“Last Chance?” Till the Next One

One of the more entertaining regular events I experienced in my last couple of years at a for-profit music school was students and students’ parents asking to either retake my course finals or, when they had blown off homework, exams, or other opportunities, to do the work after the last day of class and grades were submitted to the school’s administration. My response was usually “What part of ‘final’ do you not understand?” Unsympathetic, I’m sure, but it’s not like the last day of class or the class preparation for final exams weren’t pretty clear warnings that “the end is near.”

A few years away from that semi-academic environment and I’m having second thoughts about my attitude toward those students. Not that I would do much differently and I absolutely wouldn’t behave differently toward parents who should know better, but “the last chance” offers we all get from idiot corporations and dire warnings of “campaign deadlines” from politicians have possibly trained us to think deadlines and cutoff dates are a moving target. Clearly, when it comes to deals and political contributions, those targets are fake and a dime-a-dozen.

For example, in 2019 when Quicken decided to simultaneously force customers/victims to a subscription format and change their file format to something proprietary so that exporting Quicken data to another money management format would be as close to impossible as possible, I quit updating Quicken on a once-every-two-year basis, which I had been doing since the 90s. Now, I’m stuck entering my banking data manually, but I’m retired and don’t have that much data entry to worry about. Quicken never handled investment information particularly well, but my investment bank does that job competently on-line, so I don’t care much about that flaw in Quicken’s capabilities.

So, since sometime in 2019, every few days I get a “last chance deal” from Quicken to save 50% on the latest version of Quicken, which will forever convert my data to that non-transferable format and make me a damn subscriber instead of a software owner. I haven’t been counting, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve had at least 50 “last chances” to make the switch. All I take away from most of this urgent bullshit is that companies and politicians either think we’re idiots or they are constantly on the desperate edge of failure.

Woe Is Rural America (and it’s well-deserved)

“Greater Minnesota” is just a politically correct phrase for “rural Minnesota,” which is everywhere in the state except Minneapolis, St. Paul, Rochester, and . . . that’s about it. Duluth is a wannabe city, but that northern industrial area is just a black hole for development tax dollars with little-to-no possible return. St. Cloud is even less likely to stage any sort of economic comeback. Rural everywhere has suffered a brain and skills drain since the turn of the last century. “How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm” was a popular song in 1919 and popular music has never been great at spotting trends early. Back in the 60s, Larry McMurtry explained what had happened to rural Texas with “The kids who stayed in the country tended to be dull, lazy, cautious, or all three; those with brains, zip, and daring were soon off to Dallas or Houston.”

Red Wing and Goodhue County, for example, has suffered a steadily declining population since 2000 and regular property tax increases that make the area less and less attractive to anyone with the math skills to know what will happen to residential property taxes when Xcel closes the nuclear plans in the next decade. $15/hour or about $30,000/year is not a living wage in a town where even a serious fixer-upper costs more than $150,000. Area property values have increased by 37% in the last decade and wages by less than 3%. The city’s “average commute time” is 19.8 minutes, which means a substantial number of the area’s workforce is working a good distance from the city (mostly in the Twin Cities). Almost 14% of the city’s residents live in poverty, with women between 55 and 64 the largest demographic in that group. One quarter of the people employed in the area are over-65. The average resident’s age is 42.7 years, 6 years older than Minnesota’s average, and 41% of the City’s residents are past retirement age.

So, filling those local jobs means competing with employers from outside of the area with wages, benefits, decent management, and advancement opportunities. And that is for a rural city only 50 miles from the serious competition. Cities and businesses further from the state’s economic hub have to be shedding young talent like my sheepdog when spring hits. Red Wing is attempting to shift to a more tourist-friendly destination, but noise and air pollution and a lack of recreational resources (other than the river) and a serious lack of city development talent has turned that effort into pointless and ineffective construction and economic flailing and growing property taxes. A short look at the rural area’s economic and demographic situation would make any reasonable person suspect it is not sustainable. The city has at least a half-dozen massive development failures in its recent history, a downtown that is being rapidly abandoned by businesses and customers, an excess of empty business buildings and, even, a few empty housing units, a decent infrastructure but large and expensive municipal and county services, and an aging population that is less able to finance the “if you build it they will come” city government’s attitude.

Attitude is a rural problem, too. Much of rural American believes it is full of strong, independent individuals who are more able to take care of themselves than “city folks.” That couldn’t be much further from the truth. Rural areas and states receive an outsized investment relative to their contributions to the GNP and tax base. Rural areas need cities, but cities are steadily less dependent on the goods and services produced by rural areas; to the point that this has become a loud “taxation without representation” issue for cities that have had their education systems, infrastructure, and services scavenged for the benefit of declining rural areas. Rural areas, mostly, imagine themselves to be indispensable and their anger and outrage in the face of facts drives them to the Fox and Republican propaganda machines, which isolates them even more.

There is a lot of data supporting the argument that the keys to economic success are tightly linked to diversity, inclusion, and openness. It is incredibly rare to find any small town that exemplifies any of those attributes. 50 years ago, Mr. McMurtry also had a pretty strong and accurate opinion of the kind of people who live in outstate “cities” and rural areas, “Lubbock, Amarillo, and Wichita Falls are the three principal cities of the Texas plain—cities that I find uniformly graceless and unattractive. In summer they are dry and hot, in winter cold, dusty, and windswept; the population is rigidly conformist on the surface and seethes underneath with imperfectly suppressed malice." The vaccine paranoia, anger and resentment, and self-destructive “rebellion” against science is a great example of that “imperfectly suppressed malice.” And an obvious result is the mass exodus from those areas by healthcare professionals. “Toxic individualism” is the media’s phrase for people who grossly over-estimate their own intelligence, knowledge and capabilities, and distrust anyone smarter than themselves; which is often practically everyone outside of their narrow and sheltered society. Attracting talented young people, or retaining them, into that environment is an impossible task.

