It’s Leslie Nielsen!

With their eyes aligned, Romney’s mouth is much, much lower than Newt’s, leaving very little chin on one image…

…and a Jay Leno-esque chin on the other.

As I said…they’re just so different!

Related Photos

It is becoming more and more popular for marriages in Spain to be “civil”, done at the town hall, rather than religious, done in the church. Starting in 2009, the majority of Spanish weddings have been non-religious town hall ceremonies.

When you add these two things together, the fact that people are accustomed to and love to have parties to celebrate the birth of a child, and the fact that many people don’t see what a celibate man in robes who actually thinks he can, and should, turn wine into blood by uttering magic words has to do with celebrating family events…you get somebody suggesting that a government official should say some inspiring words to a crowd of a newborn’s family members.

I wonder if they use official government water? No I’m kidding. I looked it up. Apparently a civil baptism is a ceremony to celebrate a new Spaniard getting citizenship. The ceremony usually includes a reading of several articles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted by the UN in November 1989:

Article 6 – 1: States Parties recognize that every child has the inherent right to life.

Article 6 – 2: States Parties shall ensure to the maximum extent possible the survival and development of the child.

Article 12 – 1: States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.

Article 12 – 2: For this purpose, the child shall in particular be provided the opportunity to be heard in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child, either directly, or through a representative or an appropriate body, in a manner consistent with the procedural rules of national law.

Article 27 – 1: States Parties recognize the right of every child to a standard of living adequate for the child’s physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development.

Article 27 – 2: The parent(s) or others responsible for the child have the primary responsibility to secure, within their abilities and financial capacities, the conditions of living necessary for the child’s development.

Article 27 – 3: States Parties, in accordance with national conditions and within their means, shall take appropriate measures to assist parents and others responsible for the child to implement this right and shall in case of need provide material assistance and support programmes, particularly with regard to nutrition, clothing and housing.

Article 27 – 4: States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to secure the recovery of maintenance for the child from the parents or other persons having financial responsibility for the child, both within the State Party and from abroad. In particular, where the person having financial responsibility for the child lives in a State different from that of the child, States Parties shall promote the accession to international agreements or the conclusion of such agreements, as well as the making of other appropriate arrangements.

I remember the mountain of paperwork I had to fill out and drive to various government offices around my province after my daughter was born to get her “into the system” so she could suckle the socialist teat. It’s a big hassle, one worthy of a glass of champagne upon completion.

To me, a civil baptism deciding what country a human has allegiance to, before he is able to think for himself, based solely on the geography where he escaped the womb and allegiances of his parents is just as immoral as deciding what religious beliefs he should hold based on the same criteria. But most people don’t really put that much meaning into it. It’s really just a party for a happy reason, which is something I can get behind.

Related Photos

It might be nice to have a president, for once, that can crawl up walls.

Photo of the politician by Gage Skidmore. Photo of amphibian by Eric Highfield. Music by Kevin MacLeod.

Related Photos

I also found this news report, which is in Spanish, of course.

Apparently there are recycling companies who have some interest in receiving these plastic caps. They have offered to donate 200€ for each metric ton (1,000 kg = 2,204 lb) of caps collected. The little eleven-year-old girl, Aitana, requires an operation in Boston (“which is very expensive since medicine is private over there”, the reporter mentioned) that costs 200,000€.

Let’s do some math, shall we? For every kilogram of bottle caps I save, the company will give 0.20€. I asked the internet how much a bottle cap weighs, and the general consensus is that it’s between 2-3 grams. That means that I need 333-500 bottle caps to complete my kilogram, which comes out to 17-25 bottle caps for one euro cent going to Aitana’s 200,000€ operation.

Further research has uncovered the recycling companies’ motivation behind such an effort.

Plastic bottle caps are often made from a different type of plastic from the bottles they’re attached to. Soda bottles are generally made from Type 1 Plastic (Polyethylene Terephthalate) while bottle caps are made from Type 5 Plastic (Polypropylene). These different types of plastic have to be recycled separately. If the bottle and the cap were recycled in the same batch of plastic, the two different plastics would melt unevenly and the whole batch would be ruined.

