Age of Ultron: Recap of Criticisms

In this post, I opine that Age of Ultron, unlike the rest of the Marvel Universe movies, is morally bad. Most of the people who commented on my humble review disputed this. After careful consideration – I hope you’re sitting down – it’s possible I’m the wrongest wronger who ever wronged a wrong. The issues hinges, I think, on whether Stark, Banner and Thor were in their right minds when Thor allowed Stark and Banner to play with Loki’s scepter. Although I didn’t pick this up at the time (and I don’t intend to watch this one again) the Scarlet Witch’s mind-fritz of the team during the initial scenes was intended to establish that they were ‘compromised’ (a recurring theme among the Avengers) in their efforts to create Ultron. If so, then Stark, Banner and Thor are not responsible for the death and destruction it caused, but Hydra (again!) takes all the blame.

The problem with this view is that Stark would not have been able to keep his hands off the scepter in any event, and that his dream of Ultron seems not to have been the result of the having his mind messed with. The responsibility then falls back to Thor, who could reasonable be expected to have some serious doubts about letting Stark out of his sight with *anything* that came from Asgard. They can play with the hammer – it seems to have adequate fail-safes against puny humans – but everything we’ve seen so far shows that nothing good comes from humans messing with Asgard-tech, especially Tony.

Within the Marvel Universe, with its rules about how superheroes act and their responsibilities to us mere mortals, does it work for Thor to let Stark play with the scepter? Or does the resulting *predictable* body count of innocents break the spell? It did for me. I can see why, on the ‘their minds were clouded’ premise, another man might disagree, and might enjoy this movie.

Another Egomaniacal Mad Scientist who destroys a planet. It’s the tentacles which make it so that he has to die at the end of the cartoon.

Lots of great comments, but here I’ll just look at two which seem to capture the major objections.

I think Stark and Banner tinkering with Loki’s scepter is reckless, given that they *know* it was the weapon of a bad guy – Loki – who used it to do Bad Things, and that it is based on technology that makes Stark’s weapons look like pop guns.  The gist of my complaint:

Predictably, the scepter doesn’t want to be used by puny humans, but instead, disassembles Jarvis and reinterprets the ‘get powerful and save humanity’ goal as ‘get powerful and save humanity by exterminating it’. Perfectly logical conclusion based on utilitarian ethics – human suffering is reduced to zero once all people are dead. Scepter-tech + Jarvis + Stark & Banner’s input = Ultron.

All hell breaks loose. Jarvis appears dead, and Ultron has infected and taken over the internet and almost all computer systems on earth. It makes an army of puppet Ultrons to serve the cannon-fodder role so essential to this sort of thing.

So far, so good-ish. We’re set up for a rollicking smash ’em up good time. Except –

One of the unwritten rules of mindless fun movies is that, if innocent people are to die, the bad guys do the killing. The good guys do the saving. Right? The Empire blows up Alderaan, the rebels blow up enemy ships and shoot storm troopers, and save planets. If the rebels started blowing up planets full of innocent people, we’d quickly loose sympathy for them.

Ultron does the actual murdering, sure, but is not this a case of (Thor) handing a loaded machine gun to (Stark) a chimpanzee? Is not the man who does so responsible for the damage the chimp causes?

To rephrase the point: even within a comic book universe, morality is the same (1). In fact, that they take place in a traditional moral universe is why comic book movies are so popular – evil is punished, virtue is rewarded, suffering has a point, redemption is always possible.

Thor, knowing Tony as he does, nonetheless lets him have a crack at the scepter. Tony and Bruce, knowing what they do about the power of the scepter, nonetheless not only tinker with it but try to bend its power to their wills. So far, it’s standard comic book fare.

