It's another great day to be one of the super-rich

The last-minute machinations surrounding finally getting to some sort of Build Back Better bill are messy, as most legislative maneuvering is. But mostly I am reminded of a truth about life that many don't want to confront: it is now, and has always been, a struggle pitting the rich (very rich!) and everyone else.

It's basically unAmerican to talk about class. I suppose talking about it leads to the entire American Dream myth to explode, but when the very rich people in Congress keep sparing the unimaginably rich one-tenth of a percent to control wealth that would make emperors blush, with not even some minor adjustments to how much they can hold, is a clear message.

Everyone with power in the federal government is rich and money has become the one common denominator for most politicians. We have a multi-millionaire governor in Colorado, for instance, and he tries mightily to show that he is more a libertarian than a Democrat. 

I see that polls reveal that many people are not very interested in next week's elections and young people are particularly apathetic. After all, they reason, we voted in record numbers in 2020 and what has changed?

Political cowardice can be seen every day in Washington, and young people must notice that it just takes a couple millionaire legislators to grant or withhold money, support, and services. The views of the majority? Don't be so naïve.

The pandemic rages (abetted by Republican cowards and monsters), inflation rages (fueled by the world trying to recover from shutdowns), workers are in short supply, and the previously wealthy just get richer. If I were 25, I might join the young in their apathy. 

No matter which super rich people are in charge, the classes not only remain but become more separated. The rich get away with most of their crimes and are quite confident that their vast wealth will shelter them from climate change, poor policing, spotty education, overcrowded planes, and (of course) worrying about what their childcare costs, dental costs, hearing costs, etc., will be.

I heard an MSNBC commentator say last night that "billionaires always have a good day." 

The basic weakness of American citizens is that deep down, most believe they, too, can become billionaires, and never have a bad day. When that happens, who would want to suffer attacks based on a higher class membership? 

So, let's continue to argue about sexism, racism, and more. Those are worth working on. But in the end there will be a small number of super-wealthy and everyone else. 

In America, just don't discuss class.

When the future is already behind us

There have been lots of "think pieces" lately, worried about the authoritarian tendencies of a sizeable percentage of Americans and the threats to democracy those might lead to. 

I was thinking just this morning that some basic tenets of democracy are already in the rear view mirror. Think of how often it seems that ONE person seems to have the power to change the country's direction or change legislation or put a stop to any sort of progress. Trump. McConnell. Manchin. Sinema. 

Yes, we often refer to the entire executive branch of government by invoking the name of the president, as in Biden's Build Back Better bill. But that is a rhetorical shortcut that we understand involves dozens, hundreds, and maybe thousands of individuals, all working on different aspects of the legislation.

I often think of how key one guy -- Senator John McCain -- was in maintaining the Affordable Care Act. Of course, in THAT case, one party lauded the wisdom of that one vote. Authoritarianism isn't so bad if you get what you want, I guess.

And we should not forget that 48 of 50 Democratic senators have chosen to NOT become one-person power brokers. Do you ever just shake your head at how irrational and self-destructive our system has become? You would think having 96 percent might be enough, wouldn't you?

One result of all the one-person power plays is that representative democracy is pushed to its limit. Has Joe Manchin, for instance, exhibited enough wisdom and intelligence and morality to be able to make the call on ANYTHING that affects over 300 million Americans? More to the point: is there ANYONE who could honestly claim that their one vote is the only one that matters?

A second unintended consequence of authoritarianism is that 60 percent of Republicans say in surveys that they believe the last election was fraudulent and that the current administration is, therefore, illegitimate. Well, maybe that was the intention of Trump and the rest of the cult, but if a huge chunk of Americans has decided, without any evidence beyond repeated misinformation from a few media outlets, that they can't trust elections, what should we expect?

The most powerful lever for authoritarians is always the mass media.

Logic says that most of those Rs won't bother to participate in future elections. After all, why bother joining in a process that is rigged by some invisible group of power brokers? If they DO end up voting, that means that our worst suspicions about our fellow citizens are true, and that they have bought into the anti-democratic language of the ultra-right. A Republican who SAYS elections are all suspect, but who votes anyway, is betting that his side is doing the rigging.

I am not very good at predicting the future, but here are a couple that may hold up: for years to come, Manchin and Sinema will be models of disloyalty and egotism; and Trump and McConnell will never be forgiven for their blatant authoritarian actions. 

And, really, is there that much difference among the four?

Rich people and companies are very different from you and me

The meteoric rise of Facebook, along with other social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, etc., makes my head spin. Most people created their free Facebook account just 10-12 years ago and now there are excellent arguments for Facebook being the number source of information (or misinformation) for most Americans.

