Author: joel@waterfallhouse.net

A recent article in the Washington Post on the premise that our pets are bored, and it’s ruining their lives and ours was just too tempting to ignore. The premise that we should worry about enriching the world for your cats, dogs, birds and other critters in our homes seems so tone deaf in a world as polarized as ours, and with a gap as wide as it is with our children who are being brainwashed right before our eyes. Are we more concerned about our pets than the people in our lives?

Here are some snippets from that article.  Think about these questions in the broader context of your family unit, friends, and community members:

Have you noticed the dog is acting strange lately? Maybe licking your legs like they’re ice cream cones, or worse, attempting an escape with every walk? Is the cat destroying things more vigorously and enthusiastically than usual? Is the bird screaming? Your pets, pampered and petted though they may be, are bored, and they are letting you know.

“Boredom, stemming from lack of mental stimulation or opportunities to control certain aspects of their environment, leads to frustration or stress in pets,” says Ragen McGowan, a research scientist in pet behavior and welfare with Purina, “which can lead to health issues.”

Those physical health issues can include weight gain, self-harm and a shortened lifespan. In addition, boredom can weaken the bond between a pet and his humans, or change the relationship between other pets in the household. If these things weren’t grim enough, there are also the compulsive behaviors and destructive tendencies to consider.

Well duh … these are the same problems we see in all relationships today, when we take each other for granted. The article goes on to suggest ways of providing some mental stimulation for your pet, and how to spend quality time with the pet as well.

While we are thinking about our pets, let’s examine our lives with those who should matter more.  Do we eat together, at least occasionally? Do we eat the same meal when we do? Can we talk about truly important life issues without raising our voices or biting our lips. Do we play together … cards or a board game or are we simply sharing the same space.

Susan and I never had pets because we traveled so much … we didn’t think it was fair to the pet. We were thrust into a situation where we had to rescue a cockateel that had found its way to our country club … perhaps you remember that story … and it was such a social critter that it wove its way into our hearts even though we only had it one week before I located the rightful owner.

I grew up with a dog as did my wife. I miss having one, but our boating life is just incompatible with that kind of pet. Dogs can teach us a lot about life … they are God spelled backwards you know.

What they all teach us is that relationships are easily damaged when we don’t nurture them. We need more reminders of this in the news … but pets was a nice start.  Given this week is Thanksgiving … let’s see if we can celebrate with loved ones without getting into heated arguments.  At least we are all eating the same food at the same meal for a change!  🙂 Enjoy!

The recent proposal to extend home mortgages from 30 to 50 years has the superficially appealing notion of reducing the cost of home ownership and, specifically, making it easier for first-time home buyers to purchase a home.

Nothing could be further from the truth.  While the average person might conclude that their mortgage payments would be about 60% of those at a 30-year term because they had so much time to pay, the fact is that there is almost no monthly savings benefit to buyers of terms longer than 25 to 30 years.  The interest rate dominates the equation, and longer terms always mean higher rates.  That is why the lure of adjustable-rate mortgages traps so many.

You can look at this yourself using XCEL and the “pmt” function, which has explicit variables of interest rate, term, and principal, and you will see the following. Here are the numbers for a $300,000 mortgage at 30- and 50-year terms, assuming a 6% interest rate. Remember that first-time home buyers often must have others co-sign because lenders are uncertain they can repay the loan. Leave that aside right now.

The 50-year mortgage would be $1,579 per month, which is only about 14% lower than the 30-year mortgage at $1,799. Small differences like this don’t change the lender’s perspective on the buyer. If you can’t afford the $1,799 you probably can’t afford the $1,579.

Or think about it from the lender’s perspective.  The monthly savings would only allow the lender to lend about $8,000 more for the value of the house!  And, the lender has more risk with the 50-year term, so the likelihood is they would raise the interest rate. If they raised it by 1% it would wipe out any benefits to the borrower. 

What really makes the 50-year term absurd is the total payments perspective. A 30-year mortgage at the rates would be just a bit less than $650,000. The 50-year mortgage would total over $1,00,750! That is more than $400,000 than the 30-year mortgage!! Smart buyers learn to pay off their mortgage along the way by doubling the payment specifically to reduce the cumulative effect of the interest rate.

The fundamental reason home ownership has become “unaffordable” is that the amount lenders will lend on a home is generally only 2-3 times the annual salary, and they have always tended to discount the female in a couple’s combined salaries because there is the likelihood they will have children and then choose not to work.

