Category: Misc

Thoughts On Embracing Failure

Everyday-Freethought / / Mindset/Execution, Misc

I think I realized part of the reason I don’t get too much stuff done during the weekends. I think I am afraid of failure.

I try to learn new software skills on my free time (because I frankly hate my job). Everybody says practice makes perfect. But when I get a lot of stack traces and error messages it is hard to believe that I am making progress.

Especially when I realize I am making a mistake that I should not have made. Today I tried to use a closure to iterate through a map in Groovy, but instead of typing “mymap.each” before the closure, I typed “mymap”, and for several minutes I could not figure out why it was not working.

I know we should all be open to learning, but my employer does not pay me to learn. They pay me to get stuff done, and frankly that frequently takes me longer than it should.

Image from Wikipedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use.

Language: The word “diet”

Everyday-Freethought / / Fitness, Misc

I want to look at how people use the word “diet”.

When I was younger, people would use the word “diet” to refer to something temporary. The word was mostly used as a noun. They would “go on a diet”, usually before some event, such as a wedding or a reunion. The main idea was to reduce the amount they ate, or to radically change what they ate. This would be done temporarily. After the big event and they impressed their old friends, people would go back to their old patterns of eating behavior.

Today we call this behavior a “fad diet”: A short-term change or reduction. This is why some people say “diets don’t work; you just go back to your old way of doing things.” Many of the screenshots on the fatlogic subreddit are from people in the fat acceptance/health at every size movements who use the word “diet” in this way.

The word “diet” was used to refer to the short-term change. But the normal, regular eating habits and patterns were never given a label.

If you talk to a biologist who studies another species, they will talk about the diet of that species. The biologist uses it to mean that species’ patterns of eating behavior: what they eat, when they eay, in some cases where and/or how they eat. They do not use the word “diet” to refer to a temporary change or restriction.

Over the past decade, people’s use of the word has been changing. More and more people are starting to use it in the second sense of the word. People talk about “low carb diets”, or “the paleo diet”, or the “Mediterranean diet”. I read and hear people talk about changing their diet, not “going on a diet”.

Now, people use the word “diet” to refer to their normal, common, consistent eating behaviors.

This is a good change. The fact is, everybody is always “on a diet”. Even Elvis was on a diet. It seemed to be fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches, with lots and lots of pills. It was a terrible diet, but it was still a diet.

Maybe this is why many of the people in the screenshots on fatlogic can’t lost weight, and why they think “diets don’t work.” They are using the word to refer to something temporary, something that will get them towards some distant goal, and once they reach that goal, they will go of the “diet”. Stop using the definite and indefinite articles when using the word “diet”. Use pronouns. Do not go on “a diet”. Think about “your diet”.

As I get older, I am finding out that intense exercise is not as helpful to keeping in good shape and preventing myself from getting fat as it used to be. Now I need to pay attention to my diet.

I don’t need to go on a diet. But I do need to change my diet.

Image from My World, assumed allowed under Fair Use.

Language: Big Words

Everyday-Freethought / / Fitness, Misc

As someone with a degree in exercise physiology, spends more time than I should in the bowels of Reddit and Craig’s Lust, and a guy who tries in general to pay attention, I have noticed a few things about the use of language by some of the larger members of our society.

It is interesting that a lot of fat people like to say they have “a lot of meat on my bones”. You might have some meat, but frankly you also have a lot of fat on your bones, and that’s the turn-off.

Fit women never call themselves “curvy”, yet they themselves are not rectangular.

A lot of fat women describe themselves as “sassy”, and say they are a “queen” or a “goddess”. I don’t hear these words from fit women.

Fat people think they are “normal”, and everybody smaller than they are is “skinny”, as if being “skinny” is some sort of condition. Thin people seem to describe themselves as “thin”. As far as fat people calling themselves “normal”, it implies that fit people are abnormal. Then again, maybe few fat people have friends that exercise.

Usually when a woman calls herself or another woman “a real woman”, it is someone who is fat. Has any women pointed to a women who runs marathons and called those women “real women”?

Another observation: How can you tell if you are fat? Here is a little test. If you have no problems saying you would not date a fat person, but you get upset if you hear a fit person say they would not date a fat person, then you are fat.

Image from University Of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, assumed allowed under Fair Use.

Amazon Prime

Everyday-Freethought / / Misc, Star Trek

I finally got a trial for Amazon Prime.

