Road Trip Day Four . . . I Begrudgingly Adjust to Central Time

Diligent readers are familiar with my rants about Daylight Savings Time, but this time I have nothing to complain about, as I've inflicted Central Time upon myself . . . so this sentence is going to be a little logy (can a sentence be logy? or just the author of it?) as I woke up at 4:30 AM Monday morning, and after reading some Bill Bryson (The Lost Continent) for inspiration, I did my favorite early morning thing to do at a hotel-- go to the  hotel fitness center and give whatever odd workout devices they have a perfunctory try and then swim some laps in an empty pool-- and though I got an early start, I still had a great time in Chicago; the Shedd Aquarium is awe-inspiring-- even better than the one in Camden-- and the Art Institute is equal to the Met (I saw more Magritte paintings in Chicago than I did in Belgium) and the sculptures and fountains and architecture and skyline in Millennium Park are as beautiful (or more so) than they are in Central Park and the "L" train system is equally as complicated, confusing and expensive as the subway in The Big Apple . . . the CTA employee saved us a few bucks on tickets by sending us around the block to Walgreens to purchase some kind of re-loadable card and then she had to use her personal card to scan the kids at a discount . . . absurdity . . . and the gist of it all is this: I don't know why this surprises me so much-- perhaps because we drove across a sea of farmland-- and I should have known better . . . but Chicago is a real city!

How Did We Survive?

Yesterday, we traveled from the evergreen forests and vast meadows of the Grand Canyon's North Rim all the way to the red rock desert of Sedona . . . it was 48 degrees in the morning at the North Rim, and 95 degrees at noon in Sedona . . . but the biggest difference was technological: we had no wifi at the North Rim-- and these are the things we wanted to look up during our stay up there:

1) the veracity of the word "spackler," we were playing lots of Bananagrams and I used that word . . . but it looks like it's not a word;

2) the exact genetic origins of a mule . . . more on this tomorrow in a profanity-laced description of the North Kaibab trail;

3) the actual time . . . apparently, Arizona does not subscribe to Daylight Savings Time (but the Navajo Nation does) and so every ride was a crapshoot, because the GPS took this into consideration . . . sometimes . . . and we were operating with four different times-- the car clock said one thing, Cat's phone another, my phone a third time, and the clock in our cabin had a fourth (correct) time, but we never bothered to set anything to the correct time;

4) birds . .  . we saw little blue birds (probably Pinyon Jays) and little birds with red heads and yellow bodies and all sorts of hummingbirds and we couldn't identify any of them;

5) the name for a group of ravens . . . everyone knows a group of crows is called a murder, but we kept seeing groups of ravens (usually consuming roadkill) and we didn't know that we could have referred to them as a "conspiracy" or an "unkindness" or a "constable";

6) what a decoy spider looks like;

7) if we could see Phil Torres getting attacked by a spitting cobra on a reality science show which never aired . . . we learned about this on a podcast called Talk Nerdy and the episode is great but you can't see the footage.

I Am A Big Hairy Clock

Last week, when I began my usual rant about Daylight Savings Time, my wife said, "It's like clockwork," and I said, "It's NOT like clockwork! It's the opposite of clockwork! It's anti-clockwork! Clocks don't just jump an hour ahead!" and she said, "Not Daylight Savings Time . . . your annual complaints about it."

Let's Take A Moment and Think Logically

So now that all the uproar over Daylight Saving Time is over, let pitch my plan to you-- and I will admit that when I first explained this plan to my students and colleagues, they laughed at me-- but now I know how to approach the matter in the proper manner, so please bear with me . . . I will begin by asking a few simple questions:

1) is this the age of computers?

and (of course) the answer is "yes"

2) what is 2 times 30?

and (of course) the answer is 60

3) were the children tired the Monday morning after Daylight Savings Time?

and (of course) the answer is "yes"-- so when I propose this I want you to think about the children, all the tired, bleary eyed children . . . the children who don't get enough sleep because they want to watch the Super Bowl, the children who have to stay up late on a Monday night to watch the NCAA Championship, these aggrieved children . . . and so here is my plan, my plan for these children: instead of "springing ahead" an hour all at once, we "spring ahead" two minutes a day for a month . . . computers take care of the time-shift, and if you miss a few days on clocks that need to be set manually, there's no real problem . . . and so you can make a difference in the life of a child, for the low cost of two minutes a day, a mere two minutes a day and you can save a child, just two minutes a day . . . think about it.

Dave Conquers Daylight Savings Time?

This year-- instead of my usual ranting and raving--  I buckled down and prepared for Daylight Saving Time. I normally wake up at 5:40 AM, but last Monday, I set my alarm for 5:30 AM. I then preceded to set the alarm ten minutes earlier each day. A rigorous training schedule.

I gave myself a break the morning after pub night (Friday morning) but then I went back into training on Saturday. I got up at 5 AM. On the weekend. That's dedication.