Would You Rather I Think You Are Wrong, a Fool, or a Liar?

A couple of years ago, I was traveling in a car with some friends (remember when we did that?) listening to the driver tell us about his alien encounters, paranormal abilities, and his paranoid delusions that Big Pharma possessed cures for practically every major disease from the cold to cancer but were suppressing them for fun and profit. Normally, I zone out when this kind of noise is going on, but that was tough to do on this trip. I tried though, trust me, I tried.

Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me and I asked, “Which is less insulting, being called wrong, a liar, or a fool?” I seriously wanted to know because I do not know the answer, even for myself, at least I don’t know the absolute answer. Liars are often out for some kind of gain, but this wasn’t that kind of situation, and fools can be educated if they want to be. Just being wrong is the human condition. So it seems to me that "wrong" or “fool” would be the better option, but admitting to either is tough on the ego. Especially when you are convinced you are extremely intelligent. I am not cursed with that delusion, at least. So, for me it’s "wrong" or “fool” over “liar.” I might have said “bullshitter” rather than “liar,” but the difference is academic. You could substitute “uninformed,” “misinformed,” “delusional,” or “easily misled” for “fool,” too. Likewise, there are lots of substitutes for "wrong" that apply, but they are no less irritating. Again, the difference is semantic rather than quantitative.

Not surprisingly, my friend did not like the question and I’m still hung out to dry as to which is the worst of the options. No, I’m not kidding. It’s a serious question, or as serious as I’m capable of being. Remember, I mostly think humans are the dumbest least sustainable animal in existence.

One of the funny aspects of this conversation/confrontation is that I’d talked this friend into reading Sagan’s A Demon Haunted World: Science As A Candle in the Dark a while back and he loved it. He read statements like “I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.” And my friend agreed with Sagan and saw no contradiction between Sagan’s ridicule of alien invasions, magical hidden-away “cures” and technologies suppressed by an all-powerful government or corporations and his own claims to unrepeatable and unvalidated paranormal abilities and anything Sagan said to the contrary.

Another friend is absolutely unconvinced that motorcycle helmets contribute anything useful to motorcyclist safety. This is in spite of the most recent “experiment” in Florida in 2000, when the state exempted riders from required helmets. “The interrupted time series analysis (1/1994 to 12/2001) estimates a 48.6% increase in motorcycle occupant deaths the year after the law change.” Other states contributed to increasing motorcycle deaths in the same general period when Arkansas, Texas, Kentucky, and Louisiana weakened their helmet laws. He made some pretty extravagant claims about his lifetime riding mileage, which (probably irrationally) I had to doubt because of his anti-helmet stance. Riding a motorcycle for long hours without a helmet is just not something I’ve ever witnessed in my 50-some years on a motorcycle. The helmet-less biker crowd are usually pushing their extreme limits doing a 100 miles between long bar stops, which usually results in staggering homeward, a crash, an arrest, and/or calling a friend with a pickup or trailer for a ride home. I get that, too, since you really take a sonic and physical beating on a motorcycle without some kind of head protection and a windshield isn’t even close to useful for that purpose.

Like many from my generation, math isn’t this man’s strong point. We hear words like “million” and “billion” and “trillion” tossed around by the media so much that they become familiar-seeming concepts. However, familiarity breeds not just contempt but incomprehension when it comes to numbers; specially at the really large and really small extremes. Likewise, another acquaintance is constantly barraging me with left-wing economic silliness. He admitted that his consumer math skills are so poor that he couldn’t balance a checkbook or a family budget if his life depended on it. (His wife is stuck with that responsibility.) However, with that disability firmly in hand he is convinced he is an expert on the US Fed and the World Bank’s function and the economic solutions to the world’s many complicated dysfunctions. He is really tired of my laughing while he jabbers away about pure nonsense. Again, and likewise, a Libertarian acquaintance has equally nonsensical “solutions” to problems that are so far beyond his economic, mathematical, social-system grasp that they are pure comedy and he also stopped talking to me in person because I can’t stop laughing when he kicks the mini-Koch propaganda in gear and I blurt out, “You know, your heroes were first in line for government handouts when their real estate ‘investments’ and other gambling debts blew up in 2008, right?” People in glass houses, even glass mansions, you know?

So, my question stands and I’d love to hear a response (in the comments, not in a direct email) from anyone who stumbles on this blog. Is it better to be thought simply wrong, a fool, or a liar? What does it mean about someone who picks one over the other? And why do you think one is better than the other?

Is Religion a Species or Cultural IQ Test?

It struck me, this morning, that the USA has become a particularly gullible society. Even more than any other time in my 72 years and that is saying something. The Pew Research Foundation, in 2018, found that 53% of US citizens claimed “religion is very important in their lives.” If you look at the world map the Pew organization made, it’s difficult to find a country with a high degree of religious “commitment” that isn’t pretty much a sewer of stupid. We’re in the bag with great nations like Brazil (72%), Nigeria (88%), Egypt (72%), Ethiopia (98%), Greece (56%), Iran (78%), and the rest of the world’s degenerate nations. So, my conclusion is that the existence and persistence of religion in a society is a Gullibility Test. If a significant percentage of a population is willing to believe an incredible collection of sheepherder tales, that population will buy all sorts of incredibly stupid stories from whoever wants to rule that population. Hence, the current state of the United States of America.

