My excellent friend and excellent photographer Steve LaBadessa has a photo essay featured in Time magazine about open carry gun law advocates in California:
It’s interesting that it’s a Barney Fife situation; you have to keep your bullets in your pockets until the little Andy Taylor in your head tells you it’s OK to get operational. I didn’t realize that was the case. For all the digital ink spilled on the subject, you’d think that tidbit would have found its way to my eyeballs. But then, you don’t hear much sense about the issue one way or the other about the topic.
I must admit it’s a bit jarring to see people walking around with a holster like that. Not particularly scary, just a little odd. Maybe I got blase while working construction for the majority of my life. We were all carrying around things that could maim or kill you pretty much all the time. Which would send you scurrying off a subway car faster: a guy with a pistol in a holster, or a guy carrying a chainsaw?
People disarmed themselves in the not too distant past. It wasn’t laws that did it, particularly. Guns became mostly superfluous in most places outside a farm or a city with the crime rate through the roof, so people stopped having them around. People stopped having outhouses when indoor plumbing got going, too. The unusual nature of seeing people out and about with guns again is more a signal that many average persons don’t think guns are superfluous any more, and they don’t think the government’s first impulse is to protect them from harm any longer, so they’re doing it themselves.
The question of whether to let people carry guns is plenty argued over. Better to ask why they want to. The registered nurse in the essay doesn’t look like Annie Oakley to me; maybe she just knows something we don’t about being out in the world with a bag full of legal drugs lots of people would kill her over.
(Originally offered in 2006. The school banned the fluffernutters and the football and everything past a pulse not long after. Geaux Saints)
When we went out to vote on November 7th, my wife and I had to drive by our son’s elementary school. We were mildly amused to spy him, out for recess, playing football in the schoolyard with his classmates.
We parked across the street and watched for a few precious minutes. Since we were not a butterfly, or a jet contrail, or a candy wrapper, or a penny, he didn’t notice us there, so we got to see him in that rarest of settings: “somewhere else,” without his parents or guardians present.
The football activity was hilarious. It alternatingly resembled an algae bloom and an ayatollah’s funeral– first a kind of milling around in an amorphous blob, then a kind of wild melee over a leathery old totem. We watched them drift back and forth for a pleasant minute, with the odd missile launch of the forward pass rocketing rudderless out of the scrum and landing any old place but that most rarified of targets: a teammate.
It was wry to consider that playing tag is verboten at his school. I’m not joking.
The school is getting comical in this regard. They were terrified of the food the little ones were eating, so they tinkered endlessly with the school lunch menu to make it so healthy that no one purchased it anymore. Now everybody eats fluffernutters they bring themselves.
They built an elaborate and very expensive handicapped playground. That’s a kind and thoughtful gesture. But it is merely a gesture, as there are no handicapped children to enjoy it. There just aren’t that many children of any kind in a little town like ours.
And no tag. Someone could get hurt. Someone could be left out. Someone could sue is the real reason, and the powers that be always point that out right up front.
Tag isn’t allowed, so one of the kids brings a football, and they play that. Football isn’t banned, only because no one thought of it yet. The absurdity of allowing mobs of pre-teens to chase one another if one is holding a ball, but not if their hands are empty, seems to be lost on the school administration. At least for now. And I, for one, am glad of it.
I’m not as worried about my son being injured playing football as I am in contemplating the little straitjacket world he’s being fitted for. Those children decided on the rules, supplied their equipment –a ball– and played their game without any adult supervision; and I saw a lot less kvetching among them than at any organized sporting event they participate in. I’m leery of them being told that someone will always tell them exactly what to do, and simultaneously unerringly protect them not only from harm, but hurt feelings. One aspect of that tandem of supervision is repugnant, and the other unlikely.
I’m living in a strange world where people for whom I have no regard draw finely calculated and ultimately meaningless distinctions about everything down to the scope of activities allowed for pedophiles to roam the earth, at the same time they ban children playing tag in the schoolyard. Such distinctions are meaningless because anyone who is prepared to commit a great offense is not concerned about the rules governing small ones.
I dread the day, which is on the horizon now, not over it, when I’m forced to tell my children that the only sensible course of action is to ignore the rules, as there are so many of them that they become gibberish. And what the hell, the rules only seem to apply to those who wish to live worthwhile lives anyway –who never needed them in the first place.
[Editor’s Note: First offered a year-and-a-half ago. Timely, years in advance. There’s a word for that, isn’t there?]
{Author’s Note: Yeah: Broke-ass loser. And there is no editor.}
You don’t understand economics very well.
No offense. I don’t know who you are, but I’m willing to defame you like that. Why do you suppose that is? It’s because nobody understands economics very well, in my experience. When I see the poll question: “Which candidate for President do you trust more to run the economy?” it’s the question itself which bugs me, not the percentages assigned to the candidates. If you’d ask or answer that question, you have a pre-civilized view of economics in my opinion.
I’m not educated in economics, so I know a little about it. If I was educated, I’d know about an economics education. Not the same thing. I learned what I know about economics by getting the treatment a baby gives a diaper every day out in the economic landscape. You’re not allowed to indulge in fantasy very long out here. You can do it for a lifetime in a college. And beyond, if you can get published.
I want to talk about price elasticity, because it interests me. It refers to the relationship between the supply and demand for things as you tinker with price, or supply, or a host of other factors.
In general, people who work with their hands seek price inelasticity. That means that demand falls more slowly than an increase in price. Since the amount of work a person can do is finite you want to raise your price to perform the work without decreasing demand too much by doing so. You work less, for more money.
If demand is elastic, this means if you raise your price, the demand falls, and doesn’t make up for the increased price. You raise your prices but you make less money.
