I haven’t made the complete transition to Windows 7 yet. All of my secondary computers are still on XP (or, in two cases, Vista). When you do a search on XP, there’s a little dog that appears in the lower left-hand corner. You can make it to tricks. The problem with this digital dog is that it makes noise (some scratching sound). I don’t mind the dog, but the noise is irritating. But to get rid of the noise, you have to get rid of the dog. Right-click and tell it to take a hike and it trots away.

I feel the slightest bit bad about telling a digital dog to take a hike.

I feel ridiculously dumb for that sentiment.

—

Many years ago – maybe it’s till around – there was an application you could buy to raise a digital dog on your computer. My then-girlfriend Julianne had some. If you didn’t play with it often enough, it’d get droopy and sad. Sometimes it’d leave a dump on your screen. Julie bought me the program. I played with it a little bit, but it got old and only served to remind me that I didn’t have a real dog (mine had died not too long before). And I hated the notion that a digital dog required my attention or it would get pouty.

This is, of course, Zynga’s business model. Making you feel bad for letting pointless digital things languish. I guess, despite the stupid little feel-bad for telling the searchdog to leave, I am relatively immune.

My real dog would say that I am too immune to letting her languish.

—

Once upon a time, it was part of my job description to keep the office’s network up and running. It was an irritating part of my job. Not the least of which because I was having to look after the computing habits of a bunch of post-middle aged women who didn’t know the first thing about computers. One of them would say “Hey, Will. You need to see this!” so that she could show me something cute that the Office Help paperclip did. That was the second most annoying of all.

(The most annoying was conflating “I can’t find the database” (which I accidentally deleted the shortcut to) to “The database has been deleted.”)

This cannot stand.

Another stat shows that 80 percent of babies and toddlers know how to use the internet.

OH MY GOD TODDLERS AND BABIES ARE LEARNING TO USE ONE OF THE ESSENTIAL TOOLS OUR TIME! THIS IS POSITIVELY DISASTROUS!

Okay, actually, I find that statistic more puzzling than disastrous. How is “use the internet” defined? Learning to click on a link? Playing an Adobe Flash game? However you define it, being a toddler is a time for children to develop motor skills and language skills. Assuming that they can’t read, figuring out that clicking the button thingie when the pointer thingie will consistently cause such-and-such to happen strikes me as kind of useful. Granted, the spacial skills that come with playing with blocks are moreso, but are we really worried that kids aren’t playing with blocks?

Okay, setting that one sentence and my unreasonable response to it aside, let’s go back to the beginning:

• Text messages sent per day in the U.S.: nearly 5 billion
• Number of emails sent per second in the world: 2.8 million
• Average professional/work related meetings attended per month: 61

Sounds positively ominous… or does it? The first statistical set is the United States, the second set is the world, and the third is… what? Not the world. I doubt it’s even a company. I assume it’s an individual, in which case that’s actually kind of horrifying for a different reason. Does the average person really go to almost three meetings a day? I guess since I’ve only rarely been in management, that sounds awfully high to me. But I guess while I attended only one or two a week, there are others who just go from meeting to meeting and so it balances out to that. And maybe they define meeting liberally (though not so liberally, I would assume, that any time you stop by a boss’s office, that counts).

So is this a rallying call for more meetings? Why settle something with the convenience of an email when you can disrupt everyone’s schedule and have them drop what they’re doing for more “face time”?

My response may be somewhat intemperate, but with the exception of the part about Blackberries during family time (which I agree can be problematic), I am having difficulty what I am supposed to be pulling from this article other than “Be scared” and/or “You may not realize it, but you feel isolated.”

Except… I don’t. At least not in any of the ways that the article mentions. I have historically worked in the IT sector. We are not exactly luddites when it comes to electronic communication. We’re also not known for being the most sociable people. But, if anything, the places I have worked have involved us spending too much time talking to one another face-to-face. Often just chewing the fat. It’s a product of the Cubicle Age. I’m an introvert, but even I start up conversations with the guy sitting next to me. The only time I really avoided facetime was when everyone around me spoke through heavily accented English that I had difficulty understanding. And the only times I was really anti-social to my coworkers involved heavily accented English or an office full of people that were twenty years older than me or the fundamentalist father of triplets. I mean, am I alone in this? Due to geek-cultural solidarity and employers too cheap to spring for separate offices?

