MattMaroon.com

I’m opposed to the way we use the death penalty in this country. I’m not so much opposed to the fact that we use it (though it is pretty ludicrous) as I am to the way that we use it. I really don’t think we’re getting the maximum out of capital punishment.

Right now we use it almost exclusively for murder. But studies have shown, time and again, that it is not a deterrent to homicide. As Amnesty International puts it, “the threat of execution at some future date is unlikely to enter the minds of those acting under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol, those who are in the grip of fear or rage, those who are panicking while committing another crime (such as a robbery), or those who suffer from mental illness or mental retardation and do not fully understand the gravity of their crime.”

I’ll buy that statement because statistics seem to back it up. But I can’t believe that the death penalty wouldn’t be a significant deterrent to some of society’s other ills. Take, for instance, people who unnecessarily walk down the middle of the lane in a parking lot. These people waste our time with their own obliviousness. You can’t tell me that this atrocity wouldn’t disappear if a few people were given the chair because someone snapped a picture of them hogging the aisle with a camera phone. The same is true of the old ladies who cause traffic jams in the grocery store when they stop for five minutes to ponder whether 8 ounces of beans for 82 cents is a better deal than 12 ounces for $1.09.

I can think of dozens of much better ways to use capital punishment than we currently do. Waiters who don’t keep your drink full. People who park in the fire lane. Parents who don’t take their baby outside of the restaurant when it won’t stop screaming. People who saw Mission Impossible 3 in theaters. The list goes on and on.

Be sure to look around in your daily life for better uses of the death penalty and let me know what you come up with. Together we can affect change.

I went to the produce store today and I noticed that their pricing system is rather peculiar. Some items are priced by the unit, some by the pound and the method for each individual item seems to be mostly consistent from store to store. How do they determine which is which?

For instance apples are $2 per pound, but oranges were 4 for $1.97. How do they decide that? They are both fruits, both come from trees, and are about the same size, weight, and shape. I know the cliché says you can’t compare them, but you would think it would be okay to at least price them consistently. I can see why one might cost more than the other, but not why one should be priced per unit and one per pound.

When I see stuff like that I always wonder “why is this this way?” The answer is almost always one of the following two options:

A. It has been determined to be the most efficient system by market forces over many years.

B. Whoever thought of it was stupid, high, or both.

When deciding, most people default to option A, but I’ve learned over the past few years that it’s actually option B that is behind most of society’s irregularities. Most stuff that seems out of place actually is out of place, and it is that way because somebody who wasn’t too bright made the decision long ago and everyone else just followed along.

I was reading the Christian Science Monitor today, as I do whenever I don’t have time to get down to the old Reading Room, and I saw this article. Apparently El Presidente Vincente Fox decided at the last minute to veto Mexico’s drug decriminalization bill. All I can say about that is “thank you Jesus.”

For a minute there I was afraid that Mexico was going to embarrass America. Our drug laws are ineffective and outdated by almost a century, and that third world country was about to one-up us. Did we respond by doing something equally sensible ourselves? Hell no! We just pressured them into conforming to our pathetic policy. That’s the way we work here in the U.S.A. We don’t just sink, we take everyone else down with us.

I find it hilarious that Mexico, where the per capita income is less than one-quarter of ours and fewer than 10% of citizens have even attended (let alone completed) their equivalent of our high schools, was able to deduce that criminalizing drugs has no benefit whatsoever and at least attempt to do something about it. And yet we, the richest nation in the world, a nation whose own government has published studies saying that the War on Drugs is a losing battle, can’t see our way to effective legislation. That’s just plain humiliating.

Luckily Vincente is on our side. He’s not going to reduce his prison population, establish a support chain for addicts, and save billions in wasted tax money that could be used to feed their starving population or educate a decent percentage of their kids. And why not? Because we aren’t either. Good to see we aren’t alone in having a jackass for a president.

A friend and I were arguing about this a few weeks back and I thought I’d take it to the streets, or at least to the 30 people who read this blog, and get a second opinion. Somehow that song Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems by Notorious B.I.G. became the topic of conversation and my contention was that the premise of that song (“the more money we come across/the more problems we see”) was the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. My friend disagreed.

I happen to have a little more insight on this topic than most people, since I went from one end of the spectrum to the other in a short enough time that I still remember how life was in both scenarios. Let me illustrate my point with four stories, two from when I was poor, and two from very recently.

When Vicki and I first moved in together, which is going on 4 years ago now, I was pretty strained financially. I was living from one Home Depot paycheck to the next, biding time until I was old enough that I didn’t have to fill in the line on the FAFSA that stated my parents’ income so that I could go to school on the taxpayers’ dime. Just from this paragraph you can probably imagine at least five problems easily solved with money, but that’s not where this story is headed.

So Vicki and I lived together in this dumpy little triplex near where she was working. When we moved in our landlord had given us an old washer and dryer that he had previously used in the laundry room at an even dumpier apartment complex he owned. If you could only see that place you would be able to imagine just how bad a washer and dryer have to be to get bumped from the roster, especially considering that a new washer would cost more than most of the cars parked in the lot.

Suffice it to say that for the first few months we used the washer various gum wrappers, coins, and strange objects (whose original usage we couldn’t even begin guess at) were found in our pockets after every load. The dryer (which was gas, not electric) often smelled like an electrical fire and gave our clothing a nice “you’re probably going to die in a dryer explosion” scent. Both had the little coin-op thingy but were rigged so that the coin would fall right back through and into our hands.

