful, which permits non-tobacco users to write off tobacco users as irresponsible and uneducated.  Cigarette smoke disturbs nearby non smokers, as does the sight of a snuff user spiting into a cup or on the sidewalk.  Smoke-free bars, restaurants and places of work now force smokers to stand out in the cold and rain, often "at least 100 feet from the closest building or sidewalk" to do their dirty deed. 

States can tax tobacco freely because smoking has become a dirty, frowned-upon habit in America.  And they can also tax it freely because they know that smokers will keep smoking regardless of price.  The demand for cigarettes is highly inelastic, meaning that price increases for cigarettes do not dramatically affect the demand.  So states know they can add another $0.25 or $0.50 per pack periodically and get the additional revenue they need, and tobacco manufacturers know that higher taxes on their products, while not ideal, will not really impact their sales much. No one loses but the user. . . the sinner who is being gouged by the sin tax.  

States rationalize these frequent tax increases by pointing to the damage that smoking does, both to the smoker and to those breathing second-hand smoke.  The fact that smoking is so obviously harmful gives politicians and voters the easy moral high ground every time they decide to levy another tax on cigarettes, as if they are really doing something good for those poor smokers by jacking up the price of cigarettes yet again.  They all sleep well after each tax increase, having convinced themselves that they have done this to help or incentivize smokers to make healthier choices.  It's not about the money, right?  Smokers needn't pay higher taxes; they could just quit smoking, right?  They could transition to a nicotine gum or one of those electronic cigarettes (e-cigs) that deliver nicotine without all of those harmful effects from tobacco, right?  Life is about choices, and smokers need to just smarten up and make better choices.  Right? 

Here's the kicker.  Now that e-cigs (which use no tobacco, produce no second hand smoke, and eschew the purported dozens of carcinogens found in tobacco) are becoming popular, states are realizing that they're missing out on a great new revenue source.  The states can't just let e-cigs be sold with only normal sales taxes affixed, can they?  Of course they can't.  States (starting with Utah) will, with increasing frequency, start going after e-cig sales and levy ever increasing taxes on those products.

The hypocrisy is just epic.  The states are addicted the sinful tobacco tax revenue like a three-pack-a-day smoker is addicted to his cigarettes.  The state's own tax increases are driving people away from cigarettes, endangering the tax revenue that the states gladly gobble up from this the sale of this horribly harmful product.

To be sure, the states will (always) package any new attempt at taxation so that it appears that they are once again simply doing what is best for the citizenry   But such attempts at spin are transparent these days, aren't they?  We're not that naive any more. 

It begs an interesting question.  If states could press a button and halt all tobacco sales forever. . . if tobacco use could miraculously be wiped out in one fell swoop, never to return and saving millions of lives in the process. . . would legislators choose to press that button?  Or are they so addicted to the revenue generated by tobacco sales that they secretly, desperately need people to keep smoking?  I think we all know the answer to that.  Again, we're not that naive any more.  

I think this exposes "sin taxes" like those on cigarettes for what they are: an easy way for politicians to extort money from people who have no choice but to accept it. And there will never be enough tax revenue generated to satisfy the state's addiction.   

Where's the pepper?

I think I've uncovered some kind of conspiracy, or at least a mystery.

Except for sweets and desserts, almost every food recipe I've ever followed calls for salt and pepper. And every savory recipe I've ever seen prepared on TV always includes salt and pepper. Along with salt, black pepper is a nearly ubiquitous spice. It's everywhere in what we cook and what we see cooked.

What's weird is that, for the life of me, I cannot remember seeing "black pepper" listed as an ingredient in any packaged food I've purchased from the store. I read a lot of food labels these days, and it just dawned on me that black pepper is never listed as an ingredient.

How can that be? How can black pepper be called for in almost every recipe known to man, yet not included in any foods that we buy?

Something fishy is going on.

Have you ever. . . ?

Have you ever created something new intellectually? I mean have you ever really, seriously advanced thought in some area?

If you think about it, much of what we all do (or at least much of what I do) is derivative, rehashing what has already been done. Certainly in undergraduate school, any "research" that I did was really an exercise in collecting, repackaging and reselling what other "experts" had done. Even in those areas where I was expected to provide a fresh insight into the work of others, I was still not creating anything new. At best, I might have said something slightly original about someone else's work.

