The price of fear

What is the price we pay for our irrational fear? If I had a dollar for everytime someone that came over immediately locks my front door, I’d be a rich man. Most of my life I hear “Safety First!” everywhere; how can that be a bad thing? Well, last night it cost me $5 for a tip and about an hour of my time. Let me explain.

One of the things that drive me nuts about modern cars ( and I rent one almost every weekend) is that they lock their doors automatically every chance they get.  I understand that it can be advantageous, a locked door won’t swing open as easily in a big crash and if you walk away and forget to press that button on the remote the car is “smart enough” to know you’re not coming back and might prevent coming back to a ransacked automobile. At the same time, I move fast, faster than the car, resulting in endless trying to open the door and having to unlock it again, and again, and again. Last night it got much worse.

It was going to be a rainy night here in Los Angeles and when we got done with our weekly gig at Pip’s I wanted to load up the car with all my gear as quickly as possible. It wasn’t as cold as I had expected so after doing the first two loads I took off my coat with the key fob in it and put it in the car. Normally any car with remote unlock will have tiny little buttons on the door handle that allow you to activate the mechanism if the fob is close by without having to touch it. I put stuff in the trunk, close it and walk back to get the last two thing. Mind you, at this point the car is unlocked! When I return 2 minutes later with the final load, the door is locked again; “no problem” I think to myself, but guess what: the little button on the passenger door does nothing. Wow, is it really gonna make me do this on the driver’s side? Nope, nothing there either!

At this point, I still believe this can’t be true! You mean, the car knows the fob is close, but inside the car? Why in the world won’t it let me unlock? I ask the valet guys and they explain that this does happen once in a while and that there is no other way than to get someone to break into the car! AAA to the rescue; in literally less than a minute the guy that came opened the car, and not with some kind of master remote which is what I expected. Instead he had a kind of inflatable airbag that he wedged in the door jam, and then inflated until the gap was big enough to get the end of a long flexible stick with a ‘finger’ at the end inside to press the unlock button! That goes to show you how silly we are in thinking we can keep out anyone with the intention to get into your car by locking it, although I guess it might have some deterrent effect on someone looking for only the easiest targets.

One big question remains though: why in the world  would it be a good idea to automatically lock the car with the key INSIDE? This is not a rhetorical question. The only answer I can come up with is fear of the outside world. The only scenario I can imagine is if YOU are inside the vehicle and someone is trying to get to you, perhaps to rob you or do a car jack, and you don’t want him to be able to unlock it by the normal method of touching the little button. What other reason could there be? It’s absolutely throwing out the baby with the bathwater isn’t it?

So there it is: defeated by a damn Chevy Cruze and a Western world of snowflakes!

Cuba

Talk about getting old gracefully! “He’s almost 90 but he looks like a boy!” says the middle aged Belgian presenter. She’s in Cuba at a party for old folks, they are DANCING up a storm; one 84 year old man has all his teeth, healthy as an bear. Free healthcare has its advantages you know. But, but, but “freedom!”, “the free market!” will make it all better. Look, I’m not saying Cuba doesn’t have its problems; met plenty of musicians who came here to escape it. But getting old happy is worth a lot in my book and not being ashamed of being old is a big part. When’s the last time you say literally a hundred people over 80 dancing?

Death by machine

So, it happened. A self-driving car struck and killed a pedestrian. If I had a dollar for every person I ever discussed this tech with that said “one death, lawsuits will shut it down…..”, I’d be able to pay the families legal fees. Except that’s not what’s gonna happen. You see, these machines record every single detail all the time; if that’s not admissible evidence,  I don’t know what is.

Already police have said it seems the woman jumped out of the shadows onto a dark road,  away from a legal crosswalk, and that a human driver likely could not have prevented hitting her. These cars have 360 degree vision, radar, lidar and who knows what else. Their reaction time is a fraction of the fastest human’s; they don’t get tired, or distracted. I’m not saying they’re flawless, of course not, but every machine of a particular brand has all the knowledge of all the ones that came before it! Every human that has to learn how to drive has to start over. Just think about that for a second..

