Creating havoc since 2006. Fair use is claimed for images on this site, but they will be removed (if owned) on request out of politeness. movingnorth@gmail.com
I find this picture . . . disturbing. Should this be the XY-Files?
I think that a lot of times, we have no ideas of the capability of humanity. From the ability to understand subatomic particles from the basis of equations and thought experiments that we constructed to the ability to build pyramids and land on the Moon, we continually do lots of stuff the warning label said not to do. And we make bratwurst. Which is, when cooked right, the Best of All Possible Foods®.
Human senses are apparently much more finely tuned than we ever expected and we’ve managed to gather data that we’re way smarter than we ever thought we were. Human senses are adequate to:
Around 60% of the time, judge from a photo if a man or woman is gay or straight. For some reason, this gives gay people the heebee-geebees.
Determine which student came from a rich or poor family with about 53% accuracy. Not super accurate, but better than chance. Perhaps it was because Ivana Trump was in the photo stack?
Determine if people are sick from looking at a picture of their stupid sick face – 81% of the time.
And we might have even more amazing skills:
That could have been the end of it. But another biochemist encouraged the pair to track Milne down and try a blind T-shirt test: She sniffed six sweaty tees from people diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and six from healthy controls. Milne correctly identified which six had Parkinson’s, but she also tagged one of the control subjects as having the disease.
Despite that error, Barran was intrigued—all the more so eight months later, when the same supposedly healthy control subject Milne had identified was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
This is from National Geographic . . . you can view the article here (LINK). It’s not a great article, but I’ll cite the source . . . .
Sick people and well people, I’m not sure who is who, mainly because I don’t care about other people. (Audrey Henderson/St Andrews University)
Yeah, humans can smell diseases. Or, at least old British women can smell Parkinson’s disease, and some people can see them, at least some of the time.
And AI shows that what our brains are doing is processing subtle biological cues that are actual, physical patterns. An AI was set up to determine the whole gay/straight question by feeding it tons of pictures of gay and straight people, and the accuracy of the algorithm was in the high 80% level, if you gave it five facial images per person. Me? My ability to judge gay people vs. straight people is totally non-existent unless I “accidently” open the door when they’re having sex. My ability is zero.
Here’s what the AI figured out: both Gay and Straight people are blurry. NYTimes was where I found this, but it was originally from the original study.
One thing I’ve noted – generally just watching two wrestlers walking onto a mat, I can guess the winning wrestler about 80% of the time. And I can tell which two bratwurst will be tastiest when I grill them. Even if it’s a tie. (It’s always a tie – they’re bratwurst.)
“Nice fish, Ken. You know what Nietzsche said about animals? They were God’s second blunder.” – A Fish Called Wanda
Kids are very expensive, much more so than the tax deduction you get for them. But I’m hoping mine pay back in dividends if I ever need a kidney or four. Don’t think of them as your offspring, think of them as living replacement organ storage.
As most of you know, I’m a big fan not only of Dilbert® (LINK), but also of Scott Adams (LINK). I think that he is the second most perceptive person in our country today. Second most. Ahem.
Back over a decade ago in 2003, he wrote about his financial advice for, well, everyone. He thought that life was pretty simple, and the rules to not screwing up were likewise simple. And, in general he followed his own advice. His list is in bold. My comments follow without the bold.
Make a will. I haven’t done this. I understand that it would solve a lot of problems if I died, but I won’t be around to watch. Unless I become a WilderGhost®. And then I could haunt them as they bickered over who got my circa 1995 mechanical pencil. This is just asking me to take time out of my day and money out of my pocket now so people won’t have bicker in the future. Well, they’re gonna bicker regardless.
Pay off your credit cards. January 15, 2001. That day I paid off my credit cards. For good. The reason I had the balances in the first place was to pay for a divorce, which was quite expensive. Divorces are expensive because they’re worth it. I kid. But not really. Credit card interest rates are high, really high. Whatever it takes to pay off your credit card debt (outside of an overly complicated heist involving George Clooney and a group of tanned Hollywood sex criminals actors and a French goat) it’s worth it.
Get term life insurance if you have a family to support. I’ve always had this, but as I get older the amounts are less – The Boy and Pugsley have less time at home every year, and The Mrs. is getting older, so will have a day less of need for cash . . . each day. Again, Mr. Adams is asking me to fork over cash for things that only are beneficial after I’m dead. Not a great sales pitch.
Fund your 401k to the maximum. It’s now in a comfortable, identified place for the government to eventually raid so they can buy fighter jets, healthcare for people without jobs, and PEZ® for Albanian albinos with alopecia. You’re welcome. I guess I don’t need heat after I retire.
Fund your IRA to the maximum. I’ve never had an IRA. Again, time off from work to go set one up. And I’m confused as to what I would do with an Irish Army anyway.
Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it. Nice, simple language. I’ve owned five houses (on the fifth now) and I think that they’re net neutral as far as investments (I came out well because I negotiated a clause in my offer for my last job. Without that, I’d only be up $10,000. But I’m not really up $10,000, since I’ve had to pay much more than that in upkeep over the years. I don’t expect to make money on my current house when I finally sell it. Don’t live like you have to make money on the house – houses can be really crappy investments and can also kill your financial soul (LINK).
Put six months’ worth of expenses in a money-market account. This simple measure means that emergencies are not as threatening. If you have six months – you can get rid of stuff, change your financial structure, and find a new source of income. If you’re waiting on next week’s check to pay your (late) power bill? You’ve got no maneuvering room. Money is stored freedom. Have some hanging around. Corollary? It’s easier to get that level of cash if your expenses are low.
Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement. Great advice. Wish I would have done it. But my money mainly showed up in lumps. So, I need to (gradually) get it into the stock index funds. The last thing I want to do is dump all my cash into a market near an all-time high. As a side note: almost every single stock I’ve ever bought has been a poor decision, since I was just picking randomly, not with a value investment strategy like Warren Buffett uses. Thankfully, I’ve not hurt our family, since my stock picks have been limited in size to the point I only care marginally.
If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, or tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio. Never trust a person whose income is decided based upon their choices with your money. Pay them upfront.
Things I would add:
If you’re a guy, don’t marry early. Thirty might be a good number. Have some really lousy relationships before you select “the one”. Because the wrong “one” will mess your finances up for years. But you might walk away with good stories.
If you’re a girl, find the best guy you can. Early (20?) marriage is okay for you, provided he’s on his way in his career and can afford stuff. It’s probably preferable to marry early. (Uncomfortable Truth) Oh, and girls? It appears the stereotypes are true. Don’t sleep around before you get married – the number of guys a girl has slept with is directly correlated with probability of divorce. It doesn’t work the other way around, the ability of a guy to be faithful seem to be unaffected by the number of partners they had. Don’t shoot the messenger – the facts are the facts.
Don’t have kids. I’m joking. If you’re reading this blog, you should have a dozen or more, because you’re smart, handsome, and the world needs more of your type. (I’m not kidding.)
Don’t have kids outside of marriage. You’re just as financially entangled, but no snuggle time.
Don’t marry someone you’ll divorce. How would you know? You followed my steps one and two.
Don’t have kids with someone you’ll divorce. Kids rarely make a relationship better. And they certainly won’t make the house smell better.
Don’t buy a new car. Unless you have a million dollars. And probably not then. (LINK)
Nietzsche, circa 1875. He was 31 in this picture. His mustache was 44. I wonder if when his neighbors were loud and he was trying to sleep if he twirled that thing up and used it to plug his ears?