Predictably, things go horribly wrong – not just predictably from our somewhat omniscient audience viewpoint, but predictably *from within the story itself*. And that’s the rub: Hitler’s parents had no reason to believe little Adolf would go bad (and having a baby is not exactly tampering with the Powers of the Universe); the genetic engineers who tinkered with the spiders (in the first Toby McGuire Spiderman) had no reason to suspect that a spider bite could have such effect. BUT: Stark and Banner would have had to have been stupid, crazy or full of hubris NOT to know that using the scepter in any way whatsoever was very, very, as in threat to the planet level, dangerous.

But it still could have worked. In my opinion, Ultron crosses that moral line by the massive body count it racks up. It’s that whole one death a tragedy, 1,000,000 a statistic thing. Ultron’s casual murder of thousands of people makes the expected reflexive act of forgiveness of Stark, Banner and Thor on the part of the audience too much for me. That nobody flinches says as much or more about the audience than about the writers.

We’re used to gratuitous violence in our popcorn movies. What makes the Marvel universe so, well, marvelous is that justice is meted out – the bad guys get nuked, Loki goes off in chains, Hydra is slaughtered in a hundred different ways, and so on. Here? Well, Ultron does get mushed. But it’s not so clear the moral responsibility stops with it.

As pure entertainment, I would probably been cool with this movie had they just toned down the murder. I didn’t like it much in the other movies, either(2), but at least those responsible got theirs in the end. On to the comments:

The best counterpoint was offered by Stephen J.:

Moreover, insofar as Ultron’s emergent personality takes any notes from Tony, it’s from the distorted state of mind in which Tony’s operating following Wanda Maximoff’s mind-warp upon him.

Taking this observation back a step, that’s enough to excuse Tony – he wasn’t in his right mind. Are we willing to extend this excuse to Thor and Bruce as well? If so, I’ll take it all back. My wife’s observation is that, in making Ultron, Tony was giving in to the temptation to despair – that his (understandable) fear of Thanos lead him to take steps that were not really justifiable – just as SHEILD’s attempts to use the Fancy Blue Cube were shown to be ultimately misguided and corrupting. That he was under the influence of the Scarlet Witch at the time is very much mitigating.

We forgive them because, while their actions were reckless, their minds were clouded and their intentions were good. A friend of ours commented that the whole Scarlet Witch mind-warp really made no difference – Tony was going to do it anyway, given everything we know about him. That sounds right to me, and may be why I overlooked the mind-fritz originally.

John C. Wright perhaps puts this in the context of history, tradition and the requirements of this particular art:

This has been the basic message of all science fiction stories from since the days of Mary Shelly.

It is hardly morally bankrupt to pen a tale warning people that good intentions are not enough, and to warn people that those who exchange freedom for security end up with neither, and that pride goeth before a fall.

Beside, that is the origin story of Ultron in the comic books (except it was Ant Man, not Iron Man, who made Ultron).

So, no. With all due respect, you are absolutely, positively, and dead wrong. Science fiction stories about man playing God and having his creations turn on him are as morally straight and upright as the Boy Scouts, and just as old, tried and true.

To this I only say: so long as the perps don’t walk, I’m down with that. The tradition as I see it is that the people playing God get their comeuppance in the end, not march off into the sunset.

1. I’ve got this draft essay about how, even in speculative fiction, the two things that don’t survive much speculation are metaphysics (the rules under which a human mind interacts with reality) and morality (what gives a story meaning, if any). It’s like the story, I think it’s in Aquinas, where a man is sure that he is looking at a round tower in the distance, only to discover it is square once he gets closer – if the tower is nothing outside his perceptions, he can’t be surprised or corrected at all. Stories play with this idea, where as they go along the characters discover what is *really* going on. Push this too far, so that the readers are left not knowing what is going on, and it’s hard if not impossible to write a good story.

Similarly, you can have cold blooded murder, suicide, gratuitous violence all around – but without some appeal to right and wrong, again, it’s next to impossible to pull off the story. If we really, truly cannot believe why the characters do what they do, or if their ‘why’ is sufficiently repulsive but presented as matter-of-fact, who would want to read the story? Blindsight, I’m thinking of you.

