The second rail - race

This one is pretty simple. Race matters. But race also doesn't matter at all. Huh?

OK, like I said, it's simple. On the whole, there are physiological differences between members of various races. Caucasians are different than Africans, who in turn are different from Asians, who are a little different from Amerinds, etc. It's not racist to say that. And I'll use professional sports below as one of the tools to demonstrate my argument.

Race is, as a whole, a useful tool for describing minor physiological adaptations among select human populations that have evolved over time. One important thing to remember about evolution, though - not all changes happen for a reason. Sometimes a characteristic emerges alongside a useful one that serves no purpose - but since it's not harmful, it isn't selected out. When you take the accumulated differences and express them in comparison to another population, that's what race represents.

What is racist is to believe that the members of one race are inherently "better" than another. That's wrong. In the time scale of human evolution, most racial differences are truly minor variations. Thousands of years of self-selective breeding among communities reinforced these basic racial characteristics, but modern Western societies are re-blending them again.

That's an important thing to remember. There may be multiple races, but only one species. There's no physiological reason why members of different races can't intermingle and reproduce.

Here's the gist of my essay, though: sure, there are average differences between races. But no one human is really all that different from any other when you think about it. A lot more of the difference between two people is from upbringing and socio-economic status than racial factors.

Also, there are a few things we know at this point through anthropology. We can be reasonably certain that the human species originated somewhere in Africa. As a result, the "natural" skin tone of humans is probably on the dark side - I'd guess that what we call "white" today is a more recent mutation that self-selected. We know that the natural size of humans varies wildly - just within the African continent we have the immensely tall Bantu and the small Pygmy. Common sense says that Africans are natural athletes, right? From looking at American professional sports, people with African ancestry excel at games that require size, speed and power. It's obvious.

Except that's all wrong. The greatest distance runners in the world come from Africa, for instance. The Kenyans and Ethiopians have dominated the sport of marathon running for decades. Caucasians dominate the game of hockey, which rewards speed and power. A growing number of professional baseball players are Hispanic. The biggest player in the NBA is Chinese. If you believe that Africans are the best power athletes, then how could they not be widely represented in hockey? Why are all those great marathoners from West Africa - in a sport that is designed for athletes with endurance over speed?

Because the assumption above isn't true.

Back in the middle part of the past century, the sport of boxing was dominated by Jews and Italians - all European. Now it's dominated by blacks and Hispanics. Did the Jews and Italians suddenly lose their innate ability to box? No, of course not. What happened was a demographic shift - boxers tend to come from more disadvantaged backgrounds. In the early 20th century, that spot in society was held by the Jews and Italians (among others) who were recent, lower-class immigrants. As time went by, subsequent generations moved up in society, and other groups expanded into the void left behind. And the next generation of boxers came from those ranks.

Eventually, as prosperity hopefully makes it down the line, there will be another group rising to prominence within the sport. Time will tell. But Hispanics aren't inherently better boxers than Italians - it's just that there's a lot more of them right now involved in the sport, so more of them will rise to the upper ranks.

Hockey players generally come from Europe, Canada, or the northernmost US (New England and the Upper Midwest). The populations that produce hockey players are demographically disproportionately Caucasian. So very few people from other racial backgrounds play hockey. They play other sports that are more popular where they live. It's that simple. And basketball, for instance, is more popular in a lot of urban black communities than it is in comparable white ones - hence more blacks playing. It's not that they're all better or worse - with a larger pool of players to pick from, more of them will make it to the next level. In places like the Dominican Republic, baseball is the sport. So many people are dedicated to it that we now have a lot of Dominicans playing professionally. Simple stuff.

So yes, in a general sense, there may be minor differences between races. To deny that is foolishness in the name of being politically correct. As a total population, perhaps the average black person is a slightly better athlete than the average white person. And I say slightly. But humans are more than averages. Much more. Plus, I suspect I single-handedly hold down the average for white folks, so it may just be my fault.

One more athletic story for now: when I was in high school back in the Dark Ages (okay, the early '80s, but it seemed that way), I was an occasional athlete. In particular, before chronic injuries and changing interests (girls) took me away from it, I ran track - all three seasons per year (cross-country, indoor, and outdoor). I was decent, not great - but not awful either. I was one of the better middle-distance and long sprinters on the team, in fact - clocking an 800 meter time right around 2 minutes. I was close to my adult height of 6'3", but skinny as a rail at maybe 160 pounds (it's remarkable what beer, age, and marriage can do to add bulk).

