Lb4Lb#8: The Unauthorized Biography of Tadmaster

Well, I thought about the Army,
Dad said, "Son, you're fucking high..."
- ArmyMore than 10 years ago, I was a U.S. servicemember stationed in England. I stood a rotation of 12-hour shifts, and had a house full of small children and a pregnant wife. Our unit was remotely deployed, so we frequently had to drive 2 hours to get to our home base - where we had our medical appointments, Air Force admin stuff, shopping for U.S. foods (that we could afford), and what not. Life consisted of long, boring stretches interspersed with ennui and tension, depending on the whims of our leaders.

But we had friends, and we tried to keep each others' spirits up. One of them gave me a pirated cassette tape of a new album he had been digging. He knew I liked Ben Folds Five, and I was happy to give this new album a listen, even with the long, odd title: The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner.

I should warn you,
I go to sleep.
- NarcolepsyThat first line in that first song spoke volumes. God, I knew exactly what this guy was singing about - feeling disengaged from everyone and dropping out, while at the same time feeling turmoil and passion within that you couldn't get out - because it made you shut down.

I remember trips down to base where I put this increasingly battered cassette into the player, and sang at the top of my lungs, tears spurting out of my eyes, fist pounding the left hand piano part on the dashboard. "I know it seems that I don't care/But something in me does, I swear!" That catharsis kept me awake - and probably alive, since Narcoleptic adventures on the roads of England are not conducive to survival.

No, I don't believe in God,
So I can't be saved.
- MessEach track revealed a different piece of my own back story. I was still new to being a father and husband, and being a selfish college prick was still fresh in my mind. The wreckage of relationships, the bemusement of dealing with drama that others felt and I didn't, or the simple honest truths about myself that I was learning to come to terms with - like my skeptical non-theism - had now found a soundtrack.

Everyone knows that music can do this; it's not unusual to find songs that capture some vital thing about you and help you remember it or relive it. But it's rare that you find a whole album that does it. This is music that helps you understand and embrace the things about yourself that you were avoiding. The things that you would be embarrassed to admit were causing you pain, because that sounds like something one of those self-absorbed hipsters would say.

And no one wants to be seen as a self-absorbed hipster, right?

If you're afraid they might discover
Your redneck past
There are a hundred ways to cover your redneck past
They'll never send you home
- Your Redneck PastEveryone has something they think they need to hide. Isn't it wonderful to find that the best way to keep it all hidden is to put it out there where everyone can see it?

These songs were never about me, of course. They aren't necessarily about Ben Folds, either, but they are revealing. The appeal for me has always been the way he is so open, honest and deep in his writing. But at the same time, these songs were funny and self-deprecating. You don't write about what a fool you think you are unless you've accepted that about yourself, and learned to enjoy it.

And that's where this album took me. Through the agony and the irony, it gave me something to relate to, and then held up a mirror so I could laugh at the Mess I was in, and appreciate the good things I had.

And how we just made fun
Of those who had the guts to try and fail
- RegretsAt the end of the day, I realized I was trying. I wasn't doing a great job of avoiding failure, but I was trying. You can always do better - that's the point. You will always have failures, big and small.

And for me, having a biography in song helps get through all of that. That's why I've bought this album several times - making up for that pirated copy that sits in a box in my basement, now.

Sweet dreams, Reinhold Messner, whoever you are!

Just the three of us took flight that night
Uncle Richard, me and James Earl Jones

And the pilot he gave me a blanket
And the tall dark man sang to me in deep
Rich tones...

Goodnight, goodnight sweet baby
The world has more for you
Than it seems
Goodnight, goodnight
Let the moonlight take the lid off your dreams
-Lullaby

The Truth About Jobs

Despite all of the hair pulling over "job-killing legislation" and blame-throwing about sending jobs overseas in our national discourse lately, you'll notice that no one has any real plan for getting people back to work. I suspect the reason for this is that unemployment these days has less to do with tax codes or trade agreements than it does with something we tend to like - Innovation.

