Posted January 20th, 2011 @ 8:24am in #General Nonsense
In my prior post, I described a future where your digital ghost would live on without you. Many of you were quick to point out how many sci-fi stories have that plot. Fair enough. My point was that the technology to start building your digital ghost is already here. What I didn’t know is that it’s already being done.
Check out this company. They saw my post and were quick to tell me they are already well into the business. It’s creepy-cool.
Posted January 17th, 2011 @ 8:18am in #General Nonsense
Suppose you wanted to create your own digital ghost to live for eternity in the Internet and maybe do some haunting. What would that look like?
You’d start now, backing up everything that happens on your computer to the so-called cloud (storage on the Internet). You’d run a program in the background that monitors your Facebook changes and all of your email conversations. Together with your photos, your resume, and all of your shopping and entertainment preferences, the program running in the cloud could piece together an avatar of you.
From your photos, the program in the cloud could create a 30-year old version of you that never ages. The program would know how you speak, based on your email and other writing. It would know all of your preferences, your passions, your hot buttons, your finances, the identities of your friends and family, and anything else that flows through your computer.
That’s all possible with current technology. Now let’s say we extend this to your phone. In the near future, every conversation you make could optionally be saved to the cloud too, as well as all of your GPS locations, your web searches on your phone, your pictures and more. From your saved voice conversations your avatar would get its voice. With today’s technology, your digital ghost would sound robotic. In time, as technology improves, your ghost’s voice would be indistinguishable from your living self.
When your mortal body ends, you will have stored all the data you need to create your permanent digital ghost. As the technology in the cloud improves, so too does your ghost, learning to move more naturally, perhaps learning from videos it has of you, or even based on some type of profiling based on clues such as your level of testosterone (from face shape), and the types of sports you did in life. In a hundred years your digital ghost would be indistinguishable from a living human appearing on video or in a holographic projection.
Artificial intelligence will get to the point where all you need to do is seed it with an individual’s personality and it will do the rest. People of the future will be able to have extended conversations with loved ones who have passed. The generation who personally knew the departed might detect slight flaws in the personality of the digital copy, but to the third generation, great granddad’s ghost would appear as real as anyone they know.
In your will, you’d have to specify the degree of haunting that you’re comfortable with. And just as with Facebook, the living could decide to block a particular ghost from unauthorized appearances. Pranksters might program malicious ghosts that live in Stuxnet-like computer viruses and are harder to block. You might be able to block a particular ghost in your home computer, but in theory, a digital ghost could identify your whereabouts in public by your purchasing patterns and visit you unexpectedly.
Someday the living might send Evites to the dead to attend parties and special events. Imagine opening gifts while seven generations of your family in the form of holographic projections join the celebration. The ghosts would watch the action, talk among themselves, and join in to sing Happy Birthday, all without prompting from the living. It will be creepy-cool for a while, and then simply normal. My guess is that humans are so wired for family that keeping the ghosts of relatives in the house will feel comforting.
There are some downside risks to all of this. It will be hard to let go of a deceased loved one if that person’s digital ghost is hanging around. That problem too might be handled by the will of the deceased. For the benefit of whoever you leave behind, you might block your digital ghost from appearing for at least ten years, or until the next generation.
Entrepreneurs could start today to collect and store data for your digital ghost, in anticipation of the day, perhaps after your death, when your ghost avatar rises up. A number of companies already offer online backups of your computer. The software runs in the background and moves any new data to the cloud. The only tweak you’d need at this point is to make sure no files are ever deleted from the cloud. Storage is cheap.
Digital ghosts need to see their environment to interact properly. Phones will all have video “eyes” someday, as will most computers. The new Xbox Kinect has “eyes” that literally follow your movement around the room. You could install additional cameras in any room in which you wished to be visited by digital ghosts. The malicious ghosts might commandeer video cameras or your phone’s camera function. My point is that you are already surrounded by cameras attached to the Internet, and that trend will continue. Your ghost will be able to see most rooms in the world.
