Category Archives: Life

Their Shoes Look Good, Too

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You don’t often hear about a company that wears its atheism on its sleeve — or its shoes. Atheist Shoes, however, is a German company that claims to make very comfortable shoes “for people who don’t believe in god(s)”.

According to their website, they noticed that packages sent to the U.S. were having a lot of delivery problems. So they devised an experiment, mailing two packages to the same address, with “Atheist” clearly printed on one and not the other.

The results were or were not surprising, depending on your understanding of Americans and religion (and maybe the U.S. Post Office). You can see the results on their website, which is worth visiting just to see how they tell the story (apparently they are artists in addition to being atheists — and someone there also writes very good English).

P.S. — If you scroll way down the page, there’s an epilogue that discusses the results of their study and its scientific aspects.

http://www.atheistberlin.com/study

P.P.S. — This is also good:

http://www.atheistberlin.com/hole

$59 in 45 Years!

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In case there was any doubt about the growth of inequality in America, a new study based on IRS data shows that:

Corrected for inflation, the average annual income of the bottom 90% of workers in 2011 was $30,437. In 1966, the average was $30,378. That’s an increase of $59 in 45 years.

Meanwhile, the average income of the top 10% almost doubled, rising from $138,793 to $254,864, an increase of roughly $116,000, while the average income of the top 1% rose by $628,000. For the top 0.1%, the increase was $18 million!

More recently, since 2009, the top 1 percent received 81% of  the growth in income. The top 0.1% received more than 50% of the growth.

The wealthiest Americans are pulling away from the rest of us because income has shifted from labor to capital, and because of lower taxes on capital gains, dividends, estates, and other income that is especially important to people with a lot of money.

Policies that especially benefit people with high incomes could be changed (in theory). Yet, in the words of economist David Cay Johnston:

“It has become widely understood that we cannot balance our federal budget by raising taxes only on those at the top, because there is not enough income there, even if we taxed away everything the top makes. What is equally true is that we cannot increase tax revenue if the incomes of the vast majority keep falling [or remain stagnant]. That, however, has yet to become part of the debate on how to finance government.”

http://www.taxanalysts.com/www/features.nsf/Articles/C52956572546624F85257B1D004DE3FC?OpenDocument

Sometimes Things Just Work Out

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I took our old car in for service at a local garage yesterday. It needed a couple of things done. The guy at the garage told me the work would cost about $450. He added that he was really backed up, so the car wouldn’t be ready until the end of the day. He seemed a little stressed out.

As I was walking home, it occurred to me that I really didn’t need the car right away. I figured it would be a nice gesture if I called the mechanic and told him he could finish the work the next day if he wanted.

It also occurred to me that it might be a good thing to do this guy a favor. I always feel like I’m at the mercy of car mechanics. Maybe this one would reciprocate by giving me a break when he wrote up the bill. 

So when I picked up the car today, it was very nice to see that the mechanic had charged me $250, not $450.

The world doesn’t seem so screwed up when you can do well by doing good (even if  you aren’t being completely selfless at the time).

Monogamy and Its (Dis)Contents

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Monogamy is a short book by the English psychotherapist Adam Phillips. It contains 121 extremely brief chapters on what Phillips calls “the only serious philosophical question” for some of us (the fortunate or affluent). Phillips is given to exaggeration and paradox, but that’s o.k. 

Below are some of his observations on being monogamous, with occasionally flippant responses:

(39)  “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nowhere to go. Which is one of the reasons why couples sometimes want to be totally honest with each other.”  Because they have nowhere else to go or don’t want anywhere else to go?

(62)  “It is no more possible to work at a relationship than it is to will an erection or arrange to have a dream.”  Yet doing something on purpose, like smiling, can sometimes make us happier.

(69)  “There is always someone else who would love me more, understand me better, make me feel more sexually alive. This is the best justification we have for monogamy — and infidelity.”  Since there will always be someone better, you might as well stop searching. Or not.

(75)  “From the child’s point of view, the mother is — as the father will soon be — a model of promiscuity. She has a thousand things to do. She knows other people.”  Yes, she was quite a disappointment that way!

(98)  “If we don’t choose monogamy, our fate will be isolation or the chaos of impersonality.”  Dying alone can be bad, even worse than the dying itself.

(111)  “Familiarity may increase our affection, our respect, even our time for other people, but it rarely increases our desire for them.” As the song says, how can I miss you if you won’t go away?

(115)  “One way of loving people is to acknowledge that they have desires which exclude us; that it is possible to love and desire more than one person at the same time. Everyone knows that this is true, and yet we don’t want the people we love to start believing it about themselves”.  It might be possible, but not everyone believes it is.

Before the Storm

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I went shopping before tropical storm Sandy passed through. It wasn’t a good day to pick up some bread. This was going to be the subject of a post about a month ago, but then the power went out.

IMG-20121028-00735

The storm is long gone, the power has been back on for weeks, so I should get back to work.