Category Archives: Wondering - Page 18

Ayn I Rand. I Rand So Far Away.

Posted by on January 22, 2013 No comments

For a while, I’ve been watching “patriots” circle-jerk over Ayn Rand and I never understood why.  So, I took a short amount of time and read a short book of hers called Anthem, which I assumed would be typical of the Rand philosophy.  I can say I have no further desire to read a Rand book.  For as much as conservatives scream about the evils of socialism and communism, the world that Rand wants is just as evil, just in the other direction.

To me, Anthem is a tribute to selfishness and hubris.  The final chapters are filled with an excess of “I”, “me”, and "my”, which is meant to contrast with the whole rest of the book, where the primary character refers to himself in the plural, “we”.   This book’s story is set in an absurd world, because it’s the only world that you could even begin to justify the main character’s actions and beliefs.  Some future world where humanity has regressed to the dark ages and is controlled by a collection of councils, who have mapped out everything so there is no personal choice.  And somehow, people today think we are moving in that direction?

As I neared the end of the book, knowing what was going to happen, I thought I would write a blog post as an epilogue to the story, describing what would happen when this extreme individualistic philosophy grew.  Turns out I didn’t need to.  The book already had it covered.  The primary character took over an old house, claimed all its possessions as his, planned to convert it into a fortress, planned to build an army and wage war on the existing community, make his house the capital of a new world and be the absolute leader.  This is a good thing? 

At the turning point in the story, where the character begins to learn at a hyper-accelerated pace and surpasses the entirety of humanity in knowledge, it is not dwelled upon that he stole items from various councils to accomplish his learning.  While it sounds understandable to break the laws of an absurdly oppressive future world, the general message, reinforced in the closing of the story, comes across as “Do whatever it takes for your own benefit.”  This is something to strive towards?

The problem with this book and the current flavor of individualism is the inherent exclusiveness.  Coming along with that is the despise and near hatred for fellow humans.  In this mindset, everyone is out to get something from you and you’re not going to share anything with anyone you don’t deem worthy.  In this mindset, you have no need for anyone else – unless you need something from them, of course.  The viewpoint that a person has no value whatsoever and contributes nothing to society is the default instead of the exception.  Trusting no one but yourself is the overriding belief.

So what becomes of a society of individuals?  How does anything move forward?  How can there be any progress without shared resources?  Consider a bunch of individuals living by a stream, each using the water for daily life.  A new person comes along and dams the river upstream so he can do whatever he wants to with the large pool.  That’s his right; he’s doing whatever his individual desires want.  The others downstream suffer.  Without any governing body, I suppose the dam owner would simply be run out or killed and the dam destroyed.  Sounds like an incredible world to live in, where whatever you make is yours and only yours.

The concept of radical individualism like portrayed in Anthem and in the equally absurd previous example are possible when there is no overpopulation crisis.  If someone cramps your individual freedoms, simply move farther away.  This, accurately, is how America got started and is how and why it grew so powerful.  but with as crowded as America is now, we have no choice but to be socialistic.  We do not have the space nor the independence (as in lack of dependence on others) to make this happen.  Maybe being a farmer in the rural Midwest would be suitable for such people, but not everyone can attain this.

There’s always such a big cry from the people who feel they’re being repressed.  “Why can’t I?”  “The government won’t let me (insert anything here).”  The answer is that what you want is not good for society.  Not everyone can go and start building a nuclear power plant, because not everyone will get it right, then we all have to pay for the mistakes.  The answer this book purports is that it doesn’t matter.  The only thing that matters is that it is good for me.  Although in the closing chapters the book came very, very close to using this phase, it didn’t.  The phrase, usually reserved for unmentionable acts, is “The end justifies the means.”  And to have a society built on that belief would be a terrible one to live in.

Elevating and Deviating

Posted by on January 18, 2013 No comments

“Everybody wants to elevate from the norm. / Everybody wants to deviate from the norm.” – Rush, Vital Signs

Recently, a now-former colleague of mine, went off the deep end.  The thing I find saddening is that the arguments in support of his changes would be self-fulfilling from his viewpoint.  I guess that’s how all conspiracy theorists are, they believe everyone is wrong and they are the only sane person left. At the time I drafted this post, it wasn’t about alien or illuminati conspiracies, but what I would term fringe capitalism.  By the time he was dismissed – about a month later – it had escalated into “truther” conspiracy.

