My personal choices

Happy presidents day. Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12th in 1809. My son Zack was born 200 years to the day later in Washington State. George Washington was born on February 22nd, 1732. We celebrate these and other presidents' birthdays on the third Monday of February.

I'm a practical person. I realize that the likelihood of blogging with Google's Blogger platform to get elected president is about as likely to work as shouting at the rain will get the clouds to part and the sun to come out... So why am I doing it? Because I can. Even if a handful of people only ever read this, it still is a nice way to spend some time organizing my thoughts and reflections about what might make America and the world a better place.

I enjoy freedoms like driving my car - I recently sold my 2013 Nissan Leaf to buy a 2019 Chevy Bolt EV. Is it good for the environment? No. Not really. A bicycle would be the best choice I could make. The entire system where we manufacture a 2,000 lb monstrosity to "safely" drive 60 MPH consumes a lot of resources. The energy to move myself and a ton of mass is significant. The electricity to charge that battery comes from some kind of generator at a loss, and the battery itself is made from chemicals that will need to be recycled or disposed of in an environmentally sound manner some time in the future... So why did I buy a battery-powered electric car? A few reasons:

1) I believe in the overall utility of getting away from fossil-fuel based resources - there is a limited amount of gasoline, and it's not good for the air I breathe or my family breathes or our neighbors breathe.

2) Driving an electric vehicle is fun. It accelerates quicker. Even if it's heavy, it's safer than driving a motorcycle, and I'm responsible for driving my family around, so a car that seats 4 and gets me to work fits the bill.

3) My employer (among many others) provides free charging.

4) Other benefits - federal tax break, California Carpool access for Clean Air Vehicles with stickers. Special parking spots for EV charging.

What did I sacrifice for these, or what were the downsides of this choice?

1) Trunk space. It has a smaller trunk than similarly sized cars.

2) Range. It goes 238 miles on a charge (that's generous -- if you're driving in warm-ish weather with no air conditioning you can get more, otherwise you're likely to get less - as many articles pointed out that in Canadian winter, you're likely to get only half of that). FWIW, my leaf had a range of 68 practical miles when I traded it in. My wife's 2018 Prius averages 55 MPG for about 600 miles to a full tank. We traded in her 2011 Prius which did somewhat closer to 50 MPG. Your mileage may vary. I try and drive these vehicles efficiently and fast - leaving room to slow down via regenerative braking vs disc braking for example. My wife drives slow and cautiously.

3) Expense. New BEVs are not cheap, and they maybe don't hold their value as well as gasoline powered cars - especially if the range drops after a few years of use. They say the 2018 / 2019 model years have a longer life... I'll get back to you in 5 years if the market agrees...

4) Range convenience. It takes 10 hours to recharge (or about 1.2 hours on a fast DC charger for ~$20). My wife's Prius gains 10 gallons of fuel to go from 50 miles to 600 miles of range in about 2 minutes for $35. Any trip over 100 miles where we need to stop for under 4 hours, and we're going to be dependent / waiting on charging infrastructure at our destination.

Anyone who would be president is going to be faced with complicated decisions about how we proceed with policies and what tradeoffs to make. I like to understand the complexity of a situation before making a decision like this.

War on climate change

It seems to me that if you want to spend a whole generation's money chasing after a goal with no end in sight, and no exit strategy, that the thing you are supposed to do is declare war on an abstraction. "War on drugs" and "war on terrorism" are my examples.

Why not declare war on climate change?
Why not declare war on poverty?
Why not declare war on diseases?

I want to use our resources to solve the kind of problems we can't otherwise chase.

So much of our political news is about fear mongering and the other side of the world. I just spent my winter break with my family travelling to Southern Europe and Northern Africa. Beautiful cities and hard-working people can be found in these places. The world is a vast and amazing place, and humans have conquered it.

Rather than fighting amongst ourselves, we need to organize and mobilize all of humanity to ensure our future prosperity. That means locking down best practices for stewardship over our shared home and our species long term survival across the universe.