Here is a training video from Saturday morning. I hope you find it inspirational.

I drank a fair amount of beer on Saturday, watching the wild Rutgers/Purdue game (Rutgers won in OT!) and so I broke training on Sunday and slept in.

This morning, when my alarm went off, I was sleeping soundly, but my training paid off. I was able to rise and shine (to some extent). And I didn't have a heart attack or get into a car accident (both of which are more common right after Daylight Saving).

The transition was still a little abrupt, and so next year I am starting 60 DAYS in advance. I put a reminder on my Google calendar. I'm going to set my alarm one minute earlier each day for two months, an when the big day comes, the "springing ahead" will be totally smooth. The annoying thing, is that we could use computers to do this for us. We don't need to change the clocks a full hour on one particular day. We could use quantum easing over a span of many months and we wouldn't have this awful jarring Monday.

Until then, I will have to do it myself. I suggest you stop complaining and do the same.

We've Got Computers . . . Let's Use Them!

Because of all the flooding, I forgot to mention just how much I hate daylight savings time-- it's not just the darkness in the morning, and the fact that it's difficult enough to teach high school students at 7:26 in the morning without throwing a monkey wrench into the schedule-- those things are bad enough-- but the thing that really gets me is that we allow the government to control time, and-- for once-- I'm not just complaining, I actually have a solution: since it's the digital age and we've built all these tiny computers and placed them in everything from toasters to clock radios, why not have Daylight Saving Month-- if we subtracted two minutes a day for a month, we wouldn't miss them a bit, and we'd accomplish the same goal without inconveniencing the working population (because if you're retired, then who gives a shit?)

I May Have Finally Defeated Daylight Savings Time

The only way to short-circuit the absolute absurdity of "springing ahead" is to stay up really late the night before the clocks change, destroying your circadian rhythm, so that you can go to bed at 7:30 PM on Sunday to prepare for the ugly Monday morning wake-up (but even though I did this, I still felt like shit all day Monday . . . which isn't that unusual for a Monday, so I don't know what to think).

I Am a Libertarian Paternalist

Sorry for all the book reviews, but I read a lot when I was in Florida: Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness is a good one for people who are disillusioned with the axioms of liberalism and/or conservatism, and the authors offer a third way of doing things, which they (Thaler and Sunstein) call "libertarian paternalism," which sounds like an oxymoron, until you accept their thesis that there is no way to set up a neutral choice situation, and that all choices are somewhat influenced by the context in which they are made (the book begins with an apt example from a school cafeteria-- students most often choose food items that are placed first and eye-level, so how do you arrange the food? do you put the healthiest items there? or the most profitable? or is it fairer to do it at random? no matter what you do, you have an influence . . .) and they explain that for many choices -- in the realm of health care, preserving the environment, increasing retirement savings, etc.-- there are ways to increase people's liberty and freedom of choice while also using defaults to nudge people towards decisions that will lead to better lives and a cleaner planet . . . but honestly, their ideas make so much logical sense that I can't imagine America ever implementing them, we'd rather be mired in an eschatological red state/blue state battle until the end of time, when God's rapture will finally sort out the sinners from the saved . . . that's just how we roll in America.

Noam Says It's Okay to be Anti-American

I've been chewing and chomping on Chomsky lately, and while his writings are spicy and might give you mental indigestion, they are also very very tasty; I just finished Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth and Power, and in typical Chomsky fashion, he makes you reevaluate the established hierarchies and hegemonies and truly makes you wonder if we need to dismantle every structure of power before we can actually have a working democracy . . . here are a few of his thoughts on how the powers that be are keeping the electorate in line and preventing too much democracy, which would be a threat to richest and most politically connected constituency:

1) if someone in Italy criticizes the government or policy or Berlusconi, they're not considered anti-Italian, but if you criticize corporate power and/or state/corporate capture/capitalist politics, then you're against the society and you are "anti-American," which is a highly unusual term for a democratic country . . . usually terms like this are used in totalitarian regimes . . . anti-Soviet, for example;

2) Alan Greenspan has praised "worker insecurity" in keeping the economy humming, because insecure workers don't unionize or negotiate or ask for raises and benefits, and American salaries have been stagnant for a LONG time, despite the fact that corporations have tons of liquid assets; this insecurity can result in more and more borrowing . . . which is certainly a feature, not a bug, for the financial industries;

3) Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were the original instigators of this global plutonomy, they were really good at enriching the very wealthy and letting everyone else suffer . . . those two leaders were much less concerned with looking out for American and British middle-class consumers and much more concerned with financialization rules (and lack thereof) that would allow the richest sector of the global economy to profit;

4) rich people make a lot of money through dividends and capital gains, the rest of the society does not...  and tax law has been written to favor making money through dividends and capital gains (and the estate tax has been revised to favor the wealthy as well . . .. more fodder for Chomsky)

