Waiting for Social Change to Solve Your Personal Problems

While social changes may or may not be a good idea, waiting for them to occur, rather than take action in your life is a poor life choice.

Elizabeth Warren is a good person, despite her obvious flaws.  While claiming a spurious Native American heritage is a bad thing, it is hardly on the level of things our President has done.  Regardless of that, I think she would be a great asset in the Senate, where she is needed, rather than losing to Trump in a Presidential race in 2020.

Warren has pushed for a consumer protection agency, which the Republicans have systematically gutted since Trump took office.  What we are seeing is the collision of two social philosophies.  Republicans believe that people should be free to make shitty choices in life.   They believe this because many of their supporters own odious businesses that are predicated on customers making shitty choices - leasing cars, payday loans, check-cashing stores, rent-to-own furniture, buy-here-pay-here used cars and so forth.   While many today laud Mitt Romney as a voice of moderation, we should not forget that he made his fortune buying ailing companies, stripping them of their assets, gutting pension plans, and leaving the pensioners destitute while he raked in millions in fees.

The other half of Republican support is so-called "Libertarians" which suffer from a form of mental illness in believing that civilization itself is a really bad idea.   These are people who spend a lot of time in their basements, on their computers and polishing their guns, pining for the day when they will be in charge.   Of course, what they don't realize is they would likely be the first to be gunned down in their libertarian paradise.   An armed society is a polite society, and libertarians are rarely polite.  Libertarians believe that everyone should be allowed to do what they want - including signing their life away into financial slavery, if they are dumb enough not to read the fine print.

Oddly enough, there are many liberals who support some of these odious deals as well.   You do read articles occasionally in the "liberal media" about how the poor are "forced" to use payday lenders to "tide them over" until their next paycheck.  These articles imply that without these odious deals, the poor would have no other choices, and thus starve to death.   Maybe I am out of line here, but somehow I think they would be better off not borrowing money at 300% interest.   But then again, I studied math, even though it was "hard".

When I was a kid, of course, none of this stuff was legal.  No lotteries, no casinos, no payday lenders, no check cashing stores, no buy-here-pay-here used cars, no rent-to-own furniture, nothing.  Even car leases were very rare, and usually limited to businesses who wanted to write off the cost of a lease rather than amortize the purchase of a vehicle.   So my Dad's company car was leased by the company.  And sometimes the fleet of delivery trucks might be leased as well.   But leasing as a  personal choice?   It simply didn't exist.

It took the better part of 50 years for society to change from that to what we have today.   The high interest rates of the 1970's forced States to abandon usury laws that limited interest rates.   When rates came down - to their historic lows today - these limitations were not reinstated.   And that is the irony of it - in an era of super-low interest rates, many people are paying super-high rates.   You can get a mortgage today for about 4%, but your credit card may be at 22% or more.   And the poor, getting caught up in really raw deals, end up paying effective rates of over 100%.   It makes no freaking sense whatsoever.

Like I said, it took 50 years to get here, it may take 50 more to get back - if ever.   In order to change back to the way things were, we'd have to have liberal Democrats (not just regular ones) take both houses of Congress and have Elizabeth Warren elected President.   I think the odds of this are long, less than 1 in 5, perhaps far less.   The problem is, while Warren and other Democrats might run on a platform of financial reform, the GOP would run on a platform of abolishing abortion and gay marriage.

Guess which party the person with the payday loans is going to vote for?   Yup, those same poor blacks in the ghetto getting payday loans are also attending fundamentalist Baptist churches, whose preachers tell the parishioners the reason for their misfortune isn't the payday lender taking all their money, but God's wrath upon them for allowing abortion and gay marriage.   Oh, by the way, please put 10% of your income in the collection plate as a tithe.  My Mercedes lease is almost up!

Lest you think I am being racist, the same effect plays out in more rural areas.  The poor white trash in the trailer park - who is also victimized by predatory lenders - attends a conservative, Bible-thumping, (wait for it) Baptist church.   Same shit, different race.   And they are selling the same line of bullshit - that social issues (not economic ones) are the most important thing on the ballot every November, and pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain.

So long as the poor vote against their own self-interest, they will remain poor.   An interview with a barber in a black barbershop in Milwaukee is a case in point.   The man postulated he wasn't going to bother to vote at all in the 2016 election.  "We had 8 years of Obama, and he never got me a 401(k)!" the man opined, apparently forgetting what a self-funded retirement account is all about (as a proprietor, a Simple-IRA might have been a better choice, but again, this isn't something given to you, but something you have to set up yourself.   You do get a tax deduction, though).

