Economic theory

I couldn’t resist giving tonight’s ramble a fancy title. What I know about economic theory wouldn’t fill a thimble. It’s my inner naughty four-year-old at work.

Anyway, while moving snow around today (Portland got slammed with fourteen inches yesterday), I was thinking about the idea that economists can make predictions based on the assumption that we consumers are rational actors looking out for our own best interests.

Not! Hahahaha. I mean, what planet are they on?

In the interests of domestic harmony, I will refrain from using members of my immediate family to prove my points. Or at the very least, I won’t name names.

Suffice it to say that I would have to hunt long and hard to find examples of rational economic behavior in my family. If there is one theme that runs throughout, it is along the lines of: “It will make me happy if we __________.”

You can fill in the blank with statements like these:

buy a house.
buy a kayak.
remodel the kitchen.
take a vacation in __________. (Some of these I’ve managed to stave off, but it hasn’t made me popular.)

Lest I make it sound like I would be the sort of rational guy the economists had in mind, let me confess that I have committed my own share of stupid purchases which made me happy at the time. I was thinking the other day that it would be mighty nice to have the money I have wasted over the past 45 years or so.

But if I had, I’d probably have invested it in the stock market, and then I might be wishing I’d spent it instead.

NewsNoise

I was thinking today about the difference between news and noise. News, I assume, is supposed to inform us. Noise is jackhammers and trucks passing and airplanes roaring overhead and nearby cellphone conversations and all the rest.

But boy, there is a lot of noise in the news. For example, I defy you to find any “news” about Sarah Palin published in the last month. Plenty of noise and commentators asking each other whether or not she was being kept in the news by news commentators (even they know there’s no story there)—but news? News would be if the Alaska legislature impeached her. How much clothes she purchased and to whom they will be donated is not news. it’s gossip, and not even nourishing gossip.

I won’t bother to offer more examples. For one thing I’m beat after spending a few hours pushing slush across and down our parking lot at work. For another I’m still recovering from the shoplifter my daughter spotted in our store yesterday afternoon. First time we’ve ever had someone handcuffed and led away. This particular Christmas shopper had managed to stuff $1600 worth of beads into her large purse. Had lots in her pockets too. (Now for us, that was breaking news!)

Revenons a nos moutons, as my favorite Swiss French teacher at UCLA used to say, after one of her elegant digressions en francais. Mme Walker, I miss you!

So what if we put a tape delay on the news, make it a bit more historical. I remember being very impressed in school when I read that it took months for early Presidential election results to reach California. [I don’t even know if this is true, and I don’t want to check because the concept of a 2-3 month old newspaper arriving out west with the NEWS is so evocative.]

Perhaps if we sat on the news for a while, then the trivial stuff would have a chance to drain out through the holes in the media colander, and what ended up being reported would be tasty pasta instead of a lot of hot water and the occasional news noodle.

And then l’affaire Palin would be reduced to something like this:

Senator John McCain chose Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, as his Presidential running mate. After an initial burst of popularity, questions were raised about her qualifications to be President should Senator McCain become ill or die in office. Governor Palin also did not fare well in interviews with the press. Following the election of the Obama-Biden ticket, Ms. Palin returned to her post as Governor of Alaska.

So instead of several hundred million words on radio, television, and sprayed across the internet like foam on a runway when the jet’s landing gear ain’t working, we’d have a calm little paragraph suitable for one of those horrible textbooks we make our children read in social studies.

But that wouldn’t be any fun. And making noise and calling it news is entertaining, which is why so much of the news industry has long since devolved into just another form of entertainment.

There is still news, of course. The informative kind. But man, it’s often so grim. Like this story about cholera in Zimbabwe in today’s New York Times. It’s tragic in every possible way, and very hard to read. There’s the rhetoric—speeches by politicians, promises to do this or that—and there’s the reality that we are powerless to protect helpless people in Darfur, Zimbabwe, N. Korea, Burma and so on. Even as we witness daily tragedies here of home foreclosures and mass layoffs, it’s worth remembering that we could be worse off.

