Universal Basic Income in the Post Space Age


I originally wrote this piece in 2017 and am reposting it now because I believe the idea is critically important to the future of humanity and the survival of Earth and humanity. -Ed. 

We should come to grips with the idea as soon as possible. We are, after all, heading for a rather dramatic shift in human thinking. We need to figure out how we humans are going to formulate our societies as soon as we have self-driving vehicles of all stripes, artificial intelligence running everything, smart grids that deliver all manner of clean energy, and robots that deal with all manner of work. We will be living in a version of the dystopian we’ve all seen in movies, but it won’t be quite so dystopian.

It will be a world without work.

Of course, that won’t happen overnight, and the way our future unfolds will come down to what we do as the human race in the next 20–30 years. Believe me, you, that’s not nearly as long as you might think. I turned around yesterday and was rather shocked to discover I’m 49! It seems only yesterday that I was watching Star Trek (well, it actually was yesterday, but that’s not what I’m getting at.) And it’s really Star Trek that forms the core of my ideas around what a world without work would look like.

A World Without Work, Not A World that Doesn’t Work

So, Star Trek. If you go back and watch all of The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, Voyager, the theatrical films, you will… have watched a lot of media… but you will also have noticed something interesting. Every once in a while, there are discussions of money and jobs and values. Well, there’s a lot of talk about values, so mostly the rare bits about money and jobs are the important thing for this discussion, though it dovetails nicely into values.

You see, in the Star Trek future, Earth no longer has jobs or currency. Now, it’s important to note that there is no real discussion about how this arrangement operates (though such a discussion may exist in the books, which I haven’t read), so we really only have the glimmer of a wonderful future where everything is clean and safe and educated and includes space travel and science, and all manner of amazing things.

How?

It’s actually rather simple, which is why it’s surprising that there is no visual Trek canon (cannon?) that covers even the basic details. Now, this is where it gets a bit knotty, because it’s all about democratic socialism, and I mean that in its purest sense. The Trek future of the Federation and most things are really good is because everyone decides that life is best managed when everyone shares in the growth of that civilization.

No Jobs But Stuff Still Gets Done?

From a deeply philosophical place in the minds of people who think for a living comes the idea that people organize, make things, make scientific advances, run restaurants, clean up garbage, create art and music, work in office jobs, manage stuff, and build things big and small because they are good at it and it needs to get done.

Here’s a hint: Take the money out of it.

First, go listen to Yuval Harari over at TED. He’s a fascinating guy and what he has to say makes a load of sense. (If you make it to the end, which I really hope you do, just know that I don’t necessarily agree with his ideas about drugs and video games.)

Now that you’ve done that, do you see it?! I think you do. That’s because money is a wondrous, danger-filled myth that creates the entire scope of power and control in this world, and it only works that way because we let it. This fiction, like so many others we have created over thousands of years, is very, very powerful. Yes, we all believe in money, but it’s not like a religion. It’s more like the air we breathe. And, much like air, if you take money away, we die.

So, we work.

Since money is the core tenet of our global belief in its myth, we must trade our sweat in order to get some. This creates another fiction; power or, if you prefer, control. Those with the most money have the most control and, as we can see today, that control is a very destructive force, so we need to get rid of it, but if we do that, then there’s no more work. Right?

Not exactly. Humans are resourceful and we have a number of inherent traits that guide us towards the sense of safety, contentedness, and fulfillment we all desire. When we are hungry or thirsty, we eat and drink. When we want to explore some new place, we screw up the courage and we set out. When we need to get across a large body of water to find what’s on the other side, we build boats. When we want to get from one continent to another, we build planes. When we want to find out what’s in that inky black over our heads, we build space ships.

We are, as a large group of like beings, insanely inventive and resourceful, and that is the key to a work without work. That former work will become desires, and there will always be people who will want to fill the roles we need to make society operate as a whole. You want a salad bowl? Someone will make one for you our of wood or pottery or glass. You want to design a new kind of space craft to get to Mars? Someone will learn everything it takes to do that for you, if you let them learn how without restriction.

It’s The Values, Stupid

The foundation of our success in a post-work global society will be values. We all need to get on the same page when it comes to how we will organize to produce everything we do now, and more, but without currency being the driving force. That brings us back to Star Trek. How do they do it, in this fictional universe of the future? They just do it. I know that sounds simplistic, but it’s really at the core of this entire argument.

There will always be people willing to do something, anything, to not be stuck at home watching TV or playing video games or taking drugs all day long. In universal basic income studies in more forward thinking countries that ours they are finding that the preponderance of participants who have all of their basic needs met, go out and get a job or volunteer instead of just sitting on their asses. So, yes, it’s true that some people will choose to do nothing, but even the smallest samples have shown that most people cannot.

That is a core value.

The shape of our societies won’t really change all that much. There are those fictions that are quite successful because they work, are inclusive of all people, and don’t rest on the idea that power is the only thing of value in this world. Universal healthcare is one such result, and it is common in most first-world countries on Earth, and even most second-world countries float some kind of healthcare-for-all.

But what do we do with people who make things? That’s also surprisingly easy. Let’s say Julia is an forklift operator at an appliance plant just outside of Riverside, CA. She gets up at 7AM every, Monday through Friday, and heads in to the plant to start her shift at 8:30. She works until Noon, takes lunch with some co-workers at a local sandwich shop, and gets back to work at 1PM to move around more large palettes of sheet metal. She wraps up her day at 5:30 PM, stops at the grocery to pick up her food order, and goes home.

At no point during the day did Julia ever pay anyone for anything and she wasn’t paid a dime for her work. Yet, that evening, she can go on a date with her fiance to a nice restaurant and go see a movie. How is this possible? It is possible through a sharing economy that involves zero money anywhere. Everyone she meets during her day has a nice home to live in, access to all the food they want, and no limitations on the kinds of recreation they can consume. There is no ownership, per se. Yes, Julia “owns” her home, but that’s because she selected the home she wanted to live in and it was available. She can keep the home as long as she likes, or choose to move somewhere else and live there.

No, It’s Not Communism

At its root, Communism is based entirely around money. In the old CCCP (that’s Communist Russia, to you Millennials), the government owned everything and “evenly” distributed it to the citizens. The reality was that there was no equality and there was an enormous amount of paranoia instilled in the populace in the name of control and fear, but that’s beside the point. A world without work where people do what they choose to do, learn as much as they want, and contribute to the betterment of society as a whole is not the same thing.