Now we learn, based on thousands of pages of documents a former Facebook employee has shared with the media and various governments, that in 2017 the company adjusted its algorithm to give responses that were emoji's five times the weight of a simple "like."

The company knew that they needed engagement to continue to grow and they had the research to know that getting people angry (or any other strong emotion) produced more shares and more viral posts... and more profits for Facebook.

Here's the damning fact: Facebook leaders also recognized that those angry responses also produced the most suspect comments and spread misinformation. 

They made a simple business decision: Profits over people.

I sometimes imagine a world without social media -- hey, I don't really need to since that world was the one I inhabited for most of my life -- but do understand that the horse is out of the barn, so to speak. We aren't going back, and my deleting my own Facebook account will do little beyond registering my tiny protest against the company. I'm sure they would be devastated.

I have posted several times on the importance of deciding how we measure success, and this latest Facebook scandal grows directly from a choice to constantly increase engagement and NOT invest in effective measures to reduce misinformation, lies, and bigotry.

No wonder the company is looking to change its name and get some sort of "do over" from users.

I am reminded, once again, of why I inherently distrust the super-rich and super-large corporations. They are not on my side in any meaningful way.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald told us, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are."

Mark Zuckerberg was not born super-rich, but it's not that shocking to find that he and other nouveau riche quickly learn to think like the aristocracy.

Economic and cultural gaps are not narrowing

Here is the lead from a story on college enrollment declines from today's Washington Post:

A year after the coronavirus pandemic hammered undergraduate enrollment, many colleges and universities are still reporting a decline in people pursuing degrees this semester, especially schools serving large populations of low-income students.

A snapshot of fall head counts released Tuesday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows undergraduate enrollment down 3.2 percent since fall 2020, largely mirroring last fall’s drop of 3.5 percent. The data capture head counts through Sept. 23 at half of the institutions that report to the Clearinghouse, roughly 1,800 schools, and are a closely watched indicator of sector-wide trends.

Continued erosion of enrollment could have significant impacts on college completion rates in the coming years and raises questions about the economic trajectory of a generation of students. Some higher education experts had hoped last year’s dire enrollment data reflected a temporary blip, but the enduring trend has some worried about whether the most vulnerable students will return to the educational pipeline.

I am interested in this report partially because I teach a couple online college writing courses and fewer students eventually means fewer teaching positions. I also have a granddaughter who will be entering college in the fall of 2023, which is not all that far away.

I also found some of the writing choices the reporter made to be worth a comment or two. For instance, that very first dependent clause, which provided context prior to the actual news, might work quite nicely tacked on to the end of the graf. 

Many colleges and universities are still reporting a decline in people pursuing degrees this semester, especially schools serving large populations of low-income students, a year after the coronavirus pandemic hammered undergraduate enrollment.

The independent clause always contains the subject and verb for a sentence, and the dependent clause is properly separated from the rest of the sentence by a comma. When I flipped the order of this sentence, what stood out was how vague that first sentence is. Any story that begins with "many" is in danger of estimating and summarizing over sharing hard facts, and what the word "decline" means is anyone's guess. A one percent decline is certainly not in the same league as a ten percent decline, for instance.

Bottom line: it's not a great opening to the report, needing more specifics.

Readers might want to push on, if only to find out more about schools serving low-income students. If that is a trend, the chasm between the college-educated and everyone else can only widen. And THAT seems like a depressing trend when our economy is struggling to find workers for ever more complex positions.

Falling college enrollment need not be a horrible thing, of course, if young people have options to enroll in less-traditional higher education, in career training schools, in apprenticeship programs, etc.

But as long as the extraordinary gap between what college grads earn and non-college grads earn, we will remain stuck in not only our urban-rural splits but in our education level splits. One reason many in our country and world seem to hate one another is lack of knowledge and lack of shared experiences.

We are a nation in need of some new strategies.

Again, it all depends on how you define 'success'

I have discussed the many ways journalists (not to mention the general public) become confused by math, but the recent observation that the Build Back Better legislation (whatever that may look like) might manage to both "lose" and "win" is appealing.

The original idea was to go for a ten-year plan, though that always struck me as weird and unnecessary. First, ten years is a long time politically, but also technologically, socially, etc. Ten years ago, gay marriage was illegal. Ten years ago, Donald Trump was a late night joke (well, some things never change). Ten years ago, most older Americans were still figuring out how to log in to Facebook.

The ten-year strategy was never good messaging, as most people couldn't discriminate between $3 trillion over ten years and just a big lump sum of $3 trillion. 

The new strategy takes into account the extreme popularity of almost everything in the proposed legislation when each idea is evaluated separately. But, like masks, the tribes have dug in their heels.

But once the government creates a popular program, history shows that Congress has a tough time dropping it. 

I have no idea exactly how much President Biden and his advisers inflated that original $3 trillion, fully expecting to need to compromise and reduce the final total. Same with ten years. 

