Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Things to Look for When Buying a House

As a note: This is not intended to replace a good home inspection. Its intended to be something you can use when looking at the house for the first time. This will help you not fall in love with a house only to find out after great expense that it has huge issues.

Layout:
  • Be wary of staging (the furniture/decorations that are in the house when you see it). Often times smaller stuff will be used to make rooms look bigger than they are. Take a tape measure, and have a list of the sizes of the stuff you own just so you can visualize yourself.
  • Pay attention to ports, outlets, thermostats, windows etc. If putting your bed in the corner will cover the thermostat you will be annoyed, or if there are no outlets in the corner where you want to put the TV you will end up with cables all over the floor. etc.
  • Pay attention to what is behind or around the room you are looking at. If its over the garage you will hear the garage door opener and it will be loud. If its near the kitchen it will smell like food, and be hot in the summer when cooking.
  • Dual zone AC? This is important if its two story since the upstairs will be hot without it (heat rises.) Look for thermostats. Ideally there is 1 or more per level.
  • Rooms on the front of the house will hear street noise (cars going by, children playing, etc). Which rooms face the front?
  • Extensions. If a part of the house looks like it doesn't “belong”, i.e. the doorway in could have been a wall and the whole extra part could have not existed then be careful. Often times extensions can “corrupt” the construction of the original house. For example, they can screw up drainage, cause leaks in the seams with the roof, or generally just weaker construction. Make sure you look up who built the house, and who did the extension, and also verify that the work was permitted and done to code by contacting the city or county code division.
  • Converted garage? If there is a front room that seems like it is right where the garage should have been it might be a converted room. These are often drafty rooms that have really hard floors and can be strangely noisy due to the household equipment like water heaters or furnaces hidden in them.
  • House backs up to a business? You are going to hear cars coming and going as well as trucks loading and unloading.
  • West facing rooms will get lots of light at sunrise, bad for bedrooms, good for breakfast nooks. Rooms that face west will get lots of light at sunset, bad if a TV will be anywhere near this situation when you come home from work. North facing rooms will get no direct sunlight at all so they will be cold in winter, but South facing rooms will get full sun in summer which will make them hot.
Electrical:
  • Smoke detectors? They are required, but newer houses wire them in so that they all go off during a fire. This is ideal as it means less battery replacements and better alerting. If you test one do they all go off? Houses older than the 90’s will not have this feature.
  • GFP in bathrooms, near sinks? This is a sign of modern electrical wiring. Note that in some houses the ground fault system may also be in the circuit breaker panel. Look for breakers with a “reset” button on them.
  • 2 prong outlets? This is a sign of old wiring which can cause problems and make it hard to plug various things in.
  • Circuit breaker’s properly labeled? This will just save you time when you need to power things down and generally indicates that the previous owner maintained things.
  • Is the house wired for ceiling fans? If there are two switches and one does nothing while the other turns on a overhead light the house might already be wired for ceiling fans and one has just not been installed yet.
  • Check the breaker panel. Is there room for expansion? This can be good if you plan on adding anything over time (electric car port for example). Not a deal breaker but additions can get expensive.
  • If any wall outlets move when trying to plug anything in then they are improperly and could be a few hundred dollars to have an electrician fix. They might also pose a fire risk.
Appliances:
  • Be wary of older appliances. Even if they work now they will break and when they do they will be expensive. Appliances over 10 years will likely need replaced soon so this needs to be factored into the cost.
  • If there are high end appliances make sure to ask if they are staying. Home owners love to show a house with a nest thermostat, nice water softener, etc only to replace them with lower end models when they actually move out.
Siding:
  • Wood, Vinyl, Metal? These will last varying amounts of time before being replaced. Wood needs painted and maintained every 5-10 years. Vinyl doesn't need painted (and can't be) but lasts much longer, 30 years is common. Metal lasts even longer, and typically doesn't need painted either.
  • Rot, paint chipping, etc? This can be a sign of things happening behind the siding.

Roofing:
  • If you can see tar under shingles then a repair has been made. If done badly these can leak and cause issues.
  • If singles are bowed, pulled up, falling off, etc then this is not good either. This may be a sign that the roof will need replaced right away which can be expensive.
  • If you see small round sections on the shingles this could be bails under the shingle popping out. This can indicate leaking and rotting in the rafters which is bad and expensive to fix.
  • Look around the neighborhood. Most houses will have been built about the same time and if some appear to have newer roofs then its a sign that the house you are looking at might need replacing soon as well.
  • Check the gutters. Are they clean? If not it might be a sign of improper maintenance from the current owner.
Water:
  • Low pressure at a sink, or shower? Check all the sinks.
  • Try filling sinks by putting a couple of inches of water in them and then letting them drain. If they don’t drain quickly its a sign of blockages that can range in complexity to fix. Also once drained they should be able to drain as fast as the water comes in. If not they might have a blockage.
  • Hot water tank, capacity, fill rate? Small tanks or low BTU means that you will run out of hot water frequently. This is annoying.
  • Soft water? Take a small bottle, fill it with 1-2 cups of water and then put 4 drops of dish soap in it. Shake 4-5 times. If the soap foams up a few inches then the water softener is working. If it doesn’t foam up much (like less than 1”) then the softener could be failing or you will need to buy a softener. This can be a few hundred dollars and often is overlooked by home inspectors.
  • Alternatively to the water softener, check to see if the house has a whole house filter installed. Ask the current owner how often it needs replaced and check how much the replacement costs are. They can add up quite fast.
  • City water or Well? Check the price for city water, its usually more expensive than you expect. For wells, ensure that there is a bladder (big tank) which is what is used to hold pressure. In either case check that the sinks are not pushing air out anywhere.. This means that there is a leak somewhere which will be expensive to fix.
  • Also, if the house has well water check to see how fast the water is replenished. Run a sink until the well turns on (usually indicated by a large click as the relay changes state) then turn off the sink and see how long before your hear another click. The longer it takes the slower the tank file. This can also be acomplished by asking the home owner for well GPM. Low numbers (1-2 GPM mean you might run low on water with company over)
  • See if you can find out what type of pipes where used to supply water to the house. Post 1980 should be safe, but before that they may have used pipes with lead in them. Replacing these can be very expensive so its best to know, and if needed you can take a water sample to a testing facility to test for lead contamination. 
  • Sewer pipes can be the same. Older houses can have cast iron piping that will need to be replaced. This can be very expensive. Its also possible for a house to have clay pipes which can be destroyed by trees nearby the pipes. For an older house it can be worth getting the sewer lines scoped to check for roots.
  • Exterior spigots, do they drip at all? If so that can freeze and cause major issues.
  • If the house has a septic system then make sure you check out the leach field. If its wet or swampy and the weather can not be the source the run away. This can be tens of thousands of dollars to fix.
  • If the house has a thermostatic valve in the shower that keeps the temperature constant then turn it on, let it get to a set temperature, then flush the toilet to see if the temperature changes wildly. If so the value might not be working fully and these can be several hundred dollars to fix.
  • Check the drain pans under the water heater, AC units, etc. If there is water leaking this can get expensive to repair. 

Monday, June 26, 2017

How to Use Google More Effectively

This also works for cool other things. I remember the days when I could pirate most music simply by typing

filetype:mp3 [song name]

Found a lot of textbooks with

filetype:pdf [the ISBN of the book I wanted]

also

related:[site name]

will give you results for sites related to the site you input, whatever that means.

info:[site name]

will give you info about that website

cache:[site name]

will give you google's cached version of the site.

Just some helpful tips.


Edit: brackets irrelevant, I'm just saying that's stuff you fill in with the thing you're trying to search for.


2nd Edit: Since this seems to have been well received, here's some further obscure search tuning


Combine searches (seriously why not just do two separate searches)

put "OR" between each search query. For example,

MarchAgainstTrump OR The_Donald

Search social media

put @ in front of a word to search social media. For example:

@twitter comedians that won't make me cry

Search hashtags

Put # in front of a word. For example:

#UselessTalents

Search for wildcards or unknown words

Put a * in your word or phrase where you want to leave a placeholder. For example:

What am I doing with my *

Search for a price

Put $ in front of a number. For example:

esoteric shirts to make me look cool $10

Search within a range of numbers

Put .. between two numbers. For example:

used Xbox $200..$400

Just a few small things to improve your life...