Now don’t go asking me how many of my adders that I’ve broken. Okay, I’ve broken 1., 3., 5., 6., and 7. That’s how I knew to add these to the list . . . experience, like a divorce, is expensive. And worth it.
Remember what Nietzsche said: “That which does not kill me makes me stronger, but it does make me unable to retire at age 45.”
“J-Roc, I’m not a pessimist, I’m an optometrist but you gotta keep your eye on Randy, he’s doin’ stuff. I don’t trust that guy, I don’t.†– Trailer Park Boys
The Boy with his first pair of glasses. He might be ready to be an NFL® referee.Â
If I were an Optometrist, I’d be afraid, very afraid?
Why?
The Optopocalypse is coming, and it’s coming fast.
What’s the Optopocalypse?
To get to that, you have to start at the beginning . . . .
Optometry was originally the practice of figuring out which glasses went with which eye. The first pair of glasses for corrective vision were most likely used in Europe about 700 years ago. They were Ray Bans®. Tom Cruise (who never ages) may or may not have been the first customer.
Books mentioning how to fit people with eyeglasses date at least as far back as 1623, with nary a mention of Johnny Depp, who, to be fair, only smells that old. And Benjamin Franklin saw that there was a LOT of real estate left on the eyeglass, and he invented bifocals so he could stare at the ladies both far away and up close. Franklin was a genius, and his invention (probably around 1784) was the most significant invention in optics up to that time. All so he could see the ladies. And the Constitution and stuff.
So, ladies, swipe left or right? (Image Courtesy Federal Reserve)
And that brings us to the most significant innovation in optometry since Franklin’s bifocals. EyeQue™’s Personal Vision Tracker®.
I might be overstating it, but I don’t think that I am. EyeQue™ is a system . . . and it’s a pretty cool one.
I have worn glasses since I was about 20. My original pair were round gold-rimmed glasses, because Indiana Jones® wore those, and it partially made up for the fact that they wouldn’t let me carry a bullwhip and a pistol around the college campus. It was amazing (the glasses, not the lack of bullwhip, that sucked). I remember looking out over a valley in winter the day I got them, the outline of the mountain was so crisp in the winter air. And trees! They had individual branches that had edges and everything!
My prescription hasn’t changed much since then. It’s been stable for decades. Most recently I’ve been wearing glasses that were made before Pugsley was born (Pugsley is 12 now). They work fine, but they’re twelve year old glasses that are scratched a bit. I’ve been to the optometrist more recently, but my glasses were getting pretty bad.  One pair was eaten by a puppy (you could still use them but the lenses had little teeth craters in them), one was scratched up and the nylon that kept the lens in place broke.
I’d been meaning to go to the optometrist two years ago (just for a new prescription, no other problems) but she had cancelled my Saturday appointment. My choices? Take a day off of work to go see an optometrist, or . . . wait. Waiting always works.
Second day air brought me the EyeQue™. It’s pictured. It consists of a small plastic cylinder with a rotating eyepiece. It straps to your phone screen.
After you get the physical diagnostic piece (which I’m assuming contains prisms, mirrors, elfin magic and a small piece of dark matter) you have to download an app. Once you’ve done that, you use the serial number that came with the EyeQue™.  The app, curiously, asks if you have a screen protector, but doesn’t ask you to remove it.
I tried it on my cell phone, but since I’d not updated my Android operating system since 2015 (really), I used The Mrs.’ updated phone and logged into the app.
The device/app combination is ridiculously easy to use. The eyepiece is dialed between 1 and 9. You start at 1, and use the + and – keys on the screen to make a green line and a red line merge into a gold line. Most boring video game ever. The only difficult part (and it isn’t very difficult) was to make sure that you could see both lines at the same time. After you merge the lines, you tell the app that you’ve done it.
You then turn the eyepiece on the EyeQueâ„¢ to 2 (I assume this rotates the elfin dark matter, but if you don’t rotate the eyepiece it won’t work.) . . . and repeat until you’ve gone through all 9 settings. Then Gandalf’s voice comes on and says, “You shall not pass.â€
That’s one eye. Repeat for your left eye. Unless you’re a cyclops, in which case Odysseus would like a quick word with you.
Done, right?
No. You might be not very good at easy tasks, or drunk or something. EyeQue™ makes you do the same nine measurements at least three times on each eye, for a total of a (minimum) of 54 measurements. I’m pretty sure this is to make sure that your readings are consistent, as you have to have a minimum cumulative score prior for it giving you the measurements of your eye required to order eyeglasses. I got the max score each time, so only had to repeat the process three times.
I wrote my EyeGlass™ Number (that’s what EyeQue™ calls it) down. They looked pretty close to my last prescription, but my last prescription had probably been through the laundry, eaten by prescription-moths, or taken by Russian operatives to be included in the Trump dossier. Whatever. It was gone. But the numbers looked right.
I got online.
I went to Zenni Optical (LINK) and bought a relatively inexpensive pair of glasses to test out the numbers (I won’t call it a prescription) that I got from the Personal Vision Tracker. I waited nine days, and got my new glasses.
Wow.
Wow.
I’d never had a prescription so good. My go-to test required the stars to be up . . . I looked at Orion, and, boom, you could see that the third “star†in his sword was really two stars. I’d read once that this was a test the Sioux had used to see if a young man could be a hunter – he had to be able to see the two stars. And I could! Even the bifocals were awesome! Now I must get ready for the hunt.
I’ve since ordered three more pairs of glasses from Zenni (more on that on Monday). All of them work stunningly well. All of them are amazingly inexpensive.
The Boy is similarly nearsighted, and has a fairly recent prescription, but is pretty sure his isn’t as accurate as it could by – he thought my glasses were better than his. I can buy another subscription to the Personal Vision Tracker® for him (LINK), and will do so tonight so he can get some better glasses. The cost of the subscription is a bargain – and is fair, reflecting the tremendous amount of time, research and effort put into programming this wonderful App.
The idea that I can, in twenty minutes or so of easy work in my home, get a stunningly accurate set of numbers that I can order cheap glasses online is amazing. It is revolutionary, Ben Franklin level (but with less time in France). Let’s be honest – the only reasons anyone goes to the optometrist is:
Because they need glasses,
Because they have other vision issues/symptoms, or
Because they are married to the optometrist.
And you should go to an optometrist regularly for b., because going blind isn’t a laughing matter. But there is no reason to go (anymore) just for an eyeglass prescription, which is the revolutionary part of what EyeQue™ has done.  (Contact lenses are different – and the Personal Vision Tracker® is NOT calibrated for those. And you people who stick your fingers in your eyes make me shudder.)
Right now there are only 23 colleges that graduate optometrists in the United States. That’s probably too many. If you take the ENTIRE population of the United States and say they should get a checkup every four years (young people longer, older people more frequently) and it takes 15 minutes for a checkup, you only need . . . (working 40 hour weeks) 3,500 optometrists. A visit should cost a little more than $25 for the fifteen minutes for $200,000 of revenue per optometrist.
Currently there are 40,000 optometrists, and they’re trying to sell you expensive glasses, and vision data that you can get very accurately now for a fraction of the cost of even the $25 visit, I can see this profession going down by 36,000 in the coming years. Maybe if I’m off it will come down a bit less, but even a reduction of 30,000 at an average total compensation rate of $120,000 yields a savings to the economy (and consumers!) of $3.6 billion every year. And people will see better! It’s a win-win, unless you’re an optometrist.
So, the Optopocalypse is coming – and I predict a 90% attrition rate. This type of dislocation always happens with professions where technology changes a profession, just like Ned Ludd (LINK) leading the frame-breakers in response to the industrial revolution. You can’t stop the tech.
