Missing my bike

Winter has set in and as all of my friends and family know, I am not a fan of the winter.  First off, I am not a fan of the cold and then there's the lack of daylight.  I simply can't stand this Daylight Savings Time nonsense.  I know that there is a reason for it that has something to do with saving energy or something along those lines, I've even heard that there is some benefit for farmers as well.  That's all fine and dandy but for me, its simply a source of lethargy and fatigue.  From the time daylight savings time starts until about mid January every year, I go through a serious struggle to stay ahead of depression.  The coming and going from nightfall to nightfall with daylight only available for a few precious weekend hours causes me to lose a lot of my energy and I often find myself dozing off in the early evening because my eyes convince the rest of me that its bed time. 

At this time of year I develop a strong tendency to let my fitness regimen slip, my focus slips at work and I struggle to keep my grades up in school; all because I become so demotivated. 

But the most painful part of winter for me is that I can rarely find time to get on my bike.  Once winter hits there amount of rideable time seriously drops.  The temperature is sometimes too low, plunging to below freezing which exceeds the temperature limits of my cold weather riding gear or, too often, its very windy out, sometimes dangerously so.  This week has been like that.  Usually the good weather seems to hit during the work week which, of course, doesn't do me any good since, by the time I get home from work, its fully dark outside and a bit risky to be riding on ice patched roads when even the cars with  brilliant headlights can't see the black ice that can send me into a terrible fall or worse.

I miss my bike, even though its gotten squeeky and needs some maintenance.  Tomorrow morning I'm going for my first ride with the Fatmen.  During the warmer days and into the fall I was riding with the guys constantly and got to make some great new friendships.  Unfortunately, school started again and then the cold and dark came.  BAM!   No rides.  Tomorrow.  Hope for tomorrow.

How Labor Unions Drive Wages DOWN

The Fallacy that Unions Raise Wages

Health Care

So a few points on why health care "reform" and Obamacare is bad for America. There's a million arguments on either side and all of them focus on what's the best way to "solve the problem" and really, I think "solving the problem" is redundant because this is not a pragmatic issue.

First of all, what is this supposed problem? Below I will respond to what I have heard from the socialists who don't realize that they are socialists and from the socialists who think socialism is great because they've never been stuck having to live with it.

But first, let me get some premises established so we all are clear on what we are truly saying:

• Health care isn't a thing that simply exists. Health care is a group of services and products (like doctors' knowledge, surgical skills, insurance coverage, dental skill, nursing skills, medications, medical devices, etc) which must be created and/or provided by people. Unlike rights like speech or movement, no one simply has them; they must be provided by other people; people who have rights too. You can get up and walk without anyone's help much as you can speak without help. Health care, however, is the result of the life's work of other people. So when you want to control health the health care industry, you are in reality saying that you want the government to control your neighbors.
• All health care services are the results of people who also have rights and this applies to all elements of health services. The doctor you see is a human being with a name and a life's story and a family, just like you and me. The imaging center you go to for an MRI or XRAY is owned by a person or a group of peope like you and me.
• Even the big, impersonal Health Insurance company or pharmaceutical company is owned by people like you and me, whether the company is owned by one person, a group of partners or is a corporation with twenty-thousand shareholders. When you say "The Greedy Insurance Company" you are really saying "That greedy bastard next door"; you are referring to people, many of whom you may know who are part owners of the big bad insurance company through stocks they own or through mutual funds that they own through their 401(k) which they depend on for their retirement.
• All of these people have invested in these things (whether through money that they spent to buy stocks in an insurance company, drug company or hospital, or business partners who invested in a hospital, or a nurse's aide or pharmacist who invested in her education) with the expectation of making a profit by selling their skills or services or products. In the case of doctors, the investment is in hundreds of thousands of dollars in eduction, startup business costs and up to 12 years of their lives amassing specialized, life saving knowledge. In the case of an insurance company, it can be a lifetime of savings earned by a low income worker who needs the company to profit to be able to eat. In the case of a pharmaceutical company, the pill you take is the result of billions of dollars of research and development costs, hundreds of thousands of man hours of work and sometimes over ten years of effort. No one works that hard for free!
• Government doesn't produce health care. Governments don't produce anything. The only thing a government does is use force on the people. Governments use force to either make people do things or they use force to prevent people from doing things. Behind every action a government takes is the threat of violence. If you disobey you will be fined. Fail to pay the fine, and you will be arrested. Fail to comply with the arresting officer and you will be beaten or tazered and, if your resistance is sufficient, you will be executed. Make no mistake about it, whenever you say "the government ought to do...." the sentence ends in "or arrest/execute anyone who doesn't comply" If you support welfare what you are saying is "the government should force working people to pay for non-working people and arrest/execute anyone who doesn't pay." This isn't an extreme example, its the truth. Ask yourself...."Why do I pay my taxes?" Because ultimately, you know you may go to prison if you don't.
• There is no right that includes the right to take away another person's rights. If there were, then we wouldn't have rights...only permissions.
• For the rest of this post, I will speak in the 1st person singular (me, I, my, etc) or the 1st person plural (us, we, our, etc) because I am speaking as if I were the doctor, the nurse, the pharmacist, the stockholder in the HMO or the pharmaceutical company.