In graduate school, it wasn't much better, really. I was expected to have developed an expertise for my area of study, and I was (hopefully) able to make connections and inferences across works and across subject areas that were perhaps a bit more sophisticated than I would have pulled off in undergraduate school. It felt like hard, creative work at the time, but I know better now, all these years later. Even when completing a thesis at the graduate level, it was still more of the same, riffing on more of the same. It was all about what moderately unique twist I could come up with on what others had already done.

Now, in the real world, what do we really create? Certainly I write thousands of words a week and produce original processes, plans and ideas all the time. Or at least it seems like I do. But I think that someone doing a forensic analysis of my work after the fact would conclude that nothing I do is really anything new. I'm still retracing well-worn paths and building familiar structures.

Does anyone truly "create" any more? What about people studying at the PhD level? The requirement for that degree is supposed to be a true, original contribution to the literature in that field of study. . . something that advances the debate and provides primary research for graduate students to rehash and for other professionals to build upon. Are PhDs where the creation in academia happens?

And what about the creative ones among us in the real world? Those artistic ones among us. Surely they create, right? Original fiction and non-fiction. Original illustrations, photographs, paintings, and sculptures.

Is that really who creates? PhDs and artists? What about everyone else?

Hope

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

-- Emily Dickinson

My ISP Sucks

After countless calls to my Internet service provider (ISP) and four visits from various technicians, it appears that our house connection is finally working at reasonable speeds (10 Meg download).

Most infuriating parts of the whole experience so far?

• Realizing that the complicated way I had my modem "bridged" to my wireless router was in fact totally unnecessary and probably negatively impacting my speeds. The only reason it was ever set up that way was because my ISP said to do it that way.
  
• Being told to disconnect my router and recycle my modem EVERY SINGLE TIME I talked to anyone at my ISP (at least 20 times all together), even though I knew the problem wasn't on my end.
• Having the technician show up in the middle of my work day and being surprised when I wasn't cool with just losing my Internet connection for an indeterminate amount of time. Ever heard of "working from home?"
• Being told "Yep, we fixed it on our end; the slow speed problem is on your end" and being forced to dismantle my network for the umpteenth time, only to have the guy interrupt me half way through that process to tell me, "Oh, I just got an IM from [some other guy]. He says that we haven't actually increased your connection speed yet. It'll be fixed by this coming Friday."
• Having it not be fixed by that coming Friday. Or the next Friday. Or the next.
  
• Being told by "tech support" that I should call customer service once this is all over to get my billing straightened out. Excuse me? I thought I was already talking to customer service. I actually said, "So you can't say to me 'I'll make sure that your billing gets straightened out, sir'?" And I was told, "Nope we [tech support] can't call customer service."
  

The most infuriating part of the whole process yet to come? The certainty that I'll be charged for the faster connection for the three weeks between when they said I had it and when I actually got it.

Yes, I know that unfair additional charge for those weeks only amounts to about $10. I'll still probably end up going to jail over it.

Make PDFs

For those of you who want to be able to make .pdf files so that anyone and everyone can reliably view the things you send them, use this.

http://www.pdfforge.org/.

It's free, it's slick, and it allows you to turn your Word docs, Excel spreadsheets and other weird files directly into .pdf files.

Immensely useful.

Who Makes the World's Stuff?

Who makes the world's stuff these days? Not the United States, certainly. We don't make much of anything here in the U.S. anymore. All of our manufacturing jobs have been off-shored and outsourced and shipped overseas to China and Taiwan and other points east, where wages are low, unions are scarce, environmental protection is an afterthought, and billions of people stand in line to do work once done in the U.S. for a fraction of what we used to charge.

The United States, having served as the global manufacturing leader for most of the last 100 years, has let that all slip away and has become a weak, reactive slave to consumerism. . . choosing to buy what we need instead of making it ourselves.

Isn't that right? I mean, that's what we've been led to believe, isn't it?

Wrong. As the the Financial Times pointed out in June of 2010, "The U.S. remained the world's biggest manufacturing nation by output last year."

