Make Up Your Mind

Thursday, September 25, 2008

I don't tend to discuss religion much here. I'm not sure that a blog with "Bitter" in the title is a good place for that, at least in my case. I'm considering starting another, more personal blog along those lines, but then I'd have three blogs going on, and I'm not sure I'm ready for that level of commitment. Then again, I have (as I've noted before) a lot of half-finished projects going on, so what's one more?

Anyway, as I watched the first presidential debate the other night and and some serious question-dodging in the process, a scripture popped into my head. At some point when I was younger, I remember my dad teaching me about Revelation 3:15-16:

15 I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.

16 So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.

I'll admit it: this one scared me a little bit, since I've always found it pretty easy to become complacent and non-committal and have to fight that tendency every day.

It's probably good, then, that I've followed the career path I have. I'm an analyst, and in my previous job I was an analyst. What that really means is that I don't do any real work but get paid to have an opinion about what other people should be doing. For the most part, I don't have the luxury of being non-committal.

Fortunately, I'm not paid to have an opinion about the economic bailout plan, because I really can't decide what I think. On one hand, I'm a free-market capitalist that believes in the long-run, the system works itself out and we end up better off, but on the other hand, I'm a little scared of the short run. I've seen "Grapes of Wrath" (and I think read it long, long ago), and I'm not that keen on living in a colorless, dusty world (although some would argue that I already do). We apparently will also all have to live off of canned soup; someone at work Monday while watching the market drop noticed that Campbell's was the only stock going up.

After watching the presidential debate, I'm not entirely sure where either of them stand on the whole thing either, although they are apparently both going to vote for it. I will say that I don't think I've ever seen anyone dodge a question as consistently and enthusiastically as Obama did when asked what he'd cut in order to fund the bailout. I do at least know how I would have answered that question without cutting anything really important and without raising taxes.

For one, the government could stop advertising the digital TV transition. If we knew that a comet was going to collide with the Earth in February 2009, I'm not sure we'd even provide as much warning about that to the American people as we have about the digital TV transition. I don't know exactly what advertising costs right now, but it can't be that much more expensive to bankroll a war than it has been to keep this "No Couch Potato Left Behind" program going.

Second, we could create some real revenue utilizing what our government already has. For example, you could rent out the Capitol building for concerts, MTV "Sweet 16" birthday parties... anything that would generate a lot of cash. Don't get me wrong, I've been to the Capitol, and it's a great building with a lot of statues, but judging from C-SPAN there are typically more statues there than lawmakers, unless there is an economic meltdown going on. If that doesn't bring in enough revenue, we could throw in tours of Area 51 or rides on the Space Shuttle. For even bigger thrill-seekers you could offer the "hunt with a senior offiical" package.

Third, we could use Craigslist and eBay to have the largest garage sale in history. Trust me, I worked in the government long enough and visited enough government facilities to know that there is no shortage of old, useless junk, and apparently one person's old, useless junk is another person's new, useless junk. I'm not sure how many eBay experts there are in Washington, but they could figure it out with a free trail from the Video Professor.

Will all of this generate $700M? It's hard for me to say without running the numbers. Again judging by the debate, you can fudge the numbers a little, so I think my ideas would probably fly.

I Meant To Post This the Other Day

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

I can't decide whether I am a procrastinator or just take on too much sometimes. I think it may be a mix of the two. I shouldn't be a procrastinator, because as a general rule, I prefer to tackle the hard things first (for example, I tend to eat whatever food on the plate I like the least first). I also don't have a lot of spare time, which I would think is a prerequisite to quality procrastination, unless procrastination simply means that you prioritize the wrong things. That said, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that at times I - to my shame - don't do today what I can do tomorrow (or maybe never).

The first evidence came at some point in elementary school, when late one night I told my mom that I had a leaf-collecting project due the next day. It wouldn't have been too bad, except that the leaves were supposed to be pressed. Say what you will for the WWW, but Wikipedia won't help you flatten leaves nearly as well as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

I didn't learn my lesson, because in high school - may have been my junior year - I got to the end of the year and was way behind on a final assignment in accounting. Two nights in a row, I spent the entire night out in my dad's photo studio working out all of the debits and credits - I was literally up for all of two straight days and nights (and then the school year ended, and I immediately passed out). I don't think anyone had heard of David Blaine back then, so I didn't realize I could have skipped the accounting and just made a career out of doing otherwise mundane things for a long period of time.

My procrastination nearly cost me grades back then, but now it costs me money. I'm sure when companies offer mail-in rebates, they factor in some percentage of people that will never send them in, and I've added to that percentage too many times. I'm trying to be better, and based on the fact that I just sent in two the other day a full two weeks before the deadline, I may be learning. If you notice that companies stop offering these things, you can probably blame me for finally making them feel the pain.

[As an aside, I hate mail in rebates that are either too small or too ridiculous to bother with. I mean, I've seen $1 mail in rebates. By the time you buy a stamp and drive to the post office, you are in the hole on that one, although I suppose you could ride a bike. On the ridiculous end of things, we purchased one of those automated car washes at a gas station recently, and I went with the most expensive option partly because of the undercarriage wash (like they say, you don't ever want to get in an accident and get caught with a dirty undercarriage) but partly because they were offering a rebate that made it the same cost as the next step down, which only cleaned stuff at eye level or above. Reading the fine print on my receipt, it turns out that if within 30 days you noticed rainwater not beading up on your windshield, you could send in for a $3 rebate. Pretty generous of them, given that we live in the desert.]

