Lost in the Details

I find that people, generally when they disagree with me but have no real argument, will tell me I’m “over-simplifying” everything. For example, if you and I were to get into an argument about socialism, the first question I’ll ask you is “What percentage of the economy do you think the government should be in control of?” You can tell me that you’d like them to provide housing for poor people, or loans for kids to go to school, or regulate monopolies. That’s all fine and dandy, but you really should have an answer to my question - it’s a pretty simple question!

See, something you learn in physics is to simplify a problem without losing sight of the details you want. Better said – you simplify things while being fully aware of the details you’re leaving out, and knowing that the solution to this simplified version of a complex problem doesn’t tell you complex details about the original.

Does anyone remember the video from middle school science, where they put a sealed plastic box on a scale? Inside the box, all kind of shit goes down – exploding fireworks, batteries turning fans, confetti flying around, waterfalls turning waterwheels, wind-up penguins waddling about. The scale never changes – nothing went in and out of the box. The logical continuation of this is that if I put something that weighs 1 lb in the box, the weight of the box will go up by 1 lb – no more, no less.

It is incredible how powerful these laws of conservation are! Someone can try and tell you what’s going on inside that box, but at every single moment, the amount of stuff in that box has to remain the same. If in reading their interpretation of the events within said box, and the mass of the box changes, they are flat-out-wrong. I don’t need to tell them what specific detail makes it wrong, or where exactly the calculations went astray. The interpretation is absolutely meaningless.

Politics is about spending money. Economics are obviously about money. Social issues in politics are about spending money – because social issues require the government to spend money to enforce them. We say marijuana is illegal – that law is only as good as the amount of tax dollars dumped into enforcing it.

News for you blossoming politicians out there – money follows conservation laws. The question “who’s paying for it” is one that does need to be answered. And these “painful” budget cuts that cities, states, governments are going through?

Every single dollar cut from that budget is a dollar someone else doesn’t have to pay. Every dollar you spend today on deficit is a dollar, plus interest, you can’t spend later.

It’s a zero sum game, folks. You do it now, or you do it later. Take a look at Spain, Greece, or England if you want to see what later looks like (Do you think that the British government *wanted* to stop paying for higher education??) I know I’ve avoided every single detail of what gets cut – we have thousands of people employed to take care of the details. I don’t need to understand the details to realize that the end result of the debt is worse than cutting any program –in the end, the debt makes the cuts anyway.


Note: If you read this and have developed a political opinion of me, you're entirely misplaced, because there aren't any political opinions in here - just reality. If you'd like to discuss politics, we can start with your answer to the question I pose in the first paragraph.

The begining of.....something

I'm just going to be honest here. I'm 25. I've been in Greenland for a while now and honestly, there has been a lot of nothing going on here. I've done a lot of reading, a little bit of thinking, and not quite enough reflecting.

I've always been an successful person. I never had to work very hard to be "successful" - that is, to get through high school, college, and my masters degree with good grades, working a little (but not a lot) the entire time and making more than I have been spending (including tuition) since June 2006. I've dated some very nice girls for 6 months, a year, 2 year, 3 years - I don't think I've had a relationship make it past a week and not go to six months.

In this horrid economy, I found a decent job more or less in my field, within 3 weeks after I started looking.

But of all these things that I've created for myself, sometimes I wonder - is this what I want? It's a rather rare event in life for me to see something that I want. Conversely, I'd like to say I'm pretty good at recognizing it.

My car. I knew I wanted this car from the day I learned it existed. I drove my loud and uncomfortable 1986 Toyota for six years because I wanted to find this car, and would have no car in between. Handing over $7500 cash to the man with this car in Baltimore, MD after a 400 mile trip to get there didn't take a second thought - and I hadn't even driven the car. I knew..I just knew.

Sailing! I wasn't a sailor in fall 06. My sailing experience consisted of a few random classes at summer camp long ago and C.S. Lewis' Voyage of the Dawn Treader. but again - I knew! I knew enough to that I bought myself a sailboat big enough to live on, and a pickup truck big enough to pull it. Remember, I don't enjoy spending money. I live off potatoes, beef, and pasta. I live in the cheapest apartments that I can stand. But when I want something, I know it. In this fall, I knew I wanted to be a sailor. A funny thing about sailboats is that for $3000 you can get them in all kinds of sizes, and not knowing the absolute joy in owning a little sailboat, purchased a big one. It served to get me sailing, and it got me onto the sailing team - in the end, it wasn't the physical boat that I wanted. It was to become a sailor, a desire that has not subsided in the least!

More recently, there was a certain 24 hour delivery mission that I wanted to do. It involved 12 hours of driving in 24, to see someone whom I had only met once, and desired to make it twice. I had no more expectations than this, and no more than this happened. It was worth it.

The few things I listed here, and the many I didn't list - these are the real successes in my life. Call me selfish if you wish, but the things that I really wanted are the ones where I spend the most money, too. (I don't mean to say that spending money creates happiness. I simply mean that when I really want something, someone else tends to benefit, too)

Do you ever do things that you regret? Buy things that you know are too much money, or that you don't really want? Work for an employer or go to a school that you hate?

I used to.

No more.

Glacier

I'm in Greenland!

So, I wanted to restart my blog.  I might move some posts over, but this is necessary.  So: 
This is really just a test post, but really, I'm in Greenland.  I flew here on a military airplane, and it's really, really cold here.