MattMaroon.com

I was talking to a friend the other day about the future of our country. I mentioned that I was worried about what would happen to our deficits, and then our currency, once all of the baby boomers were in retirement homes on the taxpayer’s dime. She mentioned that in Japan this would never be a problem because apparently their society values the elderly and taking care of them is considered an honor. I realized she had hit on the perfect solution.

Let’s ship our senior citizens to Japan. Hear me out.

For one, the seniors will love it. They’ll get to go on nice two-week Pacific cruise, at the end of which they’ll be at a place where they can eat most of the food without bothering to put their dentures in. And we’ll just tell them they’re in Florida. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Disney World, but let’s just say the demographics in Orlando and Okinawa aren’t far apart. Build one giant golf ball and nobody will be the wiser.

The Japanese will win too. Americans are bastions of productivity and get far more done in a work day, even in retirement, than the Japanese. They must anyway, because why else would our auto workers get paid three times as much? Also both groups, if you believe the stereotypes, are equally skilled at driving.

You’re welcome America. And Japan.

Interesting thought experiment by Paul Graham today about the Founder Visa. After a good deal of thought though I decided though that it’s not a good idea. It’s fraught with problems that I can’t see good ways to reconcile.

For one, it assumes that startups (in the Paul Graham sense) are more worthy of economic favoritism than other forms of business. Is there any evidence that if we let in 2,500 people, and one of them founded another Google, that is any better than them starting 2,500 small businesses? Or than giving the already existing Googles, Wal-Marts, Fords, and McDonaldses of the world 2,500 more highly-educated employees? There was almost certainly a point in Google’s history where giving them 2,500 extra H1-Bs would have created more value than letting the same number of people start startups, so what about letting the immigrants work for 2,500 startups they didn’t found?

There’s a fallacy, I think, in the idea that since they started their own companies, they’re not taking away American jobs. A lot of times startups lead to overall wealth and job destruction. Take a look at what’s happening in the newspaper industry right now. Nobody’s really sure where that industry is going to end up, but it does seem like a lot of jobs, from reporters on down to guys who chop down the trees that end up made into paper, to be replaced by some low-paying jobs at blog networks.

Startups often make money primarily by reducing costs, and cost reduction nearly always means job reduction. And please don’t take that as an argument against immigration, as I think on the net it works out in our favor, I’m simply pointing out that four guys working for themselves isn’t always the same as creating four jobs.

And even if it were, if the logic for giving those extra H1-Bs only to people who start their own company is that they aren’t taking American jobs, that implies that jobs are zero sum. They’re not, in fact to a large extent it’s the opposite. If a company hires an employee whose efforts earn the company three times their salary, that gives said company the cash flow to hire two more people. Hiring good non-Americans can still improve the overall job market for the rest of us.

Also there’s the semantics problem (which leads to legal problems) of defining a startup in terms of eligibility. How do you define a startup? Someone who gets invested in by startup investors. (No room for bootstrapped companies here.) How do you define a startup investor? Someone who invests in startups. How do you know who that is? Ask them.

Even excluding the circular logic, that’s asking for trouble. It puts too much power in the hands of the startup investors you ask. It also puts too much power in the hands of the person who defines a startup. At what point is a company no longer a startup and therefore eligible for these special H1-Bs? Is number of employees a good metric? Or will companies then start finding loopholes like contracting/outsourcing rather than hiring, or dividing into smaller corporations, or any other number of unforeseen legal loopholes as they approach the limit? Is revenue a good metric? That might cause shady accounting, and be detrimental to high-volume, low margin business like retail (if they even count as a startup in the first place, which they probably wouldn’t since startup investors don’t invest in them). Will “startup investors” discover a lucrative black market in selling H1-Bs? Rich foreigners could pay them $200k under the table to invest $100k in their new startups, thus buying citizenship.

Love it or hate it, what we need now isn’t another Google, it’s another Wal-Mart. The people hurting for jobs aren’t the ones with computer science degrees, they’re the ones with high school diplomas. It’s the bottom half of our society, who won’t be working at these new Googles regardless, who need help and whose current woes are dragging down the entire economy.