Yup, this is a drawing of Ned Ludd. Great fashion sense. Also, a giant. (wikimedia, public domain)
I’ve not been compensated (yet) for any relationship with EyeQue™ or Zenni Optical®. And I might never be. But any link that gets me compensation will be noted as such on the page, should that ever happen.
Also, I’m a blogger, NOT A DOCTOR. THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. The only thing “blogger†has in common with “doctor†is that they end in a similar sound. Do your due diligence on this or any other advice you get from the Internet. Heck, there’s one site that says you should avoid setting yourself on fire!Â
“Lies are like children: they’re hard work, but it’s worth it because the future depends on them.” – House, M.D.
Pugsley, prior to going for his midnight shift in the PEZ® mines.
I was talking to a friend yesterday when he mentioned that he had been transferred to manage a group of newly graduated college kids. To be clear – this group of college graduates is in no way typical – I imagine that they’re making in range of $80,000-$90,000 a year. Not Harvard Law money, but still pretty good for the small(ish) town my friend lives in. So, as a new manager to the group (he’s been managing people for decades, and he’s a good one) he got the group together to explain what he was looking for from them, what his general expectations were of his employees. In one line that has been standard for him for years, (I heard it from him when Bill Clinton was President) he indicated that he expected the group to put in, on average, fifty hours a week.
Chaos!
Pandemonium!
My friend had become Literally Hitler.
He eventually backed down to forty-five hours per week, and was demoted to just being Literally Saddam Hussein.
As he told the story, I laughed.
The irony is that these college grads that actually do put in the long hours that my friend suggested will soon be so far ahead of their colleagues that their colleagues will never be able to catch up with them: the harder worker will have more knowledge, more skills, more credibility, and very soon, much bigger raises and promotions. Their colleagues will call them, “lucky.”
90% of success is showing up on time. At least 5% is working just a bit harder, so your skills build up faster, especially when you are young. (The remaining 5% is turtles. All the way down.)
What’s the point in all this hard work and achievement? To be rich? To stress yourself out to the point where you have a heart attack in your 30s and die?
No.
The point is Value Creation.
One of the coolest aspects of the capitalist system is that it allows you (really, forces you in a purely capitalist system) to be of value to your fellow man. Capital flows to those that create and provide value. So, in a truly capitalist system, you create wealth for yourself by creating value for someone you might not even know or ever meet. Bill Gates made money when I bought my copy of MicroSoft® Word™, and yet he’s never invited me for dinner. Nor will he, unless that restraining order lapses. I’ve told him to stop calling me, but that man won’t listen.
Value creation is like magic. You take an idea or concept to make someone else’s life better, and then you create a product or service out of wood, metal, plastic, or just plain computer code, or, like this blog, just out of pure ideas. If your idea is good, people will buy it, eat it, or read it, but probably not all three, unless it’s breakfast cereal.
Capitalism is simple – you (should) make money only when you create value for someone else. Value Creation is nearly alchemy. Alchemy was (at least in part) focused on turning lead into gold. Capitalism is better. It can turn cow poop into gold – when sold as fertilizer. In a capitalist system, we transmute lower valued items into higher valued items every day.
The flows of capital follow the paths cut by Value Creation. Those people (and businesses) that are best at creating value get more money. What do they do with that money? Do they put it in a box? No. They use it to create more value.
And that’s what my friend’s newly graduated college students do not get. The business isn’t there for them to have a great life. It doesn’t exist to pay them a living wage. It won’t pay more because housing is more expensive where the business is. Companies pay based on the value the employees create. Don’t create more value than somebody else would for minimum wage? You’ll get minimum wage. Don’t create enough value for a three bedroom house on two acres in San Francisco? Your boss and company don’t care.
In the end, it’s Value Creation. How do you do it?
“I must have started drinking again, because the woman who tried to activate a supervolcano with a giant fork is standing here, and you’re all acting like it’s a potluck.” – Warehouse 13
A picture of Abraham Lincoln as he was fighting against both the Confederacy and German engineers.
“The world was a web.”
This wasn’t the quote from a Tom Petty song. These were words that would echo through my head for two decades.
I started to write a novel back a long time ago. It started with those words.
And the novel itself? Oh my. I’m sure that if it ever saw the light of day someone would name an award in its honor for the worst novel of the year.
But . . . “The world was a web.”
There are words that haunt you through your life, and this sentence haunts mine, just like wondering how it felt while the Roman Empire was ending (LINK). I have been, since as long as I can remember, really fascinated by the unravelling of society. Once I went to the Wikipedia entry for “Apocalyptic Novels” and just nodded. I’d read nearly all of them. (I just revisited the page, and it’s all filled with editorial stuff, so, much less useful. I won’t link it.)
But the late author James P. Hogan (I read most of his stuff) wrote a novel called “Voyage to Yesteryear.” It’s a good one, though out of print, but to me, it had a fairly stunning philosophical analogy.
We as humans think a lot (and live with) more or less reversible processes. I put ice in the freezer, it freezes. And then it melts. Though once upon a time, I don’t think that there was anything at all in physics that would have predicted that the ice would have floated on the water (most frozen liquids sink – if you freeze gasoline, the frozen stuff drops to the bottom), but it turns out it’s pretty important, especially if you’re a fish. You can stay in the nice liquid water while the ice freezes above you, which, I imagine is important to a fish.
But the second discussion from the novel is that some changes are irreversible – if you burn your laptop in your charcoal grill, there is simply no thawing it out afterwards to get your keyboard to not look like a bunch of charred Doritos®, or get back all of those downloaded pictures of Emilia Clarke from Game of Thrones® or all of your Tom Petty MP3s. Those are gone, dude.
The fire (presumably from a dragon?) goes beyond the phase change represented by freezing and thawing. The physical structure has been changed to the point that it’s not remotely recognizable. And you can’t go back. There’s no way to find all the carbon atoms that baked off your display and combined with oxygen and put them back in the screen, let alone the same place in the screen that previously held them.
It’s gone, dude. And even the Roman Stoics (LINK) knew this prior to Rudolf Clausius coining the term “entropy,” which led indirectly to the U.S. Civil War through a series of humorous translation errors that made Abraham Lincoln think that Clausius was making fun of his big hat.
But let’s go back four score years (that’s 80 years, for those who are used to the metric system) from that hatastrophe. What happened then? Besides Ben Franklin being in the prime of chasing every young lady who could spell “yes” there seemed to be this revolutionary event. Pardon. Revolutionary event. Like the American Revolution.
And you just can’t go back. You can morph into something different, but you can’t go back. There are some ideas that are so radical, so amazingly simple that once they pop out – they hold the attention of almost everyone who hears them. The American Revolution was one such thing – you could never turn back after that.
Unless you hit reset. I was leafing through the Internet as The Boy piloted our car up the road for a short road trip – I alternated between reading and a light nap. The light naps were ended with (small) bursts of adrenaline when our cars trajectory was different than my half-snoozing mind expected. It’s like Dad radar. Even asleep I was looking for that change we could never recover from.
On article popped up during the ride about the Yellowstone Volcano, and how NASA was developing a plan to stop it.
Reread the sentence above. I’ll wait.
NASA has become convinced that a massive volcano is of greater threat to humanity than asteroids. I mean, both would ruin your day, but Yellowstone seems to pop off a continent cleansing burst every 600,000 years or so (last one 630,000 years ago) and some folks with a LOT of time on their hands at NASA are convinced that they should be the ones that handle it.
What NASA thinks might be in the volcano.
They’ve even advanced plans on how to stop it. And, I’ll admit that saving the lives of upwards of two billion people might even be considered a laudable goal in some circles. But not me.
