Learning to Lighten Up

When I was seventeen I worked for the Council on Aging.  I worked with a 67 year old and a 76 year old--handymen, riding around the area, doing small repairs for old folks.

We screened doors and porches, we replaced rotting boards in floors.  We fixed plumbing.  We did about everything one can do around the house.

The young guy, Albert, could not say "no" to women.  So when an old woman would ask him to plumb her trailer, he would say, "We would have to take out the wall, and we might not get it back together."

To which the old woman would reply, "Well, then that's what you have to do."

And Marion would grumble under his breath, "He can't tell her 'no.'  He just tells her how hard it would be, and she cares about it getting done, not about how hard it is."

My dad had begun to teach me to lighten up.  Albert and Marion finished the job.

They would drive a nail in two strokes.  I took around twenty strokes, and would have to redo every fifth nail.  Marion would say something like, "I don't think that nail is scared of you, John."

Or Albert would say, "We pay by the nail, not by the stroke."

One day I had enough and snapped back at Marion.  It surprised him.  He apologized.

And I realized how stupid I had been.  It is strange that thickening my hide was accomplished by someone who only showed me how thin my skin had been.

Census

In 1980 I drove around my town and asked people to fill out their U. S. Census forms.  The folks that I visited had already ignored multiple requests, so they were not interested.

One old woman thought that the U. S. government was cooperating with the Russians so that when they took over that they would know how many rooms she had so they could quarter troops.

I warned one woman, as I had been trained to do, that the next visitor with a census form would be a federal marshal.

I was such a jerk.

Mr. Hood

Your employer pays you because you create more value in working than you use up in resources.  You buy stuff that gives you more value than you have to sacrifice to get that stuff.

Now Robin Hood takes $1 from you (who earned that dollar by providing more than $1 in value) and buys a geegaw for me (you would have spent the dollar on a doodad that gave you more value than $1).  Robin Hood does not know me well, so the geegaw he bought for me is only worth only 50 cents to me.  So Mr. Hood destroyed your more than $1 worth of value to give me 50 cents worth of value.  Mr. Hood made life worse, overall.

And if Robin Hood keeps visiting you, you may end up spending money on hiding your money from Hood.  But hiding your money gives you no direct satisfaction--the doodads you would have bought if there were no Mr. Hood do give you satisfaction.  So more value is destroyed.

Of course, Robin Hood is a government that redistributes income.

This is all too optimistic, though.  Robin Hood knows where the money is coming from and where it's going.  Government is so big, it has no idea.

Incentives

The public school system turned one of my sons against government.  The system has perverse incentives.  He was talking to me about bullying.

In my experience and my son's, teachers turn a blind eye to bullying.  Now and then teachers and administrators work around the edges, but they are reluctant to get serious.  Here are the incentives.

If little Aristotle bullies little Socrates and the school lets this happen, what is little Socrates' parents' recourse?  They can demand the school do something.  Suppose the school does nothing?  Probably nothing happens.  Socrates' parents can sue.  To the parents' attorney, the school presents the paper trail they left that showed they were doing something to try to stop the problem.  The paper trail may be two sided, since the bully, little Aristotle, denied and lied at every stage.

Suppose the school expels little Aristotle?  Little Aristotle's parents have ironclad evidence that the school expelled their son.  Yes, the school has a paper trail, which may be two sided.  But there is clear evidence that the kid was expelled.  And maybe there is some theory by which the school singled out Aristotle.

Little Aristotle's case for being expelled is much stronger than little Socretes' case that the school should have done more.  Bad incentives guarantee that most of the time the bullies win.

Part Time Job

At sixteen I had a job as a night watchman at a funeral home.  They would call me when they had a body and I would spend the night.

In the rear end of the building was a small living room with a television.  Sometimes I had to bang on the side to get the picture right, but it had cable back in the days when cable did not cross the mill pond and go into the little community where I lived.  I would invite friends over and we would play games and pop popcorn.

There was a bedroom, too.  In the morning I would shower and drive to school.  For that, I made $20.

When the heating or cooling system would kick on, it would make a few loud bumps, which would make me jump.  Other than that, the job was sheer gravy.

At one point someone mentioned that I was there for insurance purposes.  Other than that, nobody ever told me what I was watching for.

Entropy

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold -- William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

Systems tend toward disorder.  This is a casual paraphrase of the Second Law of Thermodynamics--the Law of Entropy.

Orson Scott Card's "Alvin Maker" books frame evil as the destructive force, which the world tends toward, like water flowing downhill.  Whereas good, the constructive force, must work against the tide.

Things wear out, rocks erode away, the sun cools slowly.

Over a decade ago, I read something that Marilyn Vos Savant wrote.  I paraphrase it, thus.  Information is not subject to entropy.  That which stores the information is subject to entropy--paper decays, your hard drive crashes.

Other than Card's "Alvin Maker," I have not read anything which makes entropy a character in a story.  But now I am thinking about it.  Right now my ideas are soup.  I have to overcome my own entropy to make it into something solid.

And the winner is!

What should we call him?  The Nigerian terrorist?  The Christmas Day terrorist?

Mark Steyn found the perfect name for him.

The Panty Bomber!