My prediction is that the Democrats are about to settle for $1.5 trillion or so, with a shorter time horizon, prompting pundits to say they are losers (and let's just assume Trump will use that term). But if enough people feel they come out "winners" from new programs, that winning may translate to more election wins for Dems.

Once again, doing the right thing doesn't make us chumps. 

Even the idea of taxing the wealth of the top thousand Americans to partially pay for the new spending looks like a winner. Democrats can argue that their proposal simply asks Americans to pay all they OWE in tax. Republicans are arguing that it's fine for SOME people to beat the system.

For all of us without endless wealth, most of us paying what we owe on our salaries, asking the rich to pay a bit larger tax bill seems like a no-brainer.

As in many situations: don't overthink it.

Can you see the end of the line?

I am surprised that our local media in Denver is not doing more reporting on the extraordinary lines at security at Denver International Airport. There has been a tiny bit of coverage on the satellite parking lots being closed (primarily due to lack of drivers).

I have flown out of Denver a lot over many years and have never seen the lines that are now routine. The new advice is to add another hour to the previously recommended arrival time of two hours before your flight takes off.

I take very few flights that last as long as the three hours we are now asked to devote to standing in line, struggling with weak wifi, paying exorbitant prices for a snack or coffee, and all the other indignities that modern flying imposes on us.

It is impossible to not see those incredible lines winding around baggage claim and think of cattle patiently waiting their butchering. Oh, and then we get to remove our shoes based on one failed terror attack from long ago.

There are few visible agents or security folks or just airline personnel helping keep things orderly and calm, which may mean that there are no answers for passengers who simply want to know why things have gotten out of hand so quickly. It may mean that the airport can't find enough employees willing to work for a pittance (like shuttle drivers). 

Whatever the cause, these endless security lines indicate the slow crumbling of American infrastructure and the abandonment of former standards of service.

I did not mention the endless renovations ongoing at DIA, though what they have to do with the back up is not clear. 

But here's the kicker: DIA is now the third-busiest airport in THE WORLD right now, despite the humiliations, the endless shuffling from place to place, the filthy restrooms, and so much more.

So why would those in command be too interested in changes, or even sharing explanations for odd behaviors?

When I was in the Air Force, the classic cliché shared as we stood around waiting for the next orders was "Hurry up and wait." 

In modern America, we seem willing to suffer almost anything the big corporations impose upon us.

Well, unless we are asked to wear a mask or get a vaccine.

Freedom!

How we define success has much to do with happiness

Am I the only person who wishes that legislation not be cobbled together as if the writers were performing in a play that everyone is invited to see and hear?

Not only do I not want to see "the sausage being made," as the saying goes, but I am not all that interested in even knowing that someone is making that sausage. I have not engaged all that much with the Build Back Better bill and the endless compromises and cuts and new revenue and Senate machinations involved, but I would bet I have paid more attention to the process that the vast majority of Americans.

And I know nothing.

When legislators are debating spending and income that runs into the trillions, that should summon our attention. But human brains tend to count like this: one, two, three, four, many... We need analogies to even imagine most numbers and sizes. 

Hail tends to make the news at pea-sized to golf ball-sized. A wind turban produces enough electricity to power x number of households. It would take x years for a space craft to reach another planet outside our system. 

We can garner fleeting attention by exaggerating some comparisons -- "big as a house," or "without a brain in his head." 

I am aware at some level that cutting or adding a few billion dollars to a bill will have real consequences for some people or areas or industries, but I mostly think that I honestly have no idea about how directly x dollars invested produces y amount of benefits.

I write all sorts of comments on student writing through some course management software. I would estimate that I invest at least ten minutes reading and commenting on even a short essay or discussion post. As for the payoff? I have no idea if students are a) bothering to read the comments, or b) making sense of what I hurriedly write, or c) care about anything beyond how many points were earned.

Yet I continue to make that investment.

The large budget bills being hammered out may elicit similar responses from government. Sometimes we just need to do what we think is right and hope that the reach of our efforts will be worthwhile.

Government supported a near-miraculous vaccine to help the world deal with Covid, but a significant percentage of the world either can't access the vaccine or actively refuses it.

I asked a recent student group about how they will measure success in their media program this school year. I asked the young journalists if the girls basketball team at their school would count having 50 students out of 2,000 attend one of their games as a "success." After all, during the pandemic many teams played in front of zero fans. But they still played.

Government will not make everyone happy, and social media (media in general) prefers to share counter-arguments over gushing praise. 

I want to believe that, overall, government is at least trying.

We need strategies to evaluate how we are doing

Survey after survey reveals that most Americans don't really distinguish between news and opinion, and most consider advertising to be a form of news. After all, an effective ad can certainly help consumers decide how and where to spend their money.