I did it so I could watch the rest of Star Trek that I had not seen.

I had gotten through most of the fifth seasons of Deep Space Nine and Voyager while there were episodes on the Star Trek site. For the past six months or so, they had only 11 episodes of Voyager. A couple of them were sixth season, so I skipped ahead to get my fix.

Then a few months ago, the put up 10 episodes of The Original Series. This past week, I was on You Tube, and I found a channel that was putting up full episodes of Enterprise. The only problem was part of the image was cut-off. So after a little hemming and hawing and searching, I signed up for the 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime. I hope that the free trial is really free, and that all the videos on Amazon Prime are included in the price. Otherwise I will be paying Amazon a lot of money in a couple of months.

(Sidebar: “Amazon Prime” sounds like it could be the title of an episode from almost any one of the series. Except perhaps The Next Generation; they seemed to prefer one word titles.)

So this has been eating up my weekend. I watched the four episodes of Enterprise that were never on the Star Trek site, as well as a few episodes of Deep Space Nine and Voyager from earlier seasons that were never on the site. I promised to give a presentation to a local technology group on Wednesday. I was planning to get it done this weekend, but I will have to whip it up on Monday. I also thought I would listen to a conference call for ADM this weekend.

Perhaps I will see Firefly, or Battlestar Galactica, or other stuff. Who knows? I have to watch it on my Windows laptop. For some reason the videos don’t load on my Linux laptop. I have no idea why videos on Amazon won’t load but videos on the Star Trek site will. I have never owned a television, which many people found surprising. One person told me I was the only person they knew without one. Now computers and televisions are merging.

Two of the Enterprise episodes that were never on the Star Trek site were parts 1 and 2 of “In a Mirror Darkly”. I can hear T’Pol’s voice saying, “Perhaps if Ms. Blalock had long hair in every episode, Enterprise would have been more successful.”

I also watched a couple of my favorite Enterprise episodes. “Future Tense” is still my favorite Star Trek episode ever, but I do have to make one quibble: If they assembled the warhead outside the launch bay, they could have made it work.

Two of the Enterprise episodes that were never on the Star Trek site were parts 1 and 2 of “In a Mirror Darkly”. I can hear T’Pol’s voice saying, “Perhaps if Ms. Blalock had long hair in every episode, Enterprise would have been more successful.”

I also watched a couple of my favorite Enterprise episodes. “Future Tense” is still my favorite Star Trek episode ever, but I do have to make one quibble: If they assembled the warhead outside the launch bay, they could have made it work.

Image from Memory Alpha, copyright owned by CBS, assumed allowed under Fair Use. If you watch “Future Tense”, you will understand why the last two paragraphs were repeated. This website is dangerous to you. dflhas@089f0’Pauj_ph Temporal radiation.

Language: Thoughts On The Word Public

Everyday-Freethought / / Misc, Politics, Religion

I am a regular listener of Freethought Radio, which is produced by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. One of their activities is to prevent or stop government endorsement or support of religion.

When they talk about this, they will sometimes use the word “public” to describe the activities in question.

Usually it is something like prayer at city council meetings, or a city or county giving money to a church. They will describe it as “public support” or “public endorsement” of religion. This is the same use of the word “public” that we use when we say that the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a “public” university.

Many of the opponents of the FFRF will use the word “public” differently when they attack the FFRF. They say that the FFRF wants to eliminate “public expression” of religion, or they want to “take religion out of the public square”. Here, I think the word “public” has a slightly different meaning. Here “public” means being a part of society, and does not refer to government support. Sort of like when parents tell their children to behave in public.

I wonder whether some critics of the FFRF are intentionally misleading people by this use of the word “public”. The FFRF does not have a problem with the “public expression” of religion, or of religion being in the public square. There are a lot of billboards put up by churches and religious organizations, and the FFRF does not try to have them taken down. The FFRF does put up its own billboards as well. They have no problem with religion existing in society. They simply do not think it should be supported by our government. And for the most part the courts agree with the FFRF.

The word “public” can also be a bit confusing in the business world. The “public sector” refers to the government. Many people in this country work for various levels of government, and are said to work in the “public sector”.

However, a “public company” is a company that is not owned by the government. It is owned by people and institutions in the private sector, but it is called a “public company” because shares of ownership in that company are sold on stock exchanges. A “private company” is a company whose ownership is not traded on an exchange. So a company in the private sector can go public, trade for years on an exchange, and then go private, staying in the private sector the entire time.

