Tuesday, October 30, 2012

I Don't Want To Live In....

...A housing association.  Where people are paid to come around so that they can tell you how you have to have your house look, and will fine you (with authority to put a lien on your house) if you don't comply.  If I want to paint my house purple and put out an art installation featuring three urinals I think I should be able to do so.  it is my house.

...A place with a neighborhood watch program.  Look, I have no problem with neighbors looking out for each other to stop crime, I've done it myself.  But I find it creepy that people would get together and roam the streets of their neighborhood looking for crime.  For a start it demonstrates an attitude that is rooted in fear.  Secondly it encourages people to go around, spy on their neighbors and disapprove of people.  You should be able to be a young man in a hoodie walking around someone else's neighborhood without being subject to organized suspicion.

...A gated community.  A place that inherently thinks it is better than the surrounding areas and so frightened of it that it puts up walls to exclude the rest of humanity from contact with them.  This is one of the problems today, wealthy people live lives entirely removed from the experiences of most people and yet have enormous power to affect the experiences of poor people.  A community based on arrogance, superiority, ignorance, disgust and fear.

...A housing estate/project.  This is an area in which all the people poor enough to be unable to pay for housing are concentrated.  Again separating out segments of society.  If you want to produce a group of people without hope, education, prospects of advancement and prone to crime, pack them all together and away from everyone else.  These places are gardens of misery, and I don't want to live in misery.

...Alabama.

Anxiety Released

For the last couple of years, like many people, I have had anxiety about money.  I am in a situation in which I have the great fortune to not work, and so our income is based on the work of my wife.  This means that if she loses her job we would have no income.  No income means that we would not be able to pay our mortgage and so would have to very rapidly sell our house.  The housing market has been extremely depressed and our house has many problems.  To successfully sell the house at a level that would not dramatically reduce the amount of money we would have we would have to put many thousands of dollars into it (water heater, furnace, electrical work, painting the whole house, etc..) 

While we have tried to save money over this time we have largely been unsuccessful because of problems with the house and our belongings.  We have had to get pool equipment fixed so that we don't have an algae filled pond in our back yard.  We have had to replace all the pipes in our house, get electrical work done, electrical work, and we just spent several thousand dollars on our cars (cheaper than buying).  It is part of my job to organize finances and work on the house.  My darling wife's entire job is to go to work.  It works well for us.

My darling wife works for a Spanish energy company linked to the Spanish government.  You may have heard of the desperate straits of the Spanish economy and government.  The company is in trouble.  Five years ago it was borrowing money to expand its holdings across the world.  With the economic crash it is having huge difficulty paying the bills.  Under these circumstances I was worried that my darling wife would be laid-off, creating the situation described in the first paragraph.  As the number of employees dwindled and the news worsened my worries increased.  My wife seemed relatively serene about the situation and the difference seemed strange.  Like most of us she hates looking for a job, and she didn't have the desperation I was expecting with an impending job loss.  I tried hard not to needle, poke, cajole and beg.

About two weeks ago my anxiety was hugely reduced for two reasons.  The first is that apparently the loan money used to buy the company for which my wife had worked had guarantees attached.  That is that if the company is closed down there is a payment necessary of hundreds of millions of some currency.  The parent company cannot afford it.  So, the company cannot afford to close down the company for which my wife works.  The company is "underwater" and intimately connected to the Spanish government.  It is too big to fail.  She is the only person in the company who does her job.  There is a hiring freeze and she makes less than average for such a position.  Essentially she cannot be laid-off.  Her job is about as secure as a job can be in this economic climate.  I did not know this.

The second reason is based on our retirement investments.  The method we are using to make investments for retirement is two fold.  We want to reduce our living expenses primary by increasing the amount of equity we have in our housing.  Ideally we would pick one house to live in for a long time and remove the mortgage.  Our costs would be utilities and property tax.  Secondarily we have what I call a "fire and forget" system.  In this system we take the maximum 401K money and just put it away.  Neither of us ever see it leave a paycheck, and I generally don't look at the reports.  We are putting money in and I don't know much about it other than we trust our financial investor and we are putting a big chunk away.  Otherwise we have an automatic payment taken from paychecks and put in an account.  Not knowing means that you don't count on it, and that strongly encourages financial discipline.  All I know is that we are putting a very good chunk of money away that I will look at in something like twenty years.  I don't know about investing other than over decades the stock market goes up a lot.  I found out two weeks ago that some of our investments are in a form that we can take out as cash with minimum penalty.  This is a large enough amount of money to solve the problems of fixing up the house if suddenly necessary.  I did not know this.