There isn’t a single nation anyone would want to emulate with a superstitious population over 30%. Even Mexico (45%) and Israel (36%) are less superstitious than the USA. Canada, the country most US citizens would love to escape to if they would have us, has a 27% loony quotient. Most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and even Russia and China have managed to educate their populations so that under 20% fall into foolish magical thinking. Greece, Italy, and Poland are the only mostly-religious countries in Europe and . . . you can fill the blank with your own stereotype jokes of those countries. Among the world’s nations, the only countries (except the UK) with a total goober for a leader are religious nations. They are the ones who will believe anything; and the more incredible the better.

In the USA, we’re being overwhelmed with all sorts of stupid; from conspiracy delusions to radical left and right wing crazies to the usual variants of cults and splinter religions to alien invasion fairy tales. We are, also, obviously gullible as hell. Electing an internationally known con man to the highest office in the country has to be the pinnacle of gullibility and not only are US citizens that dumb but a substantial portion (typically >45%) approve of his miserable “performance.” That is also known as “doubling-down on stupid.” I’m sure we’re not the only nation that exemplifies Dunning-Kruger Effect, but we are working at perfecting it into a chaotic system of mismanaging government.

I recently read a note from a young friend who said, "Most younger Americans would kill for EU, Australian, New Zealand, or Canadian citizenship." They would absolutely marry for that reason. As of 2017, there were approximately 900,000 US-born Mexican residents, 800,000 in the EU, 750,000 in Canada, 700,000 in India, 600,000 in the Philippines, and the numbers drop radically among other US-citizen exported nations. There are only about 18,000 US citizens residing in New Zealand, mostly because (like every civilized nation in the world) NZ is only interested in educated citizens with useful skills. Of course, like every other country in the world, if you have a few hundred million to buy your way into NZ/EU/CA/AU or pretty much anywhere else citizenship it’s there for the buying. Money is still the universal language. Some things are dependable, I guess.

Is there a fix for our national foolishness? Apparently, the coronavirus is going to take a shot at it. The halfwits who believed President Fucknuts when he told them to guzzle bleach, to open up their guts to ultraviolet, to take a fist-full of unproven prescription and over-the-counter drugs, and to get out there and “open up the economy again,” are going to be the ones who continue to get clobbered the hardest by Covid-19; and reality. Maybe, instead of having to launch the boneheads toward the sun, Marching Morons style, they’ll just take care of themselves, evolution-style, and, probably, they’ll go down thinking it was part of the Intelligent Design. Who could argue with them? Who would want to?

Who Gets Replaced by A Robot

In manufacturing [Remember when we used to do that?] there is an old rule that says, “We automate the jobs that are mostly occupied by the biggest pain-in-the-ass employees.” In several of the companies where I worked in the 70s through the late 90s, the first people to be replaced by a computer or robot were technicians. For a time, moderately trained technicians were the “special children” on the manufacturing floor. They weren’t skilled enough to be engineers or even middle-management, but they were too skilled to easily be replaced by other company employees or easily recruited from the recently tech school-educated employment pool.

So, as soon as possible manufacturing engineers started searching for ways to put some kind of computer test equipment into the assembly processes to reduce the number of technicians needed. Contrary to popular belief, this was not a management decision. Few improvements in any process are driven by upper management; they are too busy stuffing their pockets with the company profits to bother with doing actual work. Actual decisions always get made by the people stuck being responsible for the work and that is almost always engineers and manufacturing technicians.

Thinking about that kind of problems in society, it is easy who and what engineers would automate in the rest of the country: police, prison guards, politicians and many bureaucrats, firefighters, tax collection, the justice system, bus and truck drivers, and restaurant workers. And, pretty much, in that order.

Police, obviously, are a societal pain-in-the-ass, a huge civic liability, more often than not more corrupt than the “criminals” they supposedly protect us from, and massively expensive. Police department costs range from as much as 64% of a city’s budget (Billings, MT, $247 per resident) to as “little” as 8% (New York, City, $624 per resident). Ridding taxpayers of out-of-control police department spending and erratic and violent policing would go a long ways toward making cities more livable, safer, less racist, less expensive, and sustainable. From a manufacturing engineering standpoint, a huge portion of what police do on a daily basis would clearly be easy and cheap to automate. At least 90% of what a traffic cop does could be done better with strategically placed sensors (cameras and microphones). Most traffic violations could be recorded, vehicles identified, and citations sent through computerized systems: no cop necessary unless an arrest for non-compliance is required. One of the most common vehicle violations that goes un-cited today is noise violations and practically every state’s current vehicle noise violations could be monitored and cited automatically with “fix-it tickets” and the revenue from those violations, alone, might pay for the system. For more aggressive traffic violations, the combination of those cameras and microphones and driver alerts could utilize the remaining human police and computerized dispatch systems to be used more effectively. The relatively few complicated police activities, typically assigned to “detectives,” would likely remain human-powered for a long time, but as the number of crimes solved by those humans continues to decline there will be plenty of incentive's for automated solutions to those underperforming employees.

Likewise, it’s pretty obvious that automation and robots could do at least as good a job as prison guards and their mismanagement for a tiny fraction of the cost. For example, California’s prison guard union is so grossly over-powerful that the annual cost of keeping a typical prisoner “guarded” is well over $100,000 per year. Even as the state’s prison population declines, the costs are rising rapidly as are the salaries and benefits of their underworked, unskilled union members. Since the guard’s union has a stranglehold on the state politicians (Democrat and Republican) the solution is clearly one place where California’s referendum system should be able to sold a problem that the politicians won’t dare touch.

