To Serve and to… Make the City More Money

Note: As a reminder, a tl;dr is at the bottom of the post, to save you the bother of actually having to read the post, if in fact one actually reads these posts anyway.  Also, tl;dr is short for "Your post is too long and boring, and I don't want to have to read it all, but I want to make sure you I get the main points in case you happen to ask me questions about reading your blog in the future".  Sweet Jesus, I have the word 'blog'.  Who named these things 'blogs', anyway?  It sounds like something you throw up.  Now that I think of it, the word seems to be fitting for most blogs now.  Including mine.  Enjoy.

I have a small rant on our Justice system coming, but it was too long to include my insight on a well known social service called the Police Department.

I was recently the proud recipient of two tickets.  I was guilty in both offenses: The first was running a red light, in which one of those fancy intersection cameras took a photo of my license plate and mailed an automated letter from the city telling me to pay them money.  The second was just last night, in which I was pulled over for driving 45 mph in a 35 mph zone.  I thought it was a 45 mph zone like every other non residential street in the city.  Silly me.

I understand that when someone breaks the law, they should be punished.  What I don’t understand, is why this punishment comes with a monetary fine.  First of all – nobody learns their lesson from a traffic violation.  If you get caught speeding, you aren’t going to automatically obey the speed limit the rest of your life.  When I ran that red light, I didn’t know I was doing it – there were no other cars around, and I was looking for the freaking on ramp to the freeway.  What I learned is that I need to look out for cops and cameras more often than pay attention to my surroundings.  I usually always go the speed limit.  If I do speed, it’s no more than 5 miles over the limit.  I constantly see people driving 20 miles or more over the speed limit, driving dangerously close behind other vehicles, cutting everybody off while brushing their teeth, shaving, reading a book and stuffing an egg mcmuffin down their throat.  I never see these people pulled over.  When I got pulled over for speeding last night, I thought to myself, “Self, you should remember that it’s 35 mph on this street and not 45.  Also, a cop might be on this street at 10PM on Monday nights”.  I immediately learned my lesson, that it was a 35 mph zone, and it didn’t take $112 for me to realize that.

Here’s the depressing realization about traffic violations.  It’s no surprise that police departments have quotas for issuing citations.  That they try to meet a certain amount of citations issued each month, or each quarter.  The fact that we are punished for breaking a traffic law by having to pay the city money is quite depressing.  What are they doing with that money?  I doubt it’s going to charities.  The depressing fact is the City needs people to break the law in order to receive full funding for their police department, or any other department for that matter.  We don’t know if the city takes that money and helps to fund the fire department or expenses for senators and representatives.  If everyone were to obey every law for a year, our social services structure might crumble to the ground with the force of a thousand whales.  I have never needed the police or fire departments to actually protect me, but they are pretty good at serving me citations.  They aren’t good enough at taking our taxes and funding our infrastructure, and they haven’t been good at that for, well, probably ever.   They need a society of deviants to make up for their deficits, and that’s just crazy talk.

I consider these citations as an additional tax – not a detriment to breaking the law.  I don’t learn anything from having to pay the city for a small crime against society.  I’ll continue to do it because it’s my way of paying those extra taxes so we can pay police officers overtime to sit at construction sites and watch movies.

tl;dr

Police departments exist as a social service within a city government.  However, they make money from citizens by issuing money.  The fact is they need this extra income to bridge the gap in funding.  If we didn’t break the law, our police force would be disastrously under-funded, and larger more dangerous crimes would occur more often.  So get out there and roll through a stop sign, drive 10 miles over the limit, and pee in public… do your community a service.

*Please don’t actually (get cought) peeing in public, as I hear this often results in being branded a sex offender.

How Octomom is Destroying the Economy

Disclaimer: For your convenience, I place a tl;dr at the bottom of the post.  This stands for "too long; didn't read", meaning you might want the main points, but don't care about my ramblings, which is understandable.  tl;dr is the internet blog version of an executive summary, but I put it at the end like a conclusion.  I'm hip like that.


I dislike a lot of social traits.  Most of these are driven by a group of people united or forced together by this common trait, or associated by some other complementing trait.  I think most of the time people call these stereotypes.  I don’t like to use stereotypes because it is often associated with race or status.  Some of these social traits are harmless.  For instance, people who wear pants/shorts/short-pants low enough to where the belt is just above or in some cases below the knees.  It’s harmless, and actually kind of funny, but it’s still a blemish.  It serves no positive function and really just looks silly.  Unfortunately this usually goes to a specific group of people in a society, and it really doesn’t help their stereotype – because like I said before, it serves no positive function.  I think if for some reason wearing your pants that low improved flexibility and overall human health somehow I would say “hey, they are concerned with their health, and won’t need to go to the doctor as much by doing that, therefore helping to reduce our collective medical costs, and I think that’s neat”.  This is not the case; well, it has not been proven, at least.  The only positive function I have witnessed to wearing pants really, really low, is I saw this security footage of a guy stealing a case of beer from a convenience store.  In his “attempt” to run away, he fell flat on his face and spilled all of the beer on the ground, which he abandoned and jumped in the getaway car.  His fall was entirely contributed to the fact that his pants waist was so far down his legs, that as he picked up speed, his limited stride due to the motion-restrictive nature of the low pants became too difficult to coordinate the foot-brain motor connection.  Why is this a positive function?  It made me laugh.