And Facebook? For every friendship it has created problems with (I can think of maybe one), it’s reignited friendships with dozens of others. I went to college at the dawn of Instant Messaging. ICQ came around my second year. My best friend Clint and I barely talked that first year. The second year and beyond, he was coordinating to see me every time he came to town and I was taking trips out there to see him. And of course this doesn’t even touch on BBSes, which provided me more friends than high school ever did. I don’t mean cyberfriends. I mean people that I met. People that I am still in touch with. And, of course, it provided me a course-correcting social education that my schools did not. But this is all kind of beside the point. The point is that unless you live in Callie, Arapaho, or some place similarly small, the only way you’re not making friends from cyber-communication is if that’s what you want. And if it isn’t bolstering your friendships, you’re likely not doing it right.

Which is not to say that there aren’t pitfalls to avoid. And in fact, I may be in one of those pitfalls now. Spending too much time online and not enough time around town making local friends which I might be forced to do in an earlier era. But a lot of that is circumstantial. I had a number of ideas on ways to meet people, but they sort of fell apart. And most of the ideas that occur to me are ideas that involve making friends way out in Redstone. And really, I was lousy with meeting people before the Internet (and BBSes), so it’s not like I can blame it on the wire. You can call it a crutch, but my ankle is sort of sprained.

So yeah, on the part about being able to put the Blackberry away at the dinner table, I’m kind of sympathetic. But complaining about the Internet getting in the way of “real communication” is like complaining that bicycles are problematic because they don’t give you the same workout as running.

I try to go to bed early every night so that I am ready for a 5:30am call. None came this morning, but one did come around 8. I reminded the call-out clerk that I lived in Callie, but she said it wasn’t a problem. It was a little bit of a longer drive than usual (ice on the roads), plus it involved refilling the gas tank and drive-thru breakfast (there was, fortunately, no line) so that I wasn’t dying of hunger throughout the day.

But when I got there, the principal told me that they had cancelled me because it had gotten too late. I told him that I hadn’t gotten the call until 8 and I had to drive over from Callie, but he told me that the clerk said she called at 7:30, making me look like a liar. It didn’t occur to me to look it up on the phone until I had already left, but the actual call-time was 7:54.

It wouldn’t bother me (what’s one school among 8 or so?) except that this is the school I like most. It’s the one that, if we relocated to Redstone, I would want to move into the jurisdiction of. Now I’m a bit worried that I may have burned that bridge. My hope is that the principal remembers that the last time (my first-ever assignment), I showed up quite early.

Thursday will (probably) be my first half-day as a substitute teacher. Friday will be my first full day. I would be a little less terrified if there’d been some sort of training program. Or a real orientation. The only orientation I got was a little get together at one of the elementary schools going over basic expectations. Which is certainly better than nothing. Oh, I also got a video about bloodborn diseases. Beyond that, the entire application and hiring process has been paperwork. Sent in your college transcripts. Submit to a fingerprinting and background check. Tuberculosis test. No interview. Congratulations, you’re hired! Call this 1-800 number and leave your name. I don’t even know how much I am going to get paid.

I’m going to spare you the details, but I will be substituting in Redstone (the “big city”, by Arapaho standards). If it goes well, I may try in small-town Callie. Apparently, Redstone has a real need as I have gotten some sort of offer for every day that I have been on their rolls. Due to the commute, however, I haven’t taken them up on it. The first official call came at 5am on Monday morning. I was having terrible sleep and wasn’t in my right frame of mind. It was for kindergarteners and the thought of my first day being with kindergarteners filled me with dread. So I tapped 2 on the robodial to say that I had a conflict. When a human called at 7:30, I told them I had car trouble. More on this in a second. In any event, the unofficial inquiry I had gotten Friday was for first graders. When I later woke up and thought about it, it became apparent that I might have to start small. That afternoon, I got the call for Thursday and Friday – first grade, again.

