Scott Adams's Blog, page 352

Business Ideas

I'd like to see a business that is a combination golf driving range and car wash. Just park the car, hit a bucket of balls, and your car is clean when you're done. It's the ideal combo, and each service would be optional and separate. A driving range and a car wash take about the same amount of time, they both require good weather, they can both be weekly or bi-weekly activities, and the combination turns two generic services into one special one. (Yes, I did steal this idea from the Laundromat/bar concept.)

I'd also like to see a better evite system that allows people to move from conditional plans into something concrete. For example, I might want to go to dinner and a movie with friends IF I like the movie, and IF the timing is right, and IF they pick a good restaurant. My guess is that many people don't bother making plans with friends because it's too hard to negotiate all the preferences. No one enjoys putting out invitations and getting no takers. It's hard to be the organizer.

I'd like the future evite system to start by figuring out who is around and who is up for what sorts of activities. Over time, the system would figure out the sorts of things you like and make suggestions to your circle of friends. Or perhaps you would keep a running profile of the new movies you'd like to see, the concerts you'd enjoy, and the restaurants you want to experience. The evite system would combine everyone's general preferences into one or more specific plans for which you can opt in or out. And all along the process that might develop over the course of a week, each participant can "nudge" the plan in the direction he or she wants. The system might even negotiate potluck menus and help pick a home for get-togethers.

I'd also like someone to invent a better calendar interface. The current ones are way too much fussy clicking. I get annoyed every time I enter something on Google calendar or Outlook. I feel like a data entry clerk. Can't that be easier?

Yeah, I know, Siri has a voice solution. I haven't tried it, but my experience with Google voice search on my phone tells me that in the real world there is no such thing as a quiet enough environment. And if it is quiet, there's a reason, such as the fact someone is working in the cubicle nearby or trying to read at the airport. As things stand, Siri is more of a douche bag identification system than a scheduling tool.

Google has a nice option for letting you do a quick entry just by typing the details in any way you like and letting the system figure out what you meant. That's about halfway to where I'd like the interface to be.

I also think my to-do list and my calendar need to be better married. If you're like me, you want to keep your "thinking" tasks separate from your "doing" tasks. In other words, you might want to do all of your writing and designing in one block of time, and then your phone calls and scheduling during another. So maybe your to-list needs to make that distinction, plus others, such as how long a task takes and when it needs to be completed. And all of that needs to happen without a fussy calendar interface.

I just needed to get those ideas out of my head to make room for more. (That's literally true. I need to clean my mental attic every now and then.) If you'd like to do the same, let's hear your business ideas in the comments.

Fairness Again

As I've said far too often, fairness isn't an objective feature of the universe. It's a concept that was invented so children and idiots can participate in arguments. With that said, I give you the following question about fairness:

If you and a friend go to lunch with each other on a regular basis, but you pay for lunch three times as often as your friend, is that fair?

Your mind immediately wonders if there are extenuating circumstances. Is the friend doing something for you in some other way? Are you wealthy whereas your friend is not? Is your friend also a client? Did your friend drive from out of town? Are these lunches always in the same place?

When evaluating fairness, we understand that you need to throw everything into the mix. You can't isolate one variable. For example, when comparing the tax burden on the rich versus the other 99%, you want to look beyond the federal income tax rate and include payroll taxes, sales taxes, and any other taxes. That's fair, right?

Wait...Are we leaving something out? Why don't we also tally up the benefits of the taxes? That's part of the equation too. Let's go back to our lunch example to see why.

Suppose you buy lunch three times more often than your friend, but in every case you eat at your favorite place in the world and your friend can barely tolerate the cuisine. Let's also assume it's a long drive for your friend, but very convenient for you. In fact, it's the only restaurant that's near enough to your workplace for you to have lunch in an hour. You both get the benefit of your friendly banter, but only one of you enjoys the food and convenience. With this new information, it seems a bit fairer that you pay for lunch more often than your friend because you get the most benefit.

Now back to taxes. Doesn't the fairness argument demand that we at least try to determine who gets the most benefits from taxes paid? I think it does. (This is a good time to remind you that fairness isn't a real thing. I'm just chasing shadows here to make a point.)

So who benefits most from taxes? Is it the wealthy person who benefits from protecting his fortune, or is it the people who consume the greatest percentage of the social services? Let's consider some specifics to tease out an answer.

Consider Social Security. The wealthy pay a much lower percentage of their total income towards social security because the tax only applies to the first $106,800 of income. And the wealthy also make a lot of money from investments that are not subject to the tax. But on the benefit side, Social Security has no real value to the wealthy. The retirement payout isn't enough to change their lifestyles. Social Security is an odd tax in the sense that you're really just letting the government hold your dollar with the promise that if you live long enough they might give you one or even two dollars later. In that sense, the tax is only unfair to the people who die young.