There are some government entities in the United States that do own shares in public companies. These tend to be the retirement funds for workers in the public sector, usually at the state, county or city level. Many people in the US do not like the idea of governments owning a company, yet public retirement funds is not considered a problem. These funds are generally given some independence from the governments whose workers’ money they are managing. Some of these funds (such as CalPERS) have been activist shareholders, but their goals are no different than other activist shareholders. Some retirement funds invest largely in index funds. But these retirement funds never get a majority stake in companies. At least not in the US.

Image from Wikipedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use.

Nobody Seems To Care About Apple Owning The World

Everyday-Freethought / / Misc

Back about 10 or fifteen years ago, many people in technology pushed open source because they distrusted Microsoft. There were other reasons, but it seemed to me that was a major motivation. When the world runs on software, the idea of one company having oversized influence on the software industry scared people.

Now, I go to technology meetups, and I am usually the only one using a non-Apple laptop. Yet everyone thinks they are edgy, cool and an independent thinker simply because they use Apple products. Sometimes I am reminded of that scene in Life Of Brian: Yes, we’re all individuals.

As Microsoft got bigger and more powerful, people fear and hated them more, and trusted them less. As Apple gets bigger and bigger, people seem to love them more. Yes, their products look better. But does “shiny object” really change everyone’s opinions on things? Is it really enough to remove objections about market power? It seems to.

I once saw Jim Cramer on Mad Money rave about what a great company Apple is. He mentioned they had changed the music industry through iTunes and the phone industry with the iPhone, in addition to influencing their original lines of business. He pointed out they displaced a lot of companies (and a lot of jobs) in those industries.

Now there is an Apple watch. The co-inventor of the Swatch thinks the Apple watch could displace a lot of people in the Swiss watch industry. Now there are rumors that Apple might make a car (but some people don’t think they can pull it off).

Am I the only one who sees a problem with this? Sure, the free market is great. Yes, things change. Yes, there is creative destruction, and people find new work. But we are talking about one company doing a lot of displacement in multiple industries. If a web site forced you to use IE years ago, people complained. If a service is only available on iPhone, nobody seems to complain. Unless they are mistreating Chinese workers, people seem okay with Apple eating the world.

I really don’t get it. People seem to want Apple to get bigger. I went to a meetup with the Austin Internet of Things group, and a few people expressed concern about what Google and Nest are doing with peoples’ information. Yet I rarely hear about this concern with Apple.

Am I the only one who thinks the standards have changed? Am I the only one who thinks it might be a bad thing if one company changes one industry after another?

A gilded cage is still a cage.

Image from the 19th century, assumed allowed under Fair Use.

Thoughts On Synchronicity and Conservative Logic

Everyday-Freethought / / Misc, Politics

I know many say the concept of synchronicity is BS, but I did notice an interesting sring of coincidences over the past couple of weeks.

Paul Krugman wrote a piece about Stephen Moore, a right-wing hack. He pointed out that a lot of these conservative hacks keep making predictions that are not true. Yet they never seem to suffer any negative consequences for constantly being wrong. The basic thrust of the piece is questioning why these “pundits” are not forced to find other work.

One of the commenters wrote something that explains it:

Ah but they’re not “predictions.” They’re simply statements about the world works couched in predictive language. You’ve got to remember, these people are deductive not inductive reasoners. They don’t build a model from observations and refine the model to reflect new observations. They know what they know and that’s that. Everything follows from first principles. You don’t *need* to make predictions if you have faith. After all, what’s a better demonstration of “faith” then believing something when all evidence points against it?

I supposed we could see if it’s turtles all the way down, and ask why they think that way. But it does seem to answer the immediate question.

Then there was a post on the Meditation subreddit in which the poster noted that of all the religions, the Buddhists seem to get more things right than everybody else, and asked why that is. Again, there was an interesting comment:

Generally I could say though that one camp is “sky religions”, prophetic.. and the other is “earth religions”, born out of observation and contemplation instead of prophecy. If you make conclusions based on observations you have a good chance of being right..

Then on March 7, CFI Austin had an event with Ryan Bell, a Seventh-day Adventist preacher who decided to go “a year without god,” and then decided to make it permanent (his website is here). He said becoming an atheist was a long process for him. A big part of it was that he had a hard time believing that people who believed differently than he did would go to hell, even if they were moral people.  He felt that way about people in other denominations, other religions, no religion, gay people. He could not accept that someone who treats others well will go to hell simply because they have the “wrong” belief.