SOURCE

Thursday, April 27, 2017

The Truth About Skin Moisturizer

Firstly, be aware that "moisturizer" is a marketing term with no scientific or clinical definition. For all intents and purposes, ordinary old tap water, absorbed into the skin via a warm bath, relaxing sauna or cooling swim, is a "moisturizer". That's why your skin feels so nice and soft after those activities ... at least for a while.

Secondly, you must understand that the "moisturizer" branch of the cosmetics industry is a high-stakes, billion dollar game played by a thousand vicious competitors who are all forever seeking an edge in the marketplace, and therefore consumer deception is a common, even universal practice. Thirdly, be advised that the vast majority of their research and development expenditures are focused on marketing and persuasion - certainly not on something as peripheral to their bottom line as producing a better formulation, or anything. In fact, most manufacturers devote far more time, money and energy to designing and producing an attractive container and label, than they ever do on designing, producing or improving their actual product.

As to your actual question:

Be they the $60-for-a-tablespoon-in-a-crystal-pot variety, the ubiquitous, sink-side blue jar variety, or your drugstore-brand "family size" pump bottle of white goo, all commercial "moisturizers" work in exactly the same way. They all provide a bit of water that penetrates cell walls membranes to rehydrate and plump up the outermost few layers of dead skin cells that form your epidermis. Typically, their water content is around 65%. In addition, they all contain (@~25%) some sort of grease, wax or oil to trap that water inside, so it isn't just immediately evaporated away again by your excessive body heat ... you sultry thing, you.

In that regard, the only advantage all those hundreds of modern "moisturizers" have over your grandmother's go-to for dry skin - petrolatum, aka Vaseline - is that makers have gotten more sophisticated at finding different formulations and combinations of grease, oil and/or wax that don't feel quite as slippery or greasy to the touch, once the cells have absorbed all they can, and the leftovers remain on the surface of your skin.

This is the reason why, for example, Johnson's Baby Oil encourages you to slop on their product immediately after you shower: to seal in that tap water you've just absorbed (which needs to be done within 5 minutes of showering, or it's gone), and to ensure that any excess oil you might apply will rub off on your towel and/or your fresh clothes, and thus appear to have been successfully "absorbed" by your skin. (What - did you think there was some sort of magic involved? JBO is merely a fine mineral oil with some scent added; buy a store brand and save some money.)

Some expensive products meant for the delicate skin of the face contain a proprietary dermal irritant like CEF. Such products basically inflame the dermis, which causes its cells to temporarily inflate by taking up plasma, which in turn reduces the appearance of facial wrinkles for a few hours (rather like blowing up a withered, half-deflated balloon). But eventually the irritant is neutralized by the body's defenses, the dermal irritation subsides and its cells deflate themselves, allowing wrinkles to re-emerge - thus setting up a new and lucrative cycle of product consumption.

There are many other formulations. Some makers add a preservative like paraben to extend shelf life. Some add a humectant to absorb and trap additional water for a longer-lasting experience. Some add collagen, which is nothing more than un-absorbable connective tissue, typically sourced from that rubbery skin inside eggshells; you might as well rub yourself with actual eggshells, for all the moisturizing benefits topical collagen will provide. Same goes for added keratin, which is mostly sourced from cattle horns and hooves acquired from slaughterhouses. I know: eww, right?

Some products increase their appeal by including pleasant odourants, like rosewater (St. Ives) or menthol (Noxema). Some add vitamins, in the hope they will appear to consumers as being able to "nourish" skin (hint: they can't).

Both useful and useless additions to moisturizers come and go in phases. At one time, sheep lanolin was popular; but it's stinky, and was largely abandoned when less pungent plant-based greases were developed. Chlorophyll was once a widespread addition, though nobody ever got around to explaining its benefits, or the supposed parallels between plant and skin chemistry. A few years ago, PABA was all the rage as a UV-blocking additive, until someone pointed out that the living tissue of the dermis was actually incapable of absorbing topical PABA. In fact, the only way to get it into dermal cells where it could do some good was to drink the damn stuff, eight hours before exposing oneself to the sun. Vitamin E is/was a popular addition, at least until clinical studies indicated it actually had no better moisturizing effect than any other fine, plant-based oil. And the most recent additive fad seems to be hemp oil, Harrelson help us.

BTW, dry skin isn't actually a health issue, unless it's so profound that cracks appear in the epidermis, exposing the living dermis to the outside world and all its microscopic creepy-crawlies. It's really more of a comfort and aesthetic issue. Still, if severe enough, it can interfere with quality of life, and it makes some people quite miserable.

I provide a couple of citations, below. There's a lot of good info out there, but I would recommend that readers stick to those sites offered by legitimate medical and research facilities, universities with teaching hospitals, and so on. Don't rely on general interest sites or any site offering to sell you product.

Even worse for providing dubious information and specious assertions are the commercial web pages of the retail cosmetics industry. If the link has a little "registered" symbol in its name, just walk on by. It is revealing that the first 500 or so links provided by any Google search for "moisturizers" consist almost entirely of cosmetic manufacturers' websites, rather than to legitimate clinical information. It's the same reason why the first thing one encounters upon entering a department store, is the makeup counter. (Hint: $)

Here, to start readers off, are a couple of authentic medical citations regarding moisturizers:

Mayo Clinic: Getting the Most out of Your Moisturizer

Harvard Medical School: Moisturizers: Do They Work?

University of Tennessee Medical Centre: The Importance of Moisturizing

The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics: Winter Dry Skin

SOURCE

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Blueprint for Learning SEO and Online Marketing

I teach people (online store owners) marketing skills. Here's the curriculum I recommend starting with. The blessed thing about marketing is that a) the actual skill curve is fairly shallow, as long as you can think with data and write fairly well and b) everything you need to surmount said skill curve is available online, often from the platform publishers themselves.

Moz - a company that publishes a package of niche tools for fetching various data about site marketing performance - publishes the excellent, excellent Beginner's Guide to SEO.

Google offers free, online certification programs in Google Adwords, their ad platform, that will get you credentials you can put on your LinkedIn profile, as well as a slightly less intense one in Google Analytics. You'll ideally want both certifications, since those two applications play so closely together. 

Similarly, getting certs in Social PPC (pay-per-click) will only make your resume stronger. Facebook offers Facebook Blueprint, fairly similar to the Adwords certification course, but for social ads. 

Altogether, these will give you the conceptual background you need to be able to understand how on-site content and off-site marketing contribute to organic search, how to run ads on various platforms to stimulate paid traffic, and Analytics will (kinda) help you understand how those things fit together into your marketing mix and where you're failing with each of them.

Creative Suite you can master on your own with a million Youtube videos. Focus on Illustrator, probably. This isn't critical, but sometimes when you're making a social ad or creating a content page, you need a graphic on the fly. You'll be a way stronger candidate if you don't have to wait on the art department to make it.

Learn the shit out of Excel. Real digital marketers are all about data-informed decisions. Excel allows you to take the data from several programs and use it to highlight trends. By Excel, I really mean learn the "advanced" Excel skills like PivotTables, =VLOOKUP, =LEFT/=RIGHT, formulas (others include =SUM, =AVERAGE, =CONCATENATE), Find/Replace, Text-to-Columns, and autofilling.

Optional bonus points: a light background in front-end dev languages like HTML/CSS or JavaScript can help you when you're creating content pages and need to understand why something's not rendering correctly. It also lets you talk to the dev monkeys a little bit whenever your boss wants you to do something drastic in a client's CMS. 

Learn a little SQL - it can help you dig in and get the reporting you need out of a client's CMS when it's not data you can get from Analytics. Finally, learn to work with a few CMSes themselves - the most popular one by a longshot is Wordpress.