For our new society, we’d need to get rid of a few things for it to work. Here are some of those things:

  • Homelessness
  • Inequality of all kinds
  • War
  • Famine
  • The lack of access to healthcare for many, many millions
  • Oppression
  • Dictatorships and monarchy
  • Genocide
  • Ethnic cleansing

No, that doesn’t mean that we get rid of homelessness by getting rid of the homeless. We put them in homes. Voila! No more homelessness. Some of the other things will, of course, require more complex solutions, and there’s a lot of work to be done to start moving in this direction, but if we all just believe, we can make it happen.

So, now that I’ve realized I’m starting to ramble and this is my first essay on this new blog, I’m going to wrap it up here. What are some of the things we can start doing now that will lead us in the right direction for a more positive, inclusive, and constructive future where we follow our dreams and can actually have them come true? What are some of the six billion things I left out because I’m a monkey in a tree who only desires a banana?

Let me know, and share this around. It would be nice to see some of the ideas presented here start to infect more people :)

iPhone cases & an important charity for Peruvian children

Where’s the rage? | Pandemic Edition

Sandy Hook gun lawsuit moves forward in Connecticut Supreme Court - CNN

Where is it, the rage? We should all be really, quite upset. Why aren't we marching in the streets, demanding accountability for the endless stream of corruption and criminality that has been unveiled on an almost daily basis for quite a few years? The French? Fuck, they're out in the street if anyone, anywhere sneezes on their rights! The Yellow Vests? You might have heard of them? 

The criminality of all involved is simply astonishing...

Today as I am writing these words... the Nassar child rape case that alleges this one asshole raped potentially hundreds of young gymnasts for decades with the apparent support of the Olympics committee people, U.S. gymnastics, and the Federal Bureau of Investigations. 

What about the January 6th insurrection of the Capitol? Why, when we've seen clear evidence of deeply concerning activity from sitting Federal representatives of American people, are these people still making (or more precisely, stopping) laws? 

How about The Big Lie? The lie, initially floated by Trump, that he won in 2020 and that the Presidency was stolen from him? Really? Larry Elder and the California GOP tried spinning the Big Lie into the recall attempt of state Governor Gavin Newsom that just ended last night in a complete rout. Apparently, Californians are mostly on-board with the mask mandates, Larry. 

Oooh. Here's one. How about the rape kits? How many haven't been processed for 1-20 years? Everyone loves statistics. Here's some about this terrible crime from the Natasha Justice Project:

Sexual Assault in the United States

  • Every 2 minutes, another person is sexually assaulted.
  • 97% of rapists will never spend a day behind bars.
  • 15% of all victims of rape and sexual assault are children under the age of 12.
  • Rapists don’t just strike once. They are often serial criminals, and DNA is the single-most effective rape prevention tool we have.
  • Victims of sexual assault are, according to the World Health Organization, three times more likely to suffer from depression; 13 times more likely to abuse alcohol, 26 times more likely to abuse drugs, and 4 times more likely to contemplate suicide.

The Rape-Kit Backlog

  • The Department of Justice estimates there are about 100,000 rape kits at public crime labs awaiting testing.
  • Media reports suggest there may be as many as 300,000 additional kits sitting in law enforcement storage, awaiting to reach labs for testing (the so-called “hidden backlog”).
  • On average, it currently costs $1,000 to test a single rape kit.
  • Apprehending serial offenders early in their careers can prevent crimes, thereby saving approximately $12.9 billion a year in avoided medical costs, lost wages, and other tangible harms to victims and society.
Backlogged rape kits in property storageJust some of the unprocessed rape kits being stored somewhere... Doing nothing... While more get raped...

Let's go back a few years to the Sandy Hook massacre... yes, massacre. Scroll back to the top of this post and look at the pictures of the victims of Adam Lanza [Source: Wikipedia]. The idea that these children were fabricated in an effort to take away people's guns is patently absurd. The Alt-Right has become obsessed with spinning lies to win since fewer people give a shit about their increasingly terrible ideological stances. Crisis actors? Insane.

List of victims Killed:

  • Perpetrator's mother
    • Nancy Lanza, 52 (shot at home)[32]
  • School personnel
    • Rachel D'Avino, 29, behavior therapist[33]
    • Dawn Hochsprung, 47, principal
    • Anne Marie Murphy, 52, special education teacher[34]
    • Lauren Rousseau, 30, teacher
    • Mary Sherlach, 56, school psychologist
    • Victoria Leigh Soto, 27, teacher
  • Students
    • Charlotte Bacon, 6[35]
    • Daniel Barden, 7
    • Olivia Engel, 6
    • Josephine Gay, 7
    • Dylan Hockley, 6
    • Madeleine Hsu, 6
    • Catherine Hubbard, 6
    • Chase Kowalski, 7
    • Jesse Lewis, 6
    • Ana Márquez-Greene, 6
    • James Mattioli, 6
    • Grace McDonnell, 7
    • Emilie Parker, 6
    • Jack Pinto, 6
    • Noah Pozner, 6
    • Caroline Previdi, 6[36]
    • Jessica Rekos, 6
    • Avielle Richman, 6
    • Benjamin Wheeler, 6
    • Allison Wyatt, 6
  • Perpetrator
    • Adam Lanza, 20 (suicide)

Wounded:

  • Natalie Hammond, 40, lead teacher
  • Deborah Pisani[37]

Just look at those children, all six or seven years old. Imagine what would be going through your mind if you and nineteen of your classmates were all lined up, staring down the barrel of a Bushmaster XM15-E2S assault rifle. Then it points at a friend down the line, perhaps Jessica or Noah. There's an impossibly loud crack, a flash of light, a puff of smoke, and one or more of those friends are lying on the floor, dead, blood pouring out of their tiny bodies. 

CRACK!!

CRACK!!!

CRACK!!!!!

Then the barrel points at you. The last sounds you hear are the screams of those who will also be dead soon. Then silence. Step into those shoes, you foul, despicable Sandy Hook deniers. You are the negative drain. You extract and give nothing in return, but I digress...

How much of a monster must you be to understand what happened at Sandy Hook and think to yourself that someone must have concocted the entire tale and spun it up like some fake, made-up Hollywood production to trick gun-toting Americans into giving up their guns? It is utterly in-FUCKING-human to treat these murders as anything but what they were. 