At one point he made an observation about conservative Christians and liberal Christians.  Conservative Christians see the Bible as inviolable, revealed text, and that the world must be shaped around that. Liberal Christians look at how the world is, and try to interpret the Bible to conform to what they see.

If I had to choose one of his categories of Christianity, I would go with the liberal camp. But I think (and he seemed to agree) that eventually you keep interpreting the Bible so much that there is nothing left.

I also read a couple of articles recently that kind of hit upon this with regard to taxes. Minnesota increased taxes on the wealthy and increased the minimum wage, and things are going pretty well there. A column in Bloomberg pointed out that California is also doing pretty well since Jerry Brown raised taxes on the wealthy. I am sure that taxes can go too high, but a lot of conservatives always seem to think that raising taxes is always bad and cutting taxes is always good. Minnesota and California have not reached the breaking point. Cutting taxes has not worked out too well in Kansas (see here, here, here). And Scott Walker has not gotten the job creation he said he would either. Conservatives usually want to move everything to the right. The Laffer Curve is the only thing they want to move to the left.

The article on Minnesota was in HuffPo. The commenters there generally acknowledged reality. There was a bit more conservative distortion on the Bloomberg site. Some of the people there basically espoused the right-wing doctrine: If Plan A does not work, keep trying Plan A.

I would like to live in a world without tax. But I like having roads, being surrounded by educated people, and have some confidence that food at the grocery store has a good chance of not killing me. It would be nice to get all that for free, but just because I want it all for free does not mean I can get it for free. You can try to look at the world as it is and then try to make your way within that, or you can only think about what you want and then spend your life complaining about the price.

Image from source unknown, assumed allowed under Fair Use. I wanted an image of people synchronizing watches, and I found one of George Harrison. How cool is that?

Update On Moving Accounts

Everyday-Freethought / / Misc

I made some more progress on moving accounts and leaving JPMorgan Chase (see previous posts here, here and here).

I got an account with a credit union. The point is to get a credit card through them, and get rid of my credit cards with Chase. The credit union only has branches in Texas, but if I move I can still do online banking.

I opened the account via video conference. Someone led me into an office, and I spoke to someone in San Antonio. I filled out all the forms and scanned in my ID. I was able to join because I work for a company that has an affiliation with them.

They do offer a credit card that gives cash back. The teller told me that if I don’t redeem the cash, they automatically put it in my account once a year.

I was thinking about getting a credit card that is affiliated with the broker who holds my IRA accounts. I could get cash back and have it go into my IRA. But I did some digging, and I found out they are owned by Bank Of America. That would put me right back with a big bank.

Plus, I worked for Bank Of America for about nine years. I would say things did not end well. When the big financial crisis happened, they lost billions of dollars, and they made some of it up by canning me and a few thousand other people. I got a severance of a few months. I do not know anyone who made the headlines, but there was a bozo a few levels up who was able to negotiate a severance. Even though lots of us got the axe plain and simple. This guy was supposed to oversee three groups. I found out through the grapevine that all three of us thought we were being ignored because he was focusing on the other two. So what was he doing that whole time?

I honestly think once you make about $300,000 or so a year, you get to skate from one job to another without any penalty no matter how badly you do.

Image from Wikipedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use, linked on the page for theft.

This site has a disclaimer.

Language: Taking Responsibility

Everyday-Freethought / / Misc

I used to listen to Loveline with Dr Drew, when Adam Carolla was on it.

Sometimes Dr Drew would tell people they need to “take responsibility” for their life. Sometimes people would object to that, especially if they were dealing with mistreatment from significant others or their parents.

I think that these people would object because they thought that Dr Drew was telling them to admit guilt or accept blame for the bad things that happened to them, or admit that they deserved it, or wanted their lives to be in bad shape.

I think instead of telling people to “take responsibility”, it would be better to tell people to take control of their life.

If someone mistreated you, then you cannot expect them to try to make things right. If they wanted what was best for you, they never would have mistreated you in the first place. It is not fair that you have to clean up someone else’s mess, but sometimes that is the way things are.

Image from Wikimedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use.

 

Thoughts On New York

Everyday-Freethought / / Misc

This past Christmas I went out to New York to see my brother and his family. The live on Long Island. Two boroughs of NYC are on Long Island, but when people in the NY Metro area say “Long Island”, they mean the parts of LI that are not NYC.