It’s not the saving all of those people that I object to. I’m probably neutral on that, unless one of them is me. Then I become a raving supporter.
I don’t give NASA any slack. If it doesn’t involve activities that directly get humanity to Mars, I’m thinking that they should just close up shop and give the money to Elon Musk (LINK), who actually seems to be interested in space exploration.
But even worse, it appears that NASA is letting people write stuff that have NO understanding of math: the NASA plan involves pumping water (which is not exactly in huge supply in the Rocky Mountains) into the magma chamber and to extract the heat. Which has how much to do with NASA’s mission? Zero. Maybe less.
Here’s the latest mission I could find:
To pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research.
So, if this involves trying to cool hot coffee so you can drink it faster by adding an ice cube or two, I’m on board. Takes a few minutes, doesn’t distract NASA from their actual day job.
But in this case the coffee is 11,500 cubic miles of coffee. At 1300˚F to 2400˚F. And NASA wants to cool that. With water.
Okay, I’m pretty sure that drug testing isn’t required to work at NASA. But the amount of heat we’re talking about is simply staggering. At a depth of five miles (that’s 8km to the “people who use money that looks like Christmas paper, and also happen to use metric”) to the top of it, keep in mind that this magma pocket sends pockets of superheated boiling water five miles through rock. The amount of energy is stunning – almost as much energy as a D.C. NASA bureaucrat with a liberal arts degree uses to avoid doing work on a typical Tuesday.
First, the good news!
I won’t bore you with all the mathy stuff, since The Boy and I figured it out. It’s not hard, it’s just thermodynamics done in hotel room on three sheets of hotel room note paper.
Let’s say you had to cool the Yellowstone magma chamber. Latest number that I had on how big it was? 11,500 cubic miles.
Cubic miles. Drive from Seattle to Los Angeles. That’s 1137 miles. Do it 10 times. Next to a mile high wall of magma. Or just once. Next to a ten mile high wall of magma. That’s a mile thick.
Hmmm.
But, let’s pretend we can cool that 52,800 foot high wall with water. Where do we get it?
Well, the Colorado River is a big one. Let’s pump all of that to Yellowstone to cool it down. I’m not going to bore you with even more thermodynamics, but you have to heat the water, and then add even more heat so it boils. (I actually saw one billion dollar business venture implode because they didn’t know you had to add the extra heat to make it boil).
At the current flowrate of the Colorado River, it would take 435,843 years to cool the lava.
I know that NASA seems to not math very well anymore, but, given past rates, Yellowstone would have exploded at least one more time, if not two. And the people in Los Angeles would have to go nearly a half of a million years between bottled-water drinks.
And that’s the good news – that only half a million years of concerted effort beyond anything the world has ever seen will maybe stop one human extinction.
But some scientists worry that the addition of the cooling water might turn the magma chamber brittle – increasing the likelihood that Yellowstone would explode in a big catastrophe. And that’s the good news!
Second – the bad news.
But that’s really not the point. There are a whole host of things that are much more likely (given the last 100 years or so) than a 600,000 year periodicity (like Yellowstone has) volcano to mess with our world.
But most folks look at this risk incorrectly – there’s a probability of occurrence, but also a severity related to the risk. Low probability events occur everyday, but they have low severity. I might lose yet another hair on my head, never to return. But the impact? Not very big.
An asteroid the size of Dallas heading towards, well, anywhere at 50 miles per second? Bad day. For everyone. Yet heart disease is more likely to kill me than the kinetic impact of an asteroid.
As catastrophes go, that’s pretty bad. But research (dating back 15 years or so) on genetics of humanity indicate that it’s likely that 70,000 years ago after the supervolcano Toba lit off, only 2,000 humans remained. Not on Toba. Anywhere.
We were that close to the lights going out on us forever.
These big, nonlinear events are very low probability, but they have a huge impact, and may impact the ability of the human race to appreciate Tom Petty.
Think aliens like Tom Petty? They should. But who can account for taste?
“Truth is, identity theft isn’t hard. A number and an ID is all you need to drain a bank account and return some money to some very surprised retirees. But why stop there? As long as you’re stealing someone’s identity, why not use it to contact some known terrorist organizations on unsecured phone lines? Why not use it to threaten federal judges and insult the local drug cartel? Most fun I’ve had in Miami.†– Burn Notice
Come and Take It was a Texan callback to Leonidas and his comment to the King of Persia. Not an invitation to my bank account, weasels!
Turns out it was my credit card company. I only have two credit cards, pay ‘em off in full each month, and they’re issued by the same bank. Why two credit cards? That will become apparent shortly . . .
Bank Lady: “Mr. Wilder, did you open an account with us on July 12?â€
Since opening a credit card account is something I do, on average, every five years or so, I shook my head.
Since this isn’t the future, she just waited until I answered in actual words. “No, I’m pretty sure I’d remember that. Besides, I’m too busy digging in the blogging mine each night to take valuable minutes of my day to eat, or open a completely redundant credit card account.â€
“Well, someone did. And, Mr. Wilder, they have your birthdate. And your Social Security Number.â€
Great. There’s another one of me out there – exactly like me, but with a goatee. Oh, wait, no . . .
I need a gold sash. Does it matter if yours is on the left or right?
Name, birthdate, and Social Security Number are the trifecta for an identity thief. Those were the Holy Grail of information. With that information, anyone can open an account. It wasn’t another person – it was a thief!
Me: “How much did they charge?â€
Bank Lady: “This is weird – looks like nothing. Only the annual fee. We sent the card and it was returned to us. I’ll cancel this account.â€
Me: “Where did they send the card?â€
Bank Lady: “Looks like Texas.â€
Great. Stupid hot summers, and now full of credit thieves. Stupid Texas.
And I wondered how I got hit? I’ve tried very much to practice safe financial practices:
No online banking.
Shred all personal information and credit card offers before throwing away. Preferably treat like a witch and burn. Bonus points if the credit card offers scream while burning.
Only share information with those that “need†it. I had to punch a Nun one time because she was too nosy. My religion? That’s “need to know.â€
I wear latex gloves while in any bank. No reason. It freaks them out, though.
I had dreaded this moment. There is some portion of my personality that is works off of fear. There is some part of your personality that works off of fear, too (LINK). The oddest part of this fear coming true?
The dread was gone. The identity theft had happened, and it was “go†time. Let’s fix it!
Me meeting evil me. Or is it me meeting nice me? Probably me meeting nice me.
My second call was to my bank. I verified my account balances and wasn’t missing any money, though I did tell my banker about the time that over 10% of my net worth went missing from my account (LINK).
She laughed. (And you will too – read the story).
I also asked her about account security. Since she wouldn’t talk to me without a special code that was texted to me, that was nice. Additionally, she said:
“I see that you don’t online bank, and you don’t have a debit card. You should be good.â€
Let that sink in. My banker just pointed out that online banking and debit cards are huge potential security holes.
And they are. I did some research, and it turns out if you online bank and get hacked? You’re screwed. This one gentleman had nearly $1,000,000 lifted from his accounts over the course of months because his laptop was hacked. And debit cards? That’s like walking around a pitbull pen in porkchop panties. Not a good idea.
My last call was to LifeLock®. I vaguely remember the CEO put his Social Security Number (457-55-5462) on billboards, on commercials, and everywhere. I also remember that someone opened a fraudulent line of credit on the guy. And I seem to recall hearing that the CEO went to the thief’s house and kicked his butt – I think it was a story I heard on the radio. I can’t find any record of this online, but I like the concept: “If someone messes with you, our CEO will go to his house and beat him with a broken pool cue.â€Â That’s one way to earn a consumer dollar!
