The Ungrammaticality of Cats

I saw this comic ages ago and I keep thinking about it, mainly when I say nonsense things to my cats. I mean I'm constantly saying things like "It's a pet the kitty" as I'm petting the kitty. "pet the kitty" is not a noun.

So, because my brain is weird, I think about this comic almost every time I say something weird to my cats, which is multiple times per day.

Since this is a post about cats, here's a cat picture (or 2).

Ok, 3 pictures.

Government Spending

     I read a comment recently on the story about the governor's proposed budget where he wants to cut 40% across the board. It said something to the effect that when the economy is down the government should tighten it’s belt because that’s what happens when a household budget shrinks.

 *sigh*

     I really wish more people took economics classes or even an anthropology class. 100 level would be fine.

     When the economy is down the proper thing for a government to do is spend. The private sector has laid off people, not as many people are buying stuff, so more people are being laid off. One of the things the New Deal did was public works projects. The Golden Gate Bridge was one of those projects. It put people to work. They, in turn, spent money which boosted the private sector. Then when those projects were complete the private sector was boosted enough to have jobs for them.

     “But isn’t the government spending money it doesn’t have?”, you ask. Well yes and no. One of the government's functions is to print money. If they need more, they can print more. Of course, they can’t do this forever, hyperinflation is bad. However, the system we have in place for better or worse is we have a central bank that handles all this for us. So the government borrows to cover the deficit spending. This has a side effect of altering the supply of money in the lending market, which changes the interest rates which makes banks want to lend again. Then that allows the private sector to expand some more. Economy grows. What’s then supposed to happen, is, after the recession is over, the government stops deficit spending.

    

     Another thing, high marginal tax rates on the upper tiers are a good thing. If nothing else, companies invest back into the company more (usually in the form of higher pay for the workers and pensions) since only profit is taxed. There’s also an inverse correlation between high taxes and government corruption. People who pay a lot in taxes tend to not like it when their representatives rob the store, go figure. Taxes are an investment in the infrastructure governments provide, everyone should pay their fair share.

     

     As far as the anthropology end of things, governments arose to take care of the people. That’s it. There are some people that decry what they call the “nanny state”. That people seem to want the government to take care of them. Yup. That’s what it’s for. Armys protect a society from outside threats. Property records keep track of who owns what. Regulations on businesses keep the water and the air clean as well as making sure the products we buy are safe to use. Roads to get us and our products from place to place. Public lands need management. All of this costs money, tax money.

     

     And no one needs a billion dollars, let alone multiples of that. I know the human brain has a hard time understanding how much a billion is. It helps if you think of it as one thousand million. 1,000 x 1,000,000 = 1,000,000,000 (Sorry, i didn’t warn you there would be math.) It would take multiple generations to spend that much, even if it didn’t accrue interest.

This is nuts.

Buy me a coffee!

Take it back

Thus far I've not said anything really political in this space, but I think I'm going to start now. 

     The problem we have right now is that the right wing has been allowed to control the narrative. They have gotten to define all the words. Liberal is a bad word. So we shifted to progressive, now that’s a bad word. We need to drag public discourse back to the left. Stop catering to the so-called middle. The middle has been forcibly shifted to the right. The liberal base doesn’t come out to vote because all the candidates put forth are center right. Most people when surveyed are center-left or left outright, but they have no reason to interrupt their busy schedules to stand in line in the cold to vote.

     So, here’s how we take the country back. First, we find the most wing nutty wingnut out there and have them run in an election that we probably wouldn’t win anyway. No one that believes in weird conspiracy theories though; no chem trails or vaccines cause autism people, that’s dumb. But someone who believes in a universal income, state-owned oil companies. Make sure that the small oil drilling companies can still operate but kick out the big ones. Run this person, hype them up pretty good. Then in a more contested election, dial it back to more normal. The masses will have gotten a little used to hearing the far out there stuff so the more typical progressive policies will seem less out there. Maybe the wing nut should be a man and the more mainstream person a woman of color. We should make sure they are all above reproach though. No questionable financial dealings, no sexual assault or discriminatory behavior.