Longer than expected hiatus

It has been some 6-ish months since my last post. I've turned 40, voted, and I decided perhaps that it is time to share this blog with others - one of my new year's resolutions for 2019 is to push the submit button more. I like to take photos and upload them to the internet to share with family and friends, and every so often that is interrupted, and I don't share. The photos pile up locally until our laptop has no space for new photos, and eventually I am forced to declare photo bankruptcy and delete some number of old, possibly unposted photographs to make room for new photographs that might or might not get posted... What a terrible system! Today, something of that sort happened when I spilled a coffee drink all over my backpack and almost sent 2 memory cards that happened to be in the backpack into the laundry... The laptop drive is close to full, and we're at sea in the middle of a long-needed vacation.

I am a technically savvy person, and still, I haven't quite devised a system to figure out how to manage the balance between the joy of taking photos with the work of processing (usually 1-5 minutes per photo) and then uploading and sharing said photos with my friends on social media. Why on earth might you want to vote for someone like that? Beats me. I just haven't posted in what feels like forever. Mind you, dear reader, this is not a promise to resume posting at a regular rate, but instead a return for the moment in the light of the new year's season. The blogging software carefully tracks these posts, so I have no excuses. No excuses. That sounds like a decent campaign slogan / new year's resolution.

Wishing you and your families a safe and happy new year.

Make the world great again!

We are living in an existential crisis. Population growth unchecked and recent technological inventions spell the end of comfortable human life on this planet as we know it. From the industries that have been rapidly (in Geologic time) changing the chemical makeup of our air and water and soil - sacrificing long term stability for short-term profits to the politicians failing to curb the proliferation of Nuclear warheads, we have lost our grip on the future. Only 100 years ago, at the birth of flight and the assembly line, was the last great attempt at conquest - world war I and then world war II.

Today, due to many stabilization treaties and trade treaties, "our world" has mostly been at peace for 50 years. All facets of our peace have become shaken or unraveled in recent times due to the mis-information age president. We are now at a time when the musings of one man on twitter can cause terrible damage. Speech has become a weapon that is tearing apart our country.

When hundreds of millions of people are denied the truth that we are irreparably harming our planet and fail to take action, we suffer. Our children suffer. Our future suffers. Already we have suffering. People are marching in the streets each week. Greater suffering is in our future if we do not find a solution to our rapidly deteriorating environment. This is just as true of our political environment as it is of our natural environment.

I don't have a solution for this. Nobody does. A politician would lie and say something akin to "X is the solution, and if you elect me, I will do X". The solution to this scale of problem requires each and every human in this world to be united against the continued destruction of our planet. It requires science. It requires faith. I can't make this happen. Not even close. But I'm not out of ideas. One of the many people that I admire is Elon Musk - he does have some kooky solutions to some problems (torpedo tube submarine made of rocket parts to rescue children in a cave), but he is creative and resourceful and dedicated to using his resources to further advance humanity's goals.

Powers, Morals, Great America

I have a hard time with watching the news lately. Watching breast-feeding babies separated from their mothers under the guise of the bible and put into cages. This is what America has become. This is disturbing because our nation was founded on the basis that we should be free to practice whatever religion we want. Our ancestors came here in waves, persecuted by bible wielding preachers. We have become that from which our ancestors fled.

I don't know how people can claim this is God's will. I'm waiting for my country's leadership to step up and do something. First to act like a leader wins. So far all I see is blame towards the other party.

What makes America great was an idea whose time needs to come again. In an ideal world, we would try and convict those people who take bribes and sell out their constituents of treason against the people of America. We would throw them in prison or worse, but that's not what will happen because we do not live in a just world; we live in the real world, where ideals are dreams. The American Dream is alive and well if you are rich. Otherwise, you are a beggar and scum to our government. There are people actively working to disenfranchise you. They are afraid of the kind of vindictive person who might take away what they have and distribute it.

Socialists, Communists they would call you. Maybe. Those words lost meaning decades ago. "This is all hyperbole." I hear people living under a rock cry out. "We have agents of our government to look after our poor, right?" I hear you say that we have these institutions for equality in Housing and Urban Development and equality in Education. Once upon a time we did. We knew how to stand up for what is right. Now these institutions are crumbling under an administration working actively to screw the American poor.