I normally hate the hard sell, but this day I was okay with it.
So, I got the double-platinum bejeweled version of LifeLock®. Normally I like to think about financial decisions before I make them, you know, let a bit of reason kick in so I make a sound decision.
This wasn’t rational thinking. It was total, complete reflex action. Doctor taps my knee with rubber hammer? Knee jerks. Robber takes personal information? Wallet jerks. I want the best plan, you know, the CEO ass-kicking plan. Can LifeLock™ waterboard? If so, I want to add that to the plan.
Can I get the “Wet Electrodes on the Nipples†plan? Oh, yes, I’d pay double.
A thief took my information.  Could they get more? Yup.
At 6:50 AM Monday morning, my bank (credit card) texted me, asking if I’d made a purchase from an online store at 5AM for $300. They’d declined the purchase.
Did I make the purchase? No.
If there is anything that all Wilder family members are in agreement on? 5AM is the devil’s time. We should sleep through that. And, my bank probably noticed that. And also noticed I don’t live within 750 miles of the state where they asked the stuff to be delivered.
So a thief has my Social Security Number, my birthday, my name AND my credit card number. One of those I can change (credit card). Actually, two if I decided I was transgender. Then I could change my name, too. But I would be an UGLY woman. But I could be Laura Ingalls Wilder. Has a ring to it?
I have not been nor ever will be a geologist. Just sayin’.
My bank politely asked me to call them. When I did, they asked me if there were any purchases that I had to make today?
No. I’m okay.
(THAT’S WHY I HAVE A SECOND CARD! Two is one, and one is none. Always have a backup on important stuff. And I even carry emergency cash. And a small parachute. And a nosehair trimmer.)
The credit card number I’d had for nearly 14 years was cancelled. A new one, with a new number, would be headed my way immediately, per my bank.
And it turns out this is fairly common. 11,000,000 people a year have to go through this. So, statistically?  It’s not if, it’s when it hits you. Sorry to be the voice of bad news.
But now I have to deal with other stuff. Notify the IRS (there’s a number for that) and notify the Social Security Administration (there’s a number for that, too), because both of those are also conduits for fraudsters to mess with my life. Somebody messing with my tax return, which in some years would buy a small country in South America (very small country, like an acre or so). Somebody taking my Social Security (don’t want to get old and find out that somebody other than politicians has stolen my Social Security).
And it gets even more twisted – identity thieves are also stealing identities for getting prescription drugs. And for having medical bills charged to other people.
And, honestly, I think that’s where my leak was. I think an M.D. I went to hired a sticky fingered weasel that deserves to be nipple-electrocuted like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, since that’s one of the few places where I can see all the above information being in one place.
I’d pay extra if they let me be Gary Busey. Not in the movie. I’d pay extra just to be Gary Busey.
Note: John Wilder has received no compensation for this post, or any of them, yet. If LifeLock(R) offers me a big pot of money? I’m on it.
“When a man of Scotty’s years falls in love, the loneliness of his life is suddenly revealed to him. His whole heart once throbbed only to the ship’s engines.” – Star Trek
Why, oh, why does it not say Texas Pain RELIEF Institute?
Daniel and I were friends from second grade onward, until I moved away.
I’m not sure if it was our mutual love of Mad® magazine, parody, or wearing army fatigues that we found here and there and the unearned ranks, units, and qualifications we’d poorly sew onto the faded olive drab fabric (I’m pretty sure I was a sergeant of a unit that never existed). We’d regularly sleep over at each other’s houses, throw up poorly breathing nylon tents in the back yard, and then go on maneuvers with our toy rifles; fording quickly flowing rivers or assaulting fortified hills. Daniel even managed to find a Korean-era K-ration we were too scared to eat. I mean, it smelled okay, but . . . . And we each shared magazines we certainly didn’t want to let our parents know we had (hint: boobies). And I still have one book he made me promise I’d return to him because it wasn’t his, this really has weighed on me, and I’m not kidding.
What magazines we looked at may or may not have looked like. I plead the fifth.
During the school day we skipped lunch together, talked science fiction together, and told bad jokes together. Our conclusion on Mel Brooks and Hogan’s Heroes? The best things on television, ever. Carrie Fisher and Sigourney Weaver? Our goddesses, along with Madeline Kahn. Especially when we saw Carrie in a bikini one night at Daniel’s house. Wow.
It was also Daniel who taught me that in Tom and Jerry, Jerry was the evil one.
When I visited him at Easter I knelt and did the novena, even though I wasn’t Catholic. We were brothers. Daniel and I belonged to the same tribe, until time and distance pulled us (mainly me) away.
This week a study (really, a metastudy, or summary of other studies, which is like a summary of Game of Thrones for your friends who don’t watch Game of Thrones) was released about loneliness and how being lonely negatively impacts health. (Hint, being lonely is worse than being obese, drinking too much, or not having enough Pez® to stick to your eyebrows on St. Johns’ Day in Nova Scotia.)
AARP commissioned a study that says that 42 million people older than 45 suffer from “chronic” loneliness. Since there were only 120 million people older than 45 when they did the study, that means that over 35% of those people over 45 are . . . sad. And it’s very sad when that many old people with that many wrinkles are sad.
What does chronic loneliness do to you?
Nothing good.
It increases your odds of death by . . . 50%. That sounds like a lot, and it is. That’s almost worse than the wrinkles.
So in the age of Facebook®, people are less connected to one another. In fact, in another study they found that old people who relied less on email and social media for their social connections were . . . happier. Let me write that in blazing letters across the sky:
Facebook® is no substitute for calling the people you know and love and talking to them. Period.
Let this be a reminder, the people on Facebook™ have bad morning breath, have bad armpit smells, and leave their socks all over the place (except, of course, me). But to a lonely spouse, or worse, and idealized memory? Not so much.
Well, my parents had dinner parties. When they were in their 50’s I was still a pup, and had to got to go to their dinner parties, at least when they were at our house. The couples would get together, and they’d immediately split up. The ladies would go the kitchen and drink whatever Mom made for ‘em, even though it smelled like something that would catch on fire if a stray spark veered by.
The men would retire to the dining room (nobody smoked anymore) and drink bourbon, scotch and talk about elk hunting, war (real, actual war) stories, or how the weather was, or what the crops were like. Someone would make an off-color joke, and give me a wink and a nudge. Really, it was always Vern that did that. Honestly, most of the jokes were right over my head unless they were directly and obviously about boobs, but at least I was part of the game.
After drinks, there would be dinner. Which would also include drinks.
The gatherings were even more wide ranging than that – on occasion we’d go spend the night, for instance, at a cabin deep in the mountains that one of the families owned. During the course of that weekend we built a mountain road with a road grader, rode horses, and I outshot all of them with Pop Wilder’s .222. Oh, I and won a game or three of Risk®.
We hunted together with Pop Wilder’s friends. We went on wide-ranging 4×4 trips deep into the forest at 12,000 feet. We rode snowmachines together. Although I was certainly the junior member, more than anything it looked like a tribe – a group of friends that supported each other and shared in each other’s joys and sorrows as we snacked on ziplock-fresh sandwiches at 12,000 feet.
And today I don’t see that. Although I know a zillion adults, most of them don’t get together like this. Most of the adults I could get together with like this (there’s a pretty big implied trust) live very far away.
In our current world, we spend our time chasing our children on their adventures (wrestling, football, academics, Boy Scouts, etc.) and focusing on our spousal relationship, and finally, work. I know that sounds like the best way to spend your time, but . . . is it, really?