Of course, my wife knew both of these things, and I suppose I probably should have known about the second.  However, my fire and forget policy means that I try quite hard to keep us within our means.  I despise and worry about credit card debt enough to do whatever I can to pay the entire amount off each month, and it quietly eats away at me if I don't manage it.  I think of credit card debt as time that must be spent working for no reward.  Indentured servitude.  I don't want me wife to be an indentured servant.  The situation with the company I simply didn't know.  Do you ever have times where you could have sworn you told someone something but they have no idea what they are talking about?  That's what happened here.

This news reduced my anxiety.  We are not in danger of having no income, having to sell the house immediately for a huge loss, and joining the ranks of those searching for work.  We are financially safe.

I am sure that many of you reading this would consider this anxiety petty and foolish.  Even the worst case scenario here is much better than most people in the USA, and certainly better than the vast majority of people in the world.  I was worried about how many tens of thousands we would have.  Fifteen years ago I would have leaped at the chance to be in this situation, I expected to never be in this sort of financial security.  But this is my life and people adjust themselves to their new reality.  If you move from an apartment to a house, moving back to an apartment sounds terrible.  If you can regularly drink Starbucks, Folger's Crystals sounds terrible.

I know my anxiety was ridiculous, I knew it all along, but I still feel a lot better for its removal.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Training Politicians

It is relatively simple to train things.  When they do something you want them to do you give them some reward.  When you don't want something you withhold that reward.  Repeat.

Either you know about the US presidential campaigns, or you don't care.  In the first case there are plenty of places to go to get detailed analysis and news elsewhere of a higher standard than I could provide.  In the second case you just don't want to read about it.  So this isn't a rant about the campaign, or a partisan attack on one of the candidates, or a look at any promise or plan.  This is more about the electorate.

There have been two presidential debates in which almost universal opinion has Romney winning the first debate and Obama the second one.  The reasons on both occasions for the victory has been described openly as body language (active, fired-up, aggressive), basically the winner of the debate was the guy that looked the most like an alpha male, the primitive concept of a tribal leader.

However, there has also been another difference that has been rarely mentioned.  In the first debate Romney flat out lied.  Liar, liar pants on fire.  Obama wasn't a shining example of truthfulness himself.  Here's an independent fact check on that debate.  In the second debate there was a drop in dishonest claims overall.  Obama was the less truthful, (as long as you consider changing a policy position as not being dishonest) although Romney was no beacon of purity.

OK, so politicians trying to get elected lied.  This isn't news, right?  I agree, it isn't news.  What for me is illustrative is that the politician who lied the most won in popular opinion.  This illustrates that lying works, it helps to get you elected.  If you tell the truth, particularly when it is uncomfortable to your position, there is no reward (polls don't go up) but when you lie to make you sound better you are rewarded.  If you go back to the first paragraph of this post you can see what the consequences of this are, the electorate are training politicians to lie, as long as they do it in a forceful, confident manner.  Not only is the electorate training politicians to lie, but training them to be good liars.

There is a vast amount of despair about special interest groups and their money controlling government and there's more than a little to that.  But the reason that we have the government we have is that the electorate elects them.  It would seem to me a decent start to punish liars rather than reward them.  It is trivially easy in this day and age to find out who is lying.  There is an independent organization dedicated to this very task.  Why doesn't it seem to matter?

In a democracy you get the government you deserve. 


Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Hope Dashed

In my last post I talked about how much I wanted to move to Austin and why.  Yesterday we were informed that Christina would not even get an interview as the company decided to go with younger, local, less qualified people because it would cost less.  Christina didn't get an interview because she was qualified to do the job, and therefore would cost more money.

