Debt and Taxes

Okay, time for another political rant.

Say you’re a parent, and you’re low on money, but your kids want cell phones. No problem, you say, you’ll just borrow some money. So you take out a loan and get them cell phone plans. You take some of the kids’ money to help pay for the plan, but you also have to pay back the loan. They kids are happy, but soon they tell you they need text messaging added to their plan. It seems like a good idea, since not getting it could cause them to rack up insane bills, so you take out another loan and buy a text plan. You take more of their money but also have to pay off the loan. Now they need data plans, so they can browse the web and use GPS and stuff. Again you take out a loan. Again, they’re happy with what they have, but at this point you have some tough decisions to make. You don’t have the money to pay off all these loans, and the charges never end because the kids will always expect their phone and data plans. So you can keep taking out loans until your credit is so bad no one will give you money, at which point you lose everything, including the phones. Or you can take away the phones. You’ll still have the loans to pay off, and the kids won’t be happy, but at least the charges will stop. (Of course, not getting the phones in the first place was an option too in the beginning, but it’s too late for that now.)

The analogy here is, of course, government spending and the national debt. We want the debt to be smaller, but anytime someone proposes to cut spending, they’re treated like heartless monsters who want to destroy people’s lives. But there really aren’t a lot of choices. We can cut spending, even to worthwhile projects, or we can keep taking out loans (which just increases the problem, obviously). There’s always raising taxes, but that’s not really a solution either, because from the citizens’ perspective, having money taken away isn’t that much different from having money depreciate due to the debt. In the case of a family instead of the government, there is also the chance of increasing income. But the government doesn’t produce any wealth; it’s a cost center. So the only way to reduce debt is to reduce spending. Which means cutting stuff that’s valuable but doesn’t have to come from the government.

Needless to say, raising the debt by a third in four years makes me very unhappy.

The Plasma Master – Audio Book

I’ve had an interesting hobby this year. At a friend’s suggestion, I made an audio recording of The Plasma Master and submitted it to Podiobooks.com. So all those folks who prefer their gratuitous science fiction in mp3 form can go to the book page and download it for free. Hooray!

In other news, after redoing a couple of chapters in the in-progress sequel, I think I’m committed to pushing through to the end. Hopefully it won’t take another 15 years.

Trust

A couple of situations lately have spawned one of those internal conversations I mentioned in the “about this site” page, this one about trust: what kinds there are, why you need it, and how to get it. It’s not intended as a lecture – more like a reflection on why I can’t deliver all the lectures I’d like to. Or something. So here it is, so I don’t have to mentally explain this again.

Sometimes people assume that they’ve been insulted if someone doesn’t trust them. This might in fact be the case, but the question “don’t you trust me?” may be pretty presumptuous, depending on the context. First of all, there are two different kinds of trust – character trust, where you believe a person will do the right thing in a given situation, and competency trust, where you believe that a person can accomplish a particular task. The concepts are orthogonal; for instance, you might trust your nephew to babysit your kids, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to let him drive your car.

The level of either type of trust that you give someone is based on circumstances and experience. Let’s consider the character type. Some people are more trusting than others by default, but everyone has a certain level of trust that they give random people in a given situation. This trust level could range from trusting someone to not attack you to trusting them with your social security number – or trusting them to help raise your family. (Or, like in the case of God, to override your personal preferences in how you live your life. If we all trusted God that much all the time, most of our problems would go away. But that’s a different topic.) The situation is important, because when you pass a stranger in a dark alley, you might not trust them to not attack you, whereas if you pass the same person in a grocery store, you probably trust them at least enough to not sabotage the groceries in your cart when you turn your back. After you start spending time with someone, the trust level goes up or down as people confirm or deny the assumptions you have made about them, and as you give them a chance to “try out” at a higher level of trust. But the important thing here is that it takes time.

It especially takes time to reverse the effect of broken trust. The gospel teaches that we should forgive everyone, but it doesn’t say that we should withhold consequences, and I think that a lack of trust is a legitimate consequence for some things. Like if someone robs a bank and later repents (and gets out of jail), you may be able to befriend them, but you probably won’t let them housesit for you. It doesn’t mean you hate them or don’t forgive them; it just means that they haven’t earned that level of trust with you. There’s nothing wrong with that. Of course, there’s also nothing wrong with not trusting someone with your home if they haven’t done anything particularly wrong, which again is the point: trust has to be earned – and proven.

So, some implications:

• Delivering constructive criticism: If someone doesn’t trust your motive, you can’t really help them by pointing out something they could improve. If they think you’re just being a jerk (even if you’re trying to be polite), or if they’re so embarrassed that they can’t imagine that you still respect them, they might just end up focusing on being mad or offended or hurt or apologetic instead of making the needed improvement.
• Fake relationships: I’m thinking online stuff and text-messaging-intensive friendships here. If you don’t interact enough to prove reliability (both in what you do and how you react to what others do), you can’t really develop the trust that it takes to form a deep relationship.
• Teasing/Sarcasm/In-jokes: Lots of relationships use this kind of thing as an expression of closeness, but if you try to pull it off with someone who doesn’t feel close to you, it will probably come across as offensive.

… to name a few. I guess the corollary of all this is that it can be important to develop trust broadly, so that you can say what you need to say when the need arises. And that could mean going out of your way to be helpful, compliment people, and just being friendly in general. And of course learning skills and finding ways to use them, so you can have the competency kind of trust too.

