The Ethos of Self-Creation

Part I The first year

2011-09-09T03:50:00.001-07:00

The trouble is I like Austin. My son was born here, its a great community. I have friends. I have a business, and I actually have great in-laws. My son's grandparents are very supportive and helpful. The trouble is some of the rest of the in-laws. Oh, and I love austin community college.

But it is no small trouble. It is actually making me want to raise my son somewhere else, away from the gossip and speculation, somewhere away from all the mean-spirited bullshit that keeps getting hurled my way.

It started before we even moved here, because of a house that was bought that we were told we were moving into. But it wasn't a house for us it was a house we were supposed to keep clean and pretty so it could be sold. Us who have never been able to keep a small apartment presentable are supposed to keep a two-floor 2400 square foot house pristine so that it could be "flipped" (it didn't need to be flipped BTW) and sold again.

So of course I told my future husband my misgivings in detail. But it didn't matter everyone thought it was a great idea and my then-fiance convinced me that we would not be expected to keep the place "pristine" or keep the yard nice etc. But of course this was completely wrong. We were supposed to water, mow, weed, put out poison for pests, edge, fertilize, clean, dust, vacuum etc. All while trying to find jobs. So we did. Of course finding jobs was our priority so much of the rest got done irregularly.

It started only a few months after we got here. We started getting visits from a sister-in-law who would bitch us out for not "finding" jobs. Of course we were applying for multiple jobs every day and not getting any call backs. Then as it turns out she had a position at her office that my husband asks her about. He is informed that she "doesn't hire family." That is unless that family is her other brother and sister, both of whom she had let work for her when she needed extra help and they needed extra money. This just happened to be my husband's back-up plan in case he couldn't find a job, working for sister temporarily. I was led to believe he had that kind of family that would look out for each other when things got tough. She informed us early on that she couldn't and wouldn't employ us and that she was upset that we would even consider that an option and that we shouldn't have expected anything of the sort.

That would have been fine if her mother hadn't tried to get me to work for her multiple times when I was visiting them on vacation. That is the only reason we thought it was an option, but never mind that. Meanwhile we have even dropped down to applying at places like wal-mart and are still not getting any call-backs. It takes us 9 months to find jobs, and we are pretty much humiliated and treated like crap by his family the whole time. His sister visits about once a month to yell at us for not keeping the place clean and tells us to get jobs. I am spending hours a week weeding by hand because I couldn't afford to buy chemicals to kill the weeds, not to mention hours mowing and dusting. In the meantime every local family member decides they need to have us over to dinner at some point or other to talk to us.

We were informed that x sibling knew it was a bad idea for us to be in that house because we weren't "responsible" enough to handle it. We are informed that we are costing his parents hundreds of dollars every month, as we are spending the last of our savings to pay for food, electricity, and the other utilities in a house that was too big to afford. Then finally his mother decides to issue us an ultimatum. She basically says that we have to find jobs within the next week or she is going to kick us out.

She presented it like it was an "intervention," and like we were intentionally taking advantage of her and weren't even trying to find jobs. Well we had already joined a local UU church and had been talking about our job difficulties there for a while. We went to church after the "intervention," and told them we had a week to find jobs when suddenly two of them appeared thanks to the urgency.

Turns out they were some of the worst jobs imaginable. My husband had to completely drop an independent study program he was working on so that he could work 60 hours a week selling vacuums door-to-door and making lets see. Pretty much nothing. $400/month was the biggest paycheck I think he ever got. Plus he got lied to continuously, promised salaries and commissions that never materialized. He had to transfer to the kyle office to avoid getting laid off which is an hour drive away and he still gets paid nothing. Meanwhile I found a job for $7 dollars/hour working 6pm-6am in a clean room with dangerous chemicals and almost no safety equipment. I started breaking out after my second week.

I spent the next four months spending half my money on my own equipment to try and counter the rashes that spread from my arms to my face and lips. It was nightmarish. But back up just a bit because when we got the ultimatum I was so pissed off I wanted to move back to Georgia and I was ready too. After the hours I had put in to weeding by hand, and pulling weeds out of the sidewalk, mowing edging, vacuuming. After all I had done, all the conflicts we had already been put through, and all the humiliating conversations where we were informed that we weren't responsible enough, tidy enough etc for the "house." and then the ones where we were told that we weren't really looking for jobs or we would have found them, that we were trying to live off of my mother-in-law, that we weren't good enough to work for his sister etc. Meanwhile I applied at every graphics design job (I was coming from a job designing ads for a magazine), every magazine, newspaper, and then every receptionist job, cashier jobs, every classified job that I had any experience in, and then finally even walmart, lowes, and starbucks. Billee went on multiple interviews just to find out at the interview that the place expected him to bring in the clients not the other way around or that while he would be a financial adviser in theory he would only get paid on commission when he sold mutual funds. Or that he could have x job as long as he took y 500 dollar test that would take several months to study for, and oh BTW he would get paid on commision selling insurance, mutual funds, services etc. But we supposedly weren't trying.