Risks are real in life and lenders generally understand that. The reason we had the bank collapse about a decade ago was there were absurd financial instruments in place that gave lenders the feeling they could “lay off these risks” and the result was that people were getting mortgages way beyond the 2-3 times annual salary guideline. We all know what happened when these risky derivatives imploded. Remember the phrase about banks being “too big to fail?”

The base problem with today’s housing market is a supply problem. We need to build starter houses specifically for this market, and I believe many builders now recognize this, specifically with very small house designs … which are really cute.

While I can appreciate leadership looking for creative ways to address this problem, my conclusion is that it will not pass financial scrutiny to be realistic. The idea that a 50-year mortgage term solves the problem is a mirage.

Sorry.  Superficially appealing notions are always like this.  

I must admit I am aghast at the stupidity of anyone thinking that you and I are interested in high-tech toilets that tell us what to do or not to do. Nope, you are not reading that incorrectly … check it out for yourself: Smart Toilet Tech Aims to Make You Flush With Health Data

This week, Personal Tech columnist Nicole Nguyen writes about a $599 smart toilet camera that aims to unlock the mysteries of what lands in the commode. The Dekoda, which started shipping on Oct. 21, analyzes something that smartwatches and other wearables can’t: urine and stool.  

The toilet-mounted gadget, made by Kohler Health, is equipped with sensors to understand waste. The device can help determine hydration levels based on factors such as urine color and stool consistency. It sends data over Wi-Fi to Kohler Health’s secure servers and offers insights in a paired app, which requires a $7 a month subscription.

Oh please, can’t we even have a moment away from our electronic leashes? Plus, can’t you see how slippery this slope is when information like this gets into the wrong hands?

Haven’t we learned anything about informational value propositions? Do you really need a toilet to tell you if you need to drink more water? Do you think anyone will pay $7 a month for this kind of information? Haven’t we learned anything from the frenzy over smart grid data where we thought we could charge customers to see more details about their energy use?

This reminds me of the work we were doing with industrial heat pumps decades ago. This was getting much attention, especially from the equipment manufacturers in Canada. This trade ally technical meeting drew a diverse audience, including Jim Hook, then head of the Canadian Department of Energy. It was a love fest of believers, and that first evening, Jim and my team sat together over dinner.

I thought it would be interesting to hear him talk about his world, so I asked what was going on in his life lately. He was happy to talk about the personal energy-use improvements he made at his house.  Domestic water heating is an important end-use in Canada because the groundwater is so cold, so I wasn’t surprised that he picked that agenda. Nor was I surprised that he wanted to emphasize conservation over efficiency. That is, using less instead of talking about how he heated and stored the hot water he used. But his story has stayed with me ever since. Here it is in his own words:

“When I get home from work, after dinner with my family, I take my bath first and leave the water in the tub for my wife to bathe. Then we bathe the children and finally, we throw some more soap powder in the tub and use it as a prewash for the day’s laundry.”

My colleagues, George Redden and Dick Niess, were sitting with me hearing the story. At a loss for words, it seemed fair of me to ask how much he had saved with this water-saving practice.

Jim was prepared for that question and said that he had done a careful before-and-after analysis that showed he had saved about $79 a year with this conservation plan. I didn’t look to my side where George was sitting, but I did notice he reached into his sports coat, removed his checkbook, and wrote Jim a check for $79 asking him to “Stop doing that.”

You can’t make this stuff up,

I was reviewing Frans De Waal’s book The Bonobo and the Atheist once again in preparation for a Sunday School lesson on why we need to stop trying to fix stupid. As Mark Twain so aptly said, “Don’t argue with stupid people … they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”  

Yes, I know we should not think poorly of others, but I am observing that intellectual elites have a unique form of stupidity. They think they know things others do not. Once again, from Mark Twain: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”  We really need to simply “let it go” and trust over time things will correct to sanity.

The reason I start this blog with a reference to his book about his battle with traditional faith and modern critical thinking is that Frans suggests the enemy of science is not religion. The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity about things we accept as dogma.  He points out that convictions never follow straight from evidence or logic. Convictions reach us through the prisms of human interpretation. As a French philosopher aptly summarized, “strictly speaking, there is no certainty; there are only people who are certain.” The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  

Our senses as well as sensibilities are dulled and getting duller!  Chillingly, Frans suggests we still know little about the capacities of the apes, both in captivity and in the field, but in the last few years, we have been getting closer. According to his extensive writing, they are not nearly as selfish as had been assumed and might beat the average priest or Levite when it comes to humane behavior.