I just see the Startup Visa as too focused on one segment of the economy. I greatly prefer the same idea I’ve heard bandied about since Obama was making his move in the primaries, which is attaching H1-B visas to every graduate (and possibly even undergrad) degree. Our nation has most of the world’s top universities, which are currently educating lots of bright people from other countries and then sending them right back home.

Let’s fix that. Rather than worry about where they’ll work or who gets to pick them, just let every intelligent, educated, highly-motivated person come on in. Some will improve current corporations. Some will start small businesses. Some will start the next Google. We’ll get a broad boost across every industry, which is what we really need at the moment and going forward.

There’s nothing more amazing than walking down the Las Vegas Strip when the town is relatively empty. At any normal time in any normal economy, you’re at least somewhat insulated from the sheer insanity by the throngs of drunken, middle class convention-goers who form a pasty white buffer between you and the madness. But the weekend before Thanksgiving at the outset of what may be the next Great Depression feels like that empty Times Square scene from Vanilla Sky but with hookers and margaritas, both measured by the yard.

Normally it’s fairly easy, if you stick to the middle of the sidewalk, to avoid the throng of Mexicans pushing their little prostitution advertisements at you. But when there’s almost nobody else in town it’s just you and them, mano y mano, and I get the feeling that they’re getting a little more aggressive for fear that if they don’t drum up some johns quickly they may not be employed next year. None of them have resorted to just shoving the hooker baseball cards into my pocket yet, but when it happens I won’t be surprised. If they do, I hope I get a rookie card. It might be worth something one day if she ends up getting busted in an airport bathroom with a Congressman. And I’m curious what sort of performance statistics they put on the back of those things.

On the way to my hotel, my friend Russ and I were walking by and one of them tried to sell us tickets to somewhere that had “naked men”. We were well-dressed (I had on an orange cable-knit sweater from Brooks Brothers and boot cut Banana Republic jeans) but really? I was a little offended (not to mention a little shocked that anyone of any gender or sexual orientation would want to see naked men) that someone would assume that any guy whose pants didn’t have a hole in them must want to see other guys with no pants on at all. I would say that my wedding ring should have prevented that, but this is 2008, or at least it was until November 4^th.

Apparently Treasure Island (now, out of a misguided sense of hipness, called TI) has gone adult-themed. When I first came out here, about a decade ago, the little pirate show that runs twice an hour was aimed at children, with pyrotechnics and cute little “yo ho ho and a bottle of rum” type songs. Now it’s full of half-naked women dancing to hip-hop. Maybe that’s what piracy is like nowadays, which would surely explain why so many Somalians are making it their occupation. If so, I do live pretty close to Lake Erie…

I also saw in passing a girl I once met (she, umm, “dated” someone I knew) working in a bar right on The Strip. I remember when I first met her she told me she worked in marketing at Imperial Palace, which is, by the way, trying to follow in Treasure Island’s scantily-clad footsteps and rebrand itself as IP. Unfortunately, when both your casino and your cocktail waitresses were made before World War II, no amount of abbreviation can make you cool.

When she said she worked in marketing I was just barely sober enough to hold back “really, because I would have guessed you for a stripper”. If you saw her, you’d understand. One glance and it was clear there that the only college diploma in her past was the one she probably regrets having done unspeakable things with at a frat party.

So today I found out that what she meant by “marketing” was that she pours margaritas behind a glass wall while wearing a shirt scientifically designed to look as if at any minute it might buckle under the weight of her surgically-enhanced cleavage. Only in Vegas could the job description for someone whose one and only requirement is a double D cup have the word “marketing” in it.

Regardless of the incredibly low occupancy rate Vegas is still Vegas, perhaps even more so than ever. You may be able to get a room during CES, which is any anomaly akin to being able to buy the latest Tickle Me Elmo in mid-December, but the buildings are still bigger and more expensive than anywhere. And as if to say “fuck you” to the millions of people struggling to pay their ballooning adjustable rate mortgage, they’re opening even better ones soon. While the rest of the world is worrying about layoffs and deflation, MGM is building a complex that costs five times more than GM.

As the town’s biggest fan, I can only hope les bon temps will keep roulering. Las Vegas is the American city, the one place I tell visitors from other countries they must see before they return to their soccer and public health care. For the most part, if you’ve seen one big city you’ve seen them all. Cracked concrete as far as the eye can see, weird smells you can never quite place but are sure they’re from some as yet undiscovered combination of bodily fluids, and clothing stores so expensive that the few people who can actually afford them are too smart to shop there. If it weren’t for the weather and the funny accents you probably couldn’t tell New York from Chicago or Los Angeles or London.