Right now, as a family, we depend upon the iron triad of children, work and spouse. All of my adult friends (locally) come from either my children or my work, or, IS The Mrs. What happens when work changes (this is a minority of friends we see, so not much) or the kids get older? Two thirds of the local social network dries up. That day.
And, I recall that the social network for my parents lived on with them after I graduated. After Pop Wilder retired. It was a durable network. They may have been alone, but they were never lonely.
In some weird way, we seem to have taken the informal support networks from men and women. We seem to have replaced them with the evanescence of work and children.
We have, when those support networks crumble over time, ignored those left over. And they get lonely. They don’t have Vern attempting to turn the butter into my thumb when he passed it to me (it never worked, I was young and fast, and he was older and a bit inebriated).
Where are they now? Are they in our past, those who trust us with their very souls?
There is an endless summer.
That endless summer contains every single day young boys spent together in a world bound only by imagination, in a world where each barley field represented a chance to crawl on our bellies toward enemy lines to stop the Germans in their tracks, or to stop the Cylons® before they could hit our main base. One last swig from the canteen before we braved the minefields and tried to take out the German 88mm gun before it savaged our boys to pieces.
We played at life, at courage, at understanding where we fit in our tribe. We discussed love before we knew what it was. We discussed right and wrong when we were living it. We displayed strength because it was intertwined with our being.
I called Daniel’s number tonight for the first time in years. I remember their house, and I know right where they were when they picked up the phone, heck, the number was familiar with me. They remembered me through the fog of ages.
I’ll talk to Daniel soon.
Why did I wait so long? Guilt. I felt (and still feel) that I’m the one who killed our endless summer with the starting of my car and the loss of my virginity. I’d left the fields of play behind. I’d left the best friend that I’d ever had or will ever have behind.
Tonight I gathered up the courage to make the call back towards summer, the call back to the innocence of boys bound together in blood, in bad comedy, in Steve Martin, in mutual, total trust.
And we’ll go back to the summer, where we belong. At least for a few minutes when we talk.
Did it get dusty in here? My eyes seem to be watering.
Nobody gets to be lonely in summer . . . especially not an endless one.
“But on this Earth, Rome never fell. A world ruled by emperors who can trace their line back two thousand years, to their own Julius and Augustus Caesars.” – Star Trek
Wilderus, Welthius, and Wisus, the original Roman Edition.
When a star starts its fusion cycle, it starts off with nice, ecologically friendly hydrogen. The star transforms this into helium, using just a bit of energy to send to nearby planets so that they can make Pez®. Eventually, the star will start fusing helium in its core. This causes the boundary of the star to move outward, and the star becomes a red giant.
If the star is big enough, it will continue creating heavier and heavier elements through fusion, each of them in turn making heavier elements. Until the star starts creating iron. Whereas the fusion reactions (including those that form iron) all produce excess energy, iron fusion actually consumes energy. The collapse of a star that starts fusing iron is rapid – the energy required to push the mass away from the center of the star disappears. The mass begins to (quite rapidly) fall inward back to the star. All of it. All at once.
And we call that a “Supernova,” which I hear is a pretty neat surf ride. I voted to name it “Wildernova” but was overruled on the grounds I hadn’t been born yet.
Great cultures have fallen in the past – Rome is forefront among them, since, from founding until the fall of Byzantium (that’s the Eastern Roman Empire) it lasted 2200 years. But there were others, the Mayans, the Greeks, and my next door neighbor when I lived in Alaska. All of those cultures passed away over time.
Since you can’t be a professor and not make up theories and stuff (the job has to look like work at least some of the time) Joseph Tainter came up with his theory of The Collapse of Complex Societies, which he published in a book in 1988. Like many people who have really good ideas, Tainter has been milking this one for quite a while, which I heartily approve of. If they’re gonna buy the same stuff from you again and again? Keep selling it! Heaven knows Aerosmith hasn’t had a new song since 1985.
Tainter’s book is quite accessible, and much shorter than one would imagine with a good idea. Most people take twenty pages of fascinating ideas and stretch them into several thousand pages of books, PowerPoints, and training sessions. Not Tainter. He packs his twenty pages of ideas into a Spartan 267 pages, including end notes.
A note about buying the book: DON’T. I spent $35 for my copy nearly a decade ago, and now a new copy is $47. Plus tax. So, unless you like paying $0.176 per page of book, DON’T. Why did I spend so much? Dunno. I’m cheap, but this book kept being referenced EVERYWHERE, so I thought I’d buy it.
I think it’s so expensive because it’s technically a textbook, and thus normal supply and demand economics don’t work with textbook publishers. Boy, when the Internet takes that group down, I’ll be smiling.
Anyhow . . .
Tainter suggests that societies start small, and aren’t very complex at the beginning. As the society grows in size and scope, it begins to become more complex. And then? Problems start. We have a water heater that supports four normal-human length showers, or one shower by The Boy. Thus, a new rule. Everyone showers BEFORE The Boy. But that has unintended consequences. Now I have to get up earlier to make sure I don’t have to take a shower in water colder than Shia LeBeouf’s jail cell.
Now I have to get up earlier. Since I have to get up earlier, I’m groggy while I drive to work. Since I’m groggy, I forget my coffee, now I’m double groggy and less sharp at work, and don’t create as much value. Then the Cubans invade, sensing weakness, and we have to move to the Rockies to defend against the Soviets. Go Wolverines!
You see how this works.
Actually, the above is a (slight) exaggeration of Tainter’s theory. You start with one rule, and it has unintended consequences that require other rules. Which . . . create more unintended consequences, requiring . . . more rules.
Pretty soon, most of society is either closely governed by the rules, or is so enmeshed in all the rules that they just want to get out – rather than society’s efforts going to create a comfortable life for the citizens, society’s efforts go into . . . supporting society’s rules.
I was reading Seneca’s (the dead Roman) Letters several years ago when one passage struck me . . . Seneca was writing to his friend and mentioned in passing boating regulations in Imperial Rome. Boating regulations. From that you can infer that the Romans had entire bureaucracies working on the correct size of a gladiator’s loincloth to the proper number of grapes in a bowl to be served to the Caesar. And, eventually, people got tired of the regulation. How bad did it get? Bad enough that they had to make a regulation stating that if you were the first born son, you had to do what your dad did. Farms were going unplanted because farmers’ sons were walking away to go do something less regulated, so they had to force them to be farmers. Except they just ignored the rule and walked away, in time.
Additionally, Rome had to support the infrastructure required by the Empire. An Empire requires food, roads, and bridges. And slaves. And Pez® factories. And an Army. And this stuff costs money. Retard the economic progress of the productive folks through regulation and add in a bunch of stuff they have to pay for, and you’ve got trouble.
Plus, let’s say you’re a Roman dealer in granite countertops. When your great-grandfather started business, all the granite was nearby, but the best stuff was used 20 years ago. Now they have to bring it in by ship. The cost of your business goes up and so does the societal energy required to get that granite. Food and wine have to be brought from farther and farther away because, in order to feed over a million people living in Rome, you had to get the stuff here, and it wasn’t like you could walk down to Caesar-Mart to get Hot Pockets® at 2AM. It took much more energy to feed the people of Rome.
And did you see that there were a million people living in Rome? There were as low as 200 million on the whole planet, which would be like a modern city having 0.5% of the world’s population living there, or 350 million people living in one city. (Tokyo is currently the biggest in the world, at only 33 million.) While not overpopulation, this population concentration was costly in an economic sense.
The outward signs of Rome’s weakness were the Goths, Vandals, and Jocks sacking Rome – but Rome had to defeat itself first, just like the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI.
