Isn't It Obvious

Phillip shares his thoughts on the benefits of spite. Micah brings up pointed questions. K Sera may (or may not be) spiteful in board games.

Show Notes:

Why be spiteful?

Bad experiences do not always provide a good scale for positive experiences

Simple tricks that can help you stay motivated 

Min-Maxing Thinking is suboptimal 

Life on autopilot 

K Sera After Thoughts

- Some good tunes for a melancholy mood.

- All in all, spite is better than being a doormat.

- Micah’s view on competition is once again at odds with mine. While I agree that competition can be as Micah envisions in some instances, competition doesn’t have to be this eat or be eaten philosophy. It can be mutually beneficial. It’s a matter of situation and perception. Micah has a very antagonistic worldview where I tend towards cooperative competition. This division in our thinking is curious to me. Clearly our perception of social threat is very different. 

- Failure is an option, ok? If you take every setback as a mark against your self worth, your personal growth will suffer for it. Take failures as an opportunity to try again with a new strategy or move on to something different.

Phillip After Thoughts

-Back in the day I left a job because of spite. I didn’t like my job and I started developing a terrible attitude. The crazy thing is my coworkers, my boss, and the vast majority of the staff were all fantastic and amazing people. The problem was me. I was the problem. I couldn’t perform the way I wanted to because there was a glitch in my thinking. One day one of my projects didn’t go over very well and a more senior engineer had to take over; this was quite the setback professionally but instead of learning and realizing that failure is an option, I said “the spiteful move is to find a new job.” Almost later of job hunting, my boss was supportive of my move; and my go-to work-life mentor showed me the ropes on how to escape-velocity to a bigger company and to a better title. I knowingly left a great group of engineers to go somewhere else, out of spite, because of my own issues. I am not going to follow up and say if it went well or not, that’s not the point of this afterthought. The message I want to get across is this: if you’re relying on spite to make decisions; then you’re already desperate, you just don’t know it yet.

Micah brings up the question of strengthening our definition of art. K Sera, our resident artist, has an opinion on this.

Show Notes:

No True King

Incredibles “if we are all special”

Why do we follow the Oscars?

Roger Ebert Video Games are not Art

Art, Self Actualization, Absurdism and the meaning of life

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K Sera After Thoughts:

- Once again, Lizard Sera proves her otherness.

- Here is the guy from San Francisco who proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States. Odd man. Neat story.

- I still stand by the premise that anyone is an artist if they want to be one. Maybe being an artist is all about your attitude? If you create something or you are performing something, even if a crowd of people think you are terrible at it, you are still an artist if artistic expression is your intent.

Probably.

I don’t think art needs to be quantified. You could probably set standards and parameters for what makes “good” or “great” art, but art isn’t something to just box in and stick a static value to. Art means different things to different people. It evokes different emotions. We don’t all experience art or life in the same way, and I tend to think that trying to homogenize experience is a mistake. 

If you like something and it ain’t harming nobody, that can be art. If you love your job and it’s something you put your heart and soul into every day, I think that is beautiful. You are an artist in your field. This is why I think being an artist is an attitude. An artist creates or performs with an attitude to add value to the world or evoke emotion from an audience, and whether that audience is three people or a thousand or just for themself, that person is an artist for that audience. An artist doesn’t need to be told they are an artist. They simply are if they wish to be.

Phillip gets an intervention, etiquette on going to a neighbors house, what it means to be Minnesota Nice, and the academic grading system doesn’t translate at all when using it to judge non-academic things (now isn't that obvious!)

Show Notes:

Why can’t I wear pajamas in the weekend at noon? 

Jnco Jeans 

You always help people shovel in Minnesota 

K Sera’s Afterthoughts:

- Lizard Sera has long nails and likes to paint them.

- Lizard Sera is shameless and hates wearing pants. She is a reptile of comfort and listless weekends.