[The cynic in me here comments that we are, in fact, rapidly becoming worse off, and that we also seem to be powerless to solve problems here at home. Ask any Katrina survivor for a quick report card.]

See what an ice storm and lack of sleep can do? Oy!

GPS vs Human

I was outside earlier this evening, attaching some rubber anti-slip treads to our wooden front steps so we don’t kill ourselves the next time it’s icy, when an SUV pulled up to the curb. The conversation went something like this:

Passenger: “Hey, do you know where the Maine Mall is? We’re driving in circles!“

Me: ”Sure. Actually the easiest way to get there is to go back to the bottom of the hill, take a right and then your next left...“

Passenger, pointing uphill and interrupting: ”But the thing says to go this way and take a left!“

Me, seeing the GPS unit on their dashboard: ”Yes, you can get to the Mall that way too, but it’s more complicated and it’ll take you longer.“

Passenger: ”Do you know where Maine Mall Donuts is?“

Me: ”No, but I can tell you how to get to the Mall.“

Passenger: ”What street is the Maine Mall on?“

Me: ”Maine Mall Road.“

Passenger, yelling at the driver who might have been his son: ”Reset that thing, will you?“ To me: ”It says we’re supposed to go this way. Where is Stevens Ave?“

Me: ”If you stay on this street, it’ll run right into Stevens.“

Passenger: ”But it says to turn left! Listen, we’ll just do what it says and take our chances. Thanks.“

And away they went. If you’re not going to trust the locals, why bother to ask them for directions? Heck, I would have drawn them a map if they hadn’t been in such a hurry.

On the other hand, Maine is one of the places where natives reputedly tell tourists things like ”You can’t get theah from heah...“ And in thinking about the tone of the conversation, I don’t really think they wanted me to give them directions. More like they wanted me to reassure them that the GPS unit’s directions were okay. So probably when I told them to turn around and head back the direction they’d just come from, it made me appear unreliable.

But not as unreliable as our front steps. Last Saturday it rained all day and then the temperature dropped right down to 32 degrees overnight. The next morning our front and side steps were slick as seaweed and I made a quick decision to find some sort of treads to put on them before winter sets in for real. So now the treads are screwed in place and I’m ready.

Footnote: My son googled ”Maine Mall Donuts“ and it does exist—on the Maine Mall Road, too.

Hubris everywhere

I can’t get the word hubris out of my mind. O’er-weening pride. In a rising market, CEOs convince themselves that their genius accounts for the vast profits washing through their companies. Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and on and on.

Oops! Turns out it wasn’t genius; it was gambling. Oh well, which of these current and former CEOs isn’t sitting on tens or hundreds of millions of dollars? If pay was related to performance, these guys would be in the stocks and the villagers would be practicing their egg and tomato hurling skills. How about a quick amendment to the tax code raising CEO personal tax rates to 95%. And let’s make it retroactive for ten years. Only applies to executives earning $5 million or more per year. That should spare the little guys and gals.

Then there’s the (Not So) Big Three. Hubris T-shirts for their management! Fly down to DC in their private jets to beg for a handout. How about starting by taking a pay cut right down to zero. Then give back 90% of all compensation received since they became bosses. Somehow I think they would still have a lot more money than the rest of us. No? Well, let’s say that you were paid sixteen million dollars last year. If we claw back 95% of it, you’ll still wind up with $800,000 which for most of us would be a huge pile of money. (Like: twenty years’ wages for the person earning $40,000 per year...).

Have they no shame?

Silly question.

So along with all the other changes we need, perhaps big salaries should come with big delays. When Mr. Big accepts his $10 million per year salary, he also accepts that his actual salary will be $250,000 per year and the balance will be delayed for five years and then spread out over some lengthy period, during which time he will be paid only during profitable years. And in years the company loses money, his salary balance scheduled for that year goes poof.

So it will be very much in his interest that the company grow and stay healthy over the long term, because if it founders, bye bye big bucks.