 

Of strength and vulnerability

All this renewed talk about the ‘alt-right’ and fascism has had me thinking about strength and where it is found in this universe. The biggest fallacy of Nazis and the like is the notion that a genetically pure people is a strong people; it just doesn’t mesh with the way the universe works. Just look at the difference between pure-bred dogs and mutts: genetic diseases are more common in the former. Similarly, in the world of finance, the most robust investment portfolio is a diversified one. We don’t have the saying “Don’t Put All Your Eggs In One Basket” for nothing, do we? In my opinion it resonates in just about all situations and I have made redundancy one of my main objectives regarding everything that matters: I’d rather have 2 computers than one, even if that means getting less fancy ones perhaps, I have accounts with multiple banks, bought 2 of just about everything that my life depends on. What it means is that half the stuff I own could get stolen and I would hardly be affected! The peace of mind that comes from that position, especially put against the increasing fear I see in others concerning the possessions, is truly priceless. What’s strange is how few people seem to understand it at all…..

Looking forward, digital security and strength is becoming more and more important. In my opinion, trusting one company with your entire digital life is not smart, especially in such a fast-changing world. We’re seeing more and more hacking of digital systems and it’s probably only a matter of time before a major bank will have its systems so compromised that it will become inoperable, at least temporarily. Think about that for a moment, if your checking account is unusable, what does that mean for your day to day life? Do you really want to be late on your mortgage due to no fault of your own? It might sound dramatic, but really we have no way of predicting what’s gonna happen. What we do know is that as everything gets more and more connected, bigger and bigger damage could be inflicted by smaller and smaller groups of people. Just this last weekend hackers broke into a California transit system and allowed everyone to travel for free, demanding a ransom to undo the hack. In this case the IT department was able to fix the system, but in others, notably a hospital here, huge ransoms have been paid. The bottom line is we don’t even know how vulnerable we are! As we move away from cash, multiple credit cards, and even a couple of checking accounts, in SEPARATE banks are the best hedge.

Another example is cellphones! We’ve all seen how people freak out at even just the thought of losing their iPhone or Galaxy; it’s about the $800 they paid for it, but also at the thought of being unable to communicate. Project Fi is just awesome in that regard, as they will give you a second data-only SIM for free, you just pay for the data you actually use. It’s allowed me to get a secondary phone, a Honor 5X I picked up for $170 BTW, which has my business number in it and a slot for a second SIM! Now I can get my texts, voice-mail and data access from my main account on a second device. I can even make and receive calls from my main number on it through Hangouts. Losing two phones is so much more unlikely than losing just one, isn’t it? Result: peace of mind.

The final example I want to bring up is food. Imagine a world in which every single person ate rice from the same patty; and now imagine there’s some kind of deadly contamination of said patty. You get the idea, everybody would die! Diversification is especially important when it comes to nourishment, on ALL levels. When you think about nutrition, the most effective way to make sure you get all the various nutrients you need is to eat a wildly diverse diet. Conversely, the best way to make sure you get deficient in something is to limit your diet to a few sources. We live in times where we have access to more different foods than ever before; for goodness’ sake, ENJOY IT! Because not only is a varied diet the healthiest, it’s the most exciting and interesting, isn’t it? It pains me when I see so many around hereconsuming nothing but salads and chicken breast, while under the impression that they’re being ‘healthy’. And yes, even McDonald’s can be part of a healthy diet.

Brain Machine Interface

What would we do without the VPRO? From before I was born, this Dutch Public Television broadcasting organization has been bringing us arguably the best TV anywhere. From some of the funniest stuff ever made (Koot & Bie!) to incredibly intelligent, truly independent documentaries, if I had to choose only one thing to watch for the rest of my life it would be the VPRO. Time after time, its series called “Tegenlicht” teaches us so much, without ever getting in the way with opinions and the episode from April 10th of this year was another mind-blower.

