Hunting The Muse

New Location

I've moved my blog to http://www.museworld.com/blog/. My feed files are located there as well. Please update your links. Thanks!

Form, Essence

A good way to sum up one of the subthreads of the previous post is that I was working so hard on avoiding "form without essence" that I was basically falling into an "essence without form" trap. The real goal should be to make form reflect essence always.

GTD (Getting Things Done)

So, for a while now I've felt frustrated about feeling overwhelmed with ideas. One thing about me and ideas - I have a lot of 'em. The writing I do on this weblog - mostly politics, lately - probably represents about a fourth of my psychic load, which is why I sometimes go a few days without writing. My other things are basically computer programming, music composing, and financial analysis. That's on top of all the personal maintenance stuff we all have.

The combinations get pretty heavy sometimes. I'm always coming up with ideas for political website tools. I've wanted to write some music for political ads that can be freely used. I just rarely have the time to follow up on my ideas. (Luckily, I haven't developed an interest in writing music that is algorithmically composed from the movements of the stock market.)

So, ideas. Over the past year in particular I've been judging against myself pretty heavily for what I've seen as, plain and simply, a lack of bandwidth. Some people just seem to get a lot more done in the same amount of time as I do.

I decided that I just needed to reject out-of-hand the possibility that some people are just naturally able to get more done, and that I'd be forever doomed to have a lot of ideas, with no chance of making serious progress on them.

So the objective became, how do I get more done in the same amount of time?

It brings up some painful thinking. For one thing, I hate discipline and I hate guilt. I've got my own values and ideals, and I'm going to stick by them. I do not want to assert myself under deadlines and schedules all the time, because I thought that if I missed the deadlines then I would just feel crappier and crappier about myself.

Of course, the way I then chose to respond to those values was to only have a very vague relationship to my goals. And that only led to the pressure building up in a different form - psychically; a general feeling of malaise, of life feeling stuck and life's pressures building up against me.

So that wasn't working. Now, discipline. What do I mean about hating discipline?

Well, long-time readers probably have a sense of the thread I'm describing here. I hate anything that involves replacing an emotion with a construct, and then doing away with the emotion.

A law that continues to exist even when the reason for that law no longer exists. A political policy that is in action only to "see it through" even when it serves no public good anymore. And, on a personal level, any ambition that we have when we've forgotten the reason for the ambition.

Basically, I want to avoid the practice of telling myself I want something, when I might underneath not want it anymore. So, I want to avoid an over-reliance of self-coaching, as I judge that it can too easily turn into a sort of consciousless, rote ambition. Better to always be in touch with what your true desires and needs are in the moment.

So you can see where I've been stuck. By not wanting to coach myself in a direction where I would get out of touch with my long-term goals, I ended up focusing too much on short-term "in the moment" types of goals.

And as happens way too often with all of us, I had come up with the answer to the wrong question. I had the right answer to, "How can I live so that I don't coach myself into a rote, consciousless ambition?". But I didn't have the right answer to, "How can I live so that I am continually moving towards my long-term goals while also staying in the moment enough that I can always know if my long-term goals are still right for me?"

Now, don't get me wrong. Feeling my way through by responding to short-term goals has actually worked pretty well for me. Particularly with my career. After I lost my last salaried job just before 9/11, I have basically been improvising since then, and it's turned into a (so far) successful freelance business that I've recently incorporated. I certainly didn't have a three-year goal to incorporate, and I frankly think that if I had had that goal, it wouldn't have worked out as well.

Um, I didn't just write that paragraph to knock it down. It's actually something that gives me pause.

The part I'm trying to reconcile with it, though, is that I don't see a long term horizon with this business. I mean, I'll keep at it, but I don't have a clear set of ambitions on how to grow it in the future. I don't exactly want to hire employees, and my time only scales so much. The only way I can truly scale it is with my hourly rate, but that can really only go so high without going through a complete overhaul.

And then there are just the general background stresses of aging, feeling more responsibility to your future, etc.

So, back to the objective. How do I get more done in the same amount of time, and how do I more efficiently work towards my long-term goals, and how do I stay checked into my internal sense of what it is I really care about and want to do, and how do I dual-use my actions so that they work towards my goals, but still are worthwhile if I decide against those goals later?

I think you start with the master goals. Keep them vague. Like, "Have a musical career." Always write a supporting document detailing exactly WHY you have that vague goal. Check in with that WHY document regularly to make sure your reasons are still valid. If you disagree with any of them, reassess that master goal.

Come up with actions or subprojects that help to enable that master goal. Make sure that you always have something scheduled for yourself that is in alignment with that master goal.