Anyhow, I, a tall, skinny white guy, was one of the better sprinters. Not great, but good. Our best sprinter, he was black. There was a white guy (not me) who was nearly as good, and occasionally beat him (they both always whupped me). Our best distance runner was a small white kid (he always whupped me, too). Short of that, though, there was no real way to predict who would excel at what - because the population was small enough to make sure that trends don't matter.

So, like I said, race matters a little bit, sometimes. But in the larger perspective, it doesn't matter at all. What matters to most humans is the natural desire to associate with "your own tribe", and racial differences are simply a visible reminder to most people that there are, in effect, different tribes. A Great Dane and a Shar-Pei may look almost nothing alike, but they're both still dogs. If they were physically able to mate, they could have offspring that would combine qualities of both (however odd that might appear). For humans? There's a lot less physical difference between any two human races than there are in an example like I just gave you. And minor trends don't make a difference with any one individual.

So in essence what I'm saying is that though it's racist and wrong to assume that any one race is inherently "better" or "worse" than any other, it's racist and stupid to pretend that there are no differences at all between races, either. There are. It's just that they're minor enough to not matter much, and the social and cultural differences between different classes make a much more pronounced difference. But unless you're one of the nutlogs who believe in predestination, virtually anyone can overcome socio-economic disadvantages given the opportunity (and desire) to do so. And that's what I believe.

A new Internet law:

I haven't seen this elsewhere, so I'm claiming it as my own.

jht's law says:

If you plug a Windows box directly into a high-speed Internet connection with only factory defaults, the probability that you will be ownz0r3d rapidly approaches 1 with each passing minute before Windows Update is at least run once.

In essence, you will not survive the first day. Period.

The usage of a hardware firewall or NAT router will lower this risk back down close to a probablity of 0, assuming Windows Update is run to patch all critical holes. A current antivirus subscription will lower it further, and good anti-malware protection will lower it further still.

That law is a major premise behind my business.

Occupational Hazards

This morning, I wanted some coffee after I arrived at my office. But I didn't feel like heading down to the bagel shop in the building to buy a cup - I've got a nice stash of Dunkin' Donuts single-pot packs of coffee so I popped one open and brewed a pot.

And then I drank virtually all of it by myself. The room is vibrating before my eyes right now, I'm so wired.

This is one of the things that can happen to you when you run your own office.

Reggae joke of the day...

"What's the preferred method of birth control in Jamaica?"
"The riddim method!"

I didn't say it was a good joke...

Simplicity

I am now a Apple Certified Help Desk Specialist. Why? because I could pass the test with a minimum of effort (I was alloted 2 hours at the Prometric center this morning, and completed the 91-question test in 15 minutes). That test gives me the certification I needed to become an Apple Certified Consultant. So I did that after I got home, and now shold be able to generate some business with Apple's help.

Every little bit helps, you know. And I almost broke even for April if you count actual receipts. If you count recievables I've already done a small profit for May. Whoo!

Wow, how remarkable!

In the most recent Google index, my old employer is number 1 in a keyword search. But right behind it is my favorite Holyoke-related link.

It's funny what impact a few links can have on a lightly-traveled destination...

That was quick

I set up the fax trap, and got one in about 20 minutes later. It was from fax.com. I'll now join the effort to kill them.

In related telecom news, a new person apparently lives in my house. At least, she ordered phone service with our home address. Needless to say, that's been taken care of as well. Most likely a normal goof - there's a lot of multi-family units around us.

And Network World sent me one last chance to renew my subscription by e-mail. Of course, they've sent me that several times already, called me a couple of times, sent me letters, and wrapped the magazine in renewal notices. I have yet to renew. Supposedly my subscription ended back in January but they still won't go away.

My second line

I have a second phone line at work, also with a good phone number. But since the day it was turned on, I've been getting anywhere from 2-8 phone calls per day from a fax machine. I don't have a fax, so they either irritate me or irritate my voicemail (making me think I have a message). The only bright side is that I forward my main phone line to my cell when I'm out of the office, and the line in question doesn't forward as well.

Verizon can't do anything about it without either making me buy caller ID or pay for tracing. So I just came up with my own solution: I've rigged up my PowerBook to answer that line with it's own fax server, then send me an e-mail to let me know when it happens. It'll capture the junk fax, and hopefully then give me the sender info so I can go find the sender and do one of three things: convince them to stop, turn them over for prosecution, or just hurt them badly.

