Technology Vs A Wall

The idea behind this blog is to help you understand the difference between a wall and technology to protect life and property.

Let's start off with banks.  Banks store their money in steel vaults to protect it from theft. The vault is like a wall.  It keeps thieves out or slows them down significantly. What if banks kept their money in a desk drawer and had a high tech camera watching the drawer?  You know what would happen.  A thief could just walk in and steal the money and then a cop would see what happened on his TV, but it would take several minutes to get too the bank.  To protect the drawer, we would need a cop watching his TV 24/7 and the money could still be stolen.  Given that the cop finally arrested the thief, we would still have the cost of a trial and the cost of keeping the thief in prison for several years.  If the cop does not catch the thief right away the money may never be recovered.  Now that you have a few facts, which method is the most effective and the most economical?  Easy decision!

Look at your car.  Why don't we just leave our keys in the ignition and the doors unlocked and rely on a high tech sensor to tell us when someone is stealing our car?  You would not do this because you know that locking the doors and taking out the keys is a lot more effective than a high tech sensor system.  What if you are in bed asleep when your car was stolen or a cop was not watching their TV at the time of the theft?  Would you vote for high tech?  I don't think so!

I could go on with more examples, but the results would be the same.  If you look at terrorists who often kill themselves in the process, do you think a high tech camera or sensor is the answer?  Would it prevent you or one of your children from being killed by a terrorist?  Terrorists have little or no fear of punishment and it is the same with many of the desperate immigrants from over populated countries.  Notice that immigrants are not trying to come in illegally from countries what are not over populated.

PS---Where is the Catholic Church when we need them to get places like El Salvador to stop over breeding?  !00% of our border problem is the result of over breeding, so why isn't someone working on the real cause of the problem?  Interesting isn't it?  Is the "end game" any different between global warming and us humans over breeding?  The problems on our border is a sneak preview of what will happen with global warming. Tell your friends!

Doctor Shortage

The reason that it takes so long to get a medical appointment is because there is a shortage of doctors in the USA.  We all know that, but do we have any idea why?  That is what this blog is about.

I have blogged before that we also have a shortage of engineers and technical professionals too, but here I want to focus on medical doctors.  In a prior blog I showed that the cost and time that it takes to become a doctor here in the USA has increased significantly in the past several years.  One of the big reasons for the increase in cost is due to our "misguided" student loan program.  The reason for that is that we have pushed more tax money into our colleges and universities and it has inflated the cost just like low interest loans have driven up the cost of housing.  We have a shortage of both technical and medical professionals, but most of the student loan money has gone to worthless "fluff" degrees.

Look at your family or those of friend's and tell me how many of their children have gone to medical school?  Is the answer "zero"?  I ask the same question about Humanities majors or Political Science?  I think that you must know a few!  If your child became a lawyer, it would only take 6 or 7 years total of college and the cost would be less than half of what it would have taken to become a medical doctor.  The other thing is that they would earn more and have a better life style.  Their working period in terms of years would be about 25% longer.  Think of the impact of the above on the "decision" of a person to go into medicine?  For that reason, we have fewer and fewer of our children becoming medical doctors.

Now, look at why so many of our new medical doctors are foreign born.  In most countries, students go directly into medical school right out of high school.  That saves them about 4 years plus the cost associated with going thru a "pre-med" program.  The other big thing is that their colleges and universities have not been saturated with tax money as in our "student loan" program.  Foreign colleges and universities cost significantly less than our colleges and universities and that is a fact.  Even if a foreign medical doctor borrowed money to go to college, the fact that they made so much more here makes it easy for them to pay the loan back.  That pay back is a drain on our economy too.  In most cases, these foreign medical doctors send "remittances" back home and again, this hurts our economy.

What is the answer?

(1)   Dump our student loan program as currently structured and only provide tax money assistance to medical and technical majors or majors that we actually need.

(2)  Set up our medical schools so that they accept students directly out of high school as most of the world now does.

(3)  Get lawyers off the backs of doctors by taking lawyers out of the equation and use forced arbitration as the remedy.

American Stupidity 2019

2019 is a record year for USA stupidity.  How can that be with all the economic growth during the past couple of years.  I will explain that stupidity in this blog.

I have harped on this point before, but it deserves a second chapter.  The taxpayers are now on the hook for over 1.5 trillion dollars of student loans.  That is "spent" money that has to be paid back by students who we loaned that money too.  Graduates in the past did not start off with this kind of debit, so their earnings could go into their pockets.  That is not the case with our current group of college graduates.  This is a very significant point.  These new graduates will have a difficult time qualifying for home loans, so you will see home ownership go down in the future, not up!  You have to ask if we got our taxpayer's monies worth with the student loan program?  I can tell you that I think the program as instituted is "stupid".

Next, look at the degrees our kids earned with our tax money.  The massive growth in college majors and degrees has been in the humanities, not technical.  Companies about 100 years ago could be created and managed by college graduates with degrees in the humanities, but not today.  Research data on new companies today show that 90% are created by people with technical degrees, while less than 10% are by people with humanity degrees.  It is clear that we don't need more people with humanity degrees.  In my high school graduating class back in the 1950's of those who went onto college, 25% took degrees in technology.  Today the graduates from my old high school are very different.  Twice as many go onto college, but less than 5% get technical degrees.  That is clearly going backwards at a time when we need exactly the opposite type of graduates.

The other thing that has happened and shows how stupid we have been is that we pumped more money into colleges and that had the affect of making college much more expensive for everyone.  In the old days when student loans were made by the "private sector", it was possible for a student to save and work their way thru college so that they graduated without and debit.  As pointed out above, new graduates could qualify for the purchase of a new home because the had no debit, but not now!

