Scott Adams' Blog

The Night I Learned to Follow Directions

Posted November 9th, 2010 @ 5:21am in #General Nonsense

The other day, my friend Steve and I had a “Husbands Cook for Their Wives” night in which we hoped to accomplish several things. First, we thought it would be a good way to add to the Husband Bank of good deeds. Second, it was an excuse to drink beer on a Tuesday afternoon. And third, Steve would transfer his vast knowledge of cooking methods to my ignorant self. It was this third objective that went terribly wrong.

Among my duties that night was chopping the jalapeño peppers. I had never prepared a meal with jalapeño peppers, and I didn’t know much about them. The conversation went something like this.

Steve: You should wear rubber gloves to cut the jalapeño peppers.

Me: Really? Is that necessary?

Steve: Yes. Do you have any rubber gloves?

I knew we had some rubber gloves somewhere in the house, but finding them would require the help of my wife, Shelly, and I didn’t want to bother her on Husbands Cook for Their Wives Night. So I pressed the point.

Me: I could just wash my hands after I cut the jalapeño peppers.

Steve: You really should wear gloves. And don’t touch your eyes, or any mucous membranes. And whatever you do, don’t take a piss until sometime next week.

Me: I’ll just wash my hands when I’m done cutting the peppers. That should be fine.

At this point, an obscure statute in the Guy Code came into play and Steve realized that nagging me wasn’t the way to play this. Instead, he decided to let me take a run at the jalapeño peppers bareback. If he was laughing on the inside, he did a good job of not showing it.

I sliced up the jalapeño peppers, and removed the seeds. Then I washed my hands thoroughly, successfully avoiding contact with my eyes, mucous membranes, and genitalia. It was no problem at all. Apparently this whole jalapeño peppers scare was overblown, I thought.

A few minutes passed, and I felt a tingle in my left hand - the one that directly handled the peppers. The tingle turned into a warm sensation, and the warmth turned into…well, this will take some explaining.

Imagine turning a broom upside down, so the pointy bristles are facing up. You take your hand, palm facing down, and bounce it on the pointy bristles. Can you imagine how uncomfortable that feels on your hand? Okay, good.

Now imagine that a giant troll sees you playing with the broom. He snatches it out of your hand, chews the handle into a point and shoves it so far up your ass that you can taste it. Then he uses you like a huge flyswatter to kill a nest of porcupines that are living in his salt mine. My hand hurt like that.

It felt as if my hand was literally on fire. It was one of the most intense pains of my life. With my good hand, I groped for the iPad and searched for home remedies. For every report of a treatment that worked, three people reported that it didn’t. I tried ice. I tried milk. I tried alcohol (internal and external). I tried sour cream. I tried ketchup. Each of those things worked for as long as it kept my hand cold, but as soon as my hand reached room temperature, the burn returned.  And according to my fellow idiots on the Internet who had made the same mistake, the burn could last most of the night.

I made it through dinner with my hand submerged in a bowl of milk.  By now, two hours had passed and the level of pain hadn’t subsided one iota.  Our dinner conversation turned to new potential remedies. Steve suggested an emery board to file down the top layer of skin and remove the irritant. I tried, but no luck. Shelly hypothesized that the remedies themselves might be slowing the recovery, and I should just “man up” and live with the pain to make it subside sooner. This advice felt suspiciously like revenge for every mistake I have ever made in the entire course of our marriage.

Steve explained how products like Ben Gay can make you feel better by creating a sensation that distracts your mind from the original pain. What I needed, he theorized, was a competing sort of pain to take my mind off of my hand. I suddenly realized that all of Steve’s medical suggestions sounded suspiciously like cruel practical jokes. The Guy Code allows for that sort of behavior because I didn’t follow his original advice to wear gloves.  But Steve has a PhD, and he’s a retired college professor of biology, so he knows things. It was a totally ambiguous situation, and I wasn’t thinking clearly because of my pain.