Digital ghosts could continue learning throughout their afterlives, by reading the news and following the Facebook pages of friends and family. The ghosts would also be free to make friends with other ghosts and live their lives independently. Ghosts could stay with the ghosts of their life partners forever, so long as that was specified in the will of both people.
If I had to predict the odds that digital ghosts will someday exist, I’d say 100%. Stay alive for another five years and you will live forever, sort of.
Posted January 12th, 2011 @ 8:51am in #General Nonsense
Being married is a lot like being deaf. If you hear the same person talking day-after-day, you literally lose the ability to hear what that person is saying. I will give you two examples from my own life. Both are true. This one happened last week:
Shelly: Do you want some carrot cake?
Me: Hurricane? What hurricane?
In that particular case, we eventually got to the bottom of it, but only because Shelly needed an answer. I estimate that half of the time she says lamp, I hear doorknob, and it doesn’t really matter so we go on with our lives. I might spend a few seconds confused about the larger point, but I shake it off.
Within a day of the carrot cake incident, I made an offhand comment to Shelly to the effect that she might enjoy a certain sport. That conversation went like this:
Me: That’s your new game, honey.
Shelly: What did you call me?
Me: (slower and louder) I SAID, “THAT’S YOUR NEW GAME, HONEY.”
Shelly: Oh. I thought you called me Jimmy Bean
Me: Why would I call you Jimmy Dean
Shelly: Not Dean, Bean. Jimmy Bean.
Me: Why would I call you Jimmy Bean?
Shelly: That’s what I wondered too.
Me: No, I said, “That’s your new game, honey.”
Shelly: What’s my new game?
Me: I forget.
As I’m sure you’ve learned, it’s impossible to speak to a spouse if he or she is near running water, or using power equipment, or concentrating on something else, or eating something crunchy, or wondering if the squeak in the distance is the cat dying, or there is a child within a hundred yards. Amazingly, that covers 90% of every conversation you might attempt at home.
Recently I discovered that spouses, like computers, must be booted up before they can hear what you say. Try walking into a room where your spouse is otherwise engaged and simply launch into your statement or question. Notice that your first sentence doesn’t count. That might go like this.
You: I think the ice maker isn’t working.
Spouse: What?
In that example, the spouse had not yet booted into listening mode. You can solve this problem with what I call the boot up tone. It is a sound that serves no function except to say, “Shift to listening mode.” I highly recommend that you use your spouse’s first name as your boot up tone. People are programmed to hear their own names even when they won’t notice other background noise. And I recommend speaking in the key of F, even if that isn’t your normal range, because it’s a great tone for penetrating background noise. It’s also a good idea to stretch out your spouse’s name a bit. I turn Shelly into She-e-e-e-e-lly. Try it at home. It works. But use your own spouse’s name.
I have the added disadvantage of being a serial mumbler. In my head, everything I say is clear and loud, sort of like Prince Charles. But I have been told that my actual sound is more like a corpse farting in a rolled up carpet. My semi-solution for that is to trick people into reading my lips while I talk. Even people who are not expert lip readers can get some extra comprehension from seeing mouths move.
My method, which I share with you today, is to first get eye contact. If you are at home, start with your boot up tone. If that doesn’t get you the eye contact you need, try a scary opening phrase such as “I didn’t want to tell you this…” Anyone will give you eye contact after you use that phrase, even if you mumble it.
Once I have tricked Shelly into giving me eye contact, I quickly stand on my tiptoes so my lips are where my eyes once had been then blurt out my message. The only downside is that I will later have to explain, maybe several times, why I opened with “I didn’t want to tell you this.” I usually handle that by eating potato chips and standing near running water.
Posted January 10th, 2011 @ 9:27am in #General Nonsense
I’ve heard good things about yoga. People say it’s an excellent way to manage stress. I convinced my wife, Shelly, to try it with me.
Shelly sensibly suggested that we try a yoga video at home before we sign up for classes. Let me tell you how well the yoga video managed my stress.
First we had to find thirty minutes that we weren’t using for something else. I found that stressful because I had a lot of work to do. And we didn’t have a clock in the designated yoga room, so we kept wondering what time it was and if we’d be late for our appointment at the Apple store to get repair service. Stress-wise, we were off to a bad start.
