Category: General Thoughts

Insurance is meant to spread risk. This does not mean subsidizing stupid behaviors. A risk easily foreseen should be avoided. Some places flood with monotonous regularity. If you choose to build a house there, you should be prepared to suffer losses. If that means that people don’t build on floodplains or barrier islands, it is better for both our economic and our ecological future. Our Congress wants to reinstate subsidies of flood insurance that they only recently voted to end. It is a mistake.

We should not subsidize stupid behavior. I know it is very hard not to have sympathy for our fellow citizens whose dreams lie in ruins, houses and businesses clogged with muddy water and it is likely to get worse with changes in climate. We should not leave our fellow citizens in dire straights, but we should perhaps help them move if their previous abodes are no longer well suited to habitation. It is not generous to enable people to stay in places where they will be serial victims to foreseeable vicissitudes of nature. Help a man rebuild his home on a floodplain and you are condemning him to misery and grief again and again. How can we be so cruel?

There is a story about a preacher in a town that was flooding. The water reached the roof of his church and along came a boat. “Get in,” said the boatman “It is still raining and the flood is rising.” No,” replied the preacher “the Lord will take care of me.” The water continues to rise. Comes another boat and then a third. Each time the preacher dismisses them, explaining that he has faith that the Lord will help him. Finally, there are no more boats and the water is rising. The preacher sees he will drown and calls to the Lord. “I trusted you,” he cries “Why have you forsaken me?” To which the Lord replies, “I sent three boats. Why didn’t you get into one of them?”

In our more modern time, maybe people have too much “faith” in government subsidized insurance. Maybe they should get in the figurative boat and move up the hill or away from the low estuaries.

It was an evolution.  I needed those programs back then and as I self-improved, I moved to different things.    They sound a little pathetic when I listen to them again.  You know the things I am talking about, things with titles like “the Winner’s Edge,” or “the Secrets of Success.” They seem mostly designed for people in sales and marketing or people trying to get their lives back on track or on track in the first place. 

Most are not subtle. Many have mantras. You repeat things like “I am the best” or “I can do this.”  I never actually did the mantras; even then I was not a mantra sort of guy.  But I did benefit from the programs; that I won’t deny.  I needed to develop a sense of what they called “personal power,” not only the confidence that I COULD do things. I have always been pretty good at actually doing things.  What I needed was the personal power to know that but that I deserved to succeed.   This was important. I was a little too diffident.  I would do a lot of the work and preparation but I never felt that I deserved the success.  I would not cross the finish line.

These brash and pushy people, people I would probably dislike then and now if I met in person, were exactly what I needed. And I could listen to them in my car and on my Walkman (remember those) w/o having to interact. It was useful, what I needed.

I don’t know why I was thinking about this yesterday, but I looked up some of the old tapes and found the Nightingale-Conant webpage.   I used to get their catalogs.  The webpage is pretty much the same, with many of the same programs and authors from the 1980s.  Some have made new ones and they are pictured on the covers, now much older and presumably much more prosperous from taking their own advice about winning and goal setting.   I imagine they have a society of their own increasingly geriatric where they meet to trade platitudes and tales of overcoming. But I am grateful to them.  Take a look at one of them here. This guy changed my life.

I think that the self-improvement reputation suffers because they are seen as shallow, but there come times in every life when you need to be shallower, a little less introspective. Going in with nothing but chutzpah or the old “smile and a shoeshine” is bad, but these guys often get what they are after.  I hate that, but it doesn’t make it less true.  The problem for competent but diffident people is that they (we?) don’t know how to close the sale.  We don’t take the last step. We are modest people, sometimes admittedly with much to be modest about but more often with ideas and abilities that deserve … wait for it … to win. We have to learn to be winners AND jettison the underlying suspicion that winning is not for us or that winning is vaguely disreputable concept.

My golden age of self-improvement lasted a few years back in the late 1980s.  I should qualify that statement.   Maybe I should call it a “self-help” stage.  We should never stop self-improving and I read more and listen to more audio programs than ever.  But now I do the history, biography, literature and science.  I circled back to my old interests, even tried to relearn some Latin with the Loeb Classic of Lucretius.  It worked not at all. These things are more intellectually defensible, but they are definitely still self-improvement. They help you examine your life and your values and figure out what you should do. There is also a matter of the hierarchy of needs.  You need to “go for the gold” when you are building a career and creating a life worth living.   If you succeed, you have the luxury of introspection and reflection.   I could disparage those still striving with the self-help programs and call them crass, but they are now what I was then and what I am now they might want to become, maybe not.  I don’t have many of the symbols of success pictured on the covers of the programs and in the brochures, but I still think I am a winner. Maybe I should repeat that mantra a hundred or so times.