Called “Het Gretige Brein”, or “The Eager Brain”, it deals with the learning capacity and desires of our most potent organ. My goodness, it was fascinating. Connecting directly to neurons is now part of what’s called the Brain-Machine Interface, or Brain-Computer Interface. Scientists have already literally connected two monkeys’ brains through the internet, one in Brazil and on in the US! Things taught to one, affect the mind of the other. It’s crazy! There are people talking about ‘liberating’ the mind from the limitations of the physical body, something that’s been speculated on for a while, but now they’re throwing in predictions of the year we will start doing it: 2035. It’s been shown that we can teach our grey matter to control robot arms, as if they were original equipment, merely by imagining the movement of a real limb, and reading the part of the brain that normally controls such thing. We’re making some serious progress here…

You know, it’s pretty scary actually, especially because of the proven gullibility of the typical human. We are setting ourselves up for something, that’s for sure. Imagine if we all upload ourselves to some giant mainframe, preferring to live without our fragile bodies. The funny thing is that we could literally be erased out of existence by wiping one system! Seems far more fragile than our imperfect bodies, doesn’t it? Just like we are blindly going headfirst into the progress that digital technology gives us. We are going to give up our POTS (plain old telephone service) copper wiring, to be replaced by VOIP systems that are worthless without all the computers necessary to operate them, ripping out an infrastructure installed over many decades. After the earthquake here in 1994, guess what still worked and what didn’t…….

Nick en Simon in Cuba

You know, all my serious music friends in Holland have no respect for these guys, or at least so it seems. They do sing sappy songs in Dutch, are white as the driven snow, but I dig ’em. First of all, they have talent and real skills, and they know the difference. Here they are in Cuba, where nobody knows their names; wrote a song, translated into Spanish, ended up in what looks like a barbershop, with a 95 year old singer…….the man sings and the tears start rolling….man, the sound coming from this human being captivates everyone…it’s a class act that lets others be the stars of the show. BTW, you can book this man; he’s working on a tour of Europe in 2014. Of course his appearance is dependent on being alive!

I remember an old episode of Dutch TV where Nick en Simon were in South Africa. The ended up on a balcony with some local musicians who still hold Graceland in high regard. They jammed Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes so beautifully, so in tune with each other, grounded in that foundation of admiration for the song and music in general. People growing up half-way around the globe from each other, in perfect synch because of a simple song. It’s these humble, quiet things that commercial TV lacks, at least the kind paid for with advertising.

Illuminatus

People make their own definitions of words sometimes; it’s not without danger, because it leads to misunderstanding when two parties involved in conversation use the same word, but mean something different. The subtleties of language are endless, but a good thing to do is to go back to the where a term came from to find common ground. There is a lot of talk about the “Illuminati” these days, so where did this name come from? Wikipedia has a fairly good article about it; it says:

“The Illuminati (plural of Latin illuminatus, “enlightened”) is a name given to several groups, both real and fictitious. Historically the name refers to the Bavarian Illuminati, an Enlightenment-era secret society founded on May 1, 1776 to oppose superstition, prejudice, religious influence over public life, abuses of state power, and to support women’s education and gender equality. The Illuminati were outlawed along with other secret societies by the Bavarian government leadership with the encouragement of the Roman Catholic Church, and permanently disbanded in 1785.”

Funny, isn’t it? Today the name is used mostly by conspiracy theorists to describe a secret group of people with power, “the man” if you will, created to effect a new world order! Originally, it was an organization that opposed the powers that were, fighting against abuses of state power and such, and vehemently disliked by for instance the Catholic Church! The enlightened part is most interesting to me, as with advancement in understanding comes a better way to do things, doesn’t it?

So if we define Illuminati broadly as those who are the most connected, with the most power, and access to information, is it really a “secret” society? This is the part I don’t understand about the conspiracy theorists! Don’t they understand that things that are obvious, clear and evident, are by definition NOT a conspiracy? When people get together to work to change things, it’s NOT secret, the agendas of world leaders are NOT hidden; it’s clear what they want, at least to me. Does that mean I’m an Illuminatus?