scrooge

Every year, much of the holiday entertainment I see focuses on the need to not be too busy over the holidays. Don't focus on being busy, but focus on what really matters. I try to do this, but I always feel that if I pushed that point too much myself that I would come across as the Scrooge. The following are examples.

Christmas Decorations: We don't really decorate much more than putting up a tree. Part of the reason for this is that the time spent setting up lights and other decorations could better be spent elsewhere. Yes, that is another way of saying that I am lazy, but I have to ask why someone would spend hours of effort (and added expense on the electric bill) on a display that will be taken down in a month.

Christmas Cards: I should preface this with the comment that do appreciate the opportunity to read what is going on in people's lives. The problem I always have is that the year-in-review letters that often come with Christmas cards are so sanitized and often focus on the things that I find less relevant. I know this is the nature of the beast, but that is why I don't care as much for this particular beast.

We actually got at least one form letter this year that violated some of the rules about what should be in a year-in-review letter. I loved it.

I don't think that we have ever done a year-in-review note, though Golden did want to at one point. I think she determined that it was too time consuming. She didn't really get any help from me on it, though, because I would prefer to leave well enough alone.

One other thing is the constant balancing of who we should and should not be sending cards to. Every year there is at least one family who sends us a card that we didn't send a card to. I know that I have heard other people also mention that they underestimated the number of cards they needed to send out. I presume this is because they realized that they needed to send cards to specific people who they did not initially think would be on their list.

Christmas Gifts: My love language is not gift giving. Gifts violate my natural sense of efficiency because the person to whom they are given knows best what they want, but what is the purpose of the gift if the recipient picks out the gift. I think that gift cards are the about the greatest thing in the world, but I get the feeling that a lot of people think that gift cards are cheating.

On an unrelated note, a relative last year gave me a gift card prominently la labeled, "Happy Kwanzaa!" I wish I had thought of that.

Seeing Family: I wish that the holiday tradition was not focused on a specific date but instead on a range of days, because that would remove a lot of the stress of the holidays. No matter what I do, we aren't seeing everyone on the day of Christmas or Thanksgiving. No one really expects that we will, I don't think, but the strain of trying to give different sides of the family holiday time can take away my holiday spirit.

I really am not the Scrooge that I sound like. I am just not as drawn to tradition as much as most people are and I happen to prefer some of holidays that come with less baggage and more entertaining movies—like Independence Day.

the casino

This is probably not a shock, but I think risk is too highly touted in today's society. It probably always has been. I know that I am probably not risky enough in my approach to life, so I am a bit biased. However, my observation is that voices of caution are almost always outnumbered by voices who advocate throwing caution to the wind. I think I know part of the reason.

Imagine for a moment that all of society exists within a huge casino. People can make money working at the casino doing various jobs at various salary scales. People can also gamble that money at the casino. One real difference between this fictional casino and a real casino is that in my fictional casino the house does not always win, but rather only sometimes wins. Many of the games are not rigged against the players. Another real difference is that playing many of the games in this casino would require a large time investment, and all of them would require a large financial commitment.

Some of the more conservative games would return a steady income and rarely bust, and some of the more risky games would frequently provide a high payout but would also frequently wipe out players' finances. Hard work and intelligence would make a difference in the games in the casino, but ultimately random chance would be the biggest factor.

Imagine for a moment who in this casino world would likely be the most financially successful. It would be the people who took big chances that paid off in a big way, or the lucky risk takers. Who in this world would experience the most financial ruin? It would be the people who took big chances that wiped them out, or the unlucky risk takers. Most who decided to rely mainly on salary and the more reliable casino games would do average or maybe slightly better than average, but few would come anywhere close to being among the most successful.

The people who others looked to for advice on how to be a success would not be the more financially conservative people, because few of them were extremely successful. The advice would come from the lucky risk takers. They would be interviewed as experts, they would write books, and they would host their own reality TV shows. In all of this press, they would extol the hard work it took to get to where they are and the importance of the risks that they took.

I think that is what is happening today. The people others look to for success are largely the people who have succeeded due to high risks they have taken. In a lot of cases, those risks were intelligent. In many they weren't. Either way, the risks are how people got where they are.

As an example, throughout the seasons that I have watched of the show The Apprentice, there have been a lot of people for whom there was no rational reason why they were successful. They weren't particularly smart, and they didn't have the business savvy that would be expected. A lot of them, though, were risk takers. I can't count the number of people I saw on the show who had made money in real estate. A couple of years ago an inebriated marmoset could have made a killing in real estate if he took enough risks. That monkey would probably have been wiped out in the last year-and-a-half, but would have had plenty of opportunity before then to share his wisdom of how he struck it rich so quickly.

Past performance is no guarantee of future success. Remember that before taking advice from a drunken monkey.

elaboration

As an FYI, this post is not about anyone who would be reading this post. A while back someone was telling me about a documentary that he had seen on a cable channel. I recalled that this person had described this documentary before. I also recalled that I had seen the documentary. What was funny was that this person got a lot of the general points about the documentary correct, especially when considering everything that a person could distinguish visually in the documentary. At the same time, this individual got a good chunk of the data that the narrator relayed wrong.

