Barriers of Shame

I've got to get the inside of my car cleaned, the thing is absolutely filthy and I might have to transport some females this week for this Ecology class I'm taking.  The problem is, the car is so dirty that even after clearing it out (one large trash-bag-full), I'm still ashamed to take it to the car wash to have the inside cleaned.  I don't want to be standing there at Octopus, trying to memorize the sounds coming out of the workers' mouths, so I can go home later and fail to translate their insults.  In my mind, I'm going to imagine they're saying stuff like, "this car is too dirty to take to a car wash, what a stupid faggot"; in reality, they'll probably be saying "why is that idiot frowning at me, what a stupid faggot."

 It's too bad they merely employ immigrants, rather than actual octopi.  I appreciate the pseudo-privacy afforded by the language and cultural divides, but I'd prefer that the work be done by something without any actual capacity to judge.  This is part of the appeal of internet porn vs live strippers.

I used to have a similar problem with clothes shopping, where I'd feel like my wardrobe was so shitty that I couldn't go into a department store.  Even if I wore my best clothes, I would still feel self-conscious, surrounded by all those well-appointed mannequins and multi-angled mirrors.  Some say these stores are designed to make you feel bad about yourself so that you'll spend more money to get yourself up to snuff, but a lot of the time it just repels me from ever entering the store in the first place. 


The "barriers of shame" phenomenon applies in many circumstances, including being too scrawny to go to a gym, being too fat to take up running, being too pale to take your shirt off outside, being too shitty at pool to learn how to play, and being too shitty at dancing to learn how to dance.  Of course, the solution is to find some way to get yourself up to the minimum standard in private, so maybe I should just vacuum the fucking car at a gas station before taking it to the car wash.  But what if the guys at the car wash notice that I'd vacuumed the car just minutes earlier, what might they say about me?

For some reason, I didn't used to apply a similar sense of shame towards my philosophy of going to the dentist.  I went through a brief phase where I thought that brushing your teeth right before an appointment was dishonest, that you were presenting a falsely rosy picture of yourself.  I thought I was being a real man of integrity by eating a meal right before walking in for a teeth cleaning.

This didn't go over so well.  The dentist seemed, not just disappointed, but actually appalled; he was literally throwing his hands up in disgust.  This forced me to reevaluate my interpretation of integrity, and if I ever go back to the dentist, I'll be sure to brush beforehand.  The thing is, I haven't been to the dentist in so long, I'm sort of afraid of what they might find, so it might be a while before I go back.  The problem has sort of gotten out of hand.

Glibertarians

John Stossel, that facile libertarian mimbo, farted another article for Reason's website, this time about how it's delusional to think we can switch to greener energy.  Stossel's roots in network TV are evident in his writing, as it seems to be targeted at the stupidest, most impressionable people in a stupid-to-begin-with mass audience.  At one point in the article he asserts that:  

"If wind and solar power were practical, entrepreneurs would invest in it. There would be no need for government to take money from taxpayers and give it to people pushing green products." 

That's the entire paragraph.  He provides no logic or evidence in support of that statement, he simply takes for granted that, just by saying it, it automatically makes it true. 

 This guy is supposed to be a voice of reason?  What the fuck is he doing with his left hand?

As with many libertarian free-market fundamentalists, Stossel's aphoristic understanding of economics could fit inside a fortune cookie; it appears he showed up for the first five minutes of the first day of Econ 101, learned that "markets are good", then failed to stick around for the next part where you learn about the concept of market failure.  In this case, the failure is not only in the free market's inability to punish coal plants for the negative externalities of pollution and CO2, there's also the market's failure to reward companies for the positive externalities of developing new, green technology.

In a free market economy, a company that created a revolutionary solar panel might make it rich, but they would never be fully rewarded for all the good they did, because within a few years, other companies would rip them off and copy their ideas, stealing part of their profits.  That's why patents exist, and of course, that's when the free-market dogmatism of every conservative breaks down, because the value of every stock in their portfolio is dependent on the government meddling in the free market, by enforcing intellectual property.

But even with patents, companies that revolutionize technology are still not fully rewarded.  Patents have time limits, countries like China ignore them, and there are ways to circumvent them by copying the bulk of an idea but adding a minor modification.  If a company has an idea that could create a trillion dollars of profits over the next 100 years, but 90% of that wealth would be captured by copy-cats, you can figure that the company is only going to be willing to invest $100 billion dollars in the idea, rather than the trillion the market believes the idea is worth.  That is a market failure.