This "smooshing" effect is true for print but even more so for online content, and that is part of how social media quickly moved to the source of so much misinformation. Most of what we see online is some form of opinion, or at least propaganda. 

The inability to know or care that there is a clear difference between objective news/facts and subjective opinion writing might indicate that most people just don't care enough to do the sorting. It might be an indication of some educational failures. Or it might be that the news platforms themselves haven't done a very good job of being transparent.

I suspect the latter.

Most of the cable news networks pretend to be objective, but viewers get that and still opt for opinions more entertaining than mere facts, if ratings are to be believed.

"Objective journalism" was always an inexact phrase, heavily dependent on the gatekeepers who decided what to print and what to leave out of the daily paper. And perfect balance in reporting will never happen, partly because we are human and partly because some situations don't really involve balance or equally weighted positions.

We can depend upon Texas to provide the most extreme instances of, well, almost anything. But here is an excerpt from a news story about what can happen when everyone sees the political everywhere:

The Carroll school board had reprimanded a fourth-grade teacher after parents complained about a book on anti-racism in her class. And it followed the passage of a new Texas law that requires teachers who discuss “widely debated and currently controversial issues of public policy or social affairs” to examine the issues from diverse viewpoints without giving “deference to any one perspective.”

A superintendent advised teachers to remember the requirements of the new law, according to the audio from a training session. “And make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust,” she said, “that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives,” which prompted a teacher to ask what would be the “opposing” view of the Holocaust.

The superintendent later partially withdrew that bizarre statement about finding reasonable opposing views (perhaps defending the murder of millions?), but beyond another chance to laugh about the silliness of those in charge, we at least can understand the knee-jerk reaction of a school superintendent trying to avoid any controversies.

But the fact that this became a 24-hour story reminds us that when all facts and history and biographies are subject to disagreement, we soon become unhinged and confused.

Maybe one reason most people find sports attractive is that there are actual scores, even though we can enjoy second guessing the coaches and the officials and the players. 

America can't figure out how to keep score right now about how things are going (well, it's tough to go wrong betting against the Broncos, but you get the idea). 

But deciding on winners and losers is too simple to be helpful. 

America needs some win-win results.

 

Choices always have consequences

The head football coach at Washington State and four of his assistants gave up their lucrative jobs by refusing to be vaccinated... and with no clear explanation as to why or how they could claim to be so supportive of their players, school, and community, yet stand apart.

Lots of large airlines and other firms have mandated vaccines (often with options for frequent testing instead), and a very small percentage of workers have given up their jobs.

I know some will call this being fired, but it's really quite logical that just as people can exercise free will in almost unlimited ways, so too they must accept the well-known consequences of their choices. Some people still refuse to wear a seat belt, after all these years, but if stopped by a cop without one on, they must accept the fines.

Some people may refuse to wear a mask, for all sorts of reasons, but that means they have chosen to NOT fly (or work in an airport).

Some students miss due dates and entire assignments, again for all sorts of reasons, but they don't normally earn all the available points, even if they can make up the work.

Life is made up of a never-ending series of choices, and we are never quite certain where the effects of each choice may take us. I have made all sorts of poor decisions but at least a few of them led to happy accidents. Some "good" decisions turned out be not so good for me in the long run. To choose an action or activity or person or group means we have excluded some other actions, activities, persons, or groups.

A couple Democratic senators have chosen to act as "moderates" (or at least portray themselves as such), perhaps hoping for victory in a future election and perhaps standing up for strongly held beliefs. There is a long tradition of just a few people being firm and standing up against the majority... and later being proven to be on the right side of history.

Choices are rarely binary, of course, and humans have a fine ability to discover compromises and gray areas. 

The U.S. has always been able to encompass a wide rage of views, relying partly on wide majorities of citizens to keep us safe, to shield us from disease, to avoid getting too close to the edge. For some Americans, any request from someone they don't know and trust elicits an automatic rejection. Our default tends to be "no."

I saw today that about 40 percent of Russians say they will never be vaccinated with the Sputnik vaccine simply because they do not trust their government. I used to just shake my head when I heard about people in other countries who so mistrusted authority and "the leaders" that their first thought was always "no."

But now I live in one of those countries.

But there is a silver lining: the vast majority of Americans are willing to follow reasonable rules for everyone's good. There were no "non-maskers" at DIA or Ontario/LA as we were traveling this past weekend. There were very few "cheaters," not covering their noses. 

It's like a dance. Enter a public building and put on your mask. Leave the building and remove your mask.

There. Was that so hard?

Looking for cause and effect among our fellow Americans...

Today's puzzle in our on-going attempt to understand fellow humans begins with this: According to a site that tracks police deaths, 460 officers have died of Covid thus far, which is four times as many who died from violence/shootings.