Eventually, Rome fell, but primarily because its citizens decided, quite voluntarily and rationally to shed a layer of complexity that no longer served their purpose. It was as if they were a star, and started fusing iron. And all the Romans ran together at once at full speed into the center of Rome and mushed into each other. And exploded outward at the speed of light.
“Honor? I’ve got seven kingdoms to rule! One king, seven kingdoms! Do you think honor keeps them in line? Do you think it’s honor that’s keeping the peace? It’s fear! Fear and blood!” – Game of Thrones
I don’t ask for much. I just want to die as I came into this world – screaming and covered in someone else’s blood.
In 1943, Abraham Maslow had one of the two ideas that cemented him in the public consciousness, sort of like a Johnny Depp of years’ past, but with more showers than Johnny usually takes.
This idea (the other idea was, “If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”) became known as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. For obvious reasons it isn’t known as Wilder’s Hierarchy, though . . . that’s coming soon, I hear, maybe even by the end of the post! (Foreshadowing!)
Maslow’s Hierarchy is often shown as a pyramid, because Maslow only intended for his psychological work to be used for ancient Egyptians, since that greatly reduced his malpractice insurance. Also, his patients could not sue, being dead and all. Upon further reflection and remembering that mummies could come back from the dead if they were played onscreen by really hot people, Maslow changed his mind (and his insurance carrier) and decided that Maslow’s Hierarchy was universally applicable, even onto inanimate objects, like bankers and rocks.
I kid. Everyone knows that rocks have feelings.
Anyhow, Maslow’s Hierarchy was really his way to describe how and why people act the way they do, and asking them is just too darn hard. Maslow’s Hierarchy became really popular in the 1960’s and 1970’s and was used to explain absolutely everything in public education from why kids hate split pea soup to why they are attempting to knife the teacher. But what is the pyramid?
By FireflySixtySeven – Own work using Inkscape, based on Maslow’s paper, A Theory of Human Motivation., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36551248
At the base of the pyramid are the physiological needs – things like breathing, food, water, shelter from the cold, cold winter of your parent’s disappointment. These were the needs that Maslow felt you couldn’t get past unless they were met. You’re not exactly thinking about writing poetry when you’re drowning, so Maslow said you were stuck down here. Interestingly, Maslow felt that sex belonged here, too, despite all of the bad poetry written by involuntarily celibate 15 year olds . . .
Moving right along, Maslow said if you were fed, warm, and could breathe after sex, you could worry about security needs. Me? I worry about staying awake. Maslow might be the only person who locked the door to his bedroom after sex. For the record – Maslow brought up sex first.
But, these security needs weren’t just having a loaded carbine when your Zombie Grandma (LINK) shows up at your bedside. These security needs also include (according to Wikipedia®):
financial security,
health, and,
“safety net” against health problems.
If these sound familiar, this appears (to me) to be the level where almost every political argument is waged. You don’t hear any politicians saying that they’ll get you all the air you can breathe, but they do sure fight for the “government will take care of me” vote.
I imagine Al is normally pretty well adjusted. But TSA? Yeah. They take it out of everyone.
Since when do I worry more about my 401k than my family? Since Maslow said so? Hmmmmm. We might be seeing some cracks in this philosophy.
Next on the list is esteem. This means people accept you and value you. You provide worth to those around you. You’re a ninja in a room full of evil kittens (unweaned, eyes closed, but still REALLY EVIL). And you have those throwing star things. And two samurai swords.
See what happens when someone harshes your esteem:
Esteem is awesome. It’s excellent! I love it when people worship the stuff I do. I also love it when people hold me accountable for the things I don’t do. It means that what I do matters. And if it doesn’t matter? You don’t get real esteem.
I think this is where the current world begins to diverge farther and farther from the social reality. I love soldiers. 95% of them are awesome! But not every single one is a hero. Many are awful people. Again, I generally see the uniform, and I sense pride. But to claim that all are heroes means that none are heroes. All have the same esteem, so they all have none.
Another interesting note (well, it was interesting to me) is that one of the leading causes of depression among men over 40 is . . . loss of esteem, usually job-related. When I say depression, I mean (shhh) suicide. Which if you believed Maslow, this would just send you to your friends, and not all the way to square zero.
At the top of the pyramid? Self-actualization. It’s like if Wolverine® could do math. Oh, wait, that’s Tony Stark. Self-actualization was Maslow’s fantasy of how it felt to be Albert Einstein walking around everyday, but without the autism. This means you’re living your full potential without restraint. It must be how Jeff Bezos feels everyday now that he’s all pumped up on testosterone and has those big guns (arms) and big guns (actual rocket ships). Heck, it’s likely he even has large artillery somewhere.
The rich aren’t like you and me – they have cannon. (With apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald.)
Later in life, apparently after watching the TV show Kung-Fu or maybe seeing Led Zeppelin on stage, Maslow added a capstone:
SELF-TRANSCENDENCE. Remember how Connor McCloud of the Clan McCloud could do and be everything after he chopped all the heads off of all of those people in Highlander? (SPOILER ALERT FROM 1985) Yeah. Apparently this was what Maslow envisioned when he added this to his pyramid.
I’ve been snarking at poor old Maslow this whole time, primarily because he looks like a well-meaning hippy from today’s standards. And I’m not sure he deserves it, but, really, it sure is fun. Ironically, my comments are tame compared to the criticisms of his fellow academicians:
Ethnocentric – individualistic versus communal. Soviet Union fell, dude.
Peacetime Vs. Wartime – war combines the two bottom parts of the pyramid so that security takes on the same level of importance as eating. Which, except for a few hundred years in a few small places on Earth?
I Could Have Done It Better – Well, sure! What part of the pyramid are you on? Sissy.
Okay, can I criticize it better than those idiots?
Absolutely.
Maslow entirely neglected the concept of time. If hunger has been gnawing at me for weeks, it’s a very different story than if I’m worried about being hungry tomorrow. Hunger forever gnaws at the soul. (Not the sole – who eats feet?)
Likewise, a brave man will jump on that grenade for you in combat, whereas one who has been sitting at the bottom of a trench for a week might just want to see you gone because you snore or eat your own toenails.
The concept of time is crucial.
And, on further reflection? Most of our motivation comes not from a clear and shining purpose – it comes from fear. And fear is time-dependent. The longer it goes, the more it nips at your soul. And those we rightly call heroes are those that overcome that fear, both in the short-term and during the long game. We used to call that character.
So, I make the following Modest Proposal:
Let’s call this . . . the Wilder Hierarchy of Fear™ – (represented by a blob, not a pyramid) starting with –
First Fear: Fear of not having Pez®. And not breathing. And not having food. And freezing to death. This fear will make you do stupid things, especially in the short term. Longer term (a week or so) it might even grow into a debilitating fear.
Second Fear: Family Survival. Fear of losing your family. Many times it will overcome the First Fear, unless you really, really like Pez® more than one of your children.
Third Fear: Bloodline Survival. You like your kids. You want them to have more kids. Why? It’s good. Especially if you read this blog, because your IQ is totes above 125. And we need more of you! Fears of financial failure fall in here.
Fourth Fear: Fear of Shame. You have people you work with. People who look up to you. People who admire you. You don’t want to appear weak or incompetent or dishonorable to them – in many ways, that’s worse than death, because it puts a blight on the family name.
Fifth Fear: Fear of Lack of Achievement. Me? I have to wonder how much more I could have done if it weren’t for the Pez®. Stupid Pez™.