TWENTY SIX & SEVEN YEAR OLD CHILDREN WERE GUNNED DOWN IN COLD BLOOD INSIDE THEIR CLASSROOM IN 2012... PERIOD. COMMENTS CLOSED.

That shouldn't require a lot of brain power to understand. 

Need even more child abuse? When are we going to start getting answers about the Jeffrey Epstein case? What about the very, very long list of very, very important people who have been associated with Epstein and have travelled on his private 727 or ventured to his private island? When do they get questioned? 

Please, someone tell me, what does it take to get the people in America who have a few brain cells to rub together and don't believe all the lies to stand up for themselves and fight? I'd seriously like to know. I mean, FUCK!! What are we doing here? Are we legit going to give fascists and racists equal standing in America when the only demanding work they've EVER done is figure out how the FUCK to subjugate People of Color and extract as much wealth from the land as possible. 

Five members of the SCOTUS essentially ignored the Constitution through a technicality that allowed Texas to essentially criminalize an enshrined right by doing an end-run around the law. You know, that thing we count on to keep us as safe as we thought we were... before the pandemic and Trump changed everything.If you think things are getting scary in the US, take a look at what's going on in the UK!! Anything, anywhere can give some asshole an idea, so don't think this can't come here. Jesus H., we thought Trump would never be elected, and we've ended up with the slowest, stupidest coup of all time. American Exceptionalism at work! STAND BACK, PEOPLE!!!Just a note, they aren't doing well with the virus, either. 

Look, you can be that American. You know, the one who thinks the world owes you, and that you owe the world nothing in return because, 'MERICA, FUK YEH, but the sad reality is that you've done little, if anything, to make America "Great", like ever. You couldn't be bothered to find your own place and carve it out with your own hands. Instead, you made a bunch of other people do it all for you, you know; the slaves, and that's just pathetic. I hope, however, that you choose a different path, one that involves marching with a load of like-minded peeps and letting our elected state and federal government officials know that we know they aren't doing it right. 

I certainly don't want people to suffer, regardless of the reason (no matter how much I might desire it for some... ahem, people), and that's precisely what we are doing when we don't stop our leaders from doing terrible things as our proxy. We do that in several ways, but some of the most effective are: 

  • Call your CongressPeeps - Get on the phone. Tell them how you feel. Finding the number is easy. Just use this fancy new Internet thingy...
  • You can send them letters, too! - Did you know that, despite being hobbled by Trump appointee Louis DeJoy, the USPS still delivers letters? Try writing one... on paper. 
  • March - If you hear about a protest in your area, head over. Talk to people who seem to know what's going on and ask if it's not obvious. Help out. Work phones as needed. Get your friends and family involved. BE A PART OF SOCIETY. Shockingly, most of that isn't done on the internet, but in person. Also, don't be a Chad or Karen and WEAR A FUCKING MASK. 
  • Volunteer - Lend a hand to some group or organization that needs a hand. There are loads of homeless shelters and soup kitchens, or if you like tech there are lots of places like Free Geek. 
  • VOTE - Don't let anyone stop you, any rule silence your voice, any crass attempt to remove your status as an American with the Right to Vote bestowed upon each citizen of this land by our Constitution be quietly stripped from you in the dead of night. Yeah! It says it right in there, too! Words. Aren't they just neato?

If we do nothing, we'll lose this country to those who have no qualms lying, cheating, stealing, killing and raping to get there. Over 650,000 Americans dead from Covid because Trump lied. America in a war with the Taliban for twenty years because Bush lied. I'm sure there are more lies that have been told by more presidents, but I'm exhausted and can't be bothered to look them up. 

In the end, I'm not entirely sure what this post is. I'll post more. Maybe.

PS: Please don't get mad if I left an issue out. There are many. COUNTLESS. I can't remember what I had for breakfast, much less the endless march of atrocities against human lives. Sorry.

Greenland (2020) | Film Review

Good GOD, what a pig. Sure, Gerard Butler was a staple in mid-budget action flicks, but this dumpster fire isn’t one of his better ones, and it’s not going to inject any enthusiasm into prospects for his ongoing career.

BUDGET: $35 million BOX OFFICE: $47.5 million (worldwide)

Directed by Ric Roman Waugh and written by Chris Sparling, this schlocky disaster flick wannabe already instills a sense of dread before you cue it up after seeing that the movie poster proudly proclaims the movie is from “the” producer of the John Wick franchise, The Town, and Clash of The Titans (that monster hit… get it.)

When was the last time you were excited to see the latest film from your favorite producer?

Look, I’ve tried to write a simple summary of the plot, but it doesn’t make any sense. Gerard Butler’s insipid delivery as structural engineer John Garrity fares as well as expected when joined by the phoned in crap from Morena Baccarin (wife Allison) and Scott Glenn (Allison’s father Dale) and the obligatory kid, played by Roger Dale Floyd. There’s nobody else of note in the film. I’m rather surprised that these three agreed to sign on, but such is the lack of quality in Hollywood these days.

The basic rundown is as follows: John and Allison are in a bad way, but it’s not made clear why. We also learn that a comet is going to just barely miss Earth, then some of it’s going to hit, then all of it’s going to hit. That’s when John gets a call from the government that tells him he’s been selected to survive if he can get his family to a nearby military base before the end of the day. A lot of stupid shenanigans ensue, they get separated, and they get back together, and they survive. The end.

Big whoop.

Simply put, it’s a waste of time. The pacing is acceptable, but there are a lot of story elements that just feel slapped on, like generic tropes strung together to approximate an actual story. There’s zero recognizable character development, especially for Gerard Butler’s role. He’s not developed as a real, feeling, engaging, desperate human. His life circumstances bring no stakes. He’s not redeemed in the end. He doesn’t learn any harsh lessons. He’s just an unadorned avatar. The same applies to Baccarin and Glenn’s characters.

Multiple planes in the sky are clearly copy-pasted. The fires in the neighborhoods are way too big. The compositing is sloppy. Shots throughout are amateurish. All of it lacks any real energy, something I’m pretty sure is necessary for a disaster film. Hell, I’d bet real money that the Greenland shots are stock.

The Takeaway: Don’t bother.


