For the love of money...

I've always had an uneasy relationship with capitalism. I actually don't understand the love of money at all.

Sometimes I wonder if it was an irregularity of my brain that I was born with or if it was learned at an early age, because I always got the impression that while my father loved me, he loved money more. My parents divorced when I was only two years old, and I would see my father on occasional visits. When I visited, he was always working long hours at his job, bragging about how much money he was making; I would wonder why he didn't cut back on work or even take a vacation while I was around. I vowed that I wouldn't be like him when I grew up.

Anyway, I actually have a hard time understanding money on a deep level. I understand that there are wants and needs in my life that I can acquire with money, but still have a hard time seeing the need for acquisition and saving of money. I have to remind myself when looking for work that I need to consider how much money a job will make in addition to whether the job will be pleasant; in fact, sometimes it's more important, I guess.

I do have a hard time understanding why the needs in particular are not something one acquires whether one has money or not. It seems deeply wrong to me that we withhold food and medical care from people who don't have money, and I tend to distrust people who are okay with this. I'm not okay with it at all.

I wanted to tell a bit of a personal story, though; it's sort of a story about how all of this broke me.

Years ago, I was out of work and searching. I wasn't really worried, because I've always managed to find work, and, of course, I don't worry about money. However, I was married with two kids, and I recognized there was a need. I had good marketable skills; I had a lot of IT experience, and I'd been working for about a decade as a database programmer. I knew there was a good job out there somewhere.

A friend from church told me there was an opening at his company for a database programmer. It was quite a distance away, but he was sure the pay was good, so I went and interviewed. The interview was full of red flags. When I had studied database administration at Oracle years before, I had an instructor who gave us some advice. He said, "If you ever get an interview for a job, and they can't fully articulate what they want, don't take the job. It's going to go poorly, and it's going to be a waste of your time and their money." In the interview, I kept asking for specifics, and they kept giving me vagueness. "Well, we're sort of... We're thinking along the lines of... We know we're going to need a database for part of what we're doing."

I said I'd consider it, and went home. They seemed very interested in me, and kept sending me emails asking if I was interested, and what salary I wanted. So there were two problems: One, I didn't think this was a goid idea, both because of the vagueness, and the commute (it would be about an hour via train). Two, they kept asking me to name a salary, but I had always been told to never be the first one to talk about salary, because they would work down from your number.

So finally, I made a decision. I'd ask for more than I thought they would give me, and when they refused, I'd turn the job down. So I told them I wouldn't do the job for less than $70k. They offered me $73.5k. It was nearly twice what I'd ever made on a job before. I felt like I couldn't turn down the offer, so I agreed.

I showed up for work not knowing why I was there, and I told everyone who was supervising me, and many of my coworkers. Surely someone would tell me what I was there for. The first few days nothing much happened, which wasn't highly irregular. I figured it would take time. I got to know my coworkers, sat in on some meetings, took tours around the buildings. (It was actually an interesting place to work, as they were a contractor that mainly designed amusement park rides, including for Disneyland. There are rides currently at Disneyland that I saw visualized on computer screens before they existed.) I was told someone would get together with me and talk to me about my role in the larger project. Any day now.

And days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months. I spent a lot of time blogging (late 2008) and going to lunch in restaurants that I could suddenly easily afford. Nobody ever came to tell me why I was there. I idly wrote some code, and looked at databases which were already in use, not really knowing why. Every day was eight hours of "work" with a one-hour break in the middle, and two hours of commute, leaving very little time for my family. I felt like I had become my father.

Finally, one day I came into work, and I couldn't log into the system. I went to IT, but nobody could help me, or even explain what was wrong. I did literally nothing that day. The next day, my boss called me into his office and explained that they didn't need me anymore. They gave me a good chunk of severance pay and kicked me out. The train that would take me back home would arrive at the station around 5:00. So I waited and reflected on the months that I had just wasted of my life.

I had earned a good sum of money doing nothing. Isn't that the dream? Isn't that what you strive for in a capitalistic society? For a time there, wasn't I a success story? It didn't feel that way at all.