There is another thing that has happened too and that is foreign student participation  has significantly increased in the technical majors  Now, approximately 50% of new graduates with advanced technical degrees are foreign born.  Many are from China and many will return to China.  All the talk about China stealing our technical secrets is a fact and much of it is due to our colleges and the desire of administrators for ego prestige.  Why is their no discussion about this big leak!

I would harp on the stupidity of our school teachers and parents and their roll in the technical decline of the USA, but I have covered these areas before.  They deserve much of the blame for allowing the situation to get this bad.  The problem with a long term problem like this is that it will take a very long time to turn things around it ever.  There are situations like this where once you go beyond a "tipping point" there is no way to ever turn things around.  I hope that we have not gotten to that point, but I am not sure.  How about you?

PS--Now, school teachers and college professors have about twice as much influence on the attitudes of our children as a result of the college loan program.  That means we can expect to see more young liberals created by our liberal teacher's union.  I am sure that most of you never looked at the current situation this way.  Look at journalism majors who are now the ones controlling our new media.  Are they more liberal than they were 50 years ago?  You know it!  I pointed out that the largest major at many of our colleges is Political Science.  Ask, how are these graduates going to earn enough to pay back their student loans?  Parents should be the ones guiding their children's development, not unionized school teachers.  You know that teachers colleges have the lowest SAT scores too!

Where Did Oil Come From?

As a kid, I wondered where oil actually came from.  How about you?  There are a lot theories, but none are accepted 100%.  That means there may just be room for another one.  That is what this blog is about.

I think that you need to think out side the box if you are going to come up with a theory that most people would accept.  That's me.  The whole process must have taken millions of years so you need to think in terms of the big picture about the Earth.  Here is where I start.

I think that back near the beginning, the Earth had a lot more water and denser atmosphere.  That follows from the universe expanding for millions of years to where it is now.  If something expands, it means there is less of everything per cubic foot than there was earlier.  Simple principle.  Next, we know that life forms on Earth started out very simple and got more complicated over time.  Germs, molds and bacteria were first followed by simple plants and then more complex plants and then to simple animals and then to more complex animals.  All that is well documented.

If there was much more water on Earth millions of years ago, it would have moderated the temperature of Earth by circulation around the Earth like air now does.  As we lost water, the seas got shallower and left large shallow lakes.  Due to rain, these lakes were not salt water.  In these lakes small swamp plants grew and settled to the bottom building up layers of organic materials.  Over time these lakes got deeper until the water made it's way out by erosion. We know the same thing happened in the Black Sea much later.  Once a pathway was eroded to the sea, the sea flowed back into some of these lakes with salt water.  Now, salt water animals like clams formed big layers of lime stone over the organic materials.  All this time, dust from outer space was coming down with the rain as was volcanic ash.  In areas where the sea did not wash back in, the organic material became coal.  In areas where the organic material was covered by lime stone oil collected.

When you realize that we are talking about millions of years, the above is very possible.  A point to remember is that this was all a "one time" deal.  It will never happen again.  You can't look at the theory if you feel that the Earth has always been as it is now.  If the Earth used to rotate faster millions of years ago, the affect would be to make temperatures more even around the world.  More water would have helped to do the same thing. 

With a denser atmosphere, there would have been more rain and life forms would have found life easier too.  It is like an older person being given oxygen to keep them alive.  With the denser atmosphere larger flying birds would have been possible too.  Dinosaurs that required lots of food, would find food more plentiful too.

To get your head around this theory, you really have to think differently about how the Earth must have looks millions of years ago.  One other thing is that many of the systems that created coal and oil changed very sharply.  Thick layers of coal have distinct starts and stops that can only be explained by some kind of sharp event like the Earth being hit by an object from space or at least some kind of close call.  The time between some of these events must have been millions of years.

Think big!!

The Wall And Our Legal System

I have been frustrated watching the debate about building a "wall" between the USA and Mexico.  None of those in the debate appear to understand the law enforcement paradigm of the USA.  This might be a repeat, so don't exit.

Most people are not really aware of how our legal system works.  They have been watching and experiencing it for so long that they accept it as "the way it is".  When confronted with a new situation that calls for a different approach, they just keep applying their old methods and wonder why they don't work.  What they do is to try to apply more force in the same old direction rather than change direction.  If this is s little confusing, let me explain.

Historically, our total legal system is based on "fear of punishment".  Even as a parent, we spanked our kids if they did wrong and expected them not to repeat their act because they have a "fear of punishment" if they ever did that again.  That is how it worked and the principle was applied at all levels.

Where this principle got out of bed was when we were confronted by Radical Muslim Terrorists.  The reason that our law enforcement system did not work with them was because they had "no fear of punishment".  These people were willing to strap bombs to their bodies in order to kill their enemy.  How do you arrest them after they have killed someone with a bomb?  Do you sweep up their body parts and put them in a bag and send the bag to jail?  As I think you can clearly see, our "fear of punishment" system does not work with these kinds of people.

We already know that our "fear of punishment" system does not work with people with mental problems either.  With people who have mental problems, it does not help if we arrest them after they have killed your child.  The only way to save your child from a mental case is by "prevention" before the act, not after.  Now, what does this have to do with the Wall?

In the case of the wall, we are having to deal with people from countries that are so "bad" that the they see getting arrested and put in jail in the USA better than continuing to live in their home country.  As long as the punishment for coming here is less comfortable than staying home, people will continue to come.  Notice that people from Switzerland don't try to cross our border illegally?  That is because the "fear of punishment" is greater than the discomfort of remaining in Switzerland.  That is not the case for people from places like Venezuela or El Salvador that are "hell holes".