I got another call at 7:15 this morning, which I didn’t pick up. Remember that car trouble I lied to them about before? Well, it wasn’t a lie. It was prescient. Even overlooking the fact that they called too late for me to get there at the start of the school day, I didn’t have a working car. But I couldn’t tell them that because, in the course of another conversation I had with the call-out lady prior to the car trouble actually emerging, I told them that the car trouble had been fixed. A tangled web. So I didn’t answer. Car troubles fixed (the real troubles, really fixed this time), I will be ready if they call tomorrow morning and so Thursday may become my second day.

Part of me is wondering if I might get called on a daily basis. It’s sure starting to seem that way. This was intended to be a part-time job and as much an effort to get me out of the house as anything. What I suspect they pay me, minus gas and considering that everything I make is going to have nearly 40% taken out in taxes because it’s in our highest tax bracket, money isn’t the big issue here. And doing this day in and day out is simply not what I had in mind. On the other hand, it’s unlikely I will match for any job they call at 7am or later for because I wouldn’t be able to get there on time (would that I had remembered this when I came up with the car story). So we’ll see how that shakes out. At the very least I am hoping not to get a call for tomorrow so that I can start with a half-day to get settled in on a day where I am mentally ready rather than from a 5am call that has me waking up, looking up the school, rushing my arse down there, and a zombie in front of a bunch of hyperactive kids (if, like all the others, it’s a grade school job).

Or maybe I want to put it off because I am terrified. It’s been forever since I have been in first grade. All I remember about it is that the teacher was awesome, I met my future best friend Clint, and… that’s it. I can only partially mentally imagine what a first grader looks like. And of course all of the uncertainties have come back to me. Crap, what if my small bladder needs too much attention? What do first graders do, exactly? The good news is that the teacher knows that she is going to be out. Presumably she doesn’t want a sub taking care of anything important, so hopefully she has filled it with activities from the more frivolous side of the first grade.

Incidentally, one of the things that has me more worried about the Redstone school system is that there are two high schools in Redstone. The public one and a rather prominent Catholic one, St. Matthews. Given that Redstone is a seriously Catholic town, and a pretty poor one, I am hoping that the public high school isn’t filled with the dregs. On the other hand, it’s not like Redstone is full of scary people. Crime rates are very low. The children of a town down on its luck are less daunting a prospect than than the children of actual poverty.

Jerry Gomez works as an IT person at a corporate law firm, Weicker & Schmidt. A woman named Beth Toomey is murdered and Jerry quickly emerges as a suspect when some emails are found where Toomey and Gomez were supposed to meet (somewhere around the time she was murdered) about something that Gomez was very upset about. When the police confront Gomez, he has a lawyer on speed-dial and refuses to say a word (refusing to even answer the question of how he knows Toomey). This only increases suspicion.

After the police do a search of his office at W&S, his boss and a corporate VP call Gomez into a meeting. Gomez assures the firm that he did not commit any crime and says that he is perfectly willing to take a polygraph to that effect provided that is the only question asked (the concern being that the police could subpoena the results and find out more than he wants to tell them). Likewise, beyond assuring them of his innocence, he will not explain any of the circumstances surrounding his relationship with Toomey for fear that they will be subpoenaed. The firm finds this unacceptable and they issue Gomez an ultimatum: fully cooperate with the authorities or you’re fired. Gomez refuses to cooperate and is fired.

Gomez is ultimately cleared of the crime (before charges are ever filed). Gomez sues the employer for wrongful termination on the basis that they should not be able to fire him on the basis of his exerting his constitutional rights. He loses the case because he lives in an Employment-At-Will state with no bad faith exemptions. That means that the firm can fire him for whatever reason they deem fit as long as it is not one of the exceptions carved out in the law (attempting unionization, whistleblowing, race/gender/etc.) and no such exception is made.

