Who Is Worth Admiration?

The more of the blogs I read at HBR, the less I respect the institution.  A HBR blog post today by Tony Schwartz called “Are You a Role Model?” brought this to me again.  His overall post is about giving and personal sacrifice.   His underlying point is obfuscated by the two approaches he takes in the article.

The first part of the article is basically how he likes it when rich people agree with his tax policy preference.  He finds himself admiring them and impressed with them.  This is pretty shallow.  If we admire people because they agree with us, it is not because we truly find them worth of admiration, but we are admiring our own positions vicariously through them.  This isn’t admiration worth the name.  Instead it is mere intellectual narcissism.

The second part of the article is a list of people and professions he admires for their sacrifice.  There are several categories missing from his list (military, law enforcement, firefighters, etc.).  I do not believe Schwartz set out to make an exhaustive list of people he deems worthy of admiration.  But what is the common theme of who deserve admiration?  It is people who sacrifice to help the underprivileged, downtrodden, etc.  While that may be worth admiration, it is also too limiting.  Admiration belongs to all who do what it admirable (I won’t attempt an exhaustive list either).  People living their own lives the best they can is admirable.  To assert that sacrifice is required to be admired is abominable.  Schwartz does not explicitly limit admiration to this, however, his article seemed to me to strongly imply it.

“The idea that the service to God should have only to do with a church altar, singing, reading, sacrifice, and the like is without doubt but the worst trick of the devil. How could the devil have led us more effectively astray than by the narrow conception that service to God takes place only in a church and by the works done therein…The whole world could abound with the services to the Lord, Gottesdienste – not only in churches but also in the home, kitchen, workshop, field” -Martin Luther

Finally, Schwartz also makes an intellectual mistake common to left-wing politics.  He conflates giving and taxes.  Taxes are taken from people under pain of prison (for tax evasion) or confiscation of assets.  Giving the government your taxes is of no greater moral weight than paying your electric bill.  Demanding to be taxed more is the same morally as demanding to be charged more on your cell phone bill.  It is a way of avoiding making a harder decision to give more.  But a our debt crisis requires only the “rich” to sacrifice.  “What we need more of,” Schwartz asserts, is more people to give the government more money.  Not because it is objectively morally right, but because he believes it is what we need and is therefore moral for other people to do.

AOL Editions

AOL Editions is not the Flipboard killer that some on the Internet would have you believe. Mote importantly, it is even a lousy version of Zite. Editions looks to provide you a personalized magazine that is set to improve with your feedback. The problem is that it isn’t half as expansive or smart as Zite. It also doesn’t look half as good as Flipboard does.

For one Editions keeps wanting give you stories from the Huffington Post. This is no surprise given the recent acquisition of the HuffPo by AOL. However, the HuffPo’s political coverage is horribly narrow and the rest of their sections are at best mediocre. After about a week of use, Editions is not is as smart as Zite was after three days.

Editions also too slavishly tries to make it appear like a print magazine. It takes over a minute to generate the days issue. That means it doesn’t give you new articles throughout the day. Again, Zite and Flipboard win out here too.

Save your time and download Zite if you want a dynamic magazine or Flipboard if you want something with predictable sources and a sharp look.

AA+

So the Standard and Poors (S&P) ratings agency downgraded the US Treasury bill from AAA to AA+.  Based on some comment in the media and on the web, you would think that they are engaging in an economic attack on the United States.  Their downgrade may have the effect of hurting the US economy in some way, but that is to confuse the effect with the intent.  Or put another way, it would be blaming the gun while ignoring the gunman.

The job of a ratings agency is to quantify the risk inherent in a security (like bonds).  Measuring risk is an inexact science that we do surprisingly well as a society.  Insurance companies do it every time they write a policy.  The risk of debt is generally the likelihood that you will get paid the agreed sum (principle plus interest) at the agreed time (maturation date).

“But the US government can print money.  There is no way they will be unable to pay debt in US dollars.”  True, but again, people who claim this are missing half the story.  By printing money (or otherwise increasing the amount in circulation) the government would inflate the currency and thus decrease its value.  While the face value of the debt would be honored, you wouldn’t be able to get the same buying power with it.  In real terms (when inflation is adjusted for) the debt/bond holder would have lost money.