He is very religious, a Roman Catholic, and we don’t always get along. (He is also a libertarian; how you can be both is frankly beyond me.)

We were not raised religious. Our parents are from Irish Catholic families. My mother went to Catholic school all the way through college. She went to Dominican University in River Forest. At the time it was called Rosary College. They had all three of us baptized, but they stopped going to church before I was born.

He has tried to convert all of us. He even tried to convert our mother, even though she has heard it all before. I don’t understand why religious people can’t get it in their heads that if something was not convincing the first 500 times, I won’t be convinced the 501st time.

Sometimes our phone conversations would degenerate into shouting matches. At one point I decided to limit them to five minutes. That worked a few times. Then once I hit the five minute mark, and I thought that things were going well so I would continue. Then it went south.

He and his wife have two kids. I did not go to the baptisms. I am not going a thousand miles out of my way to go to a church. But I can’t put this off forever, so in late November I called him up and asked if he was open to the idea of a visit. He said he was, so I went.

I drove out there just before the 24th, and I came back starting on the 28th. I really do not like flying. I finally got to Maryland, but only for 12 miles along Interstate 81. So I have now been in all states east of the Mississippi River outside of New England except Delaware. My mother thought I should fly because she was worried a long drive would be a lot of wear and tear on my car.

It was a lot of wear and tear on my car, but it was all in New York City and on Long Island. The roads are in really bad shape; they are very bumpy, there are a lot of potholes, and manhole covers don’t make for smooth driving either. I thought that roads in parts of Illinois were bad. It hurts my back just thinking about it. I know there is a high population density, but they really need to fix their roads. People in the rest of the country wonder why New Yorkers seem so rude. Probably because their brains are getting scrambled every time they drive. Yes, it would be difficult to change things. But in all seriousness, I cannot understand why they don’t do something about it.

On top of that, Long Island roads are not in a grid. It’s like they were planned out by a blind man with no arms. On the way there I got off of one expressway onto another, and I went around 180 degrees, and the street names for the exit were the same but in reverse order. So they seem to have two expressways that cover the same territory. I just want to get from Point A to Point B. If I want scenic, I will walk. I don’t like a layout that forces me to think about things I should not have to think about.

My brother got married on Long Island. Our family came in from all over. Just about all of her family was from there and living there. Long Island seems like a black hole. People go there, or they are born there, and they never leave. My sister-in-law went to college in upstate New York, and that was a big deal. At one point I overheard a women go on about how blessed they were to live on Long Island, in New York and near the ocean. First off: If you like the ocean, fine. Don’t complain the next time there is a hurricane. Secondly: I was a bit irritated that I drove over a thousand miles and I hear the same mentality I hear all the time in Texas.

I also had to pay four tolls for New York City. One to get in and one to get out each way. It would be nice if there was a way to go from the mainland to Long Island without paying a fee. I know Bloomberg did it to end congestion, but if you are just passing through are you really adding to the congestion as much as people who are going to stop in the city?

I made a comment to my brother that people seemed to wait a long time at red lights. A lot longer they need to. I thought that New Yorkers did not seem as intense as their reputation. My brother agreed. He has been told by new Yorkers that he is abrasive and that he talks quickly.

My brother named his son after our great-great grandfather. I knew that our great grandfather had been born in Ireland. I thought that he came over as a young child with his parents, but apparently he only came over with his mother. His father died in Ireland. His daughter is named after our great grandmother. She was born in Ireland and came over with her parents when she was young. She died when we were young.

My nephew is the spit-up king. Fear him.

For the most part there was not a lot of religion. My sister-in-law told me that my brother discourages their daughter from using her left hand for things. Most of our ancestors were from Ireland. Some were from the Scottish Highlands. At one point my brother said he hoped that our Scottish ancestors were not Presbyterian. I don’t know if they were, and there is not much we could do about it if they did.

I did tell them about dividend growth stocks. When I was an indexer, I sent him some books (a few mentioned here). But when I explained the concept of dividend growth investing. It’s like compound interest with an increasing interest rate. He seemed interested. I will see if I can find a few good books to send him. I might send him some links to a few good sites.

Climate change data point: I drove from Chicago to Long Island in 2007 for my brother’s wedding. There was a lot of snow in Pennsylvania on the way back. I took a different route this time, but there was no snow at all.

I might go again in July for the first birthday of The Spit Up King.

Image from Wikipedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use.