So what are the "health care reformers" really saying here? Here are some of the arguments I have heard:

Too many Americans can't afford health care and don't get the health care they need.

Pharmaceutical Stockholder: True. Its a shame. However, its not my obligation to fix it. If I can donate money to charity I will and I often do. But their need is not a mortgage on my life.Someone else's need doesn't give them the right to take over my life. Their need doesn't give anyone the right to force me to accept less money than I am willing to charge for the pill I manufactured in my pharmaceutical company. That pill cost me $3,000,000,000 to develop and 8 years. I want to make my money back and turn a profit, damnit. If you don't like me charging $50 per pill, then don't buy it. I don't force the money from their hands and no one should take the pill from my hand. If we agree on a price and you exchange money for product, its a sale. You may think the price is too high and I may think its too low but we voluntarily made the exchange. Once you bring the government regulators in, though, there is no choice, there is only a gun in my face. How would you like it if I hired you to work for me for $20 an hour then, after you did the work, I said I was only going to pay you $12 an hour and then had a cop put a gun in your face and tell you that you had to accept $12? Not fair huh? Well then don't do it to me, damnit! I didn't hurt you in any way; I've commited no crime. Why are you punishing me?

HMO Stockholder:It saddens me that some people can't afford health care. Truly it does. But I invested in this company with what little money I have so that I don't have to work until the day I die. I am an old woman so this money has to keep growing. If my insurance company doesn't turn away some patients and try to push back on some questionable claims, its bad business and I lose my life's savings. Besides, if the HMO doesn't stay profitable by making tough decisions then it goes out of business and then no one gets insurance so everyone loses. Just because you need insurance doesn't give you the right to point a gun at me and tell me how I have to run my business. How would you like it if I put a gun in your face and told you how you have to do things in your house? You wouldn't like it, would you. Well don't forget that I own the business so its my property and I can run it the way I choose to.

One of the reasons care costs are so high is because people can't afford insurance so they flood the hospital Emergency Rooms because they know the ER must provide them with medical care so the hospitals and care providers pass the cost to those who CAN pay which means bigger costs for the insurance companies to pay.

Hospital Owner: So let me get this straight...first you tell me that I can't turn people away, even if they show up without the ability to pay. Even though I invested hundreds of millions of dollars to build this place and pay millions to pay doctors, nurses, janitors, pharmacists, cooks, electric bills, water bills, you tell me that if someone can't pay I have to give all of that to him at a loss. Then, to try to stay in business, I pass that cost on to people who can pay but then I'm the bad guy? You put a gun in my head, command me to do business in a way that loses money and I'm the bad guy?