     It will take some time but I believe we can drag the political climate back to the left and make our country the place our founding ideals suggested it could be, one where everyone is included and gets what they need.

Major Change

In my last post, I mentioned that I changed my major. I suppose I can talk about it. 

(Ok, before I start that I have to talk about how Blogger is annoying me right now. There are only 6 fonts, the one I like doesn't stay between posts. Same thing with size. And whose dick do I have to suck to get a line spacing button? I may need to switch to WordPress.)

During the Spring Semester, I started to get deeper into the program. I had all the heavy math classes and math adjacent general ed classes too. I got very stressed out. I dropped one class and it didn't really help. It got to the point that I was questioning my degree program. 

Now, this wasn't the first time I had questioned it. But I did finally analyze why I picked Math in the first place. And there were a couple of reasons. None of them were about me or what I wanted to do or what I'm good at. 

I originally picked that major because I wanted to make the biggest impact. Service to the community. For one, there are a lot of bad Math teachers out there. They may know how to calculate stuff, but they have no idea how to teach. I think this is a big reason why kids hate math. If they have no confidence in their ability, they will struggle and hate it. Also, we need more women in STEM. It might help if girls had more STEM teachers that are women, it might help.

The other reason I picked Math is that I have been trying to prove I'm as good as the boys my whole life. Part of this is how my mom treated me and dressed me before my brother was born. She raised me kind of boyish. There were girls that tried to make me prove I was a girl because I always had boy clothes on. Of course that all changed when my brother was born. Then I was told to wear more dresses and he was the favorite. Now she wonders why he does nothing and expects handouts.

So for the longest time, I suppressed everything girly. Slowly I've shed most of that nonsense. The last to go was vocation. 

I bought into the idea that the hard sciences are masculine and the soft sciences are feminine. Which is nonsense since men have been trying to keep us out of all of them for generations, and women were the 1st coders. And who cares if I do something girly anyway. We need to stop gendering jobs.

Once I unpacked that I realized that I  missed writing papers. Getting a grade for my opinion is pretty great really. And while Math concepts are interesting, I really don't care about the computation. 

I am, however, still very interested in Astronomy and am doing independent research studying Seyfert Galaxies. Let me know in the comments if you want me to write for days about Active Galactive Nuclei. And we still need people to report on science if we're ever going to get the public to value it again. 

Empathy is not a higher form of sympathy

They are different things.

Closely related I'll give you, but one doesn't lead to the other. You can have empathy without sympathy just as you can have sympathy without empathy.

Here's the difference.

Sympathy is just feeling bad for someone who is having a hard time. You don't have to understand what they are going through to have sympathy for them. For instance, I have no idea what it's like you lose my mother. If you lose yours, I will have sympathy for what you're going through.

Empathy is understanding what someone is going through. You don't have to also feel bad for the person. I know what it's like to run late, but if it's your own fault you're late, I have no sympathy for you. I know what it's like to be poor, that doesn't mean I'm going be sympathetic when you vote against your best interest and mine.

Of course those two things are combined all the time. I know what it's like to lose a beloved pet and I will feel bad for you if it happens to you. 

We can also never completely understand what someone else is going through. Everyone's experiences are different. The circumstances that led to whatever is going on with a person are different, as well as our perspective. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. And when we do try we shouldn't half ass it. Trying to think of what you would feel like if something happened to you does no good if we forget to add all the circumstances to one event. Just because you think someone is overreacting doesn't mean they are. What else is going on? Is this incident the latest in a long line of small things? All good questions to ask, either the person you're trying to understand or just as a prompt to widen your perceptions.

Finally, being empathetic or sympathetic doesn't mean we need to carry other people's burdens. Most people just want a little consideration. We all have enough of our own burdens to carry.