Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Creating Your Own Environment (World)

The problems in the world, is that people think that they have to create the world for everybody else -- and not just the best world for themselves. So people still think they have to force everybody else to go along with them and "support" them, instead of just going ahead and making the best choices for themselves -- and not everybody else, which always leads to the world's catastrophes.

Individuals really are different -- and not the same, or forcing them to be -- no matter what that political correctness is called. Usually it is some noble sounding purpose like "progressive," "liberal," or even, "democratic -- this forcing, coercing and enforcing, of their will upon everybody else -- as the only true way, humans can live their lives.

And so everyone must agree to see things the same way -- even if it means denying all their own senses and better judgment to think for themselves. That is the greatest evil in the world -- even if one calls it the "enlightened" society, "paradise," or "utopia." Everyone must agree to give up their own preferences for this greater good -- that one person now decides for everyone else.

Such societies are consumed in the endless struggles for everyone to be that one person -- even if we now live in a world that provides enough for each person to make their own choices, and benefit from those outcomes. Thus the challenges of the "organization man," or conformist, were never greater, as those realities of a harsher survival and times become meaningless, and one now, is distinguished and made more fit, by the individual choices they make for themselves.

And so the difference in outcomes, were never greater -- even if some still see it as their task, to make them all the same. That is a particular problem in the schools, that still believe that the result of their education (indoctrination), is to make everyone think alike -- to their political correctness. Usually, that is, that those doing the teaching, should receive more than everybody else in society, because they above all, are the most deserving -- and particularly, most intelligent.

That's a hard habit to break -- of thinking of others only as the means to one's own ends, and not entitled to their own freedom and choices, as much as they have the capacity to exercise them. That is the cutting edge of society -- being created as people live their lives -- making the best choices they can recognize, and increasing those abilities to differentiate and discriminate them. It is a world that requires more discrimination -- and not no discrimination, and the inability to make any discriminations.

But discrimination is not just prejudice -- which is the inability to make valid discriminations, and so to think for oneself -- beyond the indoctrination of those who insist on thinking for everybody else -- and telling them what is correct -- for everybody, for all time.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Homelessness in Hawaii

You don’t have to build $500,000 houses for the homeless — to solve the homeless problem. Most of them have their own tents that they prefer to live in — and air mattresses to sleep on.

You just need to give them a place to pitch their tents — and bathroom facilities that one should know by now, need to be supervised by a caretaker (as a home and job for the most responsible homeless) — for all the public facilities in Hawaii

You need to enlist the expertise of the homeless to solve the problem of the homeless — rather than all these bureaucrats who have never done anything for their high-paying jobs — but go to school to learn how to get a high-paying (government) job.

You need to reconnect jobs to actual needs (of what needs to be done), and not just everybody looking important and “not their job” to do anything — because they are a government (union) employee.

All the jobs can’t be union employees. Somebody has to do something — besides supervise (inspect). And then one by one, the problems get solved — instead of exploding everywhere when they hit the fan.

Thursday, September 08, 2011

"Going Postal"

It seems like the Postmaster General knows what needs to be done -- and has a plan for accomplishing it -- if the United States Postal Service is to remain a viable entity into the 21st century.

Now the unions and politicians (editors) need to get out of the way and let him do it.

It's getting ridiculous, that most of the money now is going to pay for lifetime pensions and benefits (for people not working) -- so that there is "no money left over" to do the jobs they were created to do. In many states, the teachers' pensions, benefits and career advancement programs consume all the education budget so there is no money to actually hold classes.

The unions (and workers) forget that the reason for a job, is not just to get paid for life, whether one does anything in exchange for it, but to actually create value in exchange for those compensations.

The key issue is whether we create value -- in those exchanges, and not just unilaterally one side being able to extort, all one's life, as much money as they want -- as their idea of "fairness" and "justice," not to mention "entitlement."

If worse comes to worse, we can probably go with just one mail delivery a week -- because there is email, cell phone, news forums 24/7, delivery services, and not just the Postal Service as our sole lifeline to the rest of the world anymore.

But everybody is still trying to own the monopoly to happiness whereby they alone can collect the toll -- which is not the world we live in anymore -- ruled by the Boss Tweeds, Jimmy Hoffas, bin Ladens, etc.

We can't freeze the clock so that no more inventions, innovations and discoveries can be permitted anymore -- so that those getting paid high wages for producing what nobody needs anymore, or the only thing they need anymore, can continue to have lifetime security -- as the wet dream scenario of government (union) workers.

Government shouldn't be the only "option." The value of government, is the choices and alternatives they create -- and the crippling dependency of only the one way, as the only way it can ever be.

Monday, September 05, 2011

The Problem of Government (Education)

Government jobs should have a high turnover and be shared among as much of the citizenry as possible -- as part-time jobs, rather than becoming lifetime sinecures for government bureaucrats.

What is critical to government, is that it belongs to the people and is a shared responsibility and right of all the people, and not just permanent entitlements for a self-serving trade association (union). No one has a right to be a teacher permanently and irrevocably; that status is dependent on whether they have something of value to teach, and not because their seniority guarantees that.

Education should be the leading example that a person can hold that position of "teacher" as long as they are at the forefront of learning and teaching -- and not just because the unions (trade associations and lobbyists) protects their rights against those competitions to be the best.

But the original intention of government service was that it would be borne by all the citizenry -- sometime in their lives, partly as a public service -- and not as it has become, lifetime entitlements for people who have only been in schools and learned everything they know in schools rather than in the greater and larger arenas of life. That's how they become, arbitrary and authoritarian bureaucrats -- lobbying for endlessly more money (as much as their comparable peers Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Warren Buffettt et al. they fantasy in their union-think).

So we should share the government jobs as part-time (non-career) positions to employ as many people as possible -- while forcing people, especially the teachers, to make up the unlimited more they think they are entitled to, in the free market -- as proof that they really have something of value to teach, and not the obsolete and irrelevant education that is the tradition of unproductive academia, and education for the educators' sake.

That is how education has now become the problem. It is about learning the new, and not about entrenching and perpetuating the old -- as though maintaining the old status quo should be inviolable. We need education to serve the challenges of the present times to remain relevant and useful -- as the primary model of how things can be done, and not simply as the manifestation and embodiment of everything that is now wrong with society. That is the problem -- of education and everything else.