Medical Advances, Pop Rocks, Agriculture, and Nic Cage

“News team, let’s hunt.” – Anchorman

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The view from the coffeemaker (story below).  No coffee was injured in the making of this post.

I was talking with a coworker at the coffee machine back when I was working in Houston.  Our offices were in the 45th story of a gleaming skyscraper.  Very futuristic.

“So, Mr. W, what do you think the most important invention was?”  I have no idea why he called me Mr. W, but it’s been a theme – Mr. W.  No idea why.

“Ever?” I asked.  This was the setup.

“Sure.  Most important invention ever.”

“Agriculture.”

I love it when I look into a person’s eyes and literally watch their brain slowly melt from the answer they just got.  That was the case here.  For a full fifteen seconds he didn’t move, blink, or breathe.  I think his brain was rebooting.

After he got past the login screen:  “That’s . . . that’s a good one.”

I had that answer ready because I’d been thinking about just that.  What was the most significant invention in history?  Heck, even the Bible talks about it – the story where Cain (the farmer) killed his brother Abel (the sheep herder)?  It’s potentially an allegorical story about where agricultural civilization replaced the earlier pastoral civilization that’s come down to us over thousands of years.

Or maybe Cain was just a dick.  I kid.  We all know Abel had it coming.

However, agriculture was transformative.  Prior to that, it was hunting, gathering, and herding.  Or starving if you didn’t know how to hunt, gather and herd.

Notice that I didn’t say that agriculture was good for us.  There are plenty of ills that came from agriculture, but it was undoubtedly the most significant transformation that humans have ever encountered, with the possible exception of the invention of Pop-Rocks©.  I heard a kid ate a whole bunch of Pop-Rocks® and then drank a Pepsi™ and his stomach exploded.

pop-rocks-cola-faq

I found this, oddly, at the Pop Rocks© website, where they assure me that their product hasn’t killed anyone recently.  That they know of.  I kid.  Pop Rocks™ has a website to assure you that you are in no danger of a stomach rupture eating their product – it’s here (LINK).

I heard that they experimented with a product called Pope Rocks©, but it was made illegal because it reportedly turned water into wine, which is totes illegal in Utah.

Oh, yeah, I was talking about agriculture.

Agriculture was an important step – it made people stop moving around.  If you planted a crop, you had to stay there and grow it.  And if you stayed there, and had food?  Now you had to defend it.  And you had to have houses.  And you could make pots.  And buy furniture from StoneAgeIKEA®, which was largely abandoned by 3000 B.C. because no one had invented screws or hex wrenches.

Just that one invention changed economics, developed division of labor could exist.  Mankind now had farmers, soldiers, generals, and developed taxation and accountants.

Yeah.  Taxes.

But this didn’t make mankind a bit healthier.  In fact, it made the average person die sooner.  Oh, and when they died?  They had new diseases like arthritis.  And they didn’t grow as tall or as robust as their nomadic ancestors.

Why did we do it?  Dunno.  Women like houses, probably.  And men could brew beer (which happened to show up about the same time as the first agricultural settlements.  That same downfall occurs throughout history – women and beer.

native american

I assure you that you didn’t want to mess with this guy.  And he was probably average.  Not sure that Twinkies®, cars, and air conditioning helped his overall health . . . . and I’m sure that Google® now thinks I want to see pictures of shirtless men.  Oh, the things I do for you, readers.

Let’s face it, not everything that modern medicine has done has helped our health.  Some studies have shown that the nomads and herdsmen, on average, lived longer than the farmers that followed them in history.  Oh, and don’t forget, if you don’t have farms, no need for slaves, right?

But let’s look at medicine more directly:

What actual changes have made life healthier?

  • Well, agriculture has increase the overall amount of nutrition. We wouldn’t be able to feed everyone on Earth if we didn’t have that.
  • Maternal vitamins and nutrition make healthier and smarter babies. That’s good.
  • Sanitation is amazing. Not living in poop somehow makes you healthier.  Who could have imagined that?
  • Cheap food. Hard to be healthy if you’ve starved to death.
  • Pest control. Vermin are also not real healthy to live with.  Plague and all, right?

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  • Clean drinking water is much better than the alternative, but not as good as Scotch, which I guess is another alternative, so clean drinking water is second.
  • Antiseptics are good. Much less Civil War surgery.

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  • Antibiotics are also pretty good. I’m pretty sure that they’ve saved my life more than once.

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  • Trauma surgery is now awesome – many things you would have died from 20 years ago are now survivable, from gunshots to car accidents.
  • Vaccinations are, on balance, probably good. Is there proof that they kill people?    More people have died from HPV vaccinations than from HPV.  So, yeah.  But I’ll skip the small pox, thank you.  Oh, they don’t vaccinate for that anymore?

So, what’s not on this list?

  • End of life care. It’s expensive.  And it barely makes life longer.
  • Many cancer treatments are difficult and require hacking and poisoning the sick person. Some really do extend life, for decades even.  (Some don’t do much of anything.)  But none are more important than clean water, exercise, and PEZâ„¢ to human health.
  • Most really expensive diagnostic tech. Sure, some of it is awesome, but I’m not sure an MRI machine is all that awesome.

What societal changes are actually hurting health?

  • Cheap food. Yeah, it’s a paradox.  Starve or be fat.  Sue me.
  • Automatic stuff.   As a whole, we have to do much less work than 20 years ago.  Much, much less than 40 years ago.  And 100 years ago?  Oh, my.  Elevators replaced stairs.  Natural gas replaced firewood.  Cars replaced bikes.  Exercise drops through the floor.
  • Climate controls. I’ve got a theory that if you turned off the air conditioning and the heat in your house you’d actually be healthier.  But this theory will never be tested because I have The Mrs., for whom climate control is a right up there with free speech and free shotguns.  Thankfully she likes it about 60°F in the house all the time, too.
  • What is in Doritos?  40 different ingredients, many of which have never been incorporated into the diet of a human until the last 50 years.  What’s in a steak?  Cow, which we’ve been eating as soon as we developed spears.  Because steak is worth building a spear and chasing a wild, untamed giant auroch through the forest.
  • Lack of genetic culling. I’m not in favor of this as a policy, but it is a fact that the genetic pool is degraded over time when people who would have died out reproduce and pass along defective genes.  Let’s look at me:  I wear glasses, and developed the need about age 20.  I would have made a crappy nomadic warrior, so, unless I was smart, I would be squinting at the horizon while Ugg and Trevor chased the hairless caribou across the frozen tundra of the African veldt.  And no food for my family.  So we died off.  But wait!  This is 2018, and I’ve got lots of kids because I don’t have to squint, but glasses?  Yeah, that’s a thing for half my kids.  Ugg and Trevor had kids with keen eyesight.  Again, not a policy since I like my life and the kids I have, but as we save more people with health issues like my nearsightedness that can be passed along genetically?

Like anything, there are good and bad effects of changing our civilization.  Without agriculture, we never get to the Moon, but we also never get Nicholas Cage movies.  A tradeoff?

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Friends, Flexibility, and Value Creation: Keys to a Corporate Career

“The thing is, Bob, it’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care.” – Office Space

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I’m glad cats don’t run corporations.  They like to play with their prey before they kill it.

The economy is changing.  That’s a newsflash from every decade since Sunday in 12,241 BC, when Chieftain Brad Von Thundernose (he snored) invented bacon-wrapped shrimp.  Unfortunately, Brad was allergic to shellfish, and puffed up like Elvis on carbohydrates.  Brad aside, if you look back in the distant past to the year 2000 (which, for some of us, used to sound futuristic) you’d see that the largest five companies were:

  • Exxon-Mobil®
  • General Electric™
  • Ford©
  • General Motors®
  • Wal-Mart™

What were the largest five companies in 2018?

  • Apple™
  • Amazon©
  • Google®
  • Microsoft™
  • Facebook©

They’ve all changed.  And these are the five biggest!

