China Part 2: Beijing Day 1

A 12-hour flight is hard. The worst part is actually the sitting -- my butt hurt about an hour and a half into the flight, and all the rest of the way. I did have time to read over 200 pages of my friend Chuck's novel, so that was good, but on the way back I took the pillow they gave me and sat on it all the way back to LA. That helped a little.

We landed in Beijing in the afternoon, but 1:00 AM West Coast time. We stayed up until 10:00 China time, but jet lag does not go away in a day, and I woke up at 3:00 AM.

So I was tired when we started the day, and the first thing we did was took a fairly long bus drive to the jade shop. It turns out that shopping is something you do on a tour, more than you would ever choose to on your own. Jackie got some nice jade earrings, but I was feeling ill. Next stop was lunch, and I skipped it. Then on to the Great Wall, our first big attraction, with me feeling terrible. But I got out of the bus and walked with Jackie up some steps and walked around, although I was in no shape to go up the hill. All my pictures that day are blurred at the top and bottom for some reason, but I have a picture to prove we were at the Great Wall. It really is pretty amazing -- wide and tall and running up the hills and across the hilltops in both directions, with lots of little towers. Some of our group walked all the way to the top of that hill behind us, but several stayed close to the bottom.

We had an hour and a half at the wall, and as I walked around, I felt much better. I realized that I had been feeling motion sickness. I used to get carsick as a kid, but as an adult I mostly only get seasick, and that only a couple of times although I have been on many boats. But at least two other times -- once in St. Lucia and once in Canada -- I got sick on buses when I was really exhausted. Fortunately, getting out of the bus for a good long time was the cure, and I felt fine the rest of the trip.

Next stop was the Beijing Zoo, and guess what we saw there? This guy in the picture was hiding in the back, and I silently willed him to come out and give us some good pictures. And he did, wandered all around and then stretched out and posed for us. I love it when ridiculous stuff works. There were some little baby pandas too, plenty of pandas.

Dinner was Peking Duck. It was good, but they wrap it up like Mu She Pork and put plum sauce on it and pieces of cucumber, and then you can't taste the duck as much. There was lots of duck, so I just ate some of it plain. During that meal they introduced us to Chinese firewater, which I have since learned is the most-consumed alcoholic beverage in the world. It's about 50 percent alcohol, served in very small glasses. For those who have tried Aguardiente, that's the closest thing I know of. One of our group, Cedric, took a great liking to firewater, and that became an ongoing joke for the whole trip.

By then of course we had met all of the 11 other people in our tour group and spent the day with our tour guide, Nina (actually Li Nan, but our guides took English names for us.) It was a nice group, and we liked Nina, so things were off to a good start.

China, Part 1: "Call Your Wife"

Going to China takes a bit of preparation. You have to get a visa, which is no small task. It is also recommended that you get certain inoculations, which we did at the local pharmacy. In our case, we also booked a hotel room at the Holiday Inn Express near LAX, because the flight to China takes 12 hours, and we did not want to fly to LA and then fly 12 more hours without rest.

So the Friday before Thanksgiving, we left the boys in charge of the house and headed for the airport. The flight was no problem, and we called our hotel from LAX and waited for the courtesy bus. When the bus arrived, the driver asked us to leave our bags at the back rather than take them on the bus with us, and he loaded them in the back. We drove to the hotel, through some bad LA traffic. When we got to the hotel, the driver unloaded our two bags. Trouble was, we had three bags. Jackie and I both stuck our heads in the back of the van to be sure, but our carry-on was not there.

The best we could guess was that the driver failed to load the third bag into the van. So now what? I headed back to the airport with the driver to find the bag, while Jackie checked into the room. All I could think was that my passport was in that bag, as well as all of our medicines and my CPAP machine. If we can't find that bag, we aren't going to China. I was pretty much in shock all the way back to the airport, and traffic getting into the airport was worse than getting out had been, so for 20 minutes I sat there wondering if our trip was already trashed. As we got close to the terminal, traffic was heavy enough that I got out of the bus and walked ahead to find the bag. And thankfully, there it was. Some fine person had grabbed it and set it up against a pillar.

I grab the bag and turn around to find the bus. "Sir!" "Sir!" "Is that your bag sir?" I look behind me, across a couple of lanes to the sidewalk in front of the terminal, and there are three airport security guards and a cop. Turns out one of them is the fine person who noticed the bag, and they have been watching it and now want to talk to me. Fortunately their main concern is making sure it's my bag, and since my passport is in it, it doesn't take long to convince them. They make fun of me a bit (except the cop, who is very serious) and tell me to keep an eye on my bag. By the time I am allowed to take my bag and go, the bus is waiting for me. I get on and sink back into the seat, so relieved. The bus driver says, "Call your wife." Good idea.

It turns out that Jackie had lost her driver's license somewhere in Seatac airport, but she had her passport with her, and that is good enough identification anywhere you go. The biggest bit of drama for the trip was behind us at that point, and the next day I took a picture of our plane while we were waiting to board. Next stop, Beijing.

The Perfect World Series

I decided a few years back that there is a perfect sequencing for the wins in a World Series. The sequencing is this:  The home team loses the first game, then that team wins the next two, then loses the next two, then wins the last two and wins the series in seven games. It's perfect because it maximizes the drama and excitement for the fans.

Why would anyone bother to think about such as thing, you ask? I do not know; it's just the way I am. How does this set of events make the series more exciting than any other? OK, this I can answer. Consider:

• After 2, 4, and 6 games, the series will be tied. No team ever gets ahead more than one game.
• The home team will win every game except games 2 and 3. ( The World is Series is played two games in one city, then three in the other city, then two, if needed, back in the first city.) Home team wins are exciting because the fans are into it.
• The series lead will keep switching, with one team ahead 1-0, the other ahead 2-1, the first one back ahead 3-2, and then the other team winning the series 4-3.
• The series will end with the home team winning, and the stadium going crazy. Much more fun than the fans all going home crying while the only people celebrating are the visiting players.

However, the chances of a perfect World Series are pretty slim, because for it to be perfect, it has to happen exactly as I laid it out above, which means the chances are only about 1 in 128 that it could happen that way. And maybe you can guess, the current World Series is getting very close to hitting those 1 in 128 odds. The Giants are about to lose, and that would mean that the first six games have gone according to plan, leaving only tomorrow's game to possibly ruin the sequence. The Giants are on the verge of perfection, and they don't even know it. No one knows it except me. The Giants really want to avoid perfection.

It's kind of amazing, but the Giants have already played in a perfect World Series fairly recently. In 2002, they lost to Anaheim in seven games, and the sequencing of wins and losses was exactly what I laid out above. The Giants are on the verge of losing the perfect World Series, or maybe just losing in the perfect pattern, for the second time in twelve years.

Of course, the real perfect World Series happened in 1972. It was not even close to the perfect sequencing: The A's went up 2-0. Five games were won on the road. The series finished with Oakland winning in Cincinnati, with lots of sad Cincinnati fans watching. But the series went seven games, and six of them were decided by one run. And most importantly, the A's won, the first time a team I rooted for ever won a world championship. Good times.

Extra points if you can guess who that is in the picture without looking up his number, like I had to.

Working at the Shipyard

So this happened at work the other day, this thing in the picture. I walked out onto the bow of one of our tugboats and took this picture of our workers settling this big private yacht into a floating dry dock -- mostly sunk in this picture -- out in the middle of the canal next to the shipyard. A few hours later they had towed the whole thing over to the dock and lifted it out of the water, and I walked under the boat and took a little tour with my hard hat on.

This is the seventh contract position I have worked on in the 2.5 years since I last had a permanent job. And in case you are wondering, it's pretty cool to be in a shipyard with big boats all around, even if I am usually indoors. When I go out, I wear a hardhat, even to walk in and out of the building at the beginning and end of the day.