While I weighed my options, I needed to get some beer out of my system, and this posed another problem. Although I had washed my throbbing hand a dozen times since handling the peppers, I worried that the jalapeño juice had become integrated with my skin. I couldn’t rule out the possibility that using the restroom would make things much, much worse. I would have to do the deed with my opposite hand.

For the benefit of my female readers, allow me to explain something. We men are creatures of habit. After a lifetime of using my left hand for, let’s say, handling the fire hose, switching to my right hand made it feel as if a total stranger was helping out. It was creepy. To get past the awkwardness, I named my right hand Sergio and pretended I was in prison. That’s called making the best of a bad situation.

Anyway, back to the dining room, Steve’s wife, Sandy, was nice enough to get some Lanacane from their house. After I applied the Lanacane, the pain stopped.  I can’t say for sure that the Lanacane was the reason the pain stopped. Shelly’s theory is that it was time for the pain to stop on its own, because I had “manned up” long enough.  This is not a good precedent for the next time I am injured at home.

The Least You Should Know

Posted November 8th, 2010 @ 7:37am in #General Nonsense

If you live in the United States, you probably have an opinion on the best way to reduce the deficit. And you probably know almost nothing about the topic. I certainly fall into that category. 

If you listen to pundits and politicians, you’re getting your information from professional liars. If you’re reading books, you’re getting your information from professional liars who also write well. If you read newspapers and magazines, you’re getting only the information that someone has decided will be good for sales.  If you say you “do your own research,” you’re probably a liar, possibly an idiot, and maybe some sort of analytical genius. And frankly, I can’t tell you guys apart.

Prior to the last presidential election, as a public service, I commissioned my own survey of economists to see what they thought of the big issues.  I learned that the experts are all over the map on most questions. Can you feel comfortable holding an opinion in which 40% of the experts disagree?

This made me wonder what is the least a citizen needs to know in order to have an informed opinion on the national budget debate. Here’s my starter list. I invite you to add to it.

My Budget Questions…

By what percentage would you need to cut the entire national budget to achieve fiscal health in the long run, assuming tax rates stay where they are?

How much would we need to increase taxes, as a percentage of all Federal taxes, to achieve fiscal health in the long run, assuming government costs rise only with inflation?

By what percentage would we need to raise taxes on rich people (let’s say the top 2% of earners) in order to guarantee fiscal health, assuming no other change in expenses or taxes?

For an economy such as ours, at what level does the national debt become a death spiral? And where are we now in relation to that point? How soon would we reach it at our current pace?

—— End of Questions —–

On the same topic, I’m a fan of the 30-year back-weighted budget plan. You start cutting budgets only slightly in the early years, when reductions are psychologically and politically difficult, and you defer the bigger cuts for the later years, when technology enables you.

For example, I think it would be much harder to cut the military budget by 10% next year than it would be to reach a 50% reduction by year thirty, so long as we make it a national priority to do so.  In thirty years we’ll be able to crush smaller countries with nothing but, for example, one indestructible robot with laser eyes. Meanwhile, big countries won’t be dumb enough to screw with each other, thanks to nuclear weapons. It should be much cheaper to protect ourselves in the future, thanks to technology, if we start now and plan it that way.

Likewise, with health and social services, any cuts today would be cruel. But big cuts in the future might be feasible if we aim our technological sights on improving how we deliver those services.

I imagine a future in which we become so adept at the prevention and early detection of problems that health care costs become a fraction of what they are today. On top of that, I predict that in thirty years, end-of-life care will include a doctor-assisted euthanasia option. That would cut costs a great deal.

There’s a nearly universal opinion that it would be unethical to push our problems on future generations. That would be a reasonable point of view if no one worked on solutions for reducing costs between now and then. But I believe we could accomplish big budget cuts in the future if we made it a serious goal today. Technology gives us that option.