And now you idiots tell me that you want to solve the problem of people being forced to take on the medical costs of other people....by legally forcing people to take on the medical costs of other people? Are you dense or did you just eat lead paint chips as a child?

Here's a thought...just because they need medical care, doesn't give you the right to use government force to make me provide it. What if the same guy showed up at your door and said he needed food. Would you like it if a Federal agent told you that you HAD to feed him or you would be arrested? No? Then don't put me in that situation, stupid!

__________________________

What amazes me is that so many Americans have this muddled notion of what it means when we say that something is required by law or that the law mandates, this or that. No one realizes that it means "a government agency has dictated that you have no right in this matter and that you will be killed if you don't comply". And yet.....we treat it so lightly. We are so willing to send our own neighbors into slavery to solve a problem, like the NAZI (also socialists) gassing retarded people, autistics, and the mentally handicapped because they were technically a burden on the economy. This is why I say that this is not a pragmatic issue of how best to "solve a problem". Man's morals cannot depend on "what works". If that was our moral standard then we are on the same moral ground as NAZIs were for exterminating the mentally or physically disabled. Yes...the plan really did efficiently solve the problem of the cost those individuals imposed on the people. They used the justifaction of "what works".

But was it moral?

ANIMALS operate on the morality of pragmatism. Humanity cannot.

Why I Don't Buy into Global Warming

So let's be clear on something; no one is denying that the earth's climate is changing. Climate scientists and meteorologists that I have read about seem to all agree that the planet is in flux. As Al Gore says, "the consensus" is that our climate really is changing (by the way...I had no idea that science worked on consensus...I thought it worked on evidence, but what do I know?)

Here is where consensus seems to stop.

Where I see a lack of consensus is on the issue of weather the climate change is anthropogenic, or, caused by human activity. That's the real issue, right? If climate change is normal, we probably wouldn't see much activity by politicians on it. The issue is weather or not we are casing it and, if so, what we need to do to stop it. After all, if we are doing something to destroy ourselves, its probably a good idea to try to stop it. But here is where the problem is; there seems to be no conclusive evidence that we actually are the ones causing it.

I'm not one to buy into hype and panic and, since I pride myself on my rational thinking ability and ability to apply reason in the face of challenging situations, I am a natural skeptic. Hysteria and political propaganda mean very little to me. I go by facts, science, proper interpretation of statistical information. Suffice it to say that I like to check things out and look at both sides of an issue.

What I see in my own reading and research is that there are a lot of climate scientists who think people burning fossil fuels have anything to do with our climate change. Apparently almost all of them seem to indicate that climate change is a constant. It sort of reminds me of the lyrics from RUSH's song Tom Sawyer : "He knows changes aren't permanent, but change is". It seems that our planet's climate has never been a constant and changes all the time. Who knew, huh? Oh wait...no...we all sort of knew it. After all, didn't most of learn that in the age of the dinosaurs the earth was much warmer than it is today? Didn't we learn that millions of years later the earth was in the grip of a global ice age? Haven't we noticed with our own eyes that we are not living in a hot dinosaur time or frozen woolly mammoth time any longer? Yes folks...we all know that the climate always shifts but when politicians, media and Hollywood (and let's face it...Hollywood and politics are often in bed together) start screaming "panic!!" we tend to throw our common sense out the window. So the scientific consensus is that the climate actually is supposed to change and will continue to change long after mankind is gone. It seems that, contrary to our own arrogant sense of self importance, we are either totally irrelevant when it comes to climate change or we are no more than one data point in the large equation of what contributes to climate change.

There also seems to be disagreement among scientists on the role of Carbon Dioxide, the proverbial smoking gun, of climate change. The Global Warming proponents would have us believe that the relationship between CO2 and Global Warming is a clear causal relationship, with increases in CO2 directly causing temperature increase. It turns out that there is no consensus on that fact either. In fact there are many of climate scientists that argue that the ride in CO2 is a result of warming not the cause. Go figure.