Sixth Fear:Fear You Aren’t a Marvel® Superhero. Name says it all. WHY DON’T I HAVE ADAMANTIUM CLAWS???
Noting that the First through Fourth Fears are driven by a desire to save your family and your community is pretty easy. And maybe, maybe, I should change it to a pyramid. Why?
“Yeah, that’s nothing. Peter would spend millions just to mildly annoy Gavin. These are billionaires, Richard. Annoying each other means more to them than we’ll make in a lifetime.” – Silicon Valley
So, I met William Shatner. He wasn’t as thrilled as I was. I saw him sign this, for me. It looked like he wanted to get to the Holiday Inn and soak his feet.
Part of great success is built by luck.
Yes, that’s a declarative sentence, and of course I knowmy old granddaddy Quintin Tarantino used to say, “The less a man makes declarative statements, the less apt he is to look foolish in retrospect,” but I’ll stick by this one.
One of my favorite stories is about an author who submitted his novel to about a zillion publishers, only to be turned down by all of them. All of them.
He was working a crappy night job at a dry cleaner, and after the novel came back, in a fit of anger he threw it into the trash, right on top of last night’s dinner. He had given up. His wife, however, still had hope. She picked the novel out of the trash. She replaced the cover – the old one had gotten spaghetti sauce all over it – and she sent it in.
One more time.
The publisher loved it. Soon a book contract. Then a movie, “Carrie.”
Yeah, that was Stephen King. How many Stephen Kings are there working that just never got a break? That didn’t have Brian dePalma direct a masterful movie off of their work? Hundreds? Thousands?
Heck, I have my own magnum opus I wrote on construction paper about a robot that could kill all of humanity and then died. Because . . .
Dang, that was the hard part. Yes. Because humanity was so strong!!!!!
But, that’s me, not Stephen King.
Stephen King can write fiction that millions want to see. But he was lucky he married a woman who believed one more time than he did. Unlike my Mom, who cried on the construction paper. She told me she was happy, but I still think those weren’t happy tears.
Let’s switch gears . . . .
Pick anyone named Bill who is wildly successful, and I’ll point to the break that they had – the luck – that got them over the top.
I’m NOT saying that Bill Shatner isn’t a gift to the world, because clearly he is. But he was the second person who sat at the helm of the Enterprise, not the first. He had a stroke or two of luck in that one . . . But I follow him on Twitter®, he doesn’t follow me. (Yet)
There were thousands of people who competed with Gates. But we should all be honest: it took more than one lucky break for Gates to end up with enough money to buy up all of the Pez® in the world three times over:
Gates was born rich. Not mega-rich, but rich. As we all know, that’s the best way to get rich (LINK).
Gates had access to computers at a private prep school when only NASA, MIT, and The Hair Club for Men had access to that kind of computing power.
He met lots of the “right people” at Harvard.
He was lucky enough to bring some of those “right people” to Microsoft®.
He had a lucky meeting with IBM®. They’d use his new DOS® software, because (laughing) WHO WANTS TO OWN SOFTWARE? Look at this cool green screen!
Bill eventually won – he built a monolith of a cash-generating company from the ground up. At the right moment in history, Mr. Gates either developed or found:
The Right Vision. As early as 1980, the vision was a computer on every desk, in every home, running Microsoft® software. By 1998 geriatric grandfathers had them to get e-mail from distant family. By 2002 they were getting e-mailed photos regularly. By 2004 they were sending money to Nigerian Princes and sending out virus-encrusted email greeting cards to EVERYONE in their address book.
The Right Skills. Bill Gates developed a wide variety of skills beyond his programming chops – he developed team leadership skills, accounting and sales skills, and the skills to hire the best.
The Right Team. Windows 1.0 sucked. So did Word 1.0. So did Excel 1.0. They were the WORST. But the team did second and third versions that were so good, so strong, so well integrated that dominant products like “Lotus 1-2-3” and “WordPerfect” were smashed harder than an Amish girl at spring break in Cancun.
The Right Business Environment. The early vision of computers on each desk meant . . . they had to be usable. They had to provide value. They had to be something that people wanted to use. By creating that software, by creating Windows 95™, Gates got rid of the old constraints of the IBM clone as a business machine, and brought it into the home, massively multiplying the user base in a single year.
Mr. Gates was always going to do well. He had too many factors in his favor from day one, even without the family wealth and support. That was like having a springboard. With his intellect at that time and place? No way Bill walks away with less than $100,000,000. He was going to create something awesome no matter what. But one of the largest and most profitable companies on Earth?
Nah. That wasn’t a cinch.
Again, I’m not saying that these Captains of Industry (Gates, Musk, Jobs, Thiel, Bezos, Brin, Page) aren’t worthy. They most clearly are. (But do you think that Page gets mad that I put Brin first?) Again, clearly, each of them would have been very successful without luck. But luck has played a part in vaulting each of these men into the massive success that they now enjoy. (I was tempted to throw “clearly” into that last sentence, but, I think you’ve gotten the point by now. Clearly.)
So you should Get Lucky.
Good heavens! There must have been a LOT of bad decisions in the 1980s. Starting with this album cover.
Well, you’re in luck! I have a fairly short list that I’ll expand at a future point, when the astrological signs are right:
Hard Work – There is no substitute for this. Okay, there is. Massive piles of talent and luck. And money.
Live in a Big City (A Rich One) – For heaven’s sake, if you’re not rich? Hang around rich people! They have opportunity, and, most importantly, businesses you can learn to work with. And . . . run.
Work In a Job Where The Money Is – There are rich cities and poor cities. And there are rich portions of the economy and poor ones. Would you rather work at the place where they recycle used water bottles, or the place where they build underground secret bases for aspiring Bond villains? (I’m looking at you, Elon Musk).
Expose Yourself At Your Best – Have you ever seen that show, Cops? It’s every person, ever, at their very worst day. On film. Honestly, we all have bad days. And we all have things we’re bad at (hopefully the thing you’re bad at isn’t personal hygiene – and it wouldn’t be, since you read this blog – you must smell like roses and fresh bread, and that’s on a bad day!). But when you get a chance and you’re with a billionaire? Show him what you do best. Unless what you do best is eat Pez®. Focus on things you can do for the billionaire that make him even more money.
Believe You’re Lucky – Sounds crazy, right? No science behind it? But if you believe you’re lucky you’ll see good things when others see only bad. You’ll see opportunity when others only see stone walls. And if you stare at the Sun long enough . . . WAIT . . . don’t do that. But I’m not kidding – believing you’re lucky makes you lucky. Me? I’m the luckiest guy you’ve ever read, unless you’ve read something that Keanu Reeves wrote, because that man is golden (LINK).
In 2016, there were 540 billionaires living in the US. If 35% of them inherited their great gobs of billionaire cash, that leaves 351 who did it themselves. Yay, them! That gives you a 0.000117% chance of being one.
By doing the things I’ve listed above? If you’re really smart (like 140+ IQ, PLUS read this blog)? That means you can force those odds several orders of magnitude closer to your own private island. Maybe even to 0.01% of a shot at the Tres Commas (A Billion has Three Commas) club.
This much, much closer than you could ever become with a lottery ticket. And, the good news? You will certainly become a millionaire, you know, with the shameful two commas.
All of this is better than winning the lottery. Certainly your biggest shame? You’re only a millionaire.
But none of this will allow you to become as cool as Bill Shatner. Because there can be Only One True Shatner!
A picture of Abraham Lincoln as he was fighting against both the Confederacy and German engineers.
By FireflySixtySeven – Own work using Inkscape, based on Maslow’s paper, A Theory of Human Motivation., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36551248