The best part of my 30-year, back-weighted plan is that it would create the illusion, if not the reality, of a better future. Optimism is what drives the economy. What we have now is something that looks more like a hopeless budget death spiral, and people are hoarding their investible cash. A feasible and predictable budget plan would goose the economic engine and improve government revenue in the short run.

If you are a pessimist who believes that government spending will increase every year no matter what, I can’t disagree. You might be right. But it has never been a national goal to use technology to greatly reduce spending by year thirty. Goals can matter.

As part of my 30-year, back-weighted plan, we could include provisions to raise taxes at an ever-so-slight pace for each of the future years as a hedge against not making the cost reductions. The economy is pretty good at absorbing any sort of change that is both gradual and predictable. And if you knew your taxes would only increase, for example, 1% over the entire next five years, you might be willing to live with it, even if 40% of all economists tell you it’s a bad idea.

Here’s where I remind you not to make and life-and-death budget decisions based on what you read in a cartoonist’s blog. I’m just thinking out loud.

 

Eliminating Political Parties

Posted November 4th, 2010 @ 6:38am in #General Nonsense

Imagine a democratic political system in which no one is allowed to be a member of a political party. How would things be different?

My hypothesis is that confirmation bias, or cognitive dissonance, or something of that nature, influences voters to irrationally agree with the platform of their own party no matter what the facts suggest. My hypothesis is easy enough to test. All you’d need to do is come up with a phony issue and present it to your test subjects as something to which their party agrees, or disagrees, and see if party affiliation influences opinions. I think the effect would be large.

Now imagine what would happen to campaign funding if political parties didn’t exist. In our current system, a union can give a million dollars to the Democratic Party and it doesn’t seem too wrong because the party represents about half of the voters in the country. But if political parties didn’t exist, unions or corporate interests would have to donate to individuals. And a large donation to an individual campaign would either be illegal or it would look so much like a bribe that it would be counter-productive.

I think political parties made sense in pre-Internet times. It was a good way to organize and to produce candidates who had a legitimate chance of getting elected. Now it’s easy to imagine the Internet being a better platform for electing the right people. The problem is that there’s no way to get to a different type of system from here. The major parties are too entrenched to give up power, and belonging to organizations is a fundamental freedom.

I’m fascinated by the fact that the freedom to organize into political parties limits our other freedoms more than most people realize.  Political parties make the government incompetent, and the result of ineffective government is that citizens are less prosperous. Poverty is the ultimate restriction of freedom.

If Thomas Jefferson sprung back to life today, and learned about the Internet, I wonder how he would recommend changing the Constitution of the United States. I think he would favor banning political parties.

Monetizing Business Ideas

Posted November 1st, 2010 @ 8:49am in #General Nonsense

Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.

That’s what I tell people when they ask me how they can sell their ideas. There’s a general misconception that ideas have some sort of market value, if only one can find a buyer. Sadly, that is not the case. Everyone reading this blog is full of great ideas. But usually we don’t have the time, talent, resources, or risk tolerance to pursue them. So we keep our wonderful ideas squirreled away in our heads, where they remain until dementia eats them.

There are exceptions. Some patents have value. But 99.9% of all ideas are not the sort you can patent. McDonalds came up with a great idea for an efficient way to sell dead cows and potatoes, but it wasn’t patentable. I came up with an idea of using reader suggestions about the workplace to make comic strips. That worked out well, but the idea isn’t patentable. McDonalds succeeded because one person devoted his full energy to making it happen, and he had access to of the resources he needed. Dilbert worked as a comic because I devoted my full energies to making it happen. And thanks to my syndicator, I had the business resources I needed. What happens to all of the great ideas that never match up with the resources that could set them free? Is there a way to unlock the potential of these otherwise wasted ideas?

I think there is a way. And I think it could change the fabric of civilization. With your indulgence, allow me to develop this idea.

The economy works best when we have the right resources in the right combinations at the right times. A few hundred years ago, that was easy. If you wanted to open a business, you just hung a sign on the door and word got around town. You didn’t need a lawyer, accountant, IT guy, or a salesman.