Practice time-blocking. We get overloaded with tasks. But always schedule yourself time for those master goals. I might schedule myself an hour a day for classical score study. Or it might be two hours to just sit down and play with your kids.

Or, you might need to just schedule yourself time for play. Important psychological trick - view this as NEGATIVE SPACE, so it doesn't become an obligation that you have scheduled for yourself. Instead it is just a "free" block of time that is unavailable to anything else.

You start with that. Remember the story of the rocks in the bottle. A professor brings in a bottle, puts a bunch of rocks in it, and asks the class, "Is the bottle full?" They answer, "Yes!" Then he puts a bunch of pebbles in, which skitter down between the gaps in the rocks. "Now is it full?" The class, catching on, "No!" He fills even more gaps with sand. And, still not full, because he's able to pour a large amount of water in it before it truly overflows.

You have to start with the rocks. Do your master goals first. This includes vacations and social plans! Schedule them in. Within reason, of course, you can't schedule yourself a ten-year vacation to Hawaii. Then fill in the rest. Appointments and tasks would be the pebbles and the sand.

So what's really left is the appointments and the tasks. That's a lot of stuff. I've felt overwhelmed by it. I've started reading "Getting Things Done by David Allen, and it's helping a lot.

I won't describe the process here as there are plenty of other sites that can describe it. But here's my general process so far. There are a lot of kinks, but I'm slowly working them out.

If I have a "nag" anywhere at any time, then if I have my cellphone, (a Treo 650 with mVoice installed), I press and hold the phone button, which gets through the keyguard and automatically records to my SD card. I record my reminder, press the phone button again to stop recording, and then my brain is nag-free again.

Every night I go through my reminders and process them. If it's a task, I add it to my iCal task list - either work, music, or personal. If it's multi-step I put it in my project list, which is a page in my VoodooPad wiki.

I review the wiki weekly - there's a page for each project. I determine action items, and add the ones I'm enabled to do to my iCal task list.

I sync my Treo to iCal, and they show up in Agendus Pro. I haven't worked out all my categories yet, but I schedule my tasks by day. If I don't get a task done in a day, I just bump it forward. I don't use priorities. I do enjoy the "Urgency/Importance" grid, and I use that... generally looking at "Importance" as being whether or not it is aligned with a long-term goal, and "Urgency" as whether I'm feeling time pressure from it.

Physically, I basically threw every damn thing in my office into an inbox. My inbox is basically a bunch of trays. I bought a new lateral filing cabinet. It has hanging folders, but I put manila folders into them. I bought a $30 label maker. My inbox is overwhelming right now, so I am adding an extra step, where I give it a once over and grab a chunk of my inbox and throw it into my tickler; my 43 folders. So I know I will look at and properly file the urgent stuff in the next few days.

Flaws?

Well, my task list is getting pretty large, and it is still easy to feel grumpy if I don't get my tasklist completed for the day. I would actually like to get away from scheduled tasks, I think, and only categorize them by project and category. I need to figure out better categories to do this well, though.

The other thing is that as I'm doing this, I am identifying more and more potential "Next Action Items". The list is getting pretty long. It is rather overwhelming to know that at any moment, there are thirty things I could do if I just sat down and took the fifteen minutes to do them. It is easy to feel paralysis from that. I haven't figured that one out yet.

Results?

Well, I do feel more organized so far. I look at my history over the past month, and I've completed an average of six or seven tasks a day - just completely random, ambiguous tasks that had no deadlines, but were taking up psychic space from me just knowing that I needed to get them done sometime soon. And, my brain generally feels emptier of obligations, because they are all externalized.

However, that emptiness hasn't yet transformed itself into more presence for my friends or for "living in the now". Instead it's been a bit of an unsettled feeling. I think I am just getting used to it. My brain still is in this mode I call "tracking mode", continually scanning around for what it is supposed to be obsessing about, just because it's so damn used to obsessing over the stuff that isn't there anymore. I'm hoping that will shift soon.

I'm also finding that it is a bit easier to find things. I had no idea how much energy that was taking from me. If you need to find something, you have to spend five minutes to find it, and sometimes that five minutes is too much, so you put off finding it and doing the task that requires it. If it takes fifteen seconds, then you do the task, and much faster than you would have otherwise. I know it sounds simple, but those are the things we can also overlook.

I tend to either be in front of the computer, or out and about with my cellphone, so my "collection" approach is working well. If I'm going to carry something, then it's easier to carry my Treo than a Moleskine. Really all I want on the computer is a Quicksilver Plugin to append to a Voodoopad Page without having to open Voodoopad.