When I first met this person less than a year ago, I picked up quickly that he was a capitalist.  I learned this when he relayed a story about how he took a contract job and paid someone else to do it for him, pocketing the difference.  To me, this is sociopathic (sociopath: a person with a psychopathic personality whose behavior is antisocial, often criminal, and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience).  Now the term “antisocial” conjures up an image of a certain quiet personality, but the one I really want to express is “anti-society”.  This behavior is selfish and manipulative and usually anything but quiet.  Instead of being a good member of society and letting the person who could do the work accept the job, this person jumped in between and caused either the employer to pay more than they needed or the worker to be paid less than they could have.  In either case, the action is parasitic.

There was no mistaking his goal was money.  And I intentionally say money and not wealth.  He practiced visualization techniques: keeping an image of what you desire in view at all times.  The picture on his wall was a stack of money.   As the desire for money grew, he cared less about the means he used to get it.  He started surrounding himself with people who thought like him, attending real estate seminars, then wealth seminars and self-improvement seminars.

As he dwelt on the possibilities of making so much money, his personality became more extreme.  He made derogatory statements that the average American was stupid, lazy, blind, “sheeple”.  He started questioning written law and learning as much as he could about getting around it, stating “the law only says what you can’t do.”  In other words, he was becoming morally bankrupt and still viewing himself as superior to everyone else.  He started speaking authoritatively about topics that normal people don’t, like refusing to pay income tax.  He made a comment about how he discovered some internal barriers keeping him from his goal.  I must assume he means his conscience. 

Everyone has a small fringe belief and if you get around around a bunch of people who have ideas like income tax being illegal, you’re going to hear more and more strange things. Eventually, for this person, this culminated in government conspiracy and radical gun law rantings.  When I met him, he never considered a gun, now he makes posts about bloody revolution.

So, I feel I’ve now seen first-hand the transformation of a normal person into an anti-societal, psychopathic  elite.  Fortunately, I don’t think this is part of an epidemic, like my observations about the middle class being pulled to the extremes.  I think this is a case where a person is finding himself, and that “himself” is just a very bad person (and unfortunately his fiancée was taken along for the ride).  Within his new circle of friends, his view is depressing, indeed.

I somewhat pride myself in judging him correctly when I first met him.  First, that I identified him as a capitalist.  Second, that I determined him to be a person that when put in a information-rich environment, like our workplace, he would soak it all in and explode with potential.  Well, that certainly happened, but in an environment apart from our workplace.

Losing Again

Posted by on January 9, 2013 No comments

In my Internet travels, I’ve seen the good and the bad and the tasteless and the strange.  One thing that I saw that struck my fancy was a writing genre I think are called “BAWW Stories.”  These are short stories – either true or not – that exist for the purpose of being heart-wrenching and emotionally hyper-charged.  Usually, the story involves a close friend, family member, or pet in a terrible series of events.  The end result is that you just break down and bawl – “bawwwwww!”  I’ve wanted to try my hand at writing one, so let’s see how well it turns out.  Gratefully, this is total fiction.

…and that’s that.  I’m single now, I guess.  Who am I kidding, I know I’m single.  When you call your girlfriend up and you hear from the background noise that she’s at some party that you had no idea was planned, when you hear a guy asking “Is that him?”, when she stutters and hesitates when you say you’ll see her tomorrow, these are some pretty obvious signs.

It’s not like I didn’t see it coming.  She’s always been more social than me and I could tell I was holding her back.  I’m not going to bother deleting all the emails and texts just yet.  I just want to sit for a bit and think about the good times.  We had, what, maybe a month?  That’s pretty good for me, considering all the first/last dates I’ve been through.

Bub is here beside me.  Bub is my closest friend, even though he’s a cat.  He always knows when something’s up.  I take good care of him and he never fails to show his appreciation for it.  Bub chose me, which is something I could never expect from any human companion.