Whoever came up with this idea is an absolute genius. Ignoring any marketing philanthropic “corporate image” benefits for the recycling companies – of which there aren’t many since I can’t seem to find the name of any participating companies – it seems pretty obvious that it would cost considerably more than 200€ to remove the caps from 500,000 bottles, even if it could be mechanized. The task of getting the general public to properly separate items for recycling must be one of the hardest issues for recycling companies to tackle.

The media, of course, absolutely loves tearjerking stories of little dying girls, so there’s no problem getting the message out. Local governments are also suckers for positive press, and are willing to set up bottle cap collection centers at the town halls. Schools can use it as an easy way to teach simple philanthropy to the nation’s children.

Your average citizen that decides to participate in this scheme by saving bottle caps isn’t going to do the math and see that, if it takes five seconds to save each bottle cap, then it requires three and a half hours of work to produce a single euro to help the little girl. But, what it steals from you in paying ridiculously low wage is made up for by the positive feelings of wellbeing that philanthropy brings. I’m certain that, psychologically, someone saving bottle caps is going to be happier than a cynic who has done the math and refuses to based on the triviality of it.

It’s nice to find a scenario in which all parties involved come out winning.

• The people saving the caps get to feel good about themselves.

• The schools get to teach philanthropy give children the experience of happiness through helping the less fortunate.
• Local governments and organizations get to put on a positive philanthropic face.
• The recycling companies save money, which, in turn, results in lower government contract bids and tax money saved.
• The environment is ultimately less contaminated.
• A little girl gets a life saving operation. (I’d be skeptical of them reaching their goal, but this isn’t the first iteration, so they’ve done it before.)

It’s a win-win-win-win-win-win-win situation. Like I said, pure genius.

Related Photos

No related photos.

Think, People!

Here are two particular offenders that I’ve seen in the last week posted by more than one of my Facebook friends. If you have posted this, I’m not directly calling you an idiot, just pointing out that, either you and I have very different ideologies, or you did something without thinking, which is something I do all the time. If you still believe your support of the statement to be valid, then by all means explain yourself in a comment.

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered, “Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.

He’s saying, in terribly fragmented sentences, that what most surprises him about Humanity is that we plan and worry about the future and strive for wealth. Seriously?

My friend, Lance, who re-posted this in order to mock it, nailed his comment. I’m paraphrasing, since I can’t find the exact comment:

The Dalai Lama is a doofus. That’s what we do! That’s like “our thing”. Saying that’s what most surprises you about humanity, is like saying that what most surprises you about cows is that they go moo.

I get the whole romantic Carpe Diem, “dance like nobody’s watching”, vibe, which is great, but no one actually does that. The very reason our species has become so dominant is that we, unlike all our furry planet-mates, developed the capacity to not live solely in the present.

There are people who have suffered brain damage and specifically lost their ability to form memories and plan for the future, and no one would call that state the pinnacle of human existence. In fact they require constant care and attention (which requires wealth that the Dalai Lama would prefer that we not have saved up for a rainy day). The Dalai Lama himself is so concerned about the future that he’s discarded the millennia-old tenet of his religion about how the Dalai Lama is reincarnated throughout history, and wants to appoint a successor before his death. The irony of his power play is that by discarding the reincarnation doctrine, he’s also discarding his entire claim to authority. That’s the problem with Religion’s trick of setting the standards just out of human reach and claiming that past dead leaders really did attain those standards (e.g sinlessness, enlightenment, etc.). Present day leaders can’t possibly live up to them, and are destined to appear as hypocrites. I could say that what most surprises me about the Dalai Lama is that, as a leader, he’s such an egotistical control freak, but I won’t…because that’s so incredibly human of him.

I always say to people, “No one earns $100 million. You steal $100 million.” People earn $10 an hour. People earn $40,000 a year. “Earn” means work. Okay? It doesn’t mean steal, which with these vast amounts of money, of course you steal them.

Fran Lebowitz

This sounds very clever and empowering at first glance, particularly in the midst of the present Occupy Wall Street movement against bankers. Believe me, I’m very much in favor of Wall Street reform and taxing the billionaires at a much higher rate than the rest of us, but this statement, after a little thought, is absolutely ridiculous. It’s logical conclusion is not a place I want to live.

