Teachers, The Ethics of Waiting in Line, and Why Dave Is a Great Humanitarian

The PTSA always provides the teachers with a nice spread of food on the first day back, so we can load up before the endless meetings; this year there were several tables in a row, parallel to the cafeteria wall, offering a buffet of fruit, muffins, donuts, coffee, bagels and cream cheese, and cookies . . . but when my colleague Krystina and I made our approach, we had to contend with a long line . . . a long line inching along on ONE side of the row of tables, the closer side, but no one was serving themselves along the other side of the tables-- and the tables were a good six feet from the wall, so there was plenty of room for people to line up and serve themselves on that side as well-- so I said, "Let's go" to Krystina and walked past the line, grabbed a plate, and served myself-- unimpeded-- on the far side of the buffet, but I looked back and Krystina was still in line and she wouldn't budge-- most teachers like to follow the rules-- and I think a few people might have looked at me askance, because while I didn't cut per se, I did serve myself before a lot of people who were waiting patiently in line, and I served myself much faster than the people slowly plugging along on the crowded side of the row of tables, and once I got back to my own little table and sat down, I noticed that the other teachers had followed my lead and they were now serving themselves on both sides of the row of tables, so though I did something slightly immoral, it was ethically utilitarian, because once I broke the ice, a greater number of people served themselves in a more expedient manner . . . so nice job Dave, for making things flow more smoothly and for making a bunch of teachers realize that sometimes you need to break the rules of etiquette in order to get a system to work more efficiently.

Prepare to Be Confused, Then Outraged, Then Confused Again

You may have heard some news about the exorbitant price increase for the Epipen, the ubiquitous life-saving anaphylaxis injection, and that the Heather Bresch-- the CEO of Mylan, the company that produces Epipen-- is the new Martin Shkreli, but the the issue is more complicated than a couple of greedy executives incentivised by stock prices and financial gains; if you really want to understand some of the context and the big picture, listen to the first third of Slate Money in their Worse Than Marxism edition, as they can explain it better than me; their point is this: sometimes markets and capitalism work worse than Marxism . . . markets are great for fungible items that aren't totally necessary and don't need to be on constant flow-- oranges, sneakers, houses, milk-- but crazy things happen when markets and regulation coexist (because the item or service is necessary for day to day infrastructure) so when you have electricity markets (Enron) or health care markets, where there is regulation, monopolies, the hurdle of the FDA, middlemen (pharmacy benefit managers) and no consumer transparency, and so in this instance, Mylan has increased the price of an Epipen from 100 dollars in 2007 to over 600 dollars today AND they did an incredible job marketing the need for the product (which remains mainly unchanged) so that dental offices and schools and Disneyland are required to have these things, generally in first aid kits-- which rarely get used, as most people who need an Epipen carry one-- and so most of these Epipens will gather dust and expire in a year (do they really?) and so you've got to replace them all and while, of course, we should try to have Epipens in as many places as possible, we should have them in as many places as is reasonably possible-- without incurring insane expenses (and I recognize this is cold utilitarian morality in the face of peanut and bee sting deaths, and so I'll let Louie CK do his thing . . . I put it up top, go 40 seconds in) while Heather Dresch is saying the system is broken, deductibles are too high, and we never wanted consumers to pay full price for these items, and then she's offering a 300 hundred dollar rebate card to consumers, this means that the health care system is going to foot that bill, and unless a big story breaks like this, most of the time-- because of opacity, collusion, and the inability for our government to negotiate and regulate prices on drugs-- we'll be unwittingly paying for all this because we never know what anything costs . . . and Heather Bresch, in her CNBC interview, blames the system for the price and she does offer a silver lining-- which is probably specious-- is that Americans are subsidizing drug prices for the rest of the world . . . because you can get an Epipen in Europe and Canada for less than 100 dollars-- the problem with this logic is that there hasn't been many blockbuster drugs developed recently, as big pharma has been more interested in researching older very specific drugs that have no generic, improving them slightly, and then jacking the price way up and marketing these drugs effectively, and so getting Epipens into restaurants, hotels, etcetera and we will again unknowingly foot the bill in increased deductibles and health care costs . . . so Heather Bresch has shown she can be just as big an asshole as one of the guys, but she's a product of the system . . . in Australia, Europe and Canada, health care is treated like water and electricity and there are bureaucratic means to set prices so that the services flow steadily . . . markets and capitalism work well in some instances, but without the right regulations they can also produce things like the institution of slavery (supply and demand . . . Europe needed sugar!) and the stock market crash of 1929 . . . near the end of the interview Bresch finally says, "I'm running a business" and she's right, that's what health care is in America, and--like education-- it probably shouldn't be.