I’ve been fortunate to (so far) to be able do the same thing for most of my career, admittedly not with the same company.  I’ve generally been okay doing it – in at least one place I’ve worked some things I set up literally saved the company a few years after I left.  That’s nice – the thought that hundreds of folks still have a job because of something I did.

And at a different company, I saved a career.  Pay attention and it might help yours, too.

Let me explain:

A friend of mine was offered a chance to move out of our department and move into recruiting.  She took the opportunity.  Then the economy took a downturn.  And she didn’t get along with her boss.  And was close to getting fired.  I told her she was over thinking it – no way that they would fire her.

This particular person was smart, talented, and personable – not smelly, irritable, and brooding like your humble author.  I checked around and found out how close she was to getting fired.  The answer was very close to being fired – they’d started the 90 day clock before the final paycheck.

As a department head, I knew that she was better than many folks everyone that I had in my department.  Her boss, however, “didn’t want to transfer a problem” and “this person isn’t a good fit with the company’s values.”  That’s HR speak for “it’s personal.”

Thankfully, I managed to drag my boss into the idea that she’d be perfect for our department, and he was able to go up three levels of management to convince his great-grand boss that she’d be a great fit.

Today?  She’s an executive VP, hauling in the big bucks (seriously big bucks), but she had to change career focus after leaving my group.  Essentially now she’s a corporate ninja-nun who goes around the company smacking people’s knuckles with a metaphorical ruler

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Do not make my friend angry.

Lessons:

  1. Have friends that can help you.

In a big corporation if your intent is to move up the ladder, you need friends.  Let’s face it, we all screw up.  If someone higher up in the company can vouch for you when they’re looking for a designated victim, a highly-placed mentor (or sponsor, or friend) can tip the scales in your favor.  That being said, if your role has put you in a spot where you were the designated bad guy (“no, you can’t spend that money for elephant rides, PEZ®, and pantyhose for the welders in the assembly line”) then sometimes you won’t be able to survive after your sponsor is gone.

Why do I put this one first?  Despite how good you might be, having someone to cover your back is huge – it’s sometimes the difference between unemployment and the executive suite.

The reason they say, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”?  It’s true.

When you look above you in the org chart and don’t see anyone who would go to bat for you?  Your time at that job might be short, my friend.

  1. Be able to change what you do.

Chances are you have skills, unless you’re at the DMV, and heck, they have skills, too, if you count seething rage and the ability to take literally the worst possible picture of a human being.  Understand that during your career you might have to take those skills and transfer them from making people who are attempting to get a driver’s license miserable to, say, making people who need a new license plate miserable.  If I could write one thing on a billboard, the idea that “What you’re doing today might have no value in the future” would be second on my list.  Sadly, “Do you know where my car keys are?” would be number one.

But it’s true.  Just as Exxon-Mobile® has been replaced by Apple™ in valuation (and in my gas tank – sadly my car only gets four miles per iPhone®), the idea that you’ll spend your career doing the same thing is becoming less common.  How many people started their career in nuclear engineering and ended up running a carpet installation company staffed entirely by nude circus clowns?  More than I can count!

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  1. Be able to create value.

At one place I worked, there was an employee that watered and dusted plants.  That’s all she did.  The company had a huge office, and it had plants on every floor.  I had no idea that you had to dust plants, but, apparently if the plants live only by the dull fluorescent light of corporate America, you do.  One day (when profits dropped from enormous to merely massive) the plant lady (and the plants) were gone.  I think someone figured out that plants in the office building didn’t add a single dollar to the company profitability, so they let the plants (and the plant lady) become free-range.

One person in the company was notoriously difficult to work for and with, made business decisions like a drunken leper in a fish factory (I have no idea what that means, but it can’t be good), and smelled vaguely of gin and regret.  I asked my boss, “Why don’t they fire him?  He stands against literally every value that management says they’re in favor of.”

My boss:  “But he makes SOOOOO much money for the company.  Millions.”

That’s a huge defense.  If you make piles of money for the company and can prove it?  They’ll never fire you until the Grand Jury indicts.

In the end, my friend met all three of the criteria up above – had friends, had a flexible skill set, and could demonstrate how she made money, which is why she flies around on the corporate jet to eat bacon-wrapped shrimp.  Thankfully, I was able to help her avoid being a free-range plant lady . . .

The seven deadly sins and society. How do they fit together?

“There are 7 deadly sins, Captain.” – Se7en

sevensins

So, here are the movie versions of sin.  Except Pride.  Is Pride really blonde?

Some time ago I read a book that my friend wrote (there is a link below where you can get it from Amazon – I make no money from that) about sin.  I enjoyed the book, as well as one can enjoy a book that makes you feel absolutely horrible about how sinful and wretched you are.  And I mean that in the best way – how often do you have the benefit of self-reflection on your faults?  Thankfully, the author doesn’t leave you hanging, and gives you a path forward on the whole salvation from sin thing (note:  he’s a priest, so the word “Jesus” just might be a spoiler).  I heartily recommend the book.

Is sin at the problem with current society?  Maybe.  But first let’s discuss the sins.

As I recall (it’s been a while since I read it) one construct that Father Joseph used for discussing sin was the Seven Deadly Sins.  He used the mnemonic “PALE GAS” to go through them.  I’ll do the same.

Pride – Pride is the big one, perhaps the source of all the other sins.  An example:  If you’re religious, you’d accept that your intellect was given to you by God.  If you’re not religious, you’d accept that your intellect was a happy genetic accident.  In either case, no matter how smart you are, you’ve done nothing to be that smart, so taking pride in your intellect is, well, bad.  That’s why pride is the primo sin – it takes all the glory for who and what you are and wraps it up into your own ego.  It puts you and your ego at the center of the universe, when in reality no one thinks about you as much as you think they do.  Unless you’re Donald Trump.  Then people (from both sides) totally obsess over you.

Anger – This is also known as Wrath, but PWLE GAS doesn’t sound so good, unless you’re from some Eastern European country that uses colored wrapping paper for money and has a vowel shortage.  Anger is feeling and wishing for unjust or excessive punishment – execution for parking offenses, that sort of thing, or punishing the innocent, just because they are weaker than you.  Again, Wrath separates you from both God and reality by making the righting of wrongs (real or not) not about justice, but about you.  You can see how Pride echoes here . . . .

Lust – Lust isn’t love, it’s a deep and intense passionate desire that throws morality, propriety, and sometimes legality to the winds.  As sins go, this one at least (in some forms) is mutual, so it’s not as strong as pure Pride.  In some forms, it’s considered the least serious of all mortal sins, but, you know, it’s still a mortal sin.  Outside of religion, allowing Lust to drive your life tends to lead to a lot of poor decisions – just ask anyone in Hollywood®.

Envy – Like any of the sins, Envy has various gradations.  First you are jealous that your neighbor has a complete set of PEZ® dispensers of every United States Secretary of Agriculture ever.  Then you find out he has all of the United States Secretary of Commerce PEZ™ dispensers.  Then you go all Cain on his Abel.  Yup.  Envy brings you farther from God, but it also fills you with hate.

Gluttony – Generally, Gluttony is considered more of a sin when your consumption (or overconsumption) of resources will starve someone else – but it really boils down to an unbridled passion for selfishness.  Eating and drinking as the purpose of life, rather than to support it.  It’s fairly obvious how this is both bad for you, and drives you farther from God.

Avarice – This sin is also known as greed, but if we called it that, then the mnemonic would be PWLE GGS.  And what does that even mean?  Where lust is for a person, and gluttony is for food, avarice is for stuff.  That just makes it worse.  Pop Wilder described avarice best when he told me, “A farmer doesn’t want all the land in the world, son, he just wants that which adjoins his.”  This pulls you away from God though making you focus on the things only of this world.  This focus turns men into machines – focused only on owning (not creating) wealth.  See reason number 53 that I don’t want to live in New York City . . . .

sloth

Yeah, it sucks to be a sloth.

