Grow up?

I just don't know what to make of this?
What kind of creep doesn't believe you when you announce on facebook that you are suddenly engaged to your girlfriend?--actually, that's not what it is. What kind of creep calls bs on your announcement, and what creeps agree with it?

Maybe I'm making a big deal about this when really it's nothing, but to me, that's actually kind of rude. Instead of saying congrats or great job or anything, they say that it's bulls!%#. --Thanks guys. Are you saying that because you're jealous that I'm engaged and you are not? or are you saying that because you didn't think I would get engaged?--me, the dating and relationship coach? You don't believe that I would get engaged? heh. Idiots.
The other possibility is that they think I have too high of standards to ever find someone who could meet them? --Wrong again, knowing what I want and how I'm going to find it has helped me to find just the right girl for me. I've grown from my search too and learned a lot about myself and what I want to be...that's really the biggest point I make in my dating coaching is that when you have a plan and you strive to obtain it, you'll see a lot of success.

Along with that half-rude comment (I'm not really offended or anything, I just think it's bizarre behavior to make a comment like that, hence why I only think it is half rude), my best friends aren't the ones congratulating me or saying anything. My more distant friends are the ones wishing me well. It's odd really...

I almost want to say to everyone else to just grow up. The biggest reason why people disagree with my dating coaching blog is because they're too immature to see the significance of what I share. I find that a lot of the reason people have problems with dating and relationships is really because they haven't grown up enough. Maturity is really a big key to having a relationship (it's not everything, but all of the signs of maturity are also things that help you have a good relationship).

I also must mention that a lot of the topics I bring up for my blog are directly related to close friends and what I would like them to hear. Do they take the advice? No, not usually, in fact I've seen them twist it to their own liking, but the advice DOES apply to my other readers and they actually take the advice and benefit from it.

So I suppose what I have made out of this is that some people need to grow up and that I really don't care. The end.

Weather

The weather in Utah is spurratic (sp?), --I know, I know, the weather man says that too, "spurratic showers...spurratic snow storms". You can never tell what will happen until it happens. Who can blame them? They're basing their information on what appears to be patterns.--Coming from the film industry I know that patterns can be faked and if God wishes, he'll change the patterns for anything.

I guess this just goes to show how often science doesn't know the answers.


I was thinking about that the other day: the way I see it there are two approaches you can take to life: the scientific and the humanitarian (not sure if that's the term, but roll with me). You can go through life making predictions based on the scientific observations and mathematical calculations that someone made up (read my post about the rapture to get a few kicks right now, or you can go through life making predictions based on human behavior.
Sciences has all sorts of conversions they have to perform. for example, to measure human performance they still have to create a whole bunch of averages and ratios--such is the life of a fantasy sports team. After converting the player into a number that is relatively predictable they make "educated" guesses about the success of that player through the year.
But A human...ist? sees the determination of the player, the work ethic, and the character and then they make an intuitive guess about the success of the player. --Sometimes luck really is a factor, and I think humans can sense it though they might not be able to calculate it mathematically.

I suppose the reason why the weather is so "spurratic" is because mathematics can only go so far. Sometimes it doesn't rain on the just because of their righteousness and other times it rains on the just because they need to be tried. The old saying "when it rains, it rains on the just and the unjust as well" isn't always true. (read my post about global warming for a few kicks and giggles)

In any case, I'm going to make a bet against the weather and hope I hit a home run this memorial day weekend.

*cue baseball music: Nuh nuh nuh NUHH nuh NUHHHHHHH CHARGE!*

Trials

I posted this (a similar) comment on my facebook, but I want to repost it on here:

Trials are necessary in life because they prove to God that you are obedient to him. They also prove to yourself that you can accomplish things. Without such proof you have nothing--your ethos doesn't prove anything because you haven't done anything, and your logic doesn't prove anything. You might emotionally be able to prove something but without the other two to back you up, how are you going to convince anyone?
Trials help you learn and grow. They are good for you.

Personally, I like to look at trials as blessings, because they are proof to me that I am doing things right in life. If what I was doing wasn't the right thing, then I wouldn't be getting tried for it; I would merely be standing still not moving in the right direciton.

Rapture

Every time someone says anything about the rapture all I can think about was that little old lady in west virginia who told me she didn't have -time- to listen to me share a message about Christ with her because "[she was] waitin' on the rapture!"

Let me start by saying that I didn't hear anything about this until this afternoon while browsing through the news. I know nothing about the guy who made the claim other than what I saw on 4 different news channels, and I don't have a clue about what his FULL claim is, so everything I am basing this blurb on is about the things I saw on national television.