Now that I’ve vented, let’s be serious. The auto industry situation is a terrible conundrum. On the one hand, adding a couple of million workers to the ranks of unemployed Americans sure sounds like a formula for economic disaster. On the other hand, no matter how much we give to the US car makers, until they offer us products worth owning, they are doomed to fail. Gas prices are low for the moment because demand has plummeted, but everyone knows that sooner rather than later, the prices will climb again. I do not see any chance that Americans will return to buying SUVs. Asking for money without a plan for spending it wisely is pathetic. Asking for money without first accepting responsibility for their own poor leadership is disgusting. Flying to DC in private jets to ask for money? That starts at ‘out of touch’ and lands on Neptune, or maybe in another universe. Give us a break.

I don’t have a solution, and I’m not even sure the US auto industry can be saved regardless of what we do. What if we’re on the edge of a total transformation in how we travel? Maybe the Age of Cars is about to morph into something else. Anyone who thinks they can predict the future is lying or suffering from, well, hubris, by golly.

And a final note, about which I will write more in the future. Diversification is something we should, as a nation, be thinking about as we plan for putting our national house in order. Having a third of the jobs in Michigan, for example, in the auto industry is fine till the auto industry collapses. (I don’t know if it’s a third; I do know that Michigan is in terrible shape.) We need to diversify our sources of energy, our food production, and lots more. It’s not always ‘efficient’ to diversify, but it’s a helluva lot safer than putting all the proverbial eggs in one basket.

Clear and Simple

For months I’ve been reading articles about how we got into our current financial mess, and listening to really smart economists discuss its origins. One common theme is that even the smart people who created these derivatives and CDOs etc. didn’t really understand them. Clearly they didn’t understand the potential risks.

So to prevent this happening again I suggest that all such deals in the future must pass CAST, the Clear and Simple Test.

Some ideas for how it might work:

CAST would limit documents to a few pages in length.
CAST would clearly state potential risks.
CAST documents would be written in plain English. Documents which can only be understood by lawyers and accountants fail the CAST.

You get the idea.

Requiring that financial deals pass CAST would certainly take a lot of the creativity out of Wall Street. (This doesn’t sound like a bad idea.)

Deals might sound more like this:

I’ll loan you $500 for a year. At the end of the year, you’ll owe me $550. If you don’t pay me, you give me permission to come over to your house and take $750 worth of your stuff (snowblower, bicycles, whatever).

Now imagine your town or school district wants to borrow 30 million dollars to invest in some complex financial instruments which are described in a 300 page closing document. The broker offering you this deal tells you that you’ll get a 2% return (which you hope to use for pensions, or local infrastructure, or whatever) and assures you that it is a very safe investment.

I don’t know about you, but I can, if I have to, plow through 2-3 pages of legalese and, just maybe, have a general idea of what I’m being asked to sign. 300 pages? Not a chance—life is too short.

So rather than struggling, the town manager or school board members tell the broker to come back with a CAST acceptable document. If the broker can’t do it, then clearly the deal was a bad one. Whew! If he does come back, they read the new description and see if it fits their needs.

And how about laws? Wouldn’t CAST eliminate a lot of the sneaky stuff that is hidden in 1,000 page bills passed by Congress?

I’ll end with this quote:

The price of clarity, of course, is that the clearer the document the more obvious its substantive deficiencies. For the lazy or dull, this price may be too high.

* Reed Dickerson, Professor of Law, Indiana University.

Quote Source

Voting in Maine

It’s almost 11pm and I’m beat—but what a day! I was at the Riverton School Community Center off Forest Ave in Portland, Maine from 6:45am till 8pm helping register voters. This was my first experience on the ‘other’ side of the table, and we were busy! Several of my co-workers were veterans of past Portland elections and by mid-morning they said we’d already seen more voters come through the doors than they’d seen in an entire day at past elections.