But Las Vegas is unique, totally unlike anything else you’ll ever see. It’s half good and half bad, but it’s one hundred percent American. It’s over the top in every way, and it could never be replicated because no other country has the proper blend of opulence and ignorance that, when mixed together and baked at about 120 degrees Fahrenheit in July, form this rich and gooey capitalistic cookie.

And that’s why I love this town, “marketing” jobs, Mexican pimps, and all.

The most amazing thing about Obama’s election to me has been the ensuing celebration. I’ve never seen anything like this before, and I’ve asked some people older than me and they hadn’t either. All around our country and the world, people are cheering.

It isn’t just the race issue. Well, maybe in Kenya it is, but everywhere else it’s more than that. It’s about America joining the Global Century. And even though we might be a decade late to the party, much of the world (including many Americans) are just glad we showed up and are hoping we brought the beer.

The 20^th was clearly the American Century. From the Spanish War on, America was the superpower. We decided two World Wars, became by far the world’s largest economy, defended capitalism against the communists, and invented new technologies that improved quality of life all around the world at a breakneck pace. We had our missteps, of course, but it was the century in which we cast off our isolationist tendencies and became the modern world’s leader in nearly every respect.

The 21^st Century, however, doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to globalization. Advances in communications and travel have shrunk the globe. The Third World is rapidly moving forward. Free trade has shifted the balance of power and will continue to do so until borders are little more than lines on a map. The European Union is strengthening, and radical Islamists, who thirty years ago might as well have been on another planet, are delivering their hate-filled message to our doorstep.

Obama once said of our struggling lower classes “it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” That quote may have been his greatest political mistake, but it was dead on. The only thing he left out was patriotism.

Patriotism has become the panacea for the unwashed masses, especially in the aftermath of 9/11, to the point where politicians are now criticized for not wearing a flag lapel pin. People are clinging, first and foremost, to the memory of the American Century. And just like their religion and guns, the Republican Party has, for the last decade, used patriotism to play the populist card against them in order to remain in power.

By choosing Obama, we’ve ended that cycle. We’ve signaled that it’s time to accept that we are citizens of the world. We’ve sent a message both to the very vocal minority in our nation who still is not on board, and to the rest of the world, that we won’t be ruled by fear anymore. We’ll make calm, rational decisions rather than ones motivated by misguided patriotism, and xenophobia. We’re ready to join the Global Century.

So what does that entail? It starts with a complete and total rejection of our jingoism. The global economy is here, whether we like it or not, and we can adapt or fall behind. It’s been too easy, politically, to adopt Bush’s “we’ll do whatever the hell we want to” foreign policy, but it’s only hurting us. Our failures in both Afghanistan and Iraq have proven that. We’ve lost billions of dollars and thousands of lives, and we’re no better off than we were before we started. We’ve hamstrung ourselves to the point where we are now unable to deal with the very real threat Iran, who are failures have rightfully emboldened, poses.

Though conservative talk radio hosts view this as America-hating (because America is “the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the Earth” as one of their least intelligent and articulate yet most successful examples points out) it’s time to accept that while we still need to look out for number one, our policies have a drastic effect on much of the rest of the globe. It’s time to be mindful of our role as the world’s leader, and return to setting a good example.

Joining the Global Century means taking the lead once again on key issues that matter to all nations, like climate change. We’ve spent 20 years telling environmentalists and oil critics to go fuck themselves, and now that we’ve changed positions and, on top of that, are fighting an enemy funded by our own fuel dollars, we’re suddenly mad at China for doing the same. We’re worried about the coal plants they’re building while chanting “Drill baby, drill” at rallies.

It requires, perhaps most of all, recognition that the global economy is not a zero sum game. We all prosper together. The seeds of the Global Century were sown by our own nation building in the aftermath of World War II. Our leaders learned from the mistakes of World War I that stable economies make for peaceful nations and unstable ones lead to war. They sought to prevent the sort of hardship that drew a direct line from one global conflict to another, and they succeeded. Look at Germany and Japan now. They’re two of the world’s strongest economies and most peaceful nations. Let us not forget why.