You can't fix stupid, and so long as people make stupid choices, they will remain poor.   As I noted in many earlier postings, often the loudest voices defending payday loan places are their own victims.  They would howl the loudest if you shut down their abusers, just as a beaten wife will stab the cop who puts her abusive husband in handcuffs - which is why a "domestic" call is often more dangerous to answer than an armed robbery.

It seems an anathema, but there is a bit of perverted logic to it, as I noted before.   The poor feel intimidated by going to a bank or conventional lending institution.  At the bank, all of your past transgressions will be dredged up and examined, and you will be called into account for it.   Your meager pay will be ridiculed, and likely you will be turned down for a loan, as banks don't (or they didn't used to, anyway) take on high-risk borrowers at high rates.   At the payday loan place, however, they are treated nicely and no one is turned down for a loan!   They are kings there - they own the place, so they think.   It is all psychology, and poor psychology at that.

But getting back to social change, waiting for it to change your personal life is idiotic.   Sure, you should advocate for social economic change, and you should vote for it as well.   But many people use lack of social change as an excuse for failure and an excuse to not even try in life.  And I know this as I had friends who engaged in this, family members who engaged in this (and still do so) and even I did this when I was young and stoned all the time.   You sit around smoking pot and grousing with your like-minded friends that the system is stacked against you, so why bother trying and pass the bong, please?

There is another aspect to this as well, and perhaps one where the libertarians are just a teeny-weeny bit right.   People do make choices in life, and in order for these odious consumer finance deals to exist, people have to willingly seek them out and accept them.  They have to sign on the dotted line instead of leaving their pen at home.  It is a supply-based business, and if the supply of borrowers evaporated overnight, every payday loan joint in the country would go bankrupt the next day.

But they don't, because people are idiots, or more precisely they are uneducated, can't do math (because it is "hard") and are impulsive and want shiny trinkets now and don't think about paying later.  The rent-to-own bling rim store is a classic example of this - people mortgaging their future to put $1000 worth of shitty Chinese-made rims (that bend the first pothole you hit) onto a car worth $750 on a good day.  And again, lest you think I am being racist, the white-trash trailer-park Baptists go to the same store and put the same crappy rims on their pickup trucks.

And lest you think I am just bashing blacks and whites, the Hispanics are in on this as well, taking a functioning pickup truck and relieving it of its function by putting rims that stick out a foot past the wheel wells, shod with "gumball" tires with no tread or useful carrying load.   And yes, they also go to the Baptist churches, which have been recruiting like mad in that demographic (a friend of mine works for the Catholic church is in an outreach program to bring them back into the fold - they are alarmed at the success of these protestant fundamentalist "Inglesias" in recent years).   Again, same shit, different day - poor people making poor choices, and one of those poor choices is to vote for politicians who are against their financial interests, but promise social changes in terms of abortion and gay rights.  Kind of hard to feel sorry for them, eh?

The common denominator, of course, is lack of financial education.   Many have raised the alarm (as I have as well) that we simply are not educating young people about finances anymore in this country - again, something that did happen when I was a kid, and over 50 years, has been eroded by design.  Yes, those same Republicans have labored hard to strip school funding and limit education to "Readin', Ritin', and 'Rithmatic" - but apparently not spelling or punctuation.  And in terms of 'Rithmatic, they don't want people doing financial analysis of a payday loan, but mere rote memorization of multiplication tables (Jethro's "ciphering") and not much else.  They want people to be afraid of math as something that is "hard" and has no real application in life.  Because if all they understand about math is that it is to be feared and amounts to little more than memorization of useless formulas or tables, they won't be able to think critically about things like loan terms.

Of course, Republicans want more than just the "Three R's" taught in school.  They also want the "Big B" - the Bible - taught, preferably from a conservative protestant perspective.  Yes, the fucking Baptists rear their ugly heads once again - doing more than just closing the liquor stores (and chicken sandwich outlets) on Sunday.  But I digress.

So, teaching financial literacy in school would be a good thing, but good luck with that.  Because to do that, you'd have to elect liberals to every school board in the country - starting with Texas.   Yes, Texas.   You see, in order to sell textbooks in America, you have to be able to sell them in the largest State in America, and the Texas Board of Education sets the standards for school books in Texas, and by extension, in all of America.   Is it any coincidence that Kennedy was shot from the Texas School Book Depository?   Seems too coincidental to me!   I am just kidding.  We don't truck in conspiracy theories here.

So what does that leave?  Maybe a series of public service announcements to try to teach people that payday loans and check-cashing stores are a rip-off? How about some investigative reporting showing these things are scams (and not some weepy piece from the Times or the Post arguing that the poor have no other choice and the only alternative is massive welfare infusions)?   There is a problem there as well.