Sloth – Sloth isn’t just about being lazy – Sloth is giving up.  It’s abdication of responsibility for whatever reason, often as a result of the other sins, or through giving up due to depression or despondency (which used to be one of the eight deadly sins, but got voted off in the semi-finals).   It’s obvious on how this sin hurts you whether you’re a believer or not.

I heartily recommend Father Joseph’s book, whether or not you are a Christian or an agnostic or an atheist.  I think the truths that it speaks to are so fundamental in our society that this could be one of the better books on self-improvement available today.  Seriously.  I read this book, thinking I was doing okay.  (Pride will do that to you.)  Every page that I read I kinda cringed when it described me, something I felt, or something I was doing as tied into one of these sins.  I promise you – there’s not a week that goes by that you (and I!) aren’t attracted to and tempted to commit each of these sins weekly.

Oh, and my copy is signed!  (See, I just used my Pride to Envy all over you.)

And these sins are important whether or not you are religious because these sins and our universal-ish understanding of them in the Western world form the basis of Western culture.  Are there analogues in Chinese Confucianism, Shinto, or the tribal religions of Africa?  Or Islam?

I have no idea.  And it would require like a zillion Google® searches to sort that out.  But it’s irrelevant.

I do know that the culture of the West was founded on this shared concept of sin.

And we agree that these things are bad, right?

Have we managed to rebrand many of these sins as virtues?

  • “Check out my InstaFace® selfie!”
  • “He had it coming to him.”
  • “If it feels go, do it!”
  • “You deserve what the 1% have.”
  • “Have another piece of cake – YOLO!”
  • “We’re not Boy Scouts®, we’re here to make money.”
  • “Let somebody else do it. You’ve done enough.”

One of the virtues of the Seven Deadly Sins is that the common belief in them is the basis for a shared morality in a stable civilization.  One can infer that that shared belief (beyond the salubrious Christian effects on your immortal soul, if you’re into that sort of thing) is beneficial because it evolved with Western civilization.

Can the West live without the concept of sin?

I’m not sure that it can.  Let’s just take one of them:  Envy.

The biggest evil of the twentieth century was communism.  I’m not saying that because it’s an opinion – it’s an objective fact.  More people died because of communism than any other ideological cause during that century – over 140,000,000.

Communism was built on Envy; the concept that “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”  And Ivan needs Pyotr’s farm.  And Ivan’s wife needs Pyotr’s wife’s new butter churn.  And so on.

Nearly a billion people died from gluttony – it causes heart disease along with a host of other diseases.

Anger led to war and murder.  240,000,000.

So, deadly wasn’t a euphemism – outside of spiritual conditions, these sins actually lead to real and temporal misery and death.

So there appears to be some limited anecdotal evidence that virtue is better than sin.

Which brings me back to society.  If society doesn’t agree on the same cultural precepts which have driven the creation of knowledge and wealth for several thousand years . . . nah, never mind.  I’m sure it will be fine.

Health, Wealth, and Boundaries. Complete with fake IDs.

“We’re out of towels and I’m too old to go diving into lockers.” – Minor League

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It would be nice to have Morgan Freeman narrate your life.  Except for after you did stupid stuff.  Or boring stuff.  Nevermind – skip that.

A number of years ago my boss called me at 11pm.  There had been an incident at work.  As it was a Thursday and I was planning on taking Friday off, The Mrs. and I had already consumed the better part of a bottle of wine.  I decided that I’d go to bed – certainly vacation was off.

In fact, I worked the next 45 days, straight.  I averaged at least 12 hours a day, every day.

During that time, we worked really hard.  Stressful situations daily.  New decisions daily.  But the team met all the goals that were set on that first day, and then some.   We even ended up at budget.  But 540 work hours in 1.5 months is about 225% of a typical work week (40 hours).

I break my time into a triangle:

  1. Work – Ideally, work should server multiple purposes. It should put money in the bank and food on the table.  Another, very real purpose of work is to create value for society.  A well-run business generates wealth for the owner, sure.  But the jobs that it creates can generate wealth for a community.  And most businesses can’t stay in business unless they serve a need in the community.  A power generation plant has to make power to stay in business, but if it operates well and efficiently, it produces power at a low cost, which allows people to have the relative luxury of electricity cheaply, so they can read this blog, or watch Green Acres®.
  2. Family – As a husband and father, taking care of my family is a primary responsibility – it means more than the money from work, it means being there to be dad – both as a bad example of the kind of dad you don’t want to have, as well as teaching children responsibility through situations that force them to figure things out. I mean, what 12 year old shouldn’t know how to make a fake id so he can buy smokes?
  3. Personal Health – If I’m not healthy, I’ll die, and that makes it hard to shower consistently. Also, I won’t be able to lead my family, or work amazingly long hours.  Health may be its own reward, but it also supports the other two legs of the triangle.

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I’d say “bad dog,” but I am out of beer . . . and thanks to practice and parental neglect, Pugsley makes a much better fake ID.

So during this 45 day period, a big stretch of the triangle was possible.  Heck, I was in the best shape I’d been in for at least six years.  Life was good.  I’d focus on work, but put my second focus on family.  Personal health can wait, right?

And during those 45 days, I didn’t exercise like normal.  Also, I don’t eat lunch (I hadn’t since fifth grade) and in those days just worked through lunch.  But we had team meetings (complete with lunch) pretty much every day.  It turns out I can gain 2 pounds a week just by eating lunch more than once.  Yeah.

So, forty five days later, we finished.  And we were exhausted.  And 45 days later?  I entered into yet another work death-march that lasted a year and a half.

Yeah, and that second death-march ended with 45 days straight, too.  And then time required for activities related to The Boy and Pugsley multiplied.  It seems like when the work demands went down, the family demands went up.  And I could safely ignore the health demands, right?

My take on this is that I’ve set my boundaries too far towards work in the past, but the bright side is all the hard work and family stuff seems to be paying off.

But it’s always (a bit) irritated me that Hollywood types get so buff.  I saw Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 12 (or whatever) this last weekend, and it’s undeniable that the man is in great shape, not only for his age, but for any age.  Cruise was certainly in better shape than he was during his early movies.  He’s seven or eight years older than Simon Pegg, but manages to look ten years younger.  I guess maybe Scientology® might pay off, if you can deal with whole “completely made up” parts.

And Tom Cruise has a luxury that most of us don’t – he has the ability to spend 2,000 learning to fly helicopters so he could do it for this movie, plus countless thousands of hours of training.  I’m lucky to get 250 hours a year to myself for training.  And more power to Cruise!  But most people don’t have that option.  The iron triangle of work-family-health keeps showing up.

In the end that’s part of why I named the blog wilderwealthywise.com – it focuses on that triangle of important things in the average person’s life.  Wealth buys time, and time buys health.  And health . . . buys more time (on Earth).  And with health and time?  One would hope that you can end up with wealth.

And then you could have Morgan Freeman narrate . . . but hopefully not these lines:

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It will all be worth it.  Now, back to the elliptical . . .

How much money should I save? Depends on if you want to be free . . .

“Lost in oblivion, dark and silent and complete, I found freedom.  Losing all hope was freedom.  It’s OK.” – Fight Club

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Alia S. Wilder, showing her prowess at falling into debt holes.

My daughter, Alia S. Wilder, texted me today.

“How much money should I be saving?  Is 20% enough?”

My response?

“Depends.  I’m going to try to end a World War.  Are two bombs enough?”

Oh, sure, the question sounds simple, but the answer is more complicated.  Unless you’re Japan.

“Is 20% enough?”

Certainly, and certainly not.

Savings is good.  I’m throwing that out there as an absolute.  Saving money represents potential.  If I use my money to buy a pile of PEZ® today, well, when they come out next week with the President™Millard Fillmore® Commemorative MegaPEZ© dispenser?  I won’t be able to buy it.

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If ever there was a head that was made to be a PEZ® dispenser it’s Millard Fillmore, who looks exactly like Alec Baldwin.  Fillmore, when running for reelection (he became President when Taylor died) won only . . . Maryland, which is the only State to be named after Mary Poppins©.