- Minnesota Nice is probably a thing. There’s definitely a certain reserve to our niceness. As with any group, there are good and bad actors. Some of us are genuinely nice and are the type to help shovel out your plowed-in car in subzero temperatures at 4:30 am so you can get to work on time. Of course, there are also the people who put on a face to "keep up appearances" - and those people are… well, fake, but still better than the asshole who is actively making your life miserable. (Those people exist here, too.)

I guess, if you ever visit Minnesota, be prepared for random strangers in your vicinity smiling at you for no reason, making furtive eye contact, and possibly starting up a neutral conversation about the weather. Also be prepared for the ‘Ope’s.

Phillip’s Afterthoughts:

I seriously did not see this topic coming at all, kudos to K Sera’s sneak attack! Well played K Sera, well played.

Modern day first world peasants eat so much better than ye old day kings, but at what cost? A discussion filled with food, alcohol, baseball, fat shaming, Pontiac disgust, and frog legs!

SHOW NOTES:

Diet of the Kings 

Rarity (100 dollar bottle of wine) study 

Rarity makes everything better 

Kobe Steak is delicious 

Poverty, Minnesota, Nutrition, and Food Deserts: 

Honey Crisp is the best apple ever

Life expectancy of the ye old times

Typhoid Mary

We are getting fatter faster. 

Paleo Diet 

Calories In and Calories Out 

Sugar Tax, cause why not?

Variety is the spice of life

Cricket Burger needs to take a page from the Potato Marketing Campaign 

Minnesota frogs have 5 or more legs

Unfermented cheese, why is it illegal in the US? 

K Sera’s Afterthoughts:

• Rarity or arbitrary value MIGHT make things “better” in a subjective way. I’m willing to admit that perception of a thing can be considered to be an attribute of a thing. Like the placebo effect… kinda.

• Still love burgers

• Spices are the spice of life.

• I have since learned that Japan had cattle brought over from China around the second century AD, but were largely used as draft animals up until around the Meiji Restoration (1868). There was actually a ban on eating certain kinds of meat in Japan and until the Emperor, Musuhito decided to lift the ban in 1872 - likely because beef is delicious.

• As bad as some of the things are in the world, how unfair and depressing… I can still say that there isn’t another time period before now that I would prefer over the present. I really enjoy the variety and general affordability of foods and spices - and let’s be honest, alcohol - that we have access to. 

• Speaking of access to alcohol - I died a little on the inside when I said “They don’t lack [dedication and discipline] they just don’t have enough of it…” - Let’s blame that statement on my beverage consumption that evening. (Oh addictions, how you ruin us.) I guess what I meant to say there is that losing weight requires discipline along with the mental and physical resources to care about “holding the line,” so to speak. It is incredibly difficult to combat your desire for easy, efficient energy over a desire to maintain a healthy weight when, say, other factors in your life are taking away your energy to achieve long term goals.

As Micah was implying, poverty is a huge stress factor in a person’s life. The stress of living paycheck to paycheck and not knowing if you’ll make enough to pay rent influences your choices and takes from your resources - like time. If you are working a minimum wage service job (or 2 or even 3), and you want to live in an ok apartment, you're probably working more than 40 hours a week just to make ends meet. Your time is way more limited. Are you going to spend your limited hours cooking a nutritious meal? Probably not. Probably, you are going to take five to ten minutes on your way home to pick up fast food because the cost of resources (time, money, effort) are low and the immediate rewards are high (tasty, high calorie, filling). When you are poor, your vision of the future can shrink. You live more day-to-day and aren’t always able to put your energy into a longer view.

So, maybe what I’m saying is, it’s a little too simple to say an overweight person lacks discipline. If other factors in your life are drawing on that finite energy reserve that you put towards goal setting and basic needs, it isn’t necessarily solely that persons ‘fault’ for not having ‘enough’ willpower and dedication to losing weight.

And there’s probably some genetic factors that influence your weight and some upbringing factors as well. It may boil down to discipline in the end, but life and situational factors can make this issue more complicated.

Yeah.