Imminent Narcoleptic Apocalypse

I've taken a nap nearly every day this summer, and now the school year is approaching and I am full of dread and anxiety . . . how am I going to stay awake from sunrise to sunset and then into the great darkness beyond?

I'm Only Responsible for 20% of this Post

You'll have to head over to Gheorghe:The Blog today to get your daily dose of Dave . . . but I warn you: there are philosophical musings and superficially connected anecdotes-- the only payoff is you get to learn what the title means.

Two Vacation Complaints

We had a great vacation with friends in Sea Isle City, but I know you don't want to hear about that (or you'd be wandering around on Facebook) and so I will skip the fun stuff and get right to the gripes:

1) when the kids say they are going to cook dinner for the adults, and the kids are bunch of middle school boys, then the kids are NOT actually going to complete this task, and will require help, supervision, and labor from their mothers;

2) beach umbrella carrying bags are impossibly small and getting the umbrella, flaps, pole, and stakes back into the bag required super-human dexterity . . . beach umbrella companies (particularly Sport-Brella) need to consider the circumstances in which a beach umbrella is going to be stuffed back into the bag: the person cleaning up the umbrellas is often the last man on the beach, and will probably be tired, inebriated, wet, and sandy, and could be battling wind, flies, or the tide . . . so I beseech you: stop trying to cut costs and use a little more fabric on the bag!

The Test 59: A Cult Classic

This week on The Test, Cunningham uses her quiz on cults to whip Stacey and I into a fervently rapturous passion . . . so give it a listen, keep score, promulgate the tenets, try to maintain autonomy of consciousness, and be warned: you may need some deprogramming once the show is over.

Two Things I learned at the Pool Yesterday (Both Explosive)

The first thing I learned at the pool yesterday is that if you put enough rubber bands around a watermelon, it will explode . . . my wife and I saw a bunch of kids clustered around a picnic table, and so we went to investigate, and we saw a dad and a bunch of brave children stretching rubber bands around a watermelon-- which seemed very odd until someone explained the premise, and it took quite a few rubber bands and a good ten minutes, but the end result was a real crowd-pleaser; moments after the watermelon exploded all over the participants, our own children arrived (they were with friends) and we excitedly told them what we had witnessed, but they were unmoved by the information . . . apparently "everyone has seen that on YouTube" and the second thing I learned at the pool is that intestinal gas is visible in an x-ray; I learned this fun fact from a friend (a lady friend!) who will remain nameless (her request) when she recounted her last visit to the chiropractor, he took a full upper body x-ray, put it on display, and began assessing her spine, but she wasn't paying attention to his chiropractic wisdom, and instead was looking at the numerous black balls in her stomach and intestines . . . she knew what they represented and was appropriately mortified (even more so when the chiropractor said, "Wow, you're quite gassy," but she still had the wherewithal to reply, "I had Thai food for lunch").

Alfred Hitchcock Presents . . . The Flies

I certainly can't complain about the weather on our trip to Sea Isle City, but after an idyllic six days of ocean breezes and warm water, on our last day, the wind start blowing from the west, and with the west wind, the flies-- hordes of flies-- and with the flies . . . madness.

You Can Tune a Piano, But You Can't Identify Half of a Fish

My son Ian caught a little flat fish in his net today, but it looked like half of a fish, just a swimming head . . . and it had red spikes on each "tail" end-- we tried to identify it on the internet, to no avail: does anyone know what kind of fish this?

Whitesnake Foretells the Future

I finished two books at the beach yesterday, both on the the theme of human nature, and one was inspirational and disconcerting and the other satirical and reassuring;