I found in the days and months that followed, that this had broken me. If this was success, I wanted no part of it. Like most people, I was afraid of failure, but now, in addition, I was afraid of success. I didn't look for another job. I fell into a deep depression that worsened as the days went by. A year later, my wife had left me, and I was homeless. I eventually went back to live with my mother for a handful of years before I recovered, but I think there's a part of me that will never recover, even though now, years later, I'm back with my family and working full-time. (Although I'm not working with databases anymore, despite feeling back then that it was my calling.)

I don't know if there's a lesson in this, besides to be careful about accepting a job just because it pays well. I still don't like money, although I have to live with it. 1 Timothy 6:10 says, "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." I believe this deeply. I believe that so very much of the evil that is done in the world today is being perpetuated by men who love money more than anything. We live in a system that rewards this pathological greed, and many people look up to the billionaires, despite the fact that they are the cause the problems of our society, and not the immigrants or the LGBTQ community.

Do you love money more than you love people? I think a lot of people do, and it makes me angry and sad and sick all at the same time. It's just pieces of paper.

Mass Extinction Event

It's odd; for the longest time, I always thought the climate was the most important issue in the world. It makes sense, really. If we lose control of the climate, other issues simply do not matter. Human beings create a mass extinction event, likely taking ourselves down with it. Ice caps melt, sea levels rise, ecosystems are destroyed, and weather becomes increasingly chaotic. What could be more important to address?

And then, there was genocide. The whole world is going to hell, but one people on the globe is getting there first. I find that I hardly ever think about the climate anymore, because all I can think about is the suffering of the Palestinians.

My wife says it's ruining my mental health, and there is nothing I can do to stop it, but I can't look away. On October 7th, 2024, my email inbox was flooded with reports from independent journalists about the state of things in Gaza one year in. I couldn't open a single one, because it actually physically hurt at that point to read anymore.

It was my government making this happen. My Congressional representative and Senators voting for another shipment of billions of dollars in weapons, and my President signing off on it. These were all Democrats, who so many of my fellow Americans assured me were the good ones.

“Israel has a right to defend itself!” I was told by many. It seemed to me that helping Israel defend itself should look like shipping Israel a bullet for every member of Hamas, and telling them to aim carefully, not giving them 2,000 pound bombs to drop on hospitals and schools. Yet the President told Netanyahu to stop dropping our bombs on hospitals and schools, and by the way, here are some more bombs; we'll send you more when you run out.

I was raised Jewish, and my family talked often about the atrocities of the Nazis during the Holocaust. It's hard for me to understand how the descendants of the survivors of that horror could be so willing to turn around commit their own genocide. To dehumanize a people from within their own land and force them into ghettos and methodically extinguish their lives? I can't fathom it.

Netanyahu referred to the Palestinians as “Amalekites", the people God told the ancient Israelites to destroy utterly, leaving not a man, woman, or child alive, not even their livestock would be spared. I don't believe God has spoken to Netanyahu; the Palestinians are not the Amalekites, but drawing that parallel should be terrifying to anyone familiar with the book of Samuel. I know many of the people in the United States government who are supplying these weapons are not ignorant of the significance of Netanyahu's metaphor, but they continue to support him.

I still worry about the climate sometimes; it's still an issue, and it's still getting worse. However, we are creating a mass extinction event right now, on the other side of the world, quite intentionally. Our leaders are quite happy with it, it seems. The people of the world watch the death and destruction on our phones and protest, but the people who could stop it have no intention to do so. Many of them think that God is on their side. It's hard to believe in God these days, like it's hard to hold onto hope. Maybe the climate will fail us before the last Palestinian is dead in some sort of ironic justice for our hubris.

I don't have a good way to end this piece, because there doesn't seem to be a good way to end this situation.

The Watch on the Beach

I was having a rather interesting conversation with several friends on Facebook the other day about how some people see God in the world around them. It's a subject that's probably worth a post in itself, but there was a specific aspect of the conversation that got me thinking about the subject of the evolution/creation debate, which I haven't written on in a long time, but I wanted to revisit. I should say upfront that I've come to a point in my life where, while I still believe in God, I'm pretty firmly on the evolution side of the debate, but there are still interesting aspects to the conversation nonetheless.

The thing that came up in the conversation was an argument that I myself have used in the past, and it's a classic creationist parable. Imagine you're walking on the beach. As you walk along, you see something shiny in the sand at your feet. You reach down and pull it out of the sand to find it's a gold watch. Do you say to yourself, "Amazing! The random action of the tides and the sand has fashioned this timekeeping device!"? Of course you don't; you recognize that you're holding an object that has been designed.