I am still at the point where I am trying to convince the client and myself that I can be useful in this role. This one is a little different because I feel confident that I can do the job, but I need to work with various parties, and persuading people to do what I want is not necessarily my strong suit. However, I feel good about it so far.

The contract is a good one, potentially the best I have seen. It pays well, and it is scheduled to go until the end of April, which is about three months longer than any of my other contracts. The client is big enough that they might be able to find a place for me afterward, maybe, although I am not exactly counting on it. Still, it's part of my work now that I hold out some hope that each job may lead to something permanent, either with this company or through a recommendation.

Meanwhile, it's six months closer to retirement and another bit of experience on the resume, so the work life is good for now.

Holding the GOP Together

If I were a Republican, I would be worried about the future of my party. A lot has been written about how the demographics of the country are shifting to the Democratic Party, and this is true. More and more, the Republican Party is the party of white people, especially white men, and the country is becoming more diverse all the time

In addition, Republicans are popular with the oldest voters -- I have read that the average age of Bill O'Reilly's viewers on Fox is about 70 -- and the trouble with old people is that they get older and then die, and they are replaced by younger voters, who vote for Democrats in big numbers. You can hope that voters get more conservative as they age, but maybe they won't. Still, I don't think that demographics is the biggest problem for the GOP. After all, they could always change their policies to try to appeal to a larger group of constituents.

The concern is more that the party is not really trying to address their long-term problems, but rather is trying to hold things together using short-term tactics that cannot be sustained. In time, these tactics will unravel, even as the long-term disadvantage grows. At some point, reality is going to catch up with them, and it won't be pretty.

Politics = Money

A couple of weeks ago, a majority of the Senate voted to advance an amendment to overturn the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling that made it easier for people and organizations to pour money into politics. Every Republican voted against the amendment. In fact, the Republican position on money in politics is, the more the merrier. Never mind that this is inherently corrupt, and Citizens United has just encouraged more corruption. Never mind that the vast majority of citizens are well aware that billionaires are now openly and proudly exercising enormous influence over the political system while the rest of us are getting screwed. It isn't sustainable, and one day the 99% will put limits on the 1% to make politics more fair. In the short term though, the biggest donors are giving money to the Republican Party, and they want that money to keep flowing, so the policy is to let the Koch brothers have free reign.

Voter ID

Republicans expect to do well in the 2014 elections, but the reason for that cannot be too reassuring: their voters turn out better for non-presidential elections. In other words, it's not because more people prefer them. They actually represent a minority of Americans, but as long as more of their voters vote, they can still win. That is why they have done poorly in 2008 and 2012, when President Obama was elected and re-elected. In those years, voter turnout was very good, and the more people vote, the more they favor Democrats. Republicans are counting on minority rule, and they know it. That is why they are doing what they can to make voting more difficult all across the country. It doesn't bode well for your long-term outlook when you have to try to stop people from voting in order to stay in power.

Gerrymandering

In 2012, 1.5 million more people voted for Democrats for the House of Representatives than  voted for Republicans; nevertheless, Republicans held onto the House majority by a comfortable margin. There is more than gerrymandering involved, but that is a part of it. The other part is that Democrats tend to be grouped together more than Republicans are, so dividing states into House districts naturally tends to favor Republicans. Still, I would not want to be the party counting on a unrepresentative division of seats to keep my majority.

In 2012, Barack Obama won the state of Michigan by 9 percent. according to Wikipedia, Michigan has 9 Republican Representatives and 4 Democratic. Obama won Ohio by 2 percent, and the split there is 12 Republican, 4 Democrat. Virginia was a 3 percent victory for Obama, 7 Republicans, 3 Democrats. Pennsylvania was a 5 percent win, 13 Republicans, 5 Democrats. It is inherently unfair; our elected officials don't represent the voters. Republicans are counting on this inequity, but again, is it sustainable? I doubt it. Democrats are looking forward to the 2020 census, when they will have a chance to redraw the lines.

The Ruling Minority

If the money isn't enough to convince voters, and if you cannot do enough to suppress the vote of those who oppose you, what next? Republicans in Congress have used their power as a minority in the Senate and a majority only in the House to obstruct any kind of progress. Rather than compromise with Democrats to pass legislation, Republicans have used the filibuster to an unprecedented degree and have failed to pass legislation in the House that was not supported by a majority of Republicans, effectively giving control of the party to the Tea Party wing. If we can't do things our way, then the government just won't work at all. Never mind that we lost the elections. To hell with the American voters. We will break the government rather than allow majority rule.

The Longer Term

The problem with all of these solutions is that they are short-term fixes for a longer-term problem: the GOP is losing the American voters. Their policies are not popular. They fight against abortion, but 70% of Americans support Roe V. Wade. They have gone to extremes to fight the Affordable Care Act, but it's working, and they have no alternative. They have decided to pretend climate change is a hoax -- how long can you sustain that? Trickle-down economics have not worked and are now destroying the middle class. Americans support gay marriage.

The Republican response has been to push their policies even further to the right, insisting that theirs is the only way even as it becomes more and more obvious that their way will never work. They refuse to move their policies to the center, because their base is so certain that the American people have to come to their side, accept that their conservative Christian values should be the law of the land, that we need to do everything we can to encourage and enrich the wealthy while taking away from the poor. They seem to think that rather than change policies, they can bring us to their side, or maybe just force everyone to their side, majority or no.

In the long run, it won't work. You can only hold that approach together for so long.

Worst President Ever, Part 2

Let's do a little thought experiment. Let's think about a young Tea Partier, white (of course), male (of course), Southern (probably), chatting with his grandchild fifty years from now, explaining how, back when he was a young white male Tea Partier, times were really tough. Why my Tea Party buddies and I actually had to live through the worst Presidency in the history of America...

"You mean Barack Obama, Grandpa?"

"Yes, that's right, Barack Obama. I don't know how we ever survived."

"Tell us more!"

"Well, first there was the economy. When Barack Obama took office, the economy was the worst most of us had ever seen. The stock market had crashed, we were losing hundreds of thousands of jobs every month, housing prices had plummeted, and the American auto companies were about to go broke. Then President Obama bailed out the car companies and passed the stimulus..."

"You mean the Failed Stimulus, Grandpa?"

"Yep, the Failed Stimulus. Using my hard-earned taxpayer money to make things better. I hate that. After that, the job losses slowed down, and then we started gaining jobs and gained back all the jobs that were lost, but it took a long time. The stock market more than doubled and hit new highs, home prices rebounded, and the auto companies were doing great again.

"Then there was deficit spending. When George W. Bush -- you know, The Great George Bush -- was President, he started with a balanced budget left to him by the first President Clinton. But by the time he left and Obama took office, the deficit was a trillion dollars the first year. Then Obama passed the stimulus and made it worse. Then, as the economy recovered, the deficits started to go down, down to less than half of what they had been...

"And another thing. Under Bush The Great, we had been attacked by Osama Bin Laden, the worst terrorist attack in American history. As a result, we started two wars in the Middle East that both dragged on and on, and we never got Bin Laden. But President Obama ended both wars and caught and killed Osama Bin Laden.

"And then there was health care. President Obama pushed through a law that extended health care to tens of millions of Americans who had previously been uninsured. People who had to think about whether or not they wanted to go to the doctor when they were sick, because of the cost, suddenly had health insurance and could afford medical care. Millions of people suddenly were not in danger of going bankrupt because they got sick.

"And don't forget torture. Bush was not afraid to torture people; he just said that it wasn't really torture, even though we all knew it was. As a result, perceptions of America around the world were terrible while Bush was President. But during the Obama administration, the torture stopped, and America's standing in the world improved dramatically.