They explode, if you want them to! Nothing problematic about that!

2. Saw an otherwise completely unmemorable movie as a kid that evidently has still left me traumatized, some sort of spy/anti-hero movie. In it, the protagonist knock a lady unconscious, and throws her in the trunk of a car. Moments later, the car rolls into the water and sinks while the protagonist escapes. I just remember being shocked – what? You’re just going to let her drown? Perhaps in the context of the movie, it made sense that she had to die – I was a kid, I was not picking up on any more sophisticated plot points. Perhaps I’m hypersensitive to this sort of casual murder – ruins it for me.

Another story: our eldest son Andrew, when he was very little, like 3 or 4, wanted to play the old computer game Lemmings. When he got to the first level where you need to sacrifice some lemmings in order to complete the level, he burst into tears. It just wasn’t OK with him to kill some so that you would win the game. I think he was onto something, that my casual acceptance of the need to kill the little worker lemmings in their green overalls by the dozens says something unattractive about me.

Technology is Self-Correcting; Science, Not So Much

Via a William Briggs tweet and post, we learn that the editor of a learned journal has concluded that half of science is wrong. The editor’s reasons for thinking this are practical and prosaic; the Statistician to the Stars has, as usual, pithy, gimlet-eyed things to say about that.

Just back from a visit to the Yanomami, career grad student U. Will Submit extracts ‘culture’ from some bones and amulets he picked up for a couple bucks on his way to the airport.

Here we want to look at the issues from a little different angle. Among the absurdities one hears from cradle to grave in this modern world is that science is self-correcting. Also, that science marches on, makes progress and does all sorts of other surprisingly volitional things, guided by the TRVTH of Nature.

Now, it should be clear to any reasonably clear-headed person (1) that abstractions like science don’t *do* anything. Rather, science is a description of something people do. The only sense in which people are self-correcting is that we all drop dead eventually – that’s the way a little something I like to call the real world has the last word on our theories. Similarly, technology is self-correcting: get it wrong, and the bridge collapses, the building falls, the airplane crashes, the rocket explodes, the patient dies.

The real world has the last say on our technological theories once they are put into practice. It is possible, however, for more purely scientific theories to escape this fate, insofar as they may not have any directly testable technological output. The truth or falsity of such a theory, if it can be determined at all, must then rest upon some other basis. The key point here: science and technology, properly understood, are not the same thing.

The confusions is understandable. There are two reasons technology and science are confounded. First, the Enlightenment scientists who founded most of the thinking still prevalent in modern science as practiced saw science as a means to technological advance – conquering Nature – and so saw no point in making the distinction. Second, the proponents of Science! – demagogues and useful idiots in lab coats attempting to cow us mere mortals into submission by claiming that ‘science has shown’ that every crackpot pet theory of theirs is TRUE, and that steps must be taken NOW to funnel more money and power to them and theirs or DISASTER will befall us all! – such folks attempt a little slight of hand, where the manifest and wondrous successes of *technology* are counted as validation of Science! in general. That we can put stuff in orbit and wipe out polio is conclusively (and silently) presumed to validate, say, sociology.

The confusion is a goal. The game is political. That’s why, so far, two decades of failed predictions (the Real World casting its vote, as it were) have only caused the global warming crowd to double down. Technologically, they have failed – their theory, measured against the real world, didn’t work. Their building has fallen down, the plane crashed, the patient died. The ideology, however, is immune to facts. The theory is presumed to have been amended on the fly, the past rewritten and prior predictions shoved down the memory hole, so that only a denier would even mention these inconvenient truths.

Similarly, nothing in the real world corresponds to any theory sociologists claim to have discovered. To put that satellite into orbit, I need a theory of ballistics, among other things, to do the math. If the satellite achieves orbit, I can reasonably conclude that my ballistic theory is at least workable; if it crashes, I will want to examine my theory as well as my hardware. If subsequent attempts keep crashing even though my hardware performs to spec, my theories come under even greater scrutiny, and might even need to be abandoned.  But if I think sociology is a branch of Marxism, then I already know what has to happen, and my ‘research’ is merely an attempt to retrofit or ignore data that might be thought by those laboring under false consciousness to contradict it.