My main challenge now is to expand the GTD habits to the rest of my house. I just have clutter that don't have right places. I probably need to buy a couple of armoirs.

So, that's about the state of my "life organizing" habits. Feel free to weigh in how you do things, or if you have suggestions on how to enhance this approach.

Cursed, Werewolf, whatever

This is not a process that works. You can't have somebody half finish a script, then start filming, then tell them you want something else and have them rewrite it, then when it's finished try to cut it into something else you thought of later. How many times can you make that mistake and not figure out what's what? I'm telling you guys, you just can't make a good movie the way you are trying to make movies. You can't even make a good sandwich that way. You'd end up with peanut butter and dijon mustard, with lightning bolt shaped bread that has jalapeno cheese sauce in the crust, and a little screen made out of white chocolate that you can use to look up football scores and download the new song by Ludacris. These people cannot be trusted to make decisions about art or entertainment. They should not be allowed out of their houses.

Ideals and Actions

Kind of riffing from my earlier entry on hypocrisy, here's an attempt to boil down an underlying rift between left and right. It's all about actions and ideals.

The right believes that a strong and powerful set of ideals must be protected at all costs, even if it occasionally means that their actions don't align with their ideals.

The left believes that they must reconcile their actions and ideals at all costs, even if it occasionally means that they have to relax their ideals to do so.

Obviously, neither is an absolute truth, but they're two archetypes that are interesting to think about.

Dean/Perle Debate Recap

Well, that was definitely an experience.

Did you hear about the flying shoe?

Maybe I should back up. Tonight there was a debate between Howard Dean and Richard Perle in Portland, OR. You all know who Dean is. Perle is one of the architects of PNAC, the group that planned the invasion of Iraq long before 9/11. He's a neocon's neocon, one who will unapologetically defend their aims without bothering to disguise it in froofy talk like Bush does.

The debate started with each person giving a fifteen-minute opening statement. Perle's was highly disciplined but relatively simplistic. 9/11 changed everything, we didn't take terrorists seriously beforehand, they saw us as weak, they attacked us, and it was up to us to preemptively attack the states that harbored them to protect ourselves.

Somewhere in there he made reference to the military loss of life, and how he's recently become aware that Oregon has suffered disproportionately in that regard. He then proceeded to express how he felt for us in return.

I imagine that Perle is a pretty smart guy. Maybe he isn't, but in this case I have to believe that he knew that the audience would see that comment as crass. I think Perle's got a bit of a nasty streak in him.

You'd expect it would make someone want to go ballistic.

Enter Bruce. :-) A 52-year old man comes running down the right aisle, screaming "MOTHERFUCKING LIAR! LIAR!". He ran up to the stage, and... and threw his shoe at him. He missed. The funny part was that the shoe bounced off the back of the stage, and went right back to him. He stopped, momentarily confused, and then picked up the shoe and threw it at him again.

He got tackled on the ground in the audience. Perle continued to try to talk. ("He's passionate, but luckily he's inaccurate.") "Bruce" continued to scream, "LET ME UP, MOTHERFUCKERS!" and then as they finally carried him out of the hall, he was screaming, "WHORE! WHORE! HE'S A WHORE!" (Perle: "It's all right, there's a certain repetition to his theme.")

Honestly, it was pretty entertaining. I'm normally made very uncomfortable by things like that, but from where I was sitting, I think people generally enjoyed the whole display.

That said, people clapped in support of Perle after that, and when the moderator stuck up for him, so it might not have been the best tactics. On the other hand, the applause felt a bit perfunctory, as perfunctory as applause can feel.

Now, as for the actual debate.

I had never seen Dean in person before.  Actually, I don't believe I had ever seen someone in person before who I had seen so often on television.  My main odd impression was that he looked a lot more like what I thought he would look like than I thought he would.  :-)  I guess that television thing is pretty accurate.

I have to say, Perle is pretty politically stupid.  He's also among the more honest neocons.  What I mean by that is, he will often actually say one of the neocon's true goals, while they usually try to hide their goals.  I imagine the GOP winces at him occasionally.

To me there were two real jaw-droppers.  One was about the failure to find WMD.  Perle said that using that as a reason to oppose invading Iraq is a bit like realizing at the end of the year, your house didn't burn down, so therefore you shouldn't have bought your fire insurance policy a year earlier.  

I actually booed involuntarily on that one (as did the entire rest of the audience).  I couldn't help it.  It was just so amazingly outrageous.  Plus, I think that Perle was being sincere there, I don't think it was some artful crafted talking point.  He actually sees them as analogous.  Never mind all the lost life.  Never mind the thing about the fire insurance policy actually making your house more flammable.