What we all have to understand is that there are some situations and some people who have "no fear of punishment" and our normal law enforcement system does not work for them.  What we have to do for them is to make sure that they never get into the USA in the first place.  The other thing about our legal system is that it is the most expensive of any legal system or country in the world.  When you realize that it is both not effective and costly, we need to look at "prevention" and understand that it might be both more effective and less expensive and that mean a "wall" that keeps illegal immigrants out is the best.

Do you now have a better understanding of the situation and see that we need a wall?

What Happened To Equal Justice?

I have always thought that the USA was built on the principle of "equal justice".  How about you?  I have some questions about equal justice that I would like to share with you in this blog.

I am not a lawyer, but if I were I think that my views would be the same.  Have you notice how the lawsuits have been going from the "Special Prosecutor"?  Most of those who have been investigated and charged are now almost financially broke.  It looks to me like the government has an unlimited budget while those being investigated or charge have to pay their own legal bills.  To my way of thinking, that does not sound like "equal justice".  If the government can't find you guilty of something, they can always bankrupt you.  If you were attacked by our government, would you make up some kind of story to satisfy the government so that you could save your family from bankruptcy?

If you go back to the history of the government including the IRS, you will find many situations where people pay extra income tax to the IRS just to get them off their backs.  It is cheaper to pay what you don't owe or plead guilty because it is the least expensive way out.  The government knows this and uses their unlimited resources to attack their own citizens.  If you read John Locke, who had a lot of influence on the writers of our constitution, you will find that he warned about a government that had too much power and authority.  What we have is exactly what John Locke and our founders were worried about.

If the idea is "equal justice", why doesn't the government provide legal services like public defenders to people who they are investigating or are charging.  In the case of public defenders, I know for a fact that those lawyers do not have the same qualifications or staff as the government who is sitting on the other side of the table.  The Supreme Court has held that police have to tell those who they arrest that they have the right not to answer their questions or self incriminate themselves.  It looks to me like the above type of right should be extended to all contact with the government's legal system.

It is also clear that our government pulls tricks on people in an attempt to trap them in some kind of lie.  Even if you are not lieing, the government does not care.  They can charge you and you can end up being innocent and bankrupt.  Lawyers talk about this tactic all the time, so it is well know.  We all know about this tactic, why hasn't someone done something about it?  Next time you should ask your representative what he is going to do to protect you and me from this kind of entrapment.

Well all deserve "equal justice", not just "blind justice"!

Canceling Your Vote

Did you ever think about someone "canceling" your vote?  What value would it be to be a citizen of the USA if someone could "cancel" your vote?  Not only could it happen, it is happening!  That is the idea of this blog.

In California, they are allowing illegal immigrants to vote in state level elections.  That means that your vote for governor could be canceled out by an illegal immigrant.  It is the same for members of the legislature and the judges.  The bottom line is illegal immigrants can be the vote that cancels out your vote and elects state officials who can pass laws against you and your values.

The door has been opened in many other states when they started allowing felons to vote after they have gotten out of jail.  It has been our history that people who commit felonies lose their rights to vote for ever.  As states start down the road of letting felons vote, it will not be long before they allow illegal immigrants to vote.  Look at the "dreamers".  Liberals want to let them become full citizens with the right to vote and cancel out your vote.  These "dreamers" are not here by accident.  Their parents broke our laws by either bringing them here illegally or allowed them to illegally come in alone.  Some of these, so called, "dreamers" were 16 or 17 years old when they came in.  To my way of thinking, these are not children who don't understand what is happening.

With millions of illegal immigrants in the USA, most states allow them to vote by not requiring proof of citizenship.  This is clearly braking the law, but there is no enforcement.  The liberal judges have repeatedly allowed injunctions to prevent the enforcement of legally passed laws to assure that only citizens are allowed to vote.  This is just one more way that liberals are allowing illegal immigrants to cancel out your vote.  Think about the fact that this decay in our democracy has mostly happened in just the past 20 or so years.  That is like no time.  If this continues at this rate, it will only be a few years before you will be able to kiss our democracy "good by".

I don't know where this is going to end up, but I know that if we don't wake up, we won't have a country!

Economic Problem In Japan And China

There was a guy on TV today explaining how China faces the same economic problem as Japan had 25 years ago and what was that?  Lower birth rates!!! I will try to expose this stupid economic idea in this blog.

First off, we need to agree that the thrust of modern economics is "economic growth".  They claim that this is the answer to everything and is the number one objective.  You know where I am coming from and it is "median family quality of life".  Further, that is directly related to "median family income", not just economic growth.  How many example have I blogged to prove my point?  Many!

I have go give socialists a little credit here.  They want a better quality of life for the "median family" too, but their misguided approach ends up making things worse.  They want all families to be "equal".  That means that they are against rich people and see them as the problem.  By contrast, capitalists feel that more rich people is the objective, and a raising tide raises all boats.  Neither really focus on the median.

Here is another point.  Look at a system like economics as being in different states.  Growth, decline and steady state.  It also depends on the starting point.  Look at a capitalistic economic system where there is a wide spread between rich and poor.  In a socialistic system in the "transition" state from capitalism to socialism things are better for the poor, but sooner or later the system runs out of the rich people's money and the system declines to a worse "steady" state.  You only have to look at Venezuela for a modern example.  You could also site Argentina in there too.  What is needed is a "steady" state where the "median family quality of life is best" and none of the economic systems focus on this.