News about Neanderthal genes in modern humans makes you think about the whole concept of species and extinction. Among modern humans, 1-3% of our genes are Neanderthal, but these are not always the same genes in every person, so if you summed up the Neanderthal genes found in modern humans, you could reconstruct 20% of the Neanderthal genome. Someday we could recreate Neanderthals. Would that be a good idea?

The idea of a species is a human construct. As our understanding of genetics improves, we begin to see how fluid the concept really is. You could argue that Neanderthals and humans are/were the same species. Polar bears and grizzly bears could be called the same species; they just come in different colors and a few other variations. Maybe even horses and donkeys. The boundaries are not clear.

Any species has lots of variety within its boundaries and the “species” changes every day. This might seem a little strange, so let me explain. A species is made up of individuals, each one of them is a little different genetically than all the others. Every day some die and others are born. Those exiting are different in some ways than those entering the species. This is one of the requirements of evolution. Over a short time, things don’t seem to change much. Over a long time, they change a lot.

This kind of complexity and evolution explains many things beyond biology, BTW. This kind of emergent behavior can help explain development and change in almost every system, such as languages, cultures etc. But this is another story.

Anybody who has seen Jurassic Park is familiar with the theory of species restoration. It may soon become a widespread reality, although maybe not with dinosaurs. This will present us with various dilemmas. What should we do with restored species? Some will probably be uncompetitive with their evolutionary descendants; that is how went extinct in the first place, but others might displace their modern cousins. If we restore an animal, does it deserve protection as an endangered species? These choices will be on us sooner than we think. Somebody will restore a long dead species very soon; somebody probably already has.

An article in New Geography is interesting.

Madison, Wisconsin 53706 is one of the poorest zip codes in the USA. This shows one of the problem with statistics. I lived in that zip code and indeed I had so little money that I slept on a couch (i.e. didn’t have my own room) and ate little but potatoes and beans for a year. But I was not really poor; I just didn’t have money. The two overlap, but they are not the same.

Among the poorest counties in the USA is where my tree farm are. I guess that explains why I can afford the land. The dominant thing about the place is that it is covered with forests, which I think explains some. You make good money and employ people when you cut trees, but in between you get fifteen, twenty or even thirty years of nothing at all.

Places with unequal income are maybe most interesting. Washington is among them. They are places with really rich people living not far from really poor ones. A surprise for me was Berkeley 94720 where the median income is $16,192 and the average is $79,238. I don’t know Berkeley that well, but it always seemed to me to be a lot like Madison. I am not surprised at the poor students pulling down the median, but I am a little surprised to have people rich enough to so pull up the average.

The richest places are still in the old places, mostly New York, NJ, Connecticut and California. If you look at economic power by counties, it still really resides in New York metro, followed by Washington metro.

My teeth are rotten. It is my own fault. I didn’t care for them when I was young. As a result, I have a big investment in crowns and fillings. Much of this work was done decades ago and it is getting old. I also chipped two front teeth a while back. I decided to get it all fixed, in Brazil. Getting three crowns and four filling replaced, as well as two cavities fixed and my chipped front teeth capped will cost $2553, all in. Lots of money, but only about a quarter of the U.S. price.  Maybe less.
In addition, this dentist can get all of that done in about two weeks. It is different in the U.S.

A few months ago, I needed blood work to test for cholesterol, sugar etc. That cost me only about thirty dollars. And it didn’t take much time.

This was all done by private firms/doctors. Brazil has a public system, but those who can afford it usually go to the private system and pay the private doctors themselves, which keeps the costs down. And the medical system in Brazil is still not as lawyer infected as ours.

I am not saying that I prefer the Brazilian system. American medical care is still the best in the world, but it is expensive. We sometimes get more than we would want to pay for. And we don’t pay attention because somebody else is paying.

There are a few lessons here. First, medical care can become more of an internationally trade commodity.

A second lesson has to do with delivery. If people pay out of their own pockets, prices remain lower. Brazil is NOT an inexpensive country generally. It costs MORE to maintain an American level of living in Brazil than in the U.S. Restaurants and food cost more. Cars cost more. Electronics costs a lot more. But medical care is cheaper.

It seems that many people in the U.S. maintain a special kind of hatred for things like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. I have been consuming both for my entire life w/o problems. I might say “everything in moderation” but I drink more than two liters of Coke every day and have done for around fifty years. Some would say that was immoderate. But McD can be consumed in moderation and in health. Take a look at this link. Most of us are familiar with the move “Super Size” where a guy ate nothing but McD all month and got fat and unhealthy. It was mendacious. The man simply consumed lots of fat and calories. Do that with any diet and you get fat.

