Category Archives: Modernization

We’re all Tiger Woods Now

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Remember how the 1992 “Dream Team” waltzed through the Olympic basketball competition on their way to their gold medal? Fast forward to 2004 when the US lost three times and settled for bronze. Fast forward some more to today. A Sports Illustrated mock NBA draft shows five of the first eight teams taking international players.

What about golf? There are four U.S. players among the top ten, and with Woods dropping fast, that will probably be three soon.

Tennis? The top U.S. player, Mardy Fish, is ranked #10, Roddick is #11, and then you have to scroll down to #26 before finding another American.

Soccer? FIFA has the U.S. ranked 22nd in the world.

The marathon? The first 14 are East African and 65 of the top 100 are Kenyan.

Long distance triathlon? Linsey Corbin, from Montana, is ranked 7th, the only American woman in the top 10. Timothy O’Donnell is tied for tenth among the men.

The most recent international test scores (NAEP) were recently published. In math and reading, U.S. students are in the middle of the pack among students from OECD countries. In science, back of the pack.

People suffering from acute “greatestcountryintheworldhysteria” will look hard to find different competitions we’re winning (personal debt, football by default since hardly anyone else plays it, health care inflation, gun ownership, fossil fuel usage, military spending). While their parochial heads are buried in the sand, more and more of the world supersedes us in classrooms and on athletic fields.

We’re all Tiger Woods now. The rest of the world isn’t the least bit intimidated. All young international students and athletes want is the opportunity to go toe-to-toe with us.

The Satisfaction Treadmill

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I’m a third of the way into William B. Irvine’s excellent book, “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy”. Irvine “plumbs the wisdom of Stoic philosophy, one of the most popular and successful schools of thought in ancient Rome, and shows how its insight and advice are still remarkably applicable to modern lives.”

The first “Stoic psychological technique” is negative visualization or regularly contemplating the bad things that can happen to us. There are several reasons to practice negative visualization, but the main one is “We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.”  Psychologists refer to this as hedonic adaptation. We experience hedonic adaptation when we make consumer purchases, in our careers, and in our relationships. Irvine writes, “As a result of the adaptation process, people find themselves on a satisfaction treadmill.”

He adds: One key to happiness, then, is to forestall the adaptation process: We need to take steps to prevent ourselves from taking for granted, once we get them, the things we worked so hard to get. And because we have probably failed to take such steps in the past, there are doubtless many things in our life to which we have adapted, things that we once dreamed of having but that we now take for granted, including, perhaps, our spouse, our children, our house, our car, and our job. This means that besides finding a way to forestall the adaptation process, we need to find a way to reverse it. . . . The Stoics thought they had an answer to this question. They recommended that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value—that our wife has left us, our car was stolen, or we lost our job. Doing this, the Stoics thought, will make us value our wife, our car, and our job more than we otherwise would.

Irvine goes on to contrast two fathers–one who periodically reflects on his child’s mortality and the second who refuses to entertain such gloomy thoughts. The second father assumes his child will outlive him and that she will always be around for him to enjoy. The first father, he concludes, will almost certainly be more attentive and loving than the second.

So far, I’m down with modern Stoicism. Even though I’m probably more contemplative than the average bear, the notion of a satisfaction treadmill resonants with me. I take things for granted that I know I shouldn’t, especially my health; my family’s health; my material well-being; my work; and a promising future. I experience wake-up calls—the literal phone call of my father’s sudden death tops that list, the death of a neighbor’s child from leukemia, stories of cyclists getting hit and killed, and more subtle nudges like illness, and job loss and home foreclosure stories.

My take-away from the chapter on negative visualization is to be much more intentional about reflecting on the bad things that can, and in many cases ultimately will, happen to me. Stop depending on being surprised by late night emergency phone calls, and instead, make time every day or week to reflect on losing the things I most value—my family’s health, my marriage, my health, our friends, our home.

And, of course, my faithful Pressing Pause readers.