Not China. Not Taiwan. The United States, thank you very much. We make the world's stuff. Still. For now.

But as that same article points out, the U.S. is poised to relinquish that crown to China in 2011 unless something dramatic happens.

Will that happen? Probably. Powers greater than me will decide that one way or the other. I'm just pleased that we're there, right at the top, vying for the lead. It's like finding out that you're almost as good at something today as you were back in high school. Maybe we're not as far gone as we've been led to believe we are.

And maybe there's hope. There are still things the U.S. does better than anyone else on the planet, I believe.

Canary in the Coal Mine

Have you lost your job in the last year? I really am sorry if you have, and I sincerely hope you have found work since then.

If you're like me and you've been blessed enough not to have lost your job, you probably still know a few people who have. But for many of us who have remained employed during this recession, I think it is all too easy to know emperically that a problem exists but to not really believe it deep down. No amount of hype on TV or in print can really bring home the fact that people are flat out LOOSING THEIR JOBS as a result of the sad state of the economy right now.

I'm not sure one more piece of scary information will help make this whole deal real for anyone else, but I heard a statistic recently that kind of jumped out at me. In my home state of Missouri, tax revenue (resulting from income taxes, corporate taxes and sales taxes) fell 9.1% during the last year.

That's real, and that's not small potatoes, folks. That's up in the low billions of dollars.

That's a real drop in taxes collected from what people earn (7.6%), because so many people aren't working, and many of those who are still employed have seen their incomes flatline or even decline in the last year. That's a real drop in taxes on companies (~5%) that aren't doing as much business as they did in previous years. And that's a real drop in taxes collected at the cash register (~5%) as people spend less of what they earn.

For some reason, knowing that my state's revenues have dropped by close to 10% in the past year somehow makes the recession more real to me. In a weird way, tax revenues are like the canary in the coal mine. . . a second-hand indicator of the health (or sickness) of its surroundings.

I think there's something bad in the air.

http://www.connectmidmissouri.com/news/story.aspx?id=478120

America the Beautiful

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife.
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!

New York and L.A.

What grinds my gears. . .

I read this morning that the last interview with Dennis Hopper, who died recently, is on news stands in New York and Los Angeles and "will be available nationally on July 6."

This, like the practice of opening movies in New York and Los Angeles days or weeks before opening them in the rest of the country, is part of the reason why 90% of the people in the U.S. hate New York and Los Angeles.

And yes, I know that more than 10% of the nation's population lives in New York and Los Angeles. Some of those folks hate themselves.

Elitist shenanigans.

First new post in a while

I haven't posted anything here since December '09, so this is really just a check to see if I can still log in to my blog, post, edit, etc. Seems to be working.

Fool Us Twice, Shame On Us

I mentioned back in December that the bailout for automakers felt like a bad idea. Specifically, I asked the obvious question: What if the bailout doesn't work? The obvious answer back then was that the car companies would STILL go bankrupt, and we (the tax payers) would be $14 billion dollars poorer.

Well, sure enough, here we are in late March 2009, and GM and Chrysler are turning their pockets inside out again, saying that the $14 billion we gave them didn't quite do the job. They want more money, and Obama is going to give it to them. Oh, he's doing his best to look all stern and grumpy while he's using the nation's overdrawn checkbook to write Detroit another check with nine or ten zeros on it. But he'll write the check, make no mistake about it.

And guess what. The automakers will still go bankrupt. But the question is, will that be the end of it? It'll go one of two ways, I think.

Option 1 has automakers filing for some kind of high-speed bankruptcy as a condition of their getting more bail out money. They'll file for bankruptcy, wiping out much of their debt (thereby screwing over their suppliers and vendors, not to mention the US tax payers). They'll take a crack at retooling their labor contracts and restructuring their pension and benefit positions. And they'll get billions more in guaranteed loans from the Obama administration. With all of this, the car companies will reemerge, ready to do business again. And guess what! They will still fail, and they will be back yet again to ask for even more money.

Option 2 has has automakers getting billions in additional money from the government before they take the step of filing for bankruptcy. They'll get the money, burn through it, and then still go belly up, wiping out the money owed from the first bailout ($14 billion) AND however much they get this second go-round. All creditors will get screwed, attempts will be made at restructuring, and they will reemerge just as screwed up as they were before. And guess what! They will still fail, and they will be back to ask for even more money.