The link here shows a science teacher in Iowa, who ate nothing but McD and LOST weight, while lowering his cholesterol. He ate Big Macs, but also other things available at McD and did so in moderation with a healthy lifestyle.

I enjoy a Big Mac at least once a week. I also regularly eat pizza, tacos & processed flower. I am happy if my food has GMOs. I drink around 30 liters of Coke Zero each week. I almost never drink water unless mixed with extracts of things like cola nuts, barely, hops, or corn. And I love salt. I do also like vegetables; I eat them with my Rammen. My health is exceptionally good because it is possible to be very healthy w/o going organic.

You just don’t need to worry that much. Pretty much everything you eat, drink, breathe or touch CAN cause cancer if you consume too much. But most of us don’t. So eat that Big Mac and take large fries if you want. But walk more and be sensible. And, yes, Coke Zero and McDonald’s can be part of a sensible diet.

If you eat nothing but rice cakes and organic food, while avoiding Coke, candy, fast foods, booze and donuts, you will not live longer, although the boredom might make it seem that way. 

I have been complaining about how independent-minded people cannot get along in the big bureaucratic organizations as long as I have been working in big-bureaucratic organizations. It is getting to thirty years now and I have been getting along reasonable well in big-bureaucratic organizations. For an even longer time, I have been reading books about independent-minded reformers bucking the system to change the paradigms and make meaningful changes. I always identified with the plucky outsiders. Most of us do. It is the American way. You can easily see it in the plots of so many movies and books. A group of misfits is picked on and oppressed by the powerful and/or popular people. They continue to do things their way and by the end of the movie are vindicated. As I said, most of us identify with the underdogs and misfits.

It can’t be right. There are more than 300 million Americans and ALL of us are rebels? If all of us are a little different and a little rebellious, who are we rebelling against? And if the group of misfits comes out on top, don’t they become the in-group. Maybe it is the nerds and the theater kids oppressing the jocks.

I have been reading another of those business-management-behavior books that gives another set of examples about the rebels working on their own turning the tables on the established and powerful. But, as I wrote, I have been reading these sorts of books for a long time. The names are changed and the exact circumstances are different, but the stories are the same. My study of old books tells me that this story has been going on for as long as people could write. Each of the new renditions makes it seem like it is a new discovery, but maybe this is just the way it is, has been and ever will be.

In my own lifetime, I have seen many of “rebels” turn into the establishment that needs to be overturned by new rebels. These erstwhile rebels in general did not “sell out.” They simply solved the problems presented them. Yesterday’s solutions are often today’s problem, which implies that today’s solutions will be tomorrow’s problems. This seems depressing at first glance and it could be, but I don’t think it is. It is simply a matter of growth and change.

Many of the problems of my youth have indeed been solved and the world is generally a much better place than it was back in 1973. Our generation actually did pretty well. I have reasonable confidence that it will be a better place in 2053 than it is today, i.e. the kids will be all right too. But people will still complain, because people complain. We can always imagine better.

I have been complaining about how hard it is for independent-minded folks like me to make it in the organization. People like me like to “stick it to the man.” But in the course of all my complaining, suffering and strife, I realize now that I have become the man, or at least one of them. People see me like I saw my bosses of the past. I now understand that my old bosses too were surprised by their own apotheosis or demonization, depending on who was doing the taking and when. These successful folks were – in their own minds – the plucky outsiders who had to push open doors and make the system change. Some were right.

It is a little deflating but nevertheless comforting to realize that we – we plucky outsiders – we are the system, maybe too much to say bricks in the wall but not too much to say links in a chain. It is a great strength of our American system that we can easily absorb good people and ideas from outside the current establishment. We actually live in a state of constant revolution, but w/o the nasty bits associated with those things that happened in France or Russia.

It doesn’t work in spite of us but because of us. We “rebels” sometimes don’t admit it or even see it. The system works with us and we work with it.  The energy of our discontent is part of its lifeblood. We never get all we think possible because we can envision better than anyone can achieve and it is a moving target. As soon as we get to a place we thought impossible, we start thinking it is normal, deserved and maybe not enough.

Well, looking around on this first day of 2014, I see that things are pretty good. Can I envision better? Of course I can. Is it better than I envisioned by in 1974? Hell yeah. We solved the energy crisis, brought down world communism, reduced absolute poverty by 80%, cut cancer deaths, greatly improved water and air quality, brought back species such as wolves & eagles; the population bomb fizzled; Lake Erie turned out not to be dead and we even got rid of disco & leisure suits. Those were things I worried about back then, I thought there were no good solutions; fortunately, I was wrong.

And still can stick it to the man. Take a look at this clip.