Our whole experience the first year in Austin was just a long humiliating nightmare, where we were treated not as equals who had hit a difficulty but as deadbeats, we were told we were lazy, irresponsible, messy, poor, and basically not good enough. I was also informed that my writing career that I had gotten paying work in wasn't a real job. After we finally found jobs my fiance's parents decided to sell their house and move in with us while they were having another house built near my husband's brother. Of course we were told we had to clean the master bedroom out which involved hours of work, and hours scrubbing the bathroom and shower so that his parents could have the master bedroom for the short time that they were there. Meanwhile when the new house was finally built we were informed that we had a week to find an apartment and move out. Why had we not found a new apartment yet? Perhaps because I was working 50 hours a week doing a graveyard shift with perpetual medical problems and my husband was working 60 hour weeks... thats why.

I went with my father-in-law on my day off and signed a lease with the first apartment complex that I liked. It was small but clean, bright and pristine. I was actually looking forward to having a space that I could manage and keep clean. Meanwhile I had applied at massage therapy school and signed up for a loan to pay tuition. I found a job working as a cashier at homedepot, with better hours, better working conditions, and more benefits and it was just in time to. My rash cleared up only days before starting massage school. I was a few weeks into my massage training when I discovered I would have a week to get out of my home and into a new one. Thanks a lot. I had close to full time hours at work and another 12 hours a week of school. I had to spend every waking moment studying and packing. Then comes moving day. A day designated by my mother-in-law. Not one required for any other reason. I mention this because it just so happened to be on a day that I had 9 hours of school, or in other words I couldn't help in the process and we were moving into a third floor apartment.

Luckily my father-in-law volunteered to help and got his elder son to assist also (I found out later that he paid him for the privilege). I say luckily but I had already tried to get my husband to pay professional movers. We had used them in athens and I figured it would be a better safer way to do things.

Problem number one: you can't keep this couch because its too heavy, why don't you get rid of this. We'll put this up there instead... more negotiations on furniture and we end up with a giant torn-up dirty smelly leather love seat that I thought was ugly and horrific. Other bad furniture followed. Problem number two: We had to get a new dryer because there were no gas hookups at the apartment. Problem number three: they decided to try and move the washer by themselves, Which led to my father in law having to get stitches. Now here comes the nightmare part.

I get home after being in school from 8am-5pm and battling 5 o'clock traffic for another hour. I go up the stairs to my new apartment that I am looking forward to setting up and...

There are no boxes... everything had been "unpacked." By that I mean that with the exception of some of the glassware and dishes which had been unpacked and stacked on the counter, every single box had been opened and dumped upside down, and then the boxes were thrown away. There was a mountain of books in our room dumped on top of each other, and not in any orderly fashion, the books were upside down, pages getting bent, covers partially crushed. I couldn't even get to my bed. Every single room was filled with dumped out papers, dumped out magazines, dumped out dvd's, dumped out books. That wasn't even the worst though for some mysterious reason my husband's parents had decided that he had to take all the old boxes of stuff from when he was a kid with him on this move. So there were piles of old toys, piles of old photos, piles of old trophies. Junk everywhere. On top of that most of the unloaded dishes in the kitchen weren't even ours. They had unloaded the wrong boxes and brought some of his parents dishes over to our house instead. But because they had thrown out the boxes we couldn't even pack them up to send them back to the right place.

This all still gives me chills. It was so horrible and nighmarish. I came home looked at my apartment destroyed, all of mine and my husbands stuff treated like garbage, and realized that the apartment would likely never get to be the nice neat managable space I envisioned. I didn't have the time or energy to put it back together again. I sat down on the floor and just started crying. It was a few hours before I could stop.

We ended up paying a professional organizer to fix two of the rooms, but it took more than a year before I got all the toy dinosaurs and trophies out of the dining room, or that we even had space to eat. In the meantime we were criticized for spending so much money on the organizer and for not paying the brother who made the mess to clean it up if we were willing to pay someone else. Honestly even with my shitty father and grandparents, I don't think I have ever in my life felt like I was being treated like garbage, and for the second time in only about 4 months I deeply and sincerely wished I hadn't moved to Austin.

The "parents" of angels.

2011-04-02T15:38:00.000-07:00

All kids take stuff that isn't theirs. They play with it, they hide it, they break it, they bury it in the backyard... it happens and generally nobody thinks the worse of them. Least of all myself. It happens to be a perfectly normal thing that kids do. Unfortunately some parents think their parents are magical little angels who would never do anything that anyone else might find frustrating or need remedying.

I am saying this because recently my debit card was taken out of my purse while some kids were visiting. I have a toddler so I knew it could easily have been him that did it, and I didn't think that any one of the kids was trying to rob me or anything so stupid or silly as that. However after searching everywhere for it and knowing that it was going to cost me 20 dollars to replace I was forced to call up the parents of the kids in order to see if they had "seen" my card. Yes I wanted to know if they had done something with it. In fact I was hoping they had, because if one of the older kids had done something with it we should be able to find it again. While if it was one of the toddlers it could just as easily be at the bottom of the garbage can or in a spot we wouldn't discover for the next 20 years.