I am not trying to judge. I think I do the same thing, perhaps even unknowingly. I am just intrigued by how the brain not only allows this sort of thing to happen, it really encourages the behavior.

Humans take in a staggering amount of data during the day. Some people are better at remembering it than others. Unless a person has a very specialized condition, his or her subconscious brain is going to have to make the choice about what data is important and what data can be dropped (or at least rendered difficult to access). This is why a typical person can read even a short story and miss many of the major details in that story.

What interests me most, though, is not that the brain does not allow ready access to all of the data that we have taken in. I am actually blown away by the fact that the brain is prone to fill in the gaps on the stuff that we don't remember. If I do not remember some of the elements of a story that are important to the plot, for example, I am prone to subconsciously create my own elements when explaining that story to fill in the gaps in my memory. I may or may not consciously know that I just mentally filled in a gap in my memory with concocted data, but it isn't difficult to convince myself that what I added to the story was actually already there from the beginning.

I think this tendency is why eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. A victim or bystander can become convinced that some specific individual was the person who committed a crime because that individual has specific features that are similar to the actual perpetrator, and the witness just mentally filled in the gaps on some of the other features that his or her brain decided were too unimportant to store. It's possible I am remembering this all wrong, though.

the new ranch

The last few months Golden has been writing up the grocery list and I have been doing the shopping because it is easier for me to get out and about. As a result, I have gotten quite used to the details of most of the items that we tend to buy in our house. Some of the ones that we don't purchase very often are still a bit complicated, though. One example is ranch dressing.

I am pretty certain that we have generally purchased Kraft ranch dressing more than other brands rather consistently in the past. Regardless, I always kind of thought of ranch dressing as something that has been relatively standardized. The only real flavor dangers should be in either buying some strange ranch variant (like garlic ranch) or fat-free ranch (which I think tastes a bit like plastic). I have learned that I was wrong.

A few weeks ago I picked up a container of Kraft ranch dressing on the weekly grocery run. I noticed that the bottle looked different, but I was careful to check that it was the plain ranch dressing and was not a fat-free variation. When it came time to use the dressing I found that it had more in common with Elmer's glue than with the ranch dressing that I am used to. After considering for a while whether I just got a bad bottle I came across this website and this website where others describe running into the same issue that I did. Apparently, Kraft changed the recipe for a few of its dressings and this ranch dressing is but one example.

This leads me to some obvious thoughts. First, Kraft apparently didn't learn from the New Coke that changing up flavors is not always a positive thing. Sticking with the old formula would definitely have been a better move in both cases. Second, does Kraft not do reliable market testing? This sort of thing should get caught in test markets rather than in nationwide releases. Third, is there anyone who actually liked this version? I can't imagine anyone really going for it. The best I can conjure in my mind is someone who doesn't absolutely hate it. Finally, what do I do with it? Is it stupid to toss a nearly completely unused container of ranch dressing? Does anyone else want a sample before I toss it?

black friday

If you have kept up with the news recently you probably heard the unfortunate incident regarding a worker at a Wal-Mart in New York who was killed in the crush of people entering the store where he was working on the morning of Black Friday. I don't know many details beyond what is relayed in the video below. Some of the news reports that came out indicated that only his coworkers stopped to help and that almost everyone else more or less ignored him on the way to their sales.

My first reaction on hearing this was what I think most peoples' reaction was. How could so many people be so careless with another human life as to not even stop to see if he was okay or help him get out of the throng of people? Upon wondering how so many people walked past the man I started to contemplate an uncomfortable possibility. Would I have walked past the man? I don't think I would, but is that only because I don't want to think that I would?

I have read reactions from several people regarding this incident and the main thing almost everyone seems to have in common not necessarily a concern for the man's family or a question of what they would do in that situation. Most people's first priority is to react in outrage at the shoppers who were at the incident. I have already stated that this was my initial reaction as well. While I do not condone the shoppers' actions, there are a couple of reasons why I think this specific focus is unwise.

First and foremost, I am surprised that so many people assume that they would have stopped to help the man. It is a rare person who, when they are on a very tight schedule, will stop and check on someone who might be in need. When people get into a mob mentality, they are even less likely to help out. I believe that it is unlikely that most of the people who have expressed outrage would have stopped to help the man, either, had they been at that store that morning. I suspect that none of the shoppers who were there thought this man was seriously injured. I, perhaps naively, believe that more people would have stopped to help if they realized that this was actually a life and death situation. Regardless, it seems like a better use of energy to contemplate what I would do in that situation and resolve to be the rare person who will stop and help the person in need than to just get angry at the people involved in the incident.

Second, any outrage that I express about this is meaningless anyway. Why get angry in a way that benefits no one? If anything, it is detrimental because I get to pretend that I am better than the people I am outraged about. I wonder if that is why so many people like to get worked up about such unfortunate incidents. They can feel like saints compared to the people who instigated such horrible crimes.

By my calculation, the best things that I can do when I hear stories such as these are to express grief for the family and resolve to be a better person because of this incident. That is what I am going to try to do.