All aspects of the ongoing sexual revolution rely on ‘findings’ of sociologists going back at least to Margaret Mead. Science is said to have shown that such things as monogamy, taboos against sex outside marriage, homosexual acts, and, on deck for next inning, pedophilia, polygamy and polyandry are just social constructs with no reasonable basis – Science! has shown! To point out that not only has science not shown any such thing, the nature of the claims place them almost universally outside the competence of science to have anything to say about them at all, makes you not just anti-science, but a hater or denier or some other convenient and ineffable Bad Thing. We are supposed to accept these assertions because iWatch! Internet! fMRI! Or something.

Even hard sciences are not self correcting in any automatic or natural sense that ‘self-correcting’ implies. Nope, we dense humans have to do the work, and often we are either uninterested in or incapable of doing it. Thus, the better theory has to wait around for the proponents of the older theory to die off. Or, commonly, a new theory goes unchallenged because no one has the funding to check it out, or, even worse, knows that attempting replication will hurt their careers – hey, jobs and grants are on the line! Go discover something new, don’t rehash what ‘we’ already ‘know’.

1. Which qualifiers exclude Hegelians and Marxists and their spawn, who see Forces acting in History like a nervous schoolgirl sees ghosts in a graveyard.

In the Queue for This Week…

1. Several people made good comments on my review of Age of Ultron. If I get a minute, I’ll do a bit of a round-up and response.

2. Book reviews of John C. Wright’s Architect of Aeons and Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International (which, by no coincidence, is currently available as a free download on Amazon at the link above – the publisher seems to think that if you read one for free, you may read them all for money. He may be right.)  These are very different books, it would have gone without saying had it not just said it, but are both excellent after the manner of their kind. Mind-bending universe- and eon-spanning epic that pays homage to Jack Vance and Cordwainer Smith (and probably a lot of other guys I’m not smart enough to catch) spread out over thousands of pages in 6 novels? Wright’s got you covered. A fast-paced love story between a beefy ex-accountant with a thing for guns and Marilyn Monster, if Marilyn were dark haired and killed vampires for a living, where hardly a page goes by without being spattered with the ichor of eldritch fiends of one flavor or another as a result of the fairly indiscriminate use of military-grade ordinance and heavy weapons? Correia’s your man.

Hey, what’s not to like?

One the update front, we’re heading into graduation season at the Casa de Moore, with lovely daughter #2 getting the boot this year; end of year parties and shows (a tradition at Diablo Valley School); the confirmation of the our young German student (he asked me to be his sponsor – I’m flattered). We’ll be setting up for the graduation and end of the year party at DVS, as well as throwing a graduation party, and, a week later, a confirmation party, at our house – and then seeing our newly-confirmed off on a jaunt around the country with his mom before he heads off to college, too. Aaaand, we just finished the annual school camping trip and the Concord KidFest, in which the school has had a booth for pushing 20 years.

Busy.

Also, after a hiatus of a couple months, back to writing in my copious spare time. Weee! Got a couple stories almost done – just like you heard months back. No, really! This time, for sure!

Finally, if you have any prayers to fire up, my oldest sister has been back and forth from the hospital to a nursing home for the past several months, and recently had a seizure of some sort that left her delusional for several days, and she’s still not totally lucid. It’s a combination of a lifetime of rheumatoid arthritis, cancer and a series of strokes (and all the drugs they give you with all those things.) She’s 75, alienated from the Church, and probably won’t last a year (but of course nobody’s saying – just my gut feeling). So prayers that she will be comforted and reconciled to Jesus in his Church would be appreciated.

On a similar note, my boss’s youngest daughter, age 24 and married one year, has leukemia. Prayers for her and her family would also be appreciated.