So here's what you do with all of that: 

think of a business idea. 
  • Start a free Wordpress site for it
  • Build content pages and customize the design - that demonstrates your writing ability and gets you a little grease with CSS
  • Launch the site
  • Use SEMRush to learn that you didn't make the content pages keyword-rich enough
  • Do some keyword research, then rewrite them
  • Specify meta titles/descriptions for every page
  • Verify the site with Google Search Console
  • install Google Analytics and Adwords tracking code
  • Spend $25 to get $75 of free Adwords credits
  • Do something similar with Facebook
  • Divide those budgets in half
  • Set up campaigns in each ad platform to target what/who you think you should target
  • Observe the results and figure out what you did wrong
  • Use the other half of your budget to improve those results
  • Make notes about what changed
  • Finally, export all this data into Excel and try to use some PivotTables to demonstrate how this data changed over time
That's your practice course.

Monday, April 10, 2017

Susan Komen, the Pink Ribbon, and Breast Cancer

As someone with tatas, and a mother-in-law with Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer, I figured I’d chime in.

Breast cancer is FAR from an easy, curable disease. We hear that if you get regular mammogram screenings, and it’s caught early, you’re practically in the clear. These are the stories Susan G Komen shares - the “For the Cure”, the Pink Walks, the I’m a survivor because of Susan crowd. There’s this guise of breast cancer being an easy-to-cure disease because of so many success stories… pushed by Susan Komen. How many Stage 1 and Stage 2 people do you hear of dying from breast cancer? You don’t. Instead, you hear that they fought it, got heavy chemo, and walked away a year later back to their lives.

Something that you don’t hear is this: “20% to 40% of all breast cancers will metastasize at some point.” Resource.

We’re told that 30% of all breast cancer patients will become metastatic in the future, spreading to other organs or areas and killing you. And metastatic breast cancer is the ONLY cancer of it’s kind that is not curable. There is no chemo for it, there is no treatment plan, there is no funding from Susan G Komen for it.

Take a few quick moments to look at what those pink ribbons pay for. The money you donate for those ribbons, in your checkout line, in the coin drop at the gas station, and walking in a pink shirt does not go to metastatic breast cancer research. Heck, it doesn’t even go to breast cancer research. It goes to awareness. You’re buying a pink ribbon so that they can make more pink ribbons, and advertise, and run marketing campaigns to sell more ribbons.

Remember when Susan G Komen sponsored the KFC buckets? Or the pink labels on yogurt containers? These foods contain chemicals that cause the cancers they’re supposedly trying to cure. Here’s a good article: Pink Ribbon Facade.

For even more of Susan’s brilliant pink washing campaigns over the years, which our donations and pink pride have paid for, check out this article.

There is a huge outcry from the metastatic breast cancer crowd, and once you’re in it, it’s hard to see the color pink as anything but an effing stain on real cancer research. It’s truly disgusting to see how many people are dying from a disease that the world thinks is curable, low-risk, and not nearly as important as lung and brain cancer.
“Sixty percent of the 2,000 people surveyed knew little to nothing about MBC while 72 percent believed advanced breast cancer was curable as long as it was diagnosed early.” Resource
Here’s something I learned very early on after my MILs diagnosis - all of the studies, articles, blogs, and support groups created by women with metastasized breast cancer are dead. There is no survival rate. If you make it to 3 years alive, you’d literally outlived everyone in your support group, or who was diagnosed around the time you were.

When my MIL started her journey, she got into a lot of private Facebook groups with MBC patients, with a few thousand members. This was a little over 2 years ago, and recently, she told me that she and only one other lady are still alive from that first year.

Think of all those cured patients that Komen advertises. You’d better believe that they didn’t do a follow up on the 30% that ended up dying within the following 10 years.

And here’s one more article, though old but just as appropriate, about misdiagnosis. The statistics are so off about breast cancer survival rates because of how MBC spreads. My mother in law had no lumps in her breast, but a sore arm that kept her up at night. Because of her crap insurance, an X-ray to see what the cause was was too expensive and she left it for over a year until she just stopped sleeping entirely. Eventually, after a lot of homeopathic remedies, manages, oils, and chiropractor appointments, her chiro Dr. ordered an X ray for her and offered to pay for it out of his own pocket.

She got the X ray, and that same afternoon, saw that cancer had eaten away at her humerus to the point that if she had fallen asleep, and rolled over, it would’ve broken. And after more tests, and weeks of scans, MRIs, etc that they are now painfully in debt from, they found that it was caused by breast cancer that spread from her breastbone to both sides of her pelvis and to her arm. And now, years later, she’s living with cancer. There isn’t a cure, and though she's now a cyborg with a metal humerus, we’re literally just waiting for it to spread somewhere else.

And in that spreading is where many people, over many decades, have come back after winning their fight against breast cancer, only to die from lung cancer, bone cancer, brain cancer (which is actually their breast cancer metastasized). The lack of research, and the misdiagnosis is truly disgusting.

SOURCE

Monday, April 3, 2017

Choosing and Maintaining Bath Towels

Here's a little towel lesson,

So, like twenty/thirty years ago, a bunch of USA brand, union-made textile companies closed up their American plants and have since been hopping all over Asia chasing the best price. Meanwhile, American consumers have gotten used to fast fashion, where even Calvin Klein can be purchased at Herbergers for 90% off. It didn't bode well for the "linens" industry.

Sheets are doing alright right now; having quality bedding is "in" at the moment, and there were always enough people wanting nice bedding for a few companies to hang in there. 

But towels? Why do you need nice towels for the five minutes it takes to dry off your naked body once a day? 

So, towel companies fall in and out of favor, change names, are appropriated by brands like Martha Stewart Home, move locations to Sri Lanka (then Malaysia less than a year later) and are, essentially, extremely difficult to identify as Buy It For Life (BIFL).

So, look for white, 100% cotton towels big enough to completely wrap around yourself. Look for stitching at the hem ends that's clean, backstitched well and with no exposed or nearly exposed edges to rub free and fray. 

Edit: it should go without saying, but just in case, inspect the selvage edge of the towels for nicks, frays or tears, too. /Edit Do this and the basics for BIFL are nearly met!

To keep your towels BIFL, you have to take care of them. You don't have to wash your towels as often as you're washing your towels. You're dabbing clean water off a clean body. Washing them after every, or every other, or every third use is ridiculous. 

When you wash them, wash them as hot as your washer will go, without any fabric softener EVER, but maybe occasionally a vinegar rinse, with the tiniest bit of laundry detergent and if you can, set the washer to do an extra rinse. 

You may occasionally need to soak your towels in a high concentrate bleach solution, but only to get them white again. Bleach will eat away at your towels eventually. Oh! White towels because of the heat of the wash will start to fade any color you chose, and because it's easy to keep white.

Of course, you don't want them smelling musty, but that's a drying problem, not a washing one. As in, they should be completely dry within a few hours of getting wet. So get them dry in between showers. Each person having two to rotate, or tossing them outside or in the dryer for a few minutes. 

Something to ensure they're dry before it's next shower. There is so much fabric in a towel, any soap or softener remaining in it after washing will affect its absorbency, so don't overdo it. 

Dry them completely before folding and putting them away. Dryers are one of the worst things you can do to your textiles, so if you have the ability to sun dry them, that's preferable, even if the dryer gets them mostly dry and you Gerry-rig something on your apartment balcony for the last hour or so. 

If you can't sun dry them at all, go ahead and kill it in the machine. Better to have a clean towel that will get damaged a little faster than a dirty musty towel that lingers in your home for forever.

Oh, and if you're one of those cretins who use a bath towel to dry off your bath or shower, STOP IT! 

The bath and shower are not clean, unless you are as anal in your housekeeping as I am in my laundry. So, that means you're cleaning your towel after every bath (or you're super-grotty), wearing down its uses. Get a squeegee, for crying out loud! Or a couple of chamois or shop towels made to absorb scads of water and get washed frequently.

And if you dye your hair or do other unspeakable things with towels, get a few specifically for that purpose and in a different color to tell the difference. Obviously, these would not be BIFL, but I think you'd be surprised how long they'll last.