Bob is working hard at his sweat-inducing factory job earning a $40k salary. One day, Bob realizes that the weather hasn’t been very good this year, and, having grown up on an apple orchard, knows what that means. So he goes down to his local farmers market and, at the opportunity cost of foregoing some of the pleasures his $40k-earning colleagues enjoy, buys up as many barrels of apples as he can afford. Sure enough, when harvest season comes along, there aren’t many apples on the store shelves, and the price shoots up. Bob then backs his pick-up into the farmer’s market and starts selling his apples that he bought at the original price at this new elevated price. According to Fran Lebowitz, any profit he has made merely by foresight and thought has been stolen! She doesn’t specify from whom, but I assume she means that Bob should apologize and give that money back to society.

John works with Bob at the factory and also earns $40k sweating away his 40-hour week. One particular part of the manufacturing process at his plant has always struck John as particularly laborious, and he’s certain there’s another way. While his coworkers are out at the pub most nights, John stays in his garage at home tinkering with his workshop. After years of refining his design, he patents it and starts up a company to market it. What he’s designed is a piece that can be fit onto one of the machines at his factory to make the process much more efficient so they can produce twice as many units per day. His device, which costs only $50 to manufacture, will save his ex-employer, and thousands of similar factories around the country, at least $5,000 per day. How much should he charge them for the device? Fran Lebowitz would suggest that charging any more than what it costs him to pay his $40k/year employees to manufacture the device would be stealing. WTF, Franny?

The worst thing about this Lebowitz quotation is that it leads logically to exactly to the “no incentive for innovation or hard work” communist hell hole that the Conservatives think all Liberals are trying to take us to with “class warfare”. Passing this stuff around only hurts the Liberal cause.

I totally stole this idea from Dustin Timbrook, the artist that did this masterpiece.

To conclude, I’d like to state that I enjoy these little quotes as much as the next social network addict, and some of them are really good, thought-provoking and important to spread. And the social networks have done an excellent job in facilitating the spread, haven’t they? Zuckerberg’s term is “frictionless sharing”. I just wish that people would put some more thought into whether or not they really want to support a statement before hitting “Share”.

Related Photos

Recently I read an article by Washington Post columnist, Ezra Klein, about some research into the forces acting on this political pendulum. He cites a paper written by Larry M. Bartels, of Vanderbilt University, entitled Ideology and Retrospection in Electoral Responses to the Great Recession. Here’s a bit of the abstract, although the entire paper is worth reading:

My analyses suggest that voters consistently punished incumbent governments for bad economic conditions, with little apparent regard for the ideology of the government or global economic conditions at the time of the election. I find no evidence of consistent ideological shifts in response to the crisis, either to the left or to the right, but some evidence of electoral responses to specific fiscal policy choices—most notably, a boost in incumbent governments’ electoral support associated with spending on economic stimulus programs.

I have long since been irked that voters don’t vote based on issues, and now this paper has made me even more cynical about the knee-jerk thoughtlessness of the electorate. Apparently, when we are all averaged out, we tend to vote with the simplest of algorithms:

And what is the best indicator of whether or not the average voter’s life sucks? That’s right! The Economy! Check out these depressing charts from Bartels’ paper…

You can think of the x-axis as being how well the economy is doing, and the y-axis is how well the incumbent governing party did in the election.

What the incumbent government does during the crisis can have some effect, however. For instance, if there is some stimulus spending, they can soften their inevitable decline a little bit. But the absolute worst thing a government that wants to stay in power can do during an economic crisis is to cut spending. Behold:

Surprise, surprise! What do the Republicans in the US Congress – who have, on more than one occasion, mentioned that their primary goal is not to better the nation, but to defeat Obama in 2012 – want more than anything? To cut discretionary stimulus spending! Republicans are such political geniuses. Of course, they have to be, since their ideology tends to screw the majority.

I really wish, more than anything, that, as I get older and incrementally wiser, I could find reasons to be less cynical about politics, but that just isn’t happening. Can anyone see anything to be optimistic about in this data? This strong correlation between the economy and government turnover is, of course, terrible news for Obama. If such a charismatic leader can’t buck this trend, then it really is a law of human governance.