Today, starting a business is a thousand times more complicated. But our tools for combining resources in the right combinations are still primitive. In my view, that’s why we have a 9.6% unemployment rate in the United States. The rich have money to invest, we have plenty of great ideas, and talent is everywhere. But there’s no system for efficiently bring those resources together. 

If you have a potential billion-dollar idea, you might get the attention of venture capitalists or angel investors. But how many people have ideas that good? How do you get funding for an idea that might only make a million dollars? And how many people know how to effectively pitch a project to investors?

On the opposite extreme are the ideas that require very little funding to get off the ground. The story of Facebook is one example. Microsoft is another. And in both cases the miracle of their successes involved extraordinary luck that the resources they needed were readily available.  If you didn’t attend Harvard, you might not have a friend who is a programming genius, another friend who has a lawyer dad, and a third friend who can loan you $15,000.

The vast majority of stranded ideas are the ones that are not big enough to interest venture capitalists, yet they do require a both capital and expertise. For the sake of this discussion, let’s say that almost any new business in modern times needs ten resources to start.

Leader/entrepreneur
Idea
Capital
Management
Marketing
Sales
Legal
Accounting
Technical
Human Resources

To free up the value in all of the ideas that would otherwise die of neglect, imagine a web-based service for bringing together all ten resources to support any sort of business idea, but in a special way.

By way of example, suppose you have an idea for creating a chain of ping pong themed restaurants. The business would have lots of tables for rent, along with music, food, and a bar. It’s fun for the whole family. I pick this idea because it’s already being done, in a fashion, by actress Susan Sarandon. Her ping pong parlor in New York City is called SPiN. More are planned. I picked this idea specifically because it can’t be patented. And besides, maybe you want to do yours a different way, or in a different city, than SPiN.

In my imagined future, you start by making a home video of yourself pitching your idea, just as you would to an investor. You upload your video, along with a detailed description of your idea, to a web site where other entrepreneurs around the world are doing the same thing. But instead of simply soliciting funding, you solicit an entire team, based on whatever skills your business requires. The key to making this work is that no one quits his existing job, or provides funding, until all of the resources for the idea are lined up. The main function of the system is making sure everyone’s conditions for participation have been met before any risks are taken.

Now imagine that the legal contracts for your new business partners are based on standardized agreements that have been created by the online business to be fair to both sides. There’s no wrangling about the legal details. All you need to agree on are the “fill in the blank” stuff, such as who does what, and for what equity or salary. Likewise, the funding agreements are standardized.

As the entrepreneur, you might have a hundred people vying for the job of marketing for your new company. Each person would submit a resume, perhaps some text on how they would approach this specific job, and a minimum compensation requirement. The entrepreneur might choose a marketing expert with weaker experience to keep payroll low, which might in turn cause another potential team member to back out if he thinks the marketing person is too weak for the job. This process of adding and subtracting potential team members would repeat until everyone was happy with the contribution and compensation of everyone else. And during the process, all potential team members could communicate with each other to negotiate deals and refine the idea.

In my ping pong example, you would also need a retail location, an interior designer, and a builder to do the improvements. Those would be three more conditions that the entrepreneur sets up at the start of the process. The business wouldn’t launch until all of those elements were in place to the satisfaction of everyone else.

Now suppose you have a great idea for a business and you don’t want to be the CEO/entrepreneur/leader. But you still want to make some money from releasing your idea to the world. This imagined web site would allow you to post your video describing the idea, and hire just one person - the project manager - then back out. Your stake in the company, should it ever get off the ground, might be 1%, for example. It wouldn’t be so high that the people doing the work would try to cut you out, but still big enough that people with great ideas would have a reason to post them on the site.

By now your mind is racing with all of the imagined problems with a system of this type. I’ll anticipate the obvious objections and address them.