"And another thing was the Bush administration's policy toward gay marriage and gays in general was proud, open, undisguised bigotry. That all changed during Obama's time in office. The government started treating gays as equal to anyone else, and gays even got the right to marry in states all across the country."

"Gee, Grandpa, with all those good things, President Obama must have done some really terrible things to be the worst President ever."

"Uh, no, that was pretty much it. We just hated anything and everything he did. Especially that health care thing."

"So, er, Grandpa... When you say President Obama was the worst President ever... You really don't have shit to back that up, do you?"

"Uh, well, no...  not really. Can't really think of a single good reason, now that you mention it. But we really hated that guy..."

Worst President Ever!

A recent poll by Quinnipac University asked people who was the best President since World War II, and who was (is!) the worst. The best turned out to be Ronald Reagan, and the worst was the current President, our own Barack Obama.

Before we take a look at the many reasons why Barack Obama is the worst President since anyone can remember, and probably the worst ever, just some raw numbers from the poll are illuminating.

If I say that Republicans are really great at goose-stepping in unison, can everyone take that as a metaphor for Republicans all thinking the same things that they have been told to think and saying the same things that they have been told to say, and not as meaning that they are all murderous Nazis? No, too harsh?  Too bad. This poll shows some strong evidence of metaphorical goose-stepping by Republicans. (The phenomenon is not limited to this poll.)

Democrats were split (relatively speaking) on who was the best President; Clinton was the winner with 34%, but Obama and Kennedy got 18% apiece. However, an amazing 66% of Republicans polled thought that Reagan was the best, with the next highest former President chosen by only 6%, a 60% gap versus only 16% on the Democratic side. You can see how Reagan wins a poll like this. Republicans know the one true answer; Democrats have to think about the question.

Similarly, Republicans knew what to say when they were asked who was the worst President since WWII. 63% chose Barack Obama, while only 14% chose Jimmy Carter. Among Democrats, George W. Bush was the clear "winner" with 54%, but it was a little closer, with 20% making the obviously correct choice of Nixon, so Republican group-think helped select Obama as the worst President as well.

Another funny note on the polling: People have short memories, and the majority will almost always choose someone recent in this type of poll. Given that, it's astounding that only 1% of Republicans chose George W. Bush  as the best President, while 5% tagged him as the worst. When you can't even get a positive vote among your own party, you must be pretty bad. (Nixon was the only other President to poll negatively on the two questions within his own party.)

I have a sense of how long I like to make my blog posts. I don't normally like to make people read something too long, because I know that I rarely want to, so I am going to stop. That means all those reasons why Barack Obama is so terrible will have to wait for a part two.

Politics and Christianity

It's a common perception that Republicans are more religious than Democrats. Certainly they make a bigger deal about injecting religion into politics. It turns out that the evidence supports this perception; more Republicans go to church regularly than Democrats, and more Democrats are not religious at all. And Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant, are more likely to vote Republican than Democrat. Other religions (though not Mormons), and voters who are not religious, clearly favor Democrats.

So fair enough, Republicans are the more "Christian" party in that they appeal to Christian voters more than the Democratic Party does.

Well I have a problem with that. You see, I'm not a Christian, but I have read large portions of the Bible, and I went to church regularly while I was growing up and was raised based on the Christian values of my parents. I am familiar with Christianity, and if I could choose one word to describe the message of Christianity, that word is "compassion."

Well, does anyone believe that the Republican Party is the party of compassion? I wonder how some of the less fortunate people in this country, people who might benefit from some degree of caring from their fellow citizens, would see it. Do homeless people in America see the Republican Party as more compassionate? Do the unemployed? How about gays and lesbians, minorities, immigrants, people who have traditionally been discriminated against? How about people on death row, or in prison for non-violent drug offenses? Or a woman with an unwanted pregnancy? What about workers in minimum wage jobs?

Is it compassionate to be more inclined to go to war, to send our troops to kill and be killed? Is it Christian to carry a concealed firearm? Does it demonstrate caring for your fellow man if you only want to pay more taxes for a bigger military and less for anything that helps your fellow citizens? How about not caring about the environment, denying science so that you can leave the planet in worse shape for the next generation? Is that the decent thing to do?

The truth is, people who call themselves Christian in this country are more likely to support the political party that least represents Christianity.

I suppose there are various reasons for that, but I bet a big one is that a lot of Christians don't see Christianity as being largely about compassion. I suspect many of them would pick a different word to describe it if they could, maybe salvation. Maybe it's about saving my sorry ass and condemning everyone else. Sorry, but you don't know what the hell you are talking about. I have read the book. You got it wrong.

So they call themselves Christian, but they haven't learned the first lesson from their faith. I can't say that impresses me much. I guess I would say to them, OK, you're a Christian, but so what? Does that have any meaning? You call yourself a Christian, but you act like an Un-Christian jerk. Which of those two things do you think is most important?

Rolling Coal and the Politics of Hate

Rolling coal means modifying your diesel engine (usually on a pickup it seems) so that you can blow off a big cloud of black smoke when you want to. It's stupid, wasteful, bad for the environment, and a good symbol for the tendency of conservatives to do things just to piss off rational people everywhere.

Turns out though, maybe rolling coal isn't really meant to make environmentalists angry. It seems to be one of those things young men do that is meant to impress young women, like having a low rider that bounces up and down or a stereo that rattles windows in nearby houses. In other words, one of those things that probably doesn't impress young women at all, but instead it's really mostly a way to show off to other mentally-challenged guys like yourself, because guys are guys and there's something a little wrong with them.

Still, conservatives doing stuff just because liberals don't like it is a real thing. I know an actual personal example of something very close to rolling coal, in fact. No need to pick on this particular person by name, but let's say a senior citizen living by herself. She went and bought a Hummer, the huge kind that gets about eight miles per gallon, to drive her 90-pound self around in, and I swear a big part of the reason was that it was that it was her way of flipping a middle finger (and yes, senior or no, she would happily do that) at anyone who cared about the environment.

OK, easy enough to come up with a single story. Let's look at a few more public issues that demonstrate the politics of hate, or taking an irrational position just because you really don't want to be agreeable about anything.

Global Warming: What do you do if you just can't stand it that Al Gore was right, the planet is heating up, and it's a very bad thing? It turns out that what you do is, you pretend that you understand the field of climate science better than actual climate scientists, with all their elite PhD's and computer models and research. It's the modern-day equivalent of believing that the sun revolves around the Earth, just because you want it to. It takes a lot of anger to twist your mind into believing something so ridiculous.

Obamacare: I have written before about the Affordable Care Act, so I will just repeat this much: The United States has a terrible healthcare system, and the ACA is a step in the right direction that was designed by conservatives to appeal to conservatives. If it had come from a Republican President, it would have widespread support. But conservatives absolutely hate it, because they hate Democrats and they hate Obama, and because they are assholes. And speaking of...

Medicaid Expansion: Most Republican governors have refused to expand Medicaid in their states, even though it would cost them very little and would be a huge benefit for millions of their constituents collectively. And why is this? It is because they want so badly to reject anything initiated by Democrats and President Obama that they are willing to do the obviously wrong and morally deplorable thing because if people were helped by Obamacare, they might like it, and we can't have that.

Light bulbs: Republicans don't want to switch to more efficient light bulbs. Why? Because Democrats want to.

Guns: It isn't enough that one person can buy enough weapons to wipe out a small city. We need to have guns in restaurants, stores, bars, churches, schools, convents and daycares, or so it seems. Is any of this based on evidence, or is it just to annoy people who want to be safer? I have an idea: Let's allow guns at football games, lots of guns. According to gun enthusiasts, that would reduce the gun violence at games...