I nervously put the DVD into the player. The DVD player is my biggest nemesis. I have had epic battles with it over the past year. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it simply doesn’t. I was instantly reminded of every ruined movie night that this demonic machine had caused. My blood started to heat up as I placed the DVD into the unit and pressed PLAY. Amazingly, it seemed to work. It was smooth sailing so far. I had only doubled my baseline stress level to get to this point. I was optimistic that the yoga would set me right.
Shelly noted that there were five yoga classes on the DVD. Logically then, there was only one that was best for us. This was a bad turn of events. My simple yoga plan had turned into a shopping experience. Regular readers of this blog know that for me, shopping feels like being beaten to death with a salted porcupine. This was bad. This was very bad.
I suggested that we randomly select one of the classes and just see what happens. But this, my friends, is not how shopping is done. First you read each of the descriptions then you read them again. Then you read them aloud. Then you discuss. Then you narrow it down to two. Then you forget what the other three were, and wonder if maybe they were better than the two you had first selected, so you start over. Halfway through this process, my tension could have powered a Chevy Volt. I was red and vibrating. I wasn’t getting any of my cartooning work done, we would be late for the Apple Genius Bar, and I was shopping in my own home. I was so tense that I worried I would actually snap in half if I tried anything bendy.
Eventually we picked the class we wanted. It only took a few minutes, but in shopping years, I was 106. We fired up the DVD menu and looked for the class we had selected on the DVD cover.
But…it…wasn’t…listed.
Instead, they had numbered chapters with no descriptions. We quickly determined that they weren’t even in the same order as the descriptions on the back of the box. There was only one thing to do.
More shopping.
Now we had to sample each of the five classes and compare them to the descriptions on the back of the DVD. To do otherwise put us at risk of doing the wrong yoga and just maybe being crippled for life. Or maybe that would have been some sort of shopping foul. At this point, for obvious reasons, I was not part of the decision-making inner circle.
On top of this, my stress level spiked because my biggest pet peeve is poorly conceived interfaces. The more I thought about this yoga DVD, the angrier I got. No titles for the chapters? Really? Maybe the people who made that DVD would have been more productive if they had some f***ing stress. Perhaps a little bit of worrying would have helped them put in the extra five minutes it would have taken to label the chapters. I hated them. I wanted them dead. I hoped the yoga would balance my energy before I killed someone.
With each chapter we sampled, I had to coax my nemesis, the DVD player, beyond its normal tolerance. I worried that it would turn on me at any moment. I fantasized about going up to the roof and hurling it toward the driveway, thus winning once and for all our yearlong battle. I hated that DVD player. I wanted it dead. I wanted to kill the yoga people with it. I’m saying my head wasn’t in a good place.
In time, we found the yoga chapter that was for us. By now I felt like the Tin Man, begging for my oil can. I’m saying I was stiff with stress. I needed the cure, and I needed it bad.
A granola-eating, bare-chested yoga dude appeared on screen. He was on the beach of some sort of tropical ocean paradise. I call that cheating. I wouldn’t need any yoga at all if I were on that beach. But whatever.
We soon learned the flaw in the yoga-by-video method. Half of the poses require your head to be turned away from the screen, and you have to quickly go from pose to pose with each breath. I couldn’t stop trying to calculate the risk of death or paralysis from posing like a demented downward dog while being a spastic cobra at the same time. Logically, if there is a right position for reducing stress, and I was necessarily in a different position to see the screen, wasn’t I just making things worse? Now it was in my head. I wondered if anyone had ever died from yoga. And if someone has to be the first, that’s exactly the sort of thing that happens to me.
By now my mind is boiling with rage about the poor user interface. And granola dude is four poses ahead of me. Every time he tells me to inhale, I’m halfway through an exhale and I have to choke it off to catch up. If proper breathing reduces your stress, I was snorting and huffing my way to a stroke.
Granola dude lies on his back and tells me to bring my knees up to my chest. My legs reach a 90 degrees angle with my torso and refuse to go further. I glance toward the screen and granola dude is rolled up in a ball so small he would fit in his own recycled shopping bag. He’s making me feel like a yoga loser. I’m competitive, so this is totally pissing me off.