Gomez’s lawyers go to federal court on the basis that the Constitution is irreparably harmed if people are required to forego their rights in order to keep their jobs. Especially when, as in this case, no hardship is being brought to the company beyond the initial search of his office. In fact, until this lawsuit his employer was never mentioned in any of the newspapers. If Weicker & Schmidt are allowed to fire Gomez on the basis of his exerting his 5th Amendment rights, they could similarly act on other rights. For instance, they could be “good corporate citizens” and require employees to allow the police to search their car on traffic stops. If these sorts of things catch on, the protections in the Constitution become meaningless for all but the self-employed. They employer responds that the law is the law and having freedoms granted to you in the constitution does not grant you freedom from the repercussions of utilizing those freedoms. Gomez can assert his rights or not, but W&S simply doesn’t have to employ him. High-profile people are fired or punished for utilizing their First Amendment rights all the time: Whoopi Goldberg, Don Imus, John Rocker, etc.).

So the question is… do you think that Gomez has a constitutional argument? Or, in the event that precedent suggests that he does not, that he should have one? If you think that W&S is in the right here on the basis that there is no right to continued employment simply because the Constitution does not allow the government to punish you, would you also support them if they wanted to institute the “good corporate citizen” policy of forcing employees to forego their Fourth Amendment rights against search and seizure? If not, how do you draw the line? If you agree with Gomez, do you also believe that someone who publicly makes offensive (anti-American, racist, anti-Semitic, etc.) comments should also be allowed to keep their job? If not, how do you draw the line?

Note: I know that a number of you oppose Employment-at-Will doctrine on principle, but in this scenario it is the law of the land whether you agree with it or not. This question is more of how you think the constitution should be read rather than legislative preferences. So, feel free to rip on EAW, but only if you also comment on the main thrust of the post with the stipulation that the law in Gomez’s state is what it is.

Note II: If any lawyers know how the courts have responded to challenges like this, feel free to chime in. I suspect I know, but I also wanted to know what people’s thoughts on how the courts should rule are.

Does how popular you were in high school affect how much money you make later in life?

The answer is an affirmative. Causality is hard to determine for sure. The initial response of skeptics is that it has to do with extroversion, but they found no effect on the basis of gregariousness. That makes sense. Nerds and introverts make too much of the role of introversion in popularity. Some people are very extroverted and very annoying. Some people that are unpopular that people think are introverted really just won’t shut up when they’re in a position where everything they say will be used against them.

I think that it comes down to social confidence and charisma. People that are used to getting what they want from other people ask for more and in turn get more. The charisma that comes with popularity is always a career-helper. There is also the matter that some of the things that make one popular can also help one make good grades, which can have a cascading effect on future earnings. Sorta.

There was recently some news about unemployment numbers that looked good at first glance. 430k new jobs! Woohoo! This qualifies for good news these days! Then, of course, we find out that 410k of those jobs are temporary Census Bureau positions like the one that I hold. But that’s still a lot of jobs and maybe we shouldn’t be so picky!! They’re being put to work doing something important!! But maybe not:

The inspector general’s memo said that the Census Bureau had “overestimated” the staff needed for the program to enumerate people at transitory locations. “During the ETL operation,” said the memo, “crew leaders overestimated the number of Census staff needed to enumerate transitory locations, thus increasing the cost of operations.”

The memo also said that there were so many people hired for the “service-based enumeration” that there turned out to be one Census enumerator for every seven homeless people counted, and that the inspector general’s office “observed significant periods of enumerator inactivity at certain locations.”

Okay, well at least people are getting paid just a little to take on a fraction of a job. That’s not all bad, right?

Then you start hearing that even that is skewed because the Census is hiring people just to lay them off and in some cases rehire them.