Bub was a stray that showed up at the house one afternoon.  Who knows why he chose my house.  He was thin but clean and he seemed so happy to see me.  As time went on, Bub became closer and closer to me, like a child.  And he’d seen many of my ups and downs as I stumbled through my failed relationships, so he understood how I was tonight.

I figured I should go for a drive to clear my head.  That’s usually what I did in times like these.  Bub seemed to know what I was up to (as usual) and headed to the door.  That was one of the coolest things about Bub, that he was so dog-like.  He actually enjoyed car rides.  So, I hauled him up and we got in the car together, Bub settling down in my lap after I buckled my seat belt.

As I drove through the back roads, I ran through the last few days in my mind and analyzed how my latest relationship fell apart.  Yeah, she had become distant.  Yeah, I didn’t seem to care about it.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  It was me.  Bub was in my lap, purring.  Bub didn’t care about all that stuff.  If I ignored him, he just hung out with me.  That’s how a relationship should be.  No, no.  I’m being selfish again.

I turned on to the interstate for the drive home.  The back roads are nice, but sometimes you actually want to get somewhere in decent time.  Although Bub liked car rides, the Interstate made him a bit nervous.  I reassured him frequently as we drove on.

Suddenly, Bub tensed up and I looked down at him.  While I looked down, a truck horn blared right beside me.  Bub scrambled off my lap and down onto the floor.  Freaking out myself, I look up and see a wall of stopped cars straight ahead.  I look down again quickly for Bub.  He’s pressed himself down at the front of the floor, under the brake pedal.  All the blood drains from my face when I realize what was going to happen.  I only have seconds to react.

The tears burst from my eyes as the screeching of tires is drowned out by the screaming from the front of the floor of my car.  I’m so sorry.

Technology Can Do That, So Let’s Not

Posted by on January 2, 2013 No comments

I wonder what technology is coming to and at the same time, I wonder if I’m just getting old.  I look at things that were normal for me at the peak of my programming days and wonder if older developers thought I was an idiot for doing things that way.  For example, did the old procedural programmers of old see object-oriented design as ridiculous, slow, and inefficient?  Maybe.  But OO programming is pretty much the standard now.

But for some reason, I am confused as to why implicit typecasting is suddenly “awesome".  We had that way back when in VB and Classic ASP and we were hated for it.  Then .NET came along and strong-typing became the thing to do.  Now we’re back to implicit typecasting and scripted languages just like we had with ASP.

But the thing that’s really got me confused is cloud computing, why everyone thinks it great to rely on someone else instead of relying on yourself.  I guess the argument is “they can do it so much better than we can, so why not let them.”  There’s no more building yourself up?  You have to start at the top?  Talk about immediate gratification.  That’s bitter old man talk, there.

At my job, a co-worker (thankfully not me) has an integration project using Amazon Web Services (AWS).  As best I can tell, it’s a web service that sits in front of a message queue system.  To be slightly vague about the project, our client sends us a request with a questionnaire.  We collect the responses to the questions and send each individual answer back to the client as a message via AWS.  This infrastructure was forced on us; not our choice.  So, my old-timey brain is thinking, “why must a unit of work (a completed questionnaire), be transmitted in discrete pieces when it needs to be a single unit on their end?”  The answer to this is “don’t worry about it.”  The reason is a new crazy programming concept: eventual consistency.  Apparently our client is so hip and modern, they are using both “the cloud” and “eventual consistency” in their application design.

Eventual Consistency is nothing new.  Airlines have been using it forever.  Did you lose your luggage?  Is it now five states away?  It will eventually get to you and everything will be fine.  FedEx started using it with SmartPost.  If you ever had something shipped via SmartPost, you could watch the package get shipped all over the country, but eventually it would get to you.  With every real-world application of Eventual Consistency, you are guaranteed to get what you want, but never sure when it will happen.  Why, in any case, this became an acceptable solution is beyond me.