Now he sits up and tells us to put our heads down to our knees. I decide to make this work, no matter how much it hurts. I managed to get within visual distance of my knees, but I couldn’t reach them with my forehead. Or my hands. Now I’m having self-esteem issues. I look over and see Shelly, limber as Gumby, following along as if it’s no big deal. I was in last place in the yoga competition. Damn it!
Our next pose is more complicated. I’m looking at yoga dude, rotating him in my mind so that his right side is my right side, and trying to balance and breathe all at the same time. Shelly points out that I’m in the wrong position. As you know, the very best way to relax is by having your spouse tell you that you’re doing something wrong.
Now the yoga dude produces two plastic bricks to balance his hands on. Apparently we were supposed to have our own bricks. Nothing is more annoying than trying to do a job with the wrong tools. I’m a little bit pissed that the video didn’t warn us that we needed bricks. Our cat wandered into the room at about this time and I tried to use her as a sort of furry yoga brick. She was surprisingly okay with this arrangement as long as I didn’t put too much weight on her. In fact, she seemed to enjoy it. Even the cat was getting more stress relief from the yoga than I was. If you count my wife, the cat, and yoga dude, I was in fourth place in terms of yoga benefits. I hate losing, especially to the cat.
When the yoga class was over, I told Shelly that I felt centered, and I was sure I doubled my chi. That was a lie, but I needed a win. Shelly said all she got out of it was a good stretch, and I said, “Well, maybe you’ll get it next time.”
The weird thing is that my unscrupulous claim to yoga victory made me feel pretty good. I’m looking forward to doing yoga again. Next time I plan to tell Shelly that I feel nature’s energy flowing through me. I might add “But being limber is good too. Keep up the good work.”
Posted January 6th, 2011 @ 7:21am in #General Nonsense
Several months ago, during the worst of the Gulf oil spill disaster, I wrote on this blog that I invested in BP stock. BP stock dipped to about 27. Today it is nearing 47. I didn’t time the bottom right, but I averaged down and came out ahead.
Normally it’s a bad idea to invest in individual stocks because everything you know about a company is based on lies from management. And you can’t know if a competitor is about to release a killer product next week. And Lord knows what games any particular company is playing with its accounting. There’s simply no way to have enough information about a typical company to make an informed investment.
BP was different. Everyone understood that the stock’s direction would be entirely determined by the oil spill, and almost everything about that situation was in the news. For once, it was a level playing field, at least as far as raw information.
You might argue that someone close to the ground, such as an engineer or Coast Guard official might have been better informed. But that’s unlikely. I’m pretty certain that no engineer knew for sure what solution would work, or how soon. And clearly no one knew how much oil was going where. It was also fairly obvious that estimates about the size of BP legal settlements were little more than guesses.
In such a case, anyone who has experience in big organizations, and pays attention to world events, had an advantage in analyzing BP stock. You would have known that the wall-to-wall media coverage would generate more fear in investors than the facts would support. You would know that in any complex situation, lawyers will exploit uncertainty, so eventually BP would have the upper hand. And you would be aware of what I call The Adams Law of Slow Moving Disasters, which states that engineers can always solve slow moving disasters if they have society’s support. The spill was slow enough to qualify.
Still, this was more of a gamble than an investment. I’m probably just lucky that things went in the direction I predicted. But it made me wonder – and this is the point I was leading up to – whether the only smart way to invest is in entire countries as opposed to companies.
The economy of an entire country moves because of large events that the media will generally cover. For investors, it can be a more level playing field. For example, I don’t know where Microsoft will be in ten years, but it’s a good bet that India will continue getting richer.
There’s plenty of uncertainty in the economy of countries too, of course. Japan and Ireland are good examples of that. But it seems to me that in general, information about the economy of an entire country will always be superior to information about an individual company. And events will happen slower in entire countries. Terrorist attacks and natural disasters are the exception, but they rarely change the long term prospects of a country. (You could argue that 9/11 killed America’s economy. That’s the only exception I can think of.)