It's a bad day in this Binmore household.  Christina stayed home today after waking up and crying in the shower (I am on this, don't worry) and is upstairs playing a video game appropriately called, "Oblivion."  It is harder for Christina than myself.  I have more emotional resources because I don't have to go to a place I hate every weekday, Christina holds things in more than I do (that's how she keeps jobs when I get laid-off) and so problems tend to come out suddenly and painfully.  For me it is pretty much another disappointment, nothing particularly new.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

I Hope We Move To Austin, Texas

A little while ago I was hopeful about something, and even though I knew intellectually that it wouldn't make any difference I didn't tell people about it for fear of "jinxing" it.  It didn't work out.  My darling wife's old boss, who had brought us down into this mess in the first place, had got a new job in Dallas.  She said she was going to get Christina out of her present job and into one in Dallas.  The job was going to be something that Christina was very interested in, and if nothing else it would be almost impossible to have a worse working environment.
Dallas?  For those who know us the idea of us being happy in Dallas must seem bizarre.  A few years ago I would have agreed.  However, in all the cities in the USA there was a period of house building that took place before the automobile became ubiquitous.  Those areas still exist, with their Sear's Craftsman wooden houses, their sidewalks, their local parks, and their high streets.  They are less than ten miles from the city center and for much of the last few decades have fallen into disrepair, poverty, and often crime. 
 However, these areas are being invaded by young, liberal professionals interested in art and community.  I think that originally in San Francisco and New York intelligent, young people wanted to live in vibrant, city communities but only had limited money and so needed cheap places to live.  The result was the invasion of these areas by young, active, liberal, artistic people with college degrees bent on changing where they were going to live.  *

This idea spread to a few cities, Austin, TX, Portland, OR, Boulder, CO and in many ways this is the dominant theme of these cities.  In Portland, OR you have to go several miles from downtown to find something different (Gresham or the West Hills).  Now having visited three cities in Texas I can tell you that in each of these cities there is such a place.  Austin, of course, Houston has the Montrose district, and Dallas has the M streets.  So, I did some research, found the M streets and walked around (being able to walk is a vital part of these communities).  It felt like Portland.  There was the finished urban renewal of NW 21st street and fifteen blocks away the last remnants of working-class hispanics scraping out a living (and about to sell their houses for a big, big profit.
This trend is like a fungus, sending out tiny spores that multiply rapidly.  I predict that some of the most vibrant, artistic communities in the USA will spring into being in the dying rust belt states cities, like Detroit and Buffalo.  Artists need to live in cheap, cheap places, in communities that inspire them.  The average house price in Detroit right now is less than $30,000.

So, the job in Dallas didn't work out because Christina's old boss is extremely optimistic, to the point where she predicts wonderful things, and never delivers.  She doesn't have the power to hire anyone, and the particular job doesn't even exist.  Still, she's looking out for Christina, and recommended her for a job in Austin.
Austin is the origin of the "Keep X Weird" phenomenon and bumper sticker.  It is sunny all year round and that is very important.  It is one of the founding areas of this fungus.  Still, it is big enough that there are still cheap enough places surrounding these areas that we can afford to live very comfortably, and yet still be able to be involved in such a community (we can bike there in fifteen minutes).  The job environment is described as casual and team oriented.  Casual and team oriented basically describes the personality of my wife.  Christina would be fantastic at the job.  There's a shower so that Christina can commute by bike, and a real biking system throughout the city.  There's a large park right next to the office.  It is just across the river from downtown, a place full of music, irish bars, and college students.  There is even talk of a relocation package in which the company pays for moving costs and will buy our house at market value if we can't sell it in three months.
We really, really, really want to move there.  This could be home.  However, the anxiety and tension is building as Christina hasn't heard back, and it's now in the fifth working day since she applied.  We keep telling ourselves that it can often take a couple of weeks before anything happens in the hiring process, but we have already gone from hope, to despair, to a little candle flame we are hoping doesn't gutter out.

*  By the way, if you ever want to make money on housing follow the gay men.  An increase of such people into an area raises property values higher than surrounding areas.  This is probably because gay couples tend not to have children and two jobs, giving them the time and money to improve their property and area.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

"Because That's The Rule"

I was walking The Face of Evil in the park today, as I do, and I met a nice lady named Gretchen who was walking her miniature poodle.  It was a nice and friendly conversation, which is unusual for me, more the conversation than the nice and friendly bit.  The Face of Evil was off the leash, as he almost always is because he does what he is told and is simply not dangerous.  He has never bitten anything other than flies, even when much smaller dogs have bitten him.  To give you an idea of how he listens there was a squirrel available for killing, and although he really wanted to rend the defenseless mammal he stopped when I told him to leave it.  The Face of Evil's methods are much more subtle than mere disobedience, he works by sucking your soul through the portal of compassion.