For life-messes: body fluids, juice, etc., you can keep old, retired towels for those uses. All my kitchen towels are my husband pre-me bath towels I cut in half and hemmed against fraying. Only the largest and grossest messes do we need a bath-towel-assist, and then I wash and bleach the crap outta it.

For super-fun laundry-time getting your whites their whitest, try a bluing solution. It's a rinse you add to your laundry that tints the water blue. Blue whites look whiter than yellow whites (which is why so many laundry detergents have a blue dye). 

So if you have iron in your water even with bleach, your whites are never WHITE, try a blue rinse and see how that does. CAUTION: too much will be obviously blue, so experiment first!

Wednesday, March 1, 2017

How to Start New (and Positive) Habit

In order to answer the question, "How do you effectively start a habit?" — first, we must understand what a habit is.

A habit is task that has become so consistently ingrained that it begins to be carried out autonomously—by the unconscious mind—such as drinking a cup of morning coffee every day.

Why are habits important for accomplishing long term goals?

Because the moment you form a habit, it signifies that you have now transcended out the window pane that normally accompanies taking up a new task.

When something becomes ingrained as a habit, it becomes much less unpleasant to carry out that task. It just becomes natural.

The reason it is so difficult to turn a productive undertaking into a consistent practice is because it is often painful to carry out productive task. If the task is drinking coffee, or sleeping every night, it is easy to turn those tasks into habits because they are pleasurable. However, if the task is painful, like writing and editing articles, getting up and going to the gym, setting aside to time to do affirmations, then it is far more difficult to become consistent.

We are hardwired to avoid pain. Pain is helpful. It instructs us what to avoid so we don’t die, and our species can continue to reproduce.

The ease at which we can establish a habit, is directly proportional to how quickly we receive our pleasure or reward, and inversely proportional to how much pain or effort it takes to get there.

99% of the things you do are habits. The way you think is a habit. The way you present yourself to other people is a habit. Whether you start books and never finish them. They are all products of the thoughts you habitually tell yourself and the actions that you repeatedly carry out. Whatever habit you have, in some way your mind believes it is serving you.

If your lazy, perhaps it frees you up from trying and failing. If you have a victim mentality, perhaps it liberates you from personal responsibility.

In essence, you are automatic creature. However, fortunately, habits can be changed.

That is where self awareness comes into play. Self awareness is the one variable in human existence, which separates us from all other species and allows us to accomplish amazing things. In our unique ability to be aware of our habits, we have the opportunity to re-engineer them and establish new ones that serve us.

For a short period of time, we can choose to use our free will (or DISCIPLINE), in the face of resistance to push past the initial window of pain, make something become natural/expected, and thus, establish a new pattern.

Now there is a bunch of conflicting literature on how long it takes to do that. I have heard 21 days. 40 days. etc.

In my opinion, that’s all nonsense and propaganda. The amount of time it takes varies from person to person. There is only one way to tell if you established a habit.

I have used this measuring stick time and time again, to determine whether I have finally established a new pattern in my life.

The answer is two-fold:

A) when it task becomes noticeably less painful to complete
B) when you go to bed without doing it, it actually feels like your missing something

When you meet these to criteria, then you know it is ingrained.

I hope this helps to establish habits that will serve you and your long term goals. By becoming aware of your patterns and re-engineering them so that they meet this criteria, you will be surprised at what you accomplished.

The Truth About the US Military Budget

Alright, late to this party, so I hope it doesn't get buried.

Full disclosure: as an officer in the military, I see a lot more of the organizational and budgetary side of things than most, so I wanted to share my two cents on military spending and let you decide on whether we actually spend too much.

As OP mentioned, there's a lot of metrics people use on US budgeting. Let me explore some of these issues in detail and hopefully bust a few myths, give you a historical background, and tell you what we currently peg spending on.

Military Spending - And Its Myths

Yes, the US spends $600 billion dollars on defense. And yes, that's more than the next 7-8 countries combined (assuming China's budget is honest, which we believe is not). And yes, the US spends about 36% of the worlds total spending on military.

But, as OP also mentioned, as a function of GDP, the US is at 3.3% - lower than some nations (like Russia) and a far cry from the 5.6% the US spent in 1988 near the tail end of the Cold War. Source: World Bank.

In the post WW2 world, this is at an all time low per the CFR with it having peaked at 16% around the time of the Korean War.

So which metric is better to use?

Well the issue with looking at nominal spending is that nominal spending doesn't correct for cost of living.

Take into consideration what the military actually spends its money on. You can use Table 5.1 of the GPO or this nifty Official DOD Budget Request 2017 (yes, all this stuff is public) to see the pretty breakdowns.

Per the GPO, for 2013:
  • Personnel Wages - 25%
  • Operations and Maintenance - 43%
  • Procurement - 16%
  • R&D - 10%
  • Atomic Energy Defense Activities - 3%
  • Other - 3%
So right off the bat, we need to kill the myth that buying new equipment costs us the most money. It simply doesn't.

Why did I bring up cost of living? Let's take a look at personnel wages and benefits shall we. Per the DOD budget request, this chart shows that:
  • $130 billion was requested just for military personnel wages for the 2.1 million active + reserve
  • A total of $177.9 billion was requested on just military personnel wages + benefits
  • Another $72.9 billion was requested for civilian pay and benefits for the 760,000 civilian FTEs in the DOD
  • A full $250.8 billion or 48% of the DOD base budget is allocated to JUST pay and benefits
What does this mean? Consider that a Chinese soldier is paid roughly a tenth of the wages of a US soldier. So sure, if we went to a Chinese pay scale, we could save $120 billion overnight. But that's neither feasible, wise, nor is it a good indicator of relative strength with China.

This is further exacerbated by the fact that both China and Russia have huge domestic arms industries producing goods at domestic prices. Furthermore, the world arms industry isn't an open market - the US doesn't compete with China or Russia directly as nations only buy from other nations they trust. The US buys domestic or buys from close allies like Belgium and Germany, who have comparable costs of production. End result? The US often pays 2-4x as much for a fighter jet than the Russian equivalent because US wages, US suppliers, and US maintainers all cost US prices, not Russian prices.

As a side note, this also irks me about the whole "arms trade" statistic and how the US is the number one exporter. Sure, by dollar amounts, we are - but our goods are magnitudes more expensive. The fact that Russia and China - producing goods at Russian and Chinese prices - are even close, should tell you who is exporting more physical quantity of goods, but I digress.

In sum, using nominal spending gives you eye popping numbers, but it tells you little about relative strength between nations. If anything, it should tell you how little Europe actually spends on defense (especially in comparison to Russian strength), and that China is a lot closer to the US than most people realize.

Waste Exists - But It's a Complicated Issue

One of the top issues everyone talks about is waste. Let me first bust one budgetary myth though: use it or lose it is not a DOD only thing. It exists in all federal agencies (e.g. NASA, NOAA, etc.) because the budget is done annually. Money not used one year isn't seen again.

It DOES NOT mean you need to spend it to get it again next year - the budget request is done annually and things change based on need and what not. Admittedly though, it does make it harder to justify getting budgeting if you don't show need, so alas, the system is very flawed. Short of a congressional change to how budgeting is done though, we're in a tough spot.

Does waste in the military exist? Absolutely. Thankfully, people are noticing and paying attention - there has been a considerable shift in mindset in the past few years towards saving money. Of course this has to be balanced: you don't want to skimp on maintenance or training, as lives are on the line when things go wrong.

In some areas, waste is also balanced by operational necessity. For instance, aircraft routinely dump fuel. In carrier aviation, we dump fuel because we have max landing limits - too heavy, and we can snap the arresting gear on the carrier or permanently damage our plane. Thus, if we arrive at the boat too heavy, the choice might be to dump thousands of pounds of fuel... or jettison even more expensive bombs. To the layman, it seems like we're burning fuel for no reason - but there's a rhyme and reason for it no matter how much it sucks. (And for the environmentalists, jet fuel is kerosene based - it's nothing like gasoline)

Inefficient Spending Often Comes from Political Sources

One of the big issues with the annual budgeting is that there is little long term continuity in a field that necessitates long term planning. For instance, the new class of aircraft carrier has been in the works for over a decade - and was planned out two decades ago. And yet, funding for it has oscillated year by year.