If we’re going to move forward, our next leader needs to mend the fences steamrolled by the Bush Administration. If we’re going to conquer the very real threat of Islamic extremism we need to fight it the same way we did communism, with the world on our side. We can’t do it ourselves, nor would we want to if we could.

We need to stop letting religion factor into what should be exclusively political decisions. Our government must return to agnosticism. Ridiculous restrictions on stem cell research have stalled medical technology, preventing untold life-saving treatments. Belief in Armageddon, derived from literal interpretations of a book that reads like the writings of a third grader who downed a bottle of Nyquil, has led to disastrous foreign policy in the Middle East. At home we’ve resorted to torture and invading the privacy our own citizens. Basic human rights like marriage or habeas corpus are being willfully withheld.

We need someone to put a stop to it, and John McCain just wasn’t that man. Barack Obama might be. That’s why conservative politicians (Colin Powell) and publications (The Economist) all around the nation, dozens of Nobel laureates, and leaders the world over endorsed him before the election. Whether or not he’s the man to do it remains to be seen, but at least he understands it has to be done. And now, as a nation, so do we.

That’s why people are cheering in the streets. It isn’t about race, and it isn’t even about one man. It’s about America giving globalization a try. It’s about choosing calm rationality over patriotic and religious fervor. It’s not just about change in general, but about a specific and sorely needed kind: progress.

Obama’s got a tough road ahead of him, and unrealistic expectations to live up to. But if he even gets half way there he’ll be remembered as one of the top Presidents in history. The primary prerequisite to being memorialized as a great leader is taking over a country in severe turmoil. The big three, Washington, Lincoln, and F.D.R all did, and the parallels between now and 1929 are striking. We’re in the midst of the worst economic crisis since then and we have two wars, one which is unpopular and one which may be unwinnable, on our hands.

If he makes a solid dent in the first two he’ll have his name in the history books for much more than being a black man. And if not, well, he can’t look any worse than the guy who came before him. For now I’ll keep my fingers crossed while I join in the celebration.

Interesting read on Wall Street Journal’s website here about my generation’s sense of entitlement. Allow me to rebut, on behalf of the millions of people born in the two decades after myself.

What you mistake for entitlement is, in actuality, a differing world-view. We grew up seeing our parents and grandparents work their lives away in a state of near-indentured servitude. Meanwhile the rich grew richer while our elders, in aggregate and especially over the last 8 years, treaded water. They held fast to their puritan ethic, trusting that hard work was its own reward, which we’re sure was what their bosses told them when they asked for a raise.

In the end what did it get them? Some meager, middle-class lifestyle supplemented by Social Security until they were too old to take care of themselves anymore and ended up in a home, their assets spent down until they were gone and Medicare took over. They didn’t take it with them when they went, and they didn’t do anything with it while they were here.

Other than one or two strained all-inclusive beach resort vacations per year (“look kids, here’s sand! We’re having fun now!”) there was very little family time, and there was more of that than time to themselves. Life was all work, work, work, and for what? So their wealthy overlords could enjoy months-long European getaways?

Sorry, but we’re not going down that route. It’s not about having been coddled; it’s about having a clearer picture of what we want out of life. Our generation sees work not as a goal unto itself, but as means to an end. We know that unless we’re careful, our hard work is going to be someone else’s reward. We’ve seen it happen too many times.

We’re cautious. Our parents taught us that. The Republican Party has spent the last 28 years systematically destroying unions. Employers no longer have any loyalty to us enforced on them, so we have none in return. Our relationship lasts only for as long as it’s mutually beneficial. Maybe it’s better this way, maybe it isn’t, but it means we have to look out for ourselves.

There’s certainly no shame, in our eyes, in working, or even in working hard, as long as it benefits us. There’s certainly pride in a job well-done, because in the long run, those who perform consistently will wind up ahead of those who don’t. But to work at the expense of all else is to waste the only life we have while other people enjoy the fruits of our labor. If someone is going to be buying a summer home due to our efforts, it’s damn sure going to be us.

What you think is us being coddled and looking for praise is really just us wanting assurances that our hard work will be rewarded. We just want to know what’s in it for us. We want to work somewhere where we may be promoted in a year, but we also expect to earn it.