So, I was walking the beast in the park happily with a woman and a tiny dog.  It is hard for me to think of a less threatening scene involving a dog.  A woman called from a distance necessary to yell, "Is that dog on a leash?"  To which I replied, "No."  She then yelled for me to put the dog on a leash.  I waved and wished her a nice day, while walking in the opposite direction.  She, at all times, had the opportunity to simply walk around the corner and away out of sight.  She decided to stay in place and yell at me to put the dog on a leash.

There is a rule that all dogs must be on a leash in the park.  I know this.  There are people who are afraid of dogs.  I know this too.  I have even had someone call the police to tell me to put the dog on a leash 9the only method of enforcement) and he and I both knew that this was really stupid and a waste of time.  Most of the time the park staff wave and say, "Hello."  Why is there a rule in place that those in charge of enforcing it think is stupid?  It isn't to stop dogs attacking people, dogs in parks simply don't do that.  It is to protect the parks from lawsuits.

Why was this woman yelling?  If she was afraid of dogs she could have simply walked around the corner and been completely safe.  People do very strange things, but staying in place and yelling at what you are frightened of seems so strange for me to dismiss it.  The only reason I can think of is that there was a rule and she really wanted me to follow it.

"Because it's a rule" is a remarkably common reason for someone wishing you to do something.  I generally hear it after any rational reason for someone to follow a rule has been exhausted, but the person still wants me to follow that rule.  I remember this being most common in educational establishments.  Why do people use this "argument?"  The first reason given is that if people don't follow the rules there is anarchy.  It is true that if there are no rules at all, or no-one obeys them, then there is anarchy.  But breaking one rule doesn't mean that all rules are broken, just that one rule is broken.  If the rule does no harm, then the only thing that happens is the breaking of the rule.  It seems to be that the problem is simply that a rule is broken.

Why is there a problem with rules being broken?  It is because it is perceived as an act of defiance against authority.  People are trying to have everyone behave within the strictures of authority.  There is a desire for people to obey, even when it doesn't matter.  Why do people have this desire?  I think it is built in to the human psyche from two sources, functionality of groups, and raising children.  Groups where there is no leader, and everyone simply does what they want are historically ineffective.  Anyone who has seen a meeting without a defined leader knows what I am talking about.  If you are hunting a large, dangerous animal stopping to discuss strategy is a bad plan.  Raising children is the most obvious example of, "Because that's the rule."

Children ask the best question, "Why?"  When repeated enough times this line of questioning really gets down to the nitty gritty.  At the base of all reasons why a child must follow a rule is that, while the intentions of the rule are usually for the child's own good, the child is powerless and the parent can make them do it.  We really don't like to think about it that way, but when it is time to go home and the child doesn't want to go home even after being given a sensible reason, that child is going to be physically forced to go home.  With children, "Because it's a rule" is adults trying to avoid the truth that the reason is actually, "Because I can, and will, make you."  After years of such conditioning it is not surprising that the unthinking following of rules is commonplace.

Have you ever been at a junction with stop signs in all directions and no cars or pedestrians?  Have you not come to a complete stop but rather slowed down to a very slow roll and then driven on through?  This happens every day, with most drivers.  People speed.  In fact people speed so ubiquitously that to not speed can be dangerous in some situations.  If you are going 20 miles slower than the rest of traffic you are essentially reversing down the highway at 20mph.  In many places in the USA there is a rule against jaywalking, crossing the road at places not designated for pedestrians.  Only crazy people don't jaywalk when it is safe to do so.

There are rules that everyone breaks and no-one really seems to mind.  Why is this?  It's because breaking those rules has been made part of the culture.  The cultural rule is that breaking those institutional rules is OK.  What matters is the culture rather than the legality. 