As far as registering voters, we got slammed. We didn’t keep track but there were hundreds of new voters, new-to-Portland voters (from as far off as Utah and Texas), lots and lots of new citizen voters from Cambodia, Viet Nam, Sudan, Somalia, Poland, and who knows where else. Also lots of 18-25 year olds registering and voting for the first time. Tremendous excitement and enthusiasm. One of my co-workers mentioned that she signed up a 54 year old woman who had never voted before in her life.

Final thoughts before I keel over from fatigue:

1) From the reports I’ve read and heard, what I saw today was repeated all over the country. The real winner of this election? Us—the voters of America. Well done!

2) And even though I’m dog-tired and stiff from sitting for so long, I’d do it again. The people I helped today were excited, appreciative of our help, eager to register, eager to vote, and just great to meet and be around.

Standing in line

Many decades ago, when I was an undergrad at UCLA, the campus switched to a computerized class registration system. This was in the era of mainframe computers and punch cards.

At the time, late 1960s, UCLA was a campus of roughly 30,000 students. I don’t know how many of us were standing in line, holding our registration cards, but it seemed like most of the student population. Fortunately it was a sunny day, and we were young, so spending hours in line waiting to register was not such a bad way to spend time. Shoot the breeze, flirt with the girls, soak up the sun.

Fast forward to the 2008 election. In many states voters are standing in line for three, four, five, six, even eight hours to vote. And those were the early voters. What will tomorrow be like? You’ve probably seen the images on television. Your fellow citizens standing in line are not, in general, young students with nothing else to do. They are parents, workers, the elderly—many of them probably taking unpaid time off from their jobs.

It makes me furious. How can we preach the benefits of democracy to other countries if we can’t practice it ourselves? Self-delusion and hypocrisy are not attractive attributes. We don’t torture people—except when we do. We have the greatest democracy in the world—except many voters find it difficult or impossible to vote and not everyone who votes is sure that his or her vote will be counted.

I am sure that there are lots of ways to solve the voting problem. Here’s one off the cuff pre-breakfast idea:

Figure out a way to reward (tax credits, financial assistance, something) every city which enables voters to cast their votes in one hour or less. Maybe $2.00 per voter. So in a city with 300,000 voters, this would be a huge incentive. And please, don’t tell me how expensive this would be. Seven hundred billion to bail out banks—we can come up with a few bucks for fair and efficient voting.

Or if you’re in a punitive mood, the opposite. In places where voters are forced to stand in line for hours, start the meter ticking and fine the responsible parties at the state and local level. Said officials might come up with creative solutions to this problem if they were being fined $1,000 per hour for every hour above one that voters had to wait in line.

Really, we can do better. No more excuses. Fish or cut bait,

Locker room election poll

Move over, Gallup and CNN.

This afternoon I was about to leave the locker room of the gym I attend, when a fellow I know by sight walked in. We exchanged greetings and I asked him if he was ready for the election to be over. He said yes, and then said this:

“I’ve been a Republican all my life. Always voted Republican. The last eight years, I feel like the Republican Party has left me. I can’t believe the mess they’ve made. I’ve always thought Joe Biden would make a good President. Obama is okay, but I really respect Joe Biden.”

He paused and shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was saying. He concluded:

“I’ve already voted. I voted yesterday. For Obama and Biden.”

Reporting from the locker room,
bk

PS A friend just emailed me this link. Wow.

The Election

Last week my wife and I voted for Barack Obama. He’s impressed us with his intelligence, his wit and humor, and his willingness to try and reach out to all Americans, not just Democrats. He’s been patient and steady through a very long and difficult campaign. He’s used the skills he developed as a community organizer in Chicago to build a nationwide campaign organization of unprecedented size, and it has attracted a huge number of enthusiastic volunteers. He clearly has the ability to attract and inspire very talented people—the ones at the top of his campaign are aces. He has attracted the support of people like Warren Buffett and Colin Powell.

But most importantly, he has convinced me that he understands that the future is not about him. It’s about us. No President, no matter how smart, talented, and articulate, can accomplish much without the support and active participation of the citizens. Historically, the quickest way to bring the country together was to have an external threat. The attack on Pearl Harbor and the national effort during WWII is a classic example. In contrast, after 9/11, we were told to support the country by—shopping.