How about the military? All citizens get the same bodily protection. But the rich also get to protect vast fortunes whereas the poor and middle class have less to protect. But remember that half of the country pays zero federal income tax. Financially, they get a free ride from military protection, unless they are in the military. And a typical rich person might pay a hundred times more in federal taxes, on an absolute dollar basis, than a typical middle class taxpayer. That seems about right.

If you think of paying taxes for military protection as a sort of insurance policy, I would argue that it has great value for protecting your first $100 million of assets and a rapidly declining value for protecting anything above that arbitrary number. In other words, if a wealthy person loses all but his last $100 million, his lifestyle would be about the same as before. A wealthy person's practical benefit from the military is capped even if his fortune is not.

We can't ignore the physical and emotional cost to military people and their families, which is concentrated in the non-wealthy portion of the population. But as long as military service remains voluntary, I think we can view that noble calling as a separate issue from taxes.

How about sales taxes? There are no sales taxes on groceries, rent, education, medical care, garbage service, water, or any of the essential services provided by public agencies. That covers most of the budget for low income families. My guess is that most people pay about 1% of their income for sales taxes and get more than their money's worth in state services in return. The rich pay a much higher dollar amount, but arguably that's a good value for them too. They have more assets to protect from criminals, more cars on the road, and so on.

I don't have an overall conclusion in terms of tax fairness because fairness isn't a real thing. People simply do whatever they think will maximize their benefit, give or take some irrationality. Fairness is just the marketing spin. All I'm saying today is that any discussion of tax rate fairness needs to include a discussion of who gets the most benefits. A more complete discussion of fairness, as I'm suggesting, will still be ridiculous, because fairness is an illusion. But for some reason I can't settle for half an illusion. I like my absurdities in full servings.

That Top 1% Thing

I'm a big fan of the Occupy Wall Street movement. And what I like most about it is the ambiguity of their demands. There's a deep honesty to that. It is okay to say the system is broken while also saying you don't know how to fix it. I'd feel uncomfortable if the protesters had specific demands. I don't want my economic policy coming from "guy in tent."

But I worry that the media needs specificity in order pit pundits against each other. It's no fun having two people agree that unemployment is too high. You need one pundit to recommend a specific solution so the other can say he's crazy. Ideally, you also need a villain for your story. That's the standard media model.

So I've been watching in horror as the media tries to transmogrify the honest ambiguity of the Occupy Wall Street movement into a sort of tortured logic with convenient villains. Everyone starts with the same facts:
Some CEOs are overpaidSome banks take advantage of the system (while others fail)Some billionaires pay a lower tax rate than other peopleSome CEOs, some bankers, and all billionaires are part of the top 1%The top 1% are getting richer while the 99% are getting poorerUnemployment rates are obscene.Corporate profits are up.From that set of facts, the illogical conclusion I'm starting to see is that the top 1% are stealing the nation's wealth. Villains! But how many people in the top 1% are engaged in some sort of evil? Is it 1% of the 1%? That's my best guess. I know a lot of people in the top 1%, and all they do is go to work. They hardly ever perpetrate evil. But they do create jobs for the 99%.

One problem with the top 1% simplification is that people who have college degrees aren't experiencing high unemployment. So it would be equally fair - and by that I mean equally illogical - to conclude that highly educated people are stealing the nation's wealth from less educated people. That's a bumper sticker you won't see.

I would also be willing to bet that the average math skills of the people who are doing well in this economy are better than the average math skills of the people who are suffering. In other words, the Occupy Wall Street protesters are probably comprised of more psychology majors than engineering majors. But no one is suggesting that people who are good at math are stealing the nation's wealth from people who are not. That's not a catchy slogan.

Some people believe the problem with our economy is that social programs are sucking all of the money out of the system. If you have that view, you might conclude that the poor, the sick, and the elderly are stealing from everyone else. But that doesn't look good on a protest sign.

And what the hell does it mean to steal the national wealth anyway? If my flower shop does well, but your donuts shop doesn't, did I steal some national wealth from you? It might look that way on paper, but it doesn't tell you anything about what's going on.

The most objective explanation of our problem is that the economy is changing faster than humans can adapt. We have more high-end jobs and fewer unskilled opportunities. That's not anyone's fault. And obviously we have a smattering of rich crooks and rich people taking advantage of the system. That has to be addressed, but it's not the underlying problem.