You see, these are very wealthy and entrenched businesses.  They advertise on television, online, and in the papers.   You can't do a piece about how shitty the payday loan company is, when it is one of your major advertisers.  As a reporter, you'd be shown the door.   You can't even do a piece on how shitty lease deals are - when General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, et al, are you largest advertisers in every form of  media.

So there is really no way to educate or "warn" people away from these shitty deals. The whole deck is stacked against them, and society provides poor normative cues that getting shitty deals is "normal".  At the corner of Martin Luther King and "Community" Boulevards in my small down is a huge billboard, high in the air, with the image of a smiling young black girl waving a fan of $20 bills, exhorting people to visit the Payday Lending Shop.   You could be her - happy and with all that money!   No mention is made of the payback.

Well, one is.  A block away is another billboard (billboards is one thing they do well in Georgia - well do a lot of, anyway) that proclaims, "Ripped off by a Payday Lender?   Go to our Payday Lender and get a new loan to pay off your old Payday loan!"   Yes, there is a lot of money to be made taking a second bite at the apple.  Just as a plethora of MLM schemes advertise to those ripped off by other MLM schemes ("Ripped off by an MLM scheme?  Try ours, it's legit!"). You see how hard it is to educate people.

Oh, right, MLM schemes.  Something else aimed at the poor that the poor will defend vehemently as a good deal, that is, until they are bankrupt.  At that point, they whine, "why didn't anyone warn me?" and then get depressed and sign on to the next odious deal to come down the pike.

So what does that leave?   Well, we can sit in the corner weeping profusely at the futility of life and how unfair things are.  That won't accomplish much.  We can vote for Bernie Sanders or Olivia O'Malley-O'Cortez, who both promise to convert our country into a socialist paradise.   That won't accomplish much, either.   Replacing one set of radicals with another isn't the answer.   And we know this because we saw how rightests and leftists not only screwed everything up, but slaughtered millions of people.  Hitler or Stalin, the net effect was the same.

There are other options, however.

Rather than pining for social change, we can change our own lives and change society from within.  We can refuse to accept shitty deals and refuse to be cowed by them.   We can take action in our own lives and get ahead, rather than settle for depression, debt, and a string of shiny trinkets (often parked in our driveway).  We can shout down these shitty deals instead of nodding our heads when a friend or neighbor recounts what a great deal they got on a lease, home equity loan, rewards card, or reverse mortgage.   Maybe we can't change the world, but we can change our little corner of it.

And that, in simple, is why I started this blog.  I didn't expect anyone to read it.  I wasn't trying to become the next "Sooze" Orman and line my pockets with sponsorship money, or be the next "Mr. Money Beard" or "Financial Kung Fu" and establish an online brand and become an "influencer."  Oh, by the way, if you "follow" a paid "influencer" you are a fucking moron.  Just saying.  Of course, it often is hard to tell if they are paid or not - but most times, not that hard.

No, rather, I was just trying to get my own head in the right place.  And over the years, I realized I was being lied to, by the television (which I turned off) and the media and society as a whole.  I was taught from birth that debt was great because it was deductible and how "everyone does it."   And I was encouraged to wallow in depression and not try to get ahead.   And almost too late, I finally figured it out - or mostly.   I still fall down the ladder sometimes, making mistakes, buying foolish things, not saving my money, not watching out for myself, and getting taken in by the marketers.   But I've made progress.

And in the process, I have tried to shout down these raw deals in this blog, but met with much resistance.  Resistance not from the payday lenders or the car dealers, but from their customers.  Back when I had comments enabled, I would receive flames from folks who defended co-signing loans or leasing new cars every three years.   And yes, they just co-signed a loan or leased a car, and didn't like the nagging idea that maybe they just made a huge financial mistake that they cannot possibly extricate themselves from.

That was an educational experience for me - and made me realize that I too, was defending bad financial habits over the years, because I didn't want to hear hard truths.   I spent a lot of money on cars, making arguments (to myself) that if I maintained them well, I could beat the depreciation curve and come out ahead - getting 300,000 miles out of a car and beating the system!   What I learned was, a car kept in pristine condition, after 15 years, is worth only a pittance more than one in average condition, which in turn, wasn't worth much more than one in poor condition.

I still spend too much on cars - like most Americans do.   We have two, but probably only need one.   It is a nice luxury, but really an unnecessary expense.   Even with "low miles" they depreciate every day.  In fact, I am probably spending $17 a day in depreciation on two vehicles right now (it declines every day, of course) which would be easily cut in half by having only one.   I kid myself that I can afford it.

But that is a personal choice I am free to make.  And I can change my situation by making different choices.   It would be nice if society would change to suit my tastes and to improve my financial situation - but it ain't likely to happen anytime soon.  And the changes offered by the current administration - tax cuts, rate cuts, regulatory cuts - are only "goosing" the economy a few more years to delay the next recession, which will be made worse by the staggering national debt and rampant inflation.   And yes, I can't change that.  I can vote, and I can make personal financial decisions to ameliorate risk over time.  But Bernie Sanders isn't going to bail me out - nor will any politician for that matter.