Which one depends on what they keep faxing me, I guess. I'm planning solution number 1 or 2, and I'd rather not do number 3, since it would be illegal.

But I wouldn't complain if they accidentally got hit by a bus.

Trivial thoughts

As an intermezzo of sorts, here are some thoughts and notes that have been bumping around in my life and head the last couple of days:

- David is much better now. He developed a mild case of hives after his fever broke for good, but they've cleared up already.

- I made some minor updates to my company website last week. Changed a few phrases, updated the navigation system, and added my logo. I'm using FrontPage 2003 as the generator tight now, because I'm trying to get a little more familiar with some of the Windows tools. I still prefer BBEdit.

Saturday afternoon I went to the local Borders to buy a tech book for the office. I'm a huge fan of Amazon, and I usually get my book supply from there and the library, but I was reminded of just how pleasurable it can be to spend time in a brick & mortar bookstore. Even if I don't buy a ton of books, I have to start visiting them more.

- David now has an air conditioner. We picked one up for him at Lowe's yesterday, and I installed it after he took his nap. It's remarkable just how much air conditioners have improved in the last few years. You'd expect all the innovation to be over in that field given the maturity. Of course, none of them are made here anymore.

- Buying him an air conditioner gave me a nice excuse to cut wood (fitting it to the window frame). I got to play with the circular saw a few times. Yay! I could feel the testosterone surging with every chop!

- I started working out again just about a month ago - 6 days per week I go downstairs to my basement gym and lift weights for about 20 minutes. It's starting to feel good. Maybe that's where the testosterone came from.

- I'm not panicked about the Sox gettign swept over the weekend. I wasn't too excited when they swept the Yankees last weekend. Come July, I'll start thinking a lot more about it. It's way too early right now. If they win 15 in a row or lose 10 in a row, I't'll start mattering more before then. But given that the Yankees are the Yankees, the Orioles are much improved, and the Jays can't be as bad as their start, there's still a lot of race up ahead.

- You know, I just realized they were having the Kentucky Derby about a half-hour after it was over?

- Jane kind of enjoys NASCAR. I'm not into it as much, but I'm getting a lot more tolerant. There are some wonderfully geeky elements to the sport, with all the technology getting used.

- I added a few new links this weekend on the navigation frame of this blog. Give 'em a look-see!

The first rail - economics

Today's essay is one of three I'm working on that discuss topics often considered to be radioactive in everyday conversation. But it's my blog, so I can say whatever I want. I plan to post one every few days over the next week or so, and if you offend easily or know immediately that you'll disagree with me, then feel free to ignore these and skip right to my usual mixture of tech notes, daily minutiae, wrestling talk, and notes about the development of my utterly adorable son. This will be a tad more serious, though.

The first topic is on business and economics. As most readers know, I've worked for a long time in the IT field. Right now, I'm struggling to get a business off the ground, and I also bumped up firsthand into the downsizing trend last year. So I have a slightly biased perspective, of course - but anyone who won't admit some sort of bias is either a liar or a Bush administration official (which may be pretty much the same thing).

American capitalism is fundamentally the strongest economic system ever devised by man. I really believe that. But I also believe in common sense, and I don't see much of it. Our economic system is broken - I think that should be obvious to most. I trace much of this to the mutual fund industry.

Mutual funds, you say? What on earth is wrong with them?

Well, the stock market is a wonderful thing. It gives the average person the ability to own a portion of a large company, sharing in the risk and the success alike. Some years ago, somebody had the bright idea to pool stock market risks among multiple companies, and make that pool available to investors. So rather than buying the stocks directly, you bought shares of the fund that then used the total pool of dollars to try and grow wealth for everyone in the fund.

Great idea. But the law of unintended consequences always holds sway, and it was no different here. The sheer size of mutual funds gives them a larger voice than the individual shareholder would have. That's good. But the goal of the average small stock investor is likely to be growth. You buy a few shares of some company as a young person, deposit the dividend checks, and someday sell at an increased value (assuming your stocks grew). Businesses focused on long-term growth, often at the expense of short-term profits.

Mutual funds changed all that. Because of the size and volatility of these funds, the focus of businesses started to change. Where once it was good to grow long-term, the new mantra became one of quarterly growth - increased numbers mattered regardless of the way they were obtained. And the massive stock-based retirement funds (like TIAA-CREF, CALPERS, and others) contributed as well, pushing businesses to generate immediate increased profits often at the expense of the jobs of the very investors they represent. What good are better returns on your retirement fund if you don't have a job today?