Sorry for the downers – weirdly, things are actually picking up, emotion and energy-wise. Next couple posts will be fun, I promise.

Science! “Religiosity” & “Evolution & Climate Change Denial”

It is to despair. Is there really this unbridgeable gulf between people who understand science and people who do survey-based ‘studies’ and write newspaper articles?

To recap the problems with survey data:

1. You only get answers from people you ask and who are willing to talk to you;

2. You only get whatever it is that those people want to tell you;

3. The *exact* wording, order and context for the questions make a HUGE difference in the answers you’ll get;

4. These preceding 3 issues mean that drawing any Solomon-like conclusions from survey data, such as faith and science (Science!) being at odds, is an act of risible overreach.

Today’s cautionary tale comes from the Washington Post article “The surprising links between faith and evolution and climate denial — charted” in which the author discusses the work of a science educator who analyzed survey data and arranged it in the following pretty chart:

What is wrong with this picture? It purports to show that religions embraced largely by the sorts of people despised by the editors of the Washington Post tend to also contain people who are uninterested in falling in line with the positions of their moral and intellectual superiors, as represented by those same editors.

(I giggle thinking of their disappointment in discovering that Catholics are largely down with evolution. They needed to assuage their shock by ignoring that outcome and pointing out:

Second, look at all those religious groups whose members support climate change action. Catholics fall a bit below the zero line on average, but I have to suspect that the forthcoming papal encyclical on the environment will shake that up.

Yea, that should do it, as we Catholics just fall right in line with whatever the Pope says. Just look at divorce, birth control and abortion! Lockstep, baby!)

Problems? Oh, yes.

1. We hear shouted from the rooftops practically every day that science education in America is in a shambles, and that your average American can’t tell his astronomy from a black hole in the ground. Right? How else to explain how a former stand-up comic and avid swing dancer became the poster child for science education, rather than, say, Feynman. So, any survey that asks science questions of the general population is like asking a Yanomami tribesman about snow: you’re not getting an informed answer.

So, for example, say I was to ask the Man on the Street of myth and legend his opinion on the use of a multiple investment sinking fund yield on after-tax cash flows for book purposes – I’m talking gibberish to him, and he should say as much. BUT – what if he’s been lead to believe that he ought to have an opinion, that his standing as an intelligent being is at stake if he doesn’t? Then he might give an answer – and that answer would be meaningless, unless he’s one of the 0.02% of the population for whom such a question has any meaning.

Thus, this Pew study asks people to give opinions on climate change and evolution. While people may have learned no science in their 12+ years of schooling, that have been trained to believe that they have a right, nay, a *duty* to have an opinion on such matters. So they answer – and their answers are gibberish, except for those very few who work in theoretical biology or climatology.

2. But what such a survey *does* test for is compliance with the opinions of the Right Thinking Left: Do you submit to the positions of your moral and intellectual superiors as relentlessly beaten into your heads every day by school and media?

Turns out that those with religious beliefs have someplace to stand from which to judge the efforts of the self-appointed ‘leaders’ to brow-beat them into submission. They ain’t buyin’. Note that this is not – it clearly cannot be – a statement about science. Americans don’t know jacksh*t about science. It’s about how willing the sheep are to be lead. Because, ultimately, the only  “problem” this sort of analysis reveals is that there are still some Americans who are not willing to fall in line.

This will not do. Therefore, the Washington Post and its like train the big guns on the target.

3. The actual questions and context, and the sampling process, do not matter here, because what we’re doing has nothing whatsoever to do with science. If they did, we’d need to do a much more detailed analysis of them in order to see what, if anything, this analysis actually reveals. All this study aims to do is reveal who the Enemies of Progress are – they are the ones who will not be lead.

For the record, I find the beliefs and practices unique to the religious groups in the lower left quadrant to be silly and often harmful. But they are my brothers in the fight against the attempt to cow us all into submission by calling ‘Science!’ on every attempt by our current batch of demagogues and preening narcissists to seize yet more power.