There is, of course, a third option, but it is an option no one seems willing to take. This third option has GM and Chrysler being allowed to fail outright. We as tax payers resignedly write off the $14 billion in lost bailout money as a lesson well-learned, and we refuse to play the game any more. The automakers go belly up. And instead of allowing this privately-held company to screw over countless vendors and suppliers (and tax payers), we amke sure that their assets are used to pay all outstanding debts.

I used to think that having those big companies fail would be an unthinkable disaster for the country. I now see that there are far worse things.

Can GM and Chrysler emerge from such a liquidation and still competitively build cars? Probably not. So be it.

Lock the Door? Or Open It?

I’m conflicted these days about a lot of things. One that keeps smacking me in the face is the whole immigration issue.

Side A: California is showing a $40 billion budget deficit while they pay an estimated $13 billion annually to support illegal (not “undocumented”) aliens (not “immigrants”). States across the US are similarly burdened. Our federal immigration laws are being ignored, and crazy policies in states like CA are actually encouraging more illegal aliens to come on in. The US / Mexican border really does represent a national security weakness, too, although not nearly as much as some would like us to believe.

Side B: Mexico is a disaster; there is no hope there for the vast majority of Mexican citizens. The US immigration process is slow, unfair, and often wholly impassable for Mexicans wanting to emigrate to the US. If I was a Mexican citizen living there in poverty (as is the norm), I’d do everything in my power to get to the US. . . up to and including sneaking myself and my family across the border illegally. If I was poor in Mexico with a pregnant wife, I would do whatever it took to have my child born in the US. And in doing so, I would likely have to put myself and my family at great risk; too many people are suffering and dying as they try to get into the US.

There's a lot of fault to go around. I can find significant fault in the corrupt and broken Mexican government that has failed consistently for 200 years to foster any kind of prosperity for its people while actively encouraging its citizens to go to the US illegally and send money back home. I can find fault in US federal policy that has failed to reasonably and fairly regulate its southern border while also refusing to have any kind of reasonable enforcement and deportation processes in place. I can find great fault in the state policies in California, which have exacerbated the problem.

But if I am honest with myself, I cannot find fault in the motives of those who choose to come to the US illegally seeking a better life.

How’s that for wishy washy?

1979 Schwinn Stingray (red)

Man, from age seven to age fourteen or so, there were few things more important to me than my bicycle. It was everything.

It was transportation to school (occasionally), the swimming pool (all summer long), friends' houses, relatives' houses, stores, and movies. If I wanted a pack of gum or some kind of novelty from the drug store, I didn't ask my parents for a ride or for money. I used my own money, and I got myself there.

It was freedom to head out at 9:00 a.m. and not come back until dinner time during the summer.

It was ownership. . . ownership at a time in my life when I held supreme authority of very few other things in my life. My bike was MINE. . . not my sister's and not my friend's. Dudes had to ask before they could just pick up my bike and ride it.

It was responsibility. . . a maintenance responsibility prefiguring the responsibility of owning a car later in life. Keep the tires inflated, keep the chain lubed, maybe consider tearing it apart to install a double goose neck or a new seat or a hand break or something cool. And lock it up or it'll get swiped. Big, important decisions and responsibilities for a kid.

It was speed, too. . . the kind of speed a kid without a driver's license can't get any other way. Buzzing down a long residential hill as fast as the cars usually traveled gave me a kind of speed that almost seemed illegal. Speed AND danger. Something happened almost every day on that bike that surprised me or scared me or made me really take notice of things. A wobble at 30 mph. A rock in the road that almost sent me sprawling. A near collision with friend or a neighborhood dog. Riding my bike everywhere was the only thing my parents knowingly allowed me to do that routinely threatened my life. No helmets. No pads. Screw it. Just ride.

It was pain, too. . . the impetus for countless bruises, abrasions, serious cuts and full-on head injuries. My bike taught me to live with and play through pain, while also teaching me the finer points of scab care and maintenance. Bike riding, like life, was sometimes painful.

