Category: Opinions and Thoughts

How very irrational I am.

This morning I stopped at traffic light and saw a series of Trump lawn signs.  After I got over my overwhelming urge to thwart the free election process and pull the signs, I realized I was partly offended by their existence because they surprised me.

They surprised me???

I’m seeing Trump everywhere online, why was surprised?  Because my brain separates my real world from my online world.  And so when I saw Trump signs in my real world it was REAL.  It was more offensive because it is Real World.

I think that some part of my brain equates my online world with fantasy.  Online is all just happening in my head, I can’t touch you guys, I can only read you and that means all of my interactions are just thoughts inside my head.   Its ultimately not that different than my daydreams.  Just stuff that happens in my brain.

The only tangible thing that makes my online experience different than my daydreams is this computer.  But the computer’s physical existence is apparently a very transparent veneer – because I was surprised to see Trump signs.

And I’m irrational.

The continuing theme from Syrian refugees is education for their children.  It is a refrain from the children as well.  12 year old children who ask only to go to school.  These children are losing the crucial years for education.

They came from a country that with an infrastructure for educating all children and now they will likely get barely enough to subsist.

There is so much tragedy in this crisis.  The dehumanizing of people is huge – but the long term economic poverty that is going to be thrust upon this generation of Syrians is tragic.  They will not be saved when they move out of the refugee camps.  They will be then have to face the handicap of a lack of education in a world that has zoomed along technologically without them.  They will not own the skills necessary to live in the modern world as adults.

Life is More Expensive When You Don’t Have Money

This is a VERY hard concept to make people living in the comfort of middle class  understand.  But I’m gonna give it a shot.

3 years ago, I was homeless for a couple of months and when I finally got a job, I found a rooming house the let me have a 6×10 room for 60/wk. This seemed like a miracle. It was shelter I could afford.

But it turned out to be expensive shelter. Because I had no kitchen facilities in the room. And rules against any kind of heating device in the room. So I ended up buying fast food, which is both expensive and bad for you. If I tried to avoid eating 3 – .99 cent burgers a day, I was into much more expensive range.

In the end, I was able to get an apartment for $375/mo and found that my expenses were only a tiny bit higher than when I lived in the rooming house.
BTW – I only got the apt because of a government program. I did not have the money together for a security deposit. Nor would most landlords look at someone who was evicted.

Where you live is huge. Its not just being able to cook, but also being near a decent grocery that has reasonably priced food. The stores in lower socioeconomic neighborhoods called Dollar General, Dollar Store – all more expensive than Kroger (large grocery store). If you are lucky you have an actual Dollar Tree, where things are a dollar.

Being able to buy a lot of something when its on sale sounds frugal. But I live in a very tight budget. When Toilet Paper is on sale, I can’t buy enough to last until the next sale. I can only buy what I can afford now, which is maybe one extra pkg, maybe no extra. Maybe I’m just glad it’s on sale because the last light bulb went out and that’s not a weekly expense for me, so now I have more money toward new light bulbs.

I’m not buying LED bulbs.  I’m buying whatever is cheapest.  So my electric bill isn’t going down because I can’t afford the immediate expense of an LED bulb.  They pay off in the LONG run.  But I can’t plan for long run.  I can only plan how this pay check will be used.

Most people without enough money do not have credit cards.  Many don’t have debit cards because the banks charge them money to have an account because they can’t hold a minimum balance.  Or they have been overdrawn too often and the bank refuses to open an account for them at all.  Banks will often charge them to cash a paycheck that is DRAWN on the bank because they don’t have an account.  So in order to get the money from their paycheck they need to pay money.

Because they don’t have a debit card, they buy pre-paid cards.  These are VERY expensive compared to a debit card.  So in order to spend money they have to spend extra money.  This is why people in lower socioeconomic areas are using cash.  Its cheap.  But increasingly you need some form of electronic payment card.  For example, if you want to rent a nice cheap movie for a $1 at redbox – you need a card.   You want to buy or pay for anything online – you need a card.

I won’t even get started on the corporations whose ENTIRE business plan is to prey on people without money.  Check Cashing and Pay Day Loan  businesses are one of the moral atrocities of this country.

My point is that its easy to save money when you have money. Its cheaper just get and spend the money you already have.  It’s easy to get to the cheaper store. It’s easier to buy a lot of what is cheap to save for the future. It’s easy to cook because you have the appropriate tools and appliances. Its easy to choose because you can still get the other thing in case its necessary.  Its easier to buy something that is more expensive now but will be cheaper in the long run.

Mostly though, think about will power. Will power is something we exercise when we feel strong. Being poor is a constant drain on your mental and emotional energy.   It’s harder to make a conscious choice to not spend money on a frivolous thing when your life is in tatters.  And when you are poor, everything is a choice – this OR this. Its rarely this AND this.

Poor people are seeing all the same ads on TV that you are. They are constantly bombarded with the same manufactured desires that companies want you to feel about their products. Do you think it’s easier for them to avoid those wants because they don’t have money and should be just content?  Its actually harder to make a good choice when so many things in your life are bad and when everyday you have to make so many of these choices because every damn thing is a value choice.  There are studies that show that every choice you make lowers your will power for the next choice.

