Author: Captain Obvious

Modern society seems awash in a news cycle that gives airtime to almost anyone who states they are a whistleblower.  Many “come out of the woodwork” when someone claims damages for unwelcome sexual advances, perceived racial inequity, corporate actions or inactions, etc.

They get the microphone with very little due diligence.  If it is salacious it sells.  So, much like everything else they see on TV it becomes a soap opera.  Conspiracy theories trump the search for facts.  And, with websites such as glassdoor.com and others, they get to dump their buckets further justifying their rants.

We have been slandered so many times and in almost every case you can trace it to malcontents.  They were either unhappy being held to a standard of excellence or when terminated felt they could get even with us.

When I grew up this was considered illegal.  Not only is it dishonest, it was punishable by seeking damages.  Hard to prove in many cases, and in today’s whacked out woke world even harder if you have a jury trial.

But today, as Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are prone to say you “fake it till you make it!”

Unfortunately, the origin of the term whistleblower was to describe a person who had the courage to stand up to power.  We all remember that Chinese citizen standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen.  Or, more recently, that Russian news reporter alerting Russians that Putin had lied to them.

I don’t see her as a snitch.  I see her as a modern-day hero.  Ralph Nader is given credit for making the term whistleblower a noble activity.  He led the revolt against corporate irresponsibility in product quality and safety.

I was browsing online media this New Year’s day and this article in the Wall Street Journal struck me as profound.  Read the pdf here. 

Pardoning someone 400 years after the fact seems more about virtue signaling than making anything right after all this time.  Wouldn’t it be more virtuous to look at the situation back then, the fears in society, the religious and political backdrops, and then possibly learn something.  What redeeming value is it to simply apologize for a mistake made by others who are no longer alive?

Ah, now I see the pattern.  This is just one more play in the social justice game.  Being “woke” about things like this now makes us appear to be “with it” and virtuous. But, have we learned anything in the process?  Can we see how to prevent the next round of witch hunts … or worse yet, are we actively participating in or are we complicit by our passive natures to others who are on another form of witch hunt?

So, I decided to take a quick look at how society has defined witches and their activities and without surprise you read that these individuals in many cases were counter-societal agents.  However, more often than not, people who seemed preoccupied with the “occult” or some other form of spiritual connection with “demonic” insights or actions were condemned by all the world’s major religions.  You can see this battle within the Bible literature itself, especially in the accounts of the battles between Yahweh and Baal and others.

I am still not satisfied with all this seemingly obvious logic that witches are evil.  My mother had an almost supernatural instinct about people she met.  My father called her a witch because she could read them like a book.  This was extremely helpful to my father in his business dealings.  She was never wrong.  I know people even today who will go to people who claim to have a connection to this dimension of life when they lose a child or even when they face a major decision in their lives.  This form of divination is of course condemned in almost all modern religions.

But, I really wonder whether we are still too lazy here.  The play Wicked illustrates that we must be careful when we take the easy road to define good and evil.  As the Wizard points out so eloquently in the song Wonderful:

A man’s called a traitor – or liberator. A rich man’s a thief – or philanthropist.
Is one a crusader – or ruthless invader? It’s all in which label is able to persist.
There are precious few at ease with moral ambiguities, so we act as though they don’t exist.

It is all about which label is able to persist, isn’t it?

My other blogs point out the dangers of labels … they are the lazy persons language of judgment.

But, we are not to judge … certainly not defining someone as a witch.

So, my woke friends out there … please stop your judgements … I am not a racist.

And, if you are trying to clean house, why not come to grips with the atrocious misdeeds of the past in the name of religion.  I think it would be pretty easy for a modern reader to see the crusades as a form of mass witchcraft.

We really need to learn to walk humbly as we seek justice and peace for this new year.

 

Perhaps it is obvious that most cars are parked in the sun when people are at work.  Perhaps it is obvious that fast sexy cars are low and wide … great for solar panels.  Perhaps it is obvious then with all the startups that the future of EVs is NOT as a load management or even a load growth device for the grid but rather as one more solar source that destroys load factors on electric service.  Please review this Wall Street Journal article and watch the video for context.