If we seem to have high self-esteem, it’s because we’re better. Not intrinsically, but because we’re riding the rapidly accelerating wave of technological progress. Advances in education and communications technology that previous generations created have made us considerably more knowledgeable and productive than our parents were when they entered the workforce. In fact, in many ways we’re considerably more knowledgeable and productive than they are now.

There is a dark side to that. It sometimes makes us think we know more than we really do in other areas, such as leadership. We’re not inherently smarter or better than those who came before, we’re just better educated and more technologically savvy, so where it comes to experiential learning previous generations will continue to have a significant edge on us. This explains why so many feel they’re ready to step into the CEO role right out of college, and why they’re wrong.

But we’re the Nintendo generation, and as such, we’re all about working smarter rather than longer. It’s an information economy, and we were trained for that. We can do with a computer in one hour what would have taken previous generations a week at our age. Our 40 hours per week is a level of productivity that would have been unfathomable twenty years ago.

It’s also largely intellectual activity, which is considerably more fatiguing than routine physical tasks. Jobs in information technology might look a lot easier than manual labor to an outside observer, but they’re not. Burnout sets in much faster, and the law of diminishing returns ensures that effort beyond 40 hours a week is actually counterproductive. Studies confirm this.

Our desire to skip the long hours is not laziness; we’re simply concerned with efficiency in everything we do. The 24 hour news cycle has made us more aware of our mortality than any generation before us, so we abhor waste, especially of time, which is the only thing in life you can’t buy more of. If working 60 hours a week actually causes us to get less done than 40, and it does, it’s better for both parties that we spend those extra 20 with our friends playing video games.

We don’t feel entitled. That notion comes from your feelings of inadequacy in the face of a rapidly changing technological and economic landscape. You know that most of what you learned in college can now be done by a $3 an hour data-entry clerk in India with a copy of QuickBooks and a cheap Dell, and the fact that we know it too makes you view us as entitled or egotistical. It shouldn’t, it’s just the law of accelerating returns in action. The same will be true of us one day when our children enter the workforce. It’s the nature of the digital world we now live in.

So if we seem to want too much too soon, be patient with us and use that to your advantage. Nobody ever got anywhere by not wanting anything at all. You have, at your disposal, the most ambitious, knowledgeable, and productive workforce in the history of the world. And if that means letting us come to work in jeans, well, we’ll be happy to email you a link to a study that shows casual dress codes boost productivity

Dear parents,

I’m not one of you, so I won’t pretend to understand what it is like to be one. I don’t know what it’s like to see your child suffer and want to help or prevent that. Pretty gut-wrenching and enormously stressful I’m sure. And I know you probably mean well.

But don’t take medical advice from Jenny McCarthy, or, for that matter, any Playboy Bunny, past or present. Take medical advice from doctors. They go to school for 6+ years, then do 3 years in residency. Jenny McCarthy went to school for a year or two, then got breast implants and dropped out. Doctors have, at their fingertips, the collective knowledge of thousands of years of medical science. Jenny McCarthy has the collective knowledge of a door handle and a piece of lint.

I’m not sure what’s a bigger tragedy, that children are born to someone dumb enough to believe there’s a link between autism and vaccines even though every piece of evidence suggests otherwise, or that children are born to someone dumb enough to take medical advice from a stripper. Or maybe it’s the resulting outbreak of measles, a disease previously eradicated from the first world but which is causing even the children of parents smart enough to know that Jenny McCarthy is a useless bitch to get the disease as well. I’m going to go with door number three.

I guess it puts the whole global warming “debate” in perspective. It sounds ludicrous that people would pay attention to the scientific opinions of Bill O’Reilly, but compared to those who take medical advice from someone whose breasts can be seen on Google Images, those people are fucking Einsteins.

Love,

Someone Who May Have Kids One Day and Doesn’t Want Your Dumb Ass Causing Them to Get Measles

As a self-professed libertarian, I generally loathe the idea of the government poking its nose around in private business. I’m sane about it, so I do think government is still necessary and should perform certain functions for the public benefit, such as regulating natural monopolies, for instance by enforcing net neutrality. But for the most part, I think it should generally butt out.