The rest of my list (see above) will be more and less complicated to automate with some of the easiest going earlier simply because there will be fewer political obstacles to overcome (like truck and bus drivers who most everyone will be happy to see gone from the highways). So, now my “predictions” are in print and probably a while after I’m dead someone might find them and have a great time ridiculing how wrong I was. Have fun, whoever you are.

Life’s Purpose Myths

Over the last 50 years there has been a lot of bullshit tossed around about what makes for a happy/satisfied/productive/purposeful life. I don’t think any previous generation worried about that kind of crap as much as have the Boomer-and-beyond generations. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that all of the generations that came before the 1960s combined didn’t have as many people worried about bullshit like passion, purpose, or even happiness as have the kiddies born after that date. The XYZ crowd have taken that to an extreme that might be a point of no return for the west. Because, let’s face it, you are born, you live, you get old, and you die. That is life.

One observation I have made regarding much of this is that more people than not do not find either happiness or purpose following the traditional “wisdom.” Most “traditional values” are about maintaining the status quo, furthering the growth of the species, and providing the 1% with a controlling grip on the 99%. No part of that leads to happiness or purpose for the 99% or most of the 1%. Lately, even some of the usually upbeat, pro-growth propaganda media is questioning "traditional wisdom."

One of the modern experiments humans are running (without many of them knowing they are doing anything other than living their lives) has been really interesting and is, purposely, ignored as much as possible has been going childless. Parenting has been hyped as being almost crucial to having a happy life.

This chart is one of the most repeated and verifiable evidence of how that works out and one of the most ignored. Couple satisfaction and general happiness is consistently highest before having children and heads north in the general direction of a better life as the brats leave home; assuming the relationship survives the kids and the stress they provide. If humans were a rational animal, capable of absorbing and analyzing the information provided by other humans’ experiences, this would be overwhelming evidence that living your life to keep propagating the species is a dumb idea. Of course, humans are an emotional, fear-driven, instinctual lizard-brain animal first and foremost and the majority of our species uses logic and critical thinking on the rarest of events. So, we keep letting nature and instinct drive us into corrals of reproduction, captivity, and restricted options.

In the US, by age 50, about 15% of all women are childless. That is one very large portion of humans who are instinctually (the opposite of intellectually) driven to act against their own interests. Knowing that, it should not be surprising to know that the majority of white women voted for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020. These women are the least intellectual, most instinctive, least educated, and most opportunity-constrained people in the country. They are not just doing what their husbands tell them to do, they are doing what 100,000 years of breeding has programmed them to do, especially rural white women who are consistently women who are only capable (due to education and/or intellect) of doing “woman’s work,” which is why they are rural instead of leaving the constraints of stagnant rural culture and economics for urban opportunities.

The brutal truth about children is that all babies are cute and loveable; yours, mine, everyone’s. Almost nobody’s teenagers are even tolerable. Between 10 and 18-75, “kids” are a pain in the ass, a massive economic drain, and the same kind of drain on your life and energy as having your house clobbered by a tornado or a major burglary or losing a spouse to cancer. Yeah, I said “cancer.” What you will consistently get from teenage children is heartbreak. All of those fine, elevated aspirations you once had for your beautiful baby and that bright, happy toddler will devolve into angst and apprehension tempered with “Please at least grow up enough to get the hell out of my house.”

And how do those childless 15% feel when they are my age? I have not taken a large poll, mostly because I don’t really care that much, but the half-dozen women I know who are childless by choice are a lot happier, more wealthy and carefree, better travelled, better educated, and more satisfied with their life’s trajectory. No, they are not in any way depressed seeing their counterparts’ children or grandchildren and the clutter, complication, and restriction those offspring produce. They are universally relieved when they escape those scenes of domestic chaos, in fact. At least one of those childless women over 50 told me that she occasionally visits her siblings just to be reminded of how miserable life with children really is.

And it really is.

"How can they be so stupid?"

 A friend recently called me to describe a conversation he'd had with a not-so-bright local guy who is clearly well into the stupid quadrant. I tried to link my friend to this article, "The Five Universal Laws of Human Stupidity," but discovered that I had never finished writing about this brilliant piece of sociology. So, there it is (the link earlier in this paragraph) and it is well worth reading the original essay.

In 1976, Carlo M. Cipolla, a professor of economic history at the UC-Berkeley, "published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity."  He listed their identifying traits as: "they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society’s total well-being."  He warned that "The only way a society can avoid being crushed by the burden of its idiots is if the non-stupid work even harder to offset the losses of their stupid brethren."  We appear to be approaching a point in history where the incredibly stupid so outnumber the rest of humanity that work alone won't do the job. 

Cipolla defines the "laws of stupidity" as: 

#1) Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

#2)The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

#3) A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

#4) Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

#5) A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

 Cipolla created a quadrant of human types that accurately defines the possibilities, clockwise from top right: Helpless, Intelligent, Bandit, & Stupid.

 Hopefully, you can see from his illustration that this was a semi-light-hearted essay. Or maybe he just figured we were all too dumb to take his warning seriously and went for the humor; since we have to laugh about the stuff we'd cry about otherwise. Anyway, I recommend the essay and . . . look out for stupid people.

Giving Up the Begging Bowl

For a lot of years, the whole “tip economy” has not just baffled but irritated me. And for a lot of years, some people I know have ragged on me for not properly valuing unskilled menial labor, “Somebody’s got to do that work and they should be properly compensated for it.” Teaching entitled Millennials about reality-based concepts is one of the most painful things I have ever experienced and at this point in my life I’ve found that it is also the least rewarding. Turns out, reality is doing a fairly good job of it without my contributions.