The other moment was that Dean asked Perle to just speak freely about how he would solve the North Korea problem.  Perle basically said that we should blackmail China by telling them that if they didn't solve North Korea for us peacefully, that we would be forced to solve it by force.  There was no booing there.  Just a whole lot of silence and a couple of gasps.

In hindsight, I almost wonder if Dean had done that deliberately by knowing ahead of time that Perle would say something like that.  Giving him rope to hang himself, etc.

Finally, there was a good exchange at the end where Dean beat Perle pretty strongly.  Perle made the point that foreign policy should be more nonpartisan than other areas of policy, and asked Dean what he would do to help depoliticize it.  Dean didn't take the bait and said that Bush was very partisan, and wasn't open to Democratic input about foreign policy.  It was ballsy because Perle had struck a very conciliatory tone in his question.  Perle responded with the caustic comment that he was sure that any Democratic input would have been mentioned to the president by his Secretary of State.  That got a lot of mocking from the audience.  He also opened himself right up to Dean's response: "And he was treated like a Democrat."  

It was another example of Perle being politically stupid; using Powell as an example of bipartisanship when Powell isn't even there anymore.

Overall, there was one pretty important undercurrent to the whole discussion. Perle's policies really are internally consistent if you adopt his world view. The problem isn't that he's making errors within his own defined parameters. The problem is the parameters themselves. The problem is that he declares irrelevant some very damaging effects of the policies he defends. On Dean's end, he pounded home the point over and over again that being strong on defense and looking out for our long-term future are not mutually exclusive. There was one key point in the debate where that point really came through. Perle had been deriding the concept of "soft power" by saying that it was a poor alternative to using necessary force. Dean took him to task for restating the question and said that no Democrat had ever defended abdicating force; that instead, the Democrats believe we need both.

Other reflections - I was sitting near the front.  It seemed like the first fifty rows were all Republicans, and all of the mezzanine and balcony levels were Democrats.  You could actually hear the applause coming from different parts of the hall that way.  Typical...

I think that's also the first time I've been around so many Republicans.  So many suits and ties.  I found myself staring at them, wondering what makes them tick.  Surely they can't all be in it just for power's sake...?

I do have to say that I was very struck by the vocal response of the Portland audience.  Passionate, extremely participatory, and without it being a college crowd - these were like your next door neighbors, parents and professionals, caring deeply and standing up to Perle's bullshit a lot more than most Democratic politicians do.  Portland rocks.  I so love living here.

And one more note. The entire debate was about foreign policy, dominated by Iraq and the middle east. The number of times the word "oil" was uttered? Zero. I am torn whether that was a glaring omission, or if it really is impossible to bring it up in a responsible way. Anyway, it's unsettling.

Potheads and Cokeheads

Its not the Daddy party vs. the Mother party. It's the cokehead party vs. the pothead party. It is no coincidence that I can't stand people on coke and I can't stand Republicans. Potheads? Some of the best people I have met are potheads. One party is all about belligerence, overconfidence, and it hates nuance. The other is about reflection, introspection, and making sure there is enough food.

Dean and Perle

I completely lucked into a free ticket to the debate between Howard Dean and Richard Perle, tonight in Portland.

This should be really interesting. I don't really care so much about the actual content of the debate because I highly doubt they will say anything I haven't heard before, but the debate techniques will make this interesting.

Perle is an odd duck because he's the rare neocon who will actually argue in favor of what the neocons are actually trying to do. Like, in the past he's actually talked about the domino theory of how democracy in Iraq will make all the rest of the middle east countries follow suit. He doesn't seem to try to disguise his actual objectives like the rest of the neocons do.

But he's also a big bully that is very good at saying outrageous things in a rational tone of voice. Kind of like Cheney, except crazier.

I've always thought Dean to be really good at cutting through that kind of bull, but I also find him a bit spotty. As he puts it, he speaks elliptically. So I'm not at all sure he'll wipe the floor with Perle.

I'll blog the results when I get back. I'm not sure I'll be able to keep notes on the event at all, but we'll see.

Gannon: Left Shoots Itself In Foot

I'm not a big fan of what is going on with the Jeff Gannon story. I've been a regular on daily kos and saw the first diary come up that wanted to explore the story, and saw all the following revelations about his personal history.

I know that most people on the left agree that if not for the hypocrisy, focusing on Gannon's backstory would just be a witch hunt. The defense for publicizing it so loudly is the illustration of the GOP's hypocrisy. The story is, the GOP is about immorality of sex, prostitution, and homosexuality, and then here they have this reporter that contradicts all of that.