Investing in countries isn’t a clean process at the moment. Often the best you can do is to buy an index fund that is over-weighted with the largest companies in a given country. But I assume that problem will be solved in time.
My prediction for today is that twenty years from now the common form of investment will be in entire countries. And following China’s model, entire countries will start to operate more as for-profit entities. That means the big democracies of the world will evolve into “management” models in the longer run. Some degree of transparency and oversight will be the only safeguards against despotism. Someday voting will be seen as an inefficient relic of the past. In the future, citizens will laugh at the idea that uninformed citizens voted for leaders based on who looked good on television.
0 CommentsPosted January 4th, 2011 @ 6:16am in #General Nonsense
Confidence is a good thing, right? Everyone wants confidence. It makes you more attractive to others. It helps your performance. It makes you feel good about yourself. It allows you to set high goals. It’s good stuff.
It’s also an illusion.
The reality is that there are only two conditions you can be in. You can either have an accurate view of your own abilities or an inaccurate view. Confidence is similar to will power in the sense that neither of them exists and yet society is quite certain they do.
Will power isn’t a real thing because humans simply act based on the greatest impulse in their brains at the moment. The guy who can best resists eating cupcakes is the one who enjoys them the least, or is the least hungry. Will power never enters into the equation. It is a rationalization after the fact.
Confidence and will power feel as if they are real things because we have words to describe them, and we usually agree when the words apply. That’s why the illusion is so persistent. If the words didn’t exist, I don’t think the illusions would be so troublesome.
I came to this view of because people insist on viewing my various behaviors through the framework of confidence. When I have a realistic view of my ability to do some particular task well, I am labeled confident, as opposed to simply accurate. When I predict that I would be below average at some particular task, based on years of knowing myself, I am labeled unconfident when in fact I am simply right or wrong. Where does confidence come in?
Suppose a drug existed that could give you the sensation of confidence independent of your actual ability to perform tasks. Would that be a good thing? Actually, we know the answer to that question because the drug is alcohol and it kills 37,000 people per year in automobiles alone, just in the United States.
But what about the self-fulfilling nature of confidence, you ask? Doesn’t the feeling of confidence sometimes make you perform better? A confident public speaker, for example, is a better speaker. A confident quarterback will make better decisions, and so on.
I would argue that in some cases your performance can be enhanced by generating in yourself just the right amount of illusion about your own performance. A quarterback might imagine himself able to throw the perfect pass 100% of the time in order to succeed half of the time. He would be using confidence as a useful illusion because it keeps his energy in balance after some bad misses.
Generating a temporary illusion of confidence in yourself can be a good thing so long as you are aware of what you’re doing. The quarterback needs to understand that he’s just using a trick to pump up his performance. Otherwise he’d feel like a failure for completing only half of his passes.
Confidence is an illusion, but a useful one.
Posted January 3rd, 2011 @ 6:35am in #General Nonsense
The next big thing is recreational travel.
Vacation travel has always been huge. But you haven’t seen anything yet. Our ability to plan trips will dramatically improve, and that’s a game changer.
If you’ve tried to book a trip lately, you know it’s a headache. You have to research every part of it yourself, and even with the Internet you’re still shooting blind half of the time. If you hope to do something that is the least bit off the beaten path, you’re taking a risk with your vacation budget, not to mention your limited time. If you’re the one in charge of planning the vacation for your family, you don’t want to screw it up. So you play it safe. You go to places that you can easily research, or to places where someone you know has already been.
My theory is that people are rational with their vacation budgets and avoid travel to places that are hard to research. Most people would pay extra to avoid the risk of the unknown. (If you’re a natural adventurer, your mileage may vary.) So imagine what will happen to the travel industry when it is just as easy to plan an exotic vacation as an obvious one? That day is coming.
Case in point: My wife and I just spent a week in Costa Rica. It was great, and reasonably priced. If I could transfer my new knowledge about Costa Rica to you, it would lower your perceived cost of travel to that country because it would reduce the risk premium that you automatically assign to the unknown. When it comes to travel, knowledge reduces both the psychological and the actual cost. And knowledge can also save weeks of planning effort.
