A lot going on these days both in my world and in the world. At the G & G household, Lil' S has full-on entered the terrible twos, which we have heard from friends and family are more like the terrible two-through-four-and-a-halfs. The general consensus seems to be that by five the random hissy fits and bouts of impossible intransigence become more the exception rather than rule. Two and a half more years: I can make it! Acutally, it's going to be much longer than that because we've got another one on the way. Yep, that's right, baby number two.
I haven't mentioned this on my blog yet, because I wanted to make sure it was really happening before I announced it to the public (my readership is almost in the double digits, after all). Twice we thought S was pregnant, and it turned out she wasn't, and that made us sad (her much more so than me -- biological clock and whatnot), so we've been proceeding cautiously. Plus we have friends who just lost a baby in utero at like eight months, and ... we'll I don't even want to think about what that would do to S. Ideally, I would prefer to hide the pregnancy from everybody and announce that we have another kid when it actually pops out the vag (or in our previous case, is surgically extracted from the womb). But that isn't going to work for obvious reasons. So I guess I might as well talk about it. Early signs indicate it's a boy, and he's due in August.
Actually, I was thinking about miscarriages and stillbirths and what a cruel, cruel bit of nature they are. What's their evolutionary purpose? (Or, if you're not down with evolution, why would God create a life just to stomp it out in a heartbreaking way before it even reaches viability? That certainly doesn't sound like a very loving thing to do.) They are much more likely in older women, so maybe it's to encourage us to have kids at a younger age? I don't know. And then why can men produce children at 96, but women struggle in their late '30s? Maybe it's because in humankind's early years, the women were the ones who took care of the children, so they had to be relatively young to be there until their kids reached adulthood. But the men did the hunting and lived shorter lives on average, so those who survived needed to be virile as long as possible to ensure enough women got pregnant to propagate the species. That sounds reasonable enough. It might not be true, but it sounds plausible, right? One thing I learned in reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is that the entire existence of life seems to be to create more life. So I try to look at things through this circular lens.
On a similar topic, I listened to a really interesting Fresh Air episode (even if Dave Davies was filling for Terry Gross) about aging: why and how we do it and what we can do prevent to it. Since I am now well past my prime in terms of physical fitness -- I, literally, reached my peak 20 years ago -- I'm interested in this latter discussion. I don't mean I want to go John Travolta at the Oscars or anything like that. But I do want to start doing real things that can help me live longer and prosper (RIP Mr. Nimoy). The big one I'm trying to do now is to limit my sitting. Seemingly every month I read an article about how bad sitting for long stretches is ("sitting is the new smoking" is the current buzz phrase). I sit a lot, almost the entire day, and unfortunately it's not the type of thing you can make up for with extra exercise. It seems to be that you actually have to spend a portion of every hour on your feet. If you work all-day on a computer, obviously this can be really challenging. S has a standing desk in her office, and I think I need to ask my boss to get me one. What I would really like is a treadmill desk, but I don't think my company would foot the bill (pun intended) for that one.
Now hold on a second while I put my computer on the mantle and stand up ... There we go.
Anyway, in other news, the Supreme Court is about to hear a new Obamacare challenge that, if enforced, would almost certainly cause a whole lot of people to lose their health insurance. The basis of the suit would be comical if it wasn't real (the card says "The Moops"), and there is reason to believe that this tactic could backfire on Republicans, but the fact that the suit was brought about at all is a sad commentary on the state of conservatism. Reality -- how things actually effect tangible carbon-based human lifeforms -- has little place in modern conservatism; it's entirely a construct for hypothetical beings that exist in an idealized version of America that never actually existed and never will.
On a related subject, I read this gem of an article describing how one man's libertarian fantasy quickly collapsed under its own lofty ideals. It pretty much sums up everything I think is wrong with hard-core libertarianism. I've mention my dislike of libertarianism (especially as practiced by Rand Paul) several times on this blog before, but in reading this article I thought of something new. In the article, this guy Ross Ulbricht creates a pirate contraband website with the idea of it being a pure laissez-faire marketplace free from the meddling hand of the government. But in order to keep the site working he has to implement more and more practical restrictions that essentially mimic what the government does with our marketplace. At some point, he recognizes this and makes the distinction that people don't have to use his website. They can seek out a competitor if they're unhappy. But we are always forced to follow the government's tyrannical rules. There is no competition in the government.
This is something people say a lot -- the no competition in government thing -- but if you think about it, it's not really true. For one thing, the American government is not stopping you if you want to move to another country. Go ahead and set up shop in Somalia, where there are basically no rules, and see how well that works out for you. So that's one thing.