Related Photos

Nora: [cry] Daddy! Daddy! Give me your hand, Daddy! [cry]

Daddy: Nora, do you want me to sit down [in this comfortable chair near the crib]?

Nora: [cry] No! Give me your hand, Daddy! [cry]

Daddy: Okay, if you don’t want me to sit down, then I’m going to leave.

Nora: [wail] Your hand! Daddy!! [cry]

Daddy: Okay, I’m leaving. Let me know when you want me to sit down. [leaves the room]

Nora: [screams]

[30 seconds of suffered punishment]

Daddy: [opens door] Nora, would you like me to sit down?

Nora: [sob] Daddy, sit down! [sniffle]

Daddy: Okay, I’ll sit down, but only if you sit down [in your crib] too.

Nora: Daddy, sit down.

Daddy: If you won’t sit down, then I’m going to leave.

Nora: [sits down fast] Daddy, sit down.

Daddy: Okay. [sits down]

[30 seconds of enjoyed reward]

Daddy: Nora, you need to lie down.

Nora: No.

Daddy: [starts to get up] If you won’t lie down, I’m leaving.

Nora: Sit down! [lies down]

Daddy: [sits back in chair] Good girl.

Nora: Daddy?

Daddy: What?

Nora: Daddy?

Daddy: What?

Nora: Daddy?

Daddy: What do you want?

Nora: Daddy?

Daddy: [silence]

Nora: Daddy?

Daddy: Nora, you need to be quiet, okay?

Nora: Daddy?

Daddy: If you won’t be quiet, I’m going to leave.

Nora: Sit down. [shuts up]

Once I can get her to lie down, be still and quiet, getting her to fall asleep is usually just a matter of 3-4 minutes of sitting in a comfortable chair in the dark. I could keep going, successively moving myself further out the door, but I don’t mind a nice contemplative sit at the end of the day.

Of course this isn’t a new and innovative parenting technique. Behavioral psychologists call it successive approximations, in rhetoric it’s called moving the goalposts, and when the mafia does it, it’s called extortion. It’s a common method used by the powerful to get the weak to do what they want them to do.

I’m sorry, but due to budget concerns, we’re going to have to cancel your pension program…although…the accountants say we could afford it if you could work on Saturdays.

Like all manipulation, it can be unethical, but it doesn’t have to be. Whether your raising rent, freeing hostages or haggling on cheap flights to Larnaca, it’s a good negotiation technique to have in your toolkit.

Related Photos

We went down, over, and up and eventually found the internet kiosk after asking a woman in a jewelry shop who seemed annoyed at having to speak English. We could use the internet (if you can call it that using Internet Explorer) for thirty minutes for 3€. So we went to the ESTA page and filled out Marga’s information. When we got to the end of the form filling process, the website told us that she still has 30 days on her last ESTA request. When we backed out of the form submission process to do a search to find her previous ESTA reference number, however, all the system could find was our new not-yet-paid-for request that we had just filled out. Oh well. We decided to just go ahead and get a new authorization. The website asked for a credit card number to charge the $14 to…and that’s when I said, “Oh shit!”

Due to Republican tax cuts, I paid significantly less in US taxes in 2010. When it came time to fill out my 2010 tax report in Spain the day before leaving for this trip and avoid double taxation and only pay the difference (what I would’ve paid if I’d made my income in Spain with Spanish tax rates minus what I did pay in the US), the Spanish taxman told me that I owed a large chunk of money. As a result, the day before traveling, I had zeroed out our Spanish bank account. Luckily, the same day, I had wired all my money, except $9, from my US bank account to Spain (which wasn’t a big deal since I was going to get a paycheck deposited the same day I was traveling). The result of all this financial tomfoolery was that all of my liquid money was in that terrifying limbo where it’s no longer in the account you wired it from, but it’s not yet in the account you wired it to. And, you guessed it, I only have a debit card for my US bank account, with its $9 in it.

Nevermind that I had $150 in cash on me at the time, I had to pay paranoid Uncle Sam $14 on this online form. Just when I was about to wake my parents up at 3:00 AM to ask for their credit card number, I remembered that we do have a credit card in Spain, so we could use it to pay to pay the $14 and pay the bill later. Normally I can’t stand spending money I don’t have, and I think this might have been the first time I’ve ever done it (with a credit card, mortgages don’t count).