As you all know, I work for the Census Bureau as a courier. My job is to drive in a big loop of 150 miles or so. I can’t complain about how much I am being paid to do so. Beats sitting around the house for free. I’ve driven my route maybe two dozen times. Want to know how many times I actually delivered something? Well, 20 or so of that 24 times. Okay, want to know how many times I delivered (or received) something other than my pay sheet from the previous day? Two. And in one of those two cases, it turned out that the person I was supposed to deliver them to quit and so it went straight back to Alexandria.

So in essence, I have been getting paid to deliver my own pay sheets. I figure it to be a part of that front-loading that the article above mentioned. I also thought that, “Well, if they’re willing to pay me to do this, business is surely going to pick up at some point, right?” Eventually I resigned myself to “Well, I could quit, but they’d just hire somebody else to do it.”

I’ve also heard rumors of cases as is being discussed here. Specifically, they separate out the census-taking in waves. So the same person gets laid off after one wave and then replaced by a newhire a week later. Makes the job numbers look good at any rate.

My first day was relatively uneventful. I had to leave at a particular time and of course got a call five minutes beforehand asking if I could pick something up to take up to Ridge. I made it out in time and indeed got to drive 10mph below the speed limit the whole way with twenty minutes to spare. They apparently give us a lot of time to get there. The twenty minutes turned into forty-five because the guy I was meeting was late. As it happened, there was another guy at this particular government installation who was waiting for his wife’s ex-husband to drop off his kid for the weekend. We chatted a bit and I fiddled with my phone.

I was a bit more pressed for time on the road to Bass, so I actually drove the speed limit there. I would have considered driving faster, but the roads were twisty-turney and it required driving through Redstone County, which has some pretty aggressive traffic enforcement. When driving through on my way to Alexandria last week, they had a speed limit drop straight from 75mph to 35mph for a construction zone. Cops were of course waiting right behind the hill where the speed limit falls. They are obviously very concerned about public safety, though there were no construction people for the first two miles of the Orange Cone Zone. It’s not the only time I’ve noticed Redstone’s penchant for making the road ways safe. The four or so times we’ve driven through it, I’ve seen more cops on the side of the road for that county than all of the other Arapaho counties I’ve driven through combined.

Living in a smaller town means getting used to earlier bed times and close times. Only one of the four convenience stores in Callie is 24-hour (one closes at midnight, one at 10, and the main one at 9(!!). There is a gas station and a convenience store in Bass. One closes at 6 and the other at 5. Fortunately, I got to the former and got an ice cream sandwich to soothe my aching throat. Unfortunately, when I went back to get some milk to wash it down, I discovered their closing time. No more convenience stores until my eventual return to Callie. My Bass contact never showed, so I ended up waiting there for an hour.

I got lost getting out of Bass. How I can get lost with a GPS in a town of something like three square blocks is truly a talent of mine. Well, “lost” may be an exaggeration. I just couldn’t figure out which road I was supposed to go down for the direct route back to Callie. The GPS wanted me to go back through Ridge. The estimated time it gave me for what I thought was the road was twice as long as it should have been, leaving me to believe I was heading down the wrong path. Turned out the GPS thinks something is up with that road because it was the right way and just driving the speed limit had me knocking a minute or two off my ETA every minute or two. I am wondering if maybe it includes inclement weather in its estimations because it does not strike me as the type of road that would be a really high priority for the plows. Alternately, maybe it assumes you’re going to get stuck behind a slow driver.

Garrison was not in the cards today. I called Alexandria to find out the number of my contact in Garrison. When I called said Garrison contact, she told me she had nothing but might have something for me tomorrow. So I went straight back to Callie and that was more-or-less my day.

Cell phone reception was as expected. There was some iffy service between Callie and Ridge. At least I assume so because the phone never rang and I had a message waiting for me when I got to Ridge (the guy saying he was going to be late). I gave the Bureau my Google Voice number because I didn’t know what my new cell phone would be. The good news is that I get the transcribed message. The bad news is that listening to the actual message is more of a hassle than it would have been if I’d just given them my regular number. Reception went out on my way to Bass and never came back, preventing me from calling the woman who stood me up. It came back up about 15 miles outside of Callie. So I am out of reach for most of my trip.