I'll give you an example of how political grandstanding has royally fucked military personnel and arguably cost us more money in the long run: sequestration.

During sequestration, a stop was put on training new replacement pilots for the fleet. Hundreds of replacement pilots were put on hold for a year. Well, since they just got their wings in training (costing roughly $1-2 million to train, each), you don't want to cut them from the military, but you still need to pay them.

But here's where the long term effects come in: every pilot in the Navy serves a 3 year operational tour before going back to become an instructor of some sort for 3 years. Whenever a pilot in the fleet is done with his first 3 years, a new replacement pilot comes in to take his place. Suddenly, the fleet had a shortage of pilots, and too many instructor pilots with no one to teach. And once pilots are done with their commitments, a lot get out to pursue other interests in the civilian world. Talk about a waste of human resources.

But this balloons further: a few years later, that shortage of pilots means fewer pilots available to be instructors. Fewer instructors mean fewer replacement pilots. Surely you can balance out how many pilots you bring in right? But ROTC and the Academy projects how many graduates they need from 4 years ago: suddenly, you have too many pilots-to-be and not enough instructors, and the fleet may need more pilots.

I could go into more detail, but the point is this: seemingly small disruptions have BIG ballooning effects on how the military operates.

Likewise, a lot of 'inefficiency' comes from conscious decisions to save money, believe it or not. Take for instance, the fact that much of US equipment is old. In the 90s, with the Cold War drawdown, we stopped a lot of acquisitions programs. Equipment in the military is designed to typically operate in 30 year lifecycles - the notable exceptions are things like capital ships (aircraft carriers).

However, in the 90s, a lot of early to mid Cold War stuff was up for retirement - and instead of replacing them, their lives were extended.

This does, however, have an unintended effect on Operations and Maintenance - the US now has very old equipment to maintain. Some of our equipment is from the 1950s. I'm not even exaggerating - we have over 370 KC-135's, last built in 1965(!). For a long time - particularly with the Cold War drawdown - we put off replacing old equipment, but suddenly with a resurgent China and Russia, we've stretched a lot of these airframes lives out while in the late 2000's we finally sought replacements in the form of the KC-46.

All across the board you can see this happen. The F-22 was to replace the F-15 in the 90s/2000s, but was cut short and now the F-15 has had increasing costs rise to keep an airframe from the 70s and 80s flying. The A-10 was last built in 1984 - it was due for retirement years ago, but Congressmen (like McCain) have kept it alive long past their expiration date.

I hope this all gives a little insight into how a lot of spending issues do exist in the military, but the situation is far more complicated than a simple comparison of nominal spending with other nations, and how waste and inefficiency are complex issues within themselves - sometimes by design, sometimes by outside meddling.

Now, let me explain the historical precedence of US military spending and why our spending is a conscious decision, not one haphazardly done.

The Modern History of Defense Spending

Believe it or not, in the wake of World War II, the US had a major debate over isolationism. There was a major drawdown in the military, with a lot of equipment mothballed or scrapped.

Stalin's actions in Eastern Europe and in Berlin (such as the Berline blockade) and China falling to the communists were all major areas of concern. The straw that broke the camel's back, however, was the Korean War: outright naked aggression by a communist state against another state in the post-WW2 world was just too much. The US used the newly created UN (which the USSR at the time was boycotting) to form a coalition of nations to fight North Korea. In the post-WW2 world, the UN was being tested: would it be toothless like the League of Nations, or would nations actually stand up and prevent wars of conquest?

This led to a major revitalization of the US military which as you can see saw its post-WW2 spike in spending go up to 16% of GDP in the 1950s.

The necessity of a powerful military in the post-WW2 order was predicted by many. Notably, General Marshall, in his Biennial Reports as Chief of Staff of the Army, concluded before WW2 even ended that:
  • Oceans were no longer enough to protect the US heartland
  • Future defenses necessitated a strong forward deployed presence in the world
  • Technological superiority would have to exist as post-conflict mobilization and innovation cost a lot of lives
A particularly poignant passage is when he mentions that, if not for British and Soviet lives holding the line, as well as major blunders by the enemy, the US would have suffered a lot lot more. And that, had the Axis won, interviews with Goring and other Nazi leadership showed that by 1947, the East Coast of the US would have been subject to attacks by long range Nazi weapons.

Even Ike, in his famed 'military industrial complex' speech - which gets taken out of context - actually prefaced that line with his passage:
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.
Does all of that sound familiar? Because it should: the US military establishment has been purposefully designed to meet the challenges that General Marshall, Eisenhower, and other top military and political leaders have realized.

We are interested in global and full-spectrum warfare. A vital part of our defense strategy, in the world of long range missiles, supersonic jets, and precision weapons, is to put our front line of defense across those oceans. Bases in Japan, Korea, and Europe, aren't just there because our allies have hostile forces close by, but also because the further away from the US the conflict is, the more layers of defense any foe has to get through to affect the US directly.

Full spectrum isn't just a catch phrase either: the US is interested in every aspect of warfare from human intelligence to special warfare to ground warfare to air superiority to space superiority.

Whereas in the Cold War, NATO allies often focused on specializing in specific areas due to their small size and lack of funding (e.g. the UK was particularly focused on anti-submarine warfare), the US was designed to be not only the bulk of conventional forces but also charged with handling all areas that other nations lacked: logistics (e.g. the US currently has over 230 strategic airlift transports and over 430 aerial refueling tankers - the rest of NATO has about 10 strategic airlift transports and 40 tankers), submarines, bombers, etc.

Even our current aircraft carrier fleet is set to 11 ships by design. Why 11?
  • Each aircraft carrier is nuclear powered. With a 50-year lifespan, each carrier goes into drydock at the 25 year mark for its reactor's refueling
  • The refueling process is complex and lengthy, and takes 2-3 years to complete at which time the ship goes through major repairs and overhauls to stay relevant the next 25 years
  • At the end of said overhaul, another 1-2 years are put on the ship for testing and what not
  • With each carrier produced at a staggered 4-5 year interval, at any given time, one of our 11 carriers is out of service
  • One carrier is permanently forward deployed to Japan
  • Carriers are operated in 18 month cycles broken into 6 month periods. There is a six month deployment followed by six months mostly at home giving crew rest and doing minor repairs and maintenance, and six months in training for the next deployment.
  • Nine stateside carriers = 3 rotations of 3 ships rotating inside those 18 month cycles
  • Not coincidentally, we have a Pacific Ocean to care about, an Atlantic Ocean to care about, and an Indian Ocean that Congress mandates we care about. The President can truly ask "where are my carriers" any day of the year at any time.
As I said, this is by design.

But why you ask? Why is all of this necessary? Good question. Let me explain:

Your Answer to Spending is Answered in the National Security Strategy

Since Eisenhower, the US has pegged spending against the National Security Strategy of each successive presidential administration. During the Cold War, the general US strategy was: "win two major wars at any time" - largely believed to mean the USSR in Europe and China in Asia.
An archive of NSS's since Reagan is available here.

When the Cold War ended, President Clinton changed the strategy to "win hold win" - win one war, hold the line in another, then win that war when the first one concludes. The NSS also was no longer focused specifically on Russia and China. Correspondingly, the US military shrank from 3 million active + reserve to 2.1 million active + reserve. The US carrier fleet went from no fewer than 15 at any time during the Cold War to a necking down to 11 by the mid 2000's. The US anti-submarine patrol force, for instance, was cut in half overnight in the mid 90s.

In the 2000's, Bush changed it to "1-4-2-1" - protect the homeland first, deter aggression in four regions of the world simultaneously, be able to sustain combat operations in two of them, and win one of those decisively.

When Obama took office, he made a major change. First was the 'Pivot to the Pacific' - largely meant to counter China. As a result, the US refocused its efforts on buying conventional high-tech weaponry to face a resurgent and growing Chinese foe, after two decades of neglect or diverted attention under Clinton and Bush (weapons made to fight guys in pickup trucks don't do so well against actual conventional foes).