And, on that note, why do they always argue that warming is a bad thing? Isn't warm weather a good thing? Doesn't the melting of thousands of trillions of gallons of water from the ice caps, etc mean that there is more water available on earth? According to many climate scientists and geologists, if the ice caps were to melt, the world would not end up as scary as the watery planet envisioned in Kevin Costner's Waterworld (a film that is quite scary in its sheer badness). More than likely, the water would rise no more than a few inches. Sure some people would have to relocate but isn't greater water availability and more areas of warm, arable land for agriculture a good thing? If that's the result...why is that so bad. Frankly, I'm sure there are plenty of Innuit who would start heating their homes with burning tires if they could accelerate global warming.

But don't take my word for it, folks let's hear from some of the advocates of unpoliticized science:

Opposing view by the founder of the Weather Channel

Climatologists calling Global Warming a Hoax

UK Court blocks schools from airing Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth because scientists testify that the book contains 11 factual inaccuracies

Link to list of resources opposing the idea that there is a scientific consensus on global warming

My point folks, isn't that global warming is definitely not being caused by humans nor is my argument that we shouldn't reduce pollution and be responsible with our environment, after all, no one wants to live in a trash heap that smells. My point is simply that we need to use legitimate science as a basis for our policies and decisions, not half baked, politicicized pop-science. We need facts, not politics and facts are the realm of science. Trying legislate controls into the lives of people's lives so that they stop causing global warming is simply premature because there is no conclusive evidence that we are causing global warming.

I will leave you with this quote:
"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus..." - Michael Crichton, A.B. Anthropology, M.D. Harvard

A Lesson on People

Here's a key lesson I've learned about people...

People are fundamentally good.

I know that its an age old question that has been pondered by philosophers for centuries. They've often asked if man is fundamentally good and noble or is he fundamentally evil and corrupt. My answer is that man is fundamentally cooperative and wants to do, what he considers to be, good.

We have to recall that man is fundamentally a monkey and is, at his core, ruled by the same principles as all animals pursuing certain key goals

1. Survival of the self
2. Survival of the species
3. Perpetuation of the species

Like all animals, man interprets these priorities and brings them into action in ways that are appropriate to himself. All organisms do this; a violet pursues these goals by having natural immunities, turning as it grows to find the best sunlight, sending out roots to find nutrition and spreading its seeds; lions do it by killing prey, defending against predators, nursing cubs, and developing mating strategies to ensure survival. The violet cannot use the techniques of the lion nor can the lion use the techniques of the violet. For them to do so would be suicidal.

Likewise, man must use the techniques available to him. Since we have such massive brains, what is an appropriate way of living for us is far more complicated than what is appropriate for animals. One of the complicated survival mechanisms we have is our social drive and our communication skills. The social drive is one of the reasons we have the need to have moral codes: simply put, we need to agree on certain standards of conduct to allow us to know what the rules of cooperation were. These rules would vary from culture to culture and society to society but they are always there.

Essentially, moral codes of conduct are ingrained in us so we all want to do good. It doesn't mean that we always do good...but we all want to do good, whatever that code of good behavior is.

I've known a lot of cynics who would disagree with me. Frankly, for a time, I didn't think man was essentially good either. Frankly, I was a bit of an asshole when I was younger so its no surprise. I've noticed something about those cynics though; in general, they aren't happy people and happiness is my ultimate measure of success. Sure some of them may have made more money than me or maybe they got prettier dates than me etc. True, some of them had greater success than I did in certain areas of life but the one trait they had in common was that they simple were not happy people.

On Bailouts

As a cold hearted capitalist, my friends and family often ask me my opinion on the government bailouts of American businesses (or, as I like to think of it, the socialization of American business)and I generally avoid talking about the topic. I've tried to steer clear of this topic on my blog to avoid irritating my friends and family since I already routinely irritate them. But, the bug to write on this topic has bitten me. Fortunately, this argument is simple for me so I can answer it pretty easily:

No free person should be forced to support another person. Welfare is slavery, whether its providing welfare to the poor or welfare to a company.