• Church of the Obviei (Obvi-eye?) - we could make this a thing, right? Then we could call ourselves a non-profit and have rituals where we all consume illicit cricket burgers every Wednesday.

Phillip's Afterthoughts:

• I didn't even discuss Fried Chicken! 

If we do not like our status quo, being a cynical may not be the answer. Today we explore Phillip’s question if cynicism defends the current system by transforming would-be followers into apathetic drones, too cynical to even fight for the chance of a better life. And for those that want to ask “why are we putting put with this” who better to chastise us than the cynics within our ranks?

Show Notes:

Are you apathetic?

The joys of HOA (old story)

Cynics and realists 

What’s the point of venting? 

The Decline of Unions in America

How to teach integrity

K Sera’s Afterthoughts:

• HOA’s are the worst, even if the idea of them is kind of… a societal good? *barf*

• I might be a cynical failure. Generally, I don’t trust people. As Hobbes would say, “...think about how you behave: when going on a journey, you arm yourself, and try not to go alone; when going to sleep, you lock your doors; even inside your own house you lock your chests; and you do all this when you know that there are laws, and armed public officers of the law, to revenge any harms...” 

We. Have. Locks. On. Our. Doors. 

And, unfortunately, our public officers are all too human. Easily corrupted. Biased. Racist. Sexist. Power hungry. Our hopes and expectations of them are betrayed over and over again.

People are lazy and self-interested. Count on that before all else.

But that isn’t the totality of people. They can be more. More than want and indulgence.

My optimism carves out an exception to my cynicism for those people who do great and moral things for the world and for others because they value morality. This is still self-interest, but it is combined with valuing others and others’ needs alongside their own. It is cooperation for mutual gain. Valued intrinsically. An internal motivation that is essential to their worldview and reflected in their behaviors and actions.

For goodness sake, do good!

No idea how to make these uncommon people more common, though.

How do you cultivate morality? Integrity? Better storytelling maybe? The stories we share define who we are as people, and if we want to be moral, we need more stories that reflect the morals we want to inspire in others.

Along with that should come empathy. I’m sure I had a recipe here somewhere...

...

Phillip’s Afterthoughts:

Oh boy. So I complain about cynical people and then I laugh at Sera’s suggestion that people can learn integrity. Hypocrisy is not so fun; especially when it’s recorded and published for all to hear.

In this episode we scratch the surface into the terrible game of Jenga that is our education system (in the US).

What do you get when a History major, an Art Director, and an Engineer discuss education? Well, isn’t it obvious?

Show Notes:

Show Notes:

Average income of the teacher:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average K-12 teacher makes above $62,000, which is $10,000 more per year than the average of all occupations ($51,960). The benefits are usually better than average, too.

Hard work doesn’t pay https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180309-your-hard-work-doesnt-actually-pay-off

Spoiler alert: it’s luck.

Follow your passions or follow the money? Who wins, who loses… YOU DECIDE:

Full completion of a degree versus a drop out, what’s the worth of a dropout?

 “The Effect on Earning Power

Whether you hold a college degree or not can be a significant factor in determining your career path. Many higher-paying occupations—such as a doctor, lawyer, or engineer—require a degree. Without one, college dropouts may find themselves funneled into lower-paying jobs.”

https://www.thebalance.com/the-cost-of-college-dropout-4174303

Administrations are bloating the system and paid more adjunct professors:

Meanwhile, university administrations have grown — meaning colleges are now employing more provosts, deans and assistant deans than ever before.

Anyway, How to fix a toilet

We talk about time travel! Lots of time travel. Enjoy!

Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
Read it! It’s weird and kinda good? It won a Hugo award and it’ll at least give you things to ponder.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
This book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. Phil may or may not update you on why Diamond is wrong.

• Phil A and Micah B prove to be vastly inferior to Original Phil and Original Micah …Maybe.