And in 2015, the NSS was amended again: this time with a refocusing on Russia after their actions in Crime and the Ukraine. Again, instead of arresting defense spending, the President actually asked for more money that year ($630 billlion) than the GOP Congress gave ($610 billion) or what the DOD requested ($580 billion).

(On that note, if you weren't sure, Ishould tell you that budgeting is made by the DOD, amended by the President, and then sent to Congress for voting in).

Lord knows what President Trump wants to do with our National Security Strategy.

As I wrote, since WW2, there has been a conscious decision to shape our military size and capabilities. We concluded after WW2 that we could not sit back and wait to build up modern equipment after aggression has happened, that we need to keep the frontlines overseas, and that we are the only Western nation demographically and economically capable of facing China and Russia.
And that's ultimately what it all comes down to: our spending can be either too much or too little based on what we as a country want to do with our strategy.

SOURCE

Friday, February 24, 2017

If Lemony Snicket Described Donald Trump

It is a strange fact of this world that the buildings people live in often reflect what they are like. For example, I once knew a woman who lived in a very impractical home shaped like a shoe, and who suffered from perpetual verrucas, due to damp from an ineffective drainage system shaped to look like shoelaces. It is therefore not surprising that we sometimes use metaphors about buildings to say what somebody is like. So a person who is very learned and is a professor of math might be said to live in an ivory tower. Rather than being a tall building made of elephant's tusk, this means that the person in question inhabits a rarefied atmosphere, words which here indicate that they are so clever they have become removed from reality.

President Trump did indeed have a tower named after him, and he was quite removed from reality, but no one could say whether he was clever. Although Trump Tower was not a metaphor, it could be turned into one. For instance, somebody might say that the giant, glass construction was an evidence of his vainglory, a word which here means 'ruthless self-obsession and desire to take over the world'.

If it is unfair to judge people on the basis of the houses they live in, it is even more insensitive to criticize them for how they look. Polite, respectable children such as Violet, Klaus and Sunny would never have said that Count Olaf was evil because he looked evil. Yet he did look villainous, because he enjoyed playing the part of the villain. This being so, however, he went to great lengths to appear not to be a villain in order to fool people over the course of his evil schemes.

President Trump, the case in point, was a very bad man, but he cultivated the air of a permanently affronted toad. What we would like from this world in which people act in the ways we expect from their clothes and their houses is for villains to disguise themselves ostentatiously, a word which here means 'in ridiculous wigs and with make-up that fools no-one except those with responsibility for the Baudelaire orphans'. We should like our villains to go about their evil plans in underhand manners helped by a troupe of immoral actors. We should like them to reveal the plan gleefully to its victims, and for it to just barely fail at the last minute, so that they can once again escape the clutches of justice and leave the Baudelaire orphans with a glimmer of hope, even if that glimmer of hope is like the memory of an ember fading in the fireplace of a beloved mansion that was all-too tragically burned to the ground.

What we want from our villains is that moment when the scales may fall from the eyes of those who were up-to-now taken in.

President Trump did not need to disguise himself to engage in his peculiar brand of villainy. The suit into which he fitted like a plasticine model of himself was one he was probably born into. Everything that seemed ridiculous about him was in fact essentially him, no matter how improbable it seemed. For this reason, there was no moment at which the fake moustache could fall off, so to speak, and for the evil scheme to suddenly become apparent to all. He had made himself successful by a curious show of telling everyone how evil he was, so that he was like a magician who tells you what the trick they will perform is, then fools you anyway. Now nobody could grab at the side of his face and tug to show that it was really a convincing rubber mask. It no longer had any effect to point out, rationally, why his whole rationale was evil. To use one of the real metaphors of which we have just spoken, what seemed to be his wig was, in fact, unconvincing hair.

What is Socialism?

Taxing the rich and redistributing their wealth to the poor (or to those who don't work) is not socialism, that is capitalism with welfare. The tendency to refer to welfare capitalism as "socialism" is a misnomer, and redistributing wealth via taxation is really a centrist and mainstream economic policy, far from the more radical ideas promoted by socialists.

So what is "real" socialism? Socialism is a pretty broad term which encompasses lots of different branches of though these days, but the crux of socialism is the idea that workers should control the means of production. Socialists articulate this idea with the concepts of the bourgeoisie and proletariat classes. The bourgeoisie is the class which controls the means of production and does not need to work in order to survive. The proletariat is the class which must trade their labor for wages in order to survive, and cannot gain wealth simply by profiting off the labor of others.

These concepts do not explicitly advocate for resentment toward the wealthy as you seem to perceive them: it is possible for the proletariat to become wealthy in a capitalist system, after all, though it is quite difficult. In particular, they aren't meant to engender resentment toward those who are wealthy since they worked hard: the primary concern is with those who profit off the labor of others but do not labor themselves. Socialists refer to this as exploitation of labor and it is one of the primary problems socialism seeks to address. Since ownership of the means of production--businesses, factories, whatever--is frequently passed down family lines rather than doled out on the basis of "who is the hardest worker", the bourgeoisie becomes a hereditary class of owners and capital-holders who contribute nothing yet consume most of the wealth.

Socialism can be enacted in many forms:

In most countries who call themselves socialist it is enforced by nationalizing industries so that everyone is basically an employee of the government, and the workers "own" the means of production since they theoretically have some say in the way the government works. This is a heavily criticized way of doing it, since government bureaucrats typically assume the role that the bourgeoisie once held and workers don't really have any more control over the means of production than they would under capitalism. It is therefore sometimes derisively referred to as state capitalism. Traditionally this has been enforced by violent revolutions by socialist partisans--which is one of the many issues with this form of socialism.

Market Socialism, which I view as a superior form, retains the free market aspects of capitalism while implementing worker control of the means of production. This is accomplished by abolishing wage labor, and instead ensuring that any worker who provides labor gets some portion of the profits which reflects their contribution. This could be done by paying workers in company shares, forming a co-op, etc. The simplest example for this would be any enterprise where 2 people agree to do some work together and split the profits 50-50. Assuming each contributes the same amount, it is much more fair than the capitalist alternative, which might have 1 person assume the role of "company owner" and pay the other person an arbitrary wage which may not be as great as their contribution. This sort of ownership, if anything, inspires greater levels of worker engagement and hard work, since they own a stake in what they are producing rather than just working for an arbitrary wage.

So if your fundamental concerns are that socialism basically gives people something for free and undermines the need for labor, please rest assured that getting free stuff doesn't have much to do with socialism--welfare capitalism is just a more compassionate approach to typical capitalist systems. Socialism is about control of the means of production and ending labor exploitation--welfare systems are a far cry from full socialism.

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Why Florida Sucks Ass

On paper, Florida sounds like it should be great. Over the past few years it has only had a few weeks where it dipped below 50 degrees Fahrenheit, humid heat is way easier to deal with than dry heat, beaches, oceans, clubs, nightlife, etc. As far as natural disasters go, hurricanes are kind of the best one since you generally have plenty of time to evacuate if the storm gets bad and when they aren't bad you usually get a day off work for a hurricane party.


However, Florida's biggest problems are the insanely corrupt local and state governments, the complete lack of culture in cities and the racism in the white areas.

Governmental Corruption

The corrupt local and state governments have resulted in Florida being unable to take advantage of Obamacare making healthcare miserable to afford. Their current Governor is also the man who oversaw and was responsible for the largest Medicare fraud in US history, so that's partially why the healthcare system got so screwed up.


Florida also has a terrible problem with corruption from real estate developers. Because of how much of Florida's economy is dependent on tourism, migration from other states/countries and retirees resettling in Florida, real estate developers have managed to secure a disproportionate hold on governmental power in Florida. This is why the road system is so fucked in Florida and why the Federally built highways are the only functional pieces of roadwork in the state, generally only getting backed up due to poorly designed arterial connections from the shitty local road system and crashes. Developers can easily push around the local, county and state governments to get roads built straight to developments with zero regard for city planning. Florida can have traffic as bad (or worse) as California, with less than half the population.