I won’t go too much into detail, but Alia S. Wilder has debt.  Mountains of it.  Not the Himalayas.  Maybe more like smaller mountains, like the Alps.

Should you save money when you’re in debt, or pay off the debt?  Yes, save money.  Save money until you have at least six months’ worth of living expenses in cash available to you.

Why six months?  Given six months’ worth of time and space, you can make miracles happen.  You’ll be able to work your way through the emergency.  Oh, and the emergency?  Yeah, you’ll have one.  You’ll get a flat tire and accidently run into the town statue of Tom Petty and then it won’t back down, but will be freefallin’ over onto your 1972 VW® Bug™.  And then?  You’ll have to pay, or they won’t allow you to come ‘round here no more.

So, emergencies happen.  Even Petty ones.

And if I were young and had debt, the first thing I would do is build that emergency fund.  There’s nothing worse than having no money and no options when an emergency strikes.  Not if.  When.

After that, I’d save money in my 401K, if the company offered a match.

401k’s are awesome – generally you can save 6% or so of your salary, and the company will match some percentage of that – say, 50%.  And there is no place on Earth where you can get an immediate 50% return on investment, unless you’ve managed to marry into the royal family of England.  Then?  Yeah, that lip gloss and the Pilates class paid off.

So, you’ve got an emergency fund.  You’re taking full advantage of 401k matching.  Next?

Get rid of the debt.

Debt is perhaps the most evil thing we allow in society today except for Harry Potter© themed AR-15s.  I mean, I like guns, but Harry Potter™ guns?  But back to debt – it allows stupid current you to sell future you into slavery.  You have to pay the debt.  Mortgages and car loans are bad, but the worst?  Student loans.

harry potter gun

You can declare bankruptcy and get rid of mortgage and car debt.  But in order to get rid of student loan debt?  You have to pay it off or die.  I’m not kidding – that part isn’t a joke.  Student loan debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy.  Like herpes, it’s almost forever.  Unlike herpes, you can pay it off.

Why is debt so very bad?  Well, for every dollar you have in debt, you have to pay interest.  So, if you have $100 in debt, and are paying 5% interest, you have to pay off $5 every year.  No problem, right?

Actually, that interest is insidious.  Let’s pretend it’s a house, and you owe $200,000.  At 5% interest, that’s $10,000 a year.  That $10,000, divided by 12?  In year one that’s most of your mortgage payment.  Your debt remains – you only pay a little bit off in the first year.

Interest on debt destroys your happiness.

In a logical world, you’d pay off the highest interest rate debt first.  That gets rid of the most interest, right?

Nah.  Pay the one that you can pay off first.  The smallest one.  That allows you to feel good about digging yourself out of the debt hell you dug yourself into.  Then?  The next biggest one.

And this works.  How do I know that?  I’ve been there.

When my first wife and I decided that a mixed marriage wouldn’t work (I was human, she was a demon from hell) we mutually decided that she should move out.  Nice!

She handed me a plastic grocery sack.  In the grocery sack was a half a cubic foot of bills.  She then handed me a checkbook.

“I don’t know how much money is in there.”  Meaning the checking account.

She walked out the door.

I pulled the first bill off the stack.  It was a credit card statement from a gasoline station.

It was over $700.  And my soon-to-be ex-wife hadn’t paid them anything in months.  Sadly, this story kept repeating as I went down the pile.  I had massive debt.

I started paying them down.  One at a time.

Seven years later?  The only debt left was my mortgage.  I remember the day – it was January 15th.  I remember writing the check.  I felt like I was Batman™ Kirk©.  Like if Batman® had a starship, or if Kirk™ could fight anyone in a realistic way.  Yay!  But paying down those first few cards and bills was huge.  It gave me a sense of control.  It was saying that I could take small bites and make them matter.

kirkfight

But one day you sign the last check to pay off the last debt, and you realize that you’re no longer working for someone else – every dollar you’re making is going to you or things you want.

And at that moment you’re free.

So, is saving 20% enough?

I have no idea.  How soon do you want to be free?

QAnon, The Chans, and Other Cryptic Stuff

“Long I pondered my king’s cryptic talk of victory.” – 300

qshirt2

Why is this relevant?  Is this going to be on the quiz on Friday?

What if . . . there was a source deep inside the intelligence apparatus of the United States.  What if . . . that source was in the inner circle of the President?  What if . . . that source was communicating with the world, and providing “insider” information.

On 8chan.

(But he really started on 4chan.)

And what the heck is a “chan”?

I guess that’s a good enough place to start, even though that’s complicated, too.  First, promise me you’ll never go there.  I’ll explain below.

The chans (both 4chan and 8chan) are message boards.  Originally 4chan was set up to be a message board where folks who spoke English would swap Japanese anime pictures.  Yeah, not my cup of tea either.  But gradually, the boards . . . evolved.

Ever hear of group Anonymous?  These guys?

anonymousii

Yeah, they started on 4chan.  And since there’s no real way to get a username on either of the chans, they started going by the name Anonymous.  As I understand it, 4chan was where QAnon first posted, but now he posts at 8chan, since he believes that 4chan is less secure.  Or something.

So why shouldn’t you go to the chans?  8chan has a (just the one) rule – don’t post or link to any content that’s illegal in the United States.  That’s it.  That leaves a LOT of room for things that you don’t want to see.  And you can’t unsee them.  Me?  I take my own advice – just because it’s legal doesn’t mean my brain needs to know it exists.  I’ve never gone there except one time when I clicked on a link and didn’t know it was to a chan.  I immediately closed the window like my hand was being snapped at by Madonna© before she’d had her daily antibiotic shot.  (Shudder)

Why?  I’m far too young to see what unbridled libertarianism might post on the internet.  Not that I think it should necessarily be illegal, but there are things decent people shouldn’t see, like any movie with Amy Schumer, except if she were going to play the role of a Death Star© in Star Wars™ Episode IX:  Revolt of the Audience®.

So don’t go to the chans.  Just don’t.  (Really, don’t.)

But they are (maybe) an anonymous way to communicate.  But an anonymous poster began posting what was (in theory) inside information on October 28, 2017.  About sixty one posts in (on November 2) he (or she) began signing the posts “Q”.

Since then, the poster has been known as QAnon.

It’s assumed that this Q relates to the Department of Energy Q clearance – the type of clearance that people who work on nuclear bombs have.  A friend of mine got this clearance once, and I was a reference.  I said nice things to the FBI agent that showed up at my house when she asked about my friend, and my friend eventually got the clearance.  I’m pretty sure that this friend isn’t QAnon, since my friend now teaches at a college and I’m pretty sure he isn’t in the Trump inner circle.

But QAnon is now about as popular as the Beatles™ – one particular website that posts regularly about Q, Neon Revolt (LINK), gets 100,000 hits per day – more viewers than CNN® has in a month.  And that website started in February.

So what sort of things has QAnon posted?

More recently, this:

qmissile

This may or may not be a missile launch from a military base aimed at Air Force One (QAnon version) or a medical helicopter on a night training flight (the one story I could find on this – linked HERE).

If you got further into the QAnon posts, he claims that Air Force One was defended by an F-16 with a classified weapon’s package:

missile f16

Seems odd, right?

But when you look and see that QAnon might have predicted a post by the President:

trumptweet

As of this writing, QAnon has posted 1761 times – you can read them all here, but be warned, included in these posts are posts that look like this:

cryptic q

And this is what the chans love best.  It’s cryptic.  It has double meaning.  It invites going back and re-reading all of the other 1761 posts to see what clues are used in them when and what they mean.  SA, is that South American?  Saudi Arabia?  San Antonio?  (I think the general conclusion is Saudi Arabia).