Cry Freedom

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I was running with a friend one early morning recently when he started complaining about the gradual, seemingly inevitable, decline of freedom in the U.S. It takes a whole village, government intrusion, I’ve heard it all before, but this time I snapped.

“FOR EXAMPLE?” “Well, making fast food restaurants list the calorie count for every item on their menus.” “Wow, that is egregious, giving consumers more information to make better decisions. Maybe we should go into grocery stores and remove the same nutritional information from all the canned goods and other items. What else?” “Forcing people to wear helmets.”

I guess he’s correct, if by freedom we mean more specifically the right to eat crap without knowing it and the right to crack our heads open when we fall off our bicycles and motorcycles.

Then over breakfast, I kicked on National Public Radio and listened to Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera’s story. Nabagesera has just been awarded an international human rights award for fighting for LGBT rights in Uganda where homosexuality is illegal. Earlier this year, her closest colleague, David Kato, was killed, most people believe, for being openly gay.

And then we have the stirring examples of Tunisian, Egyptian, Yemenis, and Syrian democracy protestors willing to die so that their fellow citizens might have the right to assemble, vote, and speak freely.

The U.S. is imperfect, but thanks to our constitution, we can assemble, vote, and speak freely about our right to eat crappy food and crack our heads open. And we can choose where and how to live, work, worship, and raise our children.  We can criticize our elected officials without fear of reprisal and we can tweet and blog until our heart’s content.

Maybe Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly should lead an Arab Awakening tour abroad so that my right wing nutter friend and his friends can better appreciate the freedom they seemingly take for granted.

Osama bin Laden is Dead, Al Qaeda is Not

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I just finished reading Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, considered by many the definitive “rise of Al Qaeda, 9/11 book”. It was an extremely ambitious project rooted in meticulous research.

Here’s what Patrick Beach said of Wright’s work: Even for Wright — a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine who’s long been regarded as a superhumanly tireless journalist — the book is a feat of terrific endurance. He has traveled for much of the past five years, conducted some 600 interviews, compiled a reference library of 150 or more books and inhaled tens of thousands of documents. The guy’s work ethic makes every other scribbler look like a punk. And every single fact, element or category — what Osama bin Laden has had to say about Saddam Hussein, for example — has been annotated and cross-referenced using Wright’s famously meticulous index card system.

The Looming Tower is brilliant on several levels, but maybe its greatest strength is Wright’s remarkable clarity. He always opts for the simplest form of expression, as a result, despite the foreignness of a lot of the content, I almost never had to re-read. Sometimes I chose to re-read a paragraph or two just to marvel at the incredible economy, simplicity, and accessibility of the narrative.

Almost always, whenever Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Central Asia, and/or the “War on Terrorism” comes up in conversation I’m amazed at two things: 1) how strong everyone’s opinions are how we should combat Al-Qaeda and 2) how little those same people know about Islam, Osama bin Laden, and Al Qaeda. As just one example, I would guess less than 10% of North Americans could correctly list the “five pillars of Islam“.

Since Al Qaeda hasn’t pulled off a 9/11-scale attack in the U.S. over the last nine plus years, and Osama bin Laden has been killed, the vast majority of U.S. citizens would say our post 9/11 response and current military commitments have been spot-on, but I’m not so sure the world is much more secure than in 2001 despite the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our trillions of dollars of military spending.

Reading one excellent book doesn’t make me an expert, but here are some of the most relevant post-bin Laden things I learned from The Looming Tower: 1) Arab governments’ torturing and killing of Islamic fundamentalists repeatedly led to increased Islamic fundamentalism. 2) Islamic fundamentalism is an ideology; consequently, it rests far more on ideas than on one or a few charismatic leaders. Our military, by itself, even with its special forces and drones, cannot defeat the ideology. 3A) Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s top officials always hoped the 9/11 attacks would draw the U.S. into a protracted conflict in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They have been successful in fomenting more violence. 3B) Osama bin Laden was not, and Al Qaeda’s top officials are not, afraid to die for their ideas. They embrace the idea of martyrdom. 4) Osama bin Laden’s death will no doubt damage Al Qaeda’s finances, but those losses could conceivably be offset by the organization’s ability to leverage his new status as a martyr to recruit new members. I disagree with the “experts” on television right now saying this is an Al Qaeda “deathblow”.