Other primates make us look rather stupid about sensing things around us. They can out-hear, out-smell, and out-smart dangers in the wild so much better than we can. We moderns have dulled our memories because we rely on reading and writing, and virtually none of us can read Braille even when we focus on doing so. Go ahead and try it sometime.

Perhaps the best recent book that makes my point is The Arrogant Ape by Christine Webb, which delves into the myth of human exceptionalism and why it matters.  She aptly points out that Darwin considered humans only one part of the web of life, not the apex of a natural hierarchy. Yet today, many maintain that we are the most intelligent, virtuous, successful species that has ever lived. According to Webb, this flawed thinking enables us to exploit the earth towards our own exclusive ends, throwing us into a perilous planetary imbalance. But are this view and way of life inevitable? The Arrogant Ape shows that human exceptionalism is an ideology that relies more on human culture than our biology, more on delusion and faith than on evidence.

My point is that humility seems to be missing everywhere. That is why I don’t refer to AI as Artificial Intelligence but rather as Arrogance and Ignorance.

Remember that humility is a mindset of accurately assessing oneself, recognizing limitations, and thinking of oneself less, rather than thinking less of oneself. It involves a lack of arrogance, a willingness to learn from others, and a focus on serving others’ interests, as exemplified by Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. For many, true humility also includes a deep spiritual reverence and a dependence on God, but that may be a personal perspective.

It seems that today’s world is dominated by arrogance … just about everywhere you look. The result is a horror story is very likely to end badly … I can feel it.  Can you?  Perhaps today’s mid-term election results will point to improvement.

Perhaps you remember that line from the 1986 Top Gun movie. I guess it is only natural to enjoy going fast … but I also remember the energy crisis of 1978 where we were asked to conserve fuel by driving slower. Do you remember when speed limits were reduced to 55 mph on the Interstate highways to save gas and of course save lives if there were crashes?

We are hypocrites today when we hear wailing that we need to reduce our carbon footprints, yet we are increasing speed limits. There is now a 41-mile stretch of Texas State Highway 130 between Mustang Ridge and Lockhart that has a speed limit of 85 mph, the nation’s fastest. At least nine states allow drivers to legally cruise at 80 mph on highways.

Engineers know the resistance goes up exponentially faster as speed rises above 60 mph. Here is a short table of the relative energy required based upon the carefully researched range estimates for my Tesla Model S. It shows that at 80 mph, you are using 34 percent more fuel than at 65 mph. If we say we care about our energy future, why are we so comfortable allowing such high speeds on our highways?

By the way, I feel like I am going to get run over if I stick to the posted speed limits, especially with people behind me driving like racecar drivers, weaving in and out of lanes to gain a few seconds’ advantage on their trip.

President Jimmy Carter became unpopular because he did the right things, asking people to slow down and to be a bit less comfortable in their homes by lowering thermostats during the winter and raising them during the summer. Every degree reduced the energy for heating and cooling by about 8 percent, so it matters. Three degrees equates to a 24 percent reduction in heating or cooling energy use.

In previous blogs, I have pointed out how egregious it is to consider supersonic flights for domestic travel. Do we really need 100-inch TVs? How about all those SUVs and all-terrain monster trucks rather than small cars or perhaps golf carts for local streets in communities designed to avoid our current commuting and recreational consumptive patterns?

I fully understand how modern whaling methods replaced the seemingly outdated and inefficient methods of the 1800s. However, no country today seems focused on sustainable fishing methods in the big oceans, so we are depleting them quickly. To see this yourself, watch the new movie, David Attenborough’s Ocean, which may be his last, and I would rate it his best.

Convenience and the pursuit of near-term profits seem to dominate the user perspective, so why are we saying we all should be doing our part to live sustainably on this planet?

I volunteer at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut, over the summer where I explain to visitors the challenges of being a whaler and navigating the planet’s oceans. I share the evolution from reclaiming valuable and useful material from the bodies of dead whales when they washed up on shore.  But, as demand for these products increased, they moved to near-shore whaling, and then to factory ships that processed the whale out at sea. As a result, whalers depleted the near-shore whales, then the ones within a day or so’s sail, which led to the factory ships and voyages typically lasting 3 to 5 years. Had petroleum not been discovered in 1859 in Titusville, PA, there would be no whales remaining in the oceans.

Why wasn’t anyone paying any attention to the pattern back then?

Why aren’t we paying attention to the pattern in our lives today?