We’re currently experiencing a fairly impressive awakening of the US labor force. Some are calling it “The Great Resignation.” Been there, done that but not on a scale anywhere near this one. In the 70s, the after-effects of unrestrained irrational Vietnam War spending sent the country into an economic death spiral that didn’t end until Reaganomics and the rest of the Republican delusionary dribble-down thinking was briefly replaced by Bill Clinton’s “it’s about the economy, stupid” and actual conservative fiscal policy that resulted in the only balanced national budgets since Jimmy Carter (the only other economic conservative President in that period). For 30 years of my career’s 55-year lifetime, the economy was changing, collapsing, and relocating so quickly that a 3-year employment seemed like a whole career. My kids were conditioned to start throwing away toys and saying goodbye to friends on a triennium schedule.

Musicians and other semi-skilled food service and bar laborers have long depended on tips for the majority of their income and that is an aspect of that kind of work that has grated against my pride for as long as I’ve been associated with the “entertainment” business. In fact, my billing system was partially determined by coming up with an hourly rate that would guarantee my customers did not feel the need to add a tip to my invoice. At one point around 2011 that number was as high as $225 per hour. After I retired, I volunteered to run the sound system and help out at a couple of the local venues in Red Wing. That ended, in each place, when my contribution was so disrespected that someone offered me a pittance of a tip for my work that evening. I figured that if they really needed my help, the next time they could pay me a decent wage, say $225 per hour, so that they wouldn’t have to feel sorry for me. I fuckin’ hate tipping.

With that lifelong attitude in mind, I have often voiced my opinion about unskilled laborers bitching about receiving insufficient tips for their easily-replaced or automated “work.” This bullshit has gone so far as practically requiring tips for cash register operators and fast food janitors when you pay for something at the counter. Really? You have the gall to ask for 15-25% tip for punching the keys on a math-ability-disabled cash register and handing a piece of pie across a counter? That opinion has gotten me all sorts of nasty and entertaining feedback mostly from young people who wasted lots of money getting a “higher education” at a “follow your passion” institution of con-artistry and discovered that those kinds of passion also require a lot of skill, work, commitment, and sacrifice. Who knew that a job that 99% of the population would do for free might be hyper-competitive?

So, now to this moment of the “The Great Resignation” where all sorts of people are either going back to their old jobs, back to their old offices, or looking at finding work in either the business where they worked before the COVID moment or looking for something new. There is lots of faux-conservative jabber about how “people just don’t want to work when they get that $300 Unemployment boost,” but the fact is that many (95% of) people have discovered how much time and energy they are giving to dead-end, unskilled, pointless (bullshit) jobs that don’t pay well enough to even be considered worthy of Minimum Wage protection.

This week, I discovered a couple of Facebook “Notification” flags on comments I’d made on this subject more than 2 years ago. Normally, I just clear Notifications without bothering to see who made them or what group or person they came from, but these near-ancient flags made me curious. Sure enough, they were responses to an argument we’d had about tips and tipping from exactly the kind of folks I was describing above, kids who had wasted time and money at good old MSCM, pretending to be wannabe musicians or “producers,” and working at restaurants and bars after discovering how hard that business really is. The responses could be summed up to “you are right.” These young people had followed their mildly-held passions deep into debt and the panhandling restaurant lifestyle and COVID disrupted that long enough to force them to re-evaluate their priorities. One of those newly discovered priorities turned out to be finding a sustainable and functional lifestyle and career.

This brief moment in our weird-assed economy has opened up a lot of manufacturing jobs that include old-style training and education benefits to attract labor back to work. Even in small towns like Red Wing, there are opportunities like this available to anyone willing to learn skills that actually require some study, knowledge, and pride. Once you’ve done that kind of work, going back to being a food service drone is, apparently, close to inconceivable. (I don’t know. I’ve never been tempted by food service employment, at least not since I was 13 working at the Boothill concessions in Dodge City.) If you think my opinion of the panhandling/tip-based economy is radical, you really don’t want to read the opinions of the recently converted.

If You Build It . . . You’re A Fool

Like a lot of small rural villages, Red Wing, MN has visions of grandeur that may be reflections of the town’s past or, more likely, are evidence that down-breeding has consequences. The current city bureaucracy and mismanagement have been hustling growth bullshit since the momentary burst in the area’s economy in the 70’s when Xcel’s Prairie Island Nuclear plant generated a substantial increase in the city and county population and tax base.Since the 70s, Red Wing has clearly suffered from a Field of Dreams syndrome, believing that if the city builds enough expensive crap people will finally be attracted to moving here and creating jobs and businesses that will make the dreamers look like actual planners. So far, if anyone is coming they must be the ghosts that populated that corn field baseball game in Costner's movie. They are very much invisible.

The city “planners” have been hacking away at a weird idea to convert the only significant riverside area of the city into some sort of “shopping district" and a misbegotten concert venue. The project name is the "Old West Main & Upper Harbor Renewal Project." The picture above is what the area looks like now and it is obvious that this is a grossly underused and somewhat unsightly waste of a prime Mississippi River location. The two videos below are concept renderings of the anticipated outcome of this multi-million dollar project in an economically disadvantaged area that has a mostly-abandoned downtown and a rapidly vanishing retail economic segment (like almost every small town in the country).