The downgrade may ultimately increase the interest rate treasury bills pay, thus increasing interest rates elsewhere in the economy.  However, as our debt mounts, the temptation to inflate away the problem will increase for our politicians.  A less than AAA rating reflects this increased risk.  Blaming S&P for the downgrade blames the gun.

The policy of Congress (the vast majority of it in every party) has been to spend money and pretend debt doesn’t matter.  The bond market and ratings agencies think it does.  Continued deficit spending is the economic equivalent of slowly squeezing the trigger.  Nothing drastic will happen until it does.  Then there will be a big mess to clean up and no way to unfire the bullet.

A Right to the Internet?

I have stumbled across several articles and blog posts recently that have declared there is a right to Internet access.  Most of this is complete crap.  Everyone does have a right to Internet access as much as they have a right to a soft drink or otherwise engage in any legitimate commerce.  The government nor anyone else can morally tell you that you do not have the right to purchase Internet access.  To the extent a government (e.g. Syria, China) curtails your access to information via the Internet, they are infringing upon your rights.

This, however, is not what people are really talking about in the US context.  When people use the phrase, “a right to the Internet” in the United States.  What they really mean is that they should not have to pay for the strain they put on the network.  Americans have the right to legally purchase access to the Internet, but when they use more than what they purchased and are cut off, they complain.  Mobile telecommunications companies charge for data plans that are good for so much data a pay cycle (e.g. 500 MB per month).  The idea is that you will watch your data usage  and keep it low and thus minimize the strain you place on their network.  The hope is that everyone will not try to download their entire quota the same time as everyone else. Terrestrial telecommunications firms generally charge for a data rate (e.g. 15 Mbps) and care little for how much you download in a pay period.  However, most firms have a upper limit on the total downloaded data.

That upper limit is what causes the headaches.  This limit is usually ridiculously high.  The average user even with streaming movies does rarely comes close to this limit.  You would have to be using the full bandwidth constantly for a sad amount of time.  This limit prevents people from clogging up residential lines with high volumes of business traffic or illegally distributing software and other digital media.  In short the only people who get caught in this are people who have the wrong plan at worst (get a business account) or subverting the intellectual property laws at worst.  These people get no sympathy for their indignant rantings from me.

In the end what people who want the more Internet access than their current plan provides are lobbing for is for the rest of us to pay for their desire.  They are putting increased strain on the network, which will require either an upgrade to the network infrastructure or a lower quality of service overall.  Either way everyone else will pay for it in the form of higher rates or a lesser product than what they currently get.

(Those without any Internet access in their home should check out their local public library.  They are really neat institutions.)

Cities and Style

Cities are often seen as centers of style.  And the larger the city the more style and arts seem to be important.  Like all generalizations, this is not 100% true, but is generally true enough to make it useful.  But why is this the case?  After visiting Times Square in New York City and Union Square in San Francisco the answer almost screamed out at me.  It is a bit of city culture (trying to stand out just enough in the mass of people) and a whole lot of economics.  The Macy’s at Union Square is nine floors of mostly clothing.  Shoes dominate one of the substantial floors and the men’s section is in a different building.  You don’t see this even in decent size cities because there isn’t the support for it.  It appears that you have to have a large enough community so that enough of them want and can afford those products in order to make it profitable.

Take a well known, upscale brand and try to find their products in suburban areas.  Even in suburbs that don’t lack for affluence, you’ll have a tough time finding all their products available.   There simply isn’t enough demand to justify the cost.  But here is where the internet changes things.  You can find nearly everything for sale on the internet.  The internet enlarges the local community from your town to the “global village.”  While not everyone will ship all over the globe, spreading out the warehousing and storefront cost across the entire nation makes these, once hard to find items available.

You Can’t Change People

I recently had the opportunity to attend a regional assembly meeting of a large national organization. Among the items considered where various resolutions expressing support for this or that cause. This organization is not unusual in doing that. When I was a member of my university’s student senate, we considered a bill to boycott a state producer of vegetables to our school because of the way they allegedly treated their workers.