But that's where the problem is. Crowing about the GOP's hypocrisy doesn't really hurt the GOP. And the left already knows the GOP is fueled by hypocrisy. So this really serves no purpose - it's just a form of political self-pleasure for the left.

Why doesn't it hurt the GOP, really? Well, there are a few reasons. The big reason is the "We're All Sinners" phenomenon. If someone sins, it is their nature. They use their religion to absolve them of their sins. Rinse, repeat.

What this means is that for many folks on the right, especially the religious right, there's a common separation between action and ideal.

We on the left call that separation "hypocrisy". But that concept just doesn't apply to them. Their value system is completely compatible with their actions not following their ideals.

Why the double standard? From the right's perspective, when we sin, since we are not with God, we don't get absolved of the sin. So they decry us. And from their perspective, it isn't inconsistent at all. The reason it is inconsistent from the left's perspective is that so many of us reject out-of-hand the notion of a basically corrupt nature that we can only rise above with the help of God. They, on the other hand, have a relationship with Jesus Christ to help absolve their sins. They have their faith to see them through their trials.

This pattern isn't just restricted to religious thought, either. The same dynamics can be transferred to the "Good Old Boy" network of Republican politics. They fight for their ideals, but if their actions don't line up, then well, that's just life. What's important is the ideal, because they believe that it is their ideals, and not their actions, that fuel their power.

So let's break it down. The GOP shouts out ideals that liberals find repugnant. The GOP then acts in a way inconsistent with those ideals. The left exposes the action, and screams hypocrisy. The right just shrugs about the hypocrisy, because the concept just simply doesn't apply to them. It's just an action, their ideals are still pure. But they find the publicity unseemly, much in the same way we would in reverse. The cries of hypocrisy do nothing to convert people on the right. It's not even cognitive dissonance - their value system is quite comfortable reconciling a split between ideal and action.

And for the swing voter, they are caught (as usual) between two models. On the one hand, they are vaguely uncomfortable with hypocrisy. On the other hand, they don't like the witch hunt. So they're reduced to just feeling cynical about the whole thing.

Focusing on the personal life - even to expose hypocrisy - is not worth the effort, in my opinion. Yes, it revs up the more indignant among us on the left. But it also more deeply entrenches negative stereotypes the right has of us. To me, the tiebreaker is that talking about the personal life is just time and words not spent on talking about Bush's propaganda efforts.

I Google, Therefore I Am

I just had a bizarre moment of online self-awareness. I googled something I was trying to research - the keywords were "quicksilver assign abbreviation", and the sixth entry down was a page on my own damn weblog.

Very. very weird.

(So, I went and read what I wrote and it didn't even answer my question. Sigh.)

War, Troops

To be fair, it's not exactly true that D is "Hardly Anyone". But they are rarely the troop-spitting caricatures that the right make them out to be. The point is that C is much bigger than D. And Bush's quadrant, of course, has a lot more influence.

Most Democrats are in C.

Dean Chair Of DNC

So, we have a victory. Dean's in.

His opponents will be attacking his credibility. Best way to prove his credibility is to give a demonstration of "his" strength, which is our strength. Donate to support the new direction of the Democratic Party.

You can also read Dean's acceptance speech.

Social Security Annuity Flaw

Aside from all the political arguments and speaking strictly as an investor, there is one huge nonpartisan flaw with the privatization proposal that is being proposed. If our guaranteed Social Security benefits would end up not reaching the poverty line on the day we retire, then our private accounts would have enough money taken out of them to make up the difference, and converted into an annuity.

The reason this is a flaw is because we cannot control the performance of our money in the short term. Investments fluctuate a lot on a day to day basis. Two people can have similar investment amounts and similar performance, but if one retires on a one-day spike, and another retires on a one-day crash, then it affects the entire rest of their life, to a significant amount.

Our job as investors, especially as we get older, is to protect ourselves from risk when we get our money out of the market.

So here's the poison pill. What is the way to protect ourselves from having a chunk of our money all taken out on one day that, from the perspective as an investor, is arbitrary?

We do everything we can to make sure that our social security benefits will at least match the poverty line. We do everything we can to keep the forced-timing-annuity from happening.

What does that mean for the percentage amount we privatize? It drops, a lot. I don't have an estimate at this point, but I believe there will be a minimum amount we will have to send to social security in order to protect the poverty line.

I am pretty sure that it means that it would only make sense to divert money to private accounts if you make above a certain sum of money.

Bush: We're Stealing The Money You Lent Us

So, it started today. Josh has the commentary. Here's what Bush said:

Some in our country think that Social Security is a trust fund -- in other words, there's a pile of money being accumulated. That's just simply not true. The money -- payroll taxes going into the Social Security are spent. They're spent on benefits and they're spent on government programs. There is no trust.