Bin Laden: When Osama bin Laden attacked the United States, almost everyone, even me, rallied behind President Bush and supported his actions. He squandered that eventually, but for a long time, he had the country's support. When the Obama administration caught and killed bin Laden, it took Republicans less than 24 hours to start complaining that Obama had not given Bush enough credit for it. If you want absolute proof positive that a lot of conservative assholes don't want to give President Obama any credit for anything, anywhere, ever, there it is.

The stimulus: Yes, we went from the worst economic crash since the depression to recovery, but it will always be the Failed Stimulus to Republicans because they cannot admit that their President failed and Obama succeeded, even though clearly that is the case.

Bowe Bergdahl: We brought a captured serviceman home from Afghanistan. Yay! No wait, booooo!

Unions: Some Southern states are so anti-union that they have told auto companies not to bring jobs to their states if they include union jobs. WE WILL NOT STAND FOR OUR CITIZENS HAVING GOOD JOBS WITH GOOD BENEFITS. Union-hating over common sense.

I know I seem inflexible and combative, but this is one big reason why. Republicans have made it extraordinarily clear that they don't want to work with Democrats, don't want to give Democrats any credit, will oppose anything Democrats want just because, and will push to the limit any conservative policy that liberals really don't like. Republicans are basically a reflection of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, taking the opposition view to everything Obama and Democrats do, whether it makes sense or not. You can't work with that.

Hobby Lobby

First, if you know anything about me, you can guess that I think the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision is bullshit. So good, now that's out of the way.

More and more, I look at Supreme Court decisions like this one -- 5 to 4 with the conservative justice and the 4 ultra-conservative justices on one side, and the four liberal justices on the other side -- as just political votes having little-to-nothing to do with law and everything to do with politics, just like some House subcommittee voting along party lines. Supreme Court decisions that are only backed by Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Alito, and Thomas have lost any sense of legitimacy. Like most politics these days, the solution -- the only solution -- is to get the Republicans out and replace them with Democrats.

Anyone who looks at this decision and thinks that the Affordable Care Act violates the Constitution, so the Supreme Court had to slap it down, is nuts. Five Republicans voted to change the law, and four Democrats voted to leave it alone. That's all.

Here is an interesting quote from the majority opinion:

This decision concerns only the contraceptive mandate and should not be understood to hold that all insurance-coverage mandates, e.g., for vaccinations or blood transfusions, must necessarily fall if they conflict with an employer’s religious beliefs.

So what is the legal difference between a religious objection to birth control versus a religious objection to vaccinations? Or even blood transfusions? It seems to me that the justices are saying that religious objections to birth control have a special status, as opposed to say, Jehovah's Witnesses objecting to blood transfusions, which may not be protected because, you know, that's just loony tunes. Only there isn't any good scientific, fact-based, rational reason why refusing to pay for insurance that covers your employees' birth control is any less loony than not wanting to pay for insurance for transfusions. It seems to me that the Supreme Court, or at least five Republicans who seem to care less and less about the Constitution and more and more about politics, decided to favor a particular religious belief with this ruling.

Really quite amazing.

It's funny, as the graphic above indicates, seeing the hypocrisy of Republicans over religion. They understand the problem. They are very aware of the tyranny of  imposing your religious beliefs on another person, as evidenced by the wailing and gnashing of the teeth on their side when they imagine that Sharia Law is taking over America, but they seem totally unaware that imposing Christianity on non-Christian Americans, or on Christians who don't share their particular views, is the same thing.

I have a bad tendency sometimes to think that people who disagree with me, on certain issues that seem obvious to me, are stupid. This is one of those issues.

Progress Report

Last time I posted, I wrote that my first task at my new job was to get up to speed as quickly as possible, the idea being that, as a contractor, you want to establish some value before the client has second thoughts. I have not had this happen yet, but you can't take it for granted that they will keep a contract going once they start it. For example, they terminated the person before me.

Well mission accomplished, the client seems to like me, and I am getting up to speed fairly quickly. I'm pretty sure I am there until the work ends.

In some ways this is an ideal job. Don't tell Jackie that I like the hours, but it's supposed to be 15-20 hours a week, so my days are short and I get some days off. The hourly pay is really good though.  Up front I am working a little extra to get up to speed and to do some catch-up, but still, 5-hour days. I go in about 9:00 and leave at 2:30, in time to make an early dinner. Five hours is short enough that I never get worn out or start wishing that the day would end.

The client is a recently-purchased start-up, fun to work with. Lots of young software developers, stand-up cubicles, people using cell phones for their work phones, loosely-assigned work spaces. Being the old fogey, I get an office, a phone, a chair, a mouse. To give you some idea, they told me that if I wanted to know the number of the phone in my office, I should call my cell phone from the office and get the number that way. Also, they have sodas and snacks, lots of snacks, and they bring in lunch three days a week -- so far Hawaaian, Greek, Mexican, pulled pork, barbecue. I like it.

My role ends when the client finishes a project, maybe as soon as September 1, although that date may be more aspiration than reality, so it could easily go longer. It seems unlikely that this will result in anything permanent, but working now makes it much more likely that I can find the next job when this one ends.

Something New

Either contract work is a series of hurdles, or I see life as a series of hurdles, but either way, I see contract work as a a series of hurdles. Get past all of them and life is good.

Finding some sort of appropriate work is the most difficult hurdle; in addition to long stretches when nothing is available, I get many possibilities that don;t really fit -- two hour commutes one way, work I am not suited for, low pay, companies that look at my resume and say no right away. Recruiters try to fit me into places where I don't fit well, so a lot of things die before they really get started.

Next hurdle is the interview. My last two interviews went well enough, even though I only got one of the jobs, so I don't hate all interviewers and the whole interview process quite as much as I did a few weeks ago, but if nothing else most potential clients interview two to four people, so the odds are not great even with a decent interview.

Next hurdle starts tomorrow: getting up to speed as quickly as possible. I have not yet tripped over this barrier in five assignments, but I approach new contracts with some trepidation, because it's hard to be sure that I will understand what needs to be done and have the skills to do it until I see the work. Once I get settled, I'm pretty safe, but I always feel there is a possibility that the client will give up on me before I figure things out.

On one of my five jobs, I had a hard time understanding what needed to be done, and it was really frustrating. The client was just awful at explaining the work, and I was worried that they would stop paying me for not really making any progress. Fortunately, I got it after about a week of flailing, and after that I was fine.

So tomorrow is my first day of work in six months, and the mission is clear: figure it out and start being useful as quickly as possible.

Eric Cantor Goes Down

I would say there were a couple of lessons form Eric Cantor's shocking, stunning, astounding defeat in a primary last night.

Before we get to those, a couple of observations. First, haha! Good riddance. I never liked the guy. Second, how shocking is this? The majority leader gets shellacked in a primary? The only polls taken before the voting showed him way, way ahead of his challenger. Cantor spent five million dollars defending his seat, and his opponent spent $125,000. All the reactions I saw last night were complete shock; the phrase "holy crap" pretty much sums it up. I think Daily Kos actually used that precise phrase. Amazing.

Now on to those lessons...

1. Republicans are over-the-top, loony tunes, batshit nutso crazy

This is the equivalent of Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid losing in a primary because they were not liberal enough. As a Democrat, I have seen Eric Cantor at work, and I always thought he was a pain in the ass. He presided over one of the most partisan, conservative, useless, uncompromising Congresses ever. Progressives certainly did not see him as someone they could work with. He was (is) an obstructionist jerk. Apparently that was not enough for the Republicans in his district. They want someone even more uncompromising. If you are a Democrat, the message is clear: Be afraid of these people. Republicans are crazy. If you are a Republican, the message is slightly different: You are crazy.

2. Eric Cantor is Jewish, a rare Jewish Republican

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Not that that could have possibly had anything to do with his defeat.