The thing about innovation is that it is driven by a desire on the part of the innovator to Do Less Work. To be fair, it is also driven by a desire to improve safety and efficiency, but the pressure to come up with new ways to do more with less is ancient. Whoever built the first water-driven mill wanted to save time and strength previously devoted to grinding grain by hand, feed more people, and make more money. It worked. Mills grew into elaborate (and often dangerous) enterprises used in all kinds of manufacturing during the Age of Industrialization, and pressures from labor costs and safety measures drive the need to replace human workers with machinery. That pressure has increasingly driven the story of the past century or two, and isn't going away any time soon.

I'm not here to tell you that the continued and accelerating mechanization and automation of our world is "good" or "bad" - just that it's inevitable. And these are just a few of the obvious ways it's going to change in the next decade or two:

Truck Driving - I've talked with my friends about the Google Car, and how I think that within 5 years of hitting the open market, it will become unreasonably expensive for a human to afford the insurance needed to operate their own vehicle. Many people are skeptical that these self-driving cars are even possible, or that independence-minded Americans would "go for that" - but the technology has been growing up around us for at least a decade (sponsored by DARPA) and Americans have proven time and again that they'll buy anything if you convince them it's "safer" than what they have.

And while driving jobs won't go away overnight (there are nearly 1.5 million Teamsters Union members who will fight it), when it comes down to time, safety, and fuel costs, they won't be able to compete with the progeny of a Roomba and a TomTom in a Peterbilt. My guess is that long-haul cargo trucks will go automatic first, and local Fed-Ex or UPS delivery folks will hold out longest. And somewhere in there Zipcar will launch the first Johnny Cab.

Manufacturing - We've already gotten used to the idea of factory jobs disappearing; it's cheaper to pay a machine that doesn't worry about health insurance and retirement benefits to make stuff, after all. But a relatively simple innovation in 3D Printing is set to take even that away - or decentralize it and put manufacturing into every home. I guess it depends on your point of view.

This is one of those ideas that no one seems to see coming. Applications in food design and medical techniques have begun to creep into the public eye, first; and since plastic is already pretty easy to work with, it's likely that the marketing angle that hooks most of us is that you'll never need to run out to the dollar store to pick up little plastic doodads - just download them on the web, and print them out here. There's even a Makerbot on the market already.

Soldiering Surely this is a profession that will ALWAYS need people, right? Or have you been paying attention? Surely, you don't think the "future" isn't already here?

Just don't tell the U.S. military in Iraq... or the mercenary manufacturers. If that doesn't make you feel safe and secure, remember that they'll always need pilots to remotely guide these robots in the battlefield... oh, wait. Forgot about the Google Car.

Sales - Yeah, you might tell me that the ship has sailed on this one. The whole "Internet will replace stores" thing was debunked in a 1995 Newsweek article, wasn't it? (So, Mr. Stoll, what do you say these days about Amazon, eBay, and PayPal?)

But buying is just the end point of sales; won't we always need people to explain products to people and convince them to buy? Probably not. If anything, the runaway success that Google and Facebook have had in just the last five years ought to make you reconsider that career in retail. Some will still be able to make a living scripting and filming the adverts, but the sales floor will be your house, and when you click the PayPal button your new product will either print out on your 3D printer, or catch the next Johnny Cab to your door.

So what will we be able to do? Are there any jobs left? Are we going to let the robots take over? What will we do?

Small-scale, specialty farming is already a hobby in many places - perhaps more people will do things like this Garden Pool in their yard? Energy generation will likely continue to be profitable; getting decentralized, small-scale solar, wind, and geo-thermal will not only run your fridge and game systems, but provide you with income. Of course, maintaining those things is work, and it wouldn't surprise me to find that most people would rather leave that to machines, too, eventually.

So what's left? Reading, writing, music, gaming; we seem to have an endless capacity for entertaining ourselves. Will all of this mechanization and free time finally provide for everyone and tame our conflicts? Will we start taking serious steps into space? Or will we devolve into one of the many dystopian possibilities?

I don't know. I hope for the brighter visions. But in the meantime, I'm going to enjoy what I do.

Update: If you read this far, you really need to check out this post from Casaubon's Book: Efficiency, Substitution and Innovation isn't All It is Cracked Up to Be.

Is Welfare Fair?

Talking to a friend last night, he said something that captures what most regular Americans are really upset about. All of the talk of politics - the Dems vs. the GOP, the liberals vs. conservatives, the Hayek vs. Keynes - all of it boils down to what people think is "fair" at a visceral level.

