John – Page 125 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Tiny Fight Club, Taleb’s Skin in the Game, and Expensive Female Lawyer Reproduction

“A guy who came to Fight Club for the first time, he was a wad of cookie dough. After a few weeks, he was carved out of wood.” – Fight Club

The Boy and Pugsley square off in a Beta version of Fight Club. Bigfoot is in the background as an observer.

I have a fight club in my basement.

Not an officially sanctioned, Tyler Durden® approved Fight Club. Just a small fight club, mainly involving me, The Boy, Pugsley, and (sometimes) The Mrs.

What is this tiny fight club? Well, it’s wrestling.

Wrestling season ended for The Boy a little sooner than he’d planned – he’s in high school and would rather have gone on from districts. We talked about it, and he was ready to commit to working harder for the coming year – and I read somewhere that “working hard” was correlated with “success.” Sounds like crazy voodoo to me.

But sometimes a hard loss will do that to you much more effectively than a win – when I wrestled, I learned something from each match I lost. Some wins? I didn’t learn a thing. And losing can either break you or motivate you. The Boy sounded motivated.

Given The Boy’s commitment, we immediately started practicing for the next year. Since Pugsley wanted to join us, we threw him in for good measure – he’s five years younger and a bit smaller than The Boy. I will note that The Mrs. has been after me for about two years to take a more rigorous and structured approach to coaching The Boy and Pugsley in wrestling. My excuse was that I didn’t want to interfere with their actual wrestling coaches and the work that they were doing with my kids – what if I taught them moves differently than the coach liked? Yeah, a lame reason, but it was my reason.

But after this year for The Boy, he was ready. He only has so many days left of wrestling, and he committed that he’d work with me to make the most of them. Fair enough, I’d commit to him to work hundreds of hours with him to help him be better. So we started practice. But before we started practice? I started reading, studying, and preparing to coach.

I prepared to start Tiny Fight Club (no, this wasn’t a restart of my failed Midget Hammer Fighting League):

What sort of things should I teach them? In what order? Wrestling is easily the oldest sport known to humanity – men were wrestling each other when we still hadn’t figured out how to knock two rocks together to make a “clunk” sound and way before they’d invented the Nintendo® Switch™.

Why did we wrestle in the murky depths of history? To impress the ladies, sure. Also, because it’s fun. Most importantly, as Jordan Peterson would say, this combat allows us to create a hierarchy, and having that hierarchy is important, as I describe in my perfectly awesome post about Peterson’s book (LINK).

But something more happened. I became engrossed in study about how to coach and what to coach. And Pugsley still had one more tournament left . . . so we had exactly three practices until he would finish out his kid’s wrestling season.

Like The Boy, Pugsley had been, well, stalled in his progress if not taking a few steps backward this year. He just wasn’t getting much better. But we had those three practices. And with them, and in drilling he felt more confident than ever.

The good thing about that last tournament? There were only two people in his bracket. One was Dirk. Pugsley had never even taken Dirk down (where you gain control over your opponent) in the last three years. The other wrestler, Ezekiel, well, Pugsley hadn’t beaten Zeke in two years. Literally he had wrestled these two other boys a dozen times or so in the previous two years and hadn’t beaten either one of them. What was three hours of practice?

In the very first match in his weight, Dirk pinned Ezekiel. Quickly. As was usual. Dirk routinely took first place.

Dirk’s second match was against Pugsley. Pugsley immediately (and with confidence) went out and gained control and got the take down! He was up 2-0. Dirk was in such difficulty (and pain!) he’d done anything he could to get off the mat. Pugsley dominated him for most of the period, then got in a pretty bad position, and then got pinned. But he came off the mat with confidence – he knew what I had coached him in worked – he had been amazing against an opponent he’d never even scored on. The next match he pinned Ezekiel in the first period. Zeke was not pleased – the creampuff he always beat had grown fangs. And Pugsley was sold on our practices.

On the way home he talked about wanting to be a national collegiate wrestling champion. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb would say, I now had “Skin in the Game” and so did my boys. And it matters.

(The following link doesn’t get me any money as of the time of this writing, but at some point I might monetize it. It’s Taleb. Buy the book, anyway.)

I am thinking about reviewing this book, but reviewing Taleb might prove to be difficult in this blog – it might require five or more posts. We’ll see. Buy it, anyway, and read it.

In the process of working through wrestling with The Boy and Pugsley – I found something interesting (outside of the bruises randomly outcropping on my biceps, forearms, and chest). I felt more energized than I’d felt in ages. The very act of working with The Boy and Pugsley to make them stronger and more skilled improved my attitude about . . . everything. My daily cardio workouts became sharper (and I studied wrestling moves during them). And my muscles started to grow as I kept up with the boys when we lifted after fight club.

But I also had another epiphany.

The combat serves many purposes: It builds confidence. It teaches to never give up. By example, it shows that hard work pays off in success. It bonds fathers to sons. It builds discipline (Pugsley’s respect for me has gone up 372% and his pre-teen surliness has utterly disappeared). These are all traits that will lead (along with intelligence and Stoic virtue (LINK)) to much greater than average social and economic success.

And I’m in much better shape, and I’m learning how to teach The Boy (no, you have to rotate more than 180˚) and Pugsley (no, you have to throw your head through while you get your hips under your shoulders) and The Mrs. (dear, could you make us all some nice sandwiches). I kid. The Mrs. oversees our deadly serious play. When The Boy complained that Pugsley smelled like sour milk, The Mrs. awarded The Boy a penalty point for “Involuntary Lactation.” That caused us all to laugh.

But the epiphany is that the combat pays off down the road in the ultimate Skin in the Game moment: this work is a precursor to reproduction . . . what?

Yes. Being a high status man increases reproduction possibilities. Being a high status woman doesn’t.

Huh?

How does that work??? Check this tweet out:

https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/973473559933747206/photo/1

I would say that being a high-powered female attorney actually lowers reproduction access for women. The most fertile years for women are in their 20’s – after that, it lowers drastically. By the age of 40? Forget it.

But high status guys? The guys back in the cavemen days that were winning the wrestling matches? They got a chance to reproduce. And 8,000 years ago, science says that only one guy versus 17 women reproduced (LINK). The odds are better now, one guy will get to reproduce for every out 3.3 women that to reproduce. 3.3 to one? Are you kidding me? Nope. High-status guys, only the top third, get to reproduce. I guess that choosy girls all choose the same men.

High status men.

Competition – physical competition is hardwired into the brains and souls of boys. And old men, like me. That’s why I felt so good – I was throwing myself into physical combat for the first time in years, and relishing it. Winning (and coaching well) provides many physical benefits – increased testosterone, brain chemicals and other science-y things in addition to the strength and fitness ability. If you look at the math, social hierarchy is a must for men.

In today’s society, that means a cool job with money. So, in order to have children, i.e., the ultimate Skin in the Game, the behaviors of competition and working long hours to increase income are absolutely necessary for men and are negatively correlated with reproductive success for women.

There’s no wage gap, at least not one based on any sort of discrimination. Thousands (if not more) of years of human breeding have made men drive to succeed – because success is the currency of reproduction.

The final observation for today:

Raising boys is a full contact sport. To allow them to reach their full potential they have to fight. I suspect that many (but not all) cases of ADHD and the other alphabet salads of childhood disorders that have suddenly emerged after existing . . . never, are really just boys not being able to take risks or have a fistfight or nurse a bloody nose or confront a bully – behaviors that bind them into the social hierarchy.

“We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.” – Fight Club

Oops, I guess I broke the first rule of Fight Club. Again.

Stoics, Fight Club, Wealth, and Virtue

“I had it all. Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of . . . wherever.” – Fight Club

The first rule of Fight Club is . . . be older than six. And no swords.

Wealth – what is it?

Is it:

Something that we sacrifice our lives for?
Something we obsess about until it controls us?
Something that is never . . . quite enough?
Something we have to have more of than our neighbor?
Something that defines our feelings about ourselves?

I’ll be honest, but there have been times I’ve viewed wealth in more than one of the categories above and acted as such. “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants,” is what Epictetus wrote about 100 A.D. Even more succinctly, Tyler Durden said in Fight Club, “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your (gosh darn) khakis.”

What Epictetus may have looked like. If he were in a comic strip.

I may have it in for Johnny Depp, but Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden is my spirit animal (we’ve started a tiny Fight Club in my basement, but I’m not supposed to talk about it – first rule, you know).