As it turns out Japan has had a growing median family income while their economic growth has slowed or declined a little, which was good.  If as the economist on TV proposed, China needs to raise it birth rate, then one would expect that countries that have higher birth rates must also have the highest economic growth rates too.  Well, that is clearly not the case.  Most of the countries around the world who have the highest birth rates are also economic shit holes.  Look at Africa.  What country in Africa would you like to move too?  Can't find one?  How about Hatti or El Salvador?  They have high birth rates.

In a prior blog, I used the example of the owner of a shoe factory in Iowa who could not keep up with demand.  If he could get some illegal immigrants to work in his factory he could sell more and make more.  That is economic growth no mater what you may think, but how does it affect median family income.  In fact, it actually lowers the median family income in Iowa.  Does it raise the median family income of El Salvador?  Yes it does because those who illegally immigrate to Iowa are the poor and don't have jobs in El Salvador.  Our objective is not to raise the median family income in El Salvador, it is to raise the median family income here in Iowa.

These principles are so clear, so why are our colleges and universities having such a problem with them?  Why are they teaching from books that were written 100 years ago?  Why do they all look backwards and not forward?  The human race here on Earth does not need more humans, it needs to address the needs of the humans that are already here.  I think that I pointed out that both the socialist and the capitalists don't have it right and I think that it is because they don't have the right basic objective.  We all know that decisions are good or bad depending on how they affect your basic objective.  Decisions can not be judged in a vacuum!  Keep asking yourself and your friends what is the objective of our social system.  To move forward, we need to agree on some kind of simple universal objective.  You know mine!

PS--Why are Republicans and Democrats at loggerheads over the border?  It is because they can not agree on the objective.  My objective is to make sure illegal immigrants never get in in the first place.  I don't want to put murders or bank robbers in jail, I don't want people murdered or banks robbed in the first place!

Nation Building

What do you think about our efforts at "nation building" in Iraq and Afghanistan?  We have been there a long time and have spent billions and thousands of lives and for what?  That is the point of this blog.

First off, we need to ask, "Why were was our military in those countries in the first place?"  I don't know about you, but for me the answer is easy.  Those countries had damaged the USA and we were stopping them from continuing.  They attached us with terrorists and we were just protecting our country and our "citizens".  Simple, right?

Now, let's look at El Salvador and Guatemala.  What have they been doing?  They are hurting our country and our "citizens" just like Iraq and Afghanistan did.  I think that I have made it clear in earlier blogs that illegal immigration from these two countries is hurting the USA and our "citizen" so why are we looking at them differently?  Why don't we do some "nation building" in those two countries and thus prevent their continued invasion of the USA?  Seem as logical to me as the reason that we sent our armies into Iraq and Afghanistan.

We know that the two countries governments are not working or their would not be so many of their citizens trying to come into the USA illegally.  If you are killed by a terrorist or an illegal immigrant, what is the difference, you are still dead.  The cure for both is to keep them out.  We try to do that with terrorists so why not these illegal immigrants?  I am trying to apply some simple logic here to see if I can help shed some light on the confusion that we are now having about the subject.

Is there any real difference between a terrorist and an illegal immigrant?  Think about that and try discussing it with some of your friends.  If they are basically the same, then why not apply the same medicine?

Next Door Neighbor

Everyone has a "next door neighbor" so I want to build on this point.  That is what this blog is all about.

Now, let's get in the mood.  Most of us like our next door neighbors with a few exceptions.  One of the big considerations about where to live and buy a home is based on what kinds of next door neighbors one has.  It also has a lot to do with the quality of schools in your neighbor hood.  It is not money or how much the teachers are paid that determines how good your schools is.  It is the quality of your neighbors and we all know it!

Now, think about the situation where your next door neighbor is an illegal immigrant?  For the most part we all know that these illegal immigrants are not well educated nor do they come from a multi  generational tradition of obeying the law or paying their taxes.  That is a fact, so don't forget it.  These people are from a totally different culture that wants to maintain their difference and tend not to want to accept the values and traditions of 100% of the people who you know and associate with.  They are not the ones who are going to volunteer to lead a Boy Scout troupe or coach your little league baseball team.  If you are honest, I don't think that you want these people for your next door neighbors.

Think about this?  You live in a nice neighborhood where you like and respect your next door neighbors.  Your children often sleep over at their home and you have total trust in them.  You have to know that the millions of illegal immigrants who are here in the USA have to be living next door to some one.  Did you every think about those people?  Are you concerned about them?  Are you exempt from that because you live in a "good" neighborhood?  How about living in a gated community where there are guards on the gates?  Does your nice neighborhood have a community swimming pool?  Do you want kids from illegal immigrant families using your community pool, even though they never paid a dime to build it?  How about your community school that you checked out in detail before you moved into your community because you wanted your children to have the very best education?

If you are following all this, I think that you can see that even though your might live in a gated community, there are many people who don't.  Illegal immigration might not affect you today, but it will affect your children both today and in the future.  What will the future of your community look like a few years from now if illegal immigration is allowed to continue?  Will your kids want to move out of the community in which they were raises and try to find just the right neighborhood for their children as you did?  See where this is going?  What will happen when you can't just move farther away because getting farther away from one bad place on gets you closer to another.  Isn't that what you have seen in your old neighborhood?  The cure is not to run away, but to solve the basic problem and what is that?  Start looking at how you can help your own children and protect their future so that they can enjoy the same "quality of life" that you enjoyed.  Most of us want our children to have a better quality of life than we had and how can we do that?

Make sure that your children have the best "next door neighbors", and you know how to assure that that happens.  If you feel sorry for illegal immigrants at the expense of your own children, what kind of parent are you really?