And this slight paraphrase is what really bothers most average people: "We're where we are because of those people who don't want to work collecting their welfare check every month."

My friend stopped short of saying who "those people" were, so I won't speculate who he meant. But when you talk about welfare, chances are you're referring to what most would think of as "poor people." At the same time, though, most of us seem unaware of the widespread corporate welfare that goes on.

You may have seen the Guide to Corporate Freeloaders that has been circling the liberal blogosphere; it's a list of the Top Ten American corporations that either paid no federal taxes, received a tax refund, and/or received bailout money from the Federal government. I thought about what my friend had said, and decided to try to figure out who is taking more from the Feds and, by extension, the rest of us.

It wasn't easy.

First, let's figure out who we're talking about, and how to compare them. I needed to figure out a) how many people were "on welfare" and b) how much they got. I got some numbers for 2009 from a USA Today article dated January 2010. They broke out three different numbers:

* 4 million on welfare (TANF)
* 37 million on food stamps (SNAP)
* 9.1 million on unemployment

It's fairly easy to look up the budgets for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (HHS), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (USDA), and Unemployment Insurance administered by the Department of Labor using my favorite tax/budget site, WhatWePayFor.com - it's a little trickier to figure out where there might be overlap between people who fall into more than one of the three. And for me, it's always hard just doing arithmetic! The first two were pretty straightforward:

Taking the amount for TANF ($17.1B)/number of people on TANF (4M): $4,275 per person for 2009

Taking the amount of SNAP for 2009 ($59.1B)/number of people on SNAP (37M): $1,597 per person for 2009

Unemployment Insurance (Dept of Labor) is harder to pin down. There are a lot of numbers involved (all numbers for 2009; M = "Mandatory" spending, D = "Discretionary" for those tracking that happy meme):

M - Unemployment Trust fund - 116.8B
M - Payments to the Unemployment Trust Fund - $17.2B
M - Federal Additional Unemployment Compensation Program, Recovery - $6.7B
D - Unemployment Trust Fund - $3.5B
M - Federal Unemployment Benefits and Allowances - $273M
D - Unemployment Trust Fund - $1.5B
M - Federal Unemployment Benefits and Allowances - $686M

So - taking the Total amount from the above 2009 numbers for Unemployment related expenses ($146.659B)/number of people on unemployment (9.1M): $16,116 per person for 2009.

That's just the poor/unemployed/etc. - the unfortunate, or the lazy depending on your bias. I'll leave it to your own determination whether they "deserve" any of that money, or whether the Government should be involved in judging them worthy or propping them up. MY task is to figure out how to compare what these people are getting to what our Corporate Freeloaders are getting.

I wanted to try to compare on a per person basis. I decided just to look at the Top Ten from Sen. Sanders's chart, because trying to figure out how many companies there are doing business in America and how much each one does/doesn't pay in taxes is too hard. I found some Census data from 2000, but couldn't think of a quick or trustworthy way to compare it to what I know from 2009. (You're free to try!)

It's important to note that even among this Top Ten list, there are companies that are paying taxes, just like you and me. There are thousands of companies doing business here, and if they're all *better* than these, I have to feel a twinge of guilt for perpetuating the "freeloaders" meme; it's probably no more accurate to assume ALL U.S. companies are as bad as this any more than it is to assume that everyone taking welfare is a freeloader who "doesn't want to work." So don't read too much into these comparisons - just recognize that we don't just pay welfare to the unemployed.

Regardless, here's what I learned from looking at the numbers I got from that Top Ten Freeloaders chart and Wikipedia (for number of employees).