If it’s unit elastic, there’s a direct correlation between price and demand. Raise the price, demand goes down exactly the amount necessary so that revenue stays the same. An accountant is the only person to have ever seen this creature.
Now let’s go out on the economic map where navigators used to see “Here Be Monsters.”
Perfectly elastic pricing is where if you raise the price one iota, the demand drops to zero.
And finally, if we talk of demand being perfectly inelastic, no matter what you charge, the demand stays the same. You’ve got a crack stand in Marion Barry’s living room.
Now I want you to come out to the edge of the map where I live, and have lived for the vast majority of my life. Forget inelastic price, elastic price, and the unicorn of economists, unit elastic demand. Those are just things that determine whether you’ll buy a flatscreen TV or an end table or not. I want to get existential on you.
If you have a sinecure, you will never understand what it is to be in a walk of life where demand for your production risks perfect elasticity. You simply talk about the churn in the economy. No sympathy for those buggy-whip manufacturers. They should have been smart and got a job collecting tolls on the highway and then they wouldn’t have found themselves in that pickle. People with whales on their pants who refer to their significant other as “Lovie” like this line of reasoning a lot, too.
People often tell me that my furniture is very inexpensive for what you get. Raise your prices, they counsel. Maybe. But more likely, they don’t understand that the market often doesn’t make such fine distinctions about your pricing structure. Sometimes it’s pass/fail. I have to be careful never to hit the fail point because there’s no readjustment period. You’re just dead. People with straightforward jobs can picture this best by imagining that if you went into you boss’s office and demanded a raise, the only two answers are: “Sure!” and “You’re fired!”. You’d be less extravagant in your demands then, wouldn’t you?
What about the political angle I mentioned earlier? Oh, that’s where perfect inelasticity comes in. See, you don’t understand it, because if you answered the poll question above, you think the government is the producer in this scenario. You think they produce prosperity, and through some jiggery-pokery with inelastic set-asides, or elastic statutes, or unit elastic Smoot-Hawley tarriffs or raging carpet-bombing wars, they’re going to arrange for the shelves in the US Store to be stocked with goodies for you. But you’ve got it exactly backwards.
The example often used for perfect inelasticity is the human heart transplant. If heart transplants were ten dollars, you wouldn’t want one just because it was cheap, and if it cost eleventy-billion dollars, but you needed one, you wouldn’t care what it costs. You’d beg, borrow, or steal the dough to get it.
So in the real world with the government in the picture, I am the good or service. But the United States Government is not a supermarket. It is a pawn shop. And I am born pawned, and I wake up every morning pawned. And if I want to get myself out of there, to work all day and try to make a few bucks so I can worry about something other than my very existence, I’m going to do whatever I’m told, and pay whatever is demanded of me. My interest in continuing to be me is 100%, and my demand to continue being me will not diminish no matter how abusive the situation you plunge me into.
My demand for me is perfectly inelastic, and the government knows it. Pay up, sucka.
The Mafia always understood perfect inelasticity, too. They’d come in, tell you how much protection money was required, and mentioned that your kneecaps were perfectly inelastic if you bent them backwards.
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. Douglas Adams
No, I don’t mean the rheotorical you; I mean you. And me. Anybody.
Well not anybody, of course, because not everybody is educable. But there are no entrance requirements, no interview, nothing; they just put the curriculum up on the internet and let you use it. As Lawrence of Arabia says to Ali, pointing across the trackless waste of the Nefu desert towards Aqaba: “It’s just a matter of going.” Simple, really.
Indeed. Now, you’re not going to get to ask anybody any questions, get help from your peers, go to any keg parties, or clap any erasers for brownie points or anything. The stuff is just laying around there. You’ve got to do something with it, no one’s going to show you the way.
Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn at no other.Ben Franklin
Now, if you know the vernacular of the 1700s, you’d know that “dear” means “expensive” or “difficult” in that aphorism. And Ben knew what he was talking about, because he was talking about himself, really. He’s one of a long list of people that taught themselves what they wanted or needed to know. Like most auto-didacts, he knew amazing and voluminous things, but there were large gaps in his learning. This is the danger in not having a curriculum set out for you.
I’ve never been able to learn things properly. I always just wanted to be left alone in the library with the information that interested me. But you’ll notice that Ben Franklin didn’t espouse his method of learning, and neither will I. It’s a self-selecting cadre I inhabit, and if you join because you think it’s sexy, you’ll likely make a mess of your life. Try going into IBM and telling them you know the things an MIT education encompasses, but you have no credentials to prove it. The tests you didn’t take online aren’t in the Human Resources person’s desk, either. Grab a broom.
The only real way to learn anything in this world is to do it alongside someone that knows what they are talking about. But the person that knows what he’s talking about is a rare thing, and rarer still is that person that will help you. They’re busy. But sometimes they write it down. And you can learn it from them, even if they’re halfway across the planet, or dead as a Pharoah.
People drop out of college now, and say: “Bill Gates dropped out of college, and he’s rich. No problem.” Believe me, you’re not Bill Gates. If you were, you wouldn’t be looking around to see what other people were doing, and mimicking their approach. Being an auto-didact is a force-play. You run to second base on a ground ball or you’re out. There’s no deciding in it. You are or you ain’t. Bill Gates and his ilk stole second and third and home, and you’re still trying to bunt.
A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, “You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing.” Sir Arnold Bax
Regular people make the world go round. By definition, most people are regular people. But if it’s enough for you to have the stuff in your head, because you can use it, and know how to pan through the whole placer to find the glittering dust that’s there in the ore, it’s there now.
It’s just a matter of going.
Tag: education
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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