As a Former Death Penalty Proponent

With a botched execution in Ohio Oklahoma [thanks Mike], the death penalty was a hot topic again, at least for a few days. I used to believe in the death penalty, but somewhere along the line I changed my mind and decided that the disadvantages outweigh any advantages.

I have no real moral objection to the death penalty; my arguments against it are practical (although we could debate whether accidentally executing an innocent person is a practical or a moral issue. I suppose the innocent person would want to argue both.)

Following are the arguments that did, and did not, sway me.

Arguments that did not work for me

We Don't Have the Right

It seems to be a common feeling among death penalty opponents that we should just never pronounce this ultimate judgment on anyone, that it is barbaric, morally repugnant. While I understand the sentiment, I just disagree, and there is not much you can say to demonstrate that I am objectively wrong. It is very likely that nearly anyone who supports the death penalty has already resolved this issue for themselves and has gotten past any moral objections.

My example for this question is Timothy McVeigh. He killed civilians and children, 168 people in all. You don't think we should say that he forfeited his right to live? You are a kinder soul than I am. I'm glad he's dead. I feel fine with that. I doubt you can change me.

It Impacts the Poor and Minorities Unfairly

So do drug laws and probably almost every crime from DUI to armed robbery to rape to murder. This is an indictment of the American justice system, where the wealthy can purchase "better" justice for themselves. It is not a problem unique to the death penalty. If we can level the playing field such that the courts don't discriminate against those with less money, great, but the problem is not caused by the death penalty.

It's Cruel

Perhaps I need to educate myself, but why can't we kill people cleanly? We euthanize animals humanely, and we even have assisted suicide. Is there no way to execute someone without torturing them?

The human brain shuts off after just a few seconds without blood flow, so why is it cruel to use a firing squad? Guillotines are messy, but are they cruel? What about hanging - snap the neck and it's over. I can think of a dozen other ways (drop a boulder on their head) that seem like they would be quick, if not 100% painless. So a painful execution just seems like a question of incompetence, not cruelty.

Arguments that changed my mind

We will execute innocent people

Not surprisingly, this is the main problem that resonated with me. There will always be mistakes, but beyond that, if you give this weapon to every district attorney and police force in the country, someone somewhere will abuse it. It's easy enough to say that we should only execute someone if he or she is really, truly guilty, for sure. Unfortunately, that isn't how our justice system works. And unlike any other sentence that may be given to a defendant, this one cannot be reversed or mitigated once it is carried out.

For anyone who thinks that the death penalty is a great thing that is administered fairly, I would strong recommend the movie The Thin Blue Line. (Actually I recommend it for anyone -- it's great.) The film is a documentary about a man sentenced to death for murdering a policeman in Dallas, Texas. This case is one where I believe the death penalty could be justified -- for the prosecutor, police, possibly one expert witness and a judge who conspired to convict and sentence to death a man whom they had to have realized was very obviously innocent. The defendant might have been executed in time if not for the movie being made. This movie leaves little doubt that not everyone we execute is guilty.

So the conviction of innocent defendants is clearly the biggest downside of capital punishment, but not just because of mistakes. It also matters that we cannot completely control who in law enforcement is given this weapon, and that they are using it in a manner that we would think appropriate. You have to envision the worst scenario.

The Cost

It costs a lot to execute someone. This is because of the previous concern: We really want to be sure that anyone we execute is competent enough to be responsible for their actions, and that they were definitely guilty, and so, quite rightly, we have an extensive process to review death penalty cases, and it costs more than holding a prisoner for life. Which brings us to the next point...

Why?

It has been well established that the death penalty is not a more effective deterrent to committing crimes than life imprisonment, so why do we need it? I wrote above that I am glad Timothy McVeigh is dead. On the other hand, Charles Manson has been in prison for more than 40 years, and I'm fine with that too. The two punishments are more or less the same to me; both are severe punishments for severe crimes, and both take the guilty parties off the streets. I'm not sure why the world would be a better place with Charles Manson dead instead of stuck in prison, so why waste money executing him?

If I were a death penalty activist, those are the three arguments I would bring out over and over: executing the innocent, the cost, and what are we achieving? I suspect that those arguments will work better than trying to convince anyone that capital punishment is inhumane.

Little Things

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
Arthur Conan Doyle

Life is a series of events and choices, circumstances and reactions to circumstances. Some of those choices and events are pretty obviously significant at the time, and some just seem so arbitrary in retrospect, like the flip of a coin that had some huge consequences. Like Robert Frost's two roads in a wood, or Jeff Goldblum's chaos theory in Jurassic Park. There were some big things, things I could have changed, but there were some little things, that just happened, that made all the difference.

So You Want to Be a Manager

Back in 2005, I was working along, doing really well as a senior accountant, with a title that said Managerial Accounting Specialist but that meant very senior individual contributor accountant, and thinking that I would continue in that job until I retired, that I would never be a manager of any sort, and that was fine. And then, my boss pulled me aside one day and said that things were changing, and that I should stay put, that there was an opportunity coming in a few months. Well Jackie and I were both really thrilled that suddenly I was going to be in a position I had not even aspired to, and the money was good, and of course I took the job when it came a few months later. But there was that one time, before I accepted the position, that the voice of wisdom spoke to me and asked me why I wanted the pressures that came with being a manager. In this case, the voice of wisdom came from Bill, who had worked about 38 years at Farmers and had avoided becoming a manager by never wanting to be one. It often bothered me that I was too drawn by the money, too stupid to listen to Bill. If I had, I would probably be at Farmers still, doing what I wanted to do, working as an accountant.

What's Good for the Company

This one did not seem consequential at the time, but it's a decision that so much else turned on. Stupidly, I chose what I thought was best for the company rather than for me.

At Farmers, after I had been manager for two and a half years, our department became a "center of excellence," meaning we started doing the accounting for two other companies owned by our parent in addition to still accounting for Farmers Life. When it came to deciding whether I or my friend and colleague John would do the work for Farmers, and which one of us would then do the work for the other two companies, John and I stepped away from the office and had a discussion.  He offered to do the other two companies. For reasons related to our respective areas of expertise and where those companies had the most need, I suggested that it might be best if I worked on the sister companies, and that is what we did.  But I was stepping out of my comfort zone.

What I found out is that I am perfectly happy taking the lead when I feel like I am the most knowledgeable person in the group, but I am not really comfortable managing just because I have the title.  I like to know what I am doing. I remember in my 9th grade English class, Mr. Davis asked the class how many of them thought I was shy; everyone raised a hand, including me.  Mr. Davis told them that he had seem me in bridge club, and I was not shy there at all.  I acted more like a leader. That's because I knew what I was doing at the bridge table. When I was put in charge of a process that I did not know especially well, I didn't like it. I did a lot better when my expertise was a big factor in my success as a manager. When I had to rely on my organizational skills, people skills, multi-tasking ability, ability to follow-up and keep track of multiple projects -- mostly stuff I am relatively crappy at, frankly -- I felt out of place, because I was forced to rely on my weakest attributes rather than my strongest.

So I pushed my boundaries, did what was best for Farmers.  Bad mistake. I have a small comfort zone, and I should have stuck to it. (In my defense, John and I were supposed to switch jobs each year, so I thought it was only temporary; believing corporate management will follow through on their responsibilities to their employees is probably more of a big thing [i.e. a big stupid mistake] than a little thing though.) If I had just let John take the two companies like he offered, I might still be at Farmers. Just a little discussion, a coin that could have flipped either way.