It’s a dream, obviously, and one based on a gross over-estimate of the city’s planning and development skills that could only be sustained if one were to ignore the long, expensive, and sad history of the city’s weird attempts to encourage growth, population-wise and economically. Currently, what businesses exist in the area are a couple of biker bars, some tiny and insignificant consumer retail businesses, a fair amount of small manufacturing, and some of the city’s scabbier housing units. Odds are, when the $3.5-5M are spent, if the city is lucky a few of those businesses will survive the customer and access problems caused by the grossly optimistic time schedule for the project. My bet is that there will be no more than one more restaurant in the area and several of the small manufacturing companies will either be forced out or will leave, probably Red Wing altogether, “willingly.” And the local citizens will be stuck with another large cost overrun bill, higher taxes, an enlarged and even more inefficient Public Works department that will do at least as poor a job of maintaining both the “pedestrian bridge” and the additional sidewalks as they do with the existing paths, sidewalks, and city parking areas. All of this as Xcel is likely to continue to decommission the property tax cash cow that has, in the past, funded every City Council pipedream and city planner's vanity “legacy” project since 1970.

In case you think I’m overstating Red Wing’s development past, here are a few examples of the city’s development track record. #1 the most recent (2017 through 2019) Spring Creek Road Project was promoted as being a business “starter” that would free up anticipated commercial real estate and increase business to existing businesses and to “to reduce traffic deaths along Highway 61.” That last bit was a pretty tough sell, since the next major intersection, which has all of the “features” the Spring Creek Road Project would bring to the Spring Creek/HW61 intersection is one of the city’s highest “impact points” for crashes and traffic deaths. 

This foolish project was, unbelievably, “20 years in the making.” Instead of accomplishing any useful goals, the city removed 3 supposedly desperately needed lower income duplexes and created two large, toxic-material-leaking and highly illegal junk yards and there have been some spectacular crashes at the new traffic light intersection.I’ve witnessed two of of those crashes while sitting on my bicycle at the intersection waiting for the “walk” light. Not to mention driving one of the city's grocery stores (Econofoods) out of business during the long project delays and due to the difficult access to the

 

This isn't the first time Red Wing has tried to "develop" Spring Creek Road along Highway 61. More than a decade ago, the city removed three houses from the southwest side of the street in a strange attempt to create a commercial section where there had been homes on a street that has about as much commercial appeal as a back alley in an abandoned mining town. Obviously, this was another waste of local taxpayer money and one from which the city learned nothing.

This might be my favorite Red Wing "development" failure. Anderson Park was obviously someone's pipedream of a recreational attraction to the city and for the half-dozen people who use the lower park it really can be a special place to hide out, walk the dog, experience a little mildly natural Minnesota flora and fauna, or start a ride on the Cannon River bicycle trail. Clearly, someone thought that would be a big draw because a buttload of money was spent on this park. 

Just as clearly, that someone had no idea that regular maintenance would be an issue in an area and facilities that would see the kind of use the design implied. Maintenance is not a Red Wing city skill. City sidewalks go the entire winter without seeing a single attempt at snow removal. Water faucets in the few areas where there is some tourist and local traffic almost always remain "out of order" all summer. And this bathroom was massively outside of the city Public Works' capabilities. The city can't even manage placing and maintaining trash cans at the more obvious tourist attractions. A public bathroom on a bicycle trail? What a pipedream. This building has been closed and a public reminder of city incompetence for more than a decade.

The Old Main Street and Harbor area where all of the upcoming and ongoing development disaster is just beginning is a reminder of the city's maintenance lethargy, too. Believe it or not, there is a sidewalk buried under the snow in this picture and that sidewalk remained buried from January to April in 2021, while the city was convincing taxpayers to add even more maintenance to ignore with the newest development disaster. There is almost a mile of this expensive sidewalk that gets ignored by the city all winter, every winter.

Even the newest addition to the upcoming project, the traffic circle and harbor trail, that hasn't been in place for five years and, as you can see by the footprints in the snow, gets used in spite of the city's inability to make even the slightest effort to keep the sidewalks safe to use. You know that giant footbridge is going to be everything from an accidental deathtrap to a suicide launching pad and I'm sure the city will act surprised when the first city budget-crushing liability lawsuit is filed.

And my all-time favorite Red Wing boondoggle happened long before I arrived in Red Wing and, maybe, before we moved to Minnesota in '96. This retaining wall must have cost the city a half-million dollars or more and if it had a development purpose, it failed miserably. My picture doesn't convey how massive this retaining wall is. There are thousands of large retaining wall blocks in this thing and the lot it "protects" is idiotically small and impractical for any serious development. It is for sale, if you are interested, though. Beyond that, there is about 1/2 mile of marginal "condos" and apartments along this frontage road. The development cost to local taxpayers will take a couple centuries to recover. The city owns acres of undeveloped land and various abandoned "business" and industrial properties repossessed over the years due to unpaid taxes. In the right light, Red Wing could become the next great place for apocalypse or zombie movies: just add dead people and/or zombies.

In another burst of irrational optimism, in 2019 the city spontaneously decided to blow $3,655,200 (estimated cost and probably a fraction of the final bill) on a 2nd fire station on the sparsely populated west end of the village. The idea was that adding a dozen fire fighters and a multi-million dollar fire station would shorten the response time by about 5 minutes, at best. Curiously, there was a west end fire station that closed in the 1970s. That must have been a brief burst of actual conservative financial planning for the city that has since been solidly squashed by the "if you build it" nonsense. In a few years, this building will be one more monument to unrestrained municipal spending,
"irrational exuberance," and apathetic and uneducated taxpayers. Whoopee!

If this story and series of pictures does not make you want to hire Red Wing's City Council and the City "Engineer" for your next development project . . . good for you. Personally, with my money I wouldn't employ anyone associated with Red Wing's city government to run a kids' lemonade stand. 