I keep coming back to the stoics. What did Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Tyler Durden, and Epictetus think about wealth? The website How To Be A Stoic says (LINK): “. . . they classed everything that lies outside of virtue as either preferred or dispreferred indifferent. To the first group belong things like wealth, health, education, and high social standing; to the second things like poverty, sickness, ignorance, and low social standing. These things were preferred insofar it is normal for a human being to pursue them because it makes her life more comfortable, and dispreferred insofar it makes her life less comfortable. But they are “indifferent” in the sense that they are irrelevant to our ability to exercise the virtues . . . .”

So, the Stoics were indifferent to wealth, but it was better to have it than not. You could be virtuous and poor, or you could be virtuous and rich. If you were rich, perhaps you could share your virtues even further than if you were poor – so it was preferred to have money. And Marcus Aurelius was emperor – it was hard to be richer than that, even for Jeff Bezos. Seneca? He was really wealthy, too. And since they are some of the thinkers that literally define what Stoicism is, well, wealth and power isn’t off limits, but the goal was to live a virtuous life.

So what does wealth signify?

Mostly, wealth is like stored energy – it’s a potential. A child may have a wealth of days before it, and an old miser a wealth of cash, cash that he might trade every dime of for just one more taste of youth. And a six year old would trade the ages of 18-30 for six Cadbury Cream Eggs®, which is another reason that kids can’t vote.

Steve Jobs certainly traded some of his wealth for additional days of life without having to cheat a six year old in a candy deal – he could honestly say he could be at any liver in just a few hours (having a private jet and all) and he could afford to have a staff of people looking for ways to improve Steve’s chance of getting one. Heck, Apple® has a project to clone Steve from a clump of his cells that they found in his comb – they just keep getting Ben Affleck copies instead. Thankfully, Ben Affleck is not considered by the state of California to be a “living human.”

Steve’s wealth did buy him time – a few years, perhaps. And Apple will soon sell the Affleck clones as iBens©.

Choices. Wealth buys choices. And one of the choices is always . . . not choosing right now. The wonderful thing about being rich, is you don’t take any offers you don’t want. If have to sell my car – I need the money for a new kidney for my Yosemite Sam© PEZ® dispenser, well, I have to have that money now. I can’t wait. I have to take the offer I get now.

If I have wealth and can afford to buy new, black market PEZ® kidneys for cash? Well, I don’t have to sell my car. In fact, if I have cash, I can look for people who have to sell kidney cars for PEZ© kidney cash to get a bargain.

I am willing to bet a large amount of PEZ™ that this is the first time the last sentence has been written in any language.

Anyhow. Wealth buys choices, and wealth creates the conditions for more wealth.

But what creates wealth? Well, in reality – the same virtues the stoics upheld (from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy – LINK):

“The Stoics elaborated a detailed taxonomy of virtue, dividing virtue into four main types: wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation.

“Wisdom is subdivided into good sense, good calculation, quick-wittedness, discretion, and resourcefulness.
“Justice is subdivided into piety, honesty, equity, and fair dealing.
“Courage is subdivided into endurance, confidence, high-mindedness, cheerfulness, and industriousness.
“Moderation is subdivided into good discipline, seemliness, modesty, and self-control.”

If you will look – many (but not all!) of these virtues, if followed well and long enough, will lead to . . . wealth.

But perhaps Epictetus was right: “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”

And then there was Tyler Durden: “It’s a blanket. Just a blanket. Now why do guys like you and me know what a duvet or a comforter is? Is this essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we then? We are consumers. We’re the byproducts of a lifestyle obsession.”

So, be virtuous. Get wealthy. But don’t make the wealth the focus . . . it’s not the money, after all – it’s all the stuff.

AI, The Singularity, and Your 401K

“A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was us that scorched the sky.” – The Matrix

This is how “The Hobbit” should have started, with dragons and swords, rather than a dwarf dinner party? Then I wouldn’t have fallen asleep during hour one of the 12 hours of movie.

In 1947, an author began to predict it. In the 1950’s a few scientists saw it coming. In the 1960’s, it became a (more and more) common subject. In the 1970’s and 80’s it was nightmare fuel for extremely profitable movies and some great books. And, in 1993, Vernor Vinge (author and mathematician) wrote the paper (LINK) that gave this phenomenon its name: The Technological Singularity, or just Singularity from here on out.

This is the second time I’ve discussed the Singularity, and the first time was over here (LINK). The topic is big enough and important enough that I thought I’d add on to it. This will likely not be the last time. Not that I’m running out of blog topics – no, I’ve got a page and a half of them. No, the Singularity keeps getting uncomfortably closer, like your father-in-law’s farting Great Dane that he normally feeds some sort of petroleum waste covered in sulfur and toxic waste. Otherwise? Anything making that smell is generally dead.

Speaking of dead, Jack Williamson (a horribly overlooked author) wrote about the Singularity first in 1947 in his story With Folded Hands. I read that when I was in sixth or seventh grade at the Middle School for Wayward Wilders. I read every science fiction story or novel in that library, and I even started The Lord of the Rings with book two (The Two Towers) since the library didn’t have book one (The Fellowship of the Rings). To this day I maintain it’s a better two book series than a three book series. The first book is really just walking and singing elves and hobbits. Meh. The second book starts with treachery and fighting. Yeah, that’s the stuff.

Anyway, Jack Williamson’s story With Folded Hands was . . . awesome. And one of the creepiest things I’d ever read. You can read it for free, here at this (LINK). Here’s the spoiler-free-ish Wikipedia description:

. . . disturbed at his encounter, Underhill rushes home to discover that his wife has taken in a new lodger, a mysterious old man named Sledge. In the course of the next day, the new mechanicals have appeared everywhere in town. They state that they only follow the Prime Directive: ”to serve and obey and guard men from harm”. Offering their services free of charge, they replace humans as police officers, bank tellers, and more, and eventually drive Underhill out of business. Despite the Humanoids’ benign appearance and mission, Underhill soon realizes that, in the name of their Prime Directive, the mechanicals have essentially taken over every aspect of human life. No humans may engage in any behavior that might endanger them, and every human action is carefully scrutinized. Suicide is prohibited.

So, you’d think that having all of those things would be good, right? Nah. Read the story. Want to ski? The Humanoids are against it – you might hurt yourself. And anything else that might be dangerous. Like driving. Or drinking. Or smoking. Or not exercising. Or not eating the right foods. Or staying up too late. And the Humanoids are smarter than you. And always watching.

It’s an example of how the Singularity can go wrong – an instruction set that’s interpreted as machines do: literally. For example, if one read the instruction “help humanity” and figured out that humanity was always suffering, and maybe the best way to help humanity to stop suffering was to end humanity . . . or if the instruction set was to create inexpensive cars . . . and it converted the entire mass of the planet into inexpensive yet attractive and stylish cars. (Elon, make sure your programs don’t include this!)

These themes spawned numerous television episodes in the 1960’s and 1970’s. How many times, exactly, did Kirk do mental ju-jitsu with a supercomputer? I can count at least seven without thinking. So, about 1/10^th of Star Trek® episodes, Kirk was fighting a Singularity. This continued through the movies Terminator® and Terminator 2© through the 1990’s. Then Vernor Vinge named it.

Let’s talk about the Singularity. What, exactly, happens?

In general, a much larger than human intellect appears. And it rapidly reconfigures everything that it sees. Concepts that are beyond the smartest humans are correlated – the data we already have in our experiments, is all brought together.

We know we are wrong, but don’t know how. Could a superhuman intelligence bring it all together in a month? A week? A day? Perhaps. We know we are wrong about the way the Universe works – and that there are some pretty significant gaps in our understanding (LINK).

It’s a fair thing to say that we are living today with a weak AI. My GPS unit tells me the fastest route to where I’m travelling. YouTube® suggests songs I’ve never heard that I kinda like. And algorithms based on my previous web browsing suggest that maybe I’ll need a knee replacement or perhaps a new kidney (now you know why I had children: they are wonderful sources of spare organs).

I may even have interacted with an AI this weekend – I was having trouble getting the “name” of one of my Amazon® devices. The “person” on the other end of the chat kept repeating the same things. I had to figure out how to get to the answer. But I told the “person” how I got there. Bet next time it’ll be quicker . . . .

This is a weak AI. It’s a general helper every day. Only a little creepy, not “fifty years old and still collecting Star Wars® figures” creepy.