They were pretty crappy, but they did the job and none of the foreign objects that wound up in our clothing turned out to be used syringes so we were happy. And then one day the washer broke.

Now at the time I had literally $0 to my name. In fact if you count debt I was in the hole a few dimes, so buying a new one wasn’t really an option. So I had to go to the Laundromat weekly, which was expensive and time consuming, for a few months until I managed to scrounge up enough money to go in on a very cheap new set. That was a problem.

Now fast forward to about two months ago. I was washing my clothing in said “new” washer and dryer, which were, by then, almost three years old. I noticed that the dryer’s automatic setting wasn’t getting my clothes all the way dry anymore, and the timed setting didn’t have a long enough timer to do it either. Vicki called me on the phone for something unrelated and I mentioned it to her. She said that it had been doing that for months. I thought back and realized that she was right, the thing was a piece of junk. So that night I went to Lowe’s, asked them which washer and dryer set was the best (i.e. most expensive) and paid for the one they pointed out in cash. The next day my new front loading set arrived and now I put my clothes in the dryer, press start, and when it beeps they’re perfectly dry every time.

So in the first scenario I had no money and when my washer died I had a genuine problem. In the second I had more money than I knew what to do with so had my dryer died I would have had no problem whatsoever. In fact I avoided the problem of it ever dying at all just by having the spare money to replace it long before that became a possibility.

Here’s another couple stories, first the “when I was poor”. This one happened a few years before I started dating Vicki, when I was working at Sam’s Club. I was living about 15 miles away at the time and driving a 10 year old Mazda 323, affectionately nicknamed “Blue Thunder”, which I have to give a lot of credit to since it lasted quite a long time for a car with so many miles on the odometer and so few oil changes in its history. One day on the way home from work steam started coming out from under the hood and I felt the engine die, so I coasted onto a side street and parked it in front of some lady’s house. I didn’t have a cell phone (that was back in the days when they had just taken off, so they were readily available but I had no money to pay for one) and was pretty far from home. That would have been a problem right there but I got lucky and the lady whose house I had parked in front of happened to be on her way to bingo at a church very near where I lived. She was nice enough to give me a ride home.

But unfortunately once I got home I realized that I couldn’t do anything about my car. I had just enough money to tow it somewhere, but I didn’t have enough to actually have it repaired so I just had it towed back to my house. I had a paycheck coming up in a week but rent was due at the same time and I was only going to have another $50 or so left. So I was pretty screwed.

Luckily I had two roommates. One worked at Sam’s Club too, and since I was a supervisor and wrote his schedule I was able to make it partially coincide with mine and get rides for some of my shifts. And my other roommate was financially supported by his dad, so he didn’t work and rarely had any use for his car. He was nice enough to let me drive it, even though it was stick and I had only ever driven automatics.

Eventually I got Blue Thunder to a dealership and it turned out to just be a broken radiator hose. It only cost me about $100 to fix, including towing, which was tough to swing at the time.

So, when I was poor and my car broke down that was a problem. Contrast that to what happened to me a few months back. My engine light came on one day and I called the dealership. They said that since I wasn’t hearing any funny noises or feeling anything out of the ordinary when driving to just wait and see if it went off. Apparently that model has had some problems with some sensor that causes the engine light to come on sometimes when nothing is wrong. So I continued to drive it and after maybe a thousand miles the light went off.

Then, the very next day, I went to start the car and nothing happened. I talked to a friend who is a car guy (I know next to nothing about them) and he said that given the engine light and the dead car my problem was probably a dead alternator, and that if it was I probably should just get the car towed because jumping it probably wouldn’t provide enough juice to get me to the Lexus dealership. I ended up taking my girlfriends car to Wal-Mart, buying this portable battery jumper, and just driving the car there myself, figuring that I had to be able to get there on 4 or 5 jumps.

I got there without any incident at all, and while I was there I figured I’d have a new master key made, as mine had been lost by the previous owner. Plus I decided to have the maintenance done on it that you’re supposed to have every 30k miles. “In for a penny,” I figured.

It turned out that I had two problems, one of which was the goofy sensor problem turning my engine light on, and the other was a dead battery. My car was in the shop for ten days (they had to take a part out and send it to the factory to make a new master key, then wait for it to come back) and all told it cost me about $1,500. And they gave me a complimentary new GS330 to drive the entire time.

So in the first scenario I was so broke that I couldn’t get my car fixed for three weeks and had to go through a big ordeal just to get to work and back. In the second I just handed a man some Benjamins, drove a newer Lexus than mine for a week, and got my car back.

I could go on and on with pairs of stories like these but instead I’ll just give you the moral, which is that anything you can pay someone to fix isn’t a problem. It’s an annoyance at worst. When something breaks and you have to spend a little to replace it, that’s inconvenient. When something breaks and you can’t afford to replace it, that’s a problem.

I’ve used material examples because money doesn’t apply to most immaterial ones. Things like having a family member die or getting diagnosed with cancer are a problem no matter how much money you have, though I can say that even in those situations cash can at least make some things a tad bit easier.

So next time you hear someone say “more money, more problems” you can be assured that they’ve either never been rich or never been poor, or at least can’t remember being one or the other. Or they’re just some dumb ass rapper with lyrics that don’t make any sense.