If you have a shred of honesty, then one of the two following statements must be true:

• A trust fund exists, to protect the viability of Social Security, up through a date that is currently projected into the 2050s
• What happened in 1983 - raising the payroll tax to increase the trust fund - was a big con, and we are instead defending a huge raised tax on the poorest portion of the country, to help pay for normal government spending.

I'd like to see what the our actual tax rates have ended up being if we regard the extra surplus as purely being a subsidization of our normal progressive tax income.

80% of America pays more in payroll taxes than they do in federal tax.

Remember: just because it is the government is borrowing from itself does not mean it cancels out, because it is two different revenue streams. The one being stolen from is the one that comes the poor part of the nation.

Update: Last I heard, the trust fund was at about $1.6 trillion. Since 1983, that's over $75 billion per year, coming from a regressive tax. That's over $7500 per worker that we've prepaid against our social security benefits. Bush: "Golly, I don't know what to tell you! That money's been spent!" Bush says he doesn't have to pay it back: he's stealing it.*

*Assuming 1983 was a zero year. Assuming 200 million workers on payroll. Those are lazy numbers because I haven't verified either. Really, I just doubled the number of people who tend to vote. Consider this an invitation to fill in that thought process with more accurate numbers.

Spending The Social Security Surplus

Just a quick note about the surplus. Privatization defenders often point out how the trust fund doesn't exist. And they say that it's not just Bush who spends the Social Security surplus ever year; every president does.

Let's put it simply. Yes, all presidents take the money and spend it. But the Democrats intend to pay it back with interest. The Republicans don't intend to pay it back. What is the difference? The difference is between borrowing and stealing.

The point they then fall back on is that it is just the government borrowing from itself, so it just cancels out. That would be true if the income streams were identical. But the surplus comes mostly from the poorer. The government's income comes mostly from the richer.

So the Democrats borrow from the poor, intending to pay them back with interest. The Republicans want to steal from the poor to give to the rich.

FactCheck Oddness

Collective Guilt

I do not like the concept, because it involves an inherent conflation between two very different things.

When an evil happens that is tied to a particular society, then yes, that society is collectively guilty of that evil.

However, to me, it is conceptually related to arguments of racial profiling. If I belong to a class of people where 20% of my class are guilty of something, that does not mean that I, individually, have a 20% likelihood of being guilty of it.

It is the practice of taking the existence of something that applies only to the group, and applying it to every individual member, that I disagree with. That is the conflation. If a group is collectively guilty of something, it does not mean that that guilt is to be equally distributed among every member of that group.

Germans who did nothing about the holocaust were of course "complicit" as a whole. But that does not mean a handpicked German who did nothing was complicit.

There were different levels of guilt on an individual level. There were many people who could have actually done something, and didn't. They were guilty. There were many others who were faced with the calculation of, "If I do something, it will make no difference, and I will die. If I don't do something, it will also make no difference, and I will not die." In that scenario, it is difficult to apply guilt to them for choosing life.

I realize that is a hindsight argument. But I also believe that in foresight, honestly believing that your actions will result in both death and no change, that it is rational to not act. I am not saying that is honorable. But it also does not rise to the level of "evil" or guilt.

In order to create any sort of change, critical mass to affect that change needs to be reached first. If your action alone does not cause that critical mass, then you basically throw that action away.

If your priority is actually to create critical mass, then your actions should be aligned with that objective, and should be fashioned in a sense to create the best chance of that critical mass happening.

I believe there were many people in Germany that had the power to prevent or limit the Holocaust. They did nothing; they are guilty. I also believe that there were many people who also had absolutely no power to change what was happening. They did nothing; they are not guilty. Yes, there was a collective guilt, but the concept is only valid in regards to the group itself. It should not be transferred upon any of the individuals if we know nothing their individuality beyond them being part of the group.

Many Germans did nothing, were unable to do anything, and were horrified about the actions their society was taking. I do not see them as guilty; I see them as victims.

Time Tracking Application

Once again, I have completed my biannual search of OS X time tracking applications. Once again, what I want doesn't exist.

A couple are very close - I wrote a couple of shareware authors telling them what feature I thought was missing.

I don't think what I want is all that complicated. You've got clients. For each client, you have several projects. For each client, you also have several invoices.

And then for each project, you have several time entries. You should be able to give titles or notes to these entries, like "implementation of fuzzy match" or "phone meeting with third-party client" or whatever the hell you want.