1) the disconcerting and inspirational award goes to Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari; this is a Guns, Germs, and Steel-style Big History book that cuts a broad swath while telling the story of "an animal of no significance" that emerges from several other hominid species to conquer the earth-- it's one revolution after the next: cognitive, agricultural, religious, scientific, industrial, economic, nuclear, philosophical, and digital-- and we become the most wild and unnatural of all the animals, at first hunting and gathering in small tight-knit groups, but with a desire to create art (the Lion Man is 32,000 years old) and a desire for conquest (we probably took out the Neanderthals and we certainly killed all the megafauna) and this led to something larger and larger, but in no way inevitable or "natural" . . . in fact, according to Harari, there was just as much lost as gained when we settled down and became farmers (peasants ate worse, toiled harder, died of starvation and disease more often, and the great inequalities of wealth and class began) but this paved the way for one revolution after another, eventually leading to out effete, technological capitalist miracle-- fueled by cheap credit and trust in the future-- but, of course, capitalism is efficient but not ethical, so capitalism produced institutions like slavery and led to a devastation of the "natural" world . . . there are 300 million tons of humanity on the planet, and 700 million tons of domesticated factory farmed animals to feed us, but the total tonnage of the surviving large wild animals-- "from porcupines and penguins to elephants and whales-- is less than 100 million tons" and so while Harari portrays humanity as progressive, intelligent, conquering beings, he also acknowledges what Whitesnake told us long ago, that we don't know where we're going (though we sure know where we've been) and we're walking, alone down a street of dreams, drifting this way and that, into unknown, unforetold territory, revolution after revolution, looking for answers, and here we go again . . . so get ready to hold on for the rest of your days . . .

2) the second book is a refreshing change from Yuval Harari's big thoughts and philosophical speculations, and it is free on the Kindle and I highly recommend it; Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome is an account of a men's boating holiday down the Thames River, and it is semi-autobiographical, hysterically funny, and was published in 1889 . . . and I shit you not, if you read this book, you'll realize that if you took a time machine back to 1889, you would have no problem hanging out with these folks-- the tone and the jokes and the diction are perfectly modern, and Jerome K. Jerome's observations could have fallen from a Seinfeldian observational comic, here are a few examples:

a) the mildest tempered people, when on land, become violent and blood-thirsty when in a boat;

b) few things, I have noticed, come quite up to the pictures of this world;

c) little was in sight to remind us of the nineteenth century;

d) in a boat, I have always noticed that it is the fixed idea of each member of the crew that he is doing everything . . . Harris's notion was, that is was he alone who had been working;

e) each person has what he doesn't want, and other people have what he does want . . . married men have wives, and don't seem to want him; and young single fellows cry out that they can't get them.

One Upping ad Infinitum

You have probably witnessed some one-upmanship, or been the victim of a one-upper, or possibly even one-upped someone yourself, but this one-upping is beyond the pale-- and I recognize the irony of saying that I am in possession the best one-upping anecdote in the history of one-upping: my wife and our friend Connell were sitting on the porch at Sea Isle, drinking and discussing the profound beauty of the night sky (and the travesty of light pollution) and my wife reminisced about the vast array of visible stars in the sky that she witnessed when we stayed inside Mesa Verde National Park, high atop the mesa, far from civilization . . . she said "there was a star in every piece of the sky" and Connell replied to this, without malice or premeditated hyperbole, by describing his trip to New Hampshire,  where from beside a mountain lake he could see "a thousand stars in every spot in the sky" and and we all reflected upon this description for a moment and then realized that Connell had one-upped Catherine, but by a thousandfold, and not a simple thousandfold, he one-upped her by a thousandfold per piece of sky, which is enough one-upping to last a lifetime (or at least inspire a lifetime of ridicule, which we have heaped upon him in the succeeding days).

A Surveyor, an Anthropologist, a Psychologist, and a Biologist Walk into a Bar

Jeff Vandermeer's sci-fi novel Annihilation certainly owes some of its tone and plot to the Strugatsky Brothers cult classic Roadside Picnic, but instead of navigating a mysterious area through the eyes of a Stalker, Vandermeer gives us a weird, gothic, and evocatively creepy tour of Area X through the mind and observations of a biologist, and the passages in which she analyzes the bizarre ecosystem of Area X are the most vivid and memorable in a book which is generally ambiguous and confounding . . . the team investigating Area X, purportedly the twelfth mission sent in to contain and understand the zone, consists of a psychologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a biologist . . . but nothing is as it seems, everything goes awry, and the group spirals deeper and deeper into an area that has more to do with the Wallace Stevens poem "Of Mere Being" than an actual location on earth; the book is short and the first of a trilogy, and I liked it enough that I will probably read the other two, but be warned: the plot is more like a dream than a linear sequence of events, and the nature of reality is constantly eroded and called into question-- this is exemplified by the biologist's husband, who went into Area X on the 11th expedition, and came out as the walking dead . . . this was a man who thought he had been abused as a child, but when-- as an adult-- he saw a classic horror film, it "was only then that he realized that the television set must have been left on when he was only a couple years old" and his memories of abuse were a fake and a forgery, and "that splinter in his mind, never fully dislodged, disintegrated into nothing" and the looming menace, that all of our consciousness is faulty and false and misguided, takes root on every page of this book, and colors every detail of the lush, variegated environment of Area X and whatever lies beyond and below it.