The puzzle grows from another statistic: police officers across the nation are more reluctant than many groups to get vaccinated, despite their constant exposure to potentially infected people. If guns don't kill people -- PEOPLE kill people -- what do we say about the virus? 

Viruses don't kill people -- people kill people? I can't quite grasp a meaning from that question, but you may get the idea. How do we explain fellow humans who seem more afraid of a vaccine shot than a bullet?

One possible explanation is that police officers are, by nature, much more likely to identify as right wing, authoritarian, and white... and Republican. So it is no surprise that they reflect the same vaccine hesitation as those in their tribe.

Another is that the job is dangerous enough that the risk of Covid deaths doesn't rise to the top of the list of things to fear.

Another is that any group that is routinely disliked and criticized tends to circle the wagons and "fight the rules" when possible. 

Many cities and states are fudging their vaccine mandates, saying that the potential for so many law enforcement officers to quit over the mandate is too likely and too dangerous to the system. After all, if a leader/government issues an order and no one obeys... well, the options are not good for the authorities.

Everything is more complicated than any cursory story in the New York Times, and I suspect that police union power struggles add to the problem (much like the Southwest pilots saying they are not anti-vax, but want some assurances that if they get sick FROM the vaccination, they will not be abandoned or penalized). 

Or perhaps I should just shake my head and not worry about the problem. In the end, unvaccinated people will eventually get sick, most will recover (though not all), and the pandemic will continue to ratchet down. Right?

And those union issues about contract details will be ironed out. Right?

NOTE: Due to a family celebration and lack of computer access, this blog will be on hiatus until Tuesday, Oct. 19. This is the first extensive break this calendar year, when I began this experiment (and self-therapy). This is post #177, for those keeping score (so this is a note to myself).

Take this job and shove it

Nearly 3 percent of the American workforce quit a job in August, according to the Department of Labor. That mounts to 4.3 million people.

That seems like a scary number, though the report does not get into how many of those people immediately took a new job. If most simply shifted employers, not to worry. But if many of folks simply left the workforce, too stressed and depressed to continue a crappy job... that is cause for concern.

My comfort is that if we can take a long view, all this labor shuffling has to work itself out. After all, everyone needs some amount of income to live, and employers say they have millions of jobs available but can't find applicants.

So eventually we should be able to look back at the pandemic and all its associated challenges, including employment issues, and realize that it takes a couple years for an economy to kick back into gear after an abrupt shutdown. I'm sure the U.S. is not alone in this situation.

Taking the long view is not something most of us are very good at, of course. I'm certainly not. I'm more concerned with the recent surge of flight cancellations and delays by Southwest Airlines and whether the job actions (sick outs) or whatever caused the mess get worked out by Thursday at 8 a.m.

We are booked to fly to southern California for a family celebration and people are coming from Portland, Seattle, and Denver for the fun. 

I didn't want the 8 a.m. flight, booking one at 11 a.m. originally. But that flight was cancelled and we were assigned the much earlier departure time. As a consumer, I was at the mercy of the airline. I'm sure the airline was acting in its self-interest, as all large corporations do. I am not happy about the change but it's out of my hands. 

I have seen the effects of too-few workers, from slow service at restaurants to shops closing a couple days a week to (maybe) the Southwest employee unions slowing flights due to arguing about -- according to reports -- how pilots will be treated should they feel ill after receiving a vaccination for Covid. 

Here's my (not) radical idea: assure everyone that they will receive extra sick leave should they need it. Also we might assure everyone that we are all interested in ending the pandemic and that pilots -- people we trust our lives somewhat blindly to -- are not anti-science.

Flying a thousand miles only seems like magic.

If our reporting has no clear angle, we lose our readers

Here's a question that kept recurring this past week as I was judging "news writing" for a fall Florida Scholastic Press Association contest. Publications could submit their best news writing thus far this school year, so many media only had a few options, I assume.

Anyway, here is that question: What makes a piece of writing a news story? 

You would think this would not be a source of confusion, but the vast majority of the 60 plus entries did not grow from any sort of event or announcement or other specific occurrence. A new report had not just been issued. A person of prominence did not do something of interest. 

My guess is that over half of the entries involved how the school was reacting to the continuing pandemic, and since these schools are from Florida, that is no surprise. 

But those stories ended up so general and so often focused on "non-news" like, "Well, the new school year has begun, and no one is particularly happy with the continuing pandemic..."

I understand why a reporter would want to chime in on this issue. It obviously dominates school life, but the NEWS about this continuing challenge must include something "new." For instance, the superintendent just announced some new procedures for all positive testing students or staff. Or the principal announced that the entire school must go remote for two weeks due to a large outbreak of Covid cases.