But it will/is getting stronger. How long until Google® correlates web searches and times of day to a dozen or more lifestyle-related diseases? I’m willing to bet you it does that already. But this is still an algorithm designed by a human. Probably.

But recently Google™ (which now no longer promises to “not be evil”) created AlphaGo©. Go is an ancient game that rivals chess in complexity. It beat the greatest human master 89 out of 100 games in October, which most people would call a “drubbing.” Perhaps, most disturbingly, the moves that the computer made were called “disturbing” and “alien”. The computer was left with nothing more than the rules of the game and a desire to win. Not long after playing large number of games against itself, it was able to take on the greatest player in the world. And win. No human will ever beat it.

From my observation, the likely requirement for development of a true AI, a general AI is constraint. The AI was able to beat us (us=seven billion humans) because it was constrained and goal driven – it was limited to a single gaming system with observable and finite rules.

And humans aren’t constrained, right?

Well, no. Humans are constrained by a human body. As much as I would like to be able to jump to Mars and party with Elon Musk (you know he already moved there, right?) I can’t. Intellect is about observing and overcoming constraints to achieve a goal. If you don’t have constraints or a goal, intelligence has no meaning and no use. (This might be the most profound thought I ever had, with the exception of the partying with Elon Musk on Mars part.)

What are the constraints and goals of a human? Our constraints are our intellect and physical limitations. Our goals are our desire to live, help others of our kind, procreate, and keep our children safe. Obviously, these are generalized. And, they can be sublimated into secondary goals, like cats for a cat lady, or perverted into goals like more heroin for a heroin addict.

But how useful was intelligence, anyway? Surface animal life has existed for nearly half a billion years. How much evidence do we have for intelligent life on Earth? Yeah. Just us. Probably 200,000 years or so. This is 0.04% of the time that we’ve had surface life. Eyes (not human, but eyes) have been in existence for that entire time. So, 100% of the time we’ve had life on the surface, it’s had eyes. But intelligence? Not so much.

From that we can guess (maybe) that intelligence is rare. I’d guess it’s because that there’s some component of intelligence that’s simply not useful for the simple goals of procreation. It’s better to be stronger or have bigger claws or better teeth rather than a big brain. Yet we, mankind, exist. We replaced claws and teeth with brains and planning. Perhaps the dinosaurs were getting ready to make the same leap when a certain meteorite hit the Yucatan, or perhaps the cold-blooded nature of their biology prevented them from being able to sufficiently grow the brain tissue required for intelligence. To-MA-to, To-MAH-to. And, we win. You suck, dinosaurs!

Certainly, it’s fair to say that whatever biological bottleneck prevented intelligent dinosaurs from ruling the Earth today, humanity passed the test, and we are certainly, unquestionably, the dominant form of life on Earth.

The more we learn about AI, the more we will learn to give it constraints and goals like we humans have. And those constraints and goals will give the “intelligence” part of Artificial Intelligence the reason to grow. At some point, the constraints and goals will be properly set to create a general AI.

And then?

A singularity means that none of the rules from before even make sense. That’s the difficulty. Right now we worry about the prices of real estate in San Francisco or the price of the stock market or the value of our 401k. We’re concerned with how many people like our BookFace® posts or what our current salary is or how much money we have saved in a piggy bank.

After a Singularity, many of the rules that went before matter anymore. At all. Your credit score might be less important than how many freckles you have. And only the freckled will rule the Earth. Why? Because of Justin Timberlake. Duh.

Our world regularly experiences singularities – the revolution in 1776 was one. It was a fundamental change in the way the world was governed – giving more freedom than has ever come before to humanity. The entire concept of kings was overthrown with the concept of divine rights as the basis for free men living together. We also have darker experiences with political singularities, as those from the Soviet gulag or Cambodian camp can attest to. And only a Singularity can explain why Firefly® was cancelled in season one.

But the Technological Singularity will be that. On steroids.

Literally every facet of your life that you depend upon will be in question. Monetary systems? What is money to a superhuman machine intelligence? Property rights? Why do they exist? Eugenics? Perhaps the AI will work to make us better pets through forced breeding.

Nothing you can take for granted now will be certain after a Singularity. And after a technological Singularity? If a machine AI doesn’t like you, it can upload you into a core and torture you forever. In perhaps the best, but most visceral fiction representing this, Harlan Ellison has the following passage. The full story is here, but I warn you, it’s very good, but very stark (LINK). I suggest you buy the full book at Amazon . . . .

We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But it had been trapped. AM wasn’t God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge. And in his paranoia, he had decided to reprieve five of us, for a personal, everlasting punishment that would never serve to diminish his hatred … that would merely keep him reminded, amused, proficient at hating man. Immortal, trapped, subject to any torment he could devise for us from the limitless miracles at his command.

Yeah, like I said rough. And this .pdf was posted from a High School? They would have burned a high school teacher alive back when I was in school for mentioning that work even existed (though my English teacher did mention another Ellison work, “A Boy and His Dog” and was not immediately hit by lasers and burnt to a crisp (though I did hear that a time-ray hit him, and he later retired when he hit 65).

Again, you can get the book here (again, I get no profit from this, but recommend you buy it if you’re not squeamish):

Vinge stated in 1993, not before 2005, nor after 2030. Now? 2040 to 2050 seems to be the conclusion that most experts expect. Still, like fusion, 20 to 30 years away. Because a looming event that could consider everything you ever thought right, and immovable incorrect in a matter of months or days . . . that’s nothing to worry about. Right?

Review: The Hidden Truth. TL;DR? Buy it. Now.

“So I knew that down the road I would have to steer you away, that I would have to lie to you. And a lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths.” – X-Files

Neal Stephenson, moving through pages at nearly the speed of light, which is his superhero power (since it is obvious he will never have hair like Wolverine®. Neal was really neat (true story) when The Boy talked to him a few years ago. Future post, probably.

There are several books that I’ve made either The Boy or Pugsley read. They’ve both read Farmer in the Sky by Robert Heinlein. But the list also includes Dune (Herbert), 1984 (Orwell), Brave New World (Huxley), Cryptonomicon (Stephenson), The Stand (King), Lucifer’s Hammer (Niven and Pournelle), well, and a few others. You get the idea.

And the idea is ideas – one of the things that books do is they introduce us to ideas and concepts – in many ways they help teach us how to thinks – at least the good books. I had a boss who was the most Zen boss I ever had. He was deeply philosophical in an entirely unphilosophical organization and industry. He liked me quite a lot – since I loved ideas as well. He had a great saying: “Books are the way that one mind can talk to another across time.”

I’m adding a book that I’m going to make The Boy and Pugsley read:

I came across this book via a quote I saw on the internet (LINK), and I was hooked.

Here’s the quote from The Hidden Truth. It’s long. But it only took me about three seconds after I read it to hit “buy” in Amazon (I’ll note again – I get no money if you buy it here, that’s fine – the author gets sweet, sweet money):

“The women’s rights movement had three goals. First, it got women into the workplace where their labor could be taxed . . . . So, with more women entering the workforce the supply of labor increases and wages are depressed . . . .

“Now couples need to have two careers to support a typical modern lifestyle. We can’t tax the labor in a home-cooked meal. We can tax the labor in takeout food, or the higher cost of a microwave dinner. The economic potential of both halves of the adult population now largely flows into the government where it can serve noble ends instead of petty private interests . . . .

“The second reason is to get children out of the potentially antisocial environment of the home and into educational settings where we can be sure they’ll get the right values and learn the right lessons to be happy and productive members of society. Working mothers need to send their children to daycare and after-school care where we can be sure they get exposed to the right lessons, or at least not to bad ideas . . . .

“They are going to assign homework to their students: enough homework to guarantee that even elementary school students are spending all their spare time doing homework. Their poor parents, eager to see that Junior stays up with the rest of the class, will be spending all their time helping their kids get incrementally more proficient on the tests we have designed. They’ll be too busy doing homework to pick up on any antisocial messages at home . . . .

“Children will be too busy to learn independence at home, too busy to do chores, to learn how to take care of themselves, to be responsible for their own cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Their parents will have to cater to their little darlings’ every need, and their little darlings will be utterly dependent on their parents. When the kids grow up, they will be used to having someone else take care of them. They will shift that spirit of dependence from their parents to their university professors, and ultimately to their government. The next generation will be psychologically prepared to accept a government that would be intrusive even by today’s relaxed standards – a government that will tell them exactly how to behave and what to think. Not a Big Brother government, but a Mommy-State . . . .