—

Afterthought: If we were looking at the actual science here, we’d need to carefully define both what we mean by evolution and climate change, and distinguish between pseudo-philosophical positions such as materialism and rabid human-hating environmentalism and the actual science itself. I’d bet my last dollar that no such distinctions were made.

A Little Math Game: Income Inequality

Some of us routinely, habitually, compulsively do a little math when economic proposals are made. It seems most people, however, are uninterested or incapable of such activities, proving, if we needed proof, that our schools are performing exactly as designed.*

Here we address just the math & economics side of ‘income inequality’.The real issue is philosophic and moral, but that deserves a longer exposition and will have to wait until another day. For now, I note that there are some slippery concepts behind ‘income inequality’, going under the terms ‘fair’ and ‘justice’, that refuse to be defined, or, often, refuse to stick to one definition and play the logic out to the end. Of course, people of good will want everybody to be happy; of course it necessary to have some level of stuff to be happy for all but the most ascetic saints. But it’s a much different argument to say that my not having something somebody else does have – more income, for example – is, in and of itself, a cause of unhappiness, or ‘unfair’ or ‘injustice’. If it were, then my being shorter or less good at math or less physically attractive or female or black or old or just about anything could be seen as unfair or unjust – and we can see where that road leads.

No, while it is certainly the case that those who have much *may* be guilty of greed and pride, it is certainly the case that those who are unhappy merely because somebody has more than they do are guilty of envy. If one has enough food, a safe place to sleep, decent clothes, and enough security to enjoy the fellowship of family and friends, one has enough to be as happy as life in this world allows. The greatest unhappiness I’ve personally come across in my life is sometimes accompanied by poverty, which, in the country, mostly means insecurity – financial, physical – not lack of stuff, but is always accompanied by broken relationships. Maybe we need to love each other first, get to know each other, be there for each other, rather than worrying about who drives a Mercedes and who takes the bus?

Enough. Let’s take a brief look at the economics:

Any money that is used to address income inequality comes from someplace. The most popular idea is to take it from ‘the rich’, which, in practical terms, is defined as ‘anybody who has more money than I do’. ** For this exercise, however, we’ll look at corporate profits – a pretty good stand in, since most of the wealth of the truly wealthy comes from owning businesses.

So, for fun – what if we had a billion dollars with which to address ‘income inequality’? If we focused on the U.S., that would come to a little over $3 per person: $1,000,000,000 / 318,000,000 = $3.15. But, clearly, the people at the top don’t need the extra 3 buck. If we aimed to lift up only the bottom half of the country, we could give a whole $6.30 to each man, woman and child in economic bottom half (however that is defined).

But wait – that’s not what we mean! We want to give everybody in the lower half some real help here, not the price of a short latte and cookie. What about all those corporate profits?

in 2013, corporate profits in the US came to $1.68 trillion. If we gave all of those profits to each person in the bottom half of the US in terms of income, we’d give them each $10,584.

Not bad. A family of 4 in the lower half of income would be up $42K – at least until the wage earners got laid off.

Let’s say you have a retirement fund or 401(k) – even some people in the lower half of income have those. Well, the managers of those retirement and 401(k) funds will all pull their money out of the US economy as fast as they possibly can – and you, the fund beneficiary, would fire them if they didn’t – because the value of their US company holdings would promptly crater, and the value of your retirement fund and 401(k) would promptly approach zero insofar as they are made up of stocks and bonds in companies that don’t make money. Nobody wants to own a company with no profits and no prospects of profits in the future.

OK, too extreme. Let’s say instead, that we seize only another 10% of corporate profits (the government currently takes about 22% in taxes; raising the corporate tax rate to about 30% achieves this). Now we’re able to redirect $168 billion to the bottom 50% – $1,058 per man, woman and child. Not bad, but not earth-shakingly good, either – you can burn a grand so easily now days, it’s unlikely to change your life except briefly and marginally. But, hey – wealth inequality has been reduced.