But another thing -- one I hadn't consider before -- is that our government actually is a highly competitive field. Competition is a cornerstone of our government. But it doesn't translate to great results. And the reasons it doesn't, actually point out flaws with the free market. What I mean is this: We have a lot of elections in this country -- at every level from neighborhood to nation we decide through our votes what we want our government to do. In theory, if we don't like our current government we can change it, and in theory anybody can run for public office. Politicians should have to compete and should have to please their "customers" (the public) to stay in power. So, given his, why are so many people -- often a vast majority -- perpetually dissatisfied with the government we picked?
There are two main reasons as I see it. One, access to public office is effectively limited to people who have the money and time to run an election. This kills a lot of the competition. But this is similar to how things work in a laissez-faire market. Even if I have a great idea for a video streaming service that's way better than Netflix, I don't have the start-up capital or connections to compete with such a big and company. Sure, if I keep plugging away at it, I might be able to raise money, introduce my product to the public, and grab a piece of the market, but that's by no means a sure thing. You have to get really fortunate. And even if I started to do that, if Netflix notices me, and if they are ruthless enough, they could probably use their deep pockets to crush me. That is, unless there are some sort of government safeguards, like, say, net neutrality, which at its core is a very anti-free market law. (The government is preventing the sale of a good, faster Internet, between two autonomous business like Netflix and Comcast.)
Two, in elections, people don't pay attention or don't care and often vote for unscrupulous or otherwise bad candidates. So even if you are paying attention and you do care, you might get outvoted. Again, there is a parallel in the free market. Consumers also don't pay attention or don't care, and they often buy products from companies who are behave unscrupulously, so this behavior continues even if you don't support it with your dollar. And just like how a politician's election has consequences on everybody, not just those who voted for him or her, big business' actions effect even those who don't patronize it. You might never purchase a GE product, you still have to live with the pollution in the Hudson River.
The reason government often doesn't work is for the same basic reasons the free market often doesn't work: the wealthy and the powerful almost always win, and many people make bad decisions and these decisions can hurt you (as unfair as that is). So, in my opinion, we should have laws to mitigate the societal damage from these two maxims. In short, hard-core free-market libertarianism is as much a fantasy as communism.
And I'll close with a relevant quote that Ralph Nader attributes to his dad: "Capitalism will always survive, because socialism will be there to save it." Hopefully, Nathra Nader, hopefully.
Until next time ...
I haven't mentioned this on my blog yet, because I wanted to make sure it was really happening before I announced it to the public (my readership is almost in the double digits, after all). Twice we thought S was pregnant, and it turned out she wasn't, and that made us sad (her much more so than me -- biological clock and whatnot), so we've been proceeding cautiously. Plus we have friends who just lost a baby in utero at like eight months, and ... we'll I don't even want to think about what that would do to S. Ideally, I would prefer to hide the pregnancy from everybody and announce that we have another kid when it actually pops out the vag (or in our previous case, is surgically extracted from the womb). But that isn't going to work for obvious reasons. So I guess I might as well talk about it. Early signs indicate it's a boy, and he's due in August.
[It's looking like another Virgo baby.]
Actually, I was thinking about miscarriages and stillbirths and what a cruel, cruel bit of nature they are. What's their evolutionary purpose? (Or, if you're not down with evolution, why would God create a life just to stomp it out in a heartbreaking way before it even reaches viability? That certainly doesn't sound like a very loving thing to do.) They are much more likely in older women, so maybe it's to encourage us to have kids at a younger age? I don't know. And then why can men produce children at 96, but women struggle in their late '30s? Maybe it's because in humankind's early years, the women were the ones who took care of the children, so they had to be relatively young to be there until their kids reached adulthood. But the men did the hunting and lived shorter lives on average, so those who survived needed to be virile as long as possible to ensure enough women got pregnant to propagate the species. That sounds reasonable enough. It might not be true, but it sounds plausible, right? One thing I learned in reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is that the entire existence of life seems to be to create more life. So I try to look at things through this circular lens.
On a similar topic, I listened to a really interesting Fresh Air episode (even if Dave Davies was filling for Terry Gross) about aging: why and how we do it and what we can do prevent to it. Since I am now well past my prime in terms of physical fitness -- I, literally, reached my peak 20 years ago -- I'm interested in this latter discussion. I don't mean I want to go John Travolta at the Oscars or anything like that. But I do want to start doing real things that can help me live longer and prosper (RIP Mr. Nimoy). The big one I'm trying to do now is to limit my sitting. Seemingly every month I read an article about how bad sitting for long stretches is ("sitting is the new smoking" is the current buzz phrase). I sit a lot, almost the entire day, and unfortunately it's not the type of thing you can make up for with extra exercise. It seems to be that you actually have to spend a portion of every hour on your feet. If you work all-day on a computer, obviously this can be really challenging. S has a standing desk in her office, and I think I need to ask my boss to get me one. What I would really like is a treadmill desk, but I don't think my company would foot the bill (pun intended) for that one.