Not counting the bailouts some companies received, the IRS paid a total of $6.76B to the Top Ten companies - who employed a combined 1,264,113 people in 2010. That works out to an average of $5347.62 per employee. That's a little more than what the 4 million TANF welfare recipients got. ($4,275 per person)

Here's a breakdown of each of the "Top Ten Corporate Freeloaders" - how much we taxpayers paid them per person in 2010:

Exxon - received $156M refund; Employees: 83,600 = $1866 per employee

Bank of America - received $1.9B refund; Employees: 288,000 = $6597 per employee
(remember, we're NOT counting their $1T bailout)

General Electric - received $4.1B; Employees: 287,000 = $14285 per employee

Chevron - received $19M; Employees: 62,000 = $306 per employee

Boeing - $124M refund; Employees: 160,500 = $772 per employee

Valero Energy - $157M refund; Employees: 20,313 = $7729 per employee

Goldman Sachs - paid ~$25.3M (1.1% of reported profit); Employees: 35,700 = PAID $708 per employee
(again, we're not counting the fact that they recieved an $800B bailout)

Citigroup - paid $0; Employees: 260,000 = $0 per employee
(received $2.5 Trillion bailout)

ConocoPhillips - received $451M in tax breaks; Employees: 29,700 = $15185 per employee

Carnival Cruise Lines - paid $121M (1.1% of reported profit); Employees: 37300 (3,800 - Shoreside, 33,500 - Shipboard) = PAID $3244 per employee

All things considered, I would rather see people paid to work than see them paid NOT to work; but that is hardly fair to say when people actually can't find jobs. I would rather see companies keep their jobs here than send them overseas - but it's hardly fair to claim to support a free market and then cut off competition. And it's hardly fair to talk about cutting off welfare for the unemployed when we could easily recoup these comparable amounts from the give-aways being paid to these companies - many of which were so poorly managed that we ALSO had to pay trillions in bailouts to keep them off the TANF, SNAP, and UI books.

I just wonder, is it useful to compare all of the "freeloaders" this way? Is it accurate to describe them this way? I don't know, really; I just know that everyone has a prejudice - and everyone feels like someone else is getting more of a break than they are.

George Ought to Help

A friend asked me to watch this video and respond to it:



There's nothing new here, but it is a nice, concise presentation of things that many people have said to me over the years, trying to defend the morality of selfishness. That isn't the politically correct way to put it, of course; they would rather frame it as the immorality of forcing individuals to participate in our larger society. In this particular video, the message is that it is immoral to force one person to help another.

In order to determine whether I agree with that message, I start with two test questions:

1. Do I agree with that statement?

2. Is that what is really happening, or is this a false analogy?

On the surface, I agree with the general statement - it really is immoral to force one person to help another. But something about it bothers me, so I need to dig a little deeper.

I still believe in the concept of Charity, so I'll always make my decisions about helping others with the assumption that I should do so, but forcing someone to behave charitably means that it is not, by definition, "charity" - if their gift does not come freely from within, then it is no longer charitable, but given grudgingly. And, as the video illustrates, you're left with a choice between two actions that seem wrong.

Of course, someone who behaves selfishly all the time is not a very good citizen, either. Refusing to help others - as George does here - usually leads to being shunned, so when you are in the position where you need help, you can clearly expect it to be refused in return. Maybe that's a risk George is willing to take. I note that we are painted a picture in which Oliver's need is pretty innocuous; it's not as if Oliver is portrayed as having been laid off when his bank sank under toxic assets, and it isn't as if his children require life-saving medical treatment. It seems rather easier to imagine George saying no to a guy who wants to send his kids to a swanky school than he would to a guy with more urgent needs. I feel a little manipulated by this.

But for the question at hand, it doesn't matter; none of that is being debated in this video. Instead, it sticks to the very clearly defined moral situation in which an individual is compelled against his will to provide financial assistance to someone else. We are intended to agree with that message, and to draw the comparison between this small scale situation and our current government, with an eye to suggesting "better" ideas about government. Those alternative ideas may offer a better way to test my first question; which brings us to the suggestions at the end of the video inviting us to consider a list of alternatives to a coercive police state forcing participation in charitable activity.

Voluntaryism, (also called voluntarism, though it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with "volunteering" for things) is a philosophy according to which all forms of human association should be voluntary as far as possible. In other words, if George doesn't want for there to be an association (here consisting of tuition money) between him and Oliver, he shouldn't be forced to be a part of it. Consequently, voluntaryism opposes the initiation of aggressive force or coercion, which leads us to the non-aggression principle.

The non-aggression principle is an ethical stance which asserts that "aggression" is inherently illegitimate. "Aggression" is defined as the "initiation" of physical force against persons or property, the threat of such, or fraud upon persons or their property. The video clearly wants you to emphasize the first part of the definition, but I want to draw your attention to the inclusion of Fraud. That will be important in a minute.