• About my “not caring” about other people: It isn’t that I don’t care at all. I do, but I have some boundaries about how much I allow myself to care. (If that makes sense?) I don’t want people to suffer, and when I hear about the suffering happening in the world - and it’s too damn much - that knowledge eats away at my mental health. If I think about it too much, it destroys me, little by little. Knowing and accepting that I don’t have the ability to solve all the world’s problems hurts. So, I sort of set aside the emotions I have regarding that which is out of my power to change or that which I decide is someone else’s cause to take up.

I choose my causes (homelessness and hunger in my community) and put my limited resources towards them because those are things I think I help reduce. I can’t help everyone. That just isn’t possible.

I also subscribe to the indifferent universe theory where, in the grand scheme of everything, our puny lives don’t really matter except in how much we matter to each other.

It is good to do good where you can, if you can afford it. You aren’t an asshole for not bleeding yourself dry trying to save everyone. Pick the causes that are most important to you and put your resources towards them. Consider doing more for other causes if the need is immediately greater than your chosen causes, again, if you can afford it.

Most people are not Bodhisattvas. Realistically, there are just too many people in the world who are selfish to the detriment of others. Too many people who are greedy or who actually enjoy the suffering of others. We can only keep trying to limit the power of those who sew suffering and do our best to encourage those who sew peace and prosperity, hoping the latter will win out.

In this episode, we are talking about Impeachment, but for our dear listeners, we also talk about hypocrisy and why, honestly, it doesn’t really matter anymore. Especially to aliens.

More detailed description: Micah brings up the question about Impeachment. A few things we also talk about too:

Hypocrisy, Aliens, Florida, Aliens Japan and China and the Kerfuffle, Aliens, Invasions, Aliens, Game Theory, Aliens, Books, Aliens, Cortez, Aliens, on and also... Aliens!

Columbus Day by Craig Alanson
Such a great military science fiction story. Alien invasions, running jokes, and great characters. Side note: R. C. Bray’s narration on the Audible audiobook is amazing. 10/10 will listen again.

Foreigner by C. J. Cherryh
Possibly K Sera’s favorite science fiction space opera series ever. It’s a story about first contact, but it subverts the typical alien invasion trope with the aliens being us, the humans, and we aren’t in a position of dominance.

• The Empire may or may not have been wrong.

• Was this about impeachment?

• I still think competition doesn’t need to be adversarial. People (or other species) can compete for resources and make deals for mutual benefit at the same time. You can have friendly competitions designed to improve all parties.

Sports are one example. Athletes compete with each other and overall the skill level of all the teams/players improve over time - and lo, no one needs to sacrifice their life. Trees in forests compete for light and water, but there are instances of cooperation and respect for boundaries that are observable (such as crown shyness). They communicate helpful information to other trees in their mycorrhizal networks, they forms alliances with other tree species, and older trees will often share resources with younger trees. There are all sorts of examples of mutual, beneficial cooperation within and between species. While competition can make fierce enemies, it can also facilitate fierce alliances and cooperation.

• I still stand by C. J. Cherryh’s philosophy of first contact. Species who go around making enemies on first contact, seeking to destroy or threaten before any other action, will eventually come upon a more powerfully dangerous species that can take them out or make them retreat.

Better to approach with caution. Leave them alone if they can be avoided. If they can’t be avoided and they don’t immediately try to threaten you, the best move from there would be to attempt communication in an effort to understand the other and see if there are gains to be made in cooperation. If there is no possibility for cooperation, then better to leave and let live, if possible. Destroying another species should only ever be a last resort. To make an adversarial move as a first move is dangerous. Don’t develop a habit of starting fight with lethal consequences, even if you think you can win.

Micah, you’re wrong. We don’t need to be assholes in space. Space is vast. There are plenty of resources for everyone. I think we can share. You are too ready to start a fight.

“Isn’t it Obvious” discusses cell phones, fall damage is too high for phones, 1k price tags, discussing movies, closed loop time travel, five devices that Phillip believes everyone should have, and wait.. what were we talking about again?

Sera is ready to meet our dystopian future. Phillip talks about pleats. Micah argues that if everything we do is monitored, we have no freedom.