To wrap this up, but to leave it with some final, head-shaking, “why is this acceptable” thoughts, here’s some of the documented guidelines when using Amazon Web Services:

  • When you make a request for new messages, you may only request up to 10 new messages at a time.
  • If you request 10 messages, you may not get 10.  You may get less than 10, even if there are more than 10 messages in the queue.
  • If there are a very small number of messages in the queue, you may get zero.
  • Despite the inability for AWS to deliver the messages you request when you request them, all of the messages are available for viewing through their control panel.
  • When you send a message, you get no acknowledgement that it was sent successfully.  If you did not get an error during sending, you assume it was sent successfully.
  • You have no idea if the message was delivered to the destination queue successfully.  You will only know when the receiver picks up the message, and that is send as an acknowledgement on another queue.  You must query that queue and match up the acknowledgements with your initial sent messages.
  • The acknowledgement queue has all the limitations of the aforementioned message requests.

This is true progress.

The Violent Life

Posted by on December 27, 2012 No comments

Today, I made a follow-up call to one of my mortgage companies, who confirmed some bad news to me.  I guess relatively, it’s not bad news at all, it’s just information.  Time is quickly running out for HARP refinancing, and my primary mortgage company extended me a really nice offer that could save me a couple hundred a month in payments.  However, when I called to redeem that offer, I was deemed ineligible because my secondary mortgage holder wasn’t on the “approved list”.  So I called the secondary company today and they confirmed that they were not participating in that program.

So what did I do then? Nothing.  I politely thanked the woman and ended the call.  I didn’t rant at her.  I didn’t punch a wall or cry and yell.  I didn’t curse the politicians or banks.  And I didn’t start scheming.  I just kept driving home.  Nothing had changed.  I wasn’t any worse off than I was before I started this re-fi process.  As I drove, I thought of a moment a couple days ago where I forgot to provide my rewards card at a costly restaurant and missed a decent amount of reward points.  Again, I didn’t get angry.  I didn’t insist on having the staff accommodate my mistake.  I shrugged and moved on.

Some people may hear these stories and say “Look at what you’re missing out on!” or “You’re ripping yourself off!”  And that’s what I’m trying to explain.  There’s a certain segment of the population that believes life is difficult and unfair – a battle that must be fought in order to succeed.  They’ve come up with motivational sayings like “Seize the day!” and “Grab life by the throat!”  They implore you to “take what’s yours” and “settle for nothing less”.  Such violent, aggressive images – why would life freely offer anything to them when they are constantly attacking it and taking whatever they can?

However, I feel I am a model case of success caused by working in harmony with life instead of fighting it every step of the way.  When opportunities are presented to me, I take them if I can, and if I miss them, there will always be another in the future.  If you would scoff and say I’m too passive to be successful, what’s your measure of success?  I’m very sure it’s not the same as mine.  If I had to get up each day and mentally plan an attack on everyone that’s out to take something that I might feel is rightfully mine, I would be miserable.  And I’m guessing those that do this are miserable, they just don’t know any differently.

I’m not making an excuse for laziness and total passivity.  You have to be engaged enough to act on your good fortune, and that can mean working and sometimes working hard.  Further, you have to be engaged enough to recognize your good fortune and give thanks for it.  Finally, you have to have the attitude that you are losing nothing.

So I wasn’t able to get a couple hundred off my mortgage payment.  I didn’t lose that offer; it was never mine to begin with.  For me to be upset about something that wasn’t mine is selfish and dwelling on it would make me lose focus on the real facts that I am getting by without that change.  I should be very grateful that is the case, with so many others that are not as fortunate. 

In summary, as cliché as it is, you need to focus on what you have been given and not what you feel you have been denied.

A Lot Of Nonsense (But Torture is Discussed)

Posted by on August 1, 2010 No comments

I’m generally pretty good about hating on the human race, by which I mean I generally hate the human race and am pretty good at it.  But in light of recent research on my part, I feel I need to give us some credit.  It’s hard to say this is the pinnacle of civilization, but…

A lyric in a song made a reference to “Catherine wheel” and I felt inclined to find out what it was all about.  It turns out to be a torture device.  Not a particularly clever one, but rather grotesque.  I’m not sure why the wheel was needed, but the technique employed was essentially breaking all the victim’s bones then letting them die on their own.

Of course now that I knew about this particular torture device, it would be a disservice to not understand it in context of other torture devices in use at the time.  So I had a lovely time of reading and understanding many different methodologies for punishing people.  Sounds like fun, huh?