The trick is that you should be able to look at all of your uninvoiced time entries, and be able to choose which ones you want to invoice. They would then become associated with an invoice. You could then generate the invoice and track them as paid or unpaid.

Not many applications have that flow. Too many of them assume that we all invoice exactly one invoice per project. None of my clients operate that way!

Other than that, I just want a stopwatch that lets me watch the money grow as I'm working (I bill by the hour). I really don't need anything all that complicated on top of that. Honestly, you really don't even need an application that supports multiple "clients". You could just have one document per client.

So, I'll be continuing with that piece of abandonware I downloaded three years ago. At least I don't have to pay for that one.

Break-Even APY

So, after doing a bunch of fiddling with Social Security and private accounts, I have one number that's pretty reliable to repeat.

If you have a private account, it'll have to grow at over 11% annually if you want to beat inflation and make up for the budget cuts. In other words, you will have to beat the market significantly.

Assumptions are:

• Average CPI of 2.7%
  
• Current projected performance of private accounts: 4.6%
  
• Wage earner of $50,000
  
• 20% of all payroll tax contributions (which includes past contributions) privatized.
  
• Additional performance required of private accounts: around 4%
  

Most professional mutual fund managers and money managers do not beat the market.

Privatization Calculator

This is the first draft of a calculator I wrote to figure out the APY private accounts would need to make up for cut benefits.

Accuracy not guaranteed at this point. :) But I include my methodology so I can incorporate corrections if anyone has some.

Basically, all you have to do is put in the percentage amount of your payroll taxes that you expect will be privatized.

Be careful, because even though they say that you can put up to 33% away, there's a $1,000 cap per year. And, this is the percentage of your all-time payroll contributions, not just from privatization day forward. So you'll have to figure your age into it. Just guesstimate.

Enter a number between 1 and 100.

Yes, this is a complicated thing, but the end result is simple. You will be able to say, "Wait a hold it! So, in order for Bush's plan to give me what I'm going to get now, you're saying my private account would have to grow at (whatever) percent?! That's impossible! This is a raw deal!"

Back Of Napkin Privatization Costs

Using some back-of-the-metaphorical-napkin scribbling and this table, I'm figuring that someone born in 1970 would have to have their privatized account grow at 5.86% annually, in real terms, just to match the current expected benefits in Social Security.

For comparison, consider that the stock market has only grown at 6.3% in real terms over the last 100 years. The stock market is a risky beast, and not too many people beat the market. Even the professionals usually don't.

That's exposing yourself to an awful lot of risk just to match what Social Security promises right now, and what it could very conceivably deliver in full if future economic performance is in line with more moderate projections.

Why expose yourself to that risk if you don't have to? I'd rather take the risk that the economy will underperform over the next 30 years, than pressure myself to make my investments make 10% (non-inflation-adjusted) a year until I retire.

Privatization In Three Graphs

There's a lot of confusion going around about how the privatization scheme works. Here are some graphs to refer to that should help clear it up.

First, remember how the benefits are calculated. Social Security basically looks at our lifetime Social Security contributions, adjusts it for average wage growth, and constructs a monthly benefit for us. That's vastly simplified, but good enough for the purposes of this discussion.

Now for the privatization part of the plan. The plan would allow us to divert up to four percentage points of our payroll taxes to invest in a variety of ways.

The "benefit formula", however, still calculates our benefits assuming the entire 12.4% goes to Social Security.

Finally, the cash that we diverted - plus an interest rate that matches the performance of US Treasury Bonds - is proportionally subtracted from our monthly benefits.

That means that for the privatization to be worth it on an individual level, the performance would have to outperform US Treasury Bond rates.

Points to argue:

• How likely is it that everyone is going to outperform US Bond rates? Have your investments outperformed Bond rates over the past five years? Ten years? Mine sure haven't.
  
• If Social Security is unstable, then why are we looking at implementing such a costly program? Who's going to pay for this?
  

Now for step three. Bush acknowledges that he plans additional benefit cuts to help pay for privatization. This will most likely mean reducing the formula; changing it so that it pays reduced benefits. All payroll tax payments will still be applied to the formula, but it would mean a lower raw benefit amount for everyone - even the people who don't participate in the privatization.

Points to argue:

• Why so large a cut? Wouldn't it be cheaper to just not privatize?
  
• We paid payroll taxes to finance Social Security in future years, and the general government has been spending that money for tax cuts for the rich. Shouldn't the money come from them, rather than be cut from my benefits?
  

The proponents argue that privatization is worth it because the privatized money should outperform the bond rates. But this is dishonest, because the truth is that for in order for this to be worth it, the privatized money would have to perform well enough to make up for both the interest rate of the Treasury Bonds, and the extra benefit cuts.