The Excel Test

Well, I can easily see that I could write way too much about little things: the woman at Microsoft who seemed to dislike me for no reason, the Director and Finance VP who said they had budget to hire me, but HR said no. The job I turned down because the money was lousy and I was working then, making more. But I will close with the Excel test. I went to an interview two weeks ago for a job that I could easily handle, temp to perm, that involved a lot of using Excel. Excel is something I can do. So the interview went well, then the guy gave me a quick Excel test, one practical problem. But I had to do it on a laptop with no mouse, using the PC touchpad. I kinda sorta know how to do that, but I only do it when I have no other choice. (To give you some idea, I just had to look up what to call the touchpad. I don't use them.) So I was able to solve the problem fairly easily, but I could not get the formula into the spreadsheet because I couldn't operate the laptop. It was really bad; I kept navigating off the screen, highlighting other applications by going to the bottom of the screen, other bad stuff, really bad. I felt like I looked old and out of touch. The only consolation was that the recruiter couldn't believe he tested people without letting them use a mouse, and she said that all three of the others she sent also "failed" the test in the eyes of the client. I told the recruiter it was like asking someone if they could read a map, then asking them to prove it by driving a car with a stick shift, then deciding they can't read the map because they can't get the car from point A to point B. But I still did not get the job. That was just downright weird.

I need for a few little things to go my way.

The Bleak Outlook

I Google-imaged the word "bleak" and found this picture from a movie we watched recently called "The Road." It is a post-apocalyptic story starring Viggo Mortensen, very bleak.

 Overall, the job outlook is not so great. I keep vacillating between thinking that I should just do something creative and find another way to make a living, or go to work for Target, then thinking that accounting is such a valuable skill that it would be stupid to set that aside. Following is a brief rundown on some of the things I am trying to use to find a job and how each is going.

• Craigslist: It's my best resource. I check it a few times each day, filtered for my area and accounting jobs. Some of the accounting jobs are part-time bookkeeper or accounts payable clerk, but there are usually a few good possibilities each week. Sometimes I spend an hour or so tailoring an email response and attaching a resume. My experience so far is that I never hear from them again. At least I have something to apply for.
• Worksource: Jackie showed me this one recently. It is the site the State of Washington uses for job searching for people collecting unemployment, but anyone can use it. There are a lot of jobs out there, more than Craigslist, but the sort criteria are so broad that most of the jobs are not related to accounting, so I have to sift through them.
• Simply Hired, Indeed, Monster: You start to get a lot of repeats.
• Recruiter number 1: Kept me working half of last year, has contacted me about some possibilities, but she has a limited number of openings and only updates her website periodically.
• Recruiter number 2: One person from this office contacted me maybe a month ago. I got right back to her by phone (left a message) and email. She never responded. I contacted another who responded a day later and said he would get back to me. He did not. The owner called me Wednesday with a possibility. I have not heard back from him, so my hopes are not high.
• Recruiter 3: I suspect that recruiters have a list, with people at the top, people in the middle, and people way at the bottom. Teh people at the bottom of the list only get an email when the rest of the list has been exhausted. This recruiter had not contacted me in months, but just got in touch with a job possibility for someone willing to relocate to Omak. For those of you who do not know where Omak is, it's an hour from Chelan. If you are not familiar with Chelan, it's an hour from Wenatchee. Wenatchee is in Eastern Washington, two and a half hours from either Spokane or Seattle.  So Omak is kind of remote, not far from Canada actually. Jackie says no. I suspect that when I tell recruiter number 3 that I cannot do Omak, they will give up, because there is no one on the list below me.
• Recruiter 4: These guys had several possibilities for me recently, but then they sent me to Microsoft, and I was really pissed about the interview, and I never expect to hear from them again. I did not actually tell them I was disgusted with the whole experience, but I kind of hinted.
• Recruiter 5: Stopped even responding to my emails a long time ago.
• Boeing: I know someone from Farmers who now works at Boeing and suggested that I apply there. As a result, I have applied to a few jobs at Boeing -- they always have openings. They respond right away, thanking me for applying (by automated response, of course, but most companies do not.) Then, a couple of months later, they send me another email saying that the job has been closed.
• Microsoft: I have interviewed twice with Microsoft for contract jobs, both times with the same woman. I wrote about this. She rejected me for stupid reasons because she is stupid. Stupid Microsoft woman. I hate her, and them.
• Networking: I suck at networking. I don't even keep in touch with my friends, let alone with people who might help me get a job. Someone who used to work for me works now at TMobile, so I will try to use her to get in the door there. I should get in touch with that ex-Farmers colleague at Boeing too. Then I am out of networking ideas.

I keep looking, but it is not easy for someone my age at my level. I should have stayed a senior accountant.

Long-Term Unemployed

I did not realize at the time that November 22, 2013 was such a pivotal day. It was the last day of a contract, but I had just completed three back-to-back contracts lasting six months total, and with accounting busy season coming up, it did not seem like a big deal that I had nothing specific lined up for my next job. As it turned out, it was the last day I worked, maybe the last day I will ever work for all I know, at least as an accountant. But at the time it was not all that remarkable.

Somehow I went from contracting on a regular basis to unemployed, without any real warning or any event that triggered the change. What worries me now is that I am in danger of becoming one of the long-term unemployed, those people whose unemployment benefits run out, whose prospects for ever getting a job begin to look grim, and who give up looking in time.

I don't exactly fit the category, because I have worked as recently as last November, and the definition of long-term unemployed I usually see is 99 weeks without a job, but it still feels like I fit. It has been more than 99 weeks since I last worked full-time, and my prospects going forward are not great.  I talked to a new recruiter back in December, and they came up with several possibilities, but the last one may have killed my chances with them. I interviewed with Microsoft, and I talked with one of the two MS people about an experience I had at Farmers accounting for companies at remote sites, and I told her that I was never comfortable with the way it worked. She decided that this meant that I would not like working at Microsoft, because they of course work with people at remote sites all the time, as she explained, because they are a big international company.

Now this thought, I have to say, much like things that were said to me that caused me to leave Farmers, was one of the stupidest things that has ever been said since language was invented. Did she really imagine that I did not realize that working at Microsoft on currency translation for foreign subsidiaries would involve communication with people far away? But it carries the day, because someone gave someone power and she did not have the wits to use it. Based on something she imagines she gleaned from talking to me for 25 minutes, something about my personality (she agreed that I was well qualified to do the work), she decided that I was not the right person for the job. Who cares about 27 years of experience when you can figure it all out so perfectly based on a short conversation and no data? It's so much like high school, except that not being popular in high school doesn't fuck you over financially.

I tried to be nice about it when I wrote a note to the recruiter telling him it did not go well, but I used the words "ludicrous" and "frustrating," so he knew I was pissed. And I have not heard back from that recruiter, and don't expect to ever. I have a great background for contract work, but my guess is that recruiters try a candidate a few times, and if it does not work, they move on.

And to be honest, my career has felt like a series of these types of decisions. Sometimes they go my way, and I have recognized that and accepted it, and sometimes they go against me, and I usually lash out. I really cannot stand having major events in my life controlled by dull-witted people making arbitrary decisions that have a big impact on me. Unfortunately, this is called "having a job."  Which I don't.

The Minimum Wage

I'm in favor of raising the minimum wage, at least to the point where someone working 40 hours a week can raise a family an be above the poverty line. It's one of those situations where the free market advocates will say that we should not even have a minimum wage, yet we can easily see that having millions of workers working full-time and still needing food stamps is dysfunctional, but hey, free markets, yay!

As I wrote earlier this month, free markets have their limits. Let's consider a case that has no direct connection to minimum wages. Put two tire factories side by side. They both make tires that are the same quality; however, one dumps chemicals into the water and puts smoke into the air, and the other runs a reasonably clean "green" plant that produces much less pollution. The "dirty" factory sells tires for $50 each, and the cleaner factory sells them for $60 each. The residents in the area generally agree that they would rather pay $60 for their tires and have a clean factory than pay $50 and have a lot of pollution.