It made me wonder how it must have been to live in that age.  Just like now, you have your rich and elite who can get away with most everything, and there’s probably a pretty narrow “middle-class”, who garner some respect and a small sphere of influence in their region.  But then there’s the working class, and working might be a generous term.

The thing that strikes me is that physical torture was entertainment to the common people in those times.  And it might have been a perpetual worry that they might be an entertainer some day.  Could they ever have imagined what the world would be like now?  Living back then, could you even visualize cities that were clean, buildings like malls and office complexes that were kept sparkling all the time?  Paved roads, lit-up city streets, safe, secure houses?  The pessimist in me is right there with you.  “Clean cities?”  “safe houses?”  But let’s all think in relative terms, here.

Our current time would surely seem like literally heaven to them.  Of course, they don’t understand anything modern, so it would all be “magic” to them.  And how could they comprehend a civilization that didn’t employ torture as a standard practice (except for those rich and elite previously mentioned)?

So, looking around, yeah, we have a lot of stupid people.  We have some bad people that do some pretty bad things on a local level and some at a global level.  We have cases where people’s rights are violated by people in power.  But at least we don’t have rotting corpses hanging in cages in our cities, or exhibitions of torture downtown.  We don’t have to fear someone coming to town and randomly accusing people of heresy and torturing them for show.

I think short-term things look bleak, but long-term – like not in my lifetime – things should continue trending toward a global social structure.  Currently, we define ourselves by race, nationality, and religion.  Nationalism is in its death throes as the Internet allows global communication.  Nations have less power to convince their populace that outsiders are “evil”.  The more we communicate disconnectedly, the less race will be a concern.  You could have years of partnership and communication history with a person and never know he or she is of a race you dislike.  That proves the ridiculousness of racism.  Religion?  That’s going to take some work, but at least the religious leaders don’t have the power they used to, so maybe in time, we can work something out.

Take Pride, not Lives

Posted by on May 28, 2010 No comments

I see mass-manufacturer Foxconn has been pretty heavy in the news for all the suicides of their workers and now they have a solution: higher pay.  How American of a solution is that?  We’ll buy your happiness.  Little do they know they will only make the problem worse because now workers won’t be able justify quitting because they can’t make that much anywhere else.

Pondering this, I had a typical impractical thought.  But who knows,  it’s “so crazy it just might work” ™.  The root problem is job dissatisfaction.  Some of it is long hours, some is monotony, but I might speculate a lot of it is a feeling of uselessness.  It comes back to the Gung Ho principles.  These anonymous, tireless workers don’t understand the good that they are doing.  They don’t know the joy they are bringing to someone by assembling these products.

It’s not just Foxconn, it’s totally rampant.  It could be the #1 American export.  Automobile builders, apparel assemblers (shoes, shirts, jackets), farmers, everyone that makes something for someone else, they are all anonymized by a company name.  When people buy something, they say “Apple made this” or “Nissan built this.”  No, actually, people made these things.  We’ve forgotten that people do the work.  Take a look at some of the stuff around you.  People made those things for you.  Even if people didn’t make them, they maintained the machines that made them.

So, how to get this human connection back?  What if every automobile running through the assembly line had a “Thank You” card on it that each worker would sign as it went through their post?  What if an assembly worker would slip a note into each device they assembled stating “This was assembled by Dave Smith.  Let me know that you enjoy it at www.companyname.com/feedback/DaveSmith.”  You offer a chance for the worker to connect with the customer. 

And another thing happens as well.  You create accountability.  And it’s personal.  Can you imagine how people felt putting tags that say “Inspected by #11”?  That’s all I am, is a number.  If that’s all you are, who cares what quality of a job you do?  But putting your name to your work is incentive to do a good job.

Of course, maybe I’m wrong.  The current generation seems to have no problem posting stories of exceeding stupidity and embarrassment on Facebook, tying it directly to their names.  Maybe there is no value anymore to “having a good name.”  On the other end, maybe it’s completely impractical for a large company with massive turnover.  Then again, maybe there’s a reason for the massive turnover.  Hmmm. We can’t implement this idea because of the turnover cost, even though the idea might improve the retention rate.