How much is that? A lot. For proof, examine this table from Atrios's site. It figures in the most likely "extra benefit cut", and the extent at which privatization falls short in making up for it.

Social Security Benefit Cuts

It's also important to note that Bush has acknowledged that benefit cuts would be required.

Important distinction: these are benefit cuts beyond the amount that benefits would be reduced via the payroll tax diversions.

That means that even if you don't participate in privatization, that you would still be facing benefit cuts.

Familiar pattern: Bush uses the privatization plan as justification for the cuts, and the the need for cuts as justification for the privatization plan. Classic dependency loop. When the truth is that if you didn't privatize, you wouldn't need an extreme cut like that.

You ever bought a car for the sole reason to get to the job that you wouldn't need if you didn't have those expensive car payments?

The Privatization Annuity

According to this article, there's another important distinction about the annuity that a lot of people are missing.

Yes, if you privatize some money, then when you retire, a mandatory annuity would play into it.

However, it looks as if the annuity would not have to be your entire sum of money.

They would take the amount of benefits you'd receive, and they'd look at the national poverty benefit, and figure the difference.

So if your social security payment is less than the amount you'd need to be over the poverty level, you'd have to buy the annuity to make up the difference.

The remainder of your privatized money would presumably be yours, to will to beneficiaries or whatever.

Now, there are things to keep in mind about this:

1. There's no guarantee that one's privatized funds would be enough to be able to afford an annuity that would get them to poverty levels. That would mean that poorer people would be forced to annuitize their entire privatized fund, and could still be below poverty level.
2. There's no discussion here of the fees that would comprise setting up the annuity. They'd presumably be lower than fees for a normal private annuity, but it would also presumably be less efficient than how social security currently converts your wage-indexed earnings to a guaranteed payment.
3. Annuitized payments would in general be far, far less per citizen than they are now. This means more risk for the exposed money that is left over.
4. The President is talking about cutting the social security formula so that it grows with inflation rather than with wages. However, the poverty line grows faster than inflation. So that means that over time, the poverty line will get further and further ahead of the benefits supplied by social security. This all means that it becomes more and more likely that the annuity will exhaust someone's private account. In turn, there will be more and more people who cannot reach the poverty line even with the private account fully annuitized.

Breaking News: Social Security Proposal Is Confusing

Well, the Washington Post created something of a brouhaha by screwing up in their original description of Bush's privatization plan.

Their first description of the plan was basically that of a system where we would voluntarily choose to invest a third of a sum of money and let the government then steal the principle in exchange for us keeping the interest. Bizarre. Way to go, Washington Post.

I'm pretty embarrassed by all the liberal bloggers that swallowed that mischaracterization hook, line, and sinker.

The real plan is that we'd be diverting payroll taxes and Social Security would basically be cut by the amount you'd divert. You'd invest the amount you diverted. The only way you'd get a benefit from the diversion is if your investments outperformed what the growth of your social security benefits would have made had you just left it the hell alone.

(Ignore this quoted part, I was confused when I wrote it):

And here's another way in which people are screwing up in describing it.

They're conflating the interest rate on the bonds with what the growth on social security benefit is.

From what I understand, the benefits that we receive are basically what we put in, adjusted for wage growth. This is leaving aside questions of benefit caps.

But everyone's talking about comparing it to the 3.3% projected growth rate of the bonds in the trust fund. That's completely different. Who cares about the growth rate of the trust fund? Doesn't that only affect when the trust fund goes into deficit? How does that even have an impact on the formula for what one individual would receive?

It may be that we're supposed to be comparing it to a different percentage entirely; like that of the annualized wage growth.

That might be much harder for the privatized investments to outperform.

Bush might be sneaking something through here, by saying that the benefit formula would be changed to grow with inflation rather than wage growth.

Then what he can do is compare the projected performance of privatized money, with the projected benefit growth under the inflation adjustment. Which would be pretty shrewd, as far as con jobs go.

The real comparison would be to compare the projected performance of privatized money to the projected benefit growth as the system is now.

Anyway, I am not certain about this. I just know it strikes me as really odd to mix in the trust fund's projected growth with the matter of how one's benefit would grow. That's not how it works, is it?

Update: Ah, I think I get it: The formulas would still be applied unchanged. So, whether you divert 4% or not, your raw check amount would still be considered the same. But then if you diverted any money, they decrease the the benefit by that (proportional) amount, plus the interest the trust fund would have made. So it's that interest rate you have to outperform.

Now, I'm curious how many people have outperformed the Social Security trust fund's interest rate over the last ten years? I certainly haven't.