Pining for social change to solve personal problems is just... idiotic.

Fear - of Deciding

Fear is never an emotion to be trusted, particularly when it comes time to make decisions.

I feel sorry for depressed people.  I feel somewhat sorry for mentally ill people (who are often depressed, too) except that they often are violent and victimize the rest of us.   But in either case, it is a shitty way to go through life - being depressed all the time - as life is so damn short and there is so much of it to live.

Fear and anxiety consume most of us on on occasion or another.  Just realizing this is somewhat helpful.  For me, at least, I realize when I am being anxious - over nothing.   If you have anxieties over things you have no control over, then sit back and relax and think to yourself that there is nothing you can do about it anyway, and thus you might as well enjoy yourself.  If the feared thing happens, you can deal with it then.  Worrying about it now serves no useful purpose, other than to destroy the now.

On the other hand, if there is something you can do to address you anxiety, then do it.   If you can take some action in your life that would alleviate the anxiety, then it would make the anxiety go away.  And that, in effect, is what your brain is trying to get you to do.   When I get anxious about an investment, for example, it is my brain's way of saying, "maybe it is time to get out of this investment!"   And I usually get anxious about investments when they go way up in value in a short period of time.   Which is why I sold my Boeing stock (or most of it, anyway) last year, when it shot up in value and it seemed Boeing could do no wrong, what with an "order book" backlog and constant triumphs over Airbus in snagging new orders.

Turns out my brain was right.  My anxiety of the "could do no wrong" company was tempered by my subconscious saying, "hey, this is one plane crash away from tanking."   Boeing will recover, in the long-term, of course.  But not before a lot of hair is torn and clothing rendered.

Depression is the same deal - and in fact related to anxiety.   It helps, to realize if you are depressed, that depression is not a normal condition and often a transitory thing, and that if you are depressed now, you will likely feel better later on.   Of course, for hard-core clinical depression, this may not be of much help, but for the rest of us, who are just occasionally "blue" it is helpful.

Both depression and anxiety (which are in effect different aspects of the same thing) are related to fear.  People with severe anxiety tell me that during an anxiety attack they feel they are going to die.  Their chest tightens and their heart beat soars.  They feel they can't breathe.  They are deathly afraid of...... really nothing.   Fear can do that - create stasis in an individual, causing them to be depressed as they are too afraid to do anything.

I wrote before about learned helplessness and I think this related to this fear, depression, and anxiety.   If you think nothing you do in life is going to make a difference, and you are so cowed by the lack of response to your inputs into society, then all you can do is cower in the corner in fear.

And this bootstraps itself.  Once a person is convinced that nothing they do will affect their lives, they become fearful of making the wrong choices.  So they make no choices, which in effect, is choosing - to do nothing.   As a result, nothing in their lives changes, so they feel helpless, which in turn bootstraps the fear, depression, and anxiety.   And that in turn makes them fearful of making wrong choices.

Fear of mathematics is a classic example of this on a small scale.  I wrote before how Mark is afraid of "getting the wrong answer" as in school he was told there was nothing but right answers and wrong answers in math, and you'd better not get the wrong answer, buster, or it's all over for you!  As a result of this excellent "teaching" (another reason teachers need raises, eh?) is that an awful lot of people are afraid of math.   When confronted with a math problem, their mind shuts down in fear - fear of making a dreadful mistake.

So when I ask Mark how much something is, he says, "I don't know!"   And I say, "more than a dollar and less than a million?" and he says, "of course!"  to which I reply, "well, we've narrowed it down a bit, haven't we?"

With a few more questions, I can get him to admit that the price of the item was "about $80" which is close to the $79.98 it actually cost.   He knew what the item cost - in rough terms - but felt that when numbers were involved, there was an exact answer or all wrong answers.  And this fear was driven into him by shitty school teachers who felt the same way - you are right or wrong, and estimating is not allowed!

So people get anxious about math class for fear of making a mistake.   And this leads to depression and lack of trying, so their grades in math suck, which in turn bootstraps their fear of math.  In our high school, you could duck out of math class after 9th grade - and many do just that.   And that is sad, too.

What got me started on this, and how it is related to this blog, is that I see friends and acquaintances become fearful of making decisions, sometimes about the smallest things.  People who live in a house and use a milk-crate as an end table, not because they can't afford something nicer, but because they are afraid of buying the wrong furniture.   They have no faith in their own tastes and preferences to make a decision, so they decide not to decide, which itself is a decision - a decision to decorate with milk crates.