In other words, when it comes to travel, knowledge is a substitute for money. And thanks to the Internet, our knowledge about travel options is about to explode. The effect of that change is that the cost of travel will appear to drop a great deal while the enjoyment gained from vacations improves. That will cause a boom in recreational travel.
Web sites are already starting to make travel planning easier, of course, but the best of them are only scratching the surface of what is possible. Hipmunk.com has a wonderful user interface for choosing flights. Duffelup.com has an interesting approach to trip planning. And dozens of other travel sites are pecking away at the problem. But let me describe the home run application that is somewhat inevitable.
Call it CloneMyVacation.com. The idea is that future vacationers will be able to capture all of the details of their vacation trips, from the flights they booked to the hotels they stayed in, to the day excursions they took, and create blueprints for other travelers to follow. When you want to take a trip, you just search online for a family that has your same profile (income, ages, genders, location, sense of adventure) and start with their entire vacation plan. From there, you can modify as you like.
It might sound like a lot of work to document your vacation, but I think someday there will be an app for that. The GPS in your phone could help the app figure out what hotel you’re staying at, what day trips you took, and what restaurants you visited. All you have to do is take vacation pictures with your phone, which you would do anyway, and the app would author your entire vacation story automatically, complete with timelines, maps, and even photos taken by other people of the locations you visited.
The app could even figure out what airline you used, based on the location of the airport terminals and your flight times. The app could also calculate your travel time from the airport to your hotel. It could even assign a price range to your vacation based on public information about flights, hotels, and other local expenses. Then it could pull together any relevant web sites in one package, and present it to you for verification at the end of your vacation. If something looks wrong, you adjust it. And maybe there is a brief survey that asks some questions about how you liked each of the elements of your vacation. And perhaps the photos have some blank spaces below them for your comments.
The app’s primary purpose is documenting your vacation for your own digital scrapbook. But push a button and the app converts your personal vacation file to something more generic that can be published for anyone looking for a similar type of vacation. Facial recognition software could automatically masks the identities of your family members. And the app could allow you to easily remove any other information you find too personal. Then you publish. It takes you five minutes to document and publish your entire trip.
It’s probably a good time to invest in airlines.
[Note: Do not take investment advice from cartoonists.]
Posted December 30th, 2010 @ 7:41am in #General Nonsense
My wife and I were eating lunch during our holiday vacation, and she asked me, in a suspiciously casual tone of voice, if I were aware of the proper etiquette for using a fork. I responded with a blank stare, which was my way of saying that her yammering was distracting me from shoveling a respectable percentage of the resort’s entire buffet from my plate into my maw.
Undaunted, Shelly went on to demonstrate her point, holding a knife in her right hand, and a fork in her left hand with the tines pointed inexplicably downward. Her index finger was on the back of each utensil, and she explained that you should continue holding the knife even while you’re not sawing on a dead animal.
Against all odds, Shelly’s words penetrated the fog of my feeding frenzy. As her explanation sunk in, I started to go into traumatic etiquette shock. That’s the feeling you get when you realize that for several decades people have watched you eat and probably compared you unfavorably to a stoned raccoon on garbage day.
The world started moving in slow motion as I looked around the dining room to verify this stunning revelation. Sure enough, every adult diner was using the method Shelly described. How could I have gone my entire life without noticing? I was shocked and ashamed.
I quickly tried to imitate the proper forking method. That turned out to be problematic because I’m a vegetarian. I didn’t have anything on my plate that needed cutting, and the upside down fork method was a disaster for eating rice. I could only balance a few grains at a time on the back of my fork, and half of those ended up on my lap, where I have been told a napkin should have been.
I knew there was something missing in Shelly’s explanation of proper fork use, but she wasn’t giving me any more clues. The other diners all seemed to be eating meat; they were no help. I briefly considered a catapult solution, which would have involved pushing some rice onto the back of the fork, glancing furtively around the room to make sure no one was looking, and launching the payload toward my face. That probably sounds stupid to you, but keep in mind that I had already bought into the notion of using a fork upside down. I couldn’t rule out anything.