Many times we assign reporters stories but we don't provide them with angles to pursue. It shouldn't surprise assigning editors that send a reporter out to cover "the pandemic" that what comes back isn't what they had in mind.

It comes down to this truth: there are no stories about the pandemic, just like there are no stories about volleyball or the chess club.

There ARE stories about how individual people are dealing with the virus or masking or conflict within their families or vaccine hesitancy. There ARE stories about volleyball players and coaches and spouses of coaches and managers and even fans. There ARE stories about chess players, about how the chess club members react to skepticism from their peers, etc.

Finally, the ancient 5 Ws and H of good reporting -- who? what? where? when? why? and how? -- need to be answered, and in a news story they probably need to be answered quite early in the story. 

The number one question readers ask is "Why am I reading this right now?" 

If we don't provide that answer, they quite smartly move on to something that DOES seem relevant and timely and helpful to their lives.

As I slogged through so many unfocused attempts at news stories I was reminded that high school media has a tough time with breaking news (the reporters are full-time students, after all).

A reasonable piece of advice might be to avoid coverage options that are doomed to fail. 

 

Be sure to choose your options, as opposed to the options running the show

The opening three grafs from a post by Frank Bruni, former columnist for the New York Times, and currently writing a weekly blog. He moved to North Carolina for a university teaching gig, which is the setting for the following:

My grass-challenged front yard is too dense with trees. I knew that the landscape consultant would tell me that, and I wasn’t surprised when she suggested an irrigation system, maybe a bit of soil replacement, possibly some rerouting of the runoff from my gutters.

But when she pointed to a subtle churn of the lawn in various spots and said that I had moles? That threw me. And that’s when I finally accepted that I hadn’t bought a house.

I’d bought a zoo.

The post goes on to detail his dealings with raccoons, woodpeckers, and other small creatures that we don't encounter quite as much in urban areas.

Let me simply note a few choices the writer made here, all of which help get readers into the story. First, we have a clever adjective to make it clear that there is not much grass in the yard. He could have written "bare front yard," but he wanted to emphasize the lack of grass. 

He included three suggestions from the landscape architect, and three examples always produces a pleasing rhythm. The simple transition of "but" moves readers from the expected to the unexpected.

And that final four-word sentence/paragraph makes readers pause, as if a speaker were pausing for dramatic effect.

One piece of writing "common wisdom" is that the more important our claim or statement, the more powerful the short sentence can be. Of course readers want to know much more about what Bruni means by a zoo, and that launches the rest of the post.

Bruni might have dropped us directly into a scene where he is battling those moles, or some other woodland creatures, but here he wanted to begin with the metaphor of his house and property as a zoo.

There are lots of choices writers make and the key is not just mindlessly go with your default, whatever that may be.

I once heard a poet claim in a lecture that it is very difficult to foul up a poem that begins with the word "when." I can see the point, as that very first word starts writers on a journey exploring a specific time, often in the past.

But it is unlikely that starting every piece of writing with "when" will lead to success.

One of my goals in writing classes is to present the toolbox, so to speak. It is up to the user/student/writer to decide which tool will be right for the job.

Watching the sausage being made each night on TV

It's not healthy, perhaps, but there is along tradition in politics of playing games, so to speak, attempting to gain leverage, meet personal and constituent goals and needs, and curry favor for future laws and initiatives.

That is a large part of why creating laws is compared to watching sausage being made. The weakness in that comparison is that many times the "sausage" our legislators come up with isn't as tasty as we hoped. But it's easy to understand that the process of getting to some final bill can be quite messy.

The machinations around raising the nation's debt ceiling is a classic example of a messy process and likely makes the vast majority of Americans shout some form of "A plague on both your houses!" (Well, they would shout that if they remembered key lines from 'Romeo and Juliet.')

The Republicans are playing their game, with their rules. Democrats are playing their own games, with very different rules. Neither party seems entirely comfortable with the games being played out in public, but in today's media environment the messy process is part of the performance.

I was reminded of some similarities between legislating and teaching. Students often have goals that don't match those of educators, for instance, and there is a sort of dance that goes on, with delays and misdirection and compromise occurring every day. If we could lurk in a classroom corner for one period, we likely would not see the bigger picture of what the teacher was trying to do, and we might end up hopelessly confused about how engaged the students were, and about how they were thinking about the day's lesson.

The hope is that, over time, the educational process produces thoughtful, reasoning, organized American citizens and that teachers don't despair and leave the profession.

Veteran legislators probably feel like teachers who can never quite bring order to the room or the debate, but over time they might be able to point out where something they did produced at least small positive changes.

In the case of the debt ceiling, the legislature simply kicked the can down the road about six weeks, and the drama can begin again.