As the article notes, most of these startups can use the sun to provide most if not all of the typical daily commute energy needs.  That is great, right?  Customers save money!  Well, that is not what I hear our electric utilities desiring … they want the load.  When will they get the load?  The answer seems clear … when the sun does not shine … so just when the loads were higher already … oh … then solar EVs worsen the electricity load shape!

Think about it.  Wherever solar is a large part of the resource mix electric utilities want customers to use MORE energy during the peak hours the sun shines.

Does this mean that the next move is for electric utilities to move to a demand charge … and possibly a double demand charge where customers are incentivized to keep their loads between two demand levels … thereby improving load shapes?

That is what some serious European electric utilities are thinking.

Thinking … oh … once again that seems to be the problem.

Modern society has taught us a lot about the earth.  The ancients didn’t know what caused volcanoes to erupt or why the ground moved with earthquakes.  Tectonic plates moving progressively away or toward each other would have seemed incomprehensible.  It made more sense that these were the results of gods that needed to be appeased.

Yet, with all this science comes an arrogance that somehow when we do something to disturb the natural balance that we can get away with it.  Sure we can on a small scale, but eventually it catches up with us.

I remember when it was OK to take the oil from my car when I changed it and “reused” it to kill weeds on the fenceposts in my back yard.  Me doing that alone would hardly destroy the environment so it didn’t prick my conscience to do it at the time as it would now.

Well, at scale things like this matter and the consequences of horizontal drilling and fracking with water are coming home to roost just as underground coal mining in Pennsylvania has resulted in huge subsidence situations there.  Read it for yourself on the Wall Street Journal.  Or this pdf copy.

We should be learning that all ideas at scale disturb the environment.  We know now that large solar arrays kill birds.  We know the latest generations of wind turbines do the same and can wipe out species.  Yet, we persist in believing that solar and wind are the saviors of the planet.

I have warned my clients that it will only take one environmentally disastrous event to kill off horizontal drilling (fracking) and that will double or triple fuel prices.  Every time I said that in a public venue I could see the nodding heads.

Well, if you all believe me, you are culpable for failing to plan your energy resources when this happens.

Notice I did not say IF this happens … the handwriting is already on the wall and double spaced for easy reading.

The new year seems to always be a good time to vow to take better care of ourselves and others.  One of the most common “resolutions” is to lose weight, work out, etc.  But, something new emerged in the commercials recently … a place where you could actually make money losing weight.

My nature is always to look for the gimmick.  There are several of course, but as you take a closer look at this for yourself, consider the reason that the lottery and Las Vegas all thrive so well.  The odds are well known, but there is something exciting and invigorating about the process of betting.

Unbeknownst to me, a whole online industry has sprung up over the past year or so forming betting competitions about weight loss.  Yes, you bet you can lose more weight than anyone else in a period of time, and win some serious money if you do.

Check out healthywage.com and dietbet.com as just two examples.  Those of us who study online customer engagement approaches would call this gamification, and it certainly is in every way.  However, it does something more than just align with dopamine cycles in our brains.

We had a “casino night” for our annual company Christmas party and I watched in absolute wonder at the tables that drew the biggest groups:  craps and roulette.  Anyone who knows statistics like I do just shakes their head at these games since the “odds are stacked against you” … it is only a matter of time before you lose your money.

But, you watched people yell out “encouragement” to whomever threw the dice at the craps table as if somehow the dice were listening and could be influenced, or that the thrower was some form of a dice mechanic (and yes folks, there are people who learn to hold dice a certain way and throw them very precisely so they can increase their odds).

So, there is something to be learned here.  But, I am also a bit perplexed by the societal responsibility around allowing things like the lottery to exist.  We have it in Georgia and our son benefited from it because it is used to fund education in Georgia.  Boy did that lower the cost of college!

However, when you look at the demographic of people who play the lottery and the amount of money they throw away, you really can’t help but feel it is a tax on stupidity to pay for the education of others.

Does the lottery work to raise money?  Of course.  It is based upon the same ideas of Las Vegas.  Yes there are a few winners, but in general, the only winners are the house.

Does this concern change when people spend their own money to bet they can lose weight and feel good about it?  Personally, I get concerned that the people who can least afford to spend their money on these bets do so … in a form of addiction.

I know what I need to do!  I am going to put up an online therapy website and call it Weight Loss Gambling Anonymous.