I am not even close to mourning bin Laden, but forgive me if I sit out the raucous public celebrations. It’s far too early to know whether this is a substantive turning point in creating a more peaceful, secure world for all the world’s people.


Green Tour 11

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Last April the GalPal and I thoroughly enjoyed Olympia’s first Green Tour of 7-8 environmentally advanced homes. Two weekends ago we went on the second annual tour which had 20 homes and businesses available for people to visit. Last year the tour highlights took one afternoon, this year we spent the better part of both Saturday and Sunday visiting probably ten homes.

The extra-personable designers and builders use the tour to educate people and of course network in the hope of drumming up business in an obviously dismal housing market. Sometimes we’d look at a house for fifteen minutes and then spend another forty-five talking to the designer or builder.

We were especially impressed with the work of a young female architect who has designed Olympia’s and Washington State’s first passive homes. Here’s her company. I can be as skeptical as they come when presented with trendy buzzwords like “green,” “sustainable development,” “and eco-friendly,” but I’m convinced that when it comes to energy efficient home building there’s at least as much fire as heat (pun intended) and substance as style.

The one downer of the tour was visiting the “Jewelbox“, an 1,100 square foot passive home (excluding the separate state of the art art studio/shop) with an incredible 270 degree view of the Puget Sound just two miles from downtown. As the GalPal and I walked down the tree-lined street towards the “Box” and the Puget Sound, we realized it was on a property a friend had tipped us to two years ago before it went on the market.

We looked at it and loved the location, but passed because we thought it was overpriced and we couldn’t get past the decrepit house that would need to be knocked down. The furniture maker/sculptor owner found it on craigslist. He said the day he visited it the owners dropped the price 100k and eventually accepted his offer that was another 100k less. I’m glad I resisted punching him because he couldn’t have been a cooler, more soft-spoken, down to earth dude. I’m fascinated by the way many artists can envision things that I can’t. Sometimes landscaping, decorating, housing design vision is just built-in.

In the last year, the greenest U.S. designers and builders have taken a great leap forward. If your house is even two or three years old there’s a good chance it doesn’t capitalize on many of the most recent advances.

Granted, the science is interesting, but I’m more interested in the economics and the politics. In Europe, passive homes add about 7-8% to the cost of building a traditional home of equal size. In the U.S., because most of the wall and window materials have to be imported, it’s more like 15%. That 7-8% gap will no doubt slowly close as North American demand picks up. Once completed, a passive home’s utility costs are about 10% of normal. I’ve looked at computer models that suggest the pay-back period is approximately ten years. One 2,400 square foot home used a 1,000 watt b.t.u. air blower (less than a blow dryer) to heat the whole house.

Even with padding and rugs, the concrete floors would probably take some getting used to, and the outdoor siding is quite rough and different looking. No doubt you and I will adjust to those differences in short order as we become more familiar with them. More generally, the aesthetics of the kitchens, bathrooms, and other parts of the homes can be exceedingly nice.

I know not everyone can afford a stand-alone home and very few will ever be able to afford “overpaying” up front in anticipation of future savings. But for the economically most fortunate, the economic calculation is the same one I did with paper and pencil five years ago when deciding to buy a slightly more expensive hybrid car. I thought it would take 7-9 years to begin saving money on my car, but we’ve chosen to drive it more than expected and with a higher average cost of gas than I conservatively estimated, it’s only taken five years to reach the break-even point.