Or they live in fear of the restaurant menu.   So many choices!  What to order!   Even in a restaurant they have visited dozens of times, they cannot make up their mind.   Suppose they order the wrong thing and have a bad meal?  The horror!   Yet, so many people live in fear of a bad meal that they visit the same chain restaurant over and over again and order the same thing, out of fear.

Being around people like this can be annoying, to be sure.  It is a form of passive-aggression, which itself is a form of depression.   They cannot decide what to order in a crowded busy restaurant, even through they've been there several times and have had just as much time to peruse the menu as you have.  They tell the waitstaff to "come back later" - several times.   This pisses off the servers, whose time you are wasting, and the restaurateur, whose table you are hogging (a table he could be seating other people at).  It also pisses off your table-mates.

But annoying as it is, it is also sad.   I am not so much annoyed by such people as feel sorry for them.  When confronted by a menu dallier, I simply go ahead and order.   If they want to play indecision, fine for them - they can wait an hour for their dinner while we are walking out to the car.   Letting fearful people control situations like that is always a bad idea - once you let them vacillate, and act like you are vacillating too, nothing gets done and no decisions are made.  On the other hand, if you are bold and take the lead, they may think, "that sounds like a good idea!" and follow suit.   Like I said many times before, people crave normative cues, and if you act decisive, sometimes this gives others permission to make a decision as well.

Nevertheless, I feel sorry for anyone who spends their life living in fear - which is to say, depressed.   because life is over very quickly, and too late on your deathbed, you realize all the things you could have done or should have done.   And then, it is too late.

I noted before that at age 40 or so, I was not a big fan of seafood - an irrational fear stemming from my childhood, when I was forced to eat some Mrs. Shaw's Frozen Fishsticks that had thawed and re-frozen in the freezer.  They smelled like an aquarium.  It took me a long time to realize that not all seafood tasted like rancid fish sticks.    And I realized that I had squandered more than half my life not trying things, like some small child, and thus missing out on greater experiences.

Fear takes on a number of forms.  Fear of trying new things - or even allowing others to try them.  Mark's family, from Maine, was fond of saying, "you don't want to do that!" whenever someone proposed doing something new or unusual.   And maybe in snowbound Maine, where life never changes much, that is some sort of perverted survival skill.  For the rest of us, in a dynamic society where change is the norm, fear of change or trying new things can be determinedly or even deadly.

This is of course, not to say that being reckless is the answer.  I hate extremism.   Only that living in fear of even the smallest decisions in life is no way to go through life.  And maybe fighting this fear is one way of fighting depression and anxiety.   Having faith in what you think is right - even if it goes against societal norms - is sometimes the answer.  As I noted early on in this blog, it may be safer in the middle of the herd, but then again, in the middle of the herd, the grass is all trampled down and pooped upon.  Being on the leading edge of the herd is dangerous and scary, but the grass is much better.  Being on the trailing edge is worse - much poop, little grass, and most danger.

Making decision is indeed hard to do, but deciding not to decide is still making a choice.  And dilly-dallying around and delaying decisions by days, weeks, or years, often amounts to the same thing.  By the time you have decided, it is too late to take action.

I guess some people never get this - the fear overwhelms them.  They need medical help or something.  And like I said, I feel sorry for them.   I try not to fall into that trap.  I make decisions, good or bad, and sometimes horrible things happen - but not as horrible as I think they would turn out to be.    In retrospect, making bad decisions often was a better choice than making no decisions at all.   And the good decisions, well, they trumped all the bad decisions by a factor of ten to one.

Be fearless.   Because living in fear sucks.

Driving To Get A Slushie

Driving in your car to get a snack is idiotic.

A recent article online, about a young teenager who was unjustly pulled over in a traffic stop and then searched and held for 20 minutes, has generated outrage on the internet.   And indeed, I am outraged too!  The entire thing is completely ridiculous.  Imagine getting in your car to go get a slushie - it's just dumb.

That was the alleged pretext the teen used to borrow his mother's car.  He was going to drive to the store and get a slushie.  For those of you in foreign countries, a slushie is a disgusting American beverage made with chipped ice, high fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors, and artificial colors.  It takes about ten cents worth of ingredients to make, and they sell it for several dollars.

In terms of your physical health, it is a nightmare.  It is 100% sugar, or more precisely, high fructose corn syrup, which some have claimed can lead to obesity and/or affect your liver.  Plus, it is a cup of 200-300 empty calories.  Just say "No" to slushies - and all soft drinks, for that matter.  They are killing America.

But taking a side the health effects, there are the economic ones.  It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to get in your car to drive to the convenience store to buy a slushie - or any other snack, for that matter.  You're looking at burning $2 to $3 worth of gasoline to go buy a soft drink which costs $2 or so, for a total cost of $5 or more.   For someone living in a bad neighborhood in Louisville struggling to make money after high school, this is economic insanity.