Perhaps most importantly, my bike was a lesson, as simple as it was profound. Getting where I was going required genuine effort on my part. No one else would help. As soon as I identified a destination, my mental GPS calculated the obstacles and risks involved. Getting to the movie theater meant tackling that huge hill on Lindbergh Blvd and that frighteningly narrow stretch of Mattis Road that had no shoulder. Before I started any trip, I weighed its benefits against the effort and risk involved. . . a cost benefit analysis as comprehensive and honest as anything I work on today.

And in the end, the benefit of a bike trip always seemed to outweigh the effort it would take. I learned that sweating up the hill to get there always promised a breezy, effortless return trip. And there was nothing sweeter to a sweaty 11 year old boy than coasting down-hill with hot summer wind pushing his hair back.

I loved my bike.

Eclipses. . .

When we experience a perfect, full solar eclipse here on Earth, the moon is directly between our line of sight and the sun. The result is that the sun is perfectly hidden by the moon, looking to us like a pitch black spot over the sun. Just a fraction of the sun's corona is visible around the outside edge of the moon. . . enough to really screw your eyes up if you look up at it with naked eyes sporting dilated pupils.

What are the odds that the Earth would come equipped with one (and only one) moon whose size and distance from earth make it perfect for eclipsing the sun for us?

Keep it the same size and move it farther from or closer to the Earth a significant amount, and you change how much of our view of the sky the moon occupies. This would change how much (or little) of the sun it blots out during a solar eclipse. Similarly, keep its distance from Earth the same but make it a bigger or smaller moon, and it stops being the perfect solar eclipse tool.

I know that the Earth's distance from the sun differs depending on its location along an elliptical orbit. And I know that the moon's distance from the earth fluctuates. Overall, though, I think the tolerances in those two variables are tight enough that full eclipses look very much the same here on planet Earth from year to year.

I wonder if there are any other planets in our solar system that have such a serendipitous combination of lunar and orbital factors?

Dunno. This is the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night.

What if it doesn't work?

The Republicans in Congress wouldn't approve a bail out for automakers. So Bush and the Democrats in Congress did an end-around and gave up on trying to find fresh money for Detroit. Instead, they filched 14 of the $700 billion that was already approved by Congress to bail out the financial system and directed that to the automakers.

The $14 billion is purportedly being given as secured low interest loans. We are told that the money will be paid back and tax payers may even make a little money off of the deal.

So what happens if the big three automakers take the money and STILL go bankrupt?

Fixing Comments Functionality

New posts should be comment-able now. Bummer that the last few weren't.

To Love the Country or the Countryside

How about this for getting to the root of the problem?

The Chevy Volt (an electric car) is being pushed by General Motors as the first production electric car, to hit the market in 2010. GM unveiled it at a NASCAR event, and they're understandably trying to drum up excitement about the car. But GM has to be careful about pushing the Volt too hard as a patriotic, pro-American car that can help free us from our dependence on foreign oil. While they want to take advantage of the desire by nationalists to see the US become energy independent, they're reluctant to get to stars-and-stripes with the Volt.

Pete Lewis, who works in program operations at GM, puts it this way.

"There is a fear that if we position this as a 'pro-American' car, it will upset some of the environmentally conscious crowd, and we want it to be embraced by everyone."

Mr. Lewis is justified in his concern about offending the green-ers by becoming too pro-American, but I find it tremendously sad.

The most "green" or "environmentally conscious" among us are, by definition, the most anti-American. Take a look at Hollywood, PETA, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club (sorry Steven), and any other such organization if you disagree with me.

And the flag-waving, America-loving nationalists among us tend to be decidedly less concerned about environmental issues. Take a look at any NASCAR event across the country for further proof.

How has it come to this? How have we gotten to the point where, to care about our environment, we must hate our country?

Hubble Repair?

Over the last several years we've seen article after article about how the Hubble space telescope is a dinosaur and not worth repairing. Space geeks get all up in arms when talk of giving up on Hubble surfaces, and NASA officials always calmly explain why Hubble isn't worth maintaining at this point.

Each time this happens, I check Hubble off in my mind as a done deal. It's over. No longer being maintained. Fine.

And then I see stories like this. . . about a planned shuttle mission to repair the Hubble telescope.
I don't get it.