Transaction completed, I wrote down the 25-letter code that was proof that Marga had ESTA clearance, and we headed, down and over and up, back to the US Airways desk. Of course they never asked for the confirmation code. One even wonders if their computer crosschecked her passport number with the Homeland Security database. At last, they gave us our boarding passes and sent us to our gate, where the aircraft was already boarding. For all the hassle of traveling with a small child, at least the kid is a great tool for skipping the immigration and boarding queues. Parents get to board planes even before the rich first class snobs.

Hopefully this ordeal will be enough to make us remember to do the stupid pre-travel registering next time, but maybe not, as my brain has a harder time remembering things that make no sense.

Related Photos

No related photos.

The solution is a bit of moderation. In artificial intelligence programming, sometimes a bit of randomized noise needs to be added to the system to avoid overly deterministic behavior. Our search algorithms need something similar. We need some decent percentage (10%? 20%?) of our search results and news feed items to be opposing viewpoints; otherwise our society will become even more polarized.

Related Photos

With the combination of a number of successful political demonstrations – the most successful being that of Egypt – in the first quarter of 2011 and a video lecture I saw on YouTube, I finally had an epiphany about why demonstrations matter, and how they can be effective.

The whole video is wonderful, but the epiphany-inducing section about protests starts at 8:05.

I know that you know that I know

The whole point of assembling a mass of people in a public square is to stand in solidarity in the mutual knowledge that you all agree on something. When the Wisconsin Republicans had to walk through a mob of peacefully chanting protesters on their way to strip collective bargaining rights from state employees in March 2011, it was clear mutual knowledge for both the protesters and the legislators that the bill was unpopular. If the protesters had not been there, the legislators might have thought the general public was in agreement with their actions, and the would-be protesters might have been sitting at home thinking that they were in the minority in their opinion. When a protest is large enough, the person in power being protested may very well ignore the protesters, but everyone knows that the protesters are being willfully ignored. It strips the leaders of that wonderful phrase “plausible deniability”. I get that.

Note that changing the color of your Twitter avatar is still stupid, because there’s no guarantee that the “protestee” will have any knowledge of your subtle hue shift.

A protest needs an objective

The primary reason that regime changing protests like the one in Egypt earlier this year can be so successful is that they have a solitary objective. “We will protest until Mubarak steps down.” The leadership knows what needs to happen to get people to stop protesting and go back to work.

Even when a protest fails to achieve its goal, like in Wisconsin, if it had a singular objective, the fact that the leadership went directly against the will of the people remains salient and undeniable.

What does not work well is a generic protest of discontentment. This month has seen a large political protest movement in Spain erupt. They call themselves Democracia Real YA! (Real Democracy NOW!). Their manifesto reads a lot like the General Strike Manifesto I translated last September. They are unhappy with the government and feel that neither of the two primary parties actually listens to the will of the people, and they’ve had enough, dammit!

My reaction to this movement is to smile at the naiveté, like that of an 18-year-old who’s just read some Nietzsche or Ayn Rand and thinks she’s got the world all figured out. Welcome to life in a modern western democracy; this is as “real” as democracy gets, and it’s arguably the best and most fair system of large scale government humans have ever come up with. Is there room for improvement? Of course. Will it improve? Almost certainly. But for now, know that you’re on the very cutting edge of governance technology.

Getting angry at all political parties and all authority won’t fix anything. Even if one could get another party on the ballot, and everyone that supports the movement voted for that party, would anything change? No, of course not. Because A) Power corrupts, and B) Governing is really hard!

Yesterday was Election Day in Spain, for municipal and some autonomous regions (like states in the US), not for the national government. Of course the results were totally predictable. The mass discontentment swung the political pendulum from the left to the right. When a few years pass and people are still discontent, the pendulum will swing back the other way, and so on…and so on…and so on…

Conclusion

In the same way that The War On Terror was doomed to failure from the start merely by its name, a protest against everything cannot possibly succeed. If your manifesto has more than two bullet points, you’re sunk before you’ve left the dock. Protest can and does work, but the political weapon you’re swinging needs to have a very sharp edge.

Related Photos