First, no one wants his ideas to be stolen.  You would hate to make a video of your terrific idea, put it online, and have someone simply copy it. That would happen. But if you were proposing a ping pong business in a particular town, a potential competitor would think twice before opening one next door. Contrast this to the current system where three yogurt shops opened in my town at about the same time, presumably without knowing that the others had the same plan. If the system I am imagining existed for them, perhaps the first one would have opened and been a success, and the other two entrepreneurs would have made other plans.  My point is that you shouldn’t assume it would be bad for the economy if some types of startup plans were to be public. It might fix more problems than it caused.

Next, you might wonder if ten people could ever agree on the same set of conditions to launch a company. While it would be almost impossible to get a specific group of ten people to agree on anything, you could almost certainly get ten people out of the 6 billion on Earth to agree on any reasonable set of conditions. And keep in mind that it’s healthy for the economy if the worst 95% of the ideas never happen.  For example, if no lawyer in the world wants to be part of your startup, there might be a good reason for that.

Perhaps you are concerned that making it easier to launch companies would create a lot of weak businesses that would fail. That might be true. But most businesses fail now, and while they are in the process of failing, they generate salaries for employees and revenue for suppliers. A modern economy is comprised mostly of companies that are in some stage of failure, whether they know it or not.  Also, the conditional nature of these future startups might guarantee that only the strongest launch in the first place. It would be hard to get ten people to agree on a weak idea in an environment in which stronger ideas can easily be found.

There’s an obvious risk that the system would become crowded with so many atrocious ideas that it would be nearly impossible to find the good ones. That’s an issue, but probably one that can be managed. And I would expect some superstars to emerge, who can pump out three great idea videos per week. The good ideas would float to the top.

It helps to have a name for new economic ideas such as this one. What would you call a system that conditionally combines economic resources? I’m stumped.

The Ultimate Case Study

Posted October 28th, 2010 @ 7:07am in #General Nonsense

By now you’ve probably heard the news about the prankster who gave his “friend” a huge penis tattoo on his back.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/27/australian-artist-charged_n_774608.html

My immediate reaction was that this story could be turned into the greatest case study of all time. It contains most of what I learned in business school and half of what I learned from my parents. It is the ultimate parable. Let’s open the valve and see what valuable lessons spill out.

Don’t make decisions while drunk. The story doesn’t say alcohol was involved. But did I mention that one guy tattooed a giant penis on the other guy’s back?

Stay in school and get good grades. Again, the story was silent on the academic achievements of the people involved, but did I mention that one guy tattooed a penis on the other guy’s back?

Test first. Start with something small, such as a leprechaun on an ankle, just to see how the business relationship works out.

Supervision matters. If an employee unexpectedly volunteers for a project that can only be performed behind your back, something bad is going to happen.

Capitalism never sleeps. If someone offers you a free service, you should be suspicious of what he expects to get in return.  It might involve, for example, your friend laughing himself into a near coma.

Jerks never change. The tattoo artist didn’t suddenly become a jerk when he started drawing a penis on his friend’s back. I’m going to say the signals were there.

Credentials matter. If you’re in the market for a brain surgeon, don’t stop when you find a guy who owns a saw.

Network smartly. If there is even the slightest chance that your friend will misspell a gay insult that he secretly tattoos on your back, it’s time to broaden your network of friends.

Don’t believe product reviews. An accomplice of the prankster praised the artwork as it was being drawn.

Solicit opinions from others. Before you decide to get any sort of permanent marking on your back from an unlicensed tattoo artist, find out what other people think of the idea.

I could go on. I think you could build an entire law school curriculum around this case. And I’m pretty sure it would replace a bachelor’s degree in marketing and advertising, unless you think you’ll ever forget the story of the penis tattoo prank.

My point is that every school should build its curriculum around the story of the penis tattoo.  In grade school the kids could learn about the importance of good spelling, resisting peer pressure, and staying in school.  In graduate school, students could learn the legal, economic, and psychological implications of the story. It’s all there, like some sort of fabulous gift from God.

But I’m a little bit suspicious why we got it for free.

