So what has happened in the last year.

It has been a long time since I posted. In the past year I have gotten engaged and unengaged, started a new medical treatment, and gotten older without getting wiser. Part of the reason is that I haven't had a whole lot to say. The other part is that I haven't been feeling well so everything I did have to say was depressing. But here I am again. Maybe I will think of something to say.

New stupidity from the Boy Scouts

I just read a news article where the Boy Scouts are questioning letting gays into their organization because they wouldn't be able to share tents with the other boys. Gays aren't a new phenomenon  they have existed probably as long as humans have. So how did the Boy Scouts deal with this issue back in the 60's? The only difference between now and then is that gays are more likely to be open about their sexuality. They shared tents in the 60's without issues so obviously there isn't an issue.

It is way past time people accepted gender and orientation differences. Stop having Men's and Women's restrooms and either provide a mixed restroom or individual restrooms. Stop having Men's and Women's gym locker rooms and either provide a mixed locker room or individual changing and shower rooms. Yes it will be different, yes it will cost money. But it will finally acknowledge that gays, bis, and lesbians exist and have a place in society.

My own preference would be to provide individual restrooms and locker rooms. Keep gender and sexual orientation a private mater. But I could survive in a mixed environment if I had to because I have always known that their were gay men in the locker rooms and restrooms.

The economy is definitely improving

A year ago I could go out on a Sunday afternoon and eat at a nice restaurant without it being crowded. Now I can't even get into the parking lot because it is so crowded. Further evidence is that the service at the "value" places has decreased to the point they are almost not an option. So no more Sunday afternoon meals out for me. I will miss the meals out, I enjoyed them a lot. But at least the economy is getting better.

Dealing with some situations

I have been dealing a lot lately with a couple of women I know (who don't read this blog). Both have made the decision to stay single. Both have minimal skills to earn money with. Both are basically broke and one paycheck away from not being able to pay their bills. Both have been talking to me a lot about their problems, which I don't mind but the talks almost always end back at "I don't think you can afford to be single". Both of these ladies need a partner to help share their expense. Both don't want one. Neither likes the reality of the situation. Hey, I am not a big fan of reality either but even I deal with it.

Scary stuff

I don't spend a lot of time worrying about how people look or dress. I really don't care that much about looks so I just don't focus on it. But sometimes I see stuff that I find creepy. One of the creepiest things I have ever seen in my life was an 80 year old woman with jet black hair dressed in a Buster Brown type sailor suit like she might have worn as a child. I recently saw a man on TV that was over 60 with jet black hair dressed like he would have in the 60's with a gold medallion and a shirt that opened to mid chest. People who seem to be stuck in another time zone are just creepy to me. Dying your hair jet black and dressing like time froze decades ago is just not right.

People are confusing

Recently I have read about or run into several situations where people have created a problem, gotten in over their heads, then demanded others fix the problem. I find this very confusing. If you created the problem how can you demand that others fix it? You can ask. You can beg. But demand?

If you created a problem you own the problem. You are responsible for finding a solution, nobody else. There are plenty of people in the world that solve problems for money, hire them. Or fix the problem yourself. Or hire somebody to make the problem go away. But demanding that others take responsibility of something you are responsible for just doesn't make sense.

Wow

A Florida law firm fired 14 workers because they wore orange shirts to work (link). The employees said they were going out to happy hour after work and wanted to wear matching shirts so they would be seen as a group. The law firm isn't talking but told workers they found the matching shirts to be threatening. Really?

Maybe the law firm thought the workers were forming a street gang or something. I can't imagine what somebody would find threatening about people wearing the same color shirt. This story truly amazes me.

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.

Reality

Several years ago somebody told me "perception is reality". I did a search on that phrase tonight and found a bunch of contradictory uses for it. What the person saying it meant by it was that it didn't matter what the reality of the situation was, it only mattered what people perceived it as being. So if people saw you as a good person you were a good person, if they saw you as evil then you were evil. What the real situation was or what you felt didn't matter.

To me that is a lot of garbage. Reality is reality. Now I know that in one sense we never experience true reality since everything is filtered through our senses and our past experiences and I won't argue with that. What I argue with is that what people think is more important than the truth. At on time everybody on the earth knew the world was flat. That didn't make the world flat. Reality is still reality.

My opinion on perception is that people need to hold off judgement until they have more facts. People who make snap judgments based on superficial evidence are just being stupid. You should have real facts to base your opinions on.