Going Above and Beyond

Posted by on April 21, 2010 No comments

A couple of days ago I bought a piece of jewelry to extend a bracelet, since my wrist was between link sizes – one link either made the bracelet spin freely or cut off circulation.  So I purchased a small extender, $8 after shipping.  It arrived today.  This is what I bought:

DSC_1580

This is how it was packaged:

DSC_1579

Nice and fancy.  That kind of stuff is lost on me.  But that’s not the end of it.

DSC_1578

So, a bracelet link in a poly bag, in a mesh bag, in a poly bag, in a shipping box, wrapped in the shipping invoice, wrapped in tissue paper and shredded packing paper, in a plastic shipping envelope.

Now that’s how it’s done.  That’s http://chainextenders.com for everyone that insists in having their jewelry treated like gold – even if it’s not.

Epiphany

Posted by on April 10, 2010 No comments

There is an infographic I found a while ago that I found quite interesting.  At the time I found it, It was a “that’s neat” response.  Upon revisiting it and doing some critical thinking, I realize that it answers so much about the current political environment.  Some questions it explains:

  • Why can we never have world peace?
  • Why can we never be equals?
  • Why must some people be poor?
  • Why do those poor people typically vote for Democrats?
  • Why are rich, white people typically Republicans?
  • Why are we so screwed up right now?

The key, for me, is understanding the base motivations of Conservatives and Liberals.  It also made me realize how liberal I am, so consider this your warning.

For reference, the graphic is at: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/leftvright_world.html

Typically, when you hear pundits talk about right/left, red/blue, Republican/Democrat, they focus on stereotypes: Democrats want to raise taxes, Republicans want to start wars, Democrats want government to control your life, Republicans only care about the rich people.  No one ever talks about why these parties do this.

A simplistic view is that Liberals want everyone to get along and to be treated equally, while Conservatives want defined classes of people.  Why do Conservatives need classes of people?  Because their whole ideology is based on getting personally rewarded for your personal efforts – the harder you work, the more reward you get.  Sounds pretty good,  and I agree with it until I realize that this requires a winner and a loser.  Your success results in failure for others.  Their success results in failure for you.  So, successful people want to remain successful and keep others that would threaten their success as subordinate. “The rich get richer.” 

Why are they called Conservatives?  Because they resist change.  Things are fine just as they are, with us in control.  How far back do you have to go to see Conservatives resisting change because Conservatives were in power?  All the way back to the days of slavery.

So on the other side you have Liberals, who are always changing things in the interest of balancing power, making advancement possible for people who don’t have the resources available to richer people.  And Conservatives hate that.  First, because they didn’t get any help for their success, and second, because it gives them competition.

The other light bulb burning brightly from my study of this graphic is a key word applied to Conservatives: fear.  It is found in the relationship of parent to child.  Parents control their children through fear.  It’s been nearly 10 years that we have been besieged with a non-stop torrent of fear mongering from our Republican leaders.  When we finally received a break – in the message of “Hope” – the Republican message remained unchanged, but refocused.  Now instead of fearing an external enemy, we must fear our own government.  But only because the current president is a Democrat, once Republicans take over again, we can start worrying about the rest of the world.

So in summary, having Conservatives in charge means things will not change.  That’s great if you are a Conservative yourself and/or you are content with the way things are right now.  The problem with being Liberal is that your nature is to promote equality.  This tactic doesn’t work against a Conservative, who does not believe in equality and whose prime mission is to rise above and control others in order to succeed – little more than base, primal, instinct.

2012 can not come soon enough.

Driver Formula

Posted by on March 10, 2010 No comments

I think I’ve come up with a formula to determine the assholosity of any driver on a highway.  The formula is simply:

x*abs(y-z)

Where x is the number of lane changes per mile, y is the average speed of the driver, and z is the average speed of the rest of traffic.  Spoken, the formula is: the number of lane changes per mile multiplied by the deviation in speed from the flow of traffic equals the level of asshole on the road.

This formula is a great step forward in the field of Asshology, of which I consider myself an expert.