How To Be The Most Amazing Person Ever

So, you want to be the most amazing person ever. The good news is that, through the power of positive thinking, you can have anything* you want, as long as you know the secret.

What is the secret?

Well, it wouldn’t be much of a secret if I didn’t drag this unnecessarily hyperbolic exposition out for as long as humanly possible only to tell you something ludicrously obvious at the end, would it? In order for the secret to actually work, you’ll need to tolerate a lot of extraneous narrative that leads you to the very narrow conclusions I, the author, want you to “discover” for yourself. So, how am I going to do that? Easy. We start at the beginning…

The Problem

You’re stuck in a rut. You’re spinning your wheels. You can’t get a grip? You’re running out of gas? Running on empty? Any other car related metaphors I might have missed?

We eventually all get there. (Don’t worry teenagers, you’ll get you chance.) We hit a wall and feel like we’re going nowhere, especially during a pandemic with everything shut down. Now we’re working at home, dealing with the kids 24/7, finding it difficult to focus, missing deadlines, or just knocking off altogether. It’s especially difficult if, like me, you are old and don’t work.

As a (not) celebrated author, I’ve had my share of slumps. You would too over twenty years and a hundred books. Now that that industry is dead, I’ve moved on to… other engagements. I worked in IT for a number of years, my wife and I consulted for many years, I worked with a few firms in and around LA, and I sold my interesting skill set to anyone who would spare $25 an hour after the Great Recession.

Now, at 52, after five years of soul-crushing rideshare driving. now in the middle of a global pandemic, at the (hopefully) end of the reign of an American Idiot, at the top of a new year that’s starting off with a bang, after what was already the Year from Hell, I’m on… sabbatical.

And on that sabbatical, I’m trying to write. I have the perfect project that has the potential to go on for years, but I’m having trouble getting started. It all feels way too big and I can’t settle on an organization tool and there are too many new videos to catch up with on YouTube and whatever else bullshit excuse I can concoct to distract me from getting started. I’ve got the domain and the website and everything ready to go, I just need to write the content.

So, since I was too lazy to do that, I came up with a plan to fix it, and this is it.

Step 1: Personal Assessment

The first step in any self-improvement process is to assess yourself. Let’s take a quick little test. For every “YES” answer below give yourself one point. Let’s see how many points you have at the end and what that means?

  1. Give yourself a point if you are breathing.
  2. Give yourself a point if you have a pulse.
  3. Give yourself a point if you know or can determine the time and date.
  4. Give yourself a point if you can move one or more of your limbs.
  5. Give yourself a point if you can see, touch, or smell anything on or around you.
  6. Give yourself a point if you are reading this.
  7. Give yourself a point for every language you can use to communicate with others.
  8. Give yourself a point for taking this quiz.

So, what did your total come to? Check the chart to see your starting point:

Now, things start to get exciting as we get a sense of who you are going to be as you advance through the program. Don’t get too excited, though, as this first result is merely a baseline; the starting line that will help you form the foundation of your exciting new life.

Step 2: Recognizing Your Talents

Now that you’ve established that you are, at the very least, a human being, you can move on to Step 2 where we’ll work on identifying the skills you already possess. These skills, once recognized, will be crucial elements on your path to discovering the secret, which you can then apply in your life to achieve unknowable results.**

Isn’t it thrilling to be unaware of what the future holds?

What skills, then, will you bring to the table? How will you participate in daily human life? How will you contribute? Select at least two skills from the following list of common traits that best apply to you:

  • You can see/touch/smell/taste at least one thing on or around your body.
  • You can move from one place to another within a frame of time.
  • If you make an audible noise around other people, some of them may react.
  • At various times during any given day, you consume food and/or fluids…
  • …and your body takes in nutrients and ejects waste as needed.
  • You are aware of your self and acknowledge it in this space and time.

You may be surprised to discover that all of these traits are all found in amazing people. You might also be surprised to find that you relate to all the listed traits. That’s normal and merely indicates that you are well on your way to mastering being an amazing person! Better yet, it indicates that you are well equipped for your journey

Chance favors the prepared mind.
- Louis Pasteur

Step 3: Finding Your Center

This will be the least concrete segment of the overall process. You can’t just point to it, your center. It doesn’t exist in physical space. It’s the one thing that makes you the happiest, whether you’re able to do it now or ever have before. It’s the fulfillment of who you believe you are in and of that moment.

Have no fears. This isn’t permanent.

Dreams can change, and yours likely will over your lifetime. Though some settle into their dreams rather easily and with little fuss, most of us have the wrestle around a bit to find a good fit. The good news is that this can happen at any age AND you’re already on your way towards becoming an amazing person, so…

  1. Look deep inside yourself.
  2. Find that one thing that makes you the most happy.
  3. Focus on it until it becomes clear.
  4. Do it.

That’s right…

Step 4: Do It

Yes. There’s nothing more. Just do it. Do the thing you love. Now, I grant that, during a pandemic, not everyone will be able to just do whatever it is they love. I get that. In those cases, do the first thing you love that won’t get someone else killed.

Once you’re satisfied that you’ve done that thing you love to the greatest extent possible, move on to the next dream. In fact, keep coming up with new dreams. There’s nothing and nobody stopping you. And, one fantastic feature is that you aren’t limited in any way on how you can make your dreams come true.

That’s right! YOU decide when and where your dreams come true. Funny that.

Just be mindful that, somewhere nearby, someone else is making their dreams come true. The last thing you’d want is some asshole barging in on your dream. Why do the same to someone else? And who knows, maybe your dream involves helping someone else with their dream. This would be an awesome opportunity to house two birds with one nest.

What qualifies as a dream? Anything, really. How many things make you happy? I can think of quite a few, but only one gives me ultimate joy; bringing joy to a reader through the written word. You could build a bookshelf. Write some letters to people who are important to you. Craft a new business plan. Fly a radio controller airplane. Sew masks for your family, neighbors, and friends. Feed hungry families. Sleep in a hammock. Hang your fresh laundry out to dry on a breezy Fall afternoon. Can some peaches. Gild a lily. Knit a sweater. Write a rock song. Battle some orcs. Tie ribbons on porcelain dolls. Hunt for old video game gear at local thrift shops. Paint religious scenes on match heads. Go fishing. Lobby for human rights. Arrange flowers. Re-pack the read-end on an old Ford truck. I don’t know. You’d know better than I.