Does Abstinence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder?

Posted October 26th, 2010 @ 8:45am in #General Nonsense

Crazy Eyes

Posted October 25th, 2010 @ 7:01am in #General Nonsense

I have a hypothesis that “Crazy Eyes” is a real thing.

We know that a person’s eyes can reveal certain types of emotions. For example, your pupils will widen when you look at someone you love.  That’s why attraction is so hard to hide. I’ve spent the past few decades observing people’s eyes to see if they reveal other secrets as well.  One thing stands out.

I have a hypothesis that you can detect in a person’s eyes when they have a preference for imagination over direct observation. Let’s call that look Crazy Eyes because it can be unsettling to the third-party observer. With Crazy Eyes, I think the brain is accessing the imagination instead of the rational part of the brain, and it causes the eyes to have a sort of glassy, unblinking, dreamy, scary look. At least that’s how it looks to me.

I was noticing this again recently as I watched a news program about religious activists who were organizing their lives around a worldview that needs to be imagined because it can’t be directly observed. Their eyes had a spooky, dreamy look when they spoke of their plans, as if they were accessing their imaginations instead of whatever part of the brain does math.  I’m not saying their worldview is wrong. I’m only saying that objective evidence in support of their worldview can’t be directly observed, so imagination necessarily has an important role in their daily lives, and their eyes showed it. They had Crazy Eyes.

Suppose you did a study where you took one group of religious people and one group of skeptics and filmed each of them speaking about whatever is important to them. Then you cropped out everything but the eyes and showed the films to a group of volunteer subjects. Could the volunteers distinguish the skeptics from the believers just by their eyes?  I think they could, at least more than chance would predict.

I thought of this topic because the other day while working out in the gym I was having an exceptionally good hypomanic creative flood.  It was wonderful. One good idea after another was popping into my head. I stopped to use the restroom, and when I was washing my hands I looked in the mirror and noticed that I had Crazy Eyes. I was so deep in my imagination that my eyes looked different even to me.  It was jarring.

My point is that I’m glad I work alone, and I totally understand why my cat won’t give me eye contact.

The “I Wonder” App

Posted October 22nd, 2010 @ 9:32am in #General Nonsense

A fun thing about the present is that it sometimes reveals glimpses of the future. Lately I have been enjoying a Google app for my phone that lets me speak search terms. The voice recognition is spectacular. I used it about five times yesterday. Fast-forward a few years, and let me paint a picture of your future.

You’ll be wearing your Bluetooth earpiece -  a future version of it - most of the day. And it will be listening to everything you say. When it hears you say, “I wonder…” it will fire up a search engine and wait for the rest of the sentence.  The software will know you’re using an earpiece, so the answer will be delivered as a brief verbal summary, like a smart friend whispering in your ear.

In the first versions of this service, you’ll ask simple questions, such as “I wonder what ingredients go into a margarita,” or “I wonder where the nearest Starbucks is.”  In later versions, as search engines and content sources evolve, you’ll have access to more complicated answers, all with whisper-friendly brevity.

Now imagine that your earpiece has a camera. Google is already working on a search engine that will identify an object from a digital image. Someday you will be able to look at a flower and say, “I wonder what type of flower that is,” and the answer will be whispered in your ear.

Now here’s the cool-spooky part. As the technology improves, the voice in your ear will become more natural, and smarter, and it will be like your invisible friend. It will learn your preferences in a way no human ever has.  I think it will be able to keep you company and make you less lonely. The whisper-in-your-ear aspect of this technology has the potential to feel like human contact but without the inconvenience of an actual human.

Now imagine that your earpiece can identify more key words than just “I wonder."  It could learn to interject whenever it feels you need to be entertained, warned, informed, or even cheered up. 

You’ll also be able to control your environment through your earpiece. Just tell the TV what channel you want, and your smartphone will communicate with your cable box to make it so. You’ll be able to verbally control your lights, heat, microwave, and just about anything else.

