Don't quit now

This weekend I was reminded of the concept that if you give up you might be quitting one step away from succeeding. The idea is used to encourage people to keep trying because they might succeed. What they never mention is that you might be just wasting your time and you might be better served by trying a different idea.

One of the big reasons I don't like this concept is that it keeps gamblers gambling. They can't quit now, they could be one step away from winning their money back! Or losing their mortgage payment. Yes it is true that you could be one step away from succeeding but it is also true that you might not be.

In deciding to continue or quit the amount of money or effort you have put into something is irrelevant. The only thing that is important is given what you know now and where you are now, what is the best path to take. The money and effort already spent is gone, don't worry about it. And don't let wishful thinking or the fear of possible future regret keep you on a losing path. Make your decision on the now.

Prisons

The American prison system is a horrible place, but apparently not horrible enough to stop people from committing crimes. I just read a new article [link] about dementia in prison populations. Caring for a dementia patient is hard enough, caring for a dementia patient who is known to kill people is both hard and expensive. Two or three times as expensive as an average prisoner according to the article.

What can you ethically do with a person who isn't safe to release into public and yet needs constant care? According to the article some prisons are using prisoners to take care of the dementia patients, others have a special high security dementia care facility. Of the two I think the care facility is the better choice, but neither seems ideal.

Death by delay

Every once in a while I find people who have to make a decision but won't. They privately want to say no but they won't because they don't want people to hate them for saying no. But they also won't say yes because they can't justify their desire to say no. So instead they delay, often for years, until the topic goes away. This is exceptionally repugnant to me. If you want to say no then say no, if not say yes. Have the guts to make a stand one way or another, don't just delay things to death.

Sometimes the law is stupid

I read today that a dad suspected of killing his wife had a court ordered supervised visit with his children. He let the kids in, locked the supervisor out of the house, then blew up the house killing himself and the two kids.

The court is wrong to allow parental visits when the parent is suspected of murder. Very wrong.

Spelling and grammar

What do they teach kids in school now? I have never been the worlds best speller but I do read a lot and I have spell check built into my browser so spelling isn't a problem for me. But I see a lot of posts on the internet that are spelled horribly. Now I am not talking about things like "prolly" where they have spelled the word "probably" wrong just to be cool. I am talking about things like "naver used". Really? How can you misspell "never"? It is a common word.

Grammar of course varies a lot from area to area but many times I have seen posts that didn't even make sense. Posts where nobody could make out even the general topic of the post. And yes I checked, these are people inside the USA not people using a second language.

I have to put it down to laziness. With built in spell check and online dictionaries available anybody can be a decent speller. But these people should have learned something from school. Maybe the world has always had a certain percentage of poor spellers and people who can't make understandable sentences but now the internet lets everybody see them instead of them being hidden in obscure low paying jobs. I don't know.

Augmentation

I read a lot of science fiction. One of the common things that pop up in many stories is enhancing peoples strength, speed, reaction time, and mental abilities. For me augmenting peoples mental abilities is the most fascinating. Contrary to popular belief people use 100% of their brain. Sometimes they use it badly but they use it. If we could tie a vast library of knowledge directly into our brains we could do more. Of course having access to information and being able to use it are two very different things but still imagine how life would be different if you had direct access to all the information you could ever want. Being able to quickly look up traffic laws. Being able to do math in your head because your extended memory had a built in calculator.

Of course I wouldn't want to be the first guinea pig to get the system. And I suspect any hardware breakdown would send the user directly insane. But still it would be cool. We need cool. The world needs cool.

But if I can't have direct brain augmentation I will settle for a very smart robot that follows me around all day and answers questions. That would be okay I guess.

Problem solving

Problem solving is what I do. It is what I do for a living and what I do as a hobby. One of the most difficult things I have to deal with is people who don't want solutions to their problems. I give them a solution, explain it, they acknowledge that yes this would solve their problem, but they do nothing. Why would you not want a problem solved? It is difficult for me to understand and very frustrating.