Now hold on a second while I put my computer on the mantle and stand up ... There we go.
[A new dad at 96 -- and I thought I was old at 35.]
Anyway, in other news, the Supreme Court is about to hear a new Obamacare challenge that, if enforced, would almost certainly cause a whole lot of people to lose their health insurance. The basis of the suit would be comical if it wasn't real (the card says "The Moops"), and there is reason to believe that this tactic could backfire on Republicans, but the fact that the suit was brought about at all is a sad commentary on the state of conservatism. Reality -- how things actually effect tangible carbon-based human lifeforms -- has little place in modern conservatism; it's entirely a construct for hypothetical beings that exist in an idealized version of America that never actually existed and never will.
On a related subject, I read this gem of an article describing how one man's libertarian fantasy quickly collapsed under its own lofty ideals. It pretty much sums up everything I think is wrong with hard-core libertarianism. I've mention my dislike of libertarianism (especially as practiced by Rand Paul) several times on this blog before, but in reading this article I thought of something new. In the article, this guy Ross Ulbricht creates a pirate contraband website with the idea of it being a pure laissez-faire marketplace free from the meddling hand of the government. But in order to keep the site working he has to implement more and more practical restrictions that essentially mimic what the government does with our marketplace. At some point, he recognizes this and makes the distinction that people don't have to use his website. They can seek out a competitor if they're unhappy. But we are always forced to follow the government's tyrannical rules. There is no competition in the government.
This is something people say a lot -- the no competition in government thing -- but if you think about it, it's not really true. For one thing, the American government is not stopping you if you want to move to another country. Go ahead and set up shop in Somalia, where there are basically no rules, and see how well that works out for you. So that's one thing.
But another thing -- one I hadn't consider before -- is that our government actually is a highly competitive field. Competition is a cornerstone of our government. But it doesn't translate to great results. And the reasons it doesn't, actually point out flaws with the free market. What I mean is this: We have a lot of elections in this country -- at every level from neighborhood to nation we decide through our votes what we want our government to do. In theory, if we don't like our current government we can change it, and in theory anybody can run for public office. Politicians should have to compete and should have to please their "customers" (the public) to stay in power. So, given his, why are so many people -- often a vast majority -- perpetually dissatisfied with the government we picked?
There are two main reasons as I see it. One, access to public office is effectively limited to people who have the money and time to run an election. This kills a lot of the competition. But this is similar to how things work in a laissez-faire market. Even if I have a great idea for a video streaming service that's way better than Netflix, I don't have the start-up capital or connections to compete with such a big and company. Sure, if I keep plugging away at it, I might be able to raise money, introduce my product to the public, and grab a piece of the market, but that's by no means a sure thing. You have to get really fortunate. And even if I started to do that, if Netflix notices me, and if they are ruthless enough, they could probably use their deep pockets to crush me. That is, unless there are some sort of government safeguards, like, say, net neutrality, which at its core is a very anti-free market law. (The government is preventing the sale of a good, faster Internet, between two autonomous business like Netflix and Comcast.)
Two, in elections, people don't pay attention or don't care and often vote for unscrupulous or otherwise bad candidates. So even if you are paying attention and you do care, you might get outvoted. Again, there is a parallel in the free market. Consumers also don't pay attention or don't care, and they often buy products from companies who are behave unscrupulously, so this behavior continues even if you don't support it with your dollar. And just like how a politician's election has consequences on everybody, not just those who voted for him or her, big business' actions effect even those who don't patronize it. You might never purchase a GE product, you still have to live with the pollution in the Hudson River.
The reason government often doesn't work is for the same basic reasons the free market often doesn't work: the wealthy and the powerful almost always win, and many people make bad decisions and these decisions can hurt you (as unfair as that is). So, in my opinion, we should have laws to mitigate the societal damage from these two maxims. In short, hard-core free-market libertarianism is as much a fantasy as communism.
And I'll close with a relevant quote that Ralph Nader attributes to his dad: "Capitalism will always survive, because socialism will be there to save it." Hopefully, Nathra Nader, hopefully.
Until next time ...
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