In a classroom, a teacher might delay a test, sensing that students are not ready and wondering if approaching the topic in a different way might "click."

If we are NOT legislators or classroom teachers, it's all an amusing series of interactions and arguments that we can stand apart from and shake our heads at all the silliness.

A social studies teacher I knew used to say to his government classes: "Democracy is a hot, sweaty business."

So is education.

What's up with all the staff shortages?

The reports are piling up. People are quitting jobs in large numbers. Customers are getting impatient. Employers are trying almost anything to add workers. And many people are simply left wondering where all the potential replacement workers are.

Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University credited with coining the term the “Great Resignation,” attributed the departures to four main causes: a backlog of workers who wanted to resign before the pandemic but held on a bit longer; burnout, particularly among frontline workers in health care, food service and retail; “pandemic epiphanies” in which people experienced major shifts in identity and purpose that led them to pursue new careers and start their own businesses; and an aversion to returning to offices after a year or more of working remotely.

Some of this phenomenon can be traced to the normal rhythms of people making expected job changes, for all sorts of valid reasons.

My view is that when we see that about 10,000 people are turning 65 everyday in this country, there is a domino effect as Americans simply phase out of the workforce. They may retire earlier or later, but a rapidly aging population logically will reduce the total number of potential workers.

A quick search reveals that we have gone from 61 percent of American adults working pre-pandemic to about 56 percent in 2020. I think this means that about 44 percent of Americans don't have a job or are not actively looking for employment, and that seems quite high... but that includes children, retirees, the disabled, homemakers, and many other categories of folks not employed.

But if that 5 percent drop is accurate, that's a lot of people... about 10 million or so, and that alone might account for some of our current labor shortage.

I also wonder how someone like me is classified. I am retired but teach part-time. I am drawing on PERA, Colorado's state retirement system, and social security, so that may put me in the "Americans who are not employed" group. Honestly, I don't know and I'm not willing to get too far into the weeds on this issue.

It makes some sense that people will choose "better" jobs when they can, so perhaps some of the "resignations" will sort themselves out.

I do wonder whether the economy works very well when we don't have a significant number of people willing to work for at least some time at crappy jobs. High school part-time jobs, unskilled labor, and entry-level positions may not be very appealing, but they are also not permanent for many workers.

Sorry to return to math, which has been a theme of these posts for a few weeks, but at some point don't we need either lots more children (and there is a lag there between birth and being old enough for a job) or more immigrants willing to take on some understaffed jobs until they can "move up the ladder."

In the meantime, our local Noodles franchise is now closed on Sundays and Mondays. 

They are short on staff.

From Facebook fails to loving your teams

Sometimes a company just has a bad stretch. Consider Facebook over the past few days. Yesterday the entire site (along with Instagram and What's App) was down for hours.

A whistle blower blew the lid off the secretive company's philosophy and goals. Congressional committees are asking a mix of tough and just odd questions of the company's executives, and it is clear that our ancient representatives don't really know how the web works. 

Facebook's stock dropped five percent in a day on Wall Street, which translates to a $6 billion loss for Mark Zuckerberg, at least on paper.

Facebook had to go on Twitter to reassure customers and billions of people desperate to get their news... or something.

The Republic did not fall.

Bonus fun fact: the whistleblower who appeared on "60 Minutes" with her criticisms of Facebook is from Iowa City, where I lived my first half-century. That means very little in terms of the news but does remind me of how small the world can be sometimes.

And THAT reminded me of how prone we can be to tribalism, even nonsensical group associations. Iowa City's Kinnick Stadium will be the site of Saturday's "game of the century" as the Hawks host Penn State in a battle between the #3 and #4 teams in the country. I am an Iowa fan and have been since infancy.

I had season tickets to Iowa football games for many years and never missed a home game, no matter how bad the team was. In fact, Iowa had a losing record for 17 consecutive years over the 1960s and 70s and I STILL cheered for the occasional upset and grumbled about bad calls or lucky/unlucky plays that kept us from greatness.

I was also a Cubs fan, so at some point it became almost a point of pride that I kept rooting for not one but TWO perpetually losing teams. Nothing could convince me to swap my affections to, for instance, Ohio State and the Yankees, despite knowing I would experience more of the joy of victory with those teams.

I was thinking that the anti-vaxxers/anti-maskers are in much the same mindset as I was 40 years ago. They are sticking with their "team" no matter what, and there is no logic or motivation that will shake that loyalty.

Iowa got better in the late 1970s and has remained a top program. National television has allowed me to continue my lifelong love of the Hawkeyes. The Cubs eventually won the World Series, though the bad times have returned to Wrigley. 

But now I live in Denver and it is difficult to NOT root for our thoroughly mediocre Rockies. Some guys just can't resist the allure of the lovable losers, I guess.