Now every time I fill up for $40 (based on about 46mpg), I think I just saved myself $40 more (based on 23mpg). Here’s another interesting example of the same concept. The analogy works even in the sense that I received a federal tax break for my hybrid car purchase because there are many rebate type incentives in place for things like solar energy (in that case, for nine more years apparently).

I’m thinking seriously about building a passive home, or more accurately, sitting passively while the home of the future is built for me.

Is Online Learning A Good or Bad Thing?

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I know you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, but is the steadily increasing popularity of on-line learning a good or bad thing?

Depends. If all one wants students to do is recall mostly factual information on mostly objective exams, online learning makes a lot more sense than everyone meeting at brick and mortar locations at the same time.

But if it’s important that students learn to think critically, analyze content, and show empathy for others or develop greater self-understanding, a social conscience and interpersonal skills, it’s problematic because those skills tend to require “thinking out loud” side-by-side, asking questions, debating case studies, listening, problem-solving, and in the end, constructing knowledge together.

Then again, it’s probably just a matter of time until on-line instructional software incorporates group video conferencing and other related features that will make all of those more interpersonal aims equally achievable on-line.

Until then I confess to getting more than a little queazy when applicants to the Masters teaching certificate program I coordinate inform me they attended on-line universities. “Is that going to be a problem?” Inner voice, “Hell yeah!” Apart from counseling and diplomacy, I can’t think of any more intensely interpersonal profession than teaching.

I want prospective teachers to be subject-matter experts—which means knowing the elementary curriculum AND eight year olds inside and out or 9th grade physical science AND adolescents. I also know that their success as teachers will hinge as much or more on their ability to get along with students’ families and their fellow teachers and administrators more than their undergraduate grades or teaching licensure test scores. When it comes to adults getting along with one another, every school is dysfunctional, just in different ways and in different degrees.

Isn’t most contemporary work similarly interpersonal? And shouldn’t education be about citizenship as much as it is employment? And doesn’t effective citizenship require well developed interpersonal skills?

Maybe the better, more specific question is what distinguishes good online programs from bad ones? My guess is the best online programs are hybrids that require students to combine their online learning with weekly or monthly face-to-face teaching and learning experiences on brick and mortar campuses.

The “Bottled Water” Era of Internet News

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Starting today, the Gray Lady is watching and counting. Twenty free articles a month and then at least $15/month. The Times is an excellent newspaper, probably not as good as it was a few decades ago, but still very good. It’s my homepage, I read it regularly, I enjoy it, but unlike Jack Shafer, I will change my reading habits to avoid paying.

Shafer describes the current New York Times website as free. Only if he is using his employer’s internet service or someone’s wireless signal. I pay about $70 a month for internet service (including unlimited iPad 3G service). Of course my internet service providers, Comcast and AT&T, don’t pass along any of my $70 to the New York Times, so I’ll grant Shafer his point that Times writers deserve more support than web hits and associated ad revenues generate.

The problem though is that instead of partnering with other major internet news sites, the Times is making this leap solo. There are too many free substitutes of near comparable quality. I’ve never understood the bottled water craze given the quality of tap water in the U.S. I will read the Los Angeles Times, Slate Magazine, the Huffington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and the free Economist and New Yorker content more. And I’ll visit the BBC and NPR websites more.

It will be interesting to see what percentage of on-line Times readers cough up for unlimited on-line access. I heard a journalism business analyst say the Times needs 1% of it’s on-line visitors to begin paying for the experiment to be a success. If that’s true, expect to see other periodicals follow suit relatively soon. Then, thank Shafer, not me, for the “bottled water” era of internet news.

A War on Oil Dependence

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Photo credit: Ray Maker, DCRainmaker blog

We’ve had “wars” on poverty, drugs, and terrorism, why not oil dependence? Imagine a bold president challenging and inspiring us to reduce our use of oil by 20% in ten years. Why wait for that type of leadership? Let’s just commit to driving two percent fewer miles, per year, for ten years.