Thank You Netflix!

The Netflix series Stranger Things succeeded where I failed, and convinced my kids that The Clash is the only band that matters.

Cult Classics . . . You Get My Drift?

During a recent recording session for The Test, we discussed the definition of a "cult classic" and the idea that cult classics might not even exist any longer (because of the easy access and ubiquity of everything "cult" on the internet) and we arrived at this conclusion-- a cult classic has to be relatively obscure and difficult to access, but not too obscure . . . because it has to last the test of time in this low-grade state of minor fame . . . when I was a kid, Monty Python and the Holy Grail was a cult classic, I had to track a copy down and buy it to see the film, but now, of course, the movie is world renowned, but a better example would be the satirical film Porklips Now, which I watched multiple times in high school and college; looking back, it's quite bad, but this is before the advent of YouTube, so I guess we didn't have much to choose from if we wanted to watch something beyond the pale of regular media: anyway, go four minutes and fifteen seconds in for my favorite bit of dialogue . . . so you go down and you find Mertz and you know . . . you go through the gate and you find Mertz  and uh . . . what he means is you find him and you know . . . you find Mertz . . . you find him . . . go through the Chinatown gate . . . you find him and you take care of business . . . you go through the gate . . . you get my drift?

The Future Hasn't Happened Yet

In one corner, you've got Robert Gordon claiming that American growth is over-- the greatest technological leaps happened between 1870 and 1970 and those kinds of radical changes will never happen again-- but his premise is challenged by Kevin Kelly's book The Inevitable: Understanding The 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future . . . Kelly envisions a world where we don't own much at all and instead subscribe to services-- the Netflix, Uber model-- but we do this for for everything, and we participate in "dot-Communism" and do a tremendous amount of work for free (e.g. this blog and Wikipedia) including making and placing our own advertisements and photos on the internet for micro-payments, and we live in flowing "real time" of course, where everything happens instantaneously, and most of our jobs are replaced by robots . . . and if you don't think this is possible, check out Kelly's Seven Stages of Robot Replacement (of course my job won't be replaced by a robot-- you say to yourself-- a robot couldn't possibly do what I do . . . it could do some of the things, but not everything . . . and it might break down . . . ok, it can do the routine stuff: grade papers, ask questions, check for reading comprehension . . . but I need to train it to do new stuff and teach new lessons . . . ok, it can do my stupid boring job, but that's because teaching is inhuman and should be done by robots . . . and now my new job-- designing curriculum for robots to teach is much better than my old job and pays more . . . and I'm glad that a robot could never do what I do now . . . and so on) and Kelly readily acknowledges that what will be lost in this real-time, collaborative, cybernetic, collectivist, brand-based, robotic, completely searchable future is what scholars call "literature space," the place your brain goes when you read a book . . . according to scientists, your brain goes to a different place when it is immersed in a large linear logical piece of writing-- what is traditionally known as a book-- as opposed to what Kelly calls "screening," which is using various devices to browse the loosely connected miscellany that is the web . . . but maybe in the future there will be no reason to think that long about any one subject, and it will be considered antiquated to read in that fashion, and we'll be happy wandering from idea to idea, narrative to narrative, video to audio to text to who knows, adding a bit here, taking a bit there, like digital hunter-gatherers, wandering the binary plains.

Lesson Learned . . . The Hard Way

On Tuesday, my son Alex learned that you can't stand behind someone and talk to them while they are hitting tennis balls (Ian's racket hit the ball and then, on the follow through, hit Alex flush in the face . . . Alex immediately hit the deck crying and Ian, to his credit, was really upset-- he had no idea how close Alex was standing to him-- Alex suffered a swollen lip, a sore jaw, and a red mark on his face . . . and I had my usual reaction, which is just terrible but I can't help it, I checked to see if Alex was okay (and he was . . . no blood or dilated eyes or missing teeth) and then I immediately chastised him for being a complete idiot and told him he had learned a valuable lesson: you don't stand near anyone on the tennis court, especially behind them . . . and this pissed him off, so I apologized and said I should have only been concerned with his health and well-being, and I should have talked about the lesson he learned at a later time . . . and-- to Alex's credit-- after sitting out a few minutes, he recovered and play another game with us, and he was quite intimidating, with his misshapen face and all).