But seriously, the chans LOVE doing this stuff – they even have a name for it, “Weaponized Autism.”  And they are amazing at it.  My proof?

autism

Shia LeBouf (pronounced Former Celebrity) did some sort of social protest back in 2017.  Well, the chans took notice, and took time to mess with him.  He had some sort of flag on a constant net stream.  When the chans found the flag?  They’d send someone to rip it down.  So Shia got sneaky.  He put up his flag and only pointed the webcam at the flag and sky.

17 hours later?  The chans found it and took it down.

Yes.  Given minimal clues, the chans found a flag in a random location in the United States.

Yeah, they’re that good.  Do NOT be on their bad side.  That being said, they love stuff like the QAnon posts – cryptic puzzles galore.

Oh, and check out the shirt below.  Yup.  That’s the President, pointing out a guy in a QAnon shirt.

qshirt

Oh, and someone put together a huge list of proof that QAnon has some pretty big predictive power.  That link is here (LINK) – and the person who put it together did an awesome job of connecting past posts with events that happened after QAnon posted them.  There are some pretty significant coincidences in the list.

Is QAnon for real?  That’s hard to say.  The list of coincidences is long.  But on the other hand, the list of incomprehensible items is large, too, and given the cryptic nature of the posts, it’s almost like reading a Chinese fortune cookie or horoscope – you read into it what you think might be there, and then when it shows up, your interpretation is confirmed.  This most commonly happens to me

But don’t go to the chans.  Really – it’s not for normies like you and me.  Your brain will thank me for this advice.

seen too much

Smart people live longer, and they all love Red Dawn.

“Check out the big brain on Brad!” – Pulp Fiction

red-dawn

Okay, my dog ate my hard drive, so I’m stuck using memes tonight.  Let all of your memes be dank, my friends!  And, yes, that’s Charlie Sheen pretending to be Patrick Swayze’s brother.  Thankfully, no C. Thomas Howell was injured during the writing of this post.

So, there’s a very strong correlation between health and IQ.  It’s even stronger than the correlation between living in California and being forced to have a statue of Karl Marx™ in your front yard.  Really!

The short version is this:  if you’re smarter, you’ll live longer.  And not only will you live longer, but you’ll enjoy your life more.  It’s like winning the lottery twice, though I’m reliably informed that smart people don’t play the lottery – they own the lottery, just like Elon Musk gets a bright new penny every time someone plugs a toaster into the wall.

But the smarter you are?  The longer you’ll live.

Bright people live longer than average people.  Geniuses live longer than bright people.  And people like me?  Maybe I’ll live forever, if the beer holds out.

And the correlation is so very strong, that people actually wrote papers that said that we should increase educational funding.  Why?  To make people smarter.  This is similar to exercising to make yourself blonde, but, hey, there’s lots of government money in stupid ideas.  Justin Bieber® is actually a cyborg made from spare Justin Timberlake© parts and genes from a mutant chicken in a government lab in Kentucky.

But education can’t help ensmarten yourself.

IQ is baked into the baby from the start – the top number is almost all genetics.  Can you mess a baby’s IQ up?  Sure!  If Mom loves Margaritas, well, that’s a good way to bake a few brain cells while the baby is cooking.  Likewise, youthful malnutrition can hurt intellect – but this type of malnutrition isn’t “eating Big Macs® instead of “vegan free range kale,” no, this is starvation-level malnutrition.

Extra study, extra education can’t make you smarter.  You are as smart as you is.  You are as smart as you ever will be.

But there is a limit – once you reach the age of 80?  All the life expectancy logic changes.  The measure then is how much IQ you’ve lost.  If you went from 160 IQ to loving Two and a Half Men, well, your days are numbered.  Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but the truth is if you love Charlie Sheen you’re halfway to dementia.  Except it’s okay for you to like Red Dawn.  Which is just awesome.

WOLVERINES!

There’s another limit.  If you’re one of the 100,000 to 140,000 people on Earth with an IQ of 163 or more?  Yeah, that’s the limit.  More IQ than 163 won’t help you live any longer, so thankfully Bill Gates won’t be around in the year 2573.  But I’ve heard his clones will, so there’s that.

So what else do the statistics say about being smart and your likelihood of death?

If you’re smart, your mortality against cancer is better, but only if that cancer is from smoking.  All other cancers are the same between normies and eggheads.  What about suicide?  Yeah, smarter people do that a bit more often.

But high IQ people take MUCH less sick leave than lower IQ folks.  (Coincidentally, I haven’t taken a sick day since 2002, and that day was because I was shot while saving Emilia Earhart from being cooked and eaten by Kevin Spacey.)

But let’s look at how being smart impacts health.  If you’re smart, you have a:

  • Lower risk of heart disease.
  • Lower level of obesity.
  • Lower blood pressure.
  • Lower risk of post-traumatic stress disorder, and this was correlated to people who had stressful events in their life, like being forced to watch a movie starring Amy Schumer.
  • Lower risk of stroke.
  • Lower risk of schizophrenia.
  • Lower risk of schizophrenia.
  • Hey, I said that first.
  • No you didn’t.
  • Yes I did.
  • Lower chance of being bipolar, which I think refers to having houses at the North Pole and the South Pole. But not being a bear.  Or belonging to a homeowner’s association.

Oddly, if you have a high IQ?  Your risk of skin cancer goes up.  I have my theories there, but they mainly relate to our naked smart people sunbathing parties global warming.

Downsides of being smart?  You drink more.  Sometimes a lot more.  Oh, wait, that was a downside?

Also?  You smoke a LOT more weed.  Which makes me think that you’d be ready for some dank memes.  What are they, really?

Dunno.  But the fifth image for “dank meme” on my Google® search led me to this:

DANKMEME

Retirement Spreadsheets, The Apocalypse, and You

“Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” – Forrest Gump

little end

I have no idea where this came from.  But it’s exactly like the one they read to me when I was a wee Wilder.

I have an enormous spreadsheet.  Okay, it’s not really enormous – I’ve made and used much bigger ones at work to calculate the number of licks to get to the center of at Tootsie Roll® Tootsie Pop™.  The number of licks is 573,212 – and not one lick more or less.

This particular spreadsheet:

  • Has yearly calculations from the year 2014 (when I started it) until I turn 103 years old.
  • Divides my spending into 16 categories.
  • Has separate rates of inflation for each category (average inflation rate is 3.6%).
  • Has spots for assumed investment income as well as variable future income from work.
  • Has projected balances on 11 accounts, plus assumed rates of growth.
  • Graphically projects income and net worth . . . until I reach an age where 99.9% of people are dead.

I did use this spreadsheet for one pretty important decision – whether to change jobs back in 2014.  My option back then was to chuck my current job and take a job where I would have a risky proposition at making a big payout in three years or so.  The big payout would have been enough to retire on when combined with my net worth back then, for sure.  Attractive, right?

But it was risky.  How risky?  My first guess was that there was a pretty low probability that it would pay out.  How low?  Maybe 20% chance?

I ranked that against staying in my current job.  I did the math, and it looked like if I could keep my current job for three more years that I could take a differing job, say a high school teacher or flaming poodle-juggler (juggling flaming poodles, not juggling poodles while on fire – that would be stupid), and still keep my standard of living.  Three years of high stress for (relative) economic freedom, or at least more choices.

Hmmm.

I ended up not taking the job, and the risky part won – the job would have been worth much less than the job I would have left, plus the boss I would have worked for?  Yeah, he died three months later.  And my math was right – I’m about where I expected to be as far as net worth.

But I know my prediction is wrong:

  • It assumes that inflation is rather low for a long-ish period – something that I’m not sure is realistic in an economy where the government is attempting to print money as fast as Elon Musk says stupid things on Twitter®. Seriously, Elon, filter, dude, filter.
  • My investments earn about 2.5% every year, after inflation.
  • There’s nothing in there about a civil war or societal collapse.

Huh?  What investments make 2.5% every year after inflation?

No, I kid.

But there’s an entire subgroup of people of people who are preparing for societal collapse – preppers.  They even make television shows about them so that people who are stockpiling food for when the apocalypse comes advertise where they keep all that food.  Thankfully none of their neighbors will remember that after the apocalypse.