Finding more government revenue isn't even close to impossible

I know I should not spend much time scrolling through Facebook despite being far past the time in life when a poor self-image of my physique can inflict much damage. The shape my body in could never be described as anything short of alarming.

But I bumped into a post from Elizabeth Warren last weekend about an "ultra-millionaire" wealth tax and how it could generate nearly all the $3.5 trillion over the next decade that the Build Back Better legislation demands. Senator Warren proposed this wealth tax in 2019.

Here's a quick summary of the plan: "The Ultra-Millionaire Tax taxes the wealth of the richest Americans. It applies only to households with a net worth of $50 million or more -- roughly the wealthiest 75,000 households, or the top 0.1%. Households would pay an annual 2% tax on every dollar of net worth above $50 million and a 6% tax on every dollar of net worth above $1 billion. Because wealth is so concentrated, this small tax on roughly 75,000 households will bring in $3.75 trillion in revenue over a ten-year period."

I did the quickest fact checking and there is disagreement on how to enforce this tax, not to mention that $3.5 trillion seems like the "top end" of potential revenue. Still, the plan has the virtue of tapping the very, very wealthy to help pay for a much better life for millions of Americans.

Even if Warren's plan generated only half of her projection, that ain't nothin'. 

One source of math confusion is that we sometimes mix up individuals with households, though normally we should think of taxpayers as households (hence we don't need all 333 million Americans to file a tax return). 

There must be additional confusion since polls show only about 60 percent of Americans favor such a wealth tax. That seems underwhelming, since that leaves another nearly 40 percent perhaps dreaming that they may someday reach that group of the top 75,000 households. Such a dream is peculiarly American and incredibly unlikely to happen.

It seems clear that 99.9 percent of American households would pay no additional tax at all with this wealth tax.

More generally, what I was thinking is that when we begin with a very large pool of people to contribute to our tax base, even small percentage increases can add up fast. 

For instance, and I know this is just a thought experiment, imagine asking EVERY American to contribute an additional dollar to the federal government. That would bring in $333 million. Make it ten dollars from each and every American (including infants) and you get to $333 billion. That is just about what the Build Back Better plan shoots for in additional expenditures/investments each year. 

Considered that way, how many Americans simply could not contribute that $10 per person? 

I believe in a progressive income tax and I am well aware that a simple "toll" of $10 per person is the opposite of progressive. But for those who think finding large numbers of additional dollars is impossible, my little thought experiment indicates that it's not that crazy.

Who was that masked man?

Yesterday I taught in-person for the first time in at least two years.

It was exciting at first but eventually exhausting and frustrating. I did get a glimmer of what it must be like for classroom teachers, hour after hour and day after day. Teaching wearing a mask, with all the students wearing masks, while basically relying on all the lecture and interaction habits I have developed over decades, proved to be tough on everyone.

It was the state journalism conference for the Colorado Student Media Association, known as J-Day, and I drove up to Fort Collins and the Lory Student Center to represent Quill and Scroll, present a session on not spreading yourself too thin as an editor and report, and catch up with some teacher friends I only see on such occasions. 

Surprisingly, about 900 students from a variety of schools showed up, enthusiastic to gather, hang out with other students who share their interests in media, and celebrate simply being in-person on a college campus -- not to mention enjoy a field trip.

Field trips now seem to necessitate high-level approvals -- one adviser told me his group ended up needing to get a waiver from the board of education to attend -- and require Herculean efforts simply to get a bus and driver for the day. But at least a solid number of programs were able to find a way.

But back to my masked teaching: Yow! I wanted to project a bit for a group of over 100 so I definitely went into "teacher voice" mode, with more volume and more careful enunciation. That requires more oxygen, it quickly become apparent, and my mask kept getting sucked into my mouth. I also ended up with a few stray fibers tickling my lips and tongue. And I kept getting warmer, which was partially exertion and the room temperature, but seemed tied to having more of my face covered.

I try to inject some humor and some "zingers" in my presentation, but found it almost impossible to discern the masked students' reactions. I might have interpreted their eyes as full of either contempt, boredom, or terror. But I just kept going.

I went over my 45 minutes by a few, I guess, at the end rushing some final PowerPoint slides and not really "sticking the landing," as we say in the conference biz. As I walked down the hall after the session desperate for a bottle of water, I was only thinking of all the places the session went wrong. In the "real world," I might have had a chance to revisit what didn't come across or what I was too clumsy to clearly convey, maybe in another section of the class or the next day.

In the world of conferences, you only get one shot.

Speaking of shots, maybe next J-Day the pandemic will have finally been tamed to the point that masks are not needed. 

Just another example of why the entire country/world needs to do the right thing.

On a purely selfish level, I have now had the booster shot of Pfizer, so I am feeling invincible.