The audio entertainment was finishing up the BBC production of Terry Pratchett’s “Guards! Guards!” The audiobook was better. Either they changed up the plot or there were some things I definitely missed the first time around. I find that I don’t listen quite as closely to Pratchett as I do other audiobooks. In fact, I am most inclined to put Pratchett in when I am not in the mood to have to follow every word. He goes off on a lot of tangents. Some of them are really quite humorous, though I find if I think I missed something funny and go back, it’s sort of like having a joke explained to you. Not as funny.

After finishing that I moved on to the fourth Jason Bourne novel. I knew that the original author, Robert Ludlum, died and the Bourne books were being written by somebody else. I didn’t realize, though, that Ludlum only wrote three of them. This is the first not-Ludlum one. Honestly, I may like the new guy better. Less melodramatic. This audiobook was done by a different company and so the voice actor is different. In fact, it was done by the same company that did the Ender audiobooks and one of the various narrators of those books is the narrator of this one. It’s kind of confusing. Then again, a similarity in narrator style had me thinking of Ender while listening to Barack Obama’s autobiography despite the fact that the voice actor does not remotely sound like Barack Obama. So I guess I’m easily confused.

In the end, I got paid over a hundred bucks to deliver two envelopes. One of which was an employment document originating from me. Your tax dollars at work.

The notion that all men are created equal and that results are determined by effort, discipline, and so on is what my former boss Willard referred to as “one of the great noble myths.” The subject came up shortly after two of my coworkers, Edgar Braughton and Charlie Belcher, were let go. While I had, up until that point, always known that raw intelligence varied from one individual to the next, and that there were people we euphemistically called mentally handicapped that biologically lacked the intelligence that most people have, I never fully appreciated the wide spectrum of intelligence out there until I met, worked with, had to checked the work of, and eventually had to team-lead Edgar and Charlie.

Edgar and Charlie were not mentally retarded in the obvious sense. There were some questions about Edgar, but a lot of those were attributable to a speech impediment on his part that gave the false sense of retardation. Willard, too, had a speech impediment, but is among the smartest of the guys that I know. Edgar could easily have been in that category if he were, well, less dim. But he was the dimmest bulb in our shop. Charlie was a little bit smarter, though not much.

Edgar’s and Charlie’s job was really what I would call straight-forward. For much of the teach, it was mundane. Tedious. Perhaps the hardest part of the job was staying interested in the job enough to do it right. It required an attention to detail, though as Freddie demonstrated you could get away with a lot of inattention if you were simply fast. So really, all you needed was some combination of careless speed or slightly more time-consuming accuracy.

Most of the OSI Team did not have a whole lot in the way of external motivation. I was one of only four longish-term OSI Programmers that was married or in a committed relationship though the only one without children. Simon had kids to support but they were his girlfriend’s kids and he was not under any legal obligation to support them. The other two married OSI Programmers were Edgar and Charlie. On top of that, Edgar had a whopping four kids with a wife that didn’t work and Charlie had a chronically ill wife whose medical bills (by his own telling of it) were considerable. Further, they had less in the way of marketable skills than did many of us and therefore needed the job at Falstaff more than the rest of us did. In other words, these were two people that had the most motivation out of any of us.

And yet, despite all of this motivation, they simply could not get the job done. They could not get it done quickly. They could not get it done right. We tried vigorously to teach them how to do it. We patiently worked with them and looked over their shoulder and tried over and over again to teach them. They had the background that suggested that it wasn’t beyond their grasp. Edgar had a couple years of coursework from DeVry and Charlie a degree from the local vocational school. So it wasn’t completely alien to them. Charlie had a bit of an attitude problem, but his problems far surpassed that.