In fact it did turn up, underneath the crock pot in one of the bottom cabinets several weeks later after I had already been forced to replace it. At the time I was hoping one of the older kids had seen it or put it somewhere where it could easily be retrieved. So I had my husband call them knowing he had a talent for putting things as gently as possible. And they were very nice. My husband made it very clear that we just needed to find it and we were hoping their kids had seen it or put it somewhere away from the little kids. They tried to help us find it offering a few suggestions as to where their toddler might have hidden or put it. Which led me to partially excavating a pretty nasty garbage can. But to no avail. We thanked them for the help. And we thought that was the end of it.

I figured it would turn up eventually and a few days later we ordered a new card. Six weeks later we find out the other "parents" had actually been harboring a grudge this whole time, claiming that I had "accused" their children of being thieves. Honestly I can't even describe how offensive and frustrating this is. First of all all kids take stuff that isn't theirs and I would never call a kid under 13 a thief because I genuinely don't think the term can apply to a mind that young. But never mind that, I'm sure that the insane response has something to with the fact that it was a debit card. We didn't call them when cameras, wii remotes, and cell phones went missing after their visit because we figured they would turn up... and they did. No point in making a big to-do over something that isn't that important. And honestly if I hadn't needed my debit card I wouldn't have said much about it, especially given the irrational response and grudge that these "parents" are holding. $20 dollars would have been a small price to pay to avoid this insanity and conflict we are now having to endure.

Unfortunately now it is being implied that I am creating a rift in the family and that it is my responsibility to sort through this insane response and fix what to me is nothing more than a bizarre play going on in someone else's brain that has nothing to do with me. My problem is I don't think I can be nice enough to fix it. I don't believe anyone could actually have that irrational of a response. It seems deeply dishonest especially after they made a point of being so nice on the phone. So either the "politeness" was a lie to hide the brewing emotional insanity or now we are being lied to as an excuse for some other manipulation. Regardless I don't see how I can be nice, diplomatic, or even apologetic in response to them.

If you are going to just assume everyone else is being evil, and unjust anytime your kid messes with something they are not supposed to and someone has to say something... well what's the point. I'm not interested in having a relationship in which I have to walk on egg shells around someone else, and their kids so that they can maintain the illusion that their kids aren't normal everyday get-in-ta-stuff kids. Nor will I. It is always the "angel kids" that make the giant messes at everyone else's house and never clean it up, break stuff and never get in trouble, hide stuff and are never asked to find it. While everyone else's kids have to pick up after themselves and the "angel kids."

We'll put them on a pedestal and pretend that they are naturally born knowing how to do everything right. While the rest of the kids actually have to learn it.

The Credit-Card Con

2011-02-25T13:22:00.000-08:00

My experience with credit cards.

I was warned long ago, as a kid that credit cards were scams, but you know surely... surely a big well-respected business would participate in a fraudulent activity right?

Here is my experience.

After moving to Texas I was offered a credit card with Washington Mutual. It had a good low interest rate .99 plus the prime rate. At the time that was about 9 percent. That would only go up (or so I believed) if I defaulted or was continually late with my payments.

Well, it had a limit of 2500. I figured it could help with additional expenses etc. I had good credit from paying consistently on my student loans and so I figured that's why I was being offered a pretty good deal.

For the first couple years I barely used it, but then I needed it to pay for a few unexpected fees that arose. My job required me to liability insurance for massage, and then we had a major car repair. So suddenly I was carrying a balance. The finance fees were pretty low and I paid more than the minimum balance so I wasn't too concerned.

Then our Wedding came about and we had a number of last minute expenses/plane tickets for a sister etc. that were not covered in our budget plus another major car repair... The next thing I knew I was about 100 dollars shy of my credit limit. Ouch. So I stopped using the card for anything and moved money around to make sure that more than the minimum got paid every month.

Then I get a bill and in it I noticed that the previous month had incurred an additional fee. $39 for being "late." But I wasn't late I had sent the payment the same time I always had. Upon closer look I realized that they had moved my due date from the 14th to the 12th. Since I was paying electronically I had not noticed the discrepancy on my bill.

So I'm out $39 dollars. The next month I sent them my payment on the 12th brilliantly figuring that they wouldn't dare do the same thing again. They had moved the due date to the 10th. $39 but in addition they had raised my interest late a few points for being late the previous month and with the higher interest rate the finance charges had put me over my credit limit.

So they charged me an "over credit limit" fee. I was shocked. I had not used the card in several months and it hadn't occurred to me that the over-the-limit fee could apply to their finance charges and fees. So to sum up I was charged $39 dollars as a penalty for being charged $39 dollars late fee as a penalty for them changing my due date and for them raising my interest rate for being past my due date which they had changed the previous month without notifying me.

In all the minimum payment for that month was $170 dollars. The problem was with my income I could not afford to pay that month and pay the card down enough to keep them from pulling the same scam the next month. So I borrowed enough money from my husband to pay off the card entirely and then paid him back slowly over the next year.

So of course I should have ripped that card to shreds... but... I figured I might have an emergency...

I did my brakes went out and I was pregnant. The