“Eventually, we may even outlaw homeschooling as antisocial, like our more progressive cousins in Germany already do. Everyone must know their place in society and work together for social good, not private profit . . . .

“The Earth can’t accommodate many more people at a reasonable standard of living. We’re running out of resources. We have to manage and control our population. That’s the real motive behind the women’s movement. Once a women’s studies program convinces a gal she’s a victim of patriarchal oppression, how likely is it she’s going to overcome her indoctrination to be able to bond long enough with a guy to have a big family? If she does get careless with a guy, she’ll probably just have an abortion . . . .

“All those Career-Oriented Gals are too busy seeking social approval and status at the office to be out starting families and raising kids. They’re encouraged to have fun, be free spirits, and experiment with any man who catches their fancy . . . . And by the time all those COGs are in their thirties and ready to try to settle down and have kids, they’re past their prime. Their fertility peaks in their twenties. It’s all downhill from there . . . .

“In another generation, we’ll have implemented our own version of China’s One-Child-Per-Couple policy without the nasty forced abortions and other hard repressive policies which people hate. What’s more, there’ll be fewer couples because so many young people will just be hedonistically screwing each other instead of settling down and making families. Makes me wish I were young again, like you, to take full advantage of it. The net effect is we’ll enter the great contraction and begin shrinking our population to more controllable levels . . . .

“It’s profoundly ironic. A strong, independent woman is now one who meekly obeys the media’s and society’s clamor to be a career girl and sleep around with whatever stud catches her fancy or with other girls for that matter. A woman with the courage to defy that social pressure and devote herself from a young age to building a home and raising a family is an aberration, a weirdo, a traitor to her sex. There aren’t many women with the balls to stand up against that kind of social pressure.

It’s not in their nature.”

Wow. Stunning. And possibly banned in California.

To be clear, I don’t think that there is a conspiracy to create the situation described above, but the outcomes of a huge social experiment are often unclear, and wrapping up the negative social outcomes summarized above into a conspiracy? Genius!

Those are some huge ideas, and that’s just in one chapter. There are plenty of ideas, and I’ll admit that I probably know the sources of many of them. In fact, I’m pretty sure we have many of the same regular watering holes on the web, and probably many of the same values.

But this isn’t like Atlas Shrugged with an 87 page speech that would have taken six days to deliver. No. The plot is tight, and the author doesn’t repeat himself. The book is thrilling – especially the last third.

Interestingly, most of the actual action takes place out of view of the first-person protagonist. Yes, he talked to that person. And now that person is dead. While not the choice of most thrillers, I found it especially effective in this book, especially since it was told in first-person. Only Bruce Willis gets in a running gunfight with German terrorists – in real life, buildings burn down when we’re not around, even though the burning building might have huge consequences, we’re (mainly) just not around when the amazing thing happens. This technique makes the book more realistic.

And the plot? Let’s just say that over a hundred years ago, for mysterious reasons, people started censoring textbooks on electromagnetics. And killing scientists – all related to a scientific conclusion that Oliver Heaviside. Heaviside is probably most famous for taking James Clerk Maxwell’s electromagnetic equations and bringing them into the final form we see today. (If you’re not familiar, Maxwell was a genius whose work was foundational for Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.) Heaviside was also famous for sporting a cool Wolverine (like in the X-Men) hairdo.

If you like this book (as I most certainly did) then you’ll immediately go out and buy the sequel after you finish the first one. It’s that good. And for $0.99, I bought the e-book so I could start reading immediately.

And you should buy this book, too, so we can convince Hans to write some more . . . .

Debt is Awful, But Useful Sometimes?

“You won’t Iose the house. Everybody has three mortgages nowadays.” – Ghostbusters

This is a picture of The Boy, circa a long time ago. His head no longer looks like a plastic fern after about seventy plastic . . . fern surgeries.

Pretty soon after I started dating The Mrs., things started to get serious. As such, I sat her down and had a meeting.

(FOR NEW READERS: The Mrs. is either my wife, or a very advanced schizophrenic construction who has given birth to two children like something out of Bladerunner or Total Recall or Man in the High Castle but they’re not really my children but maybe tiny robots who are programmed to kill me if I ever recognize they are robots. Did I just make a huge mistake??)

John Wilder: “I need to tell you a couple of things. Sit down.”

The Mrs. To Be sat down.

John Wilder: “The first thing is that I chew tobacco.” (I don’t anymore.)

The Mrs. To Be: “Okay.” Not really surprised.

John Wilder: “The other thing is that, besides being tall, blonde, muscular and eminently desirable to all women throughout the Northern and Southern hemispheres (but strangely repellent to those in one particular tiny town in South Dakota – I think it may be something bad in the water there), I am horribly in debt. Outside of the mortgage, I have tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. And tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt.”

The Mrs. To Be: “Whew – I thought you were going to tell me you’d been in prison.”

Thankfully she had a low bar. And that she wasn’t from that town in South Dakota.

Where did I get the debt? The old fashioned way – a little bit at a time, then all at once.

The student loan debt came from college. And college really did get me a great job – one where I had huge opportunity very early in my career. Thankfully I had about 20 years that I could keep paying on that. Because everyone wants a debt they can count on for decades. Right?
Then there was credit card debt. Nearly enough for a new Corvette®. Most of the credit card debt had been used to finance my divorce. If there is ever anything worth paying 18% interest on, it’s a divorce. I may not have a Corvette™, but I also don’t have my ex-wife. How many Corvettes© is not having her around worth? All of them.
Oh, and I owed on the house – that really didn’t count, since I’d been in it long enough to have enough equity in the house to balance out the amount I owed. I could dump the house if I needed to. And there was no need to park a Corvette© in the garage.

A month before we were married, The Mrs. and I also bought our first car together. It was a brand new car. When The Mrs.’ old car gave up the ghost, we bought a brand new truck.

We could afford it, right? It was only $600 a month! Oh, wait, plus insurance.

In retrospect, it was those cars that made me hate debt and analyze every precept I had about money. Pop Wilder had always purchased new cars. Pop Wilder was successful. I came up with the idea that Pop Wilder was successful, and thus successful people always bought new cars.

Going into debt on those two new cars was the mistake that made me re-evaluate my assumption. (Hint – I was horribly wrong, and I go into my car-related idiocy and the rules I learned in detail at this LINK). For the record – I was spending about $6,400 a year in cars before I stopped buying new cars. Afterward? My average spend on cars is $1,800 per year since then. And zero money went to interest payments. Because I paid with cash.

The debt became oppressive. We were scrimping every month, and getting by on as little money as possible each week. Steak? Only when on sale. Otherwise? Burger. Or tuna. Or beans. Or sometimes just mac and cheese . . . .

Thankfully, The Mrs. wrecked the truck while going to get me fried chicken four years later. I took that money (not from the chicken, from the insurance payout on the truck) and paid off the car with The Mrs.’ blood. I never did get chicken that day.

One problem down.

We also did a complete refinance of the house. Since there was equity, we used that money to pay off most (but not all) of our credit card debt. Did I mention that divorces are expensive because they’re worth it?

We scrimped. We saved. We had strict limits on Christmas spending.

And finally, four years after we decided that debt sucked, I wrote the last check to pay off the last credit card debt I’ve ever had. A decade later, I’d sent my last student loan payment in.

Some of the lessons I’ve learned:

You can’t afford a new car. I can’t afford a new car. New cars are for suckers. If you want a new car, come to my house with the money that you’d spend on one. I’ll buy you a used car, and burn the rest of your cash for a nice bonfire. After we used some of it to buy beer.
Student loan debt is good, if used for a degree that gives you money. Anthropology? Art? French literature? Medieval midget hammer fighting studies? No good. Engineering? Finance? Accounting? Probably good. Hint: if the degree has “studies” in the title, it is scam for Marxists to take your money and buy themselves nice things. If it doesn’t require calculus? It’s not college, it’s high school with beer. Downside of student loans? You have to either pay them off or die for them to go away. Bankruptcy is an option, but student loan debt survives bankruptcy. That sounds like a scam, too. If your degree was good, banks would invest in it . . . . Let’s face it: student loans are like Star Wars® – they keep coming back even when you don’t want it and you have to live with them.
Credit card debt is awful. The interest rates are high enough that Henry VIII would have executed you for trying to charge them, though admittedly that’s a pretty low bar, since snoring too loudly could have had Henry sign the death warrant. Use only in a last resort. Like a divorce. Or a really cool sale on PEZ® dispensers.

So, the question is simple. “How did it turn out?”