So.
To summarize:
Some 89 year old kook claims the rapture is going to happen tomorrow at 4pm and that it is a mathematical claim based out of the bible.

The first thought that comes to my mind is: There is very little mathematics involved in the bible. i mean, they count the tribes and the Israelites. There are a lot of 7s here and there and 12s and 3s and 666, but really it isn't the number of it that matters in all of those cases, it's the meaning behind them.

This isn't the first time this old man has cried the end of the world. Many years ago he made the claim and was wrong. One reporter asked him what would happen if he was wrong this time. He said that it WILL happen; he was quite confident and sure of himself, almost the same way a magician is sure of himself to the point where he can convince his audience that he really did saw the young lady in half.

The old man also made a point to say he wasn't a prophet, that he didn't have a vision, that nothing came to him, he didn't eat spaghetti, etc. That he just found a mathematical formula in the scriptures and that he just came up with it himself. I find that humorous. Doesn't it also say several times that no one will know when the end will come and that people will come forth claiming things and making their own paths to heaven and yet that they will all be wrong?

Personally, I think the end is close but not THAT close. There are many things that need to take place first.

Also personally, I don't think I even want to know when the Lord is coming. If the exact date was made known to me I'd just as soon not know.
Why? Because I don't believe it would be worth my time to change my habits just because "the end is near". I plan to live every day of my life the way I ought to and not have any regrets, because whether the Lord comes or not, I could just as soon die tomorrow from something else, or things could be brought against me that would require me to have had a good life in order to get out of them...
In other words, I would like my ethos to be so good that I CAN use that as my only evidence.

Ramble Ramble.

Oh Snap!

So today I have had to think really hard about a few things--practical things that they won't ever teach you in school--and I have been persuaded on a few different subjects and I think at 11pm I am starting to come to a level of truth.

My girlfriend is the real deal. She means everything to me. She and I have been talking the big "M" word and at this point in time we are essentially engaged. Here is where my rhetoric comes in.
The thing we are missing is the "formal" asking. --Of course you want it to be special, you want it to be memorable, you want the ring to be nice, the moment to be nice, and everything to be practically perfect. But I think the thing I like most about my relationship with her is that we are both very real. I open up to her really easily, and she me. We're honest with one another, we're willing to make the steps to make things work and we know it's going to be really hard.
Today I described my relationship with her to a couple people. I used the words: open, honest, trusting, and real. --It must be right because when I went over my life goals last night I have written down that I want to be open and honest with everyone. And that's the relationship she's letting me have with her. --I don't have to be phoney, I don't have to tell her that I can do things that I don't think I can. I don't have to tell her that I expect things of her that everyone else does. I have always wanted a real relationship, my entire life, and that's what I am getting. A real wife, who I can be open and honest with and trust her to be real about it.

That said, I've asked a few close friends to help me think of ideas to ask her. All that people come up with are phoney things these days... "put on the tux, go out on an amazingly romantic dinner, and ask her in front of everyone".
Being in the show business I never liked that phoney stuff and my initial intuition has been something simple, something real. I'm not going to go into details in case she reads this ahead of time, but I'm really going to go with that idea and explain it later.

She has been telling me about how she is fine with a cubic zirconia ring since day one. --I like that. I have always wanted a girl who would say that because it shows she doesn't care about money...of which I have none anyway. She presented me with several scenarios about CZ and insisted that she loved me and ...yet...for a long time I have been saving up money for a nice ring for my future wife. I even wrote a poem or two about it. I set this amazing goal to have all this money saved up so that I wouldn't even have to think about it, and today I didn't think about it all day. yes. I have precisely the right amount of money saved up for a nice ring. The side of me that is ambitious and sets goals and has follow through that side of me acted today without even really thinking.

But after getting home and thinking more and (sorry to throw this out of chronology now) talking to my parents and etc etc. I am now persuaded to follow another side of me about the ring, about the whole thing really. --Having the knowledge I do about marketing, I think with the way our relationship has always been, and what we want it to be, in order to fit our own little "brand" (marketing term), it would be in our best interest to make it very REAL, very TRUSTING, and very OPEN and HONEST.
They say that the reason why you fork over a few large to buy a ring is because you don't want it to be dwarfish compared to the jewelry/gifts you buy her later in life.
Who is "they" though?--What I know about marketing and sociology is kinda mixing at this moment... "They" is the jewelry companies. They sell a "precious" commodity that can only be purchased in a special place in a special way in a special manner that makes it SUPER expensive. It's just a rock! What does that rock mean?! Well according to the italic saying above, it means that this is the best you've got! This is it! You're giving everything you've got, it's SUPPOSED to be a burden to show that you're a man and know how to spend money on nice things. Wow. I could go on forever about this little gem.
If you don't catch what I'm digging up: there are certain people controlling the market for a piece of rock that takes a skilled person to create the actual use of it which has not practical use and is really not as barterable as they make it out to be...go check pawn shops, they're full of them! So based on supply and demand that is kinda counter intuitive... They're selling a product that the world is flooded with already...hmmm. Crazy.