There are a few weird instances though where I think the government can benefit everyone involved with laws that might otherwise seem outlandish. One example that comes to mind is detergent.

For decades, laundry and dish washing detergent manufacturers have competed mainly by increasing bottle sizes, often even diluting their product with cheap filler to do so. Consumers have better things to do with their time than research the merits of Tide vs. Cheer, and though they may have a brand preference due to whichever one sponsoring their favorite Neckcar racer, it’s tenuous at best. So if they see two bottles for about the same price, and one is larger, that’s going to be the winner. They don’t even notice that the bottle that’s twice as large also requires you to use twice as much in every load.

So the manufacturers were trapped in a sort of mutually assured destruction that prevented them from concentrating their product. They could easily have done so, but that would have meant losing serious sales. Packaging and shipping (both of which rose almost proportionately to bottle size) were such a high percentage of the cost that doing so would have meant higher markup for them and lower prices for consumers simultaneously.

Retailers lost as well. Larger bottles required more stocking and took up more shelf space, which is as vital to them as servers are to Amazon. Consumers had to make more room for the bottles at home, and paid more for less. And we all lost due to the increased fossil fuels burned in shipping and plastics manufacturing.

If it weren’t for the rise of Wal-Mart (who now sells 25% of the nation’s detergents) and the environmental movement, this stalemate, which persisted for decades, might never have been broken. As of this month, they’ve officially mandated that they will only carry concentrated varieties, and they’re clearly the only retailer in history that could ever have gotten away with that.

(Interestingly, for all the hippie anti-big-business Wal-Mart haters constantly complaining about the stranglehold that Wal-Mart has on our retail industry, a lot of good things like that come of it. Because the interests of consumers, the environment and retailers are so often aligned and nearly always diametrically opposed to those of manufacturers, they, in a lot of unexpected ways that mom and pop grocers never could, have made life better even for the people that don’t shop there.)

So the market did solve the problem, but decades after it first came to light. And it makes one wonder, couldn’t the government have simply forced this many years ago? A law that all detergents had to be concentrated would have been opposed by nobody except perhaps the shipping industry, who is the only loser in all of this, and even they might not mind much. Manufacturers are giddy right now at the higher profit margins that Wal-Mart has dropped into their laps. Retailers and consumers are almost as happy as they are. Environmentalist bloggers are even singing Wal-Mart’s praises.

Perhaps in certain situations, government can, to the benefit of all parties, enforce certain standards in areas typically left to the market to decide. It’s touchy, because the power to do so can be a slippery slope, but there has to be some way to allow it in certain situations where game theory prevents progress if and only if the vast majority of all interested parties agree to it.

I generally don’t talk about politics much here lately. A little, but not a lot. The main reason is that I don’t have much to say that hasn’t already been said, but better, by someone else. For example I could enumerate the list of reasons why I’m for Obama (beyond net neutrality, which I already mentioned) but it would be much better to just point you at Lawrence Lessig‘s video. He explains it better than I could.

But I figure it’s impossible to write much of anything on the net that hasn’t been said before (except for the forthcoming Zuckerbot Invasion, that one was all me) so I will say that seeing the Democrats tear themselves apart in this primary season saddens me. I feel like Hillary is ruining the party (temporarily, of course) out of her desperation, and we can do nothing but sit back and watch.

And normally I wouldn’t even care. I’m not a Democrat. I don’t consider myself liberal, in fact, I’d call myself largely conservative. But I define conservative in the Goldwater sense, and sadly, I find myself without a party. Or at least without one that has any chance of winning the Presidency.

So I’m left to choose between candidates from a party whose policies I think are well-intended but often range from bad (gun control) to disastrous (universal health care) or a party that has become, dare I say, evil over the last 30 years. I’ll take the well-intentioned buffoons any day.

The Republican leaders have sold their souls to the devil by selling their votes to God. They legislate morality, not because they think it the right thing to do (their rapid alignment behind McCain the second Huckabee appeared viable proved that) but because they know that true conservativism is complex and hard for Americans to understand. We like our issues black and white (drugs are bad, and therefore should be illegal; democracy is good, and therefore should be spread) and just don’t have time for complexity.