As many people have pointed out, including even The Sooze Orman, $5 a week put into your 401k or IRA account over a working life of 45 years can amount to a couple hundred grand for your retirement.   Imagine if that was $5 a day - you'd have millions!  It is not the big expenses the bankrupt people, but the little tiny ones that, over time, add up to an awful lot of money.

I'm not picking on this particular young man - it's something that a lot of Americans do.  As I noted before, I have friends who will get in their car and drive twenty miles to get breakfast, one of the cheapest and easiest to make meals known to mankind.  It's something that we make everyday for about a dollar a serving, yet they will drive somewhere and spend $10 or more each on breakfast after burning through $5 worth of gasoline.  Things like bacon-and-eggs, pancakes, cereal, oatmeal with yogurt, take only minutes to make and cost pennies.  Yet folks will get up, get showered and dressed, drive 20 minutes, wait in line for 20 more, and then wait yet another 20 for someone else to make these simple meals for them - all at a staggering cost.   I mean, how lazy have we become as a nation?

Similarly, people working at minimum wage jobs will often leave work and then fight traffic for 15 minutes to drive to McDonald's to get lunch, and then spent 15 minutes driving back to work, arriving exhausted.  They wasted about $8 to $10 for a mediocre lunch and also spend two or three dollars - if not more - on gasoline for their car, plus the wear and tear on the vehicle.  At a minimum wage job, this means you work for an hour or two every day just to pay for your lunch. Economically, this makes no sense whatsoever.

Of course, the nominal excuse this young fellow used to borrow his mother's car - to go buy a slushie  - was probably just a story he told his mother in order to borrow the car.  More likely than not, he was going out to hang out with his friends and socialize, which is a normal thing for kids of his age.   And there's nothing wrong or illegal about that, unless you're a young black man living in a bad neighborhood, which case it means you're likely to be pulled over by the police.  This is a predictable outcome, sad as it is to say that.  You can rail against it, call it racist, or whatever.   The deal is, police will always be more suspicious of youth, of minorities, and anyone driving a flashy car in a bad neighborhood.   That will likely never change.

There is, also, the probability that hanging out with friends at the 7-11 can lead to bad things in life.  Hanging out with other young men, whether at the 7-11 or at the fraternity house, often leads to trouble, as they tend to egg each other on to do odious things.   There is just no future in being a drugstore cowboy, as I can attest to from experience.

Yes, in my white suburban hometown, we had kids who "hung out" in front of the drugstore or the convenience store, every evening, socializing with one another and looking for trouble - and often finding it.  We had a name for kids like that - losers.   Hanging out is a waste of your valuable time.  If you want to socialize, why not do it at home, like adults do?  It can keep you out of a lot of trouble - the cops can't pull you over in your bedroom.  Well, it's a lot less likely, anyway.

To this young man's credit, when pulled over, he complied with all of the instructions of the officer even if they seemed unreasonable.   While this "Terry-type" stop would be considered legal, arguably it was not justified.  But arguing with a policeman who has a gun is never a good idea.  Just comply with the officer's commands, and in twenty minutes, you'll be back on your way - assuming, of course, your trunk isn't full of drugs.  Worst case scenario, you get arrested, and a judge tosses the charges later on.

That doesn't mean it's right, only means you leave the incident alive.

In the meantime I'm going to set up a go-fund-me page to buy this young man a slushie machine so he doesn't have to leave home when he gets the urge.  We all want to see him succeed in life, and he doesn't need the hassle from the police, nor the expense of driving for slushies.

But, his Mom might want to consider moving to a better neighborhood.   This story illustrates how hard it is to get ahead in life, when you live in a crime-ridden poverty area.  Not only will you get hassled more by the cops, the odds are far greater your kids will get involved in criminality.  And we don't want to see that happen to this nice young man.

Cooperation versus Competition

Competition in the marketplace is trumped by only one other thing - cooperation.

Some financial fundamentalists like to cite Adam Smith and his "invisible hand" of the marketplace as what should be a guiding principle of our economy.  During the Reagan years, this took hold, as we were told that "marketplace solutions" to any problem were better than government ones.

And in an era where if you wanted to drive a semi truck with cargo or fly an airplane with passengers you first had to get permission from the government and then be assigned routes and told what to drive or fly, such thinking had merit.  The government was perhaps too much invested in running things back then.

But the "invisible hand" that finds the best price for the seller and lowest price for the buyer doesn't always work properly.   Psychology is the first hurdle - people act irrationally in the marketplace, spending more than they should and borrowing money on odious terms for silly things.   The second aspect is corruption or criminality.   People in the "free market" might engage in Ponzi schemes or other forms of rip-off instead of being rational, legal actors.