That same governmental corruption also permeates the school system, which has resulted in overcrowding in schools and a distinct lack of qualified teachers due to cratering teacher pay and the State's continuous attempts to bust the teacher's union in Florida. This has led the state to pursue voucher and charter school programs that are rife with another layer of corruption themselves because of the stunning lack of accountability that these schools enjoy, making them prime targets for embezzlement and money laundering by the staff that own these schools, along with poorly preparing Florida students for higher level education. These types of situations also disproportionately negatively effect the poor, those in crises, students that are disabled and students of color.


Florida is also an economic time bomb as sub-prime lending hasn't gone away in the wake of the '08 collapse and is ratcheting up again, with the state doing literally nothing to stop it because of Governor Scott's limp-wristed and corrupt financial leadership of the state. This is compounded by the state's brazen attempts to ignore and obfuscate any kind of acknowledgement of the existence of climate change, despite the fact that climate change will most likely turn Florida into a third-world country economically at the end of the century by destroying its entire coastal property market.

Lack of Culture in Cities

Florida is arguably the worst state for culture to feature major cities. This is largely a result of the massive urban sprawl in Florida that basically colonizes farmland and wilderness with deed-restricted communities much in the way locusts devour a countryside.


Every city in Florida will have the following: Every major corporate chain that could make it financially, a sushi place, that one dive bar, the one hole-in-the-wall place that you have to try, a Korean market and a Latin supermarket. Every. Fucking. City.


The most culture each city has goes as follows:


Tallahassee has hills and the corrupt state government. They also have a Melting Pot... which is an achievement for their city I guess because you can't fucking visit Tallahassee without someone suggesting that shitty Melting Pot restaurant.


Tampa Bay Which is actually a cluster of cities that are all in constant alpha-competition for big dog in the area. Tampa went for big events (sports teams, theme parks, aquarium, whathaveyou), St. Pete and Dunedin are trying to be Brooklyn by the Sea and Clearwater is slowly imploding as the Church of Scientology has ruined downtown economically while the coke problem has seen a resurgence at the beach. Unfortunately, all Tampa is actually known for outside of Florida is strip clubs and its beaches.

I want to take a side bar here to address beach culture in Florida outside of Miami. Beach culture is the absolute worst part of the state of Florida. People crowd into vehicles, to take the over-crowded and poorly designed road system, down to the poorly designed single-lane beach roads to get to the beaches where the culture clash of hipsters, meeting parrotheads, meeting jocks, meeting hippies, meeting the sun-ruined elderly, meeting the druggies/homeless, meeting the tourists, meeting the snowbirds, meeting the waitstaff economy that hates them all, meeting the criminals looking to take advantage of aforementioned groups. And you have to listen to whatever group you are with at the time complain about the traffic, the wait times to get anywhere, how expensive everything was/is/is becoming and you also get to listen to them complain about every. fucking. other. group. that is there that happens to not be your particular little tribe.


The absolute worst aspect of it though is how the closer someone lives to the beach, the more likely you are to hear them say "life just moves too fast in other places". This can range from them referring to New York/LA to Clearwater or New Port Richey depending on how insufferable they are as a human being (which, for anyone that might not know are predominantly suburban communities where nothing of note happens on a regular basis).


The closest Tampa comes to real, honest to god culture, is the Greek Orthodox Community Sponge Docks in Tarpon Springs and Ybor City's culture of Cuban cigars and rum that survives due to the resurgence in the popularity of cigars and the improving relations with Cuba.


Orlando Probably the best downtown life in Florida for your buck if you're out of college. But still has massive traffic problems and the constant influx of tourists to visit the theme parks will be a consistent hell you have to endure. Orlando also probably has one of the worst culture clash problems in the state with radical racism meeting black communities, white hipsters, retirees and the largest Puerto Rican population outside of the island. Still, you can afford to rent in Orlando for a decent price around downtown, unlike Miami.


Miami is a tough one. One of the largest Hispanic populations in the United States makes Miami a much better experience if you know Spanish, have connections with wealthy Jews or both (it can actually lead to some amazing nights if you do). If you don't, or are a white racist, you are probably going to have a much harder time enjoying Miami. It is one of the worst cities in the country rent in by ROI, faces the most dire economic threat from climate change in the state and has the most insufferable sports fans you will ever meet that aren't fans of the Yankees, Patriots, Raiders, Barcelona FC, Man U or Arsenal. Miami literally has the worst worst drivers in the United States

This is due to the combination of terrible road design and cultural bubbling over of pissed off Israelis, disenchanted Spaniards, Cubans that want you to get the fuck out of the way, Jews from New York that hate they have to drive everywhere now, white supremacists that equate cultural superiority with the height of their truck lifts for some inexplicable reason and the elderly. Miami residents don't even blush at admitting this either, that's how fucking bad it is to drive in Miami. Miami is also ridiculously expensive. Parking's expensive, beaches are expensive, food's expensive and don't even dream about going near South Beach unless you're willing to blow through $300-$1000 bucks depending on which facility you stumble into. It is a fucking ridiculous place. Getting out of the city helps, but again, knowing Spanish helps. But that won't get you away, since Hialeah ranks 3rd in the United States for worst drivers and you actually really need to know Spanish there since it has the largest Hispanic population in the United States.


Racism in the White Areas

So all the stuff I mentioned before is annoying, but can be ignored to find something positive in each of these places. What's much harder to ignore in Florida is the persistent culture of racism and bigotry that filters through fundamentalist Christian and far-right circles in Florida. It is almost impossible to escape dealing with this bullshit, even in Hispanic dominated communities like Miami. The most egregious of the racism targets anyone non-white. Basically, through either outright hate speech or dogwhistles, these people will communicate that they do not like non-whites and do not want to be around non-whites, they don't believe in race mixing and usually drive a large truck of some kind, possibly with the "ole' stars and bars". These are, more often than not, transplants or the children of transplants from the "deep south" of Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina or Georgia.


The much more insidious kind of racism is native to Florida is the kind of racism mentioned above, except it doesn't target "legal" Latinos. Basically, these kinds of racists are your true Floridian racists. They are generally pretty racist toward black people, which is usually reinforced by racist Latino friends, but will probably still have a black friend or two that "is alright". But Jews are the devil to them, particularly "Hollywood or New York Jews". Muslims are the supreme enemy though to these "folks". You will not know this person long before they say something blatantly racist, slandering all Muslims (which to them is Muslims in Iraq and Syria). They will look at you like they've said nothing wrong, every. single. time.


Then there's good 'ole Baptist racism. This is the kind of racism that targets any black community that isn't Baptist, Catholic Latinos, Jews and Muslims.


Finally, you have racism toward mixed relationships among every group in Florida.


You a white guy and want to date a Puerto Rican girl? Prepare to have every Puerto Rican man hate you with the passion of 1,000 burning suns and shit talk about you in Spanish to your girlfriend as you stand right there because they assume you can't speak Spanish.


You a white girl that wants to date a black guy? You'll find people of all ages that sneer at your relationship and casually call you a whore while all the black chicks shit talk your boyfriend right in front of you!


You a black girl that wants to a date a white guy? Get ready for racism from both sides of the aisle!


You're an Asian that wants to date anyone that isn't Asian? Too bad! You live in Florida! Find a weeaboo furry chick with yellow fever, I'm sure the thousands of you can fight over that one chick.


A lot of these problems exist everywhere in the United States, but I would actually go so far as to say that while Florida may be not be the most racist state, it has the most diverse racism out of any other state and you will be forced to deal with racism in some way living in the state of Florida if you are not a white Baptist Christian that only dates other white Baptist Christians.

SOURCE

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Let's Talk About Running



Well, part of it is the way this kind of research is done. A "running injury" is usually defined as "anything that keeps you from running for more than a day, or causes you to reduce your training load". So "80% get injured every year" sounds like a lot, but keep in mind that this includes things like blisters, stubbed toes, and skipping a run because you feel a bit too achey after a speedwork day and take an extra rest day just to be on the safe side. Running, being an endurance sport, is especially prone to this kind of injury: running injuries often develop slowly and progress gradually, and are caused by repetitive stress; in other sports, injuries are more often happen in a split second, and while it may go wrong less often, when it does go wrong, it goes really wrong. The kind of sports injury that sidelines you for weeks or months, I believe, doesn't happen significantly more often in running than the average physical sport; running accidents very rarely kill people or cause severe brain damage.