What brought this quote to mind is something I read in a book, "to him intent is reality". The person intended to be somewhere so to them they were already there. I have met a few people like this. They intended to show up at work on time so to them they did, regardless of what the clock said. They intended to spell check their work so to them they did, the errors appeared by magic. Again, reality is reality. Planning to do something isn't the same as doing it.

People and titles

Long ago I had a high school teacher who coached minor sport. Regular students could call him Mr. Smith but the students he coached were required to call him Coach Smith. I forget his real name, it isn't important. The important part was that this guy loved the title of coach and forced the students to call him that, as if the title made him important.

This particular teacher wasn't the worst teacher I have ever had, as a teacher he was okay. As a person he was a shmuck. A braggart, a blowhard, somebody who thought he was important and couldn't understand why people didn't treat him as royalty. The students he coached said he was an ass and a horrible coach, but he loved the title.

I have never understood the fascination people have with titles. Titles are just words, they don't make you important. Albert Einstein was a genius in his own right, he didn't require people to call him Mr. Genius Einstein. Yet I see people all the time who love to hear people repeat their title to them. Love to hear people call them sir or mister. I wonder where their parents went wrong and why they never learned self esteem.

Goodbye 2011

This year hasn't been the worst, nor has it been the best. Still, I will be happy to see it go. I have some hopes that 2012 will be a better year. Not a lot of hope but some.

During 2011 I didn't accomplish anything significant. I didn't go on any exciting vacations, I didn't get promoted at work, and I didn't make any significant progress with my life. Heck, I didn't even go on a date. But I did make some progress with my health. Not a lot but some. And I have streamlined my life a bit further, making things simpler so I can focus on more important things. So while I didn't accomplish anything significant I did make some progress.

In 2012 I hope to continue making progress. Maybe even go on an exciting vacation. Who knows.

More commentary on the news. Some of the motivation behind my rants.

I read an article about how emergency rooms are having to deal with the homeless and mentally ill because of budget cuts eliminating state programs. This is another example of how not doing things right ends up costing you more in the end.

Many of my rants are about how we are not doing things right, doing what is easy or convenient for the short term but ignoring the long term cost. Problems don't just go away because you want them to. People with mental illnesses don't just disappear because you cut funding for a program. They continue to exist and will get their needs met elsewhere, in this case by showing up in emergency rooms where the cost of treating them is much higher both in money terms and in terms of services not rendered to people who really need emergency treatment.

Suppose you had a mental illness. You can't get a job, the state has cut out all programs to help, and your relatives have all disappeared. You can't get the medication you need for treatment so you slip further and further from reality. You have no home and winter is here. You have no food except what you can dig out of trash cans or beg. Showing up in the emergency room for treatment of the various illnesses that appear gets you food, shelter, and medication. Sure it costs a ton but you don't have an address so they can't send you a bill. Can't get into the emergency room? Well breaking a few windows or mugging somebody will get you into jail. That also gets you food and shelter. Maybe even medication. That also costs a ton but the state pays for that. You lose your freedom but you won't starve.

My point here is that doing that there is no free lunch. You can't make a problem go away by ignoring it and trying almost always costs more in the long run than dealing with it properly in the first place. As a society we should deal with the problems we have and strive for the best solution so our society can progress.

I wish I could write

Like many people, I would like to write a book. I have a story, several of them in fact. But every time I sit down to write the story out I get nothing. Although sometimes I get incoherent garbage instead of nothing.

It is odd that something so clear in my head comes out blank or garbled in words. Life I guess. I have heard many times that writing a book is hard work but I had thought I would at least be able to get the story out. Oh well. If I keep trying then maybe some day.

Institutional hoarding

Recently I read about a new dinosaur find. The fossils were not found in the field, they were found in the basement of a museum. The museum had gathered them long ago, put them into boxes, and then hid them away.

Another recent news article spoke of a library which had a huge storage room. A janitor got curious as to what was in a wooden box in the storage room and found a cache of silver coins which the library didn't even know they had. They aren't even sure where or when the coins came from. They were very, very old and collectible yet the library had them stuck in a wooden box in a storage room.

Museums, libraries, colleges, and other types of institutions often hoard items. Tucking them away not so much so that they can be preserved for the future but so nobody else can get them. Rare books that people should have access to are lost in the back rooms of libraries. Fossils that could further our understanding of the past are stuck in boxes in the basement, unstudied and unavailable to be studied. This is a shame because these institutions exist to spread knowledge, not hide it. And yet researchers who try to access these hidden treasures are denied access because they are "them" instead of library/museum/whatever staff.

It is a shame.