Turns out that while we were borrowing and shopping, the deregulated mortgage industry and Wall Street were gambling away trillions of dollars. Now we’re in the middle of an economic meltdown. (It may, unfortunately, not even be the middle. It may only be the beginning. No one seems sure.) In addition our exhausted troops are fighting two wars, our reputation as a world leader is in tatters, our infrastructure—roads, bridges, airports, railroads, schools, and hospitals—range from dangerous to inadequate, and the current President...well, let’s just say that no one seems to be listening to his speeches.

So it’s up to us. Not to the Democrats. Not to the Republicans. Not to the Libertarians or the Green Independents. Us. We can figure out what needs doing, roll up our sleeves, and get to work while we still have time, or we can bicker and bitch and blame everyone else until the good ship America founders. And we’ve already started to transform our country. That’s why there are windmills in Texas, green roofs in Chicago, and a lot of people carpooling. But wouldn’t it be refreshing to work together as a nation?

The problems facing the next President are stunning. But guess what: he’s not going to be able to fix those problems by himself. Obama or McCain can give speeches until their voices are raspy whispers, but without our help, they won’t accomplish anything.

But it does help, when confronting a mountain of problems, to have a smart organizer around. Someone who can clearly explain what the problem is, intelligently explore possible solutions, attract and consult with the best available advisors, and come up with a plan. It doesn’t guarantee success, but it sure beats blind guesses. And if we, the people, are going to work together and sacrifice together, we need a President who can explain the plan so that every man, woman, and child understands what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it. And we need a President who is willing, even eager, to listen to people who don’t agree with him, a President who can understand and appreciate strongly held opinions which don’t echo his, and forge a consensus.

So we voted for Barack.

PS I hope every voter in America will vote this year. Regardless of who wins, voting is the first step toward reminding our representatives at the state level and in Washington that WE are the people they serve. Voting en masse is a clear way of telling our reps that we are watching them, listening to them, and that we care about what they do with our money and our country. We’re easier to ignore when half or less than half of the voters bother to vote. When we all vote, the collective voice is a powerful voice, and reps who ignore it risk a short career in politics.

PPS I finally realized today why the Joe the Plumber stuff irritated me so much. Here’s a guy who owes back taxes and claims to be a plumber although he’s missing a license, and he’s been transformed—through the magic of the media—into an odd sort of celebrity. And then I remembered Rosie the Riveter.

If we’re going to give our children a decent future, Rosie should be our role model, not Joe.

Election Day

On election day I’ll be volunteering at one of Portland’s polls as a Deputy Registrar, helping to register new voters. I signed up to do the entire day, 6:45am till the polls close at 8pm. Should be fun! Time permitting, I’ll share the experience that evening or the next day.

A Favorite Blog

No time to write this evening as I am helping clean house in preparation for a pumpkin themed party this weekend. But I wanted to recommend my favorite blog/podcast from NPR: Planet Money. If you’d like some plain English answers to your questions about the great financial meltdown, this is the place to go.

Taxes Part 1

I am reminded, as we grind our way towards election day, of how often we don’t discuss really important stuff but instead let ourselves be distracted by highly charged but meaningless phrases.

Take, for example, the argument about whether it is better to raise or lower taxes. Seems at first blush like this is an easy one. If taxes go up, we have less money to spend on things we want or need. If taxes go down, we keep more of our money. A seeming no-brainer.

But it’s not that simple. Start at the local level. I live in Portland, Maine. I pay state sales tax, property taxes, state income taxes, and federal income taxes. In addition there are restaurant taxes in Maine, beverage taxes, tolls on the interstate, lodging taxes, etc. I’m sure there are plenty of other fees and taxes (vehicle registration, drivers license fees, etc.) but you get the idea.

So let’s pretend, for fun, that tomorrow all these taxes were abolished. I’d get to keep a substantial amount of money that I currently give away. Nice!