PS--Bad neighbor lessons.  Look at the city of Detroit, 75 years ago it was a great city with may great neighborhoods, but not any more.  Why was that?  It was because your grandfather's next door neighbor was not a good next door neighbor.  Why was that?  It was because his good next door neighbor move away and a new family moved in.   You neighbor moved to an even better neighborhood and the one that moved into his old house was not as good.  It is like a lawn that has a few weeds.  If the weeds are allowed to grow while the good grass dies off, eventually all you will have in your lawn is weeds.  That is what has happened to Detroit. This happens at a pace that most people don't even see until it is too late.

This same model applies to a lot of things including immigration.  Do you think that legal immigrant neighbors are better than illegal neighbors?  Is there a difference?  You know that there is.  We are not talking about an exact or perfect process here, but if you look at the average, you know that legal immigrants make better neighbors than illegal immigrants. Neighbor hoods don't die over night, it takes a while.

In the case of Detroit, they had a "double" affect with good neighbors moving our and worse neighbors moving in.  How many new subdivisions can we build to try to create good neighborhoods and good schools?  How about protecting the good neighborhoods and schools that we already have by preventing illegal immigration from destroying them?

PS---What group is most likely to have an illegal immigrant as a next door neighbor?  It is a legal Latin immigrant family.  That just might be why the Latin American support for President Trump has increased from 19% to 50%.  When you think about this, it is exactly what you would expect.  What would your position be if you had a next door neighbor who was an illegal immigrant?

Argument For A Border Wall

Here is one of my arguments for a border wall on the Mexican border.

What President Trump should be asking is, "Will your children be better or worse off if we don't build a wall vs if we do build a wall?"

What we have to do is to start looking farther down the road rather than just to the next election  and I feel that focusing on our children is one way to do that.  You know that my basic objective for the USA is to raise the median quality of life in the USA for my children and yours.  We are not just talking about the top rich people like Polosi and liberals in California who have locked doors and fences around their homes.

We need to agree on the objective for our children, not us and focus on the future median family income for a change.  I don't know how it could be clearer that more immigration of any kind will lower our future median family income.  Remember how I have pointed out how the natural resources factor impacts economics?  In the future, those natural resources will become even more valuable and will be even more important to our children.  More immigrants will mean more mouths to divide our natural resources between. It is for our children that we need to assure that those natural resources will be there for :our" children.  For those who feel that value added human labor is the only thing that produces wealth, I remind you that it will become a smaller part in the future.  I have also pointed out that it is technology that will produce the most value added labor in the future and I can tell you that illegal immigrants crossing  our border from Mexico are "not" the ones who will participate in that technology.  Those people are among the least educated and least likely to have children who focus on technology.  Sorry, but those are the facts.  Asians are the only major group of immigrants who focus on technology and they actually raise the median family income rather than lower it.  Sorry, but those are the facts too.

Back to my message.  At all levels, we need to see if we can change the argument from one of blind stubbornness to focusing on what will be best for our children's economic future.  I think that if we can change the focus that we will have a winning position.  Everyone should be focusing on the future of their children rather than their own selfish short range benefits.  We need to stop being "one movers" and focus on the future of our families and our country.  We don't own this country, we inherited it and we will be passing it on to our children and our job is to make sure it better than we found it!  President Trump needs to be saying something like that!

Weeds In The Garden

As you know from my prior blogs, I am an avid gardener.  My favorite crop is sweet corn.  You can learn a lot from gardening and I want to share that with you in this blog.

My objective is to have a very good garden.  Now, exactly what does that mean?  Can I formulate that into a simple objective that I can use to judge my actions and options against?  Notice that even in one of my favorite hobbies, I use basic logic.  Rather than have a sloppy objective that can't be used efficiently, I like simple ones that really work.  In the case of my garden, growing the highest quality of crops is the objective.

Now, let's apply that objective.  Weeds are a serious problem for gardeners.  Weeds are a little like criminals in your garden. They cost you money by hurting the growth of your crops and take up your valuable time dealing with them.  If a gardener could get rid of weeds 100%, that would be great, but that would cost a significant amount.  You have to ask if you can afford the cost of getting rid of weeds 100%?  That would be a perfect solution, but again, can you afford it?  Look at it this way. if your sweet corn is worth $100 and you are spending $25 to control weeds at the current level, is it worth spending more?  That is a tough question that you have to answer.

Look at cutting the amount you spend on controlling weeds by $5 or 20%.  If you do that it reduces the amount of corn you can harvest by 10% or $10 worth.  It sounds to me that cutting weed control is a bad idea if your objective is to increase the value of the corn you harvest.  Follow that?

Next, let's look at spending more on weed control.  If we increase our weed control by 20% to a total of $30, how much more corn do we get? It turns out that we get $10 more of corn or $110.  That sounds like it is a good thing to do because we get $10 worth of extra corn for an expenditure of $5.

Next, let's try spending more on weed control.  If we increase our efforts by another 20% or $6, how much more corn do we get?  It turns out that we get exactly $6 worth.  That looks like a break even where we don't end up with net more value.  What if we spend even more?

How about spending $7 more on weed control?  For that we only get $5 more of  sweet corn.  It does not sound like we are spending our money wisely now on weed control!  What we should do was to go back to spending just $30 on weed control since we can not justify spending any more than that to maximize our object to produce as much sweet corn net value.

Does this simple example show you how to deal with things like bank robbery or other forms of law violations?  In most cases, we can not afford "perfect" solutions nor can we be blind not to consider partial solutions that we can afford.  Isn't this what I do with weed control in my garden?