The Republican candidates are, on the whole, no more religious than the Democrats, but they’re willing to pretend they are for the votes. And that’s about the least appalling thing they’ve done over the last decade. From push polling to fear mongering, they’ve lost any sense of their core values. They’ve gotten damn good at electioneering in the process. Arguably better than any group ever has before. But they’ve forgotten that in the end, the whole point of getting elected is to make our country and the world a better place. They’ve pursued power only for its own sake, and it is threatening to unravel them.

The worst part of it all is that in so doing, they are often forced to simply deny reality. That has never, in the history of humanity, ended well. Reality is cold and complex, and it doesn’t win votes, but it’s implacable and unavoidable. There was a time for skepticism about global warming, for instance, but that was years ago at best. And yet they’re still pandering to oil companies and doing nothing about our energy crisis, except maybe making it worse by promoting ethanol.

Terrorists killed almost 3,000 people on September 11^th. That seems like a humongous tragedy, but it’s fewer than die every month in car accidents in our country. In fact, more people probably died due to the increased road traffic that occurred after the airline fallout caused by that day than died in the World Trade Center. Yet nary a Republican speech goes by without mention of September 11^th and road safety goes all but ignored.

Psychologists decided over three decades ago that homosexuality was not a mental illness. And despite the lack of proof that gay people choose their orientation (for if homosexuality is genetic, it cannot be any more wrong than being tall or brunette) or any non-religious rationale as to why being gay would be morally offensive even if it were a choice (which should be a requirement, given that we still have separation of church and state in the Constitution, though at this point it’s only a technicality), Republicans deny homosexuals basic human rights like marriage. Even Dick Cheney, who has an openly gay daughter, serves under a president who has done more to dehumanize them than anyone in modern history. Why? For the votes.

The War on Drugs, which the Republicans trod out each time they plant their elephant flag in the Oval Office, has been one of the most disastrous policies our government has ever enacted. It doesn’t appear to have reduced long term drug use, but it has locked up 10% of African American men, created violent gangs, killed untold people on both sides, and ensures that more poor black children than not grow up in single parent households. We’ve locked up a percentage of our population that would make communist Russia grimace, and we wonder why the poor are getting poorer and blame it on welfare.

They’re willing to torture. They’ve thrown Habeas Corpus out the window and detained people for years with no trial. They’ve either lied to or willfully misled the American public into a war that was stupid in foresight (at least given the information the mongers had) and disastrous in hindsight. They’ve attacked anyone with a differing viewpoint ruthlessly, firing prosecutors, outing spies, and lying about it even after being caught red-handed. Their DoJ has opened up investigations into Democratic malfeasance many times more frequently than Republicans. They’ve spied on American citizens without warrants. The list goes on and on.

It’s to the point where even though I like McCain, I’m just not sure I can pull the lever for him because he bears the mark of the beast. He brands himself a maverick, and I guess relative to the rest of his party he is, but when the bigwigs call on him to redefine torture in such a way that they aren’t guilty of it, he, a man who lived through it, is willing to play along. It says something incredibly bad about his character.

So that’s why it saddens me to see the Democratic Party sinking. They refuse to impeach Bush. The Republican Party has lost its way, and it won’t find it again without serious opposition, and the current Democratic Party is so weak (as seen by their refusal to impeach Bush) that they cannot provide it. It’s time for a shakeup, and his name is Obama.

I’m hoping that Hillary does the right thing here. It’s clear at this point that she can do nothing but draw out the conflict and reduce Obama’s chances of winning the White House. Or worse, she can maybe pull off some sort of superdelegate coup and embitter the >50% of Democrats who voted for Obama, and destroy her own chance in the process. Even that looks less and less likely every day though. Most superdelegates are party members who will need votes later, and I think it’s a lot easier for them to explain to a Hillary fan why they voted for Obama (because he won the most delegates and votes popular votes) than to explain to an Obama fan why he voted for Hillary.

Despite the polls (which are virtually useless at this point anyway) I find it very hard to believe that any significant number of people who are for Hillary would vote for McCain if she drops out. That’s just ludicrous. She might have a better image than Obama among the blue collar set, but surely Obama has a better one than McCain.