The Upside of Genocide

Sentence of Dave does not endorse the act of genocide (although Dave occasionally endorses arachnicide, particularly in the film Starship Troopers) but that doesn't mean that the aftermath of a murderous apocalypse can't have some benefits; in Rwanda, after Hutu extremists slaughtered more than a million people (mainly Tutsis) in 100 days, there weren't many men to be found-- the population was now skewed to 70% women, and so while a typical feminist movement takes time, and goes from Rosie the Riveter to Gloria Steinem to Hillary Clinton, in Rwanda, things moved at a breakneck pace and women's participation in the legislature is mandated; the result is that Rwanda is the only country in the world where more women than men serve as elected officials . . . and this doesn't make everything perfect for women, while they've moved into many typically male professions, they still suffer discrimination at home-- but this may be a last ditch effort for men to preserve traditions that are on the way out (e.g. Donald Trump) and once women enjoy a few generations of economic success and political clout, even those rather sexist Rwandan norms will erode; for more on this topic (and theme) and a compelling story about an all girl Rwandan debate team, listen to Invisibilia: Outside In.

Sorry Chuck, The Inevitable is Coming

Chuck Klosterman concludes his book But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past with this thought: "I'm ready for a new tomorrow, but only if it's pretty much like yesterday" and while this is a pleasant thought, there's very little chance of it happening; before he gets to this romantic notion, he speculates on just how much the future will be different from the now, and how that will change the lens through which those future people view our time . . . and he also recognizes that not much will survive the test of time and that we have little to no chance of predicting what those things will be:

1) it's very difficult to predict what band will become the John Philip Sousa of rock'n'roll . . . no one can name another march music composer (and Klosterman points out that in one hundred years Bob Marley and reggae will be synonymous) so you can speculate: Chuck Berry? Led Zeppelin? The Beatles? The Rolling Stones? Def Leppard? who knows?

2) once a genre becomes insular and arcane, it's the "weirdos" who get to curate the art form, and select what is great;

3) American football now seems to be on the outs, as everyone educated knows that the sport is too dangerous because of the head injuries-- but Klosterman points out that this is because football is trying to become the sport for everyone . . . everyone watches a game or two, and almost everyone belongs to some kind of fantasy league or pool and everyone watches the Super Bowl . . . so this is too much exposure for something so dangerous, but there are plenty of sports that are more dangerous-- auto racing, UFC, base-jumping-- but they don't command such a large audience, so football may become less popular, and that may save it-- it may have a core group of diehard fans and  to them, the sport will represent valor and fortitude and toughness and all kinds of conservative values, and the rest of society will look upon it like auto-racing . . . or it may be deemed too dangerous and expensive it may die at the youth levels and go the way of boxing and the dodo . . . we won't know until the future;

4) folks in the future may look at The Matrix as a seminal film not because of the groundbreaking "bullet time" effects, but because the Wachowski Brothers transitioned and became the Wachowski Sisters, and so the world-within-a-world theme takes on an entirely new (and possibly more compelling) spin for future generations;

5) Klosterman concedes that important art from our time should reflect the most important elements of our time and he gives a list of these possibilities, while admitting that we see these through the cloudy and low vantage point of the present, but here are a few . . . and while I don't use quotes, I am usually using his exact words, just truncated: the psychological impact of the internet, the prevailing acceptance of nontraditional sexual identities, the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers, an unclear definition of privacy, a hatred of the wealthiest one percent, the artistic elevation of television, the recession of rock'n'roll and the ascension of hip-hop, a distrust of objective storytelling, the prolonging of adolescence;

BUT, while I love Klosterman and had a great time navigating his ambiguous, philosophical arguments about how we can't predict the future, or how the future will view our present, Kevin Kelly does present a convincing counter-argument in his new book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future . . . I'll save the summary of his most interesting predictions for another sentence, but, Chuck Klosterman, I'm warning you: tomorrow is going to be nothing like today, and the day after that is going to be exponentially even more wild . . . we've leapt over the edge and into the realm of the zillions . . . zillions of bits of interconnected information, zillions of smart objects, zillions of interconnected screens, zillions of hyperlinked pages, zillions of sprawling dendritic tendrils, stretching across the earth, in an ever-expanding, self-revising smart tangle of digitally connected humanity, so strap yourself in and get ready for a wild ride: we'll be in the future before you know it.

Telekinetic Kids

Not only does my son look like Eleven from Stranger Things, but he can also levitate objects with his mind (and feet).

The Test 58: Can You?

This week on The Test, Stacey puts Cunningham and me on the spot . . . and while we occasionally perform admirably, there's plenty of failure and humiliation as well; as a bonus, there is a rousing debate on the appropriate use of mnemonic devices . . . so give it a shot, keep score, and see if you can too.