I was determined to fork properly from this moment on, and not add to a lifetime of humiliation. It took me an hour to finish my rice, averaging three grains per fork. The buffet had soup, but I couldn’t imagine how long it would take to consume it with my spoon turned upside down, or backwards, or using just the edge; Shelly hadn’t covered spoon etiquette, so I was mostly guessing.
By the end of the meal I was still wondering if this whole episode had been an elaborate practical joke, with everyone else in on it. I pulled out my iPhone and Googled “fork etiquette.” A dried branch of a lady with an upper class accent appeared on video demonstrating the technique Shelly had described. My mortification was complete.
In my defense, I grew up in a small town, in a farming environment. We valued efficiency over ritual. Inefficiency was synonymous with stupidity. If there had been a way to eat faster by somehow involving your ass cheeks, that’s how I would have learned to do it. If someone sneezed where I grew up, there was no reason to say “God Bless you,” because either God was already handling it or he didn’t exist. God didn’t need a middle man to handle a simple sneezing transaction.
Anyway, back to my story, I was horrified and humiliated by my lack of forking knowledge. I started to panic, wondering what other rules of etiquette had somehow escaped my notice. Was I supposed to open doors using nothing but my elbows? Should I dial my phone with a single knuckle? Should I salute anyone wearing a hat and ask, “How’s the war going, Captain?” My point is that there’s no way to deduce etiquette from logic.
Recently I did more research and discovered that Shelly’s forking technique is called the Continental method. It’s the method used in Europe as well as anywhere else that the British have killed the locals. I also learned that you’re allowed to turn your fork right-side-up for scooping anything can’t be stabbed. Fair enough.
Best of all, there is an American forking method too, and that is what I had always used. That involves holding the fork in your right hand, like a pen, with the tines pointing up. But I have been informed that cutting food with the edge of my fork is bad form, no matter how efficient it is. Bah! I reject that tyranny.
Last night at a local restaurant I observed a boy, about ten years old, at a nearby table who took the principle of dining efficiency to such a high level that I wept tears of admiration. The restaurant provided a fork and spoon rolled up in a paper napkin. They expect you to break the paper seal and free the utensils from the napkin. But the boy realized he could use the entire sealed unit as a fork-spoon with a napkin surround. He would grab the entire bundle, stab some food with the fork and wipe his mouth on the wrapped bundle. I don’t use the “genius” label too often, but I think it applies in this case, even though he was just kidding around. I believe I witnessed the invention of the napkinforkspoon. And someday, God willing, when efficiency replaces etiquette, we will all be using it.
Posted December 27th, 2010 @ 7:59am in #General Nonsense
I’ve been hearing a lot about how fair it would be to increase taxes on the rich in the U.S. That’s justice, I’m told. Those robber CEOs, greedy bankers, and shady hedge fund managers need to “give back” a portion of their pirate booty.
Some of the super-rich are supporting this flavor of fairness. Warren Buffett wants the rich to pay a higher tax rate. Even Larry David (co-creator of Seinfeld) had a funny piece in the New York Times mocking the notion that the tax increase would be noticed by people in the hundred-million-dollar club, such as himself.
The tax-the-rich argument feels fair if you allow yourself to see the world as only two categories: the rich and the non-rich. And it helps if you let the media install Bernie Madoff as the poster boy for the rich, while perhaps you imagine Tiny Tim as your symbol for the non-rich. But what about, let’s say, a hard-working doctor? His taxes would increase when you tax the so-called rich. And unlike Warren Buffett and Larry David, a tax increase likely has real implications for the doctor’s family.
Before you break out the tiny violins for my hypothetical doctor, allow yourself to imagine that he’s got a mountain of college loans, his mortgage is underwater, and he’s supporting three grandparents (one on his wife’s side) who all need some form of senior care, and the doctor’s parents, and his wife’s parents, have no spare cash. The doctor’s parents might also need help in a few years. Oh, and the doctor has two kids of his own, one of whom needs some sort of special care. That’s what the real world looks like for the so-called Sandwich Generation. For this imaginary doctor, any extra tax burden takes money from four generations of his family who needs it and distributes the cash to strangers.