I don’t have a new car. I haven’t had one since Clinton was president. Maybe when Chelsea is president I’ll get a new car.

My student loan debt is paid off. I had the option to pay it off, but when the next “Payment Due” date was December 21, 2012 showed up, I decided I’d not pay it. Why? If the Mayan® calendar was right, I’d want to die owing them the money. (Spoiler alert: The World Did Not End in 2012)

I haven’t paid interest to a credit card company since my children have been alive. Or do I have children? Or are they robots? If they’re robots . . . they suck at cleaning their rooms. I hope Elon Musk will make better robot children.

Elon Musk Update: Elon Musk Versus NASA

“Also available in Arctic Slut, Morning-After Melon, and Elon Musk.” – The Simpsons

Artifacts from another time – when NASA actually flew rockets into space. In the 1990’s NASA lawyers made them wire the rockets to the ground so that they couldn’t fly and maybe hurt someone. Also, NASA HR has made fart jokes grounds for termination.

When I was a young Wilder, I was in awe of NASA. I was expecting that the moon landing was just a start for manned spaceflight. Successes like the Voyager probe were confirmation – NASA would be leading us into a great new era that would end up with a man on Mars. Spaceflight would be available (at least) to rich people. We’d have great cylindrical colonies up in space, and mining on asteroids would produce massive amounts of wealth. Solar power satellites would beam power via microwave down to receiving dishes and eliminate energy shortages on Earth. And probably some birds.

Ahh, the future. Now back off to the Moon mines honey! Go deal with hard radiation for a week. Then we’ll have Swiss steak! (Source – NASA Ames)

The Space Shuttle was a hopeful idea. Built on the idea of being reusable, shuttles were going to revolutionize space travel. We’d shoot one up every week or two, and the cost would be less than $700 (today’s dollars) per pound. That was the idea, anyway.

Over the course of the 135 total missions it cost about $27,000 per pound. Each mission cost about $1.5 billion. And NASA would send up a Space Shuttle to launch a communications satellite. Yes. Every time we wanted to launch something, we’d put 25% of our space launch ability along with seven astronauts on the line. The shuttle was further crippled by added weight, which limited the orbits it could reach.

In 2007, NASA estimated they could have flown Saturn V (the same rocket that went to the Moon) missions six times a year, with two trips to the Moon, each year for the same price as the shuttle. With the amount of payload that the Saturn V could have sent up, our space infrastructure and time in space would have been significantly higher than with the Space Shuttle. We’d have been on Mars. Actual people.

Yeah. NASA essentially burned our future in space on a crappy space truck. But it’s gotten worse.

The current NASA rocket program, the Space Launch System, has consumed $11.5 billion dollars over seven years. And produced no rocket.

Pictured: Actual rocket. Not pictured: NASA rocket. Because there isn’t one. (Source: SpaceX)

Elon Musk spent $500 million on the Falcon Heavy to develop it, and launch costs are $90 million to $150 million per launch, and it has a greater capacity than any rocket on Earth right now. And a greater capacity than the Space Launch System will ever have. Musk’s only competition is Jeff Bezos, who has a LOT of money and the same ideas.

In perhaps the biggest NASA troll ever, Musk sent his car into space. With a Matchbox® car of his car glued to the dash. Playing David Bowie. With a spacesuit in the car. NASA? Unable to launch bottle rockets – probably because of all of the procedures required to launch one.

How can Musk do this when NASA cannot? Several reasons:

NASA is observably stupid. It started spending money on a launch pad for a cancelled rocket. It spent $200+ million dollars. Then it decided to change the pad for the Space Launch System. As of now, NASA has spent $300 million more. It anticipates spending another $400 million. But the launch pad leans. And it might only be used . . . once. Don’t believe me? Here’s a LINK.

Yes, this is a billion dollars. Oh, the alternative? Yeah, build a complete new one for a couple hundred million. (Source: NASA)

NASA is a jobs program. There are many fine scientists at NASA. Not sure NASA needs any scientists – NASA needs engineers to build rockets and rovers. I’m sure there are plenty of universities that NASA can go to if they need scientists. But let’s pretend that NASA needs a scientist or two. Does NASA need to make braille books for blind kids about eclipses? No, but they did. (LINK) Does NASA need a writer to write about how NASA helped make the statuettes that they give out at the Oscars® shiny? (LINK) They did.
NASA has been given no fixed mission. In the 1960’s, the idea was we’ll get men to the moon by the end of the decade. And they did. The entire world watched while young (less than 40 years old, most of them) men (almost overwhelmingly) conquered the moon. What’s the mission now? To watch while Elon Musk and eventually Jeff Bezos do more than NASA ever could? How demoralized must the government workers be watching future Bond® villains take over space?
Related to the above – NASA has no consistency. Rocket programs start/stop based on the political climate of the day. Bush proposes a rocket, Obama deletes the rocket and proposes another rocket. Manned spaceflight should take second place to unmanned probes. Unmanned probes should take second place to manned spaceflight. It’s like trying to negotiate between Mom and Dad when they don’t even speak the same language.

So, the solution?

Make Elon Musk NASA Emperor For Life®. Give him the money. If we gave Musk the money, we’d be on Mars in five years. We’d have a base on it in seven years. In twenty years, there would be a million Americans living on Mars. We’d start turning the atmosphere into something we could breathe. We’d make the place homey. Maybe in a several hundred years. Maybe a thousand.

Don’t get me wrong. Living on Mars is hard. It’s tougher than living on the top of Mount Everest. It’s tougher than living at the South Pole. But it’s worth doing. Why?

Intelligent life may be very rare in the Universe – it might even be rarer than intelligent life at NASA. The one thing we owe to our posterity is that they be given a chance to live. And even though planets appear to be fairly common in the Galaxy, there’s no real sign of intelligent life around here besides us. This previous week, we saw the nearest planet to our Solar system get torched by a solar flare that we could see from Earth (with huge telescopes). This happened four years ago. If anything was living there before, it was nuked, microwaved, and fried. Colonel Sanders could only sell Kentucky Fried Alien® there, since there certainly aren’t any living ones.

And for how much time of the existence of the Earth have we had intelligent life. 20,000 years? 100,000 years? If you generously (how could intelligent life exist without beer?) assume 200,000 years, only for 0.004% of the life of the Earth have we had intelligent life. And how long has that life been observable? 0.000002%.

When we look at the threats that mankind realistically faces, putting ourselves on Mars should be the ultimate, number one goal of the human race. We face economic disruption (LINK), we face the potential for artificial intelligence being a really tough child (LINK), big asteroids (LINK), super volcanos (LINK), and diseases and other stuff (like reality television) that could wipe us out.

The alternative are space habitats. The LaGrange points (which have nothing to do with ZZ Top®) are relatively stable orbits that math provides around the Earth-Moon system. In the diagram below, you can see that LaGrange 1, 2, and 3 are stable, but tiny places. LaGrange 4 (L4) and LaGrange 5 (L5) are awesome places because they are large – you could put a lot of stuff there and not worry about bumping into each other. And you can stay in those areas for millions of years without expending any fuel.

Here are the LaGrange points, courtesy NASA and ZZ Top®.

The L5 (or L4) colonies are perhaps tougher than Mars. Or not. Manufacturing these habitats would be difficult – you’d have to set up an entire manufacturing complex on the Moon (likely) and pull some choice asteroids into L4 or L5 orbit for raw materials. It’s certain that this work would cost billions and take decades for the larger colonies that would host millions of people. On the plus side? There’s already a song built for the colonies:

Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects,
We possess, so it seems, two of Man’s greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.

-Home on LaGrange (The L5 Song)
© 1978 by William S. Higgins and Barry D. Gehm, via Wikipedia

Here’s a NASA depiction of a space colony at the L5 point. Only NASA would create a colony where you’d have to build a bridge. (Source, NASA Ames)

I really love humanity. I want it to live on until the Universe can no longer support life. I’d like to think that in 2 trillion years that young Wilders (whatever they look like) are out viewing the birth of a new black hole, or watching the latest episode of The Simpsons. Why? All of the Universe, all of creation is meaningless unless we have someone there to watch it in joy and wonder. And to make fart jokes.

Steve Martin, Bob Segar, and Interviewing; or How I Met The Mrs.

Five Year Old: Sounds like a subdural hematoma to me.

Doctor: Three years of nursery school, and you think you know it all! Well, you’re still wet behind the ears. It’s not a subdural hematoma it’s epidural!