I am stuned at all the complex arguments people come up with, for or against, the bailouts.

Even those who, like me, oppose bailouts are missing the point using arguments like "Business only works on the survival of the fittest principle." or "ultimately the ups and downs of the free market are what raises the standard of living for all of us in this country so we are all better off in the long run." blah blah blah yada yada yada. These arguments are true and neither of them matter. Ethics aren't pragmatic and are not based on "what works". Does capitalism always make everyone richer? No it doesn't. If pragmatism were our goal then we could justify an any means necessary mentality to improve our lot. So what's wrong with that?

Let's ask Hitler....that was his principle too. Few people can argue that, from an economic perspective, the mentally handicapped are a burden on society in general. From a pragmatic perspective then, we'd have to agree that his efforts to exterminate all the retarted and mentally disabled people in the Reich was the right thing to do. After all, by eliminating this burden from the economy he was helping out Germany. Pragmatic, right? But does that make it right? Is it appropriate for humans to act like that? NO! Only animals operate on the "whatever it takes" mentality. Among animals its okay to destroy the runts of the litter so that the stronger ones can survive. Humans do not work on that same principle. Sometimes, humans take the tough path or take on the burden because it is the right thing to do.

Clearly pragmatism isn't the basis for us to choose right and wrong. (Although...it is true that welfare for the poor or for businesses aren't pragmatic because they lower standards in the long run.)

On the other side of the argument is the view supporting the bailouts. "Woe are the 'victims' of the (insert name of aleged social problem here) who are suffering" is their mantra. "Let's help the victims of (insert name of aleged social problem here)." And so they write their senators and rally and get up in arms until a law is passed to solve the problems of the latest "victims" of the social issue du jour. So what's wrong with that? Accusingly I am asked, "Don't you want to help the poor?" or "people without healthcare?" or "the people who will lose their jobs if the auto industry dies in America?"

And to them I answer and emphatic......"Yes I do!" Surprising isn't it? To hear that a ruthless capitalist like me wants to ....gasp....help people? But its true. I'm a humanitarian. I do volunteer work, participate in fundraisers, donate to charities I believe in.

I really do want to help.....but no one should be forced to help which is exactly what happens the second the government makes any kind of help mandatory.

Once the government makes helping anyone do anything part of its policy, the people are forced to help, even when its against their will. You don't think you're forced? Then you are grossly misled, mon ami. All government aid comes from tax dollars which you have no choice in paying. You are forced to do it. You are forced to help. That's not help...that's slavery.

I will not be forced to help the auto industry any more than I will be forced to help a senior citizen get medical transportation, a child get a free education, or a cancer victim get treatment. No matter how you slice it....all welfare is slavery.

The Latest "Big Bad Rich People" Bandwagon

So here's an issue that's been bugging people; fat bonuses and pay scales for executives leading organizations that are being bailed out.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090203/ap_on_go_pr_wh/obama_bailout

What I think is being overlooked here is that executives work for profit and will go to where the pay is highest. The most capable executives go to where the highest compensation is. If you cut the pay, you no longer get the cream of the crop to run these troubled organizations and you end up getting inferior leadership. With inferior leadership the company will definitely go under, taking all of the bailout money with it.While its true that the government has the right to reuest certain conditions from anyone it lends money to (banks sometimes exercise the same way technique to influence companies, offering loans on the condition that the loan recipient take certain steps), by expecting the executives to lose pay the government will basically be forcing the capable executives to leave which will only make the situation worse. After all, wouldn't YOU quit a job where you got low pay and knew that you could definitely mke more money somewhere else? A better solution is to continue with the expected high pay so that quality leadership will come but tie the money to clearly defined performance goals so that failure is not an option for the executive leadership.Unfortunately, too many people have gotten on the "big bad rich people" bandwagon and are looking for any reason to tear others down and point fingers.