Ok, so here's the scoop of how it all relates to everything to:
I'm in a bind where I want to make this memorable, and I want this to be real and open and honest, but I want to prove that I think she's worth it. I want her to know how much I love her even when I think my own words aren't good enough. I want her to know I'm sincere about it and not phoney. And I want this to not be dwarfed by future gifts I give later on. Yet, I also want to follow through with my goal of using that money for what I intended it for.
She knows I have the money, and if not, she'll know anyway once we're married just how much money we have. heh.
What I am getting at is that isn't it more real to focus on the important things in life? To be open and honest about it with her and let her tell me where we already know where our priorities are: surviving until we can get a real foot on the ground and become financially stable and have a good family.
We talked about this a few days ago really, that I would much rather have a family rich with family than a lot of riches without a family. She told me that I just say that because of the family I grew up in and that she would trade me because she would love to have a lot of money. --The best I know about making a lot of money is investing it in investments and not assets. Assets usually depreciate in value, particularly when similar products flood the market making supply very high, and especially when knock offs threaten to overtake the genuine assets.
So... I think I'm going to take a happy medium with the ring. That's how rhetoric works ya know? you play with the moderate ground and you generally win everything out in the end.
Yes, I have the money. Yes, I can get it all right now. But I would rather have a cushion to make sure we're fed and happy and if not we can fall back on, than a stone that symbolizes something unnecessary, and isn't worth the resale. It's like a dodge neon. the value of it drops substantially after 60 days.

I think I'll show her I listen and that I care about her future by not spending all of that money...after 5 or 10 years we can make it better...much better. When we're on our feet. If we don't brush into that cushion, we'll still have it, plus interest.

I think what happened today was really marketing genius convincing me something I didn't necessary want, and wouldn't solve my real problems. I hate when marketers do that...marketing should market real needs rather than perceived needs, but I suppose for some people it IS a real need--everybody else just gets trapped into it.

Science

Science is only as good as the dollar behind it. What I mean is that there is no point in doing scientific research if it can't be sold reasonable. --sure, some people might be doing research that benefits society or the globe, but money for research has to come from somewhere. for example: even if we discover a cure for cancer, how are we going to distribute the cure without investing money and making money off of it?
Enterprising is the real deal behind science. --I have heard several arguments about how it is unfair that people can make profits off of life-saving or life-important products (things that have become necessities in our modern life). But the reason why we are expected to pay for all of the expenses to bring us the product AND a little extra is because companies need to see growth.
From the very start, we do not have the correct distribution channels or manufacturing means to supply the world with a cancer curing product. When someone invests in this product to distribute it, they can only give so much.
Let's attach figures to this example because it will make it more clear:

Enough money is invested by someone to supply 100 people with a cancer cure. If they pay for it merely at the cost of the product (all inclusive) then at any given time only 100 people can have the cure for cancer. --let's say it's a pill you take after age 50. So only 100 people will be spared from cancer. Ever. But if they charge double the cost, then first 100 people, then 200, then 400, then 800, etc can have that cure.

This article isn't really about science, now is it? It's about profit. Profit has been on my mind lately, and really the above example isn't profit, it's growth. Profit, in my opinion, is really whatever is left AFTER growth.
Profit is what you get when you are someone and you invest your money.
Investing is merely taking a risk with your established means and hoping you get more money back.

Now what if that SOMEONE is a government. Government's a strange in that very few of them work on true principles of capitalism. If they were run like a business they would grow at a balanced rate based on population and they would have lots of money because they control a large area of investment. --no, the U.S. government primarily invests in a round about way: if we give you money and it helps you get more money then when we tax you on your higher income we will also get more money, hopefully more than we gave you in the first place; this thereby is their GROWTH.
But it doesn't work like that, especially when you throw in all sorts of tax deductions and funny IRS stuff. Corporations and large businesses usually find a way to screw the system though, kinda like the super coupon clipper mom who get's paid money back to shop at the grocery store or walks away with $300 worth of groceries for $10.
I am not an accountant, but as I explained above in the cancer pill example, if everyone did that there would still only be 100 people with the pills (or in this case government subsidies and benefits) and everyone else would be out of luck.