Some say the government is the problem. But I think it is more accurate to say the government is failing to offer a solution. And that's because the government has also evolved more slowly than the world in general. It's an anchor on the economy. What we need is a form of government that is more nimble, and designed from scratch to support the economy.

And for that we need a constitutional convention. The genius of our constitution is that it has a big red button labeled "evolve." We just need to push it.

Creativity Spurt

Bill Clinton recently suggested that a good way to stimulate the economy is by allowing homeowners to reduce their mortgages to the actual value of their homes.  If I understand the concept, it means giving the banks one swift kick in the nads so we can all move on. In theory, that might be better for everyone, including the banks, assuming it revs up the economic engine in the long run. And it might be better than watching the underwater mortgage holders walk away. I don't know if Clinton's suggestion is a good one, but it's undeniably creative.

Meanwhile, there's a bipartisan bill in congress to grant visas to anyone that can plunk down $500,000 in cash for real estate in the United States. That would prop up the real estate market and attract people that have, in all likelihood, something to add to the country in terms of talent and resources. That's a creative idea. (And it was discussed in this blog, in the comments, some time ago.)

On the other side of the world, Afghanistan is strengthening its ties with India to force Pakistan to compete, for all practical purposes, to be Afghanistan's friend instead of its frenemy. That's creative.

In the Middle East, you have Abbas using political pressure against Israel in the United Nations instead of violence. No matter what you think of that idea, it's creative.

Then you have the Arab Spring, which involves millions of citizens imagining the previously unimaginable - that they can control their own political destinies.

Former Mexican president Fox is publicly calling for the complete legalization of drugs in the United States and Mexico as a way to end the violence and reduce the cost of the war on drugs. He uses the example of prohibition to make his case. We've always had advocates for drug legalization, but I don't recall anyone at that level ever calling for ALL drugs to be legal, and for every part of the process, from growing to selling to consuming, to be legal. No matter what you think of that idea, it strikes me as creative.

Consider the Tea Party. Consider Occupy Wall Street. Consider the calls (including mine) for a constitutional convention.

You'll be tempted to argue the merits of the movements and ideas I mentioned. But hold off on that for just a minute and look at the larger landscape. I think we're experiencing a worldwide creativity boom. I'm not sure I've ever seen anything like it.

Everyone in the entire world - from Libya to Wall Street - just said fuck the system - let's try something new. This is the sort of creative burst you would expect just ahead of an economic boom. And that's my prediction: The next ten years will be incredible.

Flat Tax

I know quite a few people who support the flat tax, and those folks all have one thing in common: They think a flat tax will make their own taxes lower. That's why the flat tax is bullshit. It can never live up to its imagined promise of lowering taxes for every individual while keeping tax revenues neutral or higher.

I think most people like the idea of a simpler tax code. No argument there. But I've never met a person who would volunteer to pay higher taxes in exchange for simplicity.

The flat tax idea is a brilliant bit of psychological class warfare. At least I hope that's what it is. I'd hate to think the people in the highest tax brackets, i.e. my peeps, are as dumb as the people they hope to screw with promises of unicorns and flat taxes.

The flat tax diversion is a deliciously cynical way to maintain the status quo while appearing to be in favor of change.  The diversion works because the middle class has been duped by the media into thinking high income people pay a lower tax rate than the general public, so maybe a flat tax will set things right. That's the power of anecdotes. If you hear a few stories about Warren Buffett paying a lower tax rate than his secretary, you assume your dentist is beating the system too. He probably isn't.

Another brilliant aspect of the flat tax argument is that it's simple to explain, and our brains are wired to perceive simple solutions as better than complicated ones. In reality, the simplest solution is usually the one that comes from someone who is either trying to screw you or who isn't capable of understanding the full situation.

The flat tax diversion is weasel-clever because it shines a light on the absurd "fairness" argument coming from the folks who want to raise taxes on the rich. Fairness is an illusion our parents taught us as kids to make us stop fighting with our siblings over the appropriate division of candy. Fairness isn't an objective quality of the real world. The reality is that the rich willingly pay higher taxes for the same reason that the British monarchy willingly converted from a dictator model to a symbolic role: If you want to avoid being beheaded, sometimes you need to be flexible.

Personally, I'm quite comfortable paying taxes at the highest rate. It's like paying protection money to the Mafia, and I mean that in the best possible way. High taxes reduce the odds that jealous mobs will kill me for succeeding in my chosen field. Oh, and my taxes are also helping fund national defense, education, social program, and other good stuff. That's a win-win. But please don't insult me with arguments of fairness. Save the fairy tales for your kids.