So, all of that still looks pretty good. I do agree that it is immoral to use force or the threat of force to compel someone to perform what should be a charitable act. Helping someone else should be something that is agreed to by both parties - the Helper and the "Helpee", if you will. I do wonder how should that work under "voluntaryism", actually. What is the proper mechanism for those in need to find willing helpers? What is the moral implication of leaving the vulnerable as prey to those who would exploit them? Or to religious organizations with which the vulnerable would not otherwise voluntarily associate? It seems an impartial third party would be needed in any event.

Well... maybe those are details that can be worked out by someone else.

What about that second question? Is anyone in America being forced with violence or the threat of violence to give money to help others? The video presents this as a foregone conclusion, and uses the classic, faceless authoritarian boogie-men to get that point across.

It *sounds* obvious, doesn't it? We hear about famous people going to jail for tax evasion all the time - Wesley Snipes, Willie Nelson, Spiro Agnew. And there are other stories of less famous people in the news - like this guy you've never heard of and this high dollar/high profile arrest clearly intended to make an example of someone making a defiant point. Heck, Tax Attorneys - like this guy - are all over the Internet and TV telling you to watch out.

Clearly, that is both "force" and the "threat of force" - things which I've already agreed are immoral. If the government is initiating that kind of aggression against its citizens, that is wrong! But there was another clause in that definition of non-agression: remember when I told you that Fraud would be important?

You see, it is not actually against the law to owe money to the IRS. (We could quibble over whether the IRS has a legal foundation or whether you agree that a government should have the power to tax in the first place - but that is also beyond the scope of this video.) The crime is not "keeping your money" - the crime is committing fraud by either not filing at all or by lying on your return. Maybe you think that is hair-splitting, but it is an important distinction that the makers of the video have ignored. After all, following the definitions of "voluntaryism" and "non-aggression", every tax payer either explicitly or tacitly agrees to remain a citizen year after year, and only the fraud violating that voluntary agreement is punished - consequences agreed upon through due process, and enforced with due process.

The point is that the "initiation" of the "aggression" is NOT happening by the action of the U.S. Government - it is happening when the citizen violates an agreement into which he voluntarily entered.

Okay, but what about that animated picture where the money is sucked out of George's pocket against his will and given to Oliver's family? Why should the majority be able to force the rest of us to "redistribute our wealth"? I did not agree to allow that to happen!

There are two bitter pills that the would be anarchist or libertarian has to swallow here: one is "representative government" and the other is the concept of "fungibility".

Obviously, there is a lot of room for argument about what our elected officials are allowed to do. This very conversation is evidence of that, and it is why we have agreed to a Constitution spelling out the rules they have to play by. That document was written with the intention of allowing room for interpretation in order to protect both the will of the majority and the rights of the minority, which is why the framers used words like "due process" and "reasonable" all over the place. But at the end of the day, that Constitution every citizen has at least tacitly agreed to support and abide by gives your elected Congress the power to decide how and when to tax and spend.

(If you think those rules should change or be interpreted differently, you are welcome to enter into all kinds of "voluntary associations" to try and get that done, by the way.)

And that is where "fungibility" comes in. Because money is fungible, the chain between George and Oliver is broken. There is no way to determine whether the money paying for Oliver's childrens' tuition is George's, any more than it is possible to tell how much of the money going to maintain the stretch of I-95 George uses to get to work came from Oliver's taxes. When you look at the breakdowns of the U.S. Federal budget on display at sites like What We Pay For, and you get all bent out of shape over the $3.50 that the U.S. Government ripped from your pocket under threat of force you voluntarily rendered to your duly authorized government to support the Corporation for Public Broadcasting... it isn't necessarily your $3.50 that was handed over to them.

So no: I don't think that the analogy presented in this video is correct. Using the concepts of "voluntaryism" and "non-aggression" as the basis for answering the question, I have to say that there is nothing here to object to.

(And if you're trying to stay out of trouble with the IRS, here is some advise for preventing IRS tax debt. Nothing about arming and provisioning your compound, but plenty about planning and doing the basic paperwork that you voluntarily agree to by remaining a citizen.)