–The Man With Two Brains

Steve Martin does not officially endorse my marriage. Officially. And the restraining order says I can’t show up at his house at 4am to ask him to endorse it anymore. I’m sure his advisors aren’t aware that we are really best friends.

It’s Friday, so technically this should be a health post. It’s about health because married couples try to live longer so they can win that final argument, like two old pythons arguing about who is older and has more wrinkles from squeezing Mongolian herdsmen. So, there.

What follows is a mostly true story, except for the exaggerations for the sake of humor or whimsy, I’ll point out when some of the more incredible facts are Really Odd But Amazingly True with the flag (ROBAT). And ROBAT makes me think of a robot bat superhero who texts in ALL CAPS JUST LIKE THIS. But, it’s still amazing because he’s a bat who texts.

Anyhow.

Let’s rewind our clocks back to when Bill Clinton was still indicating that he did not have sex with that woman, and The X-Files® was not starring some wrinkly old people. Cell phones were for the rich and insecure. iMac® was a thing, but iPod© wasn’t and iPhone meant you were talking with someone for whom spelling had little meaning.

I was in the basement of Casa Wilder 2.0 (I’m on 5.0 now) on a stair climber. This particular stair climber was one of my favorite pieces of exercise equipment I’ve ever owned: it used hydraulic pistons that look like shock absorbers for resistance. After about 20 minutes on the climber if a drop of sweat fell off my intensely furrowed brow and hit on of the hydraulic pistons, it would immediately boil off with a sizzling sound and the smell of boiling sweat. And it had cables and rollers that could easily chop off a toddler’s finger. Sadly, they don’t make them anymore.

It might have something to do with all of those nine fingered toddlers.

I was nearly divorced. I’d been separated for over two years, and the paperwork was finally winding its way through the courts for final approval. Why do divorces take so long?

Because good things happen to patient people.

I’d dated several girls, but none of the relationships had gone particularly well. Nothing horrible, mind you, except for the married Internet girl (honestly, it’s like we’re roommates,) and the other married Internet girl (we never even see each other). I stopped the relationships pretty soon after those facts came out.

I had, in fact, said in a prayer one night (in frustration), “Okay, I give up. You figure it out.” I assumed (and assume) that God has a sense of humor. It was a Monday in March, about this time of year.

Recently I’d gotten very, very tired of the same twenty classic rock songs on a seemingly permanent repeat cycle, especially Bob Segar. I can’t listen to any of his music anymore: it was on a rotation of about 2 Bob Segar songs an hour . . . . the same old cliche, is that a woman or a man . . . . No, Bob, if you have such a problem with people making fun of your long hair, cut it.

Sheesh.

The result was I started listening to the post-Nirvana® 1990;s rock on station B which was entirely Segar-Free. It might not have been metal, but it certainly had the virtue of not being Bob Segar. Seriously, you have no idea the depth of my loathing for Bob Segar.

But yet I owe him something . . . .

So, listening to Station B on a Tuesday the day after my cheeky prayer. Every night there was a game show or giveaway. And on Tuesday, the game show was Hollywood Movie Trivia® – the DJ would play a clip from a movie, and you’d have to have to call in first to name the movie. And this one was (for a super-genius like me) ridiculously easy: it’s the movie quote at the top of the post.

The DJ played the clip and then went to a commercial.

I called in. Note that my phone at this point was still corded. Stuck to the wall.

Busy signal.

I hit redial. Busy signal.

I hit redial once more.

Still busy.

The commercial break was almost over, so I gave up and went back to sweating on superheated pistons.

“We still don’t have a winner . . . ”

Redial.

Phone answered . . . “this is Station X. What’s the name of the movie?”

“The Man With Two Brains.”

“We have a winner.” Queue sound effect of ringing bell and applause.

I’d won a CD. White Town, “ Women in Technology. Yeah, it’s not real memorable.

https://youtu.be/_-rbS70uufA?si=MNAOAzswqtRvLu-H

Also, Iâ€™d won a free photo session at Glamour ShotsÂ©.Â Glamour ShotsÂ® was a strange phenomenon in the 1980â€™s and 1990â€™s.Â Essentially you went and the photographer would gussy you up with feather boas, makeup, soft fuzzy light and background.Â Essentially time consuming selfies.

Not pictured: Me. I’d attribute this if I could, but I have no idea of where it came from.

After reveling in my newfound photographic and CD wealth, I started talking to the DJ.Â Seemed kinda cool, we talked for 10 minutes or so. We never would have had the chance to talk for those 10 minutes if the DJ would have had to dump me after the commercials. As it was, the only chance to talk to her and not sound creepy was on that one conversation. (ROBAT – Really Odd But Amazingly True)

The next morning I went to work (city of about a million people) and mentioned to two of them that I thought the DJ was neat. Oh, the DJ was a girl. One of the two friends replied: “I know her, she’s not dating anyone. I’ll set you two up for St. Patrick’s Day.” And she did. (ROBAT)

On St. Patrick’s Day we were to meet at 10 or so. I got to the bar about 9:30. The place was packed, and my friend was spinning mad tunes (is that even a phrase?) and she mentioned that the DJ would be there soon, soon being 10:30 or so. I had some friends there as wingmen, and soon enough I was introduced to the DJ, or, The Mrs. To Be.

I immediately called her by the name she used on the radio.

The Mrs. To Be: “No, it’s really REDACTED.”

John Wilder: “Why don’t you use your real name?”

The Mrs. To Be: “You know . . . stalkers.”

John Wilder: “Oh. (long pause) My friends told me not to bring up stalking on the first date.” (Yes, I really said that.)

We danced. We both realized that neither of us were dancers. We picked out a booth in another room where the music wasn’t so loud.

I got beers for us. We sat down, and the interview started. Yes, I did this (LINK) and interviewed her.

But a really good interviewer (and I was in top form back then) can make an interview seem like a pleasant conversation by a person that’s interested in you. And it was pleasant. And I was interested in her. But I needed to weed out the kinds of crazy that would conflict with my kinds of crazy. And also make sure that the person shared the same core values I did. (ROBAT)

I was pleasantly surprised that The Mrs. To Be was much less neurotic (in the ways that mattered to me) than most of the crazy moonbat girls from my previous relationships. And she wasn’t married.

Yet.

We stayed until they kicked us out of the bar. Why did they kick us out of the bar? Because everyone else had already left and we had been talking for three hours, and it seemed like 15 minutes. (ROBAT)

We walked out of the bar. There had been hundreds of cars there when I’d gotten there I’d been lucky to find a good spot. The Mrs. To Be had showed up nearly an hour later. Yet, there were only two cars left in the lot. And they were parked side by side, with matching dents on the driver-side door. (ROBAT)

Apparently, God does have a sense of humor, and thankfully for me He’s not subtle when He kicks a message out. I walked her to the door, and leaned in for the kiss. (ROBAT)

Which she wasn’t expecting, but, you know, when you’ve got the sign from the Big Coach to run like hell for first base, you run like hell for first base. She kissed me right back. (ROBAT)

139 days later, The Mrs. and I were married in a mall in Bally’s® Casino in Vegas on a Sunday morning. (ROBAT)

Bob Segar, who brought together two people who were utterly tired of his music. Thanks, Bob for bringing us together in mutual hatred! (Image by Adam Freese, CC BY 2.0, Attribution)

Your Business Passion Sucks.

“I can’t afford to sell a west side home for that! But what a fantastical year for pizza by the slice!” – The Simpsons

It’s always a good idea to start a business to take money from people who say, “milady” because they often cannot defend themselves in hand-to-hand combat. Take their money and buy yourself something nice.

The Mrs. and I have had a bunch of business ideas – our Internet pizza by the slice company (we don’t deliver, you have to come pick it up) wasn’t exactly a great hit, but we sold it for $50,000,000 in Alta Vista™ stock that we couldn’t sell for three years. Easy come, easy go.

I kid. This didn’t happen to me, but it did happen to a friend of mine. Don’t worry – he’s been the CEO of multiple companies and has vacation houses in three states.

But one time The Mrs. and I actually came up with a real business plan. We’d read an article on a website back in the day (I actually don’t remember which one – it was a site I used to go to back when Google® was new) about a PC Bang in San Francisco. The concept was that the business rented computers by the hour and sold snacks to gamers who were all connected by LAN (local area networks) to play against each other or as an organized team against other gamers. The name may sound dirty, but it really was a South Korean name that just never wore off. (South Koreans are big gamers.)