I know some of you will leave comments about your own fairy tales of Laffer Curve economics, in which lower tax rates stimulate the economy and fill the treasury with free money. And then someone will point out that economic growth in the Unites States has often coincided with higher tax rates. Can we agree that the Laffer Curve has been debunked everywhere but on Fox News?

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Who Are You?

Sometimes a writer's job is to say what people are thinking, but say it better than they are thinking it. Watch me do that now.

Pause.

Have you ever wondered who you are? You're not your body, because living cells come and go and are generally outside of your control. You're not your location, because that can change. You aren't your DNA because that simply defines the boundaries of your playing field. You aren't your upbringing because siblings routinely go in different directions no matter how similar their start. My best answer to my own question is this:

You are what you learn.

If all you know is how to be a gang member, that's what you'll be, at least until you learn something else. If you become a marine, you'll learn to control fear. If you go to law school, you'll see the world as a competition. If you study engineering, you'll start to see the world as a complicated machine that needs tweaking.

I'm fascinated by the way a person changes at a fundamental level as he or she merges with a particular field of knowledge. People who study economics come out the other side thinking a different way from people who study nursing. And learning becomes a fairly permanent part of a person even as the cells in the body come and go and the circumstances of life change.

You can easily nitpick my definition of self by arguing that you are actually many things, including your DNA, your body, your mind, you environment and more. By that view, you're more of a soup than a single ingredient. I'll grant you the validity of that view. But I'll argue that the most powerful point of view is that you are what you learn.

It's easy to feel trapped in your own life. Circumstances can sometimes feel as if they form a jail around you. But there's almost nothing you can't learn your way out of. If you don't like who you are, you have the option of learning until you become someone else. Life is like a jail with an unlocked, heavy door. You're free the minute you realize the door will open if you simply lean into it.

Suppose you don't like your social life. You can learn how to be the sort of person that attracts better friends. Don't like your body? You can learn how to eat right and exercise until you have a new one. You can even learn how to dress better and speak in more interesting ways.

I credit my late mother for my view of learning. She raised me to believe I could become whatever I bothered to learn. No single idea has served me better.

 

Random Reinforcement

I read somewhere that rats become more obsessed with tasks that offer random rewards than tasks that offer rewards every time. In other words, if a rat touches a button with his nose and gets a pellet every time, he'll like the task, but if he only gets a reward now and then, he'll be addicted to it. It's counterintuitive.

I can't find a link to that study, and I'm probably remembering it wrong, but I'll forge ahead as if accuracy doesn't matter. That's how I roll.

I wonder if the rat study is applicable to humans and can explain most of our seemingly irrational behaviors. Take prayer, for example. Prayers are only answered as often as the proverbial blind squirrel finds a nut. It's the ultimate random reinforcement. And if you haven't noticed, people are quite addicted to their religions. Is that coincidence or causation?

Consider horoscopes. You'd think that being wrong 75% of the time would be enough to relegate that pseudoscience to the trash heap of history. But perhaps the 25% accidental accuracy is exactly what makes horoscopes so popular. One can know that horoscopes are not real and be addicted to reading them at the same time.

Consider listening to music on the radio. You might love only 25% of the music you hear, even if you're listening to your favorite station. Perhaps that randomness is exactly what makes you obsessed with your favorite artists as opposed to simply liking them.

Even your iPod has a shuffle mode that guarantees your favorite songs will be random instead of predictable. You might explain your use of shuffle mode as a preference for variety. And that's probably true. But why do people enjoy variety in the first place? Perhaps the study on random rewards exposes that mechanism.

Consider your smartphone. People are totally addicted to smartphones, and those are the ultimate random reinforcement. Email and text messages arrive at unpredictable times and are rewarding only sometimes. When you type, only rarely do you avoid typos, especially with screen keyboards. And now with Apple's Siri voice recognition, you can expect to be awed and delighted with its accuracy...well...sometimes. Result: addiction.

I've long been amazed that comic strips are so popular, given that even the best ones are only funny about 25% of the time. Now I'm wondering if the unpredictable nature of the rewards is exactly what causes the addiction.

Consider sports and games of all types. They all have in common a randomness of outcomes. When you swing a bat or kick a soccer ball, you never know for sure if you'll get the reward you seek. I recently took up golf (don't judge me) and I find it more random, and perhaps for that reason more addictive, than any sport I've tried.

Last night my wife and I watched a sitcom that is generally 20 minutes of predictable, hackneyed writing for every one chuckle. We looked at each other and realized we were experiencing some sort of addiction because the show hasn't been entertaining for years. I offered to delete the show from the DVR and never watch another, but neither of us could pull the trigger. That one unpredictable chuckle per episode has us addicted.