Dare we learn some things from other people in other places, like this Amsterdam family? Note the obvious: the fenders and racks; the large kid/cargo holder; the simplicity of the bikes and bike riders; no lycra, helmets, or cleated shoes; the utter normalness of it. With dedicated lanes and slowish bikes, helmets aren’t as critical. And the less obvious: the slower pace, the reduction in greenhouse gasses, the health benefits and reduced health care costs, the vitality of the sights, sounds, and elements.

City planners need to incentive bicycle commuting by integrating dedicated bike lanes, and safe, well-lit bicycle parking lots into their designs. Cities need to provide employers with incentives for bike lockers, air compressors, showers.

Car insurance should be based upon mileage traveled. Find the national average and set rates so that people who drive the national average pay existing rates. Make people self-report and audit a small percentage each year. People that drive 10% more than the national average, pay 10% more; 10% fewer miles, pay 10% less.

A nod to Friedman, raise the gas tax to $1/gallon.

I would love for someone to point me to counter examples, but our public bus systems are painfully inconvenient and slow. And unless you’re fortunate enough to live in a handful of our largest cities, subways and trains are rarely a viable option.

In the U.S. we like to pat ourselves on our collective back for being creative and hardworking, but we’ve shown no imagination or gumption when it comes to developing genuine alternatives to car travel.

Time to change that.

Two Roads Diverge—The Conclusion

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The conclusion—Our children and the fork.

What should our children do to increase their odds of enjoying some semblance of economic security?

For the last several years I’ve been preaching a liberal arts education gospel. The message has been that the key to success in our increasingly competitive knowledge economy is a rigorous higher education that develops analytical, writing, critical thinking, and related intellectual skills. Then this mind-blowing article appeared in the New York Times—Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software.

Fork anxiety alert.

E-discovery companies like Cataphora are forcing me to rethink many of my assumptions. In terms of employment success, a college education, even a law degree, guarantees less and less. Instead of starting over with a brand new gospel, I need to supplement my call for a rigorous college education with additional strategies.

One overlooked strategy, self-sufficiency, is beautifully described in the book Little Heathens. Each of our children have to decide whether to follow our model of pursuing competence or expertise in one particular area, and then trading that competence or expertise into money through long work hours, and then handing significant percentages of the money over to others for a litany of products and services including, but not limited to: growing and preparing food; making and cleaning clothes; entertainment; education, hair and related personal care; pet grooming and care; cleaning and repairing bicycles, cars, and homes; tax preparation; counseling and medical care; yard work; personal trainers and life coaches.

Rightly or wrongly, most modern peeps have convinced themselves that their time is worth more than it costs to pay for those types of products and services. But the fork will change that equation for some of our children. What if our children experience under or unemployment, what if their wages can’t keep pace with inflation? What if they have more time than money? Although no one is talking about it, self-sufficiency is a common sense insurance policy in an increasingly unpredictable woods.

In addition to greater self-sufficiency, young people who develop a specific craft or trade will enjoy more economic security because they’ll be able to use their craft or trade to supplement their income or weather periods of under or unemployment. If artificial intelligence or related technological breakthroughs make them redundant for six months or a year, every four or five years over the the course of their adult working lives, my daughters could teach violin to Tiger Mother offspring. Put all of your economic security eggs in the intellectual skills basket at your own risk. Teach your children to lifeguard or teach swimming, to cut hair, to repair bicycles, to landscape, to design web pages, to care for and tutor younger children.

Also, and we’re nearing the end of our journey, agitate and advocate for “life-skills” in your children’s school curricula. We have to push back against the President’s and high profile business leaders’ insistence that all we need to negotiate the fork is marked improvement in math and science education. Truth be told, I’m not very self-sufficient, more handsome than handy, so for my daughters to become meaningfully self-sufficient, I need the help of teachers and other adults in the community.

