Category: Politics

We might not make it

I have been “separated” from Microsoft for 18 months. It feels longer. I have forgotten so many of the little things like the phone number I had, peoples email addresses, etc. This is all reasonable and unsurprising.

I have also been working for myself for long enough and with enough variety that it feels normal. It is still a much less regular life. And considering what happened in that 18 months, it surely wasn’t “regular.”

Working for myself has been gratifying, but certainly it has not replaced my salary. Fortunately, I have been willing to forego some of that in the hope that I am building something that will sustain us in the future as our lives continue to change and we approach our 7th decade.

It is very clear to me, now, that nothing is to be taken for granted. There are fewer years in front of me than behind, and that is motivating too. I don’t have a bucket list mentality, but I do have a clear picture of what I don’t want my day-to-day life to be.

Given the current political climate, and also the regular climate, I recently had the thought that I don’t think mankind is going to make it. Funny enough, it didn’t bother me. We are in an age called the Anthropocene: the age of humans. But all good things come to an end. For all of our celebrated brain power, we don’t have what it takes to continue. And you can’t really feel bad about that, can you? It’s like hating whale because they can’t walk. They just can’t.

Chomsky said that there are two big, human-created changes that push us closer to doomsday: the invention of nuclear weapons and the human impact on climate change. The nuclear weapons thing is easy to understand. Everyone understands on the potential devastation of nuclear war. The lack of agreement on global climate change is the proof that humans are, on average, not smart enough to continue to be the dominant mammal on earth.

That might seem pessimistic, but I move from the extremes inward. There is little that I can do about either thing. Sure, I can and will vote. But that’s a tiny drop in the bucket. And I can pick an issue or two and advocate on that. Personally, my preferred issue is an end to the electoral college. I prefer the idea of a popular election because it is more democratic. If we are going to go down in a fight, I’d rather it not be on a technicality. None of the arguments for the electoral college make sense when cast in the light of democratic outcomes.

I like Robert Reich and I don’t like neo-liberalism if you want to know where I stand. Climate change is real and caused by humans. It is not hubris to think it is human caused, as religionists would have you believe.

Beyond that, it seems advisable to live a life where you are trying to minimize stress. Creating stress is not hard. And yes, some stress is necessary in order maximize one’s long term outcomes. The story the grasshopper and the ant comes to mind.

I’m not setting aside dumb luck either in my thinking and conclusions. I was lucky enough to have a good paying job for a long enough time that I can even ask these questions and take this time to think about it. I’m not starving and living a life of just surviving. But failing to see the stress that was in my life and not changing course, as I was doing, also seems quite dumb in hindsight.

Minor changes to fix some unclear points and mistakes from ealier – July 10

Maybe the Young Ones can Kickstart a Fix – Babyboomers are over.

[This isn’t my usual blog fare. But I needed to get this off my chest. And if no one reads it that’s fine. I still put it out there. Facebook was another consideration but I honestly cannot take the day-to-day noise that is there right now. So here it is.]