So, with all of this insanity, why would anyone consider living in Red Wing, let alone moving there. There is one gigantic, overwhelming, massively impressive feature of Red Wing, Minnesota: the Red Wing branch of the Mayo Clinic. The majority of Red Wing's incoming citizens (and out-going, for that matter) are healthcare workers and the senior citizens and retirees they are here to serve. We come to Red Wing because of the incredibly high quality healthcare the Mayo Clinic provides to an otherwise very isolated and under-served area. Lose the Mayo and I'd bet half of us would have our houses and condos up for sale by the end of the first year. There are at least 100 places my wife and I would rather live, but none of them have anything near the quality of healthcare services of the Mayo Clinic. I know of at least another dozen couples, our age, in town who are here for exactly the same reason. Yeah, the Mississippi River valley is picturesque, but the weather sucks 10 months out of every year, and the working-age population are unskilled and uneducated and as racist and foolish as the January 6th Goober Rioters. A substantial portion, the overwhelming majority, of the new construction in town are apartments near the Mayo Clinic.  If that isn't a scary fact for the future of the village, you are either a fool (and highly qualified to serve on Red Wing's City Council) or someone who doesn't care what happens to the town in a decade or two when that big rat passing through the bull snake economy (aka "Boomers") dies off and the places is left with hundreds of expensive and empty condos and apartments and dozens of over-priced/over-sized housing units. It's going to be scary for someone, but not us. We'll be dead. I've been in the situation that the two or three generations behind us will be in before. In the 1970s, I bought a large, older home in Fremont, Nebraska in 1976. By 1978, the Nebraska farm economy had been crushed by Vietnam War-caused inflation and the town's major employers, ag-based manufacturing (like my employer), died like they had been shot in the heart. When we moved to Fremont, there were no more than a total of a half-dozen houses for sale in a 20,000 population town. When we were forced to sell after I was laid-off, there were hundreds of houses desperately up for sale. Not having any real attachment to the area was a big advantage for us. I sold the house for a substantial (for us, at the time) loss, but I got out without having to declare bankruptcy, suffer foreclosure, or being stuck with a house payment without employment for an extended period. So many people we knew went the other route, because Fremont was "home" to them and they didn't feel they had the luxury to abandon the place while the ship-jumping was good; or as good as it would get for the next 20 years or more. I have a strong sense of déjà vu these days in Red Wing. This time, however, I don't have my life savings tied up in a house. I don't have a young career and a young family to manage, but for those who do these should be very nervous times.

When Chaos Is All You Can Create

For the past 5 years (and a lot more) many of us have wondered “what are they thinking” as Trump’s Marching Morons and many of the Republican Party have gone from one attempt at social destruction to the next. The end game for these people appears to be the total breakdown of anything that might resemble organized society and a libertarian free-for-all. When you look at the faces of the January 6th Heehaw Rebellion you have to assume that none of those people are able to sustain any sort of serious relationships or jobs. The hoard of stay-at-home moms, angry and unemployed Millennials and X-gens and Boomers, retired and active duty military and police, and the rest of that crowd of people who have never had a productive, useful moment in their lives has to make you wonder “what do they think will come of the mess they are trying to make?”

The answer is chaos. They live in a delusional world where they imagine that when order and civilization fails, they will come out on top. And the fact is, they might; for a while. The mislabeled “rebels” in places like Syria, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and the world’s other hot spots of disorder and instability, plus many members of almost every country’s military and police, are not serving some greater good in their fight. They are simply taking advantage of the opportunities chaos creates. Since they have no useful purpose in an organized 21st Century culture, they are trying to drive back progress and civilization to a point where they would at least be able to have a few moments of pleasure out of arson, theft, murder, rape, and kidnapping. It’s not like any of these people have a long-range plan for their life’s purpose.

The problem is that there are so many of them. In fact, it is entirely possible that at least half of every nation in the world is filled with what was once nothing more than cannon fodder for pointless regional wars and territorial pissing matches. A few thousand to a few hundred years ago, “excess population” (mostly male) was easily eliminated with hand-to-hand combat in large scale relative to overall population. A Bronze Age battle from 3200 years ago was discovered in the 90s and the grisly remains have been . . . enlightening. The remains of a few hundred expendables have been dug up, which indicates that at least 4,000-5,000 were involved. According to a Science Magazine article, this describes “picture of Bronze Age sophistication, pointing to the existence of a trained warrior class and suggesting that people from across Europe joined the bloody fray.” It also provides evidence that humans have needed to slough off excess and mostly-useless young men on a regular basis. One of the side effects of a large invading army is that a fair number of equally unproductive young women get used up, as hookers, rape victims, and camp hangers-on. So, all sorts of useless humans get used up relatively quickly.

In modern society, we don’t have a mechanism for ridding cultures of excess mediocrity, unless the culture collapses into chaos. Syria, for example, was the post card example of a moderately-functional Arab state. Then it wasn’t and the gangbangers have been having a field day since. That is the kind of “state” that Republicans appear to think will keep them in power and money, indefinitely, and for a few of them that will be true and for the majority, like the rest of us, they will discover the cost of “reaping the whirlwind.”

When your long-range “plan” is to wildly hope that a mobster faux-millionaire who has never done anything in his life to benefit anyone but himself, blowing up the world might seem like that act would create “new opportunities” that won’t exist any other way.

Republican Jokes

I know, that title probably looks redundant. It probably is. However, in the last 40 years it has become increasingly obvious that almost every ethnic, mental status, stupid boss, and location joke ever written can now be easily converted to a “Republican joke.”

Here are some examples, and be honest, you know every one of these modified jokes works as it stands here:

Q: What do you do if a Republican throws a pin at you?