Where’s the room in the curriculum? Not sure, but independent, Waldorf, and other alternative schools often find room for life skills. The publics would be well advised to turn to their smaller, funkier brethren for guidance. And since I don’t expect that to happen, parents better put their heads together to figure out how to help their little heathens become more self-sufficient.

And to borrow from Sue Sylvester (I shudder if you have adolescent children and don’t get that reference), that’s how Ron sees it.

Two Roads Diverge 2

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Part 2 of 3—The left, the President, and my evolving thoughts on the fork.

The left attributes stagnant wages, high unemployment, and heightened economic scarcity to conservative Republican ideology, unregulated Wall Street bankers, and all-powerful corporations. The U.S., the left contends, is not a meritocracy. Within our laissez-faire free-market capitalist economy the wealthy have many more opportunities to advance than the poor; consequently, the rich get richer and the poor poorer. Increasing the wealthy’s taxes will reduce inequality, help more people find jobs and pay for health insurance, and give the majority of people with ordinary means a fighting chance.

The right, because they insist our economic problems can be fixed by a kind of American exceptionalism positive thinking, is failing to provide any kind of realistic roadmap that might help us negotiate the fork and create genuine, lasting forward momentum.

The left, because they insist it’s impossible for individuals and families to create any kind of economic security because the gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” is so wide, is also failing to provide a hopeful, credible, compelling roadmap.

With an eye towards November 2012, the President tends to split the difference and articulates an American exceptionalism-lite that he couples with an unfailing belief that a renaissance in math and science education will help us reclaim our role as the world’s undisputed economic hegemon.

Neither political party’s platform offers any assurance that nearly enough decent paying jobs will be created, we’ll transition to alternative energy sources, health insurance and Medicaid will be affordable, and anyone but the already well-to-do will enjoy prosperity.

Despite the understandable fear and foreboding, I’m finding more inspiration from ordinary people living humble, simple, selfless lives, than from any political figure, party, or platform. People unmoved by materialism. People attuned to the limits of time. People who identify more as writers, artists, peacemakers, ecologists, and global citizens, than consumers. People relatively unperturbed by the fork because they’re on simpler pathways.

The wrap against minimalism or voluntary simplicity is that it’s boring. Sometimes minimalists deserve criticism for a one-size fits all mentality, but not for being boring. What’s boring is subjective. For me, inexpensive things like writing, preparing and enjoying a healthy meal with a few family members or friends, reading a good book, seeing an excellent film, working out, and watching basketball with the labradude are sufficiently exciting. I’m cool with other people thinking those things are uninteresting.

The natural reaction to our tough economic times and the fork in the woods is to be disappointed with having to live with less. On the other hand, it could be a catalyst for rethinking our taken for granted consumerist-materialist lifestyles.

Some will conclude, “An out-of-touch sentence that only a person who doesn’t have to live month-to-month or worry about basic needs could write.” I get that. I’m beyond fortunate. I’m not sharing my evolving thinking to convince anyone to give up anything, I just hope my musings about how much is enough and what’s most important resonates with some readers.

There’s a big difference between “voluntary simplicity” and “forced frugality”. A forced frugality mentality, “damn we can’t afford anything anymore,” breeds ever-increasing resignation and frustration. In contrast, a voluntary simplicity orientation that prioritizes health, interpersonal relationships, and service is liberating because not as much money is required, meaning not as many hours or years of work may be needed.

This reorientation is similar to my learning to eat more healthily. Initially, I didn’t particularly care for low sugar, non-fat, veggie and fruit based meals, but ten years later I prefer them. I don’t have to force myself to eat healthily, I prefer it. I don’t have to force myself to live relatively simply (by 2011 North American standards), I prefer it.

Wherever this non-work, simplicity journey takes me, I doubt I’ll ever reach a state of buddhist nirvana. I like to travel, I like cars, carbon fiber bicycles, nice hotels, and massage “therapy” too much. And not too proud to admit, I even like Million Dollar Listing on Bravo. Ample room for growth.

Next—The conclusion—Our children and the fork.