Lesson----Beware of only thinking in terms of "perfect" solutions!  Think of solutions in terms of whether the benefits are worth more than the cost, not whether they are "perfect"!

Equal Genetic Rights For Children

I think that most of us agree that children need to be treated and protected differently than adults.  That is the point of this blog.

In some cultures, the last name of children is from the mother rather than the father as here in the USA.  The reasoning is that you can be sure of the mother, but not of the father.  Logical idea.  Do you think that a child should know who their father is?  Yes!  With the progress in modern medical science, knowing who one's father is is critical for one's health and future.  If that is the case, who is protecting this "right" for the child?  I think that this is one area where our government should step in and protect children.  How about you?

When a child is born, the mother should "legally" identify the father so that the child has access to their genetic material.  If it is not possible to "legally" identify the father, the state should step in and take the child away from the mother.  The reasoning is that if the mother can not "legally" identify the father, then she is not fit to mother the child.  Think about who is responsible to protect the interests of the child?

Beyond the future health and welfare of the child, the financial responsibility of both the mother and father to provide for the child needs to be considered.  The true mother and father of the child need to have more "skin in the game" and the state needs to define some of the rules in this area.  One of the areas where the "legal" parents could put some skin in the game would be to require them to give up their rights to vote if they do not provide for their child.  Think about this.  How can you logically allow people to vote if their vote encourages more abuse of children?

I am not stuck on outlawing out of wedlock births, but allowing out of wedlock births should not be a way out of financially and socially providing for one's children.  It is not logical that the state should financially provide for one's children while they go about irresponsible sex for free.  We need to protect children first who can not protect themselves.

On the subject of abortion, if it is paid for by the state, then the mother should agree to be neutered as a way for them to have some skin in the game.  I know that there and many cases where people have gotten multiple abortions at state expense.  There is no way that the state should allow multiple abortions for free at taxpayer expense without the mother sharing in some way.

The bottom line is that we need to put the rights of both the child and the taxpayers on the table and balance those with the rights and responsibilities of the mother and the father.  Open your eyes!   If we don't start talking about the rights of the child and the taxpayers, nothing is going to change and the situation is going to continue to get worse!

PS--What if your father had a genetic problem that affected you and you did not know who he was?  What if it could be easily treated if you knew exactly who your real father was?  Would you expect the state to have protected you when you were just a child?  Yes!

Challenge To Parents

I have blogged before that our economic future will be driven by technology.  That is more than just words.  It means that we will have to meet that challenge with our "children".

That may sound strange that the challenge of the future will have to be met by our children, but if you think about it, it has always been that way.  The most important thing about us humans is that we have the ability to foresee the future and do something about it.  In the past, there was less need to be concerned about the future.  We could look backwards and use that as a guide for the future.  Most people passed their trade along to their children and that model worked as long as things did not change very fast.  That is no longer the case.  100 years ago the average person held the same job for their whole life.  Today our children can expect to hold many jobs in their working life time.  I know of kids who are now in their 30's who have already worked for 4 or 5 companies and have had as many jobs.  We know that it is only going to get worse.  Further, the nature of most of those jobs will required more intellect and skill than the jobs their parents had.

Now, I will get down to the message.  We are now competing with countries all over the world and the most significant is China.  China is building their technological abilities and skills like no other.  This is because they know the future will be driven by technology.  China produces far more engineers and technical people than the USA or any other country.  Our children will have to compete with China in that future.  Ask yourselves as parents, if you are preparing your children to compete with China?  If not, why not?

Look at your children and ask how many are taking the difficult science classes in high school and how many are working on technical degrees in college?  I can tell you that most of my friend's children who are going to college are not getting degrees in technology.  I think it is due to the failure of the parents, not the schools.  For sure, the schools could help to encourage and promote technology, but in the end, it is the responsibility of parents.  My challenge to all parents is to remind you that it is upto you to prepare your children to take care of the country that was created by those who came before them.

I can tell you that we are not in the lead right now and we are getting farther and farther behind every day.  That means that if we want to get back into the lead that we will have to get our children to work harder than we did!  Our children can not look backwards at their parents for a model, because they will have to work harder than we did and most are are not!

Wake up and do your job as parents!!  You can not pass the buck!!

Artificial Intelligence #2

Here is my chapter #2 on artificial intelligence.

The biggest challenge with AI is the structuring of the intelligence.  We are talking about a computer program and it has to be written by us humans.  We are not talking about some kind of magic here.  With  my experience in AI, my biggest problem was finding people who understood exactly how they were solving problems.  Even the smartest and best trouble shooters could not explain exactly how they went about solving a problem.  Deep down, they knew that they were "playing the odds", but did not know how to describe their process to others.  If they could not do this, there was no way that they could write a computer program that could solve the same or similar problems.  As a result of my frustration I came up with a human factors type solution which built on the graphical reasoning ability that is basic to how the human brain works.

Think about this simple test.  If I were to ask you which city in the USA was farther north, St Louis or Omaha?  You could instantly come up with the correct answer.  If the data in your head was a big list of the coordinates of all the big cities in the USA, you would not be able to come up with the correct answer even though you had all the data that you needed right there in your head. If you could figure out how to use some kind of graphical structuring system for your intelligence, then you might be able to put your knowledge into the computer program in a form that the program could use.

Now, look at a knowledge structure that is just a series of simple rules that are not exact!  It is like the "hunches" that people seem to come up with that can end up helping to solve a problem.  In this process, you have to trust that a computer program written by someone else will know how to use your not so exact rules to solve a problem.  What is the chance of that kind of process ending up with a system that can efficiently solve real problems?  It might work, but only on very simple problems or with a very low reliability.