The other disaster was the explosion in stock-based compensation. I know people who have already retired as millionaires thanks to options - so they're good, right? Well, they are good in theory - tie compensation to a company's performance and use that compensation as an incentive. Unfortunately, it helped make executive compensation ridiculously disproportionate and created an incentive to game the system in order to maximize short-term value even more. Name me even one CEO who deserves a $10 million and up pay package. Or even $5 million. I can't. Not even Steve Jobs deserves that kind of compensation, and he literally saved a Fortune 500 company from the grave. Unless you own most of the shares yourself, there is no justification for a publicly owned company paying the kind of salaries they pay their top dogs. Compensation has become an executive pissing contest, with execs pretty much battling over whose Gulfstream is bigger. It should stop. Period.

And it's been made worse by the plutocracy that was granted control of this nation by a Supreme Court decision. We thought crony capitalism was reserved for the Asian nations - no, we've got it, too. This administration has been more against the everyday person than any I've seen in my lifetime so far, and I've lived so far through Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, and Bush 2. Selling cynical tax cuts as their only solution to all ills is inane beyond belief. Paul Krugman has done a much better job than I can of pointing out the horrible economic ideas the Bush gang have been selling us, so I won't linger too much here. But I want to point something out. Notice how mortgage rates are finally starting to climb again? Well, part of that is because the US government is the safest investment bet out there. But every dollar they borrow is a dollar less available to the private sector, because banks and investors send money to the government first for safety. The total pool of money doesn't increase that fast, folks. Something's gotta give.

And it's starting to. It's going to keep becoming more and more expensive for you and me to borrow money, because the supply of money for us is down. Why? Because George W. Bush and his advisors believe you can spend more and tax less. If you make really big money (like over $250k per year), you'll pay a lot less in taxes than you did a few years ago. If you make under $100k, you'll pay a little less. If you're struggling to get by, you'll get screwed. Oh well.

But hey, from what I can tell it really doesn't matter to them. Way too many of the higher-ups for my liking subscribe to the millennialist belief that says we're entering the end times anyway. I'll save that for essay #3, but basically there are people in charge of this country who believe that "hey - deficits don't matter because Jesus is on his way". I think that speaks for itself.

How can we fix this? Well, first of all we can throw this gang of idiots out of office in November. I'm not sure Kerry will be a lot better, but I'm sure Bush is a monumental screwup. Secondly, we need more companies in the public sphere to take the attitude of Google (who hosts this blog, as they own Blogger). When Google filed their IPO statement this week, they essentially said "Screw quarterly earnings. We'll give you general guidance as to what we're doing, but we're not going to worry about quarterly profits. Success takes time and effort, and we don't care what you, Wall Street, thinks about it. And we're structuring our stock in such a way as to let us ignore you".

Companies need to focus on long-term success. Henry Ford was a bastard, but he made sure to pay his employees enough money to afford to buy the cars they made. If we send all the jobs overseas and fire people to meet short-term profit numbers that only raise the price of the stock enough for mutual funds to hit their targets and for executives to cash in their options, we're screwing ourselves out of a future tomorrow so a few people can make more money today. That's bad for society as a whole, and it's bad for the average American, too.

But thanks to cynical marketing by the political class, we think people like Jack Welch are heroes, we think that we're the people getting the benefit from the tax cuts, and we're even gullible enough to think that we're the ones who get screwed by what the Republicans have so cynically called the "death tax" (the estate tax they want abolished hits estates over $2 million in size - if you think you'll be inheriting that much cash then I want to hang out at your country club). There's a disconnect in this nation where everyone thinks they're the upper class. I have news for you. You're not. It's called "upper" for a reason - only a few people are in it. Heck, even my dear friend and former employee the lotto winner isn't part of it. That's upper-middle class, at best.

Hey, I'm cynical too. Do I really think saying this will make a difference? No way. I'm just venting. But when it comes to economics, I consider myself conservative with a small "c", but a realist with a capital "R". I'm sure as hell not a plutocrat. Not like them. Things are broken and we need to fix them, but I doubt there's anyplace in the world that's better overall.

Now that I've pissed a lot of readers off, I'll return to our regularly scheduled drivel. Expect more stuff about David's condition until early next week, when I hit rail #2.