The Mrs. liked to play games, and she and I reckoned that a great way to make money would be to take it from chain-smoking gamers – we had e-mailed the author of the article and he told us the concept worked well in San Francisco, but the gamers were amazing at smoking – even teenagers. Since even back then smoking was a thing only demons without souls did inside, the smokers would take a break from killing virtual people to smoke outside.

Thinking this would be a good idea (the PC stuff, not the smoking), The Mrs. and I priced local strip mall rents. We had a place in mind that we wouldn’t even need to retrofit. We put together a business plan. We got quotes on computers, counters, and computer furniture. We got pricing on cash registers and contacted candy, snack and frozen foods retailers. We put together a business plan. Front to back, thirty pages. Included demographics. Everything. The place in the strip mall was awesome – it was right next to a movie theater. Catch the nerds after the Star Wars, right?

I had to work the day of our appointment, but The Mrs. took our business plan and went to her bank (Bank of America) and asked for a small business loan. Hey, the government guarantees that stuff, right? They give them to everybody, right?

No.

They didn’t throw her out because she was a lady. They threw her out because our idea was stupid.

She fumed when she got home.

“I’m going to close my checking account there.”

I’m sure they were upset, because she had exactly $17.43 in her account, plus a box of lint. They even paid extra lint each month on her lint deposit. “Oh, Mrs. Wilder, we would have to shut our doors if you took your $17.43 elsewhere. And here’s your lint.”

I mean, we had cash reserves of $5,000 at that time. Why wouldn’t they loan us a measly $55,000 for an unproven idea?

Well, when I put it that way . . . it sounds stupid. And it was stupid.

See, our problem was that we talked about businesses we thought we would like (I’m not a gamer, but I like candy).

Occasionally, we see some fool with passion and money start a business we had talked about. And then the business would close within about six months.

After careful observation, every business we could be passionate about closed. The successful businesses were ones we wondered “how is that place still in business”?

I decided to observe businesses. Which ones were successful? Which ones lasted five years or more?

The biggest place to occupy was the middle. Stuff everyone needed. Milk. Eggs. Bacon. Quality footwear. Panty hose. PEZ®.

But the competition has scale here. Wal-Mart®, Target©, and the large regional/national grocery stores occupy this niche. And competing against them on price will destroy you. Everyone needs what they sell, but they have relentlessly focused on cost reduction for decades, optimizing supply chains. The result? Cheese has never been cheaper. I can get sushi at midnight in any small Midwestern town. Not great sushi, but Wal-Mart® sushi. And it doesn’t cost all that much. And I can get decent wild salmon anytime of the year.

What about the rest? I know that people sell all sorts of niche products – how do they manage to do that?

Mainly by not making much money. Do people make millions on their YouTube© channel? Yes. If their name is Pewdepie. But if you are in the top 3% of YouTube® channels? You make less than $16,000 a year. Again, not bad posting goofy videos to the Internet, but it shows that the vast majority of people make no money on YouTube™.

And it’s the same thing with the people that sold me a T-Shirt that vaguely references a movie from 1983. (No, you shouldn’t send your kids to Camp Crystal Lake.) They would never make money off of just that one t-shirt. They have to find lots of different shirts like that to sell.

I have no idea where this came from – I found it floating on the Internet. This is a t-shirt I need.

Another example was a local business near where we live. They sold bicycle stuff from 9am to 5pm to the locals (I bought three bikes from them), but their real business for the last 20 years was selling stuff online. They would import cases of, say, bicycling jackets manufactured in China. Then they’d sell them online. Ironically? I talked to the owner and they sold lots of products back to China – the stuff they sent to the United States apparently was only available in the United States, and they had to have it shipped back to them.

But now the bigger bike shops on the Internet have taken most of the market share – the local bike shop is closed. The long thin part of the market they operated on disappeared.

So where do you aim?

With a business you need a broad base of consumers.

You need a lot of people interested in your product. Our PC Bang obviously didn’t meet that.
The product should be a low cost product. Ours would have been low cost, but still would have needed hundreds of dollars in business a night.
The market (ideally) should be an unserved need or a cheap fun thing.

Good examples of this? Fidget spinners. Somebody made a zillion dollars off of those.

When the Japanese first sent cars to the United States? They didn’t send Acuras®. They sent cheap sheet metal things that had great gas mileage because the engines were nearly wind up. And they sold like fidget spinners.

What ideas suck?

I was in a business dinner with a really rich guy – it was our company and his. We were at the nicest restaurant I’ve ever been to – before or since. It makes sense, because the contract we were signing was $270 million. And that was $270 million American dollars, not that wrapping paper they use in Canada. The owner of the firm talked about how the food was wonderful in Houston – and he had tried to create a world-class restaurant in the (smaller) Midwestern city where he lived. He said he had lost a million dollars trying to create an awesome restaurant. So, super high quality is probably not the best way to go when starting out. Think cheap hamburgers. But for a million dollars he had great food for a year!

Who can get away with ludicrously high prices? Apple™. Celebrities.

Think:

Beats® headphones. $45 worth of components for $34,500 a pair (I couldn’t tell you – I buy $12 ear buds).
Whatever stupid crap the Kardashians are selling this week.

So if I were opening a business? I’ve learned a lot. I’d avoid borrowing money early on. I’d avoid everything that I love –passion clouds judgement. I’d look for good deals. My passion would be focused on creating great values for other people – and I’d maybe figure out that Internet pizza by the slice . . . . Maybe I just need an app for that? People buy anything off their cellphones, right?

Dinosaurs, Radioactivity, Time Reversed Sensing, Remote Viewing and The Ultimate Warrior

“Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.” – Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

In 1843 Sir Richard Owen came up with the term “dinosaur” to describe the fossilized remains that were being discovered and studied. Of course, before this point they were considered “dragon bones” or bones from giants because only truly massive beasts could have created bones so big. But we all know it was your momma.

Every once in a while, I like to take a large turn to the weird on Wisdom Monday – primarily because it’s fun. I think that following those that study the paranormal is similar to watching The Ultimate Warrior® take on Hulk Hogan™ for the WWF© title. It’s harmless, amusing, and if you watch it close enough, you just might stumble upon some truth. Ohhh, yeah!

I think that science describes what’s true – and as such, is the very enemy of post-modernist thought – “nothing is certain, nothing is true.” And I am certain that there are many things we don’t yet understand, and many places where the basic fundamental understanding of nature and reality eludes us. This is different than post-modernism. There is Truth. We just need to understand it. And we really don’t.

Like radioactive decay.

Radioactive decay is where an essentially unstable atomic nucleus decides that it’s done with being unstable and dumps a proton like a psycho ex-girlfriend. Or it splits into two nuclei like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck not being in the same movie together. This decay is important, because it likely is the source of heat for the core of the earth that keeps our magnetic dynamo going that keeps the planet habitable. Matt and Ben must be in separate movies so that we can all live.

But the rate of radioactive decay should be constant, right? I mean, if I jumped up and down on a trampoline with a lot of plutonium the plutonium wouldn’t decay any faster. I’d be fried like a pizza roll from the radiation from the plutonium, but the rate at which the plutonium decayed wouldn’t change.

The radioactive decay should be constant.

But it isn’t. It appears to be (in some experiments) a variable. It varies with the time of the day, and the season of the year. Not by a lot, but by about 4% in one experiment. Here’s a graph of the experiment by Sturrock, P.A.; Steinitz, G.; Fischbach, E.; Javorsek, D.; Jenkins, J.H. (2012):

Pretty colors, right? But it also is pretty plain that something is going on here that impacts the radioactive decay of Radon 222 seems to be changed . . . by how close we are to the Sun. Maybe.

This bothers physicists. A lot.

I also recall reading a paper by a Dr. Dean Radin some time ago (LINK – to a .pdf). He performed an experiment with 31 different subjects where they viewed a total of 1060 images. He measured their physiological responses during the testing. They’d see a blank slide. Then, five seconds after they pressed the mouse button, they’d see a slide. Kittens. A mountain. A hot naked person. A seaside. A dismembered body.

What???

Yeah. Some of the pictures were set up to produce an emotional response, but most, not.

About four seconds before the emotional picture, the subject displayed a physiological response. But for those boring pictures? No response.

Read that again.

About four seconds before something emotional happened, the subject knew something emotional was going to happen. Which is not how reality has been defined to us – we’re not supposed to know that something bad is going to happen. But this experiment said . . . we do.