Poor people are disproportionately overweight and far more of them smoke. You know why? Because life sucks and when life sucks it is WAY harder to make a good choice. Even when you know what the good choice is.   So the poor end up spending too much money on things they don’t need like cigarettes and junk food because life just sucks and you grab comfort where you can.  And relatively speaking these are easy cheap comforts.

Being poor is not only more expensive, it is littered with hidden obstacles that are invisible from the glorious heights of middle class American security.

I know. I was born in that security and I lived there until 3 years ago. The middle class is blind. It’s more comfortable that way.

CAVEAT:  I’m saying this from a US viewpoint.  I have no idea if the same is true world wide, but I’m going to guess that it is.

Humans continue to suck

There are humans in the world,  adult humans,  in their 40s, who do elaborate prank calls just for the fun of it.

And the internet has allowed them to create a gathering place, to feed off of each others ideas and be even greater oozing pus boils on the ass crack of mankind.

Listen to this podcast for the story.   But to summarize, a guy had a problem with comcast.  He tweeted about it.  They resolved it and gave him a discount.  Story that happens all over the internet.

A few months later, he gets a call from a comcast rep asking him to delete the tweet.  They go back and forth, with the rep comparing keeping the tweet up to keeping a mean tweet up about your girlfriend which you posted during a fight.  The rep eventually calls him a dickhole and then he deletes the tweet.  Eventually she’s mean enough that he hangs up.

It was a prank.  For fun.  Not to steal anything, just because this person finds prank phone calls entertaining.  Manipulating people is entertaining to her bored self and so why not choose a random stranger and make them severely uncomfortable for awhile.

I’ll be honest.  I find prank phone calls with no other purpose than self gratification to be SEVERAL rungs lower than some asshole who would con someone for money or ID over the phone.  And I think those vermin are the shit stuck in the butt crack of dirty heroin addicts. But the shit vermin are at least working toward a productive end, not just idly entertaining themselves like the oozy pus pranksters are.  It does not justify the behavior, but as a motivation for doing vile things, the search for money is more understandable to me than the search for entertainment.

Humans have always been terrible, but the internet allows us to find other people who enjoy our worst selves.  And they create subreddits and websites and skype and then – poof – we have a club of people who support and grow this terrible behavior.  Its the dirty underside of all the good things that are the internet.  And sometimes I worry about it.

Why don’t I recognize Earth?

I follow the astronaut Scott Kelly on twitter.  While he was in space he did this thing with earth pictures where he likened them to art without identifying the place in the picture. I could never figure out the place – although sometimes I think a cartographer would not have been able to.  Because he’d focused on a gorgeous pattern but it didn’t have an easy reference point.

image

But sometimes he challenged people to identify the place and it did have something you could reference if you knew something about geography.  I could NEVER identify it.

EVEN when he said what I was looking at, I was at a loss for several moments because it’s not oriented the way my schooling taught me the earth is oriented.

image

I think we do a big disservice to kids in constantly orienting maps with the north at the top.  It makes us internalize the idea that there is a top to earth.  AND THERE ISN’T.  No up.  No down.

North at the top is just a function of tradition.  Yeah, I know the magnetic pole thing – but honestly – in space its just a ball floating in a whole lot of vacuum.   And while the planets are on a sort of plane with the sun, AGAIN, is that really related to how the continents are on our sphere?

image

This is a Dymaxion map designed by Buckminster Fuller.  Its designed to give land masses their proper ratios.  Notice that Greenland is NOT the same size as Africa.  Of course this means none of the water is accurate.  Maps, man. Can’t be trusted.

Anyway, I guess I think that if you taught geography as a kind of wild puzzle, without orientation to the north, it would be far more captivating to kids.  If you showed them all the crazy ideas that cartographers have come up with to map the world that challenge their ideas of how the world is actually carved up – it might wake them up a bit.  They might actually learn where Malaysia is vs Madagascar

Its real.

“Depression is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune.

It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed.

You alienate your friends because you can’t comport yourself socially, you risk your job because you can’t concentrate, you live in moderate squalor because you have no energy to stand up, let alone take out the garbage.

You become pathetic and you know it. And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge. You have no perspective, no emotional reserves, no faith that it will get better. So you feel guilty and ashamed of your inability to deal with life like a regular human, which exacerbates the depression and the isolation.

If you’ve never been depressed, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier. No one on earth would choose the nightmare of depression over an averagely turbulent normal life.

It’s not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It’s an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you. If depression has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too.

No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families.

You cannot imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself.

Depression is real. Just because you’ve never had it doesn’t make it imaginary.

Compassion is also real. And a depressed person may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their depression.

Have a heart. Judge not lest ye be judged.”

—-

That was written on tumblr by ~sherunsfromdarkness, 4 years ago.

Everytime I re-read it, I’m awed by how accurately she captured depression.  There it is.  That’s it. I could write more, but essentially – that’s it.