Most of the technological development behind coal plants, and gas engines has already taken place, so companies don't have to worry about making a big investment in research that will mostly benefit other people; in fact, what they're mostly doing with coal and oil is ripping off the ideas of the past.  Stossel writes in favor of nuclear power, but nuclear companies today are using technology that was developed by the government.  Private corporations wouldn't have had an adequate incentive to do that research because they would have known that, as soon as they figured out how to harness the atom, hitler, stalin, or the US would have kidnapped them and stolen their ideas.  In cases where an idea would benefit the people as a whole much more than the inventor himself, only the government can have the full incentive because only the government represents the wishes of the people.

This is part of the reason why a lot of great inventions like the internet and GPS were spurred on by government investment.  Of course, conservatives will argue that those inventions don't count because they were made by the military, and somehow, the military is not the government.

The truth is, government subsidies and incentives are the only way to correct for the market failure and properly motivate private corporations to research green technologies.  It's either that or you just have the government do the work itself, but then Stossel would have to retreat to his underground bunker and load up his cache of libertarian assault rifles.

 The weapons cache is the "kill-or-be-killed"  flip-side of the libertarian nut-job's supposed "live-and-let-live" worldview.

Professional Standards

Those last few months at my old job, right before I got fired, I was pretty much faking it, just going through the motions and hoping no one would notice.  I'd show up to work each morning, half in a daze, park my bicycle at the bike rack, and pretend to lock it.  Somehow, I'd managed to lose all five of the keys that came with the lock, and being that I'm incredibly lazy, I could see no better alternative than half-inserting the tip of the cable so it would look like the bike was secure.

Somehow, that managed to get me through those few months, although perhaps that's more of a testament to the level of pussy-ass-nerd that works in Research Park, where my old job was located.  At the end of each work day, walking towards the rack, the first fear that came to mind was not that my bike might be stolen, but that some good Samaritan might notice the lock was loose and decide to do me a favor by clicking it shut.  I probably would have ended up getting arrested for trying to saw through the cable, and the charges might have stuck because I'm too lazy to buy a registration sticker for the bike.

A lot's changed since those days, I finally went out and bought myself a new lock, mostly since, without a job to keep me occupied, I had nothing better to do that day.  It's a good thing too, because a few mornings ago, I was sitting at my computer, dicking around while drinking some coffee, when just outside my window, some enterprising goon, busting an enormous sag, walks up and starts fussing around with my bike.  He must have been checking to see that it was locked securely, that it couldn't be easily stolen.  What an industrious young man, trying to make the most of every opportunity, much more diligent than I, and he was up and about at 7 am, out there trying to get ahead, while I'm still sitting in my underwear, doing exactly jack shit.

Smile Like You Mean It

We're finally starting to see the real Kobe Bryant.  People have long said that everything he does is contrived, that he modeled all of his behaviors off Jordan, even down to his fist pumps and his steely-eyed look of determination.  But now, Kobe seems to have learned to drop that facade, because there's no way in hell anyone would consciously do the following in an effort to look cool:

Vicious underbite.  This is what he looks like when he's happy.  He does this after making a huge shot in someone's face.

Intense finger point.  He often does this after a teammate gives him a good pass or finishes off one of his (Kobe's) assists.  Its more like he's accusing them of something than actually celebrating their efforts, but at least he's acknowledging them.

By acting like a mildly-sociopathic weirdo, he's finally learning how to be himself, but he can only act "natural" after making a good play.  For example, last night's brutal hugging of Ron Artest smacked of fakeness.  Artest won the game on a put-back after Kobe air-balled the potential game-winner, then Bryant hugged him for way too long.  A few weeks ago, Pau Gasol made a similar game-winning play off a Kobe miss, and Kobe didn't celebrate at all, instead he acted like he was depressed, and this did not go unnoticed by the media. Perhaps Kobe's handlers told him to show more affection towards his teammates; let's hope no one tells him to start kissing babies.

This became a little unnatural after the first five seconds, then it went on for another minute.

I guaranteee it.

From now on, I'm going to start every endeavor by saying, "I guarantee disappointment." 

This way, if I let you down, I've lived up to my promise, and you can't be angry.  Conversely, if you aren't disappointed, I've failed to keep my word, so I've met my guarantee.

This is either win-win or lose-lose; I'm going to say its lose-lose, that way you can't say I didn't warn you.

You're gonna love this suit.

YTMND

 You know how calling another man a bitch or a punk comes from prison culture, and how those terms had much more specific meanings in their orignal contexts?  I wonder if "who's the man?" also originated in prison.

I can't even give this stuff away...

This Slate article talks about philanthropists buying naming rights to public buildings.  This reminds me of when I found out about UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine. 

David Geffen School of Medicine?  What a self-centered asshole...

To his credit, he did give them 200 million dollars.