Thanks but No Thanks

I heard there were some budget cuts a'coming, so I whipped out my favorite new website, What We Pay For, to see just how much those cuts were going to save me. I plugged in my approximate income level, and took a look at the breakdown of how much of my tax bill goes for each of the things I heard mentioned in the news, on Twitter, or in conversation over the last year or so. Totally unscientific cherry-picking, I know, but here's what I found, anyway:

(Note: If you go to the site, you can see 2009, 2010, and 2011 projected figures; these are the 2010 figures.)

My Total Share of the Federal Budget: $25062.00

Cuts I heard proposed:

Corporation for Public Broadcasting: $3.52
Children's Health Insurance Fund: $94
Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC): $50.51
Administration for Children and Families (includes Head Start): $359.30

Savings: $507.33

Why did I pick these out? Because they all benefited my family at some point in the last decade. When I got out of the Air Force in 2001, the job market was miserable. It took years for my wife and I to both find jobs that would allow us to pay down the debt to creditors and family that we accumulated during my time in service and that horrible transition. We had no choice but to lean on these programs, and our goal all along was to get on our feet as quickly as possible.

I owe these programs, and whatever bogus studies you can pull out showing them to be "ineffective", the fact that they helped me and my family means that they were not, and are not, ineffective. Inefficient, maybe - but that means adjusting rules and oversight, not cutting programs that keep people like us from falling too deep in the hole to recover.

Somehow, cutting this $507 off my bill doesn't seem like a good deal.

Here's a good chunk of my bill, too:

Dept. of Defense Procurement: $936.18
(Under that is: Aircraft Procurement, Air Force: $94.98)
Defense Health Program (includes TriCare): $212.45
Family Housing: $15.79
Military Personnel: $1088.56
(Under that: Military Personnel, Air Force: $194.45)

Again, I'm just cherry-picking stuff that I can relate to; I find it interesting that I'm still paying for TriCare, and that I pay slightly less than 1% of an airman's salary every year. Too bad there's no easy way to see what we pay for the contractors who were supposed to replace these airmen as the military was "streamlined" over the last decade.

These are also - mostly - things that I don't mind paying for, because I feel like I'm paying something back. Most of these expenses are things that benefited me while I was a servicemember - most. But unlike with the social programs, it's what you can't see in the Defense budget that bothers me.

We've all heard horror stories about procurement - whether we paid attention or not. Some problems are famous (like the development of the Joint Strike Fighter), and some are elusive. In the name of security, it's hard to pin down how much of the Navy's hostage computer network falls under this Procurement pot, so we can't even figure out how much of that $936 might be going to HP for sub-standard equipment and service.

In fact, because of loose rules regarding oversight of defense contractors, we may never know how much has been wasted. We do know that this is not a new trend.

I don't know where I picked it up, but I sometimes refer to my taxes as "paying my dues to be an American." I'm not exaggerating - I needed these programs, and I want to make sure they are there for others who will need them. Considering what we got out of WIC alone, we have a lot of "repayment" to do - if the Congress will allow us to continue to do so.

What's Not to Like?

I had a lot going on this week, so I'm finally getting around to digesting the State of the Union. I enjoyed watching the speech; I like President Obama, and I felt like he was able to go back to the themes of bipartisanship that he campaigned on. The last two years were, predictably, about 1) bringing the economic collapse to a screeching halt, and 2) letting the opposition get their "I hope he fails" antics out of their system. Both sides learned a lot - I hope - and since the Tucson shooting coinciding with the beginning of the new Congress, there is a sense that the next two years will be about *actual* cooperation.

We shall see.

But my positive feelings aside, there were some things that I heard in this year's State of the Union that made me sigh. Here's a short list:

1. Bio Fools. I am keenly interested in seeing our energy policy move away from fossil fuels and toward decentralized renewable sources. As a consumer, I don't want to be dependent on a large, expensive infrastructure to deliver the power I need, and I don't want that power to come from sources outside of my control. I am mildly concerned about mankind's impact on the environment, but to be honest, I am more concerned with removing the alleged free market's ability to make decisions for me.

That said, there are energy policy ideas which I do not like that this President seems too willing to support. Bio-fuels, so-called "Clean Coal" and nuclear generation are where I feel he misleads himself. Bio-fuels/ethanol/corn-based alternatives are turning out to be a very poor replacement for petroleum-based fuels, according to environmentalists and scientists, and has an impact on farm subsidies and food supply, as well.