At the end of the day, despite each of their motivations and despite the easy nature of the job, it was simply beyond their grasp to do it right. Though I had always known of variable intelligence, it just never fully occurred to me that something as simple as that job would quite plainly be beyond people that were able to otherwise live independently. We may squish and squeak and slide a bit and say that they didn’t have the right kind of intelligence. There may be some truth to that in that I could see (maybe, possibly) Charlie being successful at fixing cars or something else that melded one’s mind with one’s hands. But the job itself is so easy to achieve basic competence with that it seemed to me and others that even if your real skills lay elsewhere, it’s not something that somebody shouldn’t be able to at least do right. It’s not an easy job to excel at… but to do? There isn’t a reader of Hit Coffee that couldn’t figure it out in a week.

Of course, Hit Coffee has a self-selected audience. It primarily appeals to people of a pretty basic level of intelligence. To people that like to think about things. People with college degrees (which I think all of you that I know about have) or at least the intelligence to get one. And some of my surprise at what should have been bloody obvious is that I have for most of my life been surrounded by such people. I went to an upper-crest high school. Then I went to college and hung out with the Honors College crowd. My career is mind-based. And even those I knew from outside my circles tended to be self-selected. The people I knew that went to more working-class schools tended to be the smarter people there (I met many of them through a computer network). The warehouse workers at my first job that I talked to tended to be team leads and the odd young man or two that were simply working their way through college. In that sense, it’s no surprise that my relatively sheltered existence lead to a sanguine view of the strength of human intelligence.

And so I gradually had to accede the notion that even within functioning individuals that don’t require special care and that didn’t ride the short bus and weren’t ill-educated and that weren’t just lazy, there can be some pretty basic limits as to what they are capable of. These limits include things that I would have been capable of doing in the seventh grade. Maybe earlier.

A lot of people come to this realization. Some wash it away with notions that it was really how people like Edgar and Charlie were raised and educated that are the problem. That’s historically what I’d done. Even though there were always people that couldn’t do things that I considered pretty basic and that in some cases it might take more attention and tutoring, that they could get there. A lot of whether someone accepts it or declines to accept it depends on ideology. To the extent that it dovetails with what they already believe about people (that, say, poor people are poor because they’re less intelligent), they believe it more readily than others where it presents some uncomfortable truths that contradict the way that they see the world.

For some people, it adds a stronger element of libertarianism because it adds more a sense of justice to the segregation of the haves and have-nots. For me it does slightly the opposite. If people that are at the bottom of the economic latter are so because they made less of an effort or made poorer life choices, I have far less sympathy than someone that is stuck manning a convenience store with little hopes of making it into management simply because they were born with fewer neurons firing quite as vigorously as the next guy. In fact, it almost starts to make a socialist out of me in that I believe that people that lack brain-power (assuming that they work somewhere doing something!) are deserving of, if not everything that their sharper peers that contribute more to society, as respectable a standard of living as we can afford. In short, it makes the notion of wealth redistribution bother me less. It makes the wheat-and-chaff of capitalism overall less appealing.

On the other hand, my experiences at Belle Rieve, that occurred at the same time, which come to think of it included a number of people that probably wouldn’t have been able to do OSI programming work, counteracted this somewhat by demonstrating pretty clearly the dangers of subsidizing lifestyles that aren’t going anywhere. It may be too much to expect them to get jobs that pay well, but it’s pretty important that they work. If idle minds are the Devil’s Workshop, idle lives partake in a never-ending buffet of counterproductive habits. Further, on the subject of crime-prevention, if people that live among the poor are not just limited to those that made poor lifestyle choices, trying to keep those zones as free as possible from crime becomes all the more important.

But mostly, it gives me a little more sympathy for those that haven’t made it. Not enough sympathy that I want to move back to Belle Rieve or that I would raise children where we lived in Estacado or where we live now, but enough to feel a sense of sympathy rather than simply frustration when I bump into them on a daily basis.

-{Note: The setting of most of this post is Deseret, where 90% of the population is white (96% including white-Hispanic). The racial aspects of IQ are discussed at length elsewhere and I would prefer them not be discussed here. This post is about IQ. Not about IQ and race. Not IQ and immigration. Or welfare mommas. Or about how people that are not like you or don’t think like you are ruining our country.}-