Some of you may have been exposed to "decision trees" which are like a series of roads with intersections where you have to take one road or another.  They can work and can be very efficient if the problems being solved are very well structured.  They don't work very well on complex problems.  You very often get to dead ends if you take wrong turns some where along the tree.  This is a real problem and for that reason, I have seldom used "decision trees" in the real world.

Did you ever hear of "fuzzy logic"?  This is not a joke.  If you are honest, much of what you think that you know or understand is all a little "fuzzy".  As I have blogged in the past, our school system tends to program students to only think in terms of "exact" answers or solutions.  Did you ever have a test where there was more than one correct answer?  Did you ever have a test that asked which was the "best" or "most" correct answer?  I didn't think so.  We know that most of the world does not run on exact rules, so why do we not throw out this valuable intelligence in an AI program if we are stuck thinking in terms of "exact"?  This is off the topic, but have you noticed how liberals often only want solutions or answers to questions that are "exact"?  A wall on our Southern border is not an "exact" solution.  Does that mean it is bad or not worth doing?  See what I am talking about?

Are you starting to see the challenge that artificial intelligence faces and that the structuring of the intelligence needs to take advantage of how our human brains work?  In the future, I will explore some of the ways we have advanced into this new area.  It will be a little like how a child leans how to deal with life one step, rule or experience at a time.

PS--Much of AI gets their knowledge by "mining" data.  The problem with this method is that you need data that is "rich" in knowledge and most is not.  Think about Bayes Theorem that takes into account "prior knowledge" rather than starting from zero?  

Thou Shall't Not Steal

Most of us feel that you should not steal, so why do we think that illegal immigrants are "not" stealing?  That is the point of this blog.

If you were hungry and robbed your local 7-11, would that be OK?  I don't think so.  If you wanted to play golf and were not a member of the local country club, would it be OK to break in to the country club?  I don't think so.  If you and your family had paid property taxes for the past 100 years to build a local school for their children, should an illegal immigrant who never paid a dime for building the school be allowed to attend your school for free?  I don't think so.

We have a tradition of charging people who have not paid state taxes to support state colleges to charge students from other states "out of state" tuition, so why would a state treat illegal immigrants better than citizens from another state?   If a student came in legally from another country, these same states would charge them "out of state" tuition.  What is the logic of that?

It is interesting that most churches are against stealing, but when it comes to illegal immigrants, they don't see stealing as a sin.  How can the Catholic church not see that they are promoting stealing which they call a sin by providing food to the illegal caravans?

My family came here legally 20 generations ago and they worked hard and paid taxes to build the roads, schools, dams and jails for their children and all of their descendants.  They never worked and paid taxes for illegal immigrants who never paid a single dime toward those investments.  I am sure if it was possible for them to vote that they would have voted not to let illegal immigrants steal from from their children in the future.

Look at the story about the "Little Red Hen"?  The little red hen planted and grew wheat to make bread for her chicks, but when chickens that did not help wanted to eat the bread, the little red hen told then "NO"!  Even children who heard the story knew that the other chickens were trying to steal the bread and didn't like it.  Why is this such a difficult concept for many people in the USA to understand today?  That is the big question.

Another complaint are people who take credit or praise for giving away some one else's  hard earned money.  Have you ever heard a Catholic priest tell the person they gave food too that they should not thank them, but the person who gave the money to the church?  I never have.  Isn't it exactly the same thing with many of our politicians who give away your tax money to buy votes.  It is stealing!

Why do we feel that it is bad for people to steal from 7-11 or the bank, but look the other way when it comes to illegal immigrants stealing from us tax payers?  I was taught that stealing was bad and no one was exempt from it.  No social system can survive if stealing is allowed and the USA is not exempt.  Think about it!

Ferrocement Hot Tub

Over the past 50 years I have made 3 ferrocement hot tubs as well as a couple of Saunas.  This blog is about the hot tubs.

It is a lot easier than you might think to build a ferrocement hot tub and they are more durable than the fiberglass ones.  Just like a fiberglass boat, a fiberglass hot tub has a lot of problems.  The first has to do with having hot water in it.  It is well know that the longer a boat remains in the water the more moisture that goes thru the porous gelcoat and into the fiberglass backing and the hotter the water is, the worse the moisture penetration is.   The water in a hot tub is much hotter than any water that a boat would ever encounter, so the problem.  By contrast, the longer cement is exposed to water, the stronger it gets.  Now for building a ferrocement hot tub.

All of my hot tubs were rectangular though they could be round or some kind of compound shape.  It is just easier to go with rectangular, especially if you wanted to line it with ceramic tile.  I tiled one and painted two with boat paint.  Here is my procedure.  I first make an upside down male mold in the shape of the hot tub out of plywood or particle board. Next I cover it with a roll of .003" plastic I got at the hardware store.  I stapled it down all over with a manual stapler.  Next I covered the mold with two layers of 1" mesh chicken wire which I also stapled down in a few places.  Next I cut pieces of 12 ga fencing wire as long as required and place them in a rectangular pattern with about 2" spacing all over the mold and stapled them down just enough to hold them in place.  At all corners, I bent the wire so that it provided strength around the corners.  Next I added two more layers of the 1" mesh chicken wire and stapled it down well this time.  This completed the basic mold.

Next I figured out where I needed plumbing holes for jets and water in and out of the tub.  I measured each of my plumbing fittings and found "bean cans" slightly larger than the fittings.  I used wire cutters to trim holes in the four layers of chicken wire but did not go thru the plastic.  I next took the appropriate "bean cans" with the bottoms still on and put them thru the holes and screwed them to the mold.  I next tightened the chicken wire using a mallet and a pair of pliers.  By twisting the layers of chicken wire with the pliers, I could get the chicken wire very tight to the mold.