Now imagine you’re also wearing a ring that senses motion and communicates with your smartphone. Your hand will become an air mouse to control everything from your cursor to the volume on your TV. If you’re facing the TV, just say "volume” and move your hand higher or lower to adjust it. If you’re in front of the computer, the ring would know to control the cursor.

Imagine walking into a room and turning on your ceiling fan simply by motioning toward it with a clockwise rotation of your hand. It would feel like having a magic power. 

Imagine lifting weights and having your “reps” automatically whispered in your ear, along with encouragement that is appropriate to your exercise history. It would be your own personal trainer.

I often joke about become a cyborg - part human, part machine. But that day is coming for sure, and it will happen well within your lifetime.  The first component is probably in your purse or pocket right now. And the second component might be in your ear.

Entertaining the Driver

Posted October 21st, 2010 @ 6:06am in #General Nonsense

I give you the following question of etiquette. You and one friend/spouse/relative are driving somewhere. You’re the driver. The passenger whips out his or her phone and uses your car as a mobile phone booth for the duration of the trip, reasoning that this is an ideal time to return some calls and get things done.

As the driver, you can’t listen to music, as this would interfere with the phone conversation. And you can’t have a conversation of your own because the only other person in the car is busy. Is the passenger displaying bad etiquette?

Let’s all agree that a few short calls to handle time-sensitive business would be agreeable in all cases. But let’s say for this example that it’s a one-hour drive, and most of it is taken up by phone calls. Is that bad etiquette?

Now suppose the passenger asks in advance if you would mind enduring this situation. He or she has lots of things to take care of, and you both know that you probably wouldn’t be blabbing with each other anyway. Does that make it okay?

Put another way, does the passenger have some obligation to keep the driver entertained?

Afghanistan Solution

Posted October 20th, 2010 @ 6:22am in #General Nonsense

If you were wondering when I would apply my vast lack of knowledge to the Afghanistan situation, today is the day.

Let’s agree that we have a war that can’t be won as long as Pakistan is supporting the Taliban, and that situation shows no sign of changing. Let’s also agree that if the U.S. military pulls out of Afghanistan the Taliban will slay everyone who doesn’t have a beard or a burka, and create a safe haven for terrorists. So pulling out is risky.

What do you do with a problem that is unsolvable? You take a play from corporate America. When your coworker can’t solve a problem, he redefines the objective until it becomes a problem that is solvable.

Suppose we apply this method to Afghanistan. We redefine our purpose for being in Afghanistan as keeping Al Qaeda from having a state-supported training ground. That’s close enough to our original goal that succeeding would mean something.

The first step would be to create safe zones in Afghanistan where the Afghans who are afraid of the Taliban can live and prosper. Maybe this requires some Israeli-style walls and the support of warlords who aren’t fond of the Taliban. We give the citizens of Afghanistan a one-year warning and help relocate anyone who wants to get out of the zones that are likely to come under Taliban control. This would be hugely expensive, and a great hardship on the citizens. But unlike our current approach, it could work.

Then we pull back our military to well-defended bases and create drone and Special Forces training facilities that are designed for permanent operation. In this context, I’m stretching the meaning of “training” to include attacking any group of Taliban or Al Qaeda that appears to have a leader or a military asset.

The beauty of “surrendering” big parts of Afghanistan to the Taliban, and presumably Al Qaeda, is that it will cause the bad guys to congregate and form easy targets for drone attacks. As for the so-called training facility, I can’t imagine better training than attacking live targets. And the future of warfare seems to include drones, so our national defense would be improving daily as we continue to sharpen our skills in a way that no other country can.

When the Taliban gets tired of being pounded by drones every day, and they ask for a meeting to discuss peace, we respond, “Peace to what? The war is already over. Have a nice day.”

I remind you that my understanding of world affairs, and Afghanistan in particular, could be stored inside a thimble and leave plenty of room for a thumb. This blog is for people who like to toss around ideas. You won’t find any answers here.