I guess (in a small way) that I’m a prepper, too.  The spreadsheet was my prepping – preparing for my career future – and my saving for eventual retirement is prepping, too.

Prepping is preparing, and when done right, it should prepare you for a range of options.  I could liquidate my retirement fortune and buy lots of oatmeal, bendie-straws and PEZ®, but in the sad event that Mad Max® is not the template for the future world, well, what do I do with all those bendie-straws now that California has made them illegal since they enacted common-sense straw registration.

In Houston, we rode out Hurricane Ike back in 2008.  Here is part of what I wrote then – you can find the full thing here (LINK) if you scroll down a bit:

Wow. Didn’t see that coming.

Oh, wait, we did. On radar, on the radio, on the Intertubes. As I said, it was unlikely that we’d stop until the power stopped or the beer ran out.

I still have beer.

At 6:20PM, the lights went out. They flickered on, off, on, off, on, then finally, utterly, off.

(Skipping long description of storm – and moving to the next day.)

We listened to the radio, which mainly told us that the power company wasn’t going to do anything that day (though, that afternoon, The Mrs. indicated that the power had flickered while The Boys and I went out to reconnoiter. Sorry that we missed it, but we did find that there was power on either side of us, not three miles away. No stores were open, and we had no phones. Thankfully, one of the previous announcements for hurricane preparedness had told us to have “food, water, and ammunition” (I am not making this up). We had food for a month, water for a similar time, plus more ammunition than the Pakistani army. We were set.

Eventually, washing came up. I avoided the subject. The Mrs. doused The Boy and Pugsley with coldish water (they howled) and then we ate cold Spaghetti-O’s® and sat around in the dim candlelight. Living in the 18th Century was rapidly losing its charm.

The radio had limited information. The hosts kept telling us to check their website for more information, even though 98% of their listeners were without power. Perhaps the average person has a hand-crank satellite Internet connection?

Then FEMA came on and indicated that you could contact them by calling (no phone!) or by Internet. The Mayor of Houston indicated that within 24 hours they would have 24 trucks of ice in, but he didn’t say where they’d be. He didn’t know.

A representative from our power provider indicated that we might be out of power forever, really, since they had no idea where that mythical lightning in the wire came from. It was really a mystery to them. They even indicated that changing a light bulb might require Federal authority. They began blaming FEMA for the problem. (In actuality, they said that it might be four weeks until the power was back on, in which case I would be looking for a suit of armor, a mighty steed, and a really cool battle-axe.)

On night one, The Mrs. and I had grilled hot dogs over candles. It worked okay, but our hot dogs tasted a bit like apple potpourri.  We started cooking over propane the next day.

The next morning I made coffee for The Mrs. and I. It improved our disposition greatly. Then I cooked ribeye steaks that I’d gotten on sale and frozen. That helped our disposition more. Ribeye for breakfast? Mmmmm.

I took The Boy and Pugsley to see if we could get a generator. This act in Houston (currently) would be like searching for Paris Hilton’s virginity – just not there anymore. Lowe’s® was open, and had a generator. Nah, just kidding. They had bottled water and some Chiclets©.

It appears that hurricanes smell like sex to fire ants (jerkusantus invictus). I got bit five times pulling branches out of my formerly fire-ant free backyard. I then unleashed a genocide of Biblical proportions on them, making the chemical warfare of WWI look like a Disney production of The Little Mermaid® in Candyland™.

I went back inside, and the power-gods deigned to tease us again. The lights flickered during dinner (T-bones and bratwurst saved from spoiling through immolation).

The utter lack of information was maddening. Anecdotal reports of FEMA commandeering truckloads of generators. Reports that Responders (I am ever so tired of that word) being stuck without food – you’da thunk they would have thought far enough ahead to stock up their patrol cars with Snickers®, pantyhose and Pez™ before heading to Houston. No. A Congresscritter was on the air complaining that the responders didn’t food, and wanted THE PEOPLE WHO HAD NO POWER TO COME TO THE NICE AIR CONDITIONED AND POWERED PLACE AND BRING THEM FOOD.

If you’re a responder without chow, you’re part of the problem, not the solution, bubba. I was not feeling sympathetic as I threw out $200 in spoiled food.

Power? That was a myth at this point, the electric company representative, and never really existed. Those things that you call “outlets”? Used for hanging meat to feed short animals. The representative suggested burning furniture to boil water to create steam to power a crude generator. I would have built one, but I had no power for my welder.

We went to bed early. Nice.  The next day I went to work, to an office with power. And ice. And TV. I charged the laptops so the kids could watch Garfield© DVD’s. I had hot coffee. A functioning microwave to dry my socks. I’m not sure why I came home. Oh, yeah, the fam.

I headed home. I saw . . . our porch lights on.

The mythical lightning had returned.

We were actually really prepared for Hurricane Ike.  And we were only out of power for a few days but in reality we could have handled several weeks.

And preppers are really prepared for emergencies.  Some of them have complete surgery kits, antibiotics, and armored vehicles on remote homesteads powered by solar power.  Plus they have gear to survive chemical warfare similar to what an army battalion could attack with after a late-night visit to Taco Bell®.

But the future is funny, because it’s squirmy.  It won’t be as you expect or predict:

  • You might have higher inflation.
  • A totalitarian government might arise when Chelsea Clinton is named Pope®.
  • You might rip the crotch of your jeans during a softball game.
  • The Swiss might finally snap and launch a surprise nuclear attack at the rest of the world.

Each situation that you might run into requires a different response, but in the meantime you have to plan to live a life, but have plans to respond to most reasonable situations.

Should you plan for the stores to be out of food for a week?  Sure.  Should you plan for no power for a week?  Absolutely – a big ice storm can take out the power for months in some locations.

But if the stores were closed for months?  Yeah, that’s a response that’s categorically different, and depends a LOT on where you live.  I live where most of the food comes from – there are grain elevators and cows all around.  In New York City?  Not so much.  But like a wedding between Vladimir Putin and California Governor Jerry Brown, though possible, it’s just not very likely.

Are there general rules to a major disaster?  Maybe.  Here’s a first pass at some based on my experiences where I was in situations that approximated a disaster:

  1. Be flexible. You don’t know the future, but if you’re alert, and think, you can guess at some probably things that might
  2. Be the first out of the door. When it’s obvious that your situation has gone to hell, get out.    Get in line for the re-routed plane.  Get a rental car.  Being late makes everyone in front of you your competition.  Don’t put yourself in that position.
  3. Understand that gone is gone. The universe doesn’t care if it’s not right.  The universe doesn’t care if it’s not fair.  And during an emergency, neither should you.  Your plans are changed.  Your house is on fire.  Your PEZ® has been stolen by the ghost of Tom Petty in a kimono.  Deal with the situation, not your feelings.
  4. Understand that the old rules may not apply. Again, deal with the situation, not your feelings.
  5. Regions matter. Your behavior should tie to the location you’re in.  I’d rather be in central Iowa a year after an apocalypse than Chicago on a Tuesday.
  6. Values and prices change rapidly. $10 for a bag of ice is a bargain if it saves $200 in food.
  7. Laying food and supplies in before an event makes you smart, and removes you from being part of the problem. Doing it after the disaster makes you a hoarder and part of the problem.  Looters and hoarders get shot.
  8. Preppers look like hoarders to hungry people. Don’t talk about your stuff, or sit on the back deck having a ribeye when your neighbor is boiled grain from the silo near the railroad tracks.
  9. Make sure you account for taxation when looking at your investment gains in your retirement portfolio.

Immigration, Freedom, Wealth, Corruption, and More Cool Maps

“Yeah. See, my cousin is getting married down at TJ, man, so he calls the immigration on himself.”

“But why?”

“So he can get a free ride, man.” – Up in Smoke

shaguer

This will all make sense, baby, trust me.