Why do I deserve to go to fancy restaurants and live in comfort? Because I won the birth lottery. I was born to parents who lived the American dream - starting their company and making money. Employing people, and providing value. In better words, I don't deserve my lot in life. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to give it up. My point is that we are all deserving of good food and clean water and air. We all need shelter. We all need someone to stand up to the bullies. Today the bullies are the ones with the money. The only way to prove you're standing up is to not accept campaign finance. That's not how the game is played, I'm afraid. No money means no voice. No voice means no organization. No chance. All we have are those mired in the donorship trough, voicing poll-tested lines and ducking questions, placing blame, and doing what their owners pay them to do.

Happy father's day. We are camping with our religious community this weekend, and I'm on vacation from blogging for a few weeks.

Online identity and policy; won't somebody think of the children?!?!

Every so often, you hear a politician try and come up with a solution to the duopoly that is our childlike anonymous online self. I read an article today about one such politician. The proposal is that you must provably identify yourself online so that you can be punished if you misbehave. The article suggests that billionaire tech founders have control over the vast usage of their platform and should be willing to impose draconian measures to prevent harm from befalling on their end users.

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Pardon me while I go off hunting for memes about people being mean on the internet.

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To anyone implementing these crazy notions, I warn you: watch your Daily Active Users go crashing. My children are 9 and 12 years old... They will use social networks poorly, and there are many, many millions of other pre-teenage children on the internet with brand new internet IDs. Ask them for proof, and they'll use your competitor. Facebook has 1.45B DAU (source), but website Reddit recently surpassed (source) Facebook as the number 3 website on the internet - behind Google and YouTube. As much as the UK PM is right that what is illegal offline is also illegal online, violence is something which has an offline presence. There is no easy button, and your citizens won't stand for putting microphones in their homes -- I use a Google Home, but that's only because I'm foolishly trusting in big G as a target with too much to lose if they should violate enough end user trust. As an American, I don't trust the government (of any country) to set the rules. The internet is some kind of virtual world, where not all the inhabitants are human, and not all humans are who they pretend to be, nor are they connecting from where you think they are.

So what can be done, and what is being done in this space? Well, I don't want to be a pessimist and say that nothing can be done - there is some extent to which we are talking about whac-a-mole (an arcade game which represents a futile effort at making a lasting change). There are interesting efforts - one that I've recently been made aware of is named Perspective - part of Google's Jigsaw - which attempts to discern harassment from conversations. The ultimate problem is that no one country can control its people online. Online is a big place. It is the wild west, but that's also part of the draw.

Balances of powers, scales of justice, and cake

The 7-2 gay wedding cake supreme court decision that came out this week (full text - 59 pages) was a disappointment for many people who are anxious that we are returning toward a religious state that our founders were desperate to avoid. To me, and reading much of the 59 pages this week, it falls into one of those many situations where it's complicated, and it's also a personal matter: My grandparents started a quite famous bakery by the name of Freed's in Las Vegas in 1959. I'll refrain from regailing you with many stories of all the chores and jobs my dad and his four siblings did some 50 years ago to help their struggling parents make that coffee stand with donuts into thriving a bakery.

I don't quite understand how we live in a society where our highest court justices don't understand the difference between participating in a "gay wedding" due to "not condoning it" vs discriminating baking a cake for a celebration involving 150 guests on the basis of the buyer. In my mind, the test case isn't the central case. I wonder what happens if a gay couple wants a wedding cake, and so they go shopping with a lesbian couple... Tricking the business and buying two wedding cakes... That people would have to resort to this is wrong. Then after the ceremonies send the store pictures of the newlyweds and thanking them for their wedding cakes, what happens?

See, this to me is the contrapositive. The business would have not sold the cakes. Can they then sue the couples under this ruling? This is where government laws and mathematics diverge. In reality, I don't want this supreme court decision tested again and again. For starters, I can't find a test for this decision that doesn't start with some people being terrible to others and then bringing in lawyers. Really, though, the test would be if people refuse to sell other goods and services to Gay, Black, Hispanic, Latino, Asian, and Jewish people - that's the test. That's the slippery slope.

The bottom line is that all fundamental laws and religion and in fact the civil code of our society begins with the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.