5) joblessness is a far more devastating problem than any economic indicator or stock index, and workers have lost the ability to negotiate, form unions, and collectively bargain-- many many people in our country work in a job without benefits or security or a union . . . thank God I'm a teacher;

6) Reagan started this whole business of too big to fail and too big to jail-- he increased the size of the federal deficit by subsidizing and bailing out the banking and savings and loan industries after several financial crashes caused by deregulation-- if big business knows it will be bailed out by a business- friendly government, than it will take extra risks, of course, and taxpayers will foot the bill;

7) for every dollar spent by labor union lobbyists, corporations spend $34 . . . business lobbying is ubiquitous and has caused cronyism and undemocratic policy that even a conservative thinker can recognize;

8) Citizens United and corporate personhood give more rights to corporations in Mexico than it does to undocumented aliens that do work in the United States . . . the Supreme Court justices "are put in by reactionary presidents, who get in there because they're funded by business";

9) people should spend ten minutes thinking about presidential elections and decide which candidate's policy benefits them more and then vote accordingly- there should be no two-year media bonanza-- and then people should get back to what works: community programs, local programs and active dedicated popular movements;

10) running for office in the U.S. is "fabulously expensive" so only political positioned that can draw finance can be presented to voters . . . so much of the most important political discussion is ignored;

11) organized labor is the one force that can fight corporate and government tyranny, and the anti-labor and anti-union sentiment in America is strong, so the rich and powerful should have no trouble keeping the rabble in line;

12) one of the best ways to control people is by "fabricating consumers" and making sure everyone feels like they need something new . . . whether it's getting women to smoke in the 1930s or making you think you need a new phone, fabricating these wants is a great way to keep people from worrying about democracy and policy;

13) his last principle of how to concentrate wealth and power and destroy democracy is the scariest: marginalize the population-- he cites a Martin Gilens study that shows that policy is uncorrelated with public attitudes and that 70 percent of the population has no influence on policy and government . . . they might as well live in another country . . .

so it's hard to read this logic and be pro-American . . . but the one thing that we are tops at is freedom of speech, so maybe people need to start thinking that being anti-American is more American than being pro-American.

Dave Spends $5 Dollars on Future Human Capital

I recently showed my college writing class The Big Short-- we just finished a paper on Karen Ho's illuminating (but rather long and repetitive) essay on Wall Street culture in the aughts: "Biographies of Hegemony: The Culture of Smartness and the Recruitment and Construction of Investment Bankers" and I wanted to show them what happened to this insulated system that Karen Ho critiques-- and my son Alex saw the cover of the DVD and decided he wanted to watch it . . . I told him it was a great movie, but long and complicated, and he said, "My favorite movie is Inception, Dad, I think I can handle it" so  I sweetened the deal and told him if he endured a short lecture from me before the film started-- on mortgages and subprimes loans and stocks and bonds-- and then, at the end of the film, if he could explain the systemic failure and how the financial crash of 2008 actually happened, I would give him five dollars, and-- withour irony and in the spirit of the movie, he agreed to this; Ian also watched and endured several of my financial asides, but when it was all over (and they watched the entire thing last night) Ian declined to try to explain it for five dollars (though he claimed to understand the plot) and also declined to make a sidebet on whether Alex would be able to successfully explain the origins and nature of the crash, but Alex rose to the challenge and gave me a fairly accurate portrayal of the crisis, including mortgage backed securities, CDOs, credit default swaps, fraudulent ratings, how to short the market, premiums eating into your account, the big pay-out and the bail-out . . . the only thing he had trouble with (which the movies glosses over) is the idea that the banks were unloading toxic securities they had created onto investors before they accurately marked the price, then shorting those same investments in order to attempt to balance their books -- creating a crazy conflict of interest feedback loop . . . you can learn about it in this special episode of This American Life, "Inside Job," which details the arbitrage, fraud, and corrupt strategies and tactics that Magnetar used during the crash-- and Alex was suitably annoyed with the result, a taxpayer bailout that funded the very institutions that created the crash and paid big bonuses to many of the engineers of the bubble, a bailout that so enormous that it might be incalculable and probably resulted in the election, oddly, of Donald Trump . . . because, as Jared Vennett clairvoyantly explains at the end:

In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating-agency executives went to jail . . . the SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivative industries . . . just kidding! . . . banks took the money the American people gave them, and used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby the Congress to kill big reform . . . and then they blamed immigrants and poor people, and this time even teachers . . .

the end of that little bait and switch speech surprised both my students and my children-- but it makes sense, as it too boring and complicated to completely understand the forces tearing apart our economy-- so it's much easier to blame the other, the barbarians at the gate and the freeloaders within; anyway, I'm proud of both my kids for making it all the way through-- Ian could have defaulted to The Walking Dead and Alex has decided he's going to read the book . . . maybe if enough youngsters understand what went wrong, they'll vote some people into office that will enact some policy to prevent this kind of thing . . . or maybe they'll blow all their savings on cryptocurrency and we'll all have another great movie to watch.