Anyway, I still have some work to do in this area. Tomorrow afternoon I have my regular dentist appointment, and inevitably I'll be told that I need to floss more, I'll nod my head, and then I'll put that off for six more months. Every time, I wonder if I can hurry and floss for a good 15 minutes and fool them, but I don't think it works like that (although I'm guessing that Oxy Clean guy on the late-night infomercials has a product for that). Maybe this time I'll actually follow through on it. I'll figure that out later, though - it's late, and I need to get to bed.

Not My Best Post

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

To a fault (ask my wife), I'm pretty stingy with words like "most" and "best" and "least" and "worst." In the majority of cases, I'm with Napoleon's brother Kip: "Like anyone could even know that." One thing I find interesting about the Olympics is that it's one of the rare times in life that you can use absolutes and have a little bit of credibility. For example, I can say with some degree of confidence that Usain Bolt is the fastest person in the world, given that he was facing at least a subset of the best in the world and made it look easy. Even then, it's hard to be sure there isn't another Nanu out there, just waiting to be discovered by Tim Conway and JJ's dad from Good Times.

I bring this up because this past week, I spent two days in a room filled with people much, much more intelligent than I am, but a number of them were not smart enough to recognize that they were not the "most" intelligent people in the room/world. As annoying as it is to be around someone who thinks they have all the answers, imagine spending a few days with about 10 of those people together. It was like being in a room full of Alex Trebek clones, all talking literally at the same time.

I think at the start of the two days, we should have made everyone sit down and watch this documentary I watched not long ago on Nikola Tesla on The History Channel. First, I learned that he was not just some obscure scientific figure from The Prestige, in which he is played by David Bowie (an appropriate choice, I suppose, since before seeing that movie I thought Tesla was just an 80s rock band). In reality, he invented (if I remember correctly) alternating current, thanks to which we have small power lines instead of ones with the small-tree-trunk-circumference direct-current ones Thomas Edison came up with (see, even Edison wasn't the "most" anything). Tesla also invented our car ignition system, wireless electricity, and Fantasy Football (OK, not that last one).

Of course, this works both ways. It's also reassuring to know that I am not the dumbest person in the world. I don't know how close I am, but I know that I'm at least smarter than people who write on bathroom stalls, the first person who did the butterfly stroke, and people who think their friends back home could beat Michael Phelps. Given how complicated life is becoming, I actually question how those people get by in life (well, the butterfly stroke guy was probably eaten by a shark a long time ago).

For example, going to the airport and catching a flight used to be fairly mindless. You bought a ticket, threw your junk in a suitcase, walked through a metal detector, and then got on the plane. As I flew to-and-from the aforementioned meeting, it occurred to me that you need a fairly well-thought-out strategy now to maneuver through the whole process. I'm not complaining, because I'm a big fan of not dying, but you do feel sometimes like you're in the middle of some reality show challenge.

Packing, for instance, used to be basically a physical activity; you were only worried about stuff fitting, and most of the time the answer to that was to put your full body weight on the front to enable you to zip it up. Anything you didn't want to lose you threw into a carry-on, and the only thing you had to think about there was not packing anything inherently dangerous like plutonium or a pipe wrench.

Then, of course, someone tried to make a bomb out of Gatorade, and not long thereafter the price of oil went up, and now we're stuck in the difficult position of not being able to pack much in a carry-on but having to pay for checking anything. I really hope we are winning the war on terror, but they are winning the war on luggage.

Before we had the beverage bombers, we had the shoe bomber, and the only people who appreciate that idiot are the people who sell those little foot covers. It's not that I hate taking off my shoes that much, but between that and removing my belt and whatever else has a trace of metal in it, I feel like I'm being led in to see a mob boss or something. It's actually worse on the other end, because you end up with about four of those plastic trays full of clothes & electronic equipment and not a lot of time to try to put your life back together before you're either pushed out by the people+stuff coming up behind you or are late for your plane.

Once you get through, it doesn't get that much easier. If you are like me and sometimes need to get online in the airport, the good news is that a lot of airports have free wi-fi. The bad news is that most airports only have about one power outlet per terminal. You have to scope those out pretty quickly, because you have to compete with the cell-phone-chargers too. To the credit of the Portland airport the other day, they actually had a whole area with desks and power outlets. I suppose people like me are a bit like smokers (except with a different problem), so it was nice of them to create a little area to help me satisfy my apparent work addiction.

Speaking of work, that's another part of life that requires a lot more intelligence than it used to. I'm not talking about work itself of the fact that you have to use computers (you can get that "Video Professor" guy to help you out with that) - I'm talking about passwords. Security at work has tightened up, too, so just using your dog's name as your password for life doesn't work anymore. You have to have a "strong" password, meaning that it has to consist of a certain combination of numbers, letters, special characters, Morse Code, and smoke signals. It would be bad enough if you had to come up with a password like that once in your life, but most places make you come up with and remember a new one every few months. I'm running out of remotely memorable ones, so soon I'll probably lose my job and have to find employment that doesn't involve Windows.

Thanks to filling my head with all of those passwords, I think I'm starting to slide a little lower on the intelligence continuum. First, driving to the airport from my meeting, I decided not to trust my little GPS device and ended up wandering around the back streets of suburban Portland for a while. Then a few days ago I accidentally drowned my cell phone. Unfortunately, there aren't absolutes when it comes to dumb things either, so I know that those aren't the "dumbest" things I've ever done and that there will be many "dumber" things to come.