So now, the argument turns to the human body and asks, do you realize that even on the cellular level the human body is a far more intricate and amazing piece of machinery than that watch? Cells processing minerals, nutrients, and strands of RNA, joined togather to make organs that serve larger, specialized purposes, all fitted together within your skin to make a large, incredibly complex machine that has the ability to do everything that a human body does. How can we look at this amazingly complex piece of machinery and say this was the result of random chance?

That's the Intelligent Design argument, but we know it's evolution; we have mountains of evidence, including fossils of so many of the intermediate species that evolved from simple single-celled organisms to something fish-like to something reptile-like to something rodent-like to something ape-like to what we are now. We know, minus a few minor details, how we got from simple life forms to homo sapiens, and a designer is actually not necessary for the process. Yet it bothers me still.

Why do we look at the watch and say it must have a designer? It really is so much simpler and easier to construct than a human body. You could take apart a watch, and if you were particularly clever, you could figure out how to put it back together, or even build one from parts you made yourself. Nobody could do that with a human body. Even the collective knowledge of all the scientists in the world today couldn't figure out how to build something like a human being from scratch.

The watch itself is also the product of evolution in a sense. Watches are probably never designed completely different from any watch that came before, but were built as improvements on prior designs. It occurred to me that if clocks had been invented in the southern hemisphere, they would run counterclockwise (although we wouldn't call it that) because the earliest clocks were based design-wise on sundials, a kind of proto-clock. However, that evolution was certainly guided by intelligence, although obviously not by a single supernatural one.

So, this is the thing: a watch is complicated enough that we say it must have had a designer, but does there come a point of complexity where we say something is beyond the scope of a designer? What is the basis--separate from knowing an object's history--for judging whether it had a designer?

Remembering Biden

So, I just thought I'd make a quick summary of my takeaways from the Biden years, since someone asked me.

1. While Trump fumbled on the pandemic response, I do think Biden handled COVID very poorly, particularly in acting like the vaccine meant the end of the pandemic. While the vaccine was helpful (I got one, but never bothered with a booster since I got COVID anyway), the virus had already mutated to the point of being vaccine resistant. This was a known fact by health officials, but the Biden administration gave misleading information. Also under Biden, the CDC lowered the quarantine time from ten days to five days, not based on any science, but based on a request from Delta Airlines' CEO.
2. Leading up to the invasion of Ukraine, Biden was shipping billions of dollars in weapons to Russia's border, and everyone was saying Biden was going to provoke Russia into doing something ugly. Russia invading Ukraine was exactly what Biden wanted: a proxy war to make Russia look bad and exhaust their resources without commitment of American troops. When Ukraine was willing to start peace talks, Biden talked them out of it. Biden wants war in Ukraine, and clearly doesn't care how many Ukrainians and Russians need to die for it. (He apparently also wants one in Taiwan, as we are shipping weapons there, despite the US not even recognizing Taiwan as an independent nation. This would be like China shipping weapons to Hawaii.)
3. Inflation was out of control these last four years. It wasn't a problem with the economy that Biden created, but was rather price gouging by greedy corporations. Yes, Biden didn't cause it, but he also didn't do anything to fight it.
4. The Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, and while this was due to Trump stacking the Court, Biden didn't do anything whatsoever to respond to the crisis. Democrats could have killed the filibuster and pushed through a law protecting reproductive rights. Biden could have expanded the Court, as was done before in history. NOTHING was done.
5. Biden, who Democrats keep calling "the most pro-union President ever," broke the railroad workers' strike, which was largely about safety. Shortly after this, a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, causing one of the worst ecological disasters in history.
6. Israel was attacked by Hamas on October 7th, 2023, and while I do not condone the attack (although as an occupied nation undergoing ethnic cleansing, it was arguably not a war crime), Israel's response has been to murder somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 Palestinian civilians. This is absolutely genocide according to the United Nations' definition, and it has been chiefly powered by American weapons. No weapon has gone to Israel that was not approved by Biden.
7. Democrats keep saying the economy is great under Biden, but all I can seem to see is record levels of poverty and homelessness. I don't care how the stock market is while Americans sleep in the street, and the Supreme Court allows making it a crime. We have billions to support killing people in other countries, but can't afford to house our own people.