This is the second post that I’ve really thought a very long time about, and read a lot about.  Illegal immigration is a difficult topic, and one that’s certainly one of the most polarizing topics in the country today.

I’ll start out with the end conclusion:  unrestricted illegal immigration is devastating both to the illegal alien and to the country entered, and is a phenomenon sure to cause amazing pain across the world.  Now that the Band-Aid™ is ripped off the wound, let me further note that illegal immigration is currently considered the top problem in the United States, and certainly is up there in many European nations.  I’m pretty sure it’s not considered a problem in California, since, you know, weed.

I won’t attempt to discuss specifics of this issue from a global situation – in reality, even though I read a LOT of news, I’ll admit my knowledge of the on-the-ground impacts in Europe is limited.  I could talk about it, but it would be the equivalent of a nerdy dolphin talking about hang gliding – sure I’ve read about it . . . .

“But,” you say, “John Wilder, this is a nation of immigrants!”

Nope.  Not even close.

What became the United States was a colony, specifically a colony of Great Britain.  A colony isn’t a group of immigrants, it’s the growth of the home country by extension.  In this case, the original colonies were founded by British companies operating under British law and eventually British colonies.  The British brought their independent legal system, common law, system of representative democracy, religion, and culture, or at least that’s what the Saturday morning cartoons said.

You may or may not like the British, but the places they colonized remain the most free places outside of Europe.  Here’s the Freedom House map of political freedoms in the world today (CC by SA, 4.0):

1280px-Freedom_house_freedom_of_the_world_2018_map

Thankfully, they didn’t mandate that you drive on the wrong side of the road to be free.

shaguer

Groovy, baby.

And British culture and religion formed and shaped the politics that led to the American Revolution.  The belief in ordered freedom, that laws stood above all men regardless of birth (i.e., a King was subject to law as much as a commoner), that commerce should be fair, and corruption was to be frowned on.

corruption

Amazingly, you can see that lack of corruption is tied to . . . wealth!  Amazing!  Part of the way to being wealthy is to not be corrupt.  Who could have predicted that? CC-BY-4.0-DE, Transparency International

walled world

Here’s a map that shows where the wealth is, based on this website (LINK) by Theo Deutinger.

Let’s sum this up:  The British language, culture, and religion was the vat that held the Special Sauce® that became America.  In this particular “melting pot” it was British culture, plus the inheritance of Western Civilization that produced the slightly different culture we have here, and it fits in pretty well with the rest of the productive world.  The United States is not a nation of immigrants; it’s a former colony that has created a variation on the themes that have (so far) been the most successful the world has ever seen.  (Note to the Chinese instructor in the year 2230 making fun if this comment, it seemed to make sense at the time.)

So why not have immigration?

Well, I never said no immigration, even though immigration is by its very nature creates tension, and is part of the basis for the balkanized United States that I wrote about in (The Coming Civil War (United States), Cool Maps, and Uncomfortable Truths) and still feel is likely.

Want me to prove that?

The reaction to the following ad, when it appeared in 2008 was, to put it mildly, relatively positive south of the border, and relatively negative north of the border.

vodkamexico

The tensions are currently greatest with Mexico since that country is putting the largest number of unassimilated immigrants into the country, but at different times the tensions have run high with other ethnic groups – the Irish certainly, and around the turn of the last century immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe led directly to the Immigration Law of 1924.

This particular law mainly set ceilings that aimed to preserve the existing ethic makeup of the United States – of particular note, immigration of Hispanics was less regulated, as they were considered not as Hispanic, but as European.

Eventually this policy was reversed in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which led to an increasing proportion of the foreign born in the country – now at over 13%.  This was about the proportion that led to the Immigration Law of 1924.

immigration-population-highest

But hey, if they’re legal, they’re American, right?

Well, no.  It takes more than just a stamp on a piece of paper to be an American.  Let’s run a thought experiment – The Wilder family decides to move to . . . someplace in Western Europe, say, Denmark, mainly because they love hot dogs and pastry.  We become citizens!  Are we Danish?  No.  We’re Americans who moved to Denmark and became citizens.  Well, our kids are Danish, right?  No.  They’re the “kids of the Americans.”  They’ve been raised by people whose culture is clearly not Danish.  Okay, their kids?

Maybe.  And that’s in Denmark, where we have genetic background from, and it’s a culture pretty similar in corruption levels and social standards to the United States.  I’ll note that Denmark has just put into place restrictions on immigrants who will have difficulty assimilating to Danish culture – Denmark isn’t a big country in either area or population, and the Danes like Denmark just the way it is, thank you very much.

denmark

Being a citizen is more than a piece of paper – it requires assimilation, it requires ties.  It requires buying into the culture and religion (not that you have to join that religion, but you have to respect the way that it forms and shapes the psychology of the country).

And that doesn’t mean that having the desire to “get to a better place” gives anyone the right to move to a new country.  That economic incentive would thus justify that 75% of the world would have the right to move to a Western country.  Also, if the immigrant is wanting to come here only for economics but is otherwise uninvested in the culture?  They will bring their old culture with them – the very same culture that strangled their economic opportunity at home – the borders of the United States doesn’t hold mythical properties that make those that show up prosperous – the culture and religion do.  The United States isn’t a magic bullet – it’s just got a great combination of freedom plus restraint, planning, and trust that derive from religion and culture.

And large clumps of unassimilated immigrants aren’t really Americans, regardless of where they were born or what their passport says.  Technology has allowed foreign-born populations to live with television stations from home every minute of the day – learning English is now not required.  And since they don’t learn English, the only jobs open to them are decidedly lower tier.  This keeps them on the lowest rung of the economic ladder, and also displaces lower-skilled Americans.  The relatively recent immigration enforcement phenomenon has led to much lower unemployment.

wee britain

An example of one such cultural enclave in the United States that must be rooted out.

People from different cultures also assimilate at different rates – back to the Denmark example.  Danish culture would be pretty familiar to the Wilder family, but if we were to try to assimilate into, say, Chinese culture?  We know nothing useful for assimilation there.  Literally nothing.  The Mrs. and I would be rather hopeless, The Boy and Pugsley less so, but every day for them would be a titanic struggle to assimilate to a 3,000 year old culture with vastly different norms.  But that’s unlikely to be an issue – China, a country of over a billion people, approved only about 1,500 green cards last year.  Like an invitation to arm wrestle Queen Elizabeth®, those green cards amazingly hard to get.

But let’s ignore reality: what happens if everyone in the world moved to China?

Well, if you desire diversity – that would be the death of it.  Diversity doesn’t flourish when you pull everyone from every culture into the same country – that’s the exact opposite of diversity, and the result (after the inevitable wars) is homogeneity – a single monoculture.  And diversity has huge value, because as different populations have time to grow in (relative) isolation, interesting genetic things can happen, like clusters of genius, or clusters of resistance to certain diseases, or the near superhuman powers of the Sherpas or the Wilder clan.

Here’s what I just said, put more eloquently by physicist Freeman Dyson from his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe:

It is not just an inconvenient historical accident that we have a variety of languages. It was nature’s way to make it possible for us to evolve rapidly. Rapid evolution of human categories demanded that social and biological progress go hand in hand. Biological progress came from random genetic fluctuations that could be significant only in small and genetically isolated communities. To keep a small community genetically isolated and to enable it to evolve new social institutions, it was vitally important that the new members of the community could be quickly separated from their neighbors by barriers of language.

So our emergence as an intelligent species may have depended crucially on the fact that we have this astonishing ability to switch from Proto-Indo-European to Hittite to Hebrew to Latin to English and back to Hebrew within a few generations.

It is likely that in the future our survival and our further development will depend in an equally crucial way on the maintenance of cultural and biological diversity. In the future as in the past, we shall be healthier if we speak many languages and are quick to invent new ones as opportunities for cultural differentiation arise. We now have laws for the protection of endangered species.

In many cases the smartest and most able people come on over to the United States.  That benefits the United States (in many cases), but what does it do to the country that sent those people over?  Does it make India better to send over people who are smart programmers and great leaders, or does India suffer from this? 