The case against "Clean Coal" is strong, too. It is an expensive attempt to sell environmentalists on the continued use of regular old coal, but ignores the problems of extraction and the expensive infrastructure of high-powered transmission lines needed for delivery.

I would personally like to see Nuclear power develop into the cleaner, safer source that the next generation of nuclear generation technologies promises to be, but even more than the still-young solar industry, this is a technology which is "not there yet."

2. Why Speed Trains? I would love to see public transit take off in this country. I would, as a free market consumer, LOVE to have a real choice between car and a system of reliable, timely buses, trains, etc. I pay so much in financing, fuel, maintenance, and insurance, I am certain that a competitive and profitable business of getting people from here to there within any metropolitan area could be built.

Highways are far and away the deadliest way to travel, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Congestion is increasingly costly (see Texas Transportation Institute stats). Compare fuel consumption (and see issue #1), too, while you're at it. It's pretty clear that our "free choice" to drive ourselves everywhere is not only an illusion of choice, but it is also a pretty poor one.

But are high speed trains the place to start building that? How am I supposed to get to one from my house? What about getting to and from the grocery store? Perhaps the self-driving Google car will make this a moot point? If so, then perhaps the President was right to include Google in the company of the Wright Brothers, after all?

3. The Feeble Response. Rep. Paul Ryan's response was a crucial part of the State of the Union. He had an opportunity to really make the GOP case that they have ideas and can compete with the President's agenda. But there was no "there" there. Never mind the factual inaccuracies; all he tried to do was restate the memes of "spending discipline" and "limited government" without explaining in concrete terms what either meme means.

Since the President talked about the debt and spending in some depth, and listed specific ideas for dealing with the issues, the GOP needed to address his ideas with specific ideas of their own. Instead, Rep. Ryan reiterated the tired rhetoric of the last two years - the stimulus failed (which is not necessarily the case), health care reform should be repealed (which is not necessarily a good plan or the right battle), and "unshackling business" will lead to new jobs and growth (for which there is no real evidence).

I would have liked to see Rep. Ryan come out in support of something truly innovative, like the FairTax legislation (now proposed by Sen. Chambliss). Or perhaps he could have talked about ways to make Social Security solvent without leaving those who paid into it their whole lives out in the cold? I don't know - I'm not a Republican, so I don't know what I should expect them to come up with.

At the least, perhaps they could publicly distance themselves from the odious talking heads and pundits lying to America in their name on Fox News and Talk Radio? (Just a thought.)

Let's see what happens this year.

The Solution Is BORING!

Making things better is difficult and boring work. Breaking things is easier. The natural tendency to pick the easier path can be called "entropy". Our most important job - assuming we want to live in a safe, beneficial civilization - is to fight that entropy, and that means working on improving ourselves and keeping to the moral codes that society is built on.

We all need to apply this advice to ourselves, and to how we relate to others - whether they are people we know and talk to, or people we watch via the various media.

Assume good intent. It's always easy to find "evidence" to "prove" that someone else wants to take that easy entropic path - and it's impossible to deny that we all feel the urge to break everything down and start from scratch. But it is vital that we not act on that "proof". Act as though everyone really is working toward the same goal - never give them the excuse they need to decide that cooperation is pointless.

Don't settle for shortcuts or shorthand. What do phrases like "special interests" mean? How often are "some people" or "many people" accused of some action? How often are "most people" attributed with certain thoughts or beliefs? We all use these shortcuts because "everyone knows" what we're talking about - but it's too easy to fool ourselves into making assumptions that aren't true.

Don't confuse attitude with substance. The other side will ALWAYS seem smug to you, especially when they are right about something. The attitude of either party about their "correctness" does not affect that "correctness" in any way.

Don't act out of destructive frustration. Calling it "revolution" just jazzes it up. We all need to act out of a sense of constructive cooperation. We all want the same things - freedom, prosperity, happiness - and those are not limited commodities. NOBODY has the whole solution - that's why we form groups and argue. Argument itself, like cultivation or home maintenance, is necessary, difficult, and often messy work.

I hope that I'm helping. I trust that is your intention, too.