Advocacy is not a bad thing. However, when people seek to expend energy on merely expressing their self righteous indignation it results in a sad and wasteful display. It appears that a simple truth escapes these pseudo legislators (and all too often our elected officials).

You cannot change a person; you can only educate them.

No matter how much you might want someone to change, you cannot make them without their consent. Your significant other is no different. They have to want to change, and all you can do is inform them on how doing so will make their lives better than it would be otherwise. In severe cases that may be informing them that a divorce is the alternative to change.
You cannot make your boss give you a raise. You can demonstrate your worthiness by operating at a level deserving of a raise (thus educating him on your “true” value).

People who try to change society by fiat will always fail. Empires have been squandered by monarchs who have tried. The only way to change society is to do so one person at a time. Education of that one person is a lot harder than issuing a declaration. That is why so few people actually do it.

Video Games and Apparent Productivity

I have come to notice that some of the same things that makes people good at video games also make the games problematic. The good news is that those same behaviors can fix the problem when applied.

The first is dedication. The more you do something the better you get at it. The problem is that spending more time in a video game keeps developing a skill that has no marketable value and enriches your life the same way that watching hours upon hours of television does. Applying the same dedication towards another goal will reallocate that time and funnel that energy towards a (we hope) worthwhile endeavor.

Successful gamers also have a tendency to set goals and work toward achieving them. This often means enduring some sort of real or virtual hardship, which is likely a real psychological hardship. The issue is that the objectives obtained in video games is ephemeral and does not further develop other skills that help them outside of that game.

The immediate response is that they do it for fun. While there is some merit in that, it is without a sense of proportion. How much fun do they derive for the time invested? Was there something that is more worthwhile or even more fun they could have done with that time?

Nearly Ten Years On

For the uninformed history starts at the day you were born (or when you entered high school). The recent successful operation by S.E.A.L. Team Six deep in Pakistan has illustrated this for us again.

There were a number of teenagers who searched Yahoo! to find out why killing UBL was such a big deal (link).

There are always big events that happen during our lives that we do not know about because we were too young or we were not paying attention. The first is not our fault. It is something we come to correct with age, or failing to do so makes us take the fault–remember December 7th? If we were not paying attention then we are usually to blame. Some events happen in obscurity and then become big only after they matured over time. But when we miss world changing, paradigm breaking events, it is our own fault and we do it at our own peril.

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iPad Game For Cats

While I have never really used my iPad for games. However, my cat can make no such claim. I have discovered the iPad Game for Cats. This is absolutely hilarious. This game has two levels. The first is a mostly black screen with a red dot that moves somewhat randomly around the screen. It essentially replicates a laser pointer and keeps my cat entertained. However, not nearly as much as the other level does.

The other level is yellow with occasional “holes” over which a small mouse runs around. Every time I start this up, it immediately garners my cats attention and she starts trying to pounce on the mouse. When she’s successful a satisfying squeak is produced by the game. What’s more is this game keeps score and you can “brag” about your cat on Facebook and Twitter.

So you can go out and buy an iPad and turn it into a $500 cat toy. Or do what I did and make your personal $500 toy usable by your cat for a few bucks. It is about the same price as many other cat toys and is as much fun for me to watch as it is for my cat to play.

Facebook Punditry

Everyone has that friend on Facebook who constantly posts links to news articles with their own comments attached. Most people do this to some degree, and it definitely is better than the person who updates his status every time he uses the restroom. However, I’m talking about the person who feels their opinion is necessary on every half-reported article with no attempt to find out the whole story with such enlightening cComments like, “I wish someone would shut so-and-so up.”

Facebook is not the place for this. The reasons are simple. Most of your friends don’t care. Of the few who do, some don’t agree and most don’t want to get in a debate on Facebook over it. Also, most of the attached statements are in the theme of “aren’t we (me and those who think like I do) just so much smarter than that idiot.” The answer is generally, “no.” People who are smarter aren’t making themselves look like fools on Facebook and don’t presume everyone agrees with them.

This does not mean that comments on articles are bad. It does mean that you have to actually engage your intellect prior to hitting post. That may mean you will be posting significantly less. I suspect some reading this are taking exception to my comments. That is just fine. I’ll take you off my Facebook feed. The sad thing is, your kids are more interesting than you are.

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