That said, distance running does have a very high potential for repetitive stress injuries. Two reasons for this; one, it's an endurance sport. This means that you perform the same movement over and over and over, so any imperfection you have in your movement patterns will be amplified by sheer repetition. That little scraping in your gait, that you normally don't even notice, will give you a bad blister after 30,000 steps; the way your hip drops when your left foot lands is not a big deal for everyday activities or chasing a bus once in a while, but 10 miles into a run, it will start punishing your knee. On top of that, a typical running training regimen routinely involves exercising your slow-twitch muscles to the point of deep fatigue (a.k.a. the "long run") for the purpose of pushing that point up. Once you've reached that point, movement patterns will change to compensate for those muscles that are no longer capable of working properly, and this often leads to even worse running form and even more stress on the joints and connective tissue.


The other reason is that running is a high-impact activity; if you dial in the right amount of training, it makes your bones, joints, and connective tissue stronger, and more resilient against impact forces, but if you do too much, it's easy to overload your body. And because the kind of training stress we're dealing with often takes a day or two to fully manifest, it's easy to overdo - you run a bit too much, but it feels great, so you do the same thing again the next day, and it still feels great, but by the end of the week you suddenly feel super groggy and everything hurts.


And then there's the endurance athlete's mindset of "embracing the suck". Many of us are in it because we want to experience self-inflicted suffering, exploring and expanding the limits of our bodies. To a degree, this is healthy and the way to improve, but there's a fine line between suffering that is mostly mental, and little more than physical discomfort, and the kind of suffering that is plain old pain, a warning signal our body sends us, urging us to stop doing whatever it is we're doing. It's not always easy to tell the difference.


And finally, I believe a certain level of consumerism also plays a role. As in any other sport, many people are looking for easy solutions; but running is as simple a sport as it gets, there's basically just your mind, your body, and the road, everything else is mostly irrelevant (yes, this includes running shoes). So the usual approach of solving your problems by buying a product doesn't work, but there's a whole industry built around telling you that it does, and people fall for it big time. The treatment for knee problems is fixing your running form, doing strength training, and adapting your training schedule so that it doesn't hurt you; but this requires brutal honesty, and people are often more comfortable listening to someone who tells them that what they need is a particular kind of running shoe or sock or compression shorts or sports drink or whatever.


SOURCE

Monday, February 6, 2017

Trump's View of Others is Utterly Self-Contingent.

If someone praises him or works with him, they are a winner. If they criticize him or give him even the slightest of ego wounds, then they are failing disgraceful losers.

Everyone has a little bit of this in them. I mean we all think better of people who compliment us, and perhaps if someone criticizes us we start to think of reasons why "that loser has no right to say ____ about me...."

But Trump displays this behavior to a compulsive, uncontrollable degree.

He is unable to accept a criticism, any criticism, however valid or mild, of anyone on his "winner list."

He incontinently accepts and amplifies every criticism, however poorly founded or unsubstantiated, of anyone on his "loser" list.

He seeks revenge, domination and humiliation of those who defy him.

I don't get how some people have not spotted this pattern yet.

It is how we get Trump repeating the idea that Ted Cruz's dad shot JFK. There was no mastermind plan behind this smear. Ted Cruz opposed and defied Trump therefore everything bad anyone has ever alleged about Ted Cruz, even if the claim came from some egg on Twitter, must be true.

it is how he was continually caught retweeting White nationalists. It's way too complimentary to say that "Trump is indifferent to the source of a claim." It would be more accurate to say that "The nature of a claim, in Trump's mind, vindicates or discredits the source." That is how a poll was "respected" one day and "failing and dishonest" the next purely based on its results - the claim vindicates or discredits the source. It's exactly backwards which is why it's so hard for ordinary people, I reckon, to get to grips with the way Trump thinks.

Let's take the opposite case - Trump being given a criticism about someone who is on his "winner list." How does he react? Right now a story that's developing is Bill O'Reilly asked Trump whether he was concerned/critical about the fact that Trump was praised by Putin, a man who has journalists and political opponents murdered. And Trump replied "We've got a lot of killers too." This is actually the second time Trump has made this claim. People are outraged because Trump made a baseless claim that the USA kills journalists.

But interpreting Trump's words as factual claims is simply missing the point.

The right way is:

1) You made a criticism of someone who has praised Trump.

2) Beep boop, Trump's psyche interprets this as an attempt to inflict ego injury.

3) Trump's mouth leaps to his psyche's defense with a blurted, usually incoherent attempt to minimize, dismiss or delegitimize the criticism.

It's like people don't get the idea that showing Trump a photo, a representation of the real world, will do nothing. Because his statements aren't really claims about an external, real and objective world around us. They're more like value-creating statements that impose on reality a super-reality in which he is continually vindicated.

People have noticed that Trump lacks shame. He lies shamelessly, he insults shamelessly, he is shameless in never admitting error, he doubles down. I mean: It would have been the easiest thing in the world, in the inauguration crowd nonsense, to have Sean Spicer come out on Day 2 and say "Yes Obama got a larger crowd because his inauguration was a historic event, and in any case DC is a heavily Democratic city where half the population is Black and naturally wanted to cheer on the first Black President, but Trump's supporters are certainly excited for his Presidency and now the President is focused on his mission of making America great again, etc."

All this would have been so easy. But instead the President sends out his Press Sec to tell a shameless bold face lie that the media almost has no choice but to turn into the day's leading story, to ruinous effects.

It's because even in situations where it would be easy to make a bad situation go away by losing a small amount of face, his psyche will not allow him.

His ghostwriters have turned this into a macho businessman personality where his philosophy is "Never show weakness to the dogs of war" or some bullshit - but the reality is that his uncontrollable horror of losing face is because of deep personal insecurities.

We can tell this is objectively the case because his behavior is compulsive and reckless. It's not geared to advancing his own interests. It's self destructive. Always remember Trump is not some genius like, for instance, Dilbert Man makes him out to be.

Consider Trump's lies. All politicians lie. But most politicians don't tell lies that they will obviously be caught on in 15 minutes, like Trump's lie about receiving a letter from the NFL. Trump tells these lies because he can't help himself. Most politicians lie needfully - that is, they lie when the Truth threatens to bring about embarrassment or accountability. Trump lies compulsively because even the mildest "reality checks" are for him ego-shattering events.

I want to point out that I, nor anyone reading this comment, is qualified to actually diagnose Trump with anything. Diagnosis has to happen in a therapeutic environment with the participation of the patient.You can't diagnose someone with a mental illness via TV.But what you can do is spot a consistent pattern of behaviors.

We already see states and leaders formulating their actions in light of modeling Trump's behavioral patterns. For example Theresa May's visit was a big cuddlefest, not because May actually likes Trump, but because the apolitical apparatus of the British state behind May has made the calculation that deliberate flattery of USA's leader is now a necessity in US-UK relations and may position UK advantageously vs the other European states.

This is disgusting and concerning. And this extends beyond our allies, obviously. Other state actors, like our adversaries Russia and China, are also surely operating with a consciousness of the President's mental weakness and the idea that Trump's psyche is a mechanism or opportunity to "short circuit" the American state acting in its own actual national interest.

Bottom line, this is dangerous for our country and if I may say so, SAD.

SOURCE

Saturday, January 28, 2017

Trump and Putin Conspiracy

Trump is being bribed by Putin.
Now, of course, we know that:
What has the Trump team been up to since then?
During the campaign many described Trump as a useful idiot of Russia. His actions since then may determine that an underestimation.
We're getting fucked, royally, by a Trump-Putin alliance that is out for oil money and the destruction of western democracies. That's potentially why John Lewis and other Democratic law makers who left a recent intel briefing on the Russian interference called Trump "illegitimate"and part of a Russian conspiracy.