This is just off the top of my head; there's really so much more. And Kamala Harris said if she was in charge, she would have done nothing different. Is it really a surprise that Americans didn't turn out to vote for her?

Introducing Viktor

I actually saw someone say on Facebook that season three of the Umbrella Academy was ruined by having a transgender character, and that's stewed with me a while. I have some observations to make about this subject, and it doesn't matter if you watch the show or not.

Season three of the Umbrella Academy was definitely its weakest season, but if someone thinks that's because one of the main characters came out of the closet as transgender, they're deluding themself.

The actor who plays Viktor, Elliot Page, himself came out of the closet as a transgender man, I think sometime during season two. This presents a bit of a challenge for the producers of the series. Do you have someone who identifies as a man continue to play a female character? Do you find a new actress to take over the role? I don't think either of those are a very satisfying choice. So, why not make the character transgender? It's a risk, but how did that really play out?

I've seen it done before where an LGBTQ character comes out of the closet on a comedy show (and while Umbrella Academy is a mix of genres, the tone is generally comedic) and the show has to stop the comedy to address the serious issue of coming out. That in itself can be jarring, but Umbrella Academy made what I thought was a very bold choice to not go down that road. Viktor's coming out takes considerably less time than a single episode. He gets a masculine haircut, changes his clothing, and then, as the plot continues to unfold without stopping for his transition, he confronts each member of his family one by one, informing them, "I'm Viktor now."

I think this way of introducing the change in the character simultaneously dials the "woke" factor up to 11, while giving transphobes zero basis to reasonably complain. Why? Because something understated but beautiful happens: everyone...just...accepts him. It's no big deal. They pretty much just say, "Okay," and the plot moves on.

What a beautiful world it would be if every transgender person had a coming out experience that was so unremarkable. Just, "Okay, I believe that you are who you say you are." And that's over.

There is absolutely nothing to complain about this quick and simple transition in the series other than, "Well, I don't want a transgender character in my show." Which really is no reason at all. It's, "My bigotry won't let me enjoy this piece of entertainment. I can accept people who have superhuman powers, but I can't accept this moment that occurs in real life." I truly believe that if Viktor's transition ruined the show for you, that's entirely on you, and not the show.

Season four is looking much better.

Elevators again?!

I had a dream a couple nights ago that my family lived in the Eiffel Tower. Apparently the tower was filled with apartments, and ours was on the second floor. It wasn't clear to me, looking back at it, where the tower was supposed to be, because it didn't look like Paris, nor did it look like Southern California. What I especially remember was the elevator.

The elevator was very large, and round, and it had no controls. Instead of choosing the floor you wanted, the elevator just automatically stopped at every single floor on the way up. This was a very strange elevator.

So this is the random bit of information that I wanted to share: I dream a lot about elevators. I don't know why, but somewhere between a quarter and a third of my dreams involve elevators as a significant element. Riding on strange elevators, elevators that malfunction, and sometimes climbing up buildings through empty elevator shafts. A significant portion of my dreams are weird elevator dreams.

I actually have multiple dreams that take place in this hotel that clearly doesn't exist anywhere in real life. It has two elevators, one of which services the first through third floor, and the other servicing the second through seventh floor. The two elevators are at opposite ends of a very long building. Sometimes I dream I'm a guest, sometimes I work at the hotel, and one time I was a paranormal investigator trying to determine if the hotel was haunted. But always, there are these strange and inconvenient elevators that I have to use, because there are no stairs.

I really have no idea why I dream this way. It's not like there's some significant traumatic elevator story from my childhood, or I have any particular waking fascination with elevators. It's just this thing that I really have no explanation for. There are other recurring themes in my dreams, but this is the one that seems the most random.

Another generation

Recently on Facebook, I saw a post about how Babe Ruth, back in the 1920s, used to play baseball games with players from the Negro Leagues. Even though he was one of the greatest baseball players of all time, when he retired, he never got a job as a manager, because people were afraid he'd integrate major league baseball.

My point? Sometimes the excuse that “they were raised in a different generation” only holds so much water. There were always people who weren't bigots even when bigotry was the norm.

I'm not trying to attack your parents or grandparents here; my mother, who isn't bigoted in any way, has nonetheless said things that were offensive because she simply didn't know better. It's just that it's the 21st century, and it's time for people to know better.