Seriously. It’s not rocket science.

Step 5: What Happened To Becoming Amazing?

If, and I stress IF, you followed the steps precisely, you will have already transformed yourself into an amazing person. You’ll know when. If you haven’t done anything yet and skipped ahead, you’ll only find the disappointment of the reality that there is no simple solution to this problem.

It’s not someone else’s problem to fix. This is all on you.

Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t have help or support from anyone. Happiness isn’t a solo endeavor, it’s a team sport. Humans thrive best in social climes. So, yes, it’s on our shoulders to work on our problems, but we’re not alone. We can leverage any resources necessary (and legal) to achieve happiness. Hell, it’s even enshrined in the Constitution of The United States of America as a key human pursuit.

In the end, whoever you are most comfortable being is the most amazing you there is, and you should strive to be that you as much as possible. And the easiest way to do that, is to do you.

That’s all anyone should ever ask of you. Everything else is gravy.

Oh, and the secret is you.

* by “anything” I mean anything (i.e., factor, value, trait, etc…) you already have but don’t yet acknowledge in yourself.

** Unknowable results, by there very nature, are unknowable. Therefore, we cannot predict the outcomes of any efforts to find your amazing self. We do, however, know that, in the end, you’ll be an amazing person! You already ARE!!


My father died today.

My father being arrested for protesting, something he was quite happy to do. He was staunchly anti-war and would always stand up for the little guy. Well, mostly always…

My sister summed it up best.

“I haven’t seen him in so long, he’s already been dead to me,” she said, or something like it. You get the point.

I was watching a video on YouTube about the new Anbernic RG351M when it paused itself. Then my phone rang. I could see it was my sister from the image that appeared on the display. I knew at that moment that she was calling me to tell me dad had died. She had texted me the day before letting me know that he was in hospice at home.

This was a marked change from years past. When my older sister died in the early 2000’s, I learned two weeks later, by letter from my father. Years later, when my mother had moved back to Southern California from Knoxville and would subsequently die of dementia, I was told about that a week late. When I figured out that my father had a degenerative brain disease and was likely going to die from it, I figured the same would happen when he did.

You see, our step-mother has been keeping us away from our father. Why, I couldn’t tell you. My sister and I agree that they likely planned it together, but I’d need more information before I were to make an educated judgement. There are loopholes in some of the timing elements that I’ll need to look into.

This, however, should illustrate the issue. I’m not sad my father has passed. No, I’m more concerned about the apparent shady behavior of our step-mother. Like my sister said, it’s like he’s been dead, but it’s taken everyone else a few years to figure out.

We expected it.

Like I knew that seeing my sister on my caller ID meant that he had passed. Like knowing my mother’s dementia would lead to her eventual death. This got me reflecting on familial relationships.

In a letter I wrote to our step-mother over Christmas, I likened our family to a diaspora of micro families that don’t frequently interact with each other, and when we do, it’s all through a veneer of casual, apathetic complacency. Happy enough with things to not be concerned about anything in particular. Pleasantries passed about like business cards.

This is no way for a family to act, so I’ve decided that I’m going to reconnect with my sister and her family and our terminally acidic brother. And maybe even our estranged brother-in-law, our older sister’s widow. My sister has already agreed, which makes me endlessly happy, but I have yet to speak to either of my brothers. I believe they will be saltier to deal with, but I shall make the effort.

I have lots of issues to deal with, personally, within my family, and among my distributed family, that I think it’s far better to at least work on positive communications with your family, despite the hard pasts. It’s so much better to work together as a team, leveraging our strengths and forgiving the weaknesses in ourselves and others, to achieve a goal. But it seems so very hard to muster the courage to work with some people. I’ll remind you of this, though:

We’ve all got our demons.

We could compare scars all day long, but in the end our pains our ours alone and we can neither share nor compare them with others. These burdens are ours to bear, but that doesn’t mean we can’t work together to share the load across many shoulders.

It’s never an easy row to hoe, change. Think of the metaphor. Dirt. On the top, it’s old and crusty and drained of nutrients. Underneath, however, the sustenance-rich, moist, life-giving soil has been spending years growing on the food of the past, and is now getting churned into the crusty, old topsoil, blending the two into an amalgam of old and new, each fighting for prominence. The old, running out of resources, desperately clutching at authority for validation, to keep mattering.

But they do matter. They need to move into teaching roles to feed the new soil being readied for the next tilling, and so on, and so forth… As each season fades into glorious reds and oranges before falling to the ground to feed the soil that feeds the tree that feeds so many, making room for the new leaves to stretch out and reach for the Sun.

My father fought for that ideal in Apartheid South Africa alongside Bishop Desmond Tutu. He fought for the souls of human beings to be recognized as such, in a society where racial segregation and hatred had become indoctrinated into law. With the help of many others, my father did his part to bring about freedom in South Africa.

You’d think that kind of deep human empathy would translate to a loving home life, but you’d be wrong. It wasn’t ripped from the pages of a horror anthology. It was my otherization because I was adopted. Likewise, it was dad focusing on my fuckups more than he focused on his blood children’s authentic issues.

He wasn’t a dad as much as he was an event.

But I’m not here to denigrate my father. I know that he loved us all, and we loved him. When I asked to go to Disneyland for my birthday every year, we went. I wasn’t abused, at least not in obvious ways. I was, however, sent off to boarding schools, anything to keep my away from home and out of anyone’s hair. At the age of nine, after truly learning that I was adopted from my mother, that growing sense of abandonment continued to swell inside me.

The sense compounded after, upon evaluating my life at the nexus of my eighteenth birthday, I counted that I had been sent to no less than nine different schools since kindergarten. There’s no question I was a difficult child. I won’t apologize for that. Those were times past that I can no longer rectify directly. That work must be done retroactively.

But it’s still hard knowing that, as a child, you had appointments to meet with your father in his office.

There’s an emotional distancing to that. It sticks with me, that I dealt with dad’s secretary almost as much as I did him directly. But there’s something that hurts far more, and it didn’t have to happen this way. Choices were made, and we have to abide by them for now, but I make no guarantees that I won’t go after them in the near future. What is it that I’m talking about?

That my step-mother wouldn’t let me see my father before he died.

That, I’ll never forgive. Or forget.

In the meantime, however, I think I’ll get to writing that which I should have been writing for a very long time.