Next for the cement.  I used regular cement mixing 2.5 parts sharp mason's sand that I had sifted with an old window screen with one part Portland cement and 0.25 parts of diatomatious earth that is used in swimming pool filters.  The diatomatious earth provides the "fines" needed to assure that the concrete is as dense a possible.  I mixed the concrete very much on the dry side.

To apply the concrete I used an old vibrating sander that I installed a sheet of thin sheet metal in place of the sand paper.  The sander acted like a vibrating trowel that forced the dry side concrete well into the mesh.  As the concrete packed it you could see that it actually had plenty of water.  Because the concrete was on the dry side, it all stayed in place.  The wire was all covered and the thickness ended up only between 3/4" and 7/8" thick.

I let it dry for a couple of hours and then using a large water spritzer, I spritzed the tub all over.  After about 6 hours I covered the molded tub with an old blanket which I had also wetted down with water.  I next covered the whole thing with a plastic tarp and for a week, once a day, I sprayed the tub with a garden hose and put the plastic tarp back on.  I waited an additional week for the tub to cure and then  flipped the tub over and took the mold out as well as the "bean cans". With a small disk grinder, I trimmed off the ends of the staples on the inside.

From here on installation of the hot tub was just like installing any other tub.  The beauty of this method is that your designs are almost unlimited and you can custom fit your hot tub into almost any existing space.  Plus it will end up costing you a fraction of a plastic hot tub and last last longer!

PS--I got part of this idea from ferrocement boat making and shower stalls that my father had made using chicken wire and plaster years before.

New Paradigm In Economics

There is a new paradigm affecting economics that economist seem not to recognize.  I am going to try to shed some light on the subject in this blog.

Here is the new paradigm.  The generation of wealth by human value added labor has shifted and is shifting at a faster and faster rate.  That shift is from physical labor to intellectual labor.  It has been further compounded by the fact that the human race now faces a limited amount of intellectual ability.  Do you follow that and agree with it?  If so, I will try to show the new path forward.

The objective of an economic system should be to produce the greatest amount of wealth and thus the greatest quality of life for its participants.  Simple, right?  This does not conflict with my basic objective of increasing the median income either.  To accomplish the above, what is needed is for every individual to produce the maximum amount of wealth that they are capable of.  That means that us humans have to utilize the abilities that we have to the greatest extent possible from physical to intellectual.  Again, these are simple concepts!

Now, any economic systems does not operate in a vacuum.  There are other players around he world who are looking after their own interests just like we should be.  This means that we can't buy with out limits cheaper products from one country like China if it put some of our lower skilled people totally out of work and out of our economic system.  By protecting their jobs thru tariffs if necessary may be the correct decision to optimize our basic objective.  It is in this area where old fashioned economic thinking is wrong.  A "no holes barred" economic model does not optimize the generation of total wealth as a centrally controlled economic systems does not either.   I feel that there is a difficult balance that does and that is what we need to focus on.

The thing that we have to accept is that the world of economics has changed and intellect is the wealth generator of the future and that it is limited.  Further, we have to accept that the difference in worth between physical labor and intellectual labor will continue to grow as never seen before or considered before.  How to deal with this new paradigm is the big challenge for social and economic systems of the future.

As pointed out in prior blogs, if we individually "game" our own economic system we will never reach our goal of  maximum median income.  What we need are socially acceptable ways of limiting "gaming" and changing the way we teach economics in our colleges and universities is a first step in the right direction.

Pay Back On Border Wall

In private businesses, they require any investment to "pay back". so why not our government?  That is the idea behind this blog.

No one seems to be working on collecting the numbers for the cost of illegal immigration and our screwed up legal immigration.  It is my position that the USA loses on both groups, but it is worse on the illegal immigrants.  Arresting them after they cross our border is not the solution, because that is just where the cost start to accumulate and it is a big number.  Figure that they are kept in jail for at least 30 days and then let out to await our legal process.  It has to cost us at least $1,000 a week to keep them in jail.  That totals about $4,000.  Then they are on some kind of welfare for a year at a cost of at least $250 per week for a total of $13,000 for the year.  We all know that any legal process is expensive, so I estimate that this alone amounts to at least $10,000.  I get a total of at least $27,000 per individual illegal immigrant who we catch and deport, it may actually be higher.

Next, let's look at the wall and ask this question. "How many illegal immigrants do we have to prevent ever entering the USA to pay back the wall in 10 years?"  Given my numbers above, we could spend up to $270,000 on a wall to prevent one illegal immigrant from crossing our border each year.  Think about this.  The wall is a one time expenditure that keeps illegal immigrants out forever rather than a guard or technology system at the border that  you have to pay year after year.

We keep hearing from liberals that the wall is a bad idea and that we should get with the times and use technology.  Technology does not keep illegal immigrants out, all it does is to help arrest those who easily cross our borders and once they cross we have all the costs that I pointed out above.  If El Salvador wanted to bankrupt the USA, all they would have to do is to have a bunch of their people line up on the border and walk across when our guards were not looking.  Our costly legal system would kick in and lawyers would end up with all of our tax money and we would still have illegal immigrants in our country.

Catching, arresting and deporting illegal immigrants is "not" the solution.  The only solution is to prevent them entering in the first place and that is what a wall can do.  As I have blogged before, we have to make getting into the USA illegally more painful than staying back in El Salvador.  We need to start thinking in terms of real pain, not like Dr Spock with his "time outs"!