When the English language was hardening, I suppose the only wealth descriptors needed were rich (nobility) and poor (everyone else). Now we don’t have a word to describe a doctor’s income range. The nearest you can get is “upper-middle class” which is vaguely defined, according to Wikipedia, as a “comfortable income.” The limits of language can be a problem for a debate such as this.
Just for fun, suppose we introduce to the discussion of taxation a new word for our hypothetical doctor’s income range. To demonstrate the power of language, let’s call that income group suckers. It’s a loaded word, and that’s the point. Watch how the fairness argument can turn when the labels change.
Now we have three income groups:
1. Rich (such as Larry David)
2. Suckers (such as doctors and small business people)
3. Majority
Now let’s look at the fairness argument using our new categories. In a democratic system, the majority is in charge. Therefore it is fair to say that the Majority left the bank door unlocked so the Rich could loot it. Nice work, Majority. Now the Majority’s proposed solution is to take money from the Suckers income group to compensate for their own gross mismanagement of the country.
You might argue that the rich are the ones who are really in charge, even in a democratic system. That makes the story even worse. In that case, the rich plundered both the Majority and the Suckers, and now Warren Buffett and Larry David are pointing fingers at the Suckers in the hope that the Majority doesn’t decide to boil the rich for food. That’s what I would do if I were a billionaire. Just sayin’.
My own view, as a member of the Suckers group, is that if economists determine that the best way to make the country solvent is to increase my taxes, I’m willing to look at those numbers. I’m a practical guy. But I do resent being gang raped by the Rich and the Majority while they high-five each other and call it fairness. And I’d feel a little better about it if the Majority would do a better job managing things going forward.
Posted December 16th, 2010 @ 7:27am in #General Nonsense
Ideas are a lot like viruses. Neither a virus nor an idea is alive, technically, but both reproduce though contact with other people. And both are hard to eradicate. For example, 20% of the American population believes Obama is a Muslim. That’s actually an increase since he was inaugurated.
Most idea viruses are the bad type. But I see no reason we couldn’t engineer good idea viruses. Such a virus would have three traits:
1. It must be catchy, so you never forget it.
2. It must be something you are inclined to share.
3. It must cause a positive change in the world.
The catchy-sharing part happens all the time. You see that in the form of famous quotes. One harmless idea virus is John Lennon’s “Give peace a chance.” It’s catchy, and it has a positive message, but it probably doesn’t cause people to act differently. It’s too general.
I’ve been tinkering with an idea virus that links education with peace. It would be a takeoff from the famous observation (and idea virus) that no two countries that both have a McDonalds ever went to war. I’m not sure that assertion is technically true. And it’s hard to act upon, short of conquering a country and forcing it to become a free market.
Here’s my engineered idea virus: Education is the antidote to war.
The engineering that went into that idea is that you want it to be true because it suggests an alternative to war. That’s what lets it slip past your rational defenses.
Your rational mind can come up with lots of examples where relatively educated countries started wars. But the virus is already past your rational filter. A wanted truth is always stronger than an evidenced truth.
The second part of the engineering is that the sentence itself is pleasing and pithy and quotable. You can imagine it on a bumper sticker. It will probably be in the tweetisphere within an hour after I post this. Here it is again: Education is the antidote to war.
Notice that my idea virus used the word education instead of knowledge. Knowledge is a fighting word, because people always disagree on the facts. But education is universally desirable. Even the Taliban believe they need to learn some things, such as operating firearms. My idea virus is cleverly agnostic on the content of the learning.
Is it true that education is the antidote to war? I would argue that China educated itself out of the risk of war with Russia and the United States. Education primed their economic engine, and that led to economic ties around the world. Those economic ties greatly reduce the odds of war. You might say that education is what brought McDonalds to China.
Long term, the world will need to figure out how to improve the general education levels inside problematic countries. I can imagine a future where rich countries smuggle millions of iPads into rogue countries and provide free wireless Internet to the masses. Then the world can sit back and let education do its thing.
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