Does our future require Capitalism?

A neighborhood in Mexico City that shows a stark divide between the wealthy and powerful and those who cannot afford to live in a safe, clean place. [SOURCE: BoredomTherapy]

There is an existing dynamic between capitalism and science which fosters a high stakes game of one-upmanship among different corporations and organizations to find the “killer app” and crush the competition. An enormous component of this dynamic is the winner-take-all mentality that is a core tenet of today’s current hyper-capitalism.

Proponents of capitalism claim that it is the market that is the catalyst for the competition that has created all of our advanced technologies and drives our future. Without capitalists being allowed to do whatever they want (ala Ayn Rand) our potential will waste away as we languish in a socialist paradise overflowing with flotillas of content people, no longer interested in competing because there’s no hunger behind that drive to innovate.

This concept causes the rise and fall of entire industries and consumes billions of dollars every single year, raising and dashing the hopes of hundreds of thousands of employees caught in this seemingly never-ending tide of feast or famine. In the meantime, the capitalists who started off as innovators have amassed vast oceans of wealth and owning, year after year, more and more of the artificially finite global cash reserve, while a growing number of people on Earth fall deeper into poverty as available money inexorably moves towards the top.

This, we are told, is what we need because, without it we would all just be filthy apes scrabbling in the dirt for food. We should thank the “job creators” for fostering an environment where the struggle for little slips of paper is real and necessary and the only thing that will drag us out of our neanderthal state and into a glorious future full of bright, shiny technology and prosperity.

On the face of it, that’s rather preposterous. Before money, people competed just fine. With money, people compete just fine. We live next to a baseball field and every Monday night anywhere from 20–40 people show up to play a night of baseball. Nobody pays them. It’s not a formalized league. There is no prize for winning. Yet, people still congregate to share in the sheer joy of competing with each other. You should hear the noise that rises from that field. Those people put their hearts and souls into those games, and for no reward greater than just having tried their best.

What do you think? Can we have functional competition while maintaining a healthy lifestyle for everyone on Earth? If humans invented money, can’t we just invent a better way and still have all the benefits a global society, rich in cultural diversity brings?


Spare Seat | Short Fiction

The clattering melody the train wheels sang under my feet was hypnotic. It beat a staccato rhythm against the rails, countering the smooth, blur outside the double-pane window upon which I rested my right temple. The car swayed; gently, then roughly, and gently again. Several tons of steel, aluminum, plastic, wood, and fabric played a cacophonous symphony as it hurtled down the misty California coastline. I watched without seeing, my vision blurred as my mind juggled thoughts of indecision and mortality.

“Is anyone sitting here,” said a voice over my left shoulder. I sat alone in a set of four seats arranged to face each other.

“No,” I responded, leaving my head on the chilly glass.

“Indeed,” said the voice.

Santa Barbara was fading away behind me, but the little city couldn’t have remained clearer in the theater of my mind. The events of the last week were still fresh, an open wound of shock, resignation, and pent up emotion let loose in a resultant torrent of rage.

I got the news Tuesday morning as I drove to work through Santa Ana. The traffic was worse than usual, an accident a few miles away having caused ripples of congestion to spread out like concentric wavelets on the surface of a pond.

My father had been found dead in his Ojai home.

The scuttlebutt was homicide, as if that were even possible. The idea was so absurd I couldn’t stop turning it over and over, examining every possible angle. I called work and told them I wasn’t coming in, that there was a sickness in the family, and I would be gone for, at least, a few days. My boss wished me and my family well, and I turned around to head North. You can, after all, go home again, but nothing will be the same.

I guess that was the point.

The trip up the coast was punctuated by whipping rain and tearing gusts pouring from dull, grey skies, feeling very much like my mood had been extracted and hoisted up for all to see. I rented a car in Santa Barbara and drove up to Ojai, checked in at a hotel, and made my way to the house. My father’s body had already been moved, and there was some kid in a police uniform minding the front door, trying to look authoritative.

That… familiar voice came out of the fog.

“A penny for your thoughts,” it said.

“That’s my line,” I quipped, and looked around.

That was the first time that turning my head would be an event unto itself. I stared across the gap between the seats to peer into eyes as pale blue as my own, but older, worn, beaten, but oddly content. The elderly man smiled at me; his left front incisor cocked at an odd angle. He stroked his sparse, closely cropped beard and chuckled.

“Pay no mind to me. I just saw you so deep in thought you might want some help back up for some air,” he said in a comfortable baritone.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” I lied. “I’m just thinking about something.”

“Yeah.” He said. I sighed and turned to look at the endless shoreline passing by.

“Rough times,” he said, almost too quietly to hear.

I had just gotten out of the rental when an unmarked detective car rolled up to the curb. The doors popped open and two large men in neatly tidy suits climbed out, making the Crown Victoria look like a clown car. The passenger took two enormous, though oddly lazy, strides towards me and extended his hand.

“Mr. Kerr.” It was a statement of fact.

“Yes,” I replied.

“I am sorry for your loss.” Another statement of fact.

“Thank you,” I responded. I shook his hand or, to be accurate, he enveloped mine and then waggled it around.

“Mr. Kerr,” stated the other man, “I’m Detective Hatch. This is Detective Stokes.” Hatch put his hand in his pocket and pulled out what looked like a Zippo lighter. It was his smart phone. A smirk crossed my face.

“Your father was found at 5AM Tuesday morning. I was the one who called you. I can’t give you any details about the crime, but I can tell you that it was clear that he was killed,” announced Hatch. Stokes nodded in agreement, clutching his hands behind his back at what appeared to be parade rest.

It didn’t really click into place. They were just words, spoken at me by a pair of monotonic yetis in dark suits. My mother had passed away four years prior of lung cancer. She was a prodigious smoker. My father had never smoked. He had been retired for more than a decade but had never stopped being a minister to his congregation.

“Wow,” was all I could say.

The train started to slow, its rhythm slowing in pace and insistence. We were stopping at Union Station in downtown LA where I would change over to a Metro train to take me back to Mission Viejo. The marine layer was thick, but it wasn’t raining. The man sitting across from me was looking across the car. I could see he was a little thinning, his hair a rumpled mess of brown and grey.

“What did you mean,” I asked his neck. He slowly turned, that gentle, crooked smile on his lips.