I have a hypothesis that for alcoholics and drug addicts, the thing called "hitting bottom" isn't real. We observe that addicts have to experience the near-death bottom before they have the will power (another illusion) to beat their habits. But suppose what's really happening is that once an addict manages to stay high or drunk for 24 hours a day, for enough days in a row that there is no randomness to the reward, the addict starts to lose the addiction naturally. That would look exactly like hitting bottom, since a person's life would disintegrate under those conditions, but the hitting bottom would simply be a coincidence and not a contributing cause of the ultimate recovery.

The practical application of this idea is that perhaps you could keep an alcoholic mildly inebriated for 24 hours a day in a controlled clinical setting, for as long as it took for randomness to be removed from the equation. Would that lead to just as much recovery as the so-called "hitting bottom"?

This is where I caution you not to take health advice from cartoonists who can't be bothered to find links to back up their speculation. All I'm suggesting is that random rewards might be controlling our lives in more ways than we imagine.

The Smart Missed Shot

In the game of pool, sometimes the best shot is the one you miss on purpose. Toward the end of the game, it's important to manage the position of balls on the table and wait for a clean opportunity to run the last three or four. That sort of strategy is why Herman Cain will be the Republican nominee for president.

Perry is self-immolating. Bachmann is too scary. Romney has the Mormon issue. And he's an android, obviously.

That makes Cain the smart miss. If Cain runs against Obama and loses, Republicans will still come out ahead by appearing to be less of an elitist white male club. They need that if they ever want to win another presidential election. And Republicans would get to blame Obama for what will likely be another four years of economic pain no matter who is in charge. With those conditions in place, Republicans could run a stuffed deer for President four years later and win.

But let's not assume Cain would lose against Obama. Cain is Christian, likeable without being scary, made his money the hard way, the media loves him, and he would peel away some of the African-American vote from Obama. That's a strong package.

At some point soon, the Republicans with deep pockets will realize that with Cain they can win if they win and win if they lose.

The Leap Frog System

When a board of directors removes a CEO for poor performance, we don't expect the board to have a specific plan for how the next CEO will run things. The board's job is to remove the underperforming CEO and start a search for a new one.

That model reminds me of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Some pundits are criticizing the protesters for not having specific demands, but I don't think that's a fair observation. The protesters are simply trying to fire the old CEO, metaphorically speaking. It's not their job to micromanage the next one.

Some politicians have branded Occupy Wall Street as a class war. But I think that misses the point too. If the economy were humming along and creating the right kind of jobs, folks would see wealth as an aspiration and not an enemy.

I see Occupy Wall Street as an effort to get rid of the system that brought us to this place. The anger is not so much about replacing politicians as it is a complaint about the nature of government and the corrupting influence of money. Our collective image of the protests is muddied by the media's fascination with the nut jobs in the crowds, allegations that George Soros is the puppet master, and references to evil bankers and capitalists. We humans like to put faces to evil, but sometimes the evil is simply the result of a mismatch between the system and the times.

As self-appointed Transitional Leader, I support a new Constitutional Convention. Sooner or later the Occupy Wall Street protesters will join Tea Partiers and others in calling for exactly that. Nothing short of a total system reboot will clear the streets. Tweaking the tax code won't get us there. Replacing ineffective politicians with other ineffective politicians won't get us there.

Our current system of government served us well for over two hundred years. It was perfectly designed for simpler times. Now the natural complexity of issues plus the corrupting influence of money have choked out the system. We're firing on one cylinder. It's time for a new system.

In times like these, it's easy to focus on all of the bad news. But I'm not wired that way. When I see a broken system, I see an opportunity to build something new and better than can leap frog the performance of competing governments. (I'm looking at you, China.)

The Internet has come of age at exactly the time we need it to form the platform for a new system of government. A new and properly engineered government could be immune to financial corruption and more efficient at matching economic resources to opportunities. That sort of change would be enough to turbo charge the United States' economy for generations.

In a reengineered system of government, I like the idea of states operating as test sites for social and economic programs. In some ways, that's the opposite of how things are operating now. For example, the federal government is clamping down on California's state-legalized medical marijuana industry. Does that look like a government system that is worth keeping?

If you want the rich to pay more taxes, there are two ways to do it. One way is to use force, but that path leads to ruin or gridlock because the rich have plenty of force of their own. The other way is to change the system to make it worth the extra taxes. I'll gladly pay 5% more in taxes in exchange for a better system of government, under the theory that a better government will create a better economy and give me a return on my investment. And I'll believe that's possible when we have a Constitutional Convention.

1955 - 2011

I once thought his success was mostly a matter of luck. Anyone can be at the right place at the right time.

But then he did it again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

He was my only hero.