Tax burden expressed symbolically

Two consequences of this move. First, investment dollars (your 401(k), for example) will move away from the more highly taxed, and therefore less profitable, companies toward instruments (fancy word for things you can invest in) that look to have better returns. One thing this means is that it will become more expensive for those companies to raise money for ongoing operations and new projects (that might employ more people). So – and this part seem really hard for people to grasp for some reasons – economic activity, part of which is paying workers, will tend strongly to decrease.

Think of it as hiking up a hill: everything that weighs anything that I have to carry up the hill slows me down and tends to take the fun out of it and discourages me from even trying. If I like hiking, I might do it anyway even if I have to carry a brick with me; if I have to carry a couple cinder blocks, I might reduce the number or length of the trips, or give up entirely. And carrying anything heavy will slow me down regardless of how I feel about it.

So, say we really want a DMV office on the top of that hill, and believe businesses should carry the bricks and cinder blocks up for us, since they are going that way anyway.  And the businesses might agree, even. But, eventually, it gets old – especially if the people making the demands don’t even know what it’s like to carry blocks up a hill.

Analogy strained beyond its carrying capacity.

Second, and here’s another thing where the common understanding is curiously baffling, businesses will look for ways of doing business that generate fewer taxable dollars.  This gets called ‘tax evasion’ even when it is a perfectly reasonable and legal response to a disincentive. Just like you or me, if we’re deciding between two options and one is cheaper to us than the other, businesses will give a hard look at seeing if they can get by doing stuff that costs them less. For example, at $1 a gallon for gas, I might like the Prius but not get it; but a $4 a gallon (and thousands of dollars in tax breaks and incentives) it looks a lot better. If I choose a Prius under those conditions, am I guilty of tax evasion, since I’m paying much less gas tax than if I bought the Land Rover?

Thus, the people I work for invest in creating leasing companies, because the tax laws favor owning equipment over other types of investments. Is it good that a company whose bread and butter is insurance or tech hardware would want to get into finance instead of investing in what they are already good at? I don’t know, but I do know that taxes are a major driver in this decision.**

The net result of all this is that taxable corporate profits will be less than they would have been had the tax rate not been raised, just like taxable corporate profits are reduced when you buy a Prius (you didn’t know that’s how it works? Somebody somewhere is paying for those subsidies – and trying to figure out a way to reduce their bill.). Profits may still be good; they may still even go up – but they will be less, as companies continue their endless battles to control costs. Taxes are a cost

OK, so our hypothetical family of 4 gets an additional $4,200 per year, based on taking 10% of 2013 total corporate profits and redistributing it to the bottom half of people, however determined. Corporations will give even more attention to seeing how they could reduce expenses.

It just so happens that one of the top expense for most corporations is people. So, by reducing profits through taxation, we would reduce, among other things, the ability of corporations to hire and pay people. Now, we can pout about this, or even convince ourselves that it’s WRONG for corporations to, for example, lay people off when faced with reduced profits – we may even try to enact laws to make it hard to lay people off (we already have – Europe has gone much farther, which is why they have much higher and more permanent unemployment that we do).

But the real price, the one almost universally ignored, is the drag on people who might otherwise want to start or expand their businesses – little companies and big. If you make it harder to pay people or to fire them, you discourage hiring by the guys tinkering in the garage, the dudes mowing lawns and cleaning office buildings, the plumber and car repair people, as well as the Walmarts and the GEs.

They don’t behave like this because they’re evil – business people are no more or less evil than anybody else, in my experience – but because they do the math.

* The only mystery: how did any of us sneak through without hating math? No doubt efforts are underway to fix that systemic flaw – any new educational proposals out there that would dull our minds and crush initiative? That’s what I’m talking about.