And this is where government comes in, or should - to provide a level playing field such that competition can flourish.   In every sport ever played, there are rules to the game and an umpire or referee to enforce them.  We may argue with the ref over a bad call, but no one argues that the game would be better played with no referees or no rules.    We need a framework to operate in, a frame of reference - standards to live by - in order to function in society.

And in order to create the things we want in life, our society requires the cooperation of thousands and millions of people.   Unless you are one of those particularly dense people who think Steve Jobs "invented" the iPhone and that it is made by elves in the Apple factory, you realize how this is so.   There are thousands of Engineers, not just at Apple, but in many supply companies, that spend their entire lives designing one small circuit or control feature to operate just one aspect of these devices.   The orchestration of all of these myriad people takes place without much in the way of direction, other than the incentive of money.

A chip supplier wants to land a contract with a cell-phone company.  They design a chip to the company's specifications, and it had better work as expected, or they won't get the contract.   The cell phone company, in turn, needs to make a product that people desire, hopefully won't catch fire, and will operate better than the competitor's.   It is an amazing ballet of interacting market actors, and it would not exist but for the structure and rules we have in place.

My job, for the last 30 years, has been to be one of those "cops" in the marketplace, or at least someone who works in the field of enforcement.  By prosecuting patent applications for clients, I have been able to help, in a small way, parse out who owns what in various technological fields.   Sometimes these things end up in court, most times they don't.   But even when they are not litigated, these Patents have value - often being sold or licensed to other companies for their recognized value.

If we didn't have this system in place - as weak and fallible as it is - there would be little incentive to innovate.  The innovator would have his ideas stolen by the low-cost producer, who would then drive the innovator out of business - something that happens all-too-often anyway.   The system is imperfect, yes.  It could stand improvement, too.   Abolishing it would be a nightmare.  And yet some "Libertarian" types think exactly this - that if we abolished all intellectual property rights, there would be more incentive to create.

Oh, and by the way, the Patent Office generates a profit for the U.S. Government, so please, no nonsense about "your tax dollars" going to waste.  Ditto for the Postal Service - until recently, anyway (and it would make a profit, if Congress would let it, and stop Saturday delivery).    We should be thankful these organizations are run as efficiently as they are - the most efficient in the world today (try sending a letter in other countries - you'll pay more than double what you do here, and you might as well just throw it in the trash, as it has only a 50/50 chance of arriving - and this includes those efficient Japanese!).

Don't get me wrong, competition is also necessary in the marketplace.   Imagine if the only cell phone company was Apple or if the only airliner company was Airbus.   Since they could charge whatever the market would bear, prices would skyrocket, under monopoly conditions.

Or consider if companies were allowed to dump waste wherever they wanted to - wherever was cheapest.   This was the case, not long ago in this country, where rivers were viewed as sewers to dump toxic chemicals into.   A Republican President, Richard Nixon, signed into law the bill creating the Environmental Protection Agency.    He knew back then, that left unfettered, companies will engage in a "race to the bottom" and not by choice, but in order to survive.

Today, there is much talk about abolishing regulations entirely or even abolishing entire agencies.  This mental illness of libertarianism has taken hold in this country - the idea that people should be allowed to do as they wish, even if it impacts the lives of others - and settle their disputes with handguns in some sort of wild-west shootout.

The problem with this model is that especially as our country gets more crowded, the rights of one person necessarily infringe on another's.   You can't dump toxins in the river without affecting the rights of people downstream, and expecting them to enforce their rights at the point of a gun isn't civilization, but anti-civilization.   You can't be a "sovereign citizen" by poaching on government land - land that belongs to the rest of us.  Far from being a "rugged individual" they end up being a social parasite, no better than the welfare recipients they rail against.

Sadly, this form of mental illness is sweeping the nation - an illness marked by weak thinking.  "If only" they say, "we could abolish X than everything would be hunky dory!" - where X is whatever whipping boy they are railing against at the time.   Simple answers, however, are rarely the right answers, particularly for complex problems.

I am all for better government - simpler and clearer and fairer regulations.   But merely abolishing things doesn't take much thought, particularly the thought as to the outcome.   Tearing down takes no talent.  Building things does.

Note:  This is an older post that I had left in DRAFT form for some reason.  I have several hundred of these!

Stroller Karma

People with enormous strollers have annoyed the rest of us for ages.   Well, the chickens have come home to roost!