So what tire do they choose? Well, in reality, a lot of them will choose the cheaper tires. Why? Because they know that their individual decision won't shut down the dirtier factory, and that if they choose the more expensive tires, their neighbors can undermine their good environmental intentions by buying cheap tires. They just don't have the power individually to change the situation.

What to do?  The answer is, you write some laws (otherwise known in Republican-speak as burdensome government regulations) that say the factories have to minimize their pollution. In other words, the people collectively make a decision as consumers that they cannot practically make on an individual basis.

Companies like McDonald's and Walmart make billions of dollars, and they have executives and stockholders who are making tons of money, while their workers get paid so little that they have trouble affording food and housing. Yet nearly every worker for those companies is essential to the process; you can't sell a billions burgers unless someone cooks them, and someone runs the cash register. You have to wonder if the free market is just giving out the wrong answer, if the contributions of the lowest-level employees to these multi-billion-dollar profit machines are so paltry that they don't deserve to be paid a living wage, or if, maybe, they are just getting screwed, and someone else is being overly-rewarded.

So people get together and decide that, if people are going to work, they should be paid enough that they can eat. If companies cannot afford a decent wage, their business model is broken.

The free market true believers will tell you that this is interference in the free market, and it will hurt the economy, but I think we have to look at it differently.  It seems to me that people getting together and making decisions collectively, as a society, that they cannot reasonably enforce as individuals, has to be considered a part of the free market. It just doesn't make any sense that people should not get together and agree on some rules to put restraints on enterprises simply because those restraints cannot logically be instituted through individual transactions. Certain limits have to be enforced by society as a whole, by government, because it's the only means to enforce them.

The idea that all restrictions on business are bad just handcuffs us as all, keeping us from trying to make things better. I think someone is trying to fool us with their free market garbage.  Raise the minimum wage, give the workers a bigger piece of the economic pie.  Americans who do the work to make other Americans rich should not have to live in poverty.

Doing the Housewife Thing

First, let me say that I am beginning to understand better why Jackie did not like being stuck at home all those years, even when I was making enough money that we could afford it.

OK, that's out of the way.  I have been home long enough between jobs this time that I am beginning to take my role as homemaker a little more seriously than I have previously.  I get up and feed the dogs, help Jarrod get breakfast and lunch together, clean and put away the dishes, do laundry, clean the house, go shopping, pick up Jarrod at school when necessary, take him to Boy Scouts, pay the bills.  I do some volunteer work, keeping the books for the scout troop.  It keeps me busy.

There are some advantages.  The commute is great.  The dress code is very relaxed; I am wearing shorts right now, but even that is optional.  The hours are flexible.  I can mostly schedule my own time.  All together, it's not as much work as working.  I take time to watch TV or play on the computer or write a blog post.

There are also disadvantages:  You don't get paid for running a household.  Nevertheless, it isn't a vacation; you can't just enjoy the time.  The work is not very rewarding, and I think that this is the big factor.  Yesterday I had a busy day, went to the bank, did some Boy Scout accounting and made a deposit at their bank, bought groceries, checked on having programs printed for Lucas's Eagle Scout ceremony, steam-cleaned the carpet in the loft, did a load of laundry, did dishes, cleaned up after Jarrod in the loft and his room, got Jarrod after school, made dinner.  Important stuff, no doubt, but the problem is, none of it feels like much of an accomplishment.  I can see why some people might learn to take a lot of pride in their cooking, or their knitting, or even in how shiny their floors are, because you want to feel some sense pride in something.  You can feel good over time about raising a kid, but day to day most of it is getting them to school, making sure they do their homework, feeding them, clothing them, doing their laundry -- boring stuff.

And like many jobs, it never ends, and it never feels like enough.  After you have dusted every surface, pulled every weed, paid every bill, waxed every floor, cleaned out the refrigerator, cleaned under the refrigerator, power-washed the driveway, and changed the furnace filters, you still haven't washed all the windows, straightened up the garage, or repainted the walls, and they need it.  Then you can start all over.  You never get there; you just trudge along.

So yeah, maybe I need to work.

The Limits of Free Markets

On both ends of the economic scale,  increasing the minimum wage and reducing CEO pay, conservatives like to make the argument that the market is the best mechanism to set the right value for those jobs.  I actually think this is sort of ridiculous; you start with the assumption that the free market will set the right value for a commodity, then you plainly see that this is not the case and the value looks out of whack, so rather than adjust the assumption, you decide that the value must be correct, because free markets always work.  Even when they obviously don't.  Or something like that.

However, there is a great deal of theoretical and empirical support for the value of free markets, so I would not just dismiss the idea.  I just think that, before we accept the idea that CEO pay is currently very reasonable, and the minimum wage should be left alone or abolished altogether, because free markets are the answer, we ought to consider some evidence.

So here are a few things that free markets have given us:

• Slavery
• Discrimination against minorities
• Discrimination against women
• Discrimination against older workers
• Discrimination against gays
• Starvation wages
• Child labor
• Unlimited work hours
• 7-day weeks
• Unsafe working conditions
• Unsafe products
• Unfettered pollution
• Fraudulent companies
• Monopolies
• The stock market crash (1929, if you need to pick just one)
• The Depression
• Snake oil
• Bernie Madoff
• Enron
• The housing bubble
• And so on and so on and so on

On the other hand, government intervention in the markets has brought us:

• The end of slavery
• Laws against discrimination
• A minimum wage
• Restrictions on child labor
• 40-hour weeks
• Safer workplaces
• Safer products, food inspections
• Cleaner air
• The power to break up monopolies
• Prosecution of fraud
• Regulation of banks
• And so on and so on

Completely free markets don't work; that has been proven by experience.  Capitalism is a tool, and a very useful one; it brought us Microsoft and GE and Coca Cola and lots of good stuff.  But when you make the assumption that the market always knows best, there are plenty of reasons for doubt.

Patience

I keep thinking that all it takes is one.  One job, one company that can find enough contract work for me.  It has been two years now, and I still have not found that one.  I thought I had last year, but that stopped as suddenly as it started, ended at Thanksgiving and has not started up again.  I have tried other places, heard from recruiters, sent emails reminding people that I am still around, but things are quiet right now.

During the last 20 months since I left Farmers, I have worked about 9 months total.  While that sounds pretty bad, the practical consequences are that I will have to work a year at the end of my work life that I would otherwise have been retired.  Not the worst thing in the world, but then that is one year so far.  It is a little hard to say how the next 20 months will go.

Meanwhile, I have to use savings that I was hoping not to touch for several years.  At the rate things are going, that money will run out in about four years, so we are a long way from being homeless.  If we end up homeless, we have equity in our home that will last another three years or so.  I guess I think something positive will happen before then.

Still looking for that one.  It's hard to be patient.

Ping, Ping

Things were pretty quiet at the beginning of this week on the job front, and Jackie and I talked about contacting some of my recruiter acquaintances, just to let them know I am still here and interested.  It probably helps to remind people every so often, just so your name is on their minds.  I told Jackie that I would ping a few people.  Jackie asked what that means, but if you have worked in the corporate world, at least around here, you have heard that expression more than you cared to.  It's one of those things that people say in companies that sounds silly in the real world, but when you get to work and turn on corporate-speak, it's just part of the language.  It's what you do when you email someone and it has been a few days and they have not responded and you think they forgot about you.  I guess it is a reference to using sonar.

So Tuesday I started by pinging a couple of people, one who had been working on a job for me, and the another who posted a job on LinkedIn.  Both got back to me right away  The job we were working on was still on hold; the one posted on LinkedIn was filled already.

I have written before that it seems that in this business, when the need for contractors spikes, all of the recruiting firms get busy at the same time, and they go down their lists of contacts, and at some point they reach my name, so I tend to hear nothing from anyone and then everything from everyone.  So this happened this week, after my two pings, starting Tuesday.