But what would I lose? Offhand I can think of quite a few things. At the local level we’d have:

No police or fire department
No road maintenance or snow removal in the winter
No trash removal
No public schools
No summer rec programs for kids
No public library
No building inspections, workplace safety requirements, health department, public works dept., etc. (Eating out might get pretty dicey. All the traffic lights being red, or green, or out could make driving across town more challenging. No auto insurance requirements would make accidents a lot more complicated to sort out...)

Moving up to the county and state level:

No highway patrol so speed limits would be gone
Again no road, bridge, or highway maintenance or snow removal. (In Maine, that would pretty much shut down the state during the winter so no food coming in to our markets.)
All state programs would cease: child protective services, mental health programs, prisons, etc. etc.
No water treatment or sewage removal.

I could go on to the national level but you get the picture. I’ll just mention a couple that could make life way more adventuresome:

No air traffic control or required aircraft maintenance and safety inspections.
No military
No more regulation of food or drug safety, workplace safety, vehicle safety, etc.
No bank regulation—no wait, we tried that one recently...

I can’t speak for others, but I personally do not mind paying taxes so that I can get the benefits of these services. I have no desire to live in a town with no police or fire department. I don’t wish to drive on pot-holed roads and highways with no speed limits. I don’t want to fly in airplanes which are never inspected, in airspace where anyone can fly at whatever speed and altitude regardless of how many other aircraft are in the same part of the sky. I like my public library, and the parks. I like safe drinking water and flush toilets. I don’t want to eat contaminated food. The world is not a safe place and not everyone on the planet wishes us well, so having a well-trained and well-equipped military is prudent.

Higher vs. lower taxes is not the same as a discussion of good vs. evil, although one might think it was from the tone of campaign rhetoric. For me, however, the important question is what I get for the taxes I pay. Are my tax dollars being spent wisely or foolishly? Invested so that I get benefits, or wasted?

So let’s take one concrete example: drinking water. (For some history, here’s a link.) Waterborne illnesses are often fatal and in developing countries—as well as in some poor corners of the USA—these diseases cause “an estimated 4 billion episodes of diarrhea resulting in an estimated 2 million deaths, mostly among children. Waterborne bacterial infections may account for as many as half of these episodes and deaths.” (CDC)

So I personally am okay with having some of my tax dollars go to providing safe clean drinking water for me, my neighbors, and you and your neighbors. Seems much better than dysentery (I got dysentery a couple of times when I was in the Peace Corps in Senegal. Take my word for it—a fever of almost 105 is not something you forget or wish to repeat), or cholera, or E coli.


To be continued...

Politics & Hubris

This is ridiculous. How can anyone believe that Sarah Palin is qualified to be vice president and quite possibly president? Have we so completely blurred the line between the ‘reality’ that appears on television and the reality we live in that people no longer know the difference? If so, then I guess I can quit my day job, buy some scrubs and a lab coat, go down to the hospital and start doing brain surgery. The pay will be a lot better and probably the hours too. Not qualified? Heck, I’ll get better with practice and some coaching. I’m a quick study.

She can’t answer questions like “What newspapers or magazines do you read?” C’mon folks. This is not “gotcha” journalism. This is not a trick question dreamed up by Katie to make Sarah Palin look stupid. We have the right and obligation to know about anyone running for high office. But apparently in the case of Sarah Palin, unscripted interviews are too dangerous so there won’t be any more. Just have to trust that she’s ready to take care of anything that might come up.

Sorry, Senator McCain. Your claim to be looking out for America went right out the window and off the planet when you picked Sarah. But give her credit: she may not be qualified to be vice president, but she’s plainly ambitious enough to want a higher office. Why else would she refer to the “Palin/McCain” ticket?

Good grief.

And a final thought. One sign of intelligence is to know when to say, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Which is what most people would say if offered a job for which they were totally unqualified. But not Sarah Palin. I believe she “didn’t even blink” when offered the chance.