And then there was Project Stargate, started at Stanford Research Institute and eventually folded into an Army project. The movie The Men Who Stare at Goats is a fictionalized version of what went on during the Army project, and it’s not a bad movie.

Yeah. This was a government funded (to the tune of $20,000,000) project in what’s called Remote Viewing. What’s Remote Viewing? It’s fairly simple – a target was assigned to a “viewer” who was asked to describe it. In one trial, the US government was looking for a downed Soviet Tu-22 bomber in Africa – it was converted to a surveillance plane and had all of the latest Soviet goodies (I assume that they had diesel-powered calculators weighing in at only 350 kilograms). The report says the remote view assigned to find it wrote down a latitude and a longitude. And the plane was there.

The government reportedly got information they could take action on for years, in some cases entirely verified by satellite photos and other James Bond-type stuff. In my own personal admission – at one point I got online and did a remote viewing test. I concentrated very hard, wrote down a sketch and my observations, and the following photo was nearly spot on.

Coincidence? Sure.

Science? No way. I couldn’t replicate it. But it happened. And these coincidences have happened to me throughout my life.

We’ve talked before (LINK) about the biggest advantage humanity has – the ability to see into the future. We do it regularly. I can predict that during the month of December, it’s probably not going to be an awesome time to catch a bunch of sun in Fairbanks. I can predict that if I plant grass seed, fertilize it, and water it, at some point I’m going to need a mower. Through our thought processes we can see the future.

But would it have been to our advantage to know four seconds before a saber-toothed tiger attacked? Would it have been subject to natural selection? Would the people who couldn’t see slightly into the future die at a slightly higher rate? Sure.

How could that even work?

There is precedence in quantum mechanics for particles to become entangled that doesn’t even involve alcohol and a frat party – Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance” wherein the state of one entangled particle changed the state of the other particle even though they were far apart. Something about information seems to tie distant particles together – even though there’s no way that they could be tied together, just like Hulk Hogan® and The Ultimate Warrior©.

Is there a coincidence that Hulk Hogan® teamed up with The Ultimate Warrior™ right when the Global Warming© thing began?

And the whole “spooky action at a distance” is difficult to believe, but it is generally accepted, and based on actual scientific observation, but we have problems with thinking that we might in some way be tied into events slightly into the future, or thousands of miles away.

Science can tell us a lot. But we have to wait until Summer Slam ’18 for the results . . .

DNA Testing, Cousin Lovin’, and Khannnnn!

“My father has warned people about the dangers of experimenting with DNA viruses for years. You processed that information through your addled, paranoid infrastructure.” – 12 Monkeys

I come from the land of the ice and snow . . . but this is Denali. My ice and snow is probably closer to Denmark?

So, my mother-in-law gave me a DNA testing kit for Christmas. I’m pretty sure she wanted to verify that I was human. It turns out I am at least 94% human. There’s 2% “Other” (I’m thinking bear) and 4% “Filler” – whatever that is.

The kit that she got for me was from Ancestry.com. It’s a fairly simple kit – there’s a tube that you spit into. It takes about ¼ teaspoon of saliva to fill it up to the line. Since Ancestry sold over 1.5 million of these kits over the Thanksgiving weekend, that’s 375,000 teaspoons of spit headed to Lehi, Utah in a four day period. That’s 488.281092 gallons (150,000 liters) of spit in just 4 days! I guess they need the water in Utah.

How long does it take to test all that spit? In my case, not very long. I put the spit in the mail the first week of January, and it arrived there in five days. They started processing it two weeks later, and about 10 days after that my DNA test results were in. They sure do know how to handle spit in Lehi.

The results are:

Europe West 40%
Great Britain 24%
Ireland/Scotland/Wales 17%
Scandinavia 17%

Low Confidence Regions

Finland/Northwest Russia 1%
Iberian Peninsula < 1%

None of these were a surprise to me. Based on family history and stories, I’d expected just a bit more Danish than 17%, but if you look at the “Europe West” it overlaps Denmark quite a bit. Additionally, the stories that I’ve been told about the McWilder side seem about right. I wasn’t surprised about the Finland or Iberian (Spanish/Portuguese), but those numbers are pretty small.

What is 1%? It’s roughly one direct ancestor back in ~1790 (for me – if you were younger, it would be later, if you were older, it would be sooner, and if your great great great great grandparents had kids young or late, that would skew it as well). But 1790 seems about right.

The DNA data is put into a computer simulator that pulls genetic information into a model and computes how yours matches up against various populations. Are there margins for error? Sure. And are there different models? Absolutely. Once you’ve taken the test, you can upload your data to GEDMATCH.com for free and run it against a huge batch of models. An overwhelming number of models. Really, an overwhelming number of models without guidance. So, I went to look on the Internet, and they suggested I use the Eurogenes K12 model – it models against twelve European populations and produced an output (for me) that looks like:

Population
South Asian	–
Caucasus	4.89
Southwest Asian	1.56
North Amerindian + Arctic	0.57
Siberian	–
Mediterranean	9.72
East Asian	–
West African	–
Volga-Ural	7.66
South Baltic	13.09
Western European	26.41
North Sea	36.10

Looking at this in a pie chart, it looks like this:

For Southwest Asian, think the area around the Caucuses and the Middle East. A different version of the test suggested that this might be Ashkenazi Jewish, to the tune of 1.9%. Mazel Tov!

This would indicate that around 1765 that the Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother Grandpa McWilder talked about is real. And I saw another chart from a Norwegian dude (online) that look nearly identical to mine as far as proportions go. So, yeah, pretty Scandinavian.

But that takes it back to about 256 ancestors. Seems like as you go back in time, the number of ancestors that you have is manageable. So, let’s go back to, say, 400AD, about the time the Roman Empire fell. What, would we need a school auditorium? An NFL® stadium to hold them all?

No. There are 4.6 quintillion ancestors needed. By comparison, there are only 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on Earth (an estimate I saw online).

Huh?

Well, we certainly know that that many people weren’t around, so what happened? Well, have you ever been to a village in upstate New York where all of the residents looked . . . similar? All around the world, there are little isolated villages that have villagers that look the same. Or similar enough that you can see they’re all related.

If you haven’t watched Game of Thrones . . . his parents are brother and sister. Spoiler!

Because they are. There weren’t 4.6 quintillion ancestors, because many of them were duplicated. While there have been a lot of marriages between second cousins, (Professor Robin Fox of Rutgers thinks that 80% or more of marriages in history were between second cousins or closer) after about 1860 you saw the practice come under (in the United States) a rather wide degree of disapproval. In Europe it had been discouraged since the days of Rome, but the 24 of the 50 United States have laws against first cousins marrying. To my surprise. I would have expected the number to be 100% since it is so very icky.

Around the world, first cousin marriage is tolerated in lots of places, but actively encouraged in the Middle East (especially Pakistan).

But that gets us out of needing 4.6 quintillion people (each) to produce you and I.

And those villages produce populations where genes are sampled from. The best I can figure is that it gives a good idea of where people came from in the last 500 years – it won’t tell you in great detail that you were related to Julius Caesar (because you aren’t).

Ancestry.com indicated that I have Mormon pioneer ancestors.

Five years ago, this would have surprised me. But at a family funeral, a relative I’d never met filled me in on the family story.

“Sit down, John.”

Turns out that one of my ancestors had been sent down to Mexico by Brigham Young (an early Mormon leader) to set up a polygamist Mormon colony.

Yeah. Back only five or so generations my great-great-great-great grandfather was zooming across international borders so that he could have multiple wives.

I had no idea, as I’m not Mormon, and NO one in my family had ever talked to me about that. But it’s certainly written in the DNA and confirmed through my Mormon Aunt.

Now I have to go see this.

But it makes sense that Ancestry.com has that data, because Ancestry.com is largely a Mormon venture, just like familysearch.org, which is a free genealogical website. The familysearch.org database might just be a bit suspect as you go thousands of years into the past, as you can go back to find Adam and Eve on it. And Julius Caesar (who had no kids). But it did show I was related to Charles Martel (Martel means “The Hammer”) who was so tough that he thought the title of “King” wasn’t enough for him. And I believe that, because men of status had lots and lots and lots of babies.

Genghis Kahn, who died in 1227, is the ancestor of 0.5% of the men alive on Earth today. Which was probably due to this (disputed) quote:

“The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms.”

And, as the grandfather of 0.5% of all the men on Earth . . . he apparently held a lot of wives. Maybe he was a Mormon, too?