• A recruiter called me with three different possible positions, two contract and one permanent.
• A different recruiter sent me a contract possibility, then sent another one the next day.
• A third recruiter called me with another contract possibility.
• A fourth sent me a possible permanent Assistant Controller position in Tacoma.
• A fifth sent a note (obviously widely distributed) looking for someone with particular Excel skills.  I called her and said I could do what she needed.  She said she would send my resume to the client.

All of this is after two months of no work and very few inquiries.

It may, of course, all amount to nothing, or I may get five more contacts next week.  I turned down four of the contract possibilities already, which leaves two permanent and two contract still possible.  I have not heard back on the Assistant Controller position, total silence, so that one may be off the table as well.  However, it's all very encouraging.  Apparently the job market is heating up right now.

The Best of Times

If you look in Google Images for "Best of Times," you get some strange images.  The one at the left might have been the strangest.

I sometimes read posts about polls in which people say they think that things will be worse for the children that it was for them.  And I find those sentiments strange, because I have considered many times over the years the incredible impact technology has had just in my lifetime, and I can only think that my children will have more than I could have ever had, and their children will have more, and so on.

There are so many examples I could give, but the one that somehow always strikes me is kind of a frivolous one:  the movie business.  I suppose the thing that fascinates me about movies is that a whole industry, symbolized by Blockbuster stores, has been built up from nothing and then wiped in my lifetime.  When I was young, you watched movies either in a movie theater or when they came on TV, with commercials, and you had to watch as they were broadcast, no recording.  And movies did not come on very often, because we only had a few channels.

The first big breakthrough I remember was the VCR.  Now you could rent a movie or buy it and watch whenever you wanted.  DVDs were just a better version of the video tape, but the DVR, combined with dozens of channels, made it possible to get free shows from all over cable.  Now even DVDs from Netflix are becoming obsolete; you just get a digital download of anything you want off of cable or Netflix.  My kids will never know a world in which you can't watch movies whenever you want to.

Want a more practical example?  OK, cars.  When I was young, cars had seat belts, for the driver anyway, and the front seat passenger also, I think.  They didn't always have belts for the back seats.  And these were lap belts only, no shoulder belts.  Forget about air bags, and cars weren't built to save your life in a crash.  It used to be that you hoped to get maybe 100,000 miles out of a car; now it's more like 200,000.  And when I was younger, when you started a car, you turned the key and the engine cranked and cranked, maybe you had to give it a little gas, and you hoped it caught before it flooded.  Somehow they solved that problem; cars just start now.  And those cars drained a lot of gas.  Now engines are more efficient, and electric cars may take over the world during my boys' lifetimes.  We didn't even have rear window defoggers.  Cars have gotten better.

Apply that kind of change across dozens of industries, and life has just gotten better and easier and richer over the years.  Ebooks, iPhones, iTunes, the Internet, microwaves, flat-screen TVs, GPSs, ATMs, so much more.  Right now is the best it has ever been.  Five years from now will be better.

Defending the Baby Boomers

It is one of those things that seems to be accepted as common knowledge that something is terribly wrong with the baby boomer generation, that we are, in the words of Paul Begala, "the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing generation in American history."  I am not sure how one measures self-centeredness, self-absorption, or self-aggrandizement, but I have never really bought this characterization.  I think my generation has been maligned.

Just as a little background, I was born in 1957, so I fit right into the dates on the social security card pictured here, as do my siblings and their spouses, and people I knew from high school and college.  As a general rule, we went to school, got jobs, bought houses, raised kids and gave them every chance to succeed.  We have more stuff and more opportunities than our parents had, but they had more stuff and more opportunities than their parents had too, and our kids will have more than we ever did.

The quote from Paul Begala is from a column he wrote titled "The Worst Generation."  I read the column; I wondered if there was some measurement behind the prevailing caricature of baby boomers, and if his column is any indication, no there is not.  Instead, he generalizes and picks out historical events that he blames on boomers, which is sort of what I intended to do in reverse, so now I feel a little bit validated in my approach.

When I turned 18 in 1975, the economy was in a kind of malaise, with high inflation and occasional gas shortages caused by OPEC, and American companies were beginning to show their weakness versus foreign companies, especially the Japanese.  My generation did not cause these problems, but we were in the workforce when the economy turned around in the 1980s.  Baby boomers, mostly a little older than myself were at the forefront of the high-tech companies that drove the strong economy during the 1980s and 1990s.  We made our contribution.
It has also been largely during my adulthood that we have made substantial progress toward equality on many levels.  A generation before us, racism was still standard practice across the country (I know, it has not completely gone away), women were barely represented in the workforce, gays were treated like criminals.  Tolerance is still a work in progress, but baby boomers have made huge strides toward equal treatment on many fronts.

For a generation that is supposedly so selfish, our generation has given plenty to the previous generation and to the next one.  People my age have taken care of their parents when they got sick, just like generations before, not to mention all the taxes we paid supporting their Social Security and Medicare.  As for our kids, we have lavished more attention and money on them than our parents could have ever afforded.  We used to do sports a couple of days a week when I was a kid.  Our kids go to sports camp, have to buy uniforms, do fundraisers for their sports.  We get them involved in music and community service and AP classes so that their college resumes are overfilled with impressive accomplishments.  If anything, they may suffer from too much parental input and too much spending on their behalf, but we have not exactly neglected them in favor of ourselves.
And as we approach retirement, we keep hearing that we are the selfish generation that is going to bankrupt the country, because we want the government to take care of us in our old age, and we won't agree to reductions in Social Security to help balance the books.  Hmm, let's think about that.  So first, who could have guessed that all of these tens of millions of people would be retiring and taking money from the government at the same time?  I wonder, who could have known?  The answer, of course, is that pretty much everyone everywhere realized for the last 60 years that a huge wave of retirees was coming.

The logical -- or more importantly, the responsible -- approach would have been to build up a surplus in the Social Security system, then let that surplus drain down as the baby boomers used it.  And sure enough, Social Security has a big surplus, and it really is not going broke at all, and it can easily be made solvent for another fifty years with some small changes.  The problem is not the Social Security system.  The problem is that while all of that surplus was building up in Social Security, the rest of the government was borrowing it to pay for all of our deficits.  Now, it has to be paid back, and it's a big crisis because the United States has been borrowing my retirement contributions for 40 years, and now they don't have the money to pay for my retirement.  The fact is, the government has been living off the taxes the boomers have paid during their working years, and now that baby boomers are retiring, politicians are trying to find a way out of the bargain we agreed to all of this time.

I have some other suggestions for ways to balance the budget, but I will save those for another day.  But at least realize that baby boomers are not exactly asking to retire in luxury and spend the next 30 years sailing our yachts around the world.  I have read that people retiring now are the first group ever who will get less back out of Social Security than they put in, hardly what you would expect from a self-absorbed, self-indulgent group of people.  We are also the first generation to get screwed by private industry by replacing pensions with 401K's, which saved companies money and reduced their risks but have not turned out to be sufficient for most retirees (although to be fair I think only about one generation ever got widespread pensions.)  No, we are not retiring rich (certain people I know notwithstanding.)  Instead, I read all the time that people my age should just plan to keep working into their 80s (selfishly taking jobs that young people really need), and then die quickly and preferably cheaply.  Or something close to that.  We have no expectations of being pampered in our elder years.

I suspect that some clever person twenty years ago or so realized that baby boomers were going to hit Social Security age one day and decided to start a campaign to disparage them so that they could be screwed out of as many retirement benefits as possible.  I don't think there is really anything to it other than anecdotes and cherry-picked stories.  Boomers I know have plenty to be proud of.