Clear case of hubris. Seems like we’ve seen this play before and it didn’t turn out so well.

Change? No problem!

If writing is a way to clarify one's thoughts, then it's telling that I haven't made an entry since July. And certainly a lot has happened in the last two months—more than enough to make my head spin. So let's start with politics, a form of gardening after all. (Does it not involve slinging manure?)

Now that the endless election campaign is heading for the finish line, I've been thinking about the "change" that both Democrats and Republicans are claiming as their way to improve Washington.

Guess what? Change is normal. It's given. It's the de facto way things are. Nothing is static. Seasons turn, the children grow, the weeds sprout, tomatoes ripen (or rot if there's too much rain, or are eaten by slugs or worms), we age, the stock market goes up, or down, or both. Babies are born, people die. Accidents strike, Nature reminds us by hurricane or tsunami or earthquake that we are puny and easily washed away or struck down. Continents drift, lava flows, cosmic rays pass through us, stars explode, endless constant change. That is the norm.

So what are the politicos yammering about? What changes will they make that will transform our lives and bring us fair skies and a bright future in exchange for our vote?

Never mind. No point in trying to attach meaning to political rhetoric. Instead this: remember the old days when commoners would travel to court to request a boon [favor] from the king? I would like to make a request of our future leaders in Washington.

O people of power and influence, hear my small request. I ask that you change into speakers of the truth.

I know, it won't be easy or come naturally. No more lies, no more pretending things are okay when they're not. No more hiding big chunks of the federal budget in 'supplemental appropriations' or whatever you call tens of billions of dollars spent but not counted in the budget. I can't do that with my checkbook and I don't want you doing it in Washington. No more saying the war (take your pick) is going great when it's not. No more saying the economy is doing fine when it's dissolving around us. No more saying things are getting better when for too many of us they're getting worse.

No more dodging around the conversations we need to have. Are we going to restore the Gulf Coast or let it erode? Right now it's vanishing while we talk about how much we 'care', just like we 'care' about the rusting bridges and neglected highways. Just like we 'care' about the wounded vets coming home to a red-tape nightmare that they, of all of us, should not have to endure. Shameful! If we care about all these problems, then we fix them. It won't be easy or cheap but we can do it. If we're not going to address the real problems, then let's be honest and say so.

I know, I know. It's more likely that I'll win a lottery (and I don't buy tickets) than a sudden outburst of honesty from Washington. But I can dream.

And that would be change worth fighting for.

Idea of the day 7.20.08

All my life I've had 'bright' ideas. (I've had plenty of dumb ones, too—ask anyone in my family. Like my 'shortcuts' which almost always resulted in getting lost and arriving late.) Often these flashes of brilliance come late in the evening or even in the middle of the night. And often, if I can remember them the next day, some or most or all of the luster is gone and I toss them away and wait for the next one to strike.

Some of my 'bright' ideas are in fact legitimate, but usually they've already been invented and patented. I said for years that home battery-powered smoke alarms should be able to wirelessly trigger each other in case of a fire. Then one day I did a patent search (uspto.gov) and found that someone had this idea long before me. Oh well. At least they're finally on the market (and in our house, too).

So here are a couple of ideas from yesterday:

I've never driven a Prius or even sat in one, but I understand they have a display which shows gas consumption. I was thinking about meters which show consumption recently, and it occurred to me that a display that showed cost would certainly get my attention. If I filled the tank and then entered that day's cost per gallon, a 'smart' display could then behave like a taxi cab meter showing miles per dollar (or dollars per mile, depending on the vehicle).

A similar display for electricity would also graphically tell us the cost of baking the turkey, running the big screen TV, etc., not in kilowatts, but in $$$$$.

And here's a fanciful one: A bad odor is added to natural gas so it's easy to smell a gas leak, thereby making something invisible easier to detect. What if we could temporarily—for a week, say— add a dye to carbon dioxide emissions from vehicle exhausts, factories, power plants, etc. so that we could see how much of this invisible gas our activities pour into the atmosphere? I think a pastel color would be pretty...