A: Run like hell - he's still got a hand-grenade between his teeth.

 

Q: What do you do if a Republican throws a hand-grenade at you?

A: Take the pin out and throw it back.

 

Q: How do you know if a Republican has been using a computer?

A: There's whiteout on the screen.

 

Q: How did the Republican mother teach her son which way to put his underwear on?

A: Yellow in the front, Brown in the back!

 

Q: How do you know you're flying over a Red State?

A: Toilet paper hanging on the clotheslines.

 

Q: Why do Republican names end in "ski" ?

A: Because they can't spell toboggan.

 

Q: Did you see the Republican submarine with a screen door?

A: Don't laugh, it keeps the fish out.

 

Q: Did you hear about the Republican Helicopter crash?

A: The pilot got cold, so he turned off the fan.

 

Q: How do you sink a Republican battleship?

A: Put it in water.

 

Q: Why did the Republican put ice in his condom?

A: To keep the swelling down.

 

Q: What happened to the Republican hockey team?

A: They all drowned in spring training.

 

Q: Why don't Republican women use vibrators?

A: It chips their teeth.

 

Q: Why did the Republican cross the road?

A: He couldn't get his dick out of the chicken.

 

Q: Why are there no Republican doctors?

A: Because you can't write prescriptions with a crayon.

 

Q: What’s the difference between a smart Republican and a unicorn?

A: Nothing, they're both fictional characters

 

Q: Did you hear about the winner of the Republican beauty contest?

A: Me neither.

 

Q: Why wasn't Christ born in A Red State?

A: Because they couldn't find three wise men or a virgin.

 

Q: How did the Yankees conquer the South so fast?

A: They marched in backwards and the Confederates thought they were leaving.

 

Q: How do you tell which is the groom at a Republican wedding?

A: He's the one with the clean tee-shirt.

Q: How do you get a Republican out of the bath tub?

A: Throw in a bar of soap.  

 

Q: Why are there no ice cubes in a Red State?

A: They forgot the recipe.

 

Q: What happens when a Republican doesn't pay his garbage bill?

A: They stop delivering.

 

Q: How do you ruin a Republican party?

A: Flush the punch bowl.

 

Q: What happened to the Republican National Library?

A: Someone stole the book.

 

Q: Why did the Republican couple decide to have only 4 children?

A: They'd read in the newspaper that one out of every five babies born in the world today is Hindu.

 

Q: What did the Republican mother say when her daughter announced that she was pregnant?

A: "Are you sure it's yours?"

 

Q: Why did the Republican sell his water skis?

A: He couldn't find a lake with a hill in it.

 

Q: What do Republican athletes do with their gold medals?

A: Go home and got them bronzed.

 

Q: Did you hear in the news that a 747 recently crashed in a cemetery in a Red State?

A: The Republican officials have so far retrieved 2000 bodies.

 

Did you hear about the Republican family that froze to death outside a theater?

They were waiting to see the movie "Closed for the Winter."

 

An English guy is driving with a Republican as his passenger, when he decides to pull over because he suspects that his turn signal may not be working. He asks the Republican if he doesn't mind stepping out of the car to check the lights while he tests them. The Republician steps out and stands in front of the car. The English guy turns on the turn signal and asks, "Is it working?"

To which the Republican responds, "Yes, it's working....No, it's not working....Yes, it's working....No, it's not working...."

 

Did you hear about the terrible automobile accident in Georgia last night? A Republican family on vacation lost all of their children. The pickup truck they were riding in ran off the road into a lake and sank to the bottom. The parents got out of the cab OK but all the kids in the back drowned...they couldn't get the tailgate open.

 

Three men are traveling in the Amazon, a Socialist, a Democrat, and a Republican, and they get captured by some natives. The head of the tribe says to the Socialist, "What do you want on your back for your whipping?"

The Socialist responds, "I will take oil!" So they put oil on his back, and a large Amazon whips him 10 times. When he is finished the Socialist has huge welts on his back and he can hardly move.

The Amazons haul the Socialist away, and say to the Republican, "What do you want on your back?"

"I will take nothing!" says the Republican, and he stands there straight and takes his 10 lashings whimpering and bawling like a baby.

"What will you take on your back?" the Amazons ask the Democrat. He responds, "I'll take the Republican!"

 

A popular bar had a new robotic bartender installed. A guy came in for a drink and the robot asked him, "What's your IQ?"

The man replied, "130." So the robot proceeded to make conversation about physics, astronomy, and so on. The man listened intently and thought, "This is impressive."

Another guy came in for a drink and the robot asked him, "What's your IQ?"

The man responded, "110." So the robot started talking about the superbowl, dirt bikes, and so on. The man thought to himself, "Wow, this is really cool."

A third guy came in to the bar. As with the others, the robot asked him, "What's your IQ?"

The man replied, "80."

The robot asked, "So, which Red State are you from?"

 

A Republican is hired to paint the lines on the road. On the first day he paints ten miles, and his employers are amazed. But, the second day he painted just five, and on only the third day, he painted only a mile of the road. Disappointed his boss asks what the problem was. The Republican replies, "Well sir, every day I have to walk farther and farther to get back to the paint bucket."

 

Three prisoners, an bank robber, a car thief, and a Republican, are scheduled to be executed by firing squad. They bring out the bank robber and stand him in front of the pole. He points and shouts, "Tornado!" They all look and the bank robber runs away.

Next, they place the car thief in front of the firing squad. He yells "Earthquake!" They all hit the dust and the car thief escapes.

Next up is the Republican. He shouts "Fire!"