** One of the ideas I’ve tried to beat to death here on this blog is the notions that the rich are people with high incomes. Nope – if you are relying on income for your daily needs, you’re a piker. If you need an example, look at your typical professional athlete or lottery winner – huge amounts of income, often, but more often than not, they are broke again within a few years. Meanwhile, how many generations of Rockefellers and Carnegies are still living in big houses at the ends of long drives, more than a century after their forebears assembled their original fortunes? Nope, wealth is owning stuff that produces money. It takes a lot of income and steely resolve to reach that point for us working stiffs. It can be done – it just isn’t, for the most part.

*** This is what is meant by market distortion: instead of people doing business based on what other people want to pay for, they do business in such a way as to best avoid or take advantage of government policies. This could be good, or it could be bad – but it is inevitable once pressure (taxes, regulations, whatever) are applied to buying, selling and making stuff.  What I’m primarily against is pretending it doesn’t happen – or that we understand in advance exactly how it will shake out.  Unintended consequences and all that.

 

 

More Work Humor

Regarding that earlier post – further investigation reveals:

Who was the goofball who scheduled ‘Bile to Work’ day for Friday?

That would be me.

When is Bike to Work day?

Thursday.

Review: Age of Ultron

Saw this over the weekend. Nutshell: For the first time in the Marvel universe of blockbuster movies, I was unable to turn my brain off enough to really enjoy this one. At first, I wanted to say that, if you *could* turn your brain off sufficiently, it was a workable action and special effects packed popcorn muncher, but, upon reflection – nobody should turn their brains off that much. I’m not talking about the highly improbable to ludicrously impossible ‘science’. That’s fine and expected. Contrary to the Marvel brand, at least as far as the movies go, Age of Ultron exists in a terrible, loathsome moral universe.

Some spoilers ahead.

The story picks up where previous Marvel epics left off, particularly Winter Soldier: the team is attempting to recover Loki’s scepter from some Hydra bad guys. Once they get it, via the daring-do and gee-wiz we buy the ticket for, we get a nice series of Avenger bonding and character-development moments in the luxurious Avenger Tower, which is apparently the rebuilt and rebranded Stark tower in Manhattan.

So far, so good. 

Cheap Work Humor

On the company calendar, someone had scheduled Friday as ‘Bile to Work Day’.

This needs scheduling?

I changed it to ‘Bike to Work Day’. Team player, me.

An Education Link

Somehow, I failed, it seems, to link to this essay by the esteemed Dr. Boli a couple months back. Fabulous stuff.

We are, however, so totally doomed.

Oops! Seems I did already link to this – still, worth even a second read.

Mother’s Day at Mass

At Mass today, a nice youngish priest, for whom I am grateful, decided to spent his homily walking about asking people at Mass to comment about their mothers. This priest is studying at the Graduate Theological Union (uh-oh 1) and living on his own outside any community (uh-oh 2). We will charitably assume he’s studying under the Dominicans at the GTU (a bunch of good orthodox guys), and that things will go much better for him once he’s got a supportive community around him.

Anyway, he never wandered over to our part of the church, which meant I was spared the temptation of offering this though in honor of the mothers in my life:

“My beloved mother, may she rest in peace, and my wife, the mother of our children, would both be mortified to think the Eucharist was about them and not Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

Ya know?

Update 1: The mothers were in fact called to stand at the end of Mass to get a special blessing. However, right after they stood, the rest of us were also instructed to stand and to place a hand on the shoulder of somebody or other – I wasn’t clear what exactly he wanted us to do, so I just sort of stood there. Then there was a blessing of some sort, not sure it was particularly motherly. Then they remembered there was supposed to be a second collection, and that next week there were going to be goodies for hospitality, and that there were roses for all the mothers, then we sang a hymn and left.

So we got the full ride Mother’s Day experience, I suppose.

Update 2: Irony Immunity – this is also at a church where the kids are all sent out for a special dumbed-down version of the Liturgy of the Word delivered by a catechist. So, the little people that make most of the mothers in the congregations mothers aren’t there for the discussion of mothers.