And as a side note (that you may not catch the significance of right away): of course businesses are going to take any free offers that the government gives them, that's how they stay competitive, but businesses aren't going to enter into a deal with the government that doesn't help themselves more than it helps the government--that is the rule of buisness: you only make deals if it helps you more than it helps them. [actually, that's not true, when you make trades and transactions that are not fluid (cash/money) then everything in the deal is relative and that's where you can make compromises. But when we're talking: I'll give you $300 to help you grow if you give me $600 after you've grown, then businesses are going to find every way around it so that instead of $600 they give back $10.==profit: $290

Civil War Casualties

Whenever someone brings up the civil war when speaking about U.S. casualties and costs, I usually blow them off. The reason I do this is because the civil war killed U.S. citizens on both sides. It was not so much of a war as the quelling of rebels. Unlike other wars, there was 0% chance of us avoiding this war--other wars, like Vietnam or WWI, we could have simply NOT joined (outcomes would have been different, sure, but we didn't HAVE to fight them). The Civil war though, threatened our authority as a nation-state. It was necessary for us to go into the south fight a costly war, the only one fought on U.S. soil destroying U.S. buildings and farms in the north and in the south, and killing U.S. citizens in the north and in the south.

It isn't that this wasn't a real war with real guns and real fighting. It's that it isn't comparable to a national war. People who try to use the statistics of this war to prove a point about international wars are using a logical fallacy. It's about like comparing apples to oranges.

And that is without mentioning the fact that modern warfare brings less casualties due to advances in medicine, more environmental and economic tragedies due to advances in warfare, and other outcomes of learning how to fight better. Times have changed and scholars and journalists need to compensate for that. You can't really compare wars that are distant from one another by over 100 years.

Indentured Servitude

Try not to take me too seriously when I say this but:

I don't think indentured servitude started with one person wanting to have another person do all of their work. I bet it started with a smart person meeting an idiot, feeling sorry for them, and offering them a job working for room and board. Next thing you know the idiot keeps messing things up and the landlord gets angry with them and pulls out a whip --yes, a whip.

*crack*

One thing leads to another and the master of the house suddenly is the master of a whole gaggle of slaves. whooaahhh!

My point is, there are some idiots out there that just don't seem to be able to figure life out and are suseptable(sp?) to ruining life and being forced to do things because they aren't smart enough to perform any other job.

Computer Science

Computer scientists (programmers) have got to be the MOST overpaid profession in the entire world. It takes a smart individual only several hours to learn how to program a new language and it takes the average idiot a couple hours to learn HTML. So if you start with HTML and progress your way to all sorts of interesting programming languages you could honestly learn how to program just as well as the next guy without getting a degree. In fact, more and more in the future people will be expected to know some sort of programming for their job (whether they know it is programming or not).

But then again, this is coming from me, who has been doing a lot of light programming my entire life and is very computer literate and workin' on bein' speakin' 'n readin' literate :).

It's just like learning a new language. If you get thrown into a foreign world and forced to survive, I am convinced you will be able to pick up just about any language. What about you?

I also know though that a lot of nerdy kids are getting paid by very non-tech-savy wealthy individuals to make them website and apps and other business essentials and they get ripped off for it. Let me explain: in brick laying, someone who tends the haws and stirs the mud gets paid less than someone who knows how to apply the cement and place the bricks correctly. Someone who designs the blueprint gets paid more than the person who lays the bricks.--why? because they have more invested in their jobs--the haws tender (sp?) progresses into the brick mason after gaining experience and watching to see how it all works. The architect went to school and therefore invested more devoted time to his job, plus they log a lot more hours that the haws tender doesn't even know about, and they generally have more creativity and talents that the construction worker doesn't apply. At this point you could compare the computer scientist and the architect and say they sound similar, but here is where the difference comes in: the architect has to write up a new plan every time he sets to work. No two plans are the same unless they are constructing two identical buildings. But the computer programmer on the other hand, can make two different programs and yet use the same code they wrote elsewhere. --I'm not an expert at architecture, but I don't think they can just copy full blueprints and make entirely different buildings.

If anyone can find that one piece of evidence (that architects often copy large sections of buildings relatively simply to place inside other buildings) I am comfortable changing my argument to claim that computer programmers should be paid exactly the same amount that architects are.

What are your thoughts?

Too busy or too inept?

I have been thinking about it lately and decided that I am NOT too busy to do the things I get invited to (going as a family to see my grandfather, helping out people who ask, etc.) When it comes down to "time" my only real excuse is that I'm not skilled enough at managing my time. I have plenty of time, it just happens at the wrong moments, if I can figure out a way to postpone certain things in order to do other things that I see as important I could probably get both of them done.

Just a thought. --I suppose the logic works better in my head.