10/21/15 - Feeding the Stupid

This will be the second segment of Arguing With My Wife.  This weekend she and I were driving around southern California listening to podcasts, specifically at the time Episode 128 of We Are Libertarians.  There are very few podcasts that I listen to that my wife also enjoys, but she and I both enjoy listening to Chris and the others shoot the breeze and sometimes even talk about news and politics.

The episode ended with a discussion of the Democratic Primary Debate.  I can honestly say I did not watch it, just as I did not watch the Republican Primary Debates.  I've heard some commentary on it now from three or maybe four different sources, but they're all Libertarian or right wing leaning sources, so I cannot give any kind of objective commentary on it.

What I can say is that the discussion on We Are Libertarians about the debate caused a discussion in my vehicle with my wife.  She, who is absolutely not engaged in politics at all, decried both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton as awful candidates.  I would follow that up by saying that the one time she did vote in 2008, she voted for current President Barack Obama.  Her family generally votes Democrat and she really hated former President George W. Bush.  Apparently none of her friends on Facebook have anything nice to say about Senator Sanders, and she feels that Hillary Clinton is a disingenuous person at the very least.

I was fairly surprised to hear her speak of the two front-runners for the Democratic Party nominee given her background, and also given the fact that I had no idea at all that she's paid any attention the politics what-so-ever.  I told her that one of those two was likely going to be the nominee unless Joe Biden enters the race (and as of today he says he will not), and asked her which of the two she'd rather see selected.  She didn't want to answer, so I told her that, even though Rodger Paxton of the Lava Flow Podcast (who was on this episode of We Are Libertarians) thought it would be Bernie Sanders, I was sure it would be Hillary Clinton.  During the discussion on the episode, it was said that if the nomination went to Hillary Clinton, she would be very beatable in the general election.  My wife agreed with the podcast on that point, but once again, I disagree.

This is where the argument began.  I believe that the odds of Hillary Clinton being the next president of the United States of America are much higher than most of the commentators on the right are willing to admit.

My first election that I was able to vote in was in 2008.  I spent a lot of time researching the candidates and deciding who I agreed with the most before voting.  Honestly, I hated the idea of voting for either the Republican Party Candidate (John McCain if I remember correctly) or the Democratic Party Candidate (now current President Barack Obama).  I also spent a lot of time talking about these candidates to both the students in my high school, and later to my classmates in college.  This is where I learned that "it was time for the United States to have a black president."  I also learned that I was actually racist for not wanting to vote for Barack Obama even though I completely disagreed with him on nearly every issue.  I also believed that his campaign had very little substance and was riding on the vague Hopes of people everywhere, but neither of these things were apparently as important as the fact that I was racist.

I explained this to Megan and told her that I am already seeing things online about how "it's time for a woman president."  I absolutely cannot wait for the discussion about how misogynistic people are for not wanting to vote for Hillary Clinton just because she's a woman.  I swear my wife had the absolute best come-back to this.  She looked me square in the face and said, "Politics is all about feeding the stupid, isn't it?"

Needless to say I nearly peed my pants.

I wish I had insights as beautiful and hilarious as that.  The discussion kind of died after that as I laughed for a good long time and then we were almost home, but I wanted to tell the story of that fantastic insight.

I can say, though, that if the Democratic Party puts forth Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders as their candidate (which they will), and the Republican Party puts forth some worthless establishment candidate like Jeb Bush, I may actually be able to convince my wife to vote Libertarian this year.  Though there's also the very possible chance that she'll refuse to vote at all.

10/4/15 - Why I'm Optimistic

There are a ton of horrible things happening in our world every day.  It would be easy to watch the news and come the conclusion that we're all going to be killed by terrorists, shot by a madman, die of some rampant disease, etc.  Every day there's some new calamity, and if I paid attention to nothing but these horrible things, I would shut down, curl up in a ball, and never move again.

However, I have been lucky in that I don't see most of that as I do not have television service in order to watch the news, and what news I catch on social media I can skim through to get the basics without spending too much time on things that aren't actually that important to me.  I know it sounds heartless, but I haven't read an entire article about the shooting that happened in Oregon earlier this week.  It's all over my Facebook and Twitter feeds, but there's literally nothing I can do about it, so I didn't spend much time on it.  This is an attitude that has served me well, and allowed me to spend my time thinking about the future.

The future is bright, as they say, and I, for one, believe that to be true.  Just a few days ago I read about the possibility of using carbon nano tubes to create high efficiency, low power transistors that could once again put us on track to increasing speeds and abilities of computers.  Every increase in computation power increases the well being of people, everywhere, so this is very exciting news.  This is why I'm optimistic about the future: people continue to push forward and, in doing so, raise the standard of living of everyone.

I know I've spent my fair share of time complaining and otherwise being negative, but I don't think that's really a path forward.  We all need to vent from time to time, but in order to move forward, we need to deal in solutions, not complaints about problems.  Technology increasingly makes finding a solution easier and easier.

In 2015, thanks to increases in technology, GDP per person in the U.S. reached an all time high, despite the lackluster recovery and the possibility of a rate hike from the Fed.  In fact, GDP per person worldwide has almost doubled since 1950.  People are living better now than they ever have, and still wealth continues its upward trend.  This is why I'm optimistic.

So, I know this is a short post, but I just wanted to say that the future is bright, and the facts are on the side of the optimists.  Despite all the media coverage, crime is on a downward trend, and standard of living is on an upward trend.  If we continue to push forward and embrace the future with open arms, we may see a world in which gross poverty and undernourishment are abolished.  Already it's down from 18.7% to 11.3% just in the last 20 years.  Despite everything bad happening in the world, there is still plenty of reason to hope for a better tomorrow.