Flick’s Great Idea

[Spoiler alert for The Sword of Shannara]

I recently wondered whether the Mythbusters might have a problem with a scene in The Sword of Shannara. The scene is this: The company from Cullhaven have been traveling through the Wolfsktaag Mountains, and a group of Gnomes has spotted them and set fire to the forest. The group hurries forward and makes it out of the trees, but the path behind is cut off, and the Gnomes are presumably not far behind. They make their way to the Pass of Noose, where they expect to cross a rope bridge, which they could then cut and leave pursuit behind. But when they get to the pass, they find that the bridge has already been cut, on their side. It dangles from the cliff face on the far edge of a (relatively small) canyon. It looks like they’re trapped.

Suddenly, Flick has an idea – one of them can fire an arrow with a rope attached to it into the wooden planks (or ropes, or whatever) of the bridge on the far side, then haul it back into place so the group can cross. Fortunately, the shot is successful, and they haul the bridge into place, just in time to tie it off, cross, and cut the ropes on the other side.

So here are the issues that have me a little worried:

1. The rope would add weight, causing the arrow to lose altitude. In theory, you could compensate for this by aiming higher.
2. The rope would have to be fed out pretty fast, or it would pull back on the arrow as soon as the slack was gone. I supposed you could toss the coil over the edge before firing, so there would be nothing to unwind.
3. The rope would prevent the arrow from spinning, which would make it very hard to aim, not to mention the additional drag from air resistance that you’d get the moment it stopped pointing straight forward.

#3 seems like a big problem. I don’t remember exactly how wide this gap was, and I guess you might not have to be super precise – if the barbs on the arrowhead could be made to catch among some rope, that might be enough to let you pull it back up on the other side. And if the rope were thin and light enough, maybe the arrow could even spin for a while before the rope became over-wound. Let’s just tell ourselves that and call it good. After all, the group made it through, so it must be possible, somehow.

Morph Ball & Subspace

I have a theory about how Samus’s Morph Ball works. First of all, I don’t think she actually rolls around inside a metal sphere – that would be crazy. I think the Morph Ball exists completely separately from Samus’s armor and is stored in some parallel plane of existence. When you activate it, Samus switches places with it and observes it from “subspace”, or whatever. So in the Prime games, when you are in Morph Ball mode, the game is still in first-person view; you’re seeing what Samus sees as she steers the ball around. And of course, because the Morph Ball shares whatever shielding protects Samus’s normal armor, damage to one damages the other.
Now about how she steers while doing repeated somersault jumps… I don’t have an answer for that.

Laser Rooms and Password Screens

I’m a big fan of lasers. They look cool, they do cool stuff, and the word even sounds cool. (Did you know it’s an acronym?) Maybe that’s why it kind of bugs me when they are misused in supposedly-realistic fiction. Like in movies and TV shows, where there’s a room full of lasers protecting a room or a vault or something. Here are my complaints about that:

1. Lasers are light beams, so you can’t see them unless they hit something. If you could, you’d see sunlight coming out of the air, and you couldn’t see anything at all because of the glare. So unless there’s dust in the room, if you can see the lasers in one of those laser rooms, you already know that the movie or TV show has screwed up. (And if you can see dust without the intruders putting it there, that’s fake too – why would you want the lasers to be visible if you’re the one they’re protecting?)
2. There’s always a path through them, for someone athletic enough. Why? Given the number of lasers in these rooms, you could easily just make a dense grid, instead of spreading them out across a wide area, creating person-sized gaps.
3. When they move, that looks like added security, but it’s also totally fake. Laser sensors work because a sensor in the wall is continuously picking up the laser light. When you step in the way, the signal stops, and the alarm goes off. If the laser is moving around the room, you’d have to have the sensor moving around the room too, which you couldn’t do (and which is clearly not happening in shows that do this).
4. When the lasers cut stuff, that also feels a little off. Of course lasers can cut things, but it would take a lot of power to have them on, and of course the “sensor” on the other end would have to be absorbing the laser energy somehow. It would be a lot more efficient to have the lasers just be sensors, and then have guns mounted in the wall that fire when the sensor goes off.
5. In movies and TV, these elaborate security devices never, ever work. Have you ever seen a laser room in a show that the person trying to break in didn’t get past? I didn’t think so.

Speaking of things that never work, I just remembered something else that always happens in fiction that bugs me so much that I added it to the title: People logging on to other people’s computers. I’m not talking about someone’s house, where there’s no password at all. I’m talking about folks guessing a one-word password, or just glancing over at the screen of some employee who has been lured away from his or her desk. No self-respecting corporation lets its employees leave computers unlocked or pick passwords that are a single word from a dictionary. Sure, you could probably crack most people’s passwords with brute force software (that is, guessing thousands of times in quick succession). But a human guessing words? Not a chance. But it happens all the time in even the most “serious” tech-fiction.

There. I’ve said it. I feel better now.

“Pro” Singers in Congregations

We do a lot of singing in church. Abilities range widely, and of course that’s not an issue at all. I figure the main value from hymns is the message behind them, plus the sense of unity that comes from singing them together. And it invites the Spirit.

There’s one thing that bugs me though. It’s when someone feels like they’re so talented at singing that they need to belt the hymn out so loudly that you can’t focus on anything but them, and – this is the worst part – when they add that operatic pitch-fluxuating “flair” to their voice. I’m sure works fine on a stage, when the audience is supposed to be listening to one person (or a group singing in a predetermined harmony). But when you throw that kind of thing in with a hundred other voices, it just sounds bad. I’m sure the people who do this aren’t consciously trying to draw attention; they probably just think they need to put their “best” into it because after all it’s sort of a prayer. But come on, “best” doesn’t always mean “most elaborate.” I learned this in eighth grade choir – when you’re singing in a group, your goal is to blend in with the group so that no one notices your individual voice. You just hit the note and call it good.

So let the reader beware, lest you inadvertently drive the folks around you crazy next time you’re sitting in church. Thank you.