Point of view

Somewhere in our house, or perhaps now stored with the many books which we've relegated to boxes, is a copy of Powers of Ten. Here's a brief summary of the movie upon which the book was based:

In 1977, Charles and Ray Eames made a nine-minute film called Powers of Ten that still has the capacity to expand the way we think and view our world. Over ten million people have seen the film, and it continues to be shown in classrooms, business meetings, festivals and retreats around the world. Starting with a sleeping man at a picnic, the film takes the viewer on a journey out to the edge of space and then back into a carbon atom in the hand of the man at the picnic, all in a single shot. It is an unforgettable experience. [quoted from the Powers of Ten website].

In the book, each page gives a view that is ten times closer or ten times more distant than the previous page's image. Imagine that you are sitting on a folding chair on the goal line of a football field. A friend is sitting in another chair one yard from you. He snaps his fingers and suddenly you are pushed back to the ten yard line. Another snap and you're a hundred yards off on the opposite goal line. A third snap and you're a thousand yards away—perhaps in the middle of a street many blocks from the stadium. Snap number four and you're 10,000 yards away, more than five and a half miles. Maybe in a different town. Two more snaps and you're a million yards away, 568 miles, about sixty miles more than the distance from San Diego to San Francisco.

Unlike my description which jumps you horizontally away from your friend, the movement in Powers of Ten is vertical: either down through the skin of a hand, or straight up through the atmosphere and off through the solar system, galaxy, and beyond. Either way, one quickly sees how the view changes with each ten-fold change in the distance.

Which brings me to pulling weeds, which are in ample supply at work. Pulling weeds is a close-up activity, where I am forced to attend to details so that the weeds come up and the flowers stay in the ground. Weeds that are a foot from a flower are easy; I just jerk them up, shake off the dirt, and toss them in a pile. But sometimes the weeds have sprouted millimeters from the flower and a more attentive surgical extraction is needed. If there are any ten-fold changes in view here, they are most likely to be from ten inches down to one.

But when I finish weeding—well, abandon it since it's never done—I only need walk across the drive to our building and look back at the little hill where weeds, grasses, and flowers share space, and the view is transformed. A distance of less than ten yards totally changes what I see, and even how I feel about it. Weeds up close irritate me a lot more than weeds at a distance.

Sometime in the past it struck me that speed changes my view of things in a somewhat similar fashion to distance. With distance, moving farther away replaces details with larger, less distinct forms and batches of colors. Up close I can see the bark of a tree. Closer still I can see small insects on the bark or on the leaves. Back away a few hundred yards and I can tell that I'm looking at some woods, but the details are gone.

Speed also makes details vanish. When I walk to work, I can see oddities like the woman pushing her cat in a screened-in baby carriage. I can admire gardens in our neighborhood, inspect the flotsam and jetsam in peoples' yards, resist or yield to temptation as I pass the local bakery (The Big Sky Bread Co. in the old firehouse: such good bread! and cookies!), and generally move at what I call human speed. And, if I may return to weeds for a moment, what about the ones that grow out of cracks in the sidewalk or pavement? Are these not remarkable? Talk about tough!

(What would be the human equivalent to weeds rooted in a bit of sand in a crack next to a busy street? Maybe me buried to my waist in an iceberg floating from Greenland to Newfoundland while subsisting on ice chips scraped off the berg with my fingernails...oh yes, without clothing. How in hell do weeds survive with their roots in two teaspoons of sand? Not just survive, but thrive? Amazing!)

I digress. Bicycling to work, the same journey takes six or seven minutes instead of twenty. I see less because I have to devote more of my attention to cars, railroad tracks, sand or broken glass in the street, and other challenges to safe cycling. In the car, going thirty or thirty-five, most of my attention is given to watching out for my fellow drivers. If I notice flower beds or pedestrians, it is done in quick glances which don't tell me much.

Point of view. As we move away or move faster, details blur. As we slow down or move closer, the small things become clear.