The carnage was awful.  Adjectives were torn and abused.  Adverbs were bruised.  Metaphors were tortured.   Could something be done about it?   Not until Jeff Bezos sells the Washington Post!   In today's paper, this article about the "carnage" resulting from a wheel falling off a stroller:

The crashes were brutal. With no warning, the front wheel on the three-wheeled BOB jogging strollers fell off, causing the carriages to careen and even flip over. Adults shattered bones. They tore ligaments. Children smashed their teeth. They gashed their faces. One child bled from his ear canal.

In other words, people fell down, which happens all the time to people, even kids.  Nice article - not trying to influence our opinion in the first paragraph, or anything, right?  Even better, the photo accompanying the article showed the wrong stroller.   Journalistic integrity dies in the darkness, it is said.

The point of the article was another opportunity to bash Trump for gutting the Consumer Product Safety Commission.   This comes as a big surprise to most people, as we know that Republicans are all in favor of more regulations and consumer product safety.   Oh, wait.  They aren't.   So this is another one of those "Sun rises in the East" stories that the news likes to publish, with an ain't-it-awful spin, because someone's kid fell out of a stroller and they hired a personal injury attorney.

The reality is, of course - and not mentioned by the Post in the article - that the consumers were not attaching the wheels properly to these things, which you have to do, if you don't want the wheel to fall off.   Of course, the types of users of these things - brain-dead yuppie Moms - aren't the type to understand this, or much of anything else (for example, how to drive a car) so I guess the manufacturer should have anticipated that the wheels would not be attached properly.

This is not rocket science - it is how you put a wheel on a bicycle.  But then again, people are apparently fucking this up as well, which is why most consumer-grade bicycles these days don't have quick releases anymore.

You've seen the "Moms" who own these monster strollers.   They ram them into your ankles and then act like you're the problem for getting in their way.   "Mom coming through!  Make way!  Precious cargo!"   The problem is, they also use them as human shields - pushing the stroller out into traffic, daring you to run over their kid - or trying to shame you for taking the right-of-way when they are crossing against the light.

These new strollers are enormous, too - taking up all the space in the lobby of a restaurant, clogging hallways and elevators, and all for no reason.  It has gotten so bad that Disney now has size restrictions on strollers - you can no longer push your car through Disney world, loaded up with kids and supplies.

Many of these strollers are sold as "sport" models, so Mommy can go jogging with the kids.   The reality is, of course, no one is jogging with these - at least not very often.  The reality is, people want them as status symbols, as they cost a lot of money.   They are also a way of passive-aggressively asserting space in public places, again using the "Mommy" gambit to assert superiority over us mere mortals.  I have a right to park this small vehicle in any inconvenient place I want to, as I have given birth to a miracle!  Blocking fire exits - nice.

The problem is, of course, that even if Mommy is getting in shape jogging behind one of these things, her kids are not.   People routinely put children into strollers long after they become ambulatory.  Until age 5 or 6, even.  As a result, our children are getting fatter and flabbier, and getting used to being carried around more and more.   Instead of a tricycle or even a big-wheel, kids get a little electric car as soon as they can walk.  The message is clear - walking is for chumps.

Back in the 1980s, they came out with these folding "cane" strollers that folded up into almost nothing, and everyone thought they were annoying as well.  Why?  Again, because people were infantilizing their children.   When I was a kid, you were put in a "perambulator" as a baby only because you could not walk.   And even then, Mom didn't drag us everywhere, all the time.   Maybe we spent a few months in a stroller before we hit the toddler stage.  But once we were up on two feet, the stroller and baby-buggy went back up in the attic.   Today, these are accessories used well into grade school, because "the kids get tired and fussy and don't like to walk" - which becomes a foregone conclusion.

So it is a lot easier just to strap these kids into a contraption and push them around like you are moving a small appliance on a dolly.  The children are objects, not actually people.

But the worst part about it is the status thing.  Not only must you have one of these strollers today, in order to be a parent, you have to have the right one.   A decade ago, it was this particular stroller, which rocketed into fame as it supposedly survived a building collapse (without the wheel falling off, I guess).  Back then, we all thought it was scandalous that someone would spend $600 on a baby stroller.  Today, that is pretty much entry-level pricing.

There are, of course, some folks fighting this trend.  Believe it or not, I've seen people actually carrying their babies, which isn't all that hard to do, as if you don't get them so obese, they aren't all that heavy.   They even make little papoose packs to put the kids in, so Dad can walk around with a second beer-belly.   And when they get older - believe it or not - they become autonomous, like these new cars.  Just set them down and watch 'em go!   Tires out the little buggers, too - so they'll sleep better at night.

But of course, how are you going to carry all your stuff?   This is the troubling part and for the life of me, I don't know how my parents coped with me as a child, without a "baby bag" with bottled water, snacks, extra clothes, sun screen, a floppy hat, and so forth.   Oh, wait, they simply did without.

And yet, we all managed to survive.