It destabilizes India, which, in turn, makes the world a less stable place.

The current mass-migration of peoples on the planet, regardless of their aims and difficulties, will end in violence and tears – there is no instance of a stable multicultural society in the history of mankind.  The longer it goes on, the more devastating the end will be.  But I’ve stopped worrying about that.  Too scary.  Now I just worry about fashion trends.

What is health? My definition. Bonus topics: Indiana Jones. Snakes. Super Glue.

“It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage . . .” – Raiders of the Lost Ark

premium

If only I could find a temple to raid, then I could pay for insurance . . .

Okay, this is listed as part I.  I don’t have a part II planned, really, but I sometimes think we look at health in a really messed up way so I’m sure at some point I’ll have another post, or I’ll forget about this one and do it again.  Guess I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing Super-Glue®.

First, what is health?  I did some thinking about it (it was in the morning, and I’m not sure I had enough caffeine for this function) but I came up with my own definition.  Enjoy!

  • Physically able to do stuff you want to do.
  • Mentally able to do stuff you want to do.
  • Not in constant or unreasonable pain.
  • The body is (generally) working the way it’s supposed to.
  • Stuff that should stay in, stays in. Stuff that should stay out, stays out.
  • Not missing critical bits and pieces.
  • The bits that are left, generally work pretty well.
  • No bits are ready to fail right away (that you know of).
  • Absence of current system disruption (you don’t have a cold or the flu).

I think this is a very different definition from the rest of the world.  I’ll argue that this definition makes a lot of sense if the goal is happy people.  If I want to go run, and I can do it, and am not suffering from some sort of stress thing that makes me think that if I go running that the kimono-clad ghost of Tom Petty will chase me around with a butcher knife, well, I’m healthy enough to run.

And I am healthy enough to run.  Once per week.  Maybe.  My knees, after a lifetime of football, wrestling, and running from booby traps while pilfering South American treasure are, well, shot and will hurt like Bernie Sanders trying to explain how a socialist mayor is a multimillionaire.  And I like running.  So, I guess when it comes to running, I’m not exactly healthy.

indianajones

My hair.  Where did it go?  Oh, my back, and my ears.  So I’m missing some bits, but unless it’s sunny outside, well, I’m okay – these aren’t critical bits.

So, if I had a sudden heart attack tomorrow and died, am I healthy today?  Surprisingly, by my definition, I am totally healthy.  Nothing in my definition of health implies indefinite or infinite life.  Nor should it.

Tonight, The Boy dropped a glass cup on the floor of the kitchen.  It shattered, since we live in a reality where glass doesn’t bounce.

Twenty minutes later?  The Mrs. walked into the kitchen and stepped completely on a shard (not a shart, which was my original typo) of glass.  Immediately blood poured from her heel like money from Elon Musk’s Tesla® factory.  Yeah, it was a lot of blood.  I mean a lot.  I immediately asked The Boy to wipe that up so the dogs didn’t get into it.   Even though the dogs are small enough that you could stomp them if they went crazy, I have a strict policy of NOT teaching the dogs to like the taste of human flesh.

So, The Mrs.’ inside bits became outside bits.  Healthy?  Sure.  I think.  The Mrs. claims she has a tetanus shot that’s recent enough to keep her alive, so I’ll go with that.  But the line that I said to The Boy and Pugsley that is worth repeating is this:  “You’re Mom’s going to die!  I mean, not tonight, but sometime.”

And that’s normal.  Death is normal.

A lot of the current focus of medicine is on saving life.  Duh.  But a huge amount of the money is spent on the last year and last month of life.  When life sucks.  If the outrageous spending on the last month of life, when let’s face it, you have much worse problems than a shard (shart) of glass in your heel, well, is that money well spent?

Not by my definition.  Literally, not by my definition above.

Hey, I’m not trying to stop you from spending whatever money you want on whatever you want.  If you want to spend $400,000 for a 50% probability of living another two months stuck in a hospital bed at 147 years old?  Sure!  Go for it.

But that’s not how it works.  Virtually no one spends their own money on health care when they’re in the last year of their life – this money is coming from Medicare®.  And Medicare™ money?  It comes from you.  And me.  I’m not happy about public radio, let alone public funding of health care, but it’s a real thing, so how do we make it suck less than it does now?  (Not the radio, the health care.)

I’d much rather spend that money on making life better for people who are Kinda™ Healthy®.  People who are in otherwise pretty good shape.  I’m also entirely against euthanasia.  It’s murder.  Make whatever argument you want – but when you turn doctors and hospitals into consciously life-ending organizations?  Yeah, you’re not on the side of the angels.  “OMG – this baby has NO chance of making it into Harvard™!  Better end it all now.”

Part of the problem of healthcare today is that we’ve disconnected virtuous actions with reward.  Sure, they can charge you more money for insurance if you’re a smoker, but the current system allows anyone to skip out on paying for insurance, and then only purchasing it after they get sick.  That’s not insurance – it’s a con job.

That’s not insurance, that’s a cheat.  And it irritates me.  I’ve been paying for insurance for myself (either directly or as part of a job) since I was 22 or so – hundreds of thousands of dollars into a system that we’ve pulled very little out of.  Heck, I haven’t been to a doctor since 2012 (being healthy) and I just needed some antibiotics at that point.  Allowing people to be non-virtuous (be a freeloader until sick) breaks the system.

My brother, Other John Wilder, told me a story (a LONNNNNG time ago) about a wife and mother who was without insurance.  She got cancer.  She didn’t have insurance.  The doctors wouldn’t do anything to help her.  She died.

A tragedy?  Sure.  And I’m sorry for her.

Plan better.  Really.  If the taxpayer (or, worse yet, insurance payers like me) bails out every sad story?  Yeah, the insurance costs will explode.  Like they have.

What else ails our system?

Litigation.  I think our system would be much better if we removed judicial and jury decisions and replaced it with trial by combat to the death.  With the attorneys involved being the combatants.  It might not be a fair decision, but it would be awesome television.

grail knight

Sir Habeas Corpus, Attorney at Arms™.  Okay, Attorney at Arms™ might be a really cool idea for a short story or a book series.  I hereby trademark thee!

Insurance is really a problem.  It requires a ton of codes, and billing staff, and it’s a risk (if you’re a doctor or a patient) if you’re going to get the money.  I was reading on the Internet about the Surgery Center of Oklahoma®.  No insurance.  They don’t take it.  Cash only.  And if you don’t have cash, don’t show up – they won’t treat you.  Their costs for surgery are often less than the copay for insurance or Medicare™.

Don’t believe me?  Go to their website and check it out (LINK).  It would be nice where . . . you could just avoid insurance and government altogether . . . .

But insurance isn’t cheap – Obamacare© has resulted in (or occurred at the same time as) huge cost increases in premiums for insurance that only covers injuries resulting from meteorite strikes on alternate Tuesdays and pregnancy services for men.

And hospitals mark stuff up.  Here is a bill of a guy who got bit by a rattlesnake.  Note the cost for “Pharmacy” – this is almost all anti-venom.  Costs $200 a vial in Mexico.  Let’s say this guy had to have 20 vials.  That’s $4,000.

snakebite

Snakes.  Did it have to be snakes?

Yeah.  They marked the stuff up 20 times.  If you or I did that?  They’d avoid a trial and just execute us.  But for lifesaving drugs that you have no choice but to take, like anti-venom or insulin?  The hospitals look to remove your wallet through your throat, like they did with Pugsley’s stitches.

Yeah, he was camping with the Organization Formerly Known as Boy Scouts.  He had his knife out, and was whittling a piece of wood.  No, his finger.  The Mrs. took him to the emergency room.  Three stiches.  $4,000.

Yeah.  If it would have been up to me?  I’d have Super-Glued® it shut and we’d have solved the whole problem for $1.42.

Super-Glue®.  Can it save American health care?  Only one way to find out . . . .