The example at the beginning of this post shows pretty clearly that there are large differences in attitudes to following rules.  Jonathon Haidt has done wonderful research into these differences in psychology.  It can be summed up by different groups (that seem to be largely genetically based) coming to moral decisions based on different criteria.  Sensibly named liberals and conservatives, he calls his theory/findings the Moral Foundations Theory.  The criteria for moral decisions can be broken down into six areas.  The more liberal you are the more you base your decisions on care/harm, and fairness/cheating.  The more conservative you are the more you base your decisions on loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.  By the way, Haidt actually says that conservatives understand the moral decisions of liberals better than the other way round.  People who think you should follow rules regardless of whether they are useful or not think this because they value loyalty to those who set the rules, respect for authority, and possibly the sanctity of obeying (the #1 subject of the Bible).  People who think you should only follow rules that are useful value whether the rule does harm or not, and whether it is fair, or not.  I don't want to suggest for a minute that almost all people care about all of these factors, just that these are trends, and strong ones at that.

I am extremely liberal morally.  I basically only care whether something does harm, is fair, or is oppressive.  If you tell me to do something harmful and unfair to stop something that the authority figure of my group thinks is disgusting I will simply not do it.  In fact, if you want me to not do something, probably the most effective way would be to tell me I must do it because you say so.  I actively dislike people who think differently, although I take some time to understand why they think that way.  The reason people are opposed to gay marriage is because they think of it as a rebellion against their group (church/nation), subversion of authority (they are destroying our America) and it is disgusting to them.  The reason I support gay marriage (in practice, I think the words don't matter) is because I think it does no harm, is fair, and allows people to have more freedom of choice.  Morally I am almost freakishly liberal.

The only way to change the morality of conservatives is to convince them that the authority of their group has decided that a particular moral position is sacred.  If you think this is impossible go find a conservative and suggest that we should start owning slaves again.  They will be outraged despite the fact that less than two hundred years ago conservatives supported slavery because the Bible said it was right.

While I get the nervous thrum of adrenaline with almost any confrontation, I also very much enjoyed the dismay of that woman trying to tell me I must do something.

Monday, October 1, 2012

Going Bald

I am going bald.  In fact I have been going bald for something like 15 years.  Contrary to what I have heard I am not going bald in the manner of my maternal grandfather, who never really went bald, but in the same pattern as my father.  I am going bald much more slowly but I expect to get there in the end.  This pattern advances from the sides of the forehead in a looping pattern to isolate an island of hair above the middle of the forehead.  This is presumably because of the extra testosterone that is produced in this area.  I'm not sure if this is a particularly bad or good way to go bald, I suppose at least I can see it well enough to not deny it is going on.  Pattern 5, stage 3.


 I think balding, like most parts of aging, happens in relatively short jumps interspersed within longer periods of stability.  All of a sudden your knees hurt, or your hangovers are terrible, or you start listening to National Public Radio (I now experience all of these).  Three years ago I was being asked for my identification when buying alcohol to ensure I was over 21.  This has now completely stopped.

My balding advance has unfortunately now become somewhat unsymmetrical, my left conquering more scalp than my right.  There isn't too much worse for human beauty than non-symmetry (other than disease and gross fatness) and so I should probably not emphasize this new development.  I have thought for some time that the most important thing about going bald is not to fight it, not to try to disguise it.  Don't cover balding areas with wisps of long, fine hair.  I used to have long hair at times until I was twenty-seven, and not since.  It is better to have a shaved head than the long but scraggly remnants of a rockers' teenage barnet.  This may well be simply because of the failed attempt to fool someone, one of the reasons I don't like make-up on women.

I don't really mind going bald.  I don't consider it a tragedy of lost youth, just one of the many signs that I am getting older.  Women say they don't really mind (but then they also say that the most attractive thing in a man is a sense of humor and that size doesn't matter, two very kind lies) and I better get used to it, signs of aging are going to happen for the same amount of time I have been alive so far.

I still get a haircut with scissors rather than buzzing the whole thing, which is the haircut that reduces the appearance of balding the most, because there is only a limited amount of time for this to not look silly.  Since my darling, and honest, wife says I look like an egg with a buzzed head and no facial hair you should get used to seeing me with this scraggly, red beard.  Unless I lose forty pounds.