 

Things that will annoy us in the future.

xkcd

I been thinking about some of the implications of smart cars.  Because it wouldn’t actually play out like the comic says.  In all probability the car would only respond to the voice command of the person it currently thinks of as the driver, otherwise it would randomly react to conversations in a car.

Think about it.  The cars come linked to the owner with a voice or the fingerprint or something.  So, lending a car – You don’t just hand the neighbor the keys to your truck so he can run to Lowes and pick up something too big for his Prius.  You have a glitchy app, probably, that gives temporary access to the neighbor, which probably fucks up after he parks in Lowes and now he can’t get back…

Imagine if the Owner dies. You have to get the dealer to reset it or something.

The car will probably have some government access so that they can impound your car as necessary.  Also the loan company will have that access.

In fact the loan company could just send a message to a self driving car to come in to their lot.  A whole group of people whose job it is to repossess cars will become slowly obsolete.

Police chases will end as soon as a cop sends a message to the self driving car to pull over.   Probably no siren needed in those cases.  Its not like the world needs to be aware of what can be communicated through the car.  And the cars themselves are going to go about pulling over in the safest possible manner with all the cars around them cooperating.

From a law abiding stand point all these things are good things.  Less cost, less injury, more socially acceptable behavior.

So, why do I feel like we are losing something?

Choice, even the choice to do something illegal, seems so paramount to me.  And so when I think about a world in which the speed limit is always obeyed and the stolen car will never be missed in traffic and will always pull over safely, and the interest rates on car loans go down because the repossession of default is cheap and easy… all I can feel is sad. It feels dystopian instead of utopian.

But it is in fact utopian.   Right?

Well, not completely.  How do you make sure the loan company gives up that access when you pay off the loan?  How do know someone won’t hack the loan company and now some random asshole has potential control of your car.    Because there is always an asshole.

There are lots of things like that.  But like most things, the convenience and effectiveness will out weight the outlier negatives.  And we will numbly hand over control of our cars to corporations and governments because it now is easier to stare at a smartphone on the commute to work.

And if you are thinking, as I did for a moment, well, I just won’t buy one.  This is what I think is going to be the most insidious part of it.  At some point the saturation of self driving cars will be say 75%.  And the vast majority of people not using them will be people without enough money.  And criminals.  And we will then place a stigma on non-self driving cars.

And then people will begin to say it won’t be truly effective until EVERYONE is using a self driving car.  So they will ban the old ones because only criminals use them (because who thinks people won’t oversimplify it to that?).  Which will effectively take a huge amount of mobility and freedom from a whole lot of lower income people who can’t afford a self driving car or to take a self driving taxi everywhere.  And the likelihood of public transit being pervasive enough to fix that, especially in rural areas, is unlikely.

The net effect 100 years after that will probably be positive and no one will do more than comment in history books on the social implications of the change. Those people won’t know what we lost, because they never had those choices, can’t see why I would think the ability to choose to do something I would never do is important.  They will feel distantly that the plight of several million people who lost mobility was sad but they won’t understand because we will probably have solved that problem with a wider net of public transit.   But during the change, which will happen in our lifetimes, it isn’t going to be so nice.

The Power and Danger of Social Media as an Engine for Change

A few days ago, #WhichHilary was trending on Twitter.  It was highlighting the various inconsistencies in Clinton’s current position vs her past positions and actions.  It was used heavily by Sanders supporters and various Republican Supporters.  It had A LOT of traction.

It was started by an activist twitter @guerilladems.  That account was suspended soon after the hashtag started trending.

The trending references were removed from Twitter.  Upon realizing that it wasn’t working, an alternative hashtag sprang up #whichhilarycensored.  That one disappeared too.

Twitter later said it was a mistake.

The Twitter CEO hosted a fundraiser for Clinton.

But it was a mistake.

Right.

Twitter and similar social media have been very powerful agents for change and political focus.  Everything from the Arab Spring to Ferguson gain energy and inclusion and focus through social media.

But these things happen on a very limited number of websites.  And those websites control the content.  So essentially what happens in the world is now controlled at the pleasure of the website.  At the pleasure of a very small number of people.

Its a terrible power to place in the hands of a human.

We like to think that the web is, for better or worse,  a truly democratic place.  Where the voices of the many can come together and express their similar views.  Voices that used to never be heard.

But ultimately they can only be seen if that website allows it.

People will blame Clinton and it is not unfair to do so.  I have a hard time doubting that someone in her camp didn’t make a call.  But the real power in this situation isn’t from the person begging the favor.  Its in the person who had the ability to grant such a favor.  A very powerful favor.   That favor represents more power than should be given to anyone.

I have always been a proponent of the idea that a website has the right to control the comments that happen on their website.  I would NEVER allow any sort of hateful comment to live on my blog.  I would censor it in a heartbeat.

But I have to question whether places like twitter or facebook have grown beyond the bounds of private gardens where individuals can control what happens on their sites.  Perhaps they are now a truly public forum, as much as a public park is and as such, perhaps it really is a place where the rights of free and uncensored speech apply.

What do you think?