The presidential election is broken. Fixing it is impossible for people of my generation and over. We had our chances and we didn’t do anything with it. Good luck with fixing it, young people.
You give me hope because you are not beholdin’ to ancient, sacred  ideas like the Constitution being an immutable and nearly biblical artifact. You are problem solvers and you have some tough problems.
The way that I want to look at this is from the top down. Fix the presidential election, and you might, just maybe, improve the confidence people have in other types of elections or the federal government in general. Even if you think the country is already great enough, there is near universal agreement that the campaign and the election are proving to be expensive contests that dissatisfy too many people. Dissatisfied people disrupt. It’s an unproductive cycle.
Here it is: You have to eliminate the Electoral College and return the so-called “fourth estate”  to a trustworthy institution. Most young people will not know the fourth estate (the press) because they believe in the fifth estate, social media, etc. How can you blame them? They grew up with it and search engines are fantastic.
Young people are perplexed at how us oldsters held on to the Electoral College this long. It’s clearly antiquated. Why, in light of modern communication, do we use it? How did we ever let it get this broken they ask, and it’s a fair question.
I’m not arguing for any particular party. I am arguing for change. But change isn’t happening because the institution is broken. Just like it is for racism. You don’t see it if you have that blind spot, but that’s your blind spot.
Young people will get it. In fact, they are perplexed at how shitty the experience is. Look at the average Bernie supporter and this is clear.
One way to say it simply is that the game theory involved in the Electoral College (because of winner take all) leads to the entrenched two party system. It is far more cost effective to undermine all truth and your opponent because winning by default or attrition is still winning.
Cooperation among parties is unthinkable. Because of that there is no real room for a third party. If a third party splits your party, then neither has any serious chance in any winner-take-all Electoral College.
The scale of the election and the size of the growing republic exacerbate the problem. It cannot get better. It can only get worse because it isn’t rigged, it’s busted.
If you don’t understand that, or can’t google it and understand it, then you cannot be part of the solution. It’s not your fault. Relax. Just keep doing what you’re doing.
If you can listen to the Freakonomics podcast you might understand it.
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/idea-must-die-election-edition/
And while many of the ideas are novel, they all depend on changing the basic existing Electoral College. I.e. you have to admit that you have a problem. They don’t make as big a deal of this as I wish they did. The ideas are novel and most have no shot.
If you can’t listen because you can’t find it or you can’t handle what they are saying, you are in the same group as above. I’m not saying you are part of the problem but you are not part of the solution. It’s ok. Just like me, there’s lots of things you can’t do but life is still worth living.
Everyone else, you might have a chance to fix this but you have to kill a sacred cow AND (Boolean – you get it) fix something you might think is not broken but it is – the fourth estate.
The amount of conspiracy theory that I hear is astonishing to me. How can you verify or deny that any claim is crazy? Take, for example, the clam that the Democratic primary was rigged. (It wasn’t. The favorite won the contest that is set up for the favorite to win. That’s not usually how a rigged game works.) You really can’t; not in any way that you believe because social media is an echo chamber.
No one can figure out how a vibrant and robust press can exist without advertising dollars. Dollars equal influence. I get it. TV is a business. And they, like newspapers, are losing out to any free content provider on the internet. Everyone can find some outlet that is putting out material in favor of their view.
Maybe it was always this way with the “free press” but again we have scale working against us. And a tradition, the fourth estate, that is nowhere now. And it ain’t ever coming back. It shouldn’t. Times have changed.
Young people might be able to get rid of the Electoral College because it is easy for them to see how broken it is. They also trust other ways of fixing the problems and see no reason to stand still when they can iterate towards a better fix.
Young people don’t put the founders on a pedestal like they are canonized saints. In fact they don’t know what that means. And they are problem solvers. They do stuff like kick starter and get on with using whatever bathroom is open.
Us oldsters trusted journalists and “the news” to be a proxy for the truth. That notion is completely gone. Kids don’t know that Jon Stewart was a News parody. They just thought it was a funny show. They never watched the news.
Young people have some responsibility for killing this. Their devotion to the fifth estate – Facebook, Twitter, and social media in general – gives everyone an equal status for their ideas.
This leads to everyone checking everything on the internet. You think the election is rigged for Clinton, right? Look it up. You will find information that supports your idea. But is that reliable? Has that article been vetted by other parties? No. But you will never know that because you already posted it to Facebook and gotten 37 likes by other similar thinking people.
That forces everyone to become unrelenting fact checkers who must be omnipresent. In light of that impossibility, we start to trust charlatans pedaling snake oil. Or we start making “feelings based” judgments about what is true. That’s not how to run a country. Too many people end up unhappy.
To recap, young people fix two problems: eliminate the out of date Electoral College and establish the fifth estate as a robust replacement to the fouth estate in a new 21st millennium style. Good luck. I will support you but I, and many people my age, probably can’t help you. Where the hell is my phone?