Obama also gets to differentiate himself on the Iraq War. He can show the videos he posted on his website, before the war even began, condemning it. He can show that he knew the correct course of action not just in hindsight but in foresight as well. Hillary cannot, and McCain can’t even claim to realize it now. His stance on the war is his Achilles’ heel, so if you look at it from an electability standpoint only, it makes sense to go with the candidate who can differentiate himself the most there.

The longer Hillary draws this out, the more Republican she appears in caring more for her own short-term results than the party’s long-term health. I’ll be curious to see if taking this path to the end damages her future credibility. Her supporters claim it’s her right to do so, and it is, but that doesn’t make it the right thing to do.

I’ve long heard that people who have traumatic experiences can often flash back to them if they encounter certain triggers. Today was the first time this ever happened to me, and oddly enough, it was in a video store.

Four or five years back, I was on a cruise held by Party Poker. I got in an elevator on the top floor (10^th if memory serves me) and was going all the way down to the bottom. An older gentleman got in right behind me and immediately started yammering on about God only knows what. He spoke so quickly and for so long that I began to wonder how he managed to do so without choking.

It was a cruise elevator, so it moved slowly and stopped at pretty much every floor. It was probably only a few minutes, but the ride seemed like an hour. I think it had something to do with the “a watched pot never boils” principle. A watched douche bag never shuts the hell up.

The older man finally stepped off on floor 2 and one of the ladies in the back said “he’s so down to Earth.” I can’t imagine the look I must have given her, but it had to be a mixture of confusion and hatred. She seemed to notice at least the first part of the mixture, because she looked at me and said “That’s James Woods.”

“Who is that?” I asked.

“A famous actor.”

I’d never heard of him, so I asked her what movies he’d been in. She rattled off one movie after another that I’d actually seen, and yet I didn’t recognize either his name or his face until finally she mentioned that he was the dad in The Virgin Suicides. I realized immediately that that role, a somber, unassuming math teacher, must have been the biggest stretch of his career.

So today I was in the video rental store, picking out a game, which is in a small, tightly packed room off to the side. I was sandwiched between two stereotypical obese lower middle class soccer moms (who looked just like every single person I saw on that fateful cruise) debating between Mario Party 8 and Super Smash Brothers Brawl, when I heard that voice. I looked frantically for the “open” button and fought back panic before realizing I was on dry land in the Wii section of a Family Video. And then I realized that James Woods wasn’t actually there, it was just a voiceover for a talking penguin in some kid’s movie.

I stepped outside and the sun was shining.

A couple years back, Scott Adams posted an article called Humor Formula, about how to write funny stuff. He removed his archives when he published his book, but you can see it here courtesy of archive.org. In it he defines 6 elements of humor, which are:

Cute (as in kids and animals)

Naughty

Bizarre

Clever

Recognizable (You’ve been there)

Cruel

He claims that the more elements something has, the funnier it is. It takes two to be funny, four is great, and five is "virtually unheard of".

Since reading that, I’ve been analyzing everything I’ve come across and checking for those six criteria. I think it holds up very well, but I’ve come to realize that one of those categories is far more important than the rest, and that’s Recognizable.

Something that’s recognizable but meets none of the other criteria can still be viewed as funny by a lot of people, especially if not much else is similarly familiar. A great example of this is the web comic XKCD. Viewed from any objective standpoint, that site is about as funny as a partial birth abortion. Take this one for example:

Hahahahahah! A parody of The Night Before Christmas! Never seen that before. How original. And the dude is up at 3 a.m. using a computer! I’m practically dying here. (For those who cant tell, the preceding paragraph was dripping with sarcasm.)

Sadly, that’s above average for that site too, at least from the 5 or 10 I’ve seen. But it’s extremely familiar to it’s audience of uber-geeks, and that’s a group to whom not much humor is catered. So even though that site is not actually funny at all, and I’m allowed to say that because I actually get the "jokes" (parentheses required there), a lot of people enjoy it because it’s a sort of recognizable that little or nothing else is.

The above comic certainly fits none of the other categories. It’s clearly not cute, naughty, or bizarre. Well, it’s bizarre that anyone thinks it’s funny, but that doesn’t count. It’s certainly not clever or cruel. And most of their comics are the same, which means that the site has found a substantial audience through sheer familiarity.

I’ve yet to see anything like this with the other categories. Anyone have any examples of popular humor that fires only on one cylinder? Or something unpopular that does 2 or more?