I have a feeling that most of my posts will be about these social stigmas, but more importantly the social stigmas that have an impact on society as a whole.  In the case of the low wearing pants thief, there really is no impact in the grand scheme of things.  An old lady in Denver isn’t going to be affected by a fashion challenged booze crook in Tampa.  I read a news article titled “Growth anemic, debt fight poses recession risk” today.  It wasn’t the headline that interested me more so as it was the “Going out of Business” banner on the thumbnail.  As some of you may know, we are in a recession, and many people are out of work, and many businesses are not profiting.  We have had recessions before, but for some reason I find this one more troubling.  In other recessions, we were still in a beginning phase of industrial revolution, and technology advancement was moving at a slower pace than it is now, with most of that technology being kept from the general public.  Technology innovation and growth seems to be a big indicator as to how healthy an economy can be.  In the 90’s we had a very profitable period due to the dot-com industry.  That era has died down now, and we are searching for the next big advancement that will bring a new service or product that the world wants to buy, thus creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs.  What troubles me is that I do not see a new technology on the horizon capable of creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs.  I see new technology that further allows us to do more, with less.  Technology that only increases productivity for things that already exist.  Technology that removes jobs rather than creates them.

I believe that the recession is not a product of a weak economy, but of social adaptation – a climate shift for society and human function.  We no longer need a computer for email, a phone for voice communication, a video recorder for home movies, a camera for vacation pictures, a planner for our schedules or a beeper for texts.  All of these individual technologies that provided unconnected jobs are now in one piece of hardware that incorporates multiple different software.  We have become more efficient as humans in our world of technological advancement and no longer need a multitude of singular technology to manage our lifestyles.  Needing fewer services and products to feed our current and future lifestyle will not create jobs like it used to.  The connection I am trying to make here, is that we have too few jobs to offer for a recovery, and we also have too many people that need jobs for a stable economy.  There’s a short term and long term coefficient to this problem.  The short term is that all of the 60-some workers can’t retire because they can’t afford to, so the younger generation can’t get the jobs they are supposed to have filled in by means of career advancement, thus opening up entry level jobs for new graduates (who are probably working more of the trade/skill jobs that non collegiate folks need).  This may be rectified in the next decade, as the retirement age workers actually retire.  If we don’t fix the long term coefficient to this problem, it will occur again in the future, with much greater impact.

This long term coefficient I am talking about is probably pretty controversial, and I have a very logical point of view towards it, but I feel there is a moral point of view that inhibits the rectification of the problem.  The very name of this coefficient sounds cold and heartless, but it doesn’t have to be if we view it correctly.  This coefficient of stabilizing social adaptation with economic growth is population control.

It’s not rocket surgery – as more people are put on this earth, more jobs will need to become available in order to allow these people to function in society.  It was actually surprising to me to discover that the birth rate is much lower today than it was ten years ago.  The death rate has also declined, but not as rapidly, resulting in an overall reduction in population growth in the last decade.  While the population growth seems to be decreasing, it is still existent.  If we already have too many people and too few jobs, putting even more people on this earth while continually shrinking the availability of jobs will only further dissolve the quality of life for most everyone else on this planet.

In the mean time, people are still having babies.  There’s nothing wrong with this, and it’s important to mitigate both population decrease as it is to minimize population increase.  It’s also our right and purpose as humans to reproduce.  However, I find it selfish of families to reproduce in the masses.  Some families keep reproducing without regard to the consequences.  Maybe it’s their personal beliefs, or their religious rights, but some think it is their purpose to reproduce as much as possible.  These people lack the mindfulness that as their children grow older, they will have to compete with one another in a shrinking job market.  They neglect to consider about the impact having more children has on all of the existing children; All the while bringing more children into the world while there are thousands of kids without families.  Altruism exists in all creatures, and we should be no different.

If we want to be prosperous in our society, and more importantly provide a prosperous society for the children we bring into the world, we need to start taking steps in the right direction.  Overpopulation deteriorates our planet quicker than it can replenish itself, and our greed is a direct result of this.

tl;dr

The amount of available jobs are decreasing, and the decline in population growth isn’t enough to reverse the impact job decline has on the economy.  Our society only increases in productivity, which is proof of the job availability decrease.  The economy only recovers when there are actually jobs available for people that are already out of work.  We can’t just create redundant or meaningless jobs just so people have a paycheck.

It’s not that we need more jobs – it’s that we need fewer people.  This sounds cruel and sadistic, but I’m not talking about thinning out the population in a morbid way.  We as human beings should remember that we don’t have natural predators to help manage our ecosystem, and it is up to us to control our population.