“By what,” he queried.

“You said ‘rough times’ just now,” I reminded him.

“Oh, that.”

“Yeah.”

“You had this look in your eyes that spoke of a deep pain,” he said, his gaze calm and friendly. He smiled a little less.

“If only that weren’t true,” I said. I felt the anguish start to bubble in my gut and a flush come to my face.

“I’ve seen some ugly things,” he said.

I sat there, saying nothing. The train was moving into the yard. In a few minutes, everyone would be getting up to get off the train and find their happiness or sadness or nothing at all.

“There was once a time in my life that I had no idea what to do. I had faced a terrible demon and fought it for years,” he said, almost wistfully.

“What happened,” I asked.

“I won.” The smile came back. I looked into those eyes and I saw that there was peace.

The train came to a stop and dozens of people stood, fetching parcels and luggage from the overhead racks. I started to stand, but the man placed his hand on mine and leaned in.

“I know you’ll win, too,” he said, winking.

He stood, wheeled around, and followed the crowd out of the train car. After a few minutes, I stood up, wondering what just happened. I grabbed my bag, and swung down out of the train, sucking at the the little notch in my front tooth.

Photo by Stefan Stefancik from Pexels


How open source software can save you from the horrors of Social Media

Facebook. WhatsApp. Instagram. Adult Friend Finder. Yahoo. Marriot. Anthem Health. eBay. JP Morgan Chase. Target. Equifax. Adobe. RSA Security. The US Office of Personnel Management. [SOURCE]

This is a partial list of organizations that have been hacked and lost control of millions of user accounts since 2011. In the case of Yahoo, it was 3 billion.

That’s billion, with a capital “B”.

Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

That’s a lot of people’s personal and, as in the case with Anthem Health, very confidential, data. In some cases it was just email addresses and passwords, some of which weren’t even encrypted. In others, complete packages of personally identifying data was taken. Many of these people are now targeted by scammers to steal from them or hold their data for ransom.

I found this to be an unacceptable relationship, but I already had an out. I’ve been a proponent of Free and Open Source Software (often notated as FOSS) for a few decades now. Back when we had a converted garage office in New Mexico, I taught myself how to build out early versions of Caldera Linux into a workable desktop and used that for my writing work for two full years.

But then, I’m a nerd.

A few years ago, my wife Rima and I were chatting in Facebook Messenger about something we were interested in purchasing. Neither of us had searched for it or mentioned the product in any social networking service. Regardless, ads for the product started showing up on Facebook and various sites on the web. I’m sure you’ve had a similar experience, and out experience embittered me towards Messenger. I felt that there had to be something better from people who were acting for the benefit of human beings, not the bottom line.

It was then that I started looking into alternatives that would offer my family the peace of mind that we had always desired, and I found Telegram. After some prodding, I got both my wife and daughter, as well as a handful of close friends, to open accounts, and we’ve been using it ever since. While my wife retained her Facebook account because of her sizable following, I closed my account, and haven’t found any interest in returning since.

The number of data breaches in all sectors has been on the rise, almost since the inception of the public internet, and this will continue to be a real issue that will affect real people and cause real damage as long as capitalism is the sole player on the internet at large.

What you can do that’s not all that difficult

First, you can stop using Facebook and their related services, WhatsApp and Instagram and develop a strong sense of skepticism when you are offered something for free. After being burned by Facebook, I did just that. I went out and leveraged my tools to track down services that would allow my family to communicate securely, and carefully vetted them for the values I was seeking. I had even considered WhatsApp back then, not aware that Facebook had already, or was about to, acquire them.

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

After an exhaustive amount of research, I signed up for an account on Telegram, and now I doubt I’d be able to get my wife and daughter to give it up, either. But, don’t take my word for it. Do your own research. Find out for yourself what circumstances would lead someone like Pavel Durov, the Co-Founder of Telegram, to say something like this.

Every one of us is going to die eventually, but we as a species will stick around for a while. That’s why I think accumulating money, fame or power is irrelevant. Serving humanity is the only thing that really matters in the long run. -Pavel Durov, Co-Founder of Telegram, 2019 [ SOURCE]

There are a number of other things you can do to give yourself the best possible chance in this increasingly difficult world:

  • Switch to Mozilla’s Firefox for browsing. It’s fast and supports many of the same or similar extensions that Google’s app does, but doesn’t contain all of the invasive stuff that the browser from the Big G shoehorns into Chrome.
  • Use an ad-blocker and tracker blocker in combination, no matter how much some sites complain. I’d suggest uBlock Origin and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Privacy Badger.
  • Stop using Google. Period. Their old slogan, “Don’t Be Evil,” died off a long time ago and their singular focus is now on dominating the internet with revenue-generating free services where they pump ads at you while selling your data to anyone with money.
  • If you need an email service, check out ProtonMail or Tutanota. These privacy-oriented services offer webmail and apps for iOS and Android. Tutanota is the more reasonable at only $13.41 a year for Premium (it’s a German company, so their rates are in Euros), but some people prefer ProtonMail (which is a Swiss company).
  • If those seem too nerdy for you, use Microsoft’s Outlook.com service through Office 365. A personal account costs just $7 a month and includes the complete office suite for Windows AND MacOS and a ton of other features. Yes, I know a lot of people complain about Microsoft “spying” on everyone, but CEO Satya Nadella has been on a crusade to change the entire culture of the largest operating system maker in the world, including a deep embrace of FOSS technologies and an ethic that will challenge the status quo over privacy in the coming years. I’ve been using the service for years now and not once have I ever seen private communications used to push ads at me. NOTE: The free version does display ads, but you can turn off personalization.
  • Stop using stupid passwords. Get LastPass or KeePass and use it to not only store your credentials, but also generate unique ones for each service you use. Sure, LastPass is a division of LogMeIn, but it’s inexpensive (at $24 a year) and has a good track record for security. KeePass, on the other hand, is FOSS and requires some additional nerding, but is well worth it, if you’re technically minded.
  • Stop using SMS. It’s stupid old, is slow, has loads of limitations, and some carriers still charge per message. For chat with your friends and family, use Telegram or Riot.im. Telegram is fully integrated on all common platforms and supports a wide range of features, many of which WhatsApp copies (and not very well, I might add). Riot.im is what’s called a federated networking system that connects privately run servers in a loose network to form a large-scale social chat system. It’s a touch more fiddly than Telegram, but it has a lot of fantastic features you can’t find anywhere else.
  • Learn about the world of FOSS. It’s a diverse, engaging, and surprisingly complete world where millions of people live and work and play without being subjected to the whims of irresponsible corporations who are only driven by profit at any cost. Check out sites like It’s FOSS or, if you are a programmer for Windows or Mac and would like to dig into FOSS, check out GitHub’s OpenSource.Guide.
  • Stop selling yourself. You’re worth more than $12 a year, which is what companies like Facebook and Google make off each user through ad views. It’s critical to their bottom line that they hook as many eyes as possible to make as much money as possible, and values aren’t really a consideration. You are priceless, and you need to use tools and services that don’t treat you like a piece of meat that pulls in a few pennies a day. You. Are. Priceless. Treat yourself that way.

Why should I pay for something I can get free?

The simple answer is to shift the balance of power back to the consumer. Right now, you give away your personal data, where you go, what you search for, what you buy, what you write and delete, which sites you go to, how you relate to other people, and much, much more in exchange for seeing advertisements.

Photo by Samantha Sophia on Unsplash

Your data earns companies like Facebook money, as does the ad revenue. All of this free data people willingly give up dis-incentivizes them from offering real customer value and support, from fixing security flaws, and generally being good corporate citizens. The same applies to Google and others. Since Facebook has a few BILLION users, they don’t really give a damn about how it hurts anyone or risks the privacy and security of individuals. It’s not, after all, their problem.

The best way to fight this is to remove from these companies the source of their revenues, i.e., leaving their services and paying moderate fees and making donations to projects that do NOT sell your data and that do NOT earn revenue from advertising*. This generally means switching to some kind of open source-based projects, like the newly created project from Purism called Librem.one.

*some advertising isn’t bad, such as advertising on a news site, but it shouldn’t be targeted and it shouldn’t rely on spying on you to figure out what you want. A good advertiser will do the hard work to reach out to their target markets.

Librem.one is a set of services, using a range of open source projects, that are designed to replace things like Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Gmail, and Google Drive, among many more which are planned. We pay for this service in lieu of having our data scraped and ads blasted at us. The more of us who speak with our money and our choices, the more these services can develop into better, more accessible tools that help us through our daily lives.

All I ask if that you reevaluate what it is that you get from the internet and how those choices are affecting you and those around you, and choose to take a different approach that might actually benefit everyone instead of just people like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, or the Google machine.


How did we get to Trump? - The Abridged Edition

The following essay is from a Quora comment that I made in response to this honest question:

But I still think it is strange what has happened to the USA. It used to be the country that got together to solve any kind of problem or public need. You had the entire country to have paved roads and everybody had cars way ahead of us even so with electricity and telephones. You invented the Internet. But now it looks like every community expects somebody else “big corporations” to come and sort all problems out. What changed so that the US stopped to be a “let us get together and solve this shit!”. I am by no means complaining to you I just don't get it. It is like the public is afraid of starting or wanting changes. - Kjell (2019)

---

There are a lot of Americans who feel the same way, Kjell. It’s not wrong that you’re confused.

The problems stems mostly from capitalism, principally the form as espoused by Milton Friedman. Milton said a few things that I hope will give you an idea of what’s been happening for decades:

“The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of a system.”

and…

“The world runs on individuals pursuing their self interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way.”

and…

“When government - in pursuit of good intentions - tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player.”

It’s not all on Milton’s head, though. A lot of where we are now is the tacit agreement between various groups seeking power and control and freedom from government limitations, such as the Religious Right, the Koch brother(s), the white supremacist Alt-Right, protectionists, Libertarians, conservative Republicans, and others who were tired of losing their individual fights.

Obama really put a bee in their bonnet, which gave the Tea Party, the Koch’s pet project, a target to rage against, and pushed the GOP into forming a policy that would try to make Obama a one-term President.

They failed to make that goal, but they were deeply successful at obstruction and fear mongering. Leveraging tools like propaganda, a unified messaging scheme, the use of lower-level sacrificial lambs to test the waters for said messaging (how low can they go before things break), spreading false narratives, and engaging the services of networks like Fox News whose leadership were keen to have America run by people who were far more empathetic to their goals.

It is around this time that Trump pops up with his claims that Obama wasn’t a real American, but an imposter from Kenya. Other lies that were spread around were that Democrats wanted to take away everyone’s guns, and that national health care would necessitate the need for Death Panels to decide who would get health care.

The reality, however, wasn’t about the issues that were all over the news cycle day in and day out, but the Right’s new agenda package.

  • Lower taxes for the wealthy
  • Reduce, if not eliminate, regulations on business
  • Get rid of illegal immigrants
  • Eradicate religious diversification
  • Legitimize the re-segregation of America
  • Empower a renewed need for male dominance

Trump gave the ‘cabal’ two things.

  1. A target that media would focus on and a mouthpiece that sat at one of the biggest tables on the world stage in a single person
  2. An in to start changing the American government that would facilitate their desire to ‘terraform’ the country in the form of a Republican party that was reshaped by the Tea Party

By the end of the 2016 election, enough American were disgusted by the choices on offer to not vote enough for Hillary Clinton, and Trump was able to win, despite being dramatically short of the popular vote. Not that it mattered, since Americans don’t vote for presidents. The Electorate does, and all they need is enough incentive to pick the candidate that can muster enough support.

States Rights also played a significant role, by allowing each state to organize their own election rules, which means each state gets to select how the candidates will receive their electoral college votes.

This has never been about making America great again, but taking America back from the dirty, unwashed, uncouth and colored filth that come to bright, shining America to build a better life for their families.

Its about getting revenge for losing their slave labor, having to see all those Black people walking around free, making money, and being happy instead of earning the white people money with their blood, sweat, and lives because they are less than human. Cows don’t run Fortune 500 companies, do they?

Its about getting people out of their face when they want to poison a lake to make 100,000 more widgets an hour and not having to pay a lot for labor.

Its about getting those fat stacks of cash, and fuck anyone who isn’t devious enough to get it first.

Its about winning.

And the only way to win this game, the game that involves the lives of 300,000,000+ human beings, is to play dirty, no matter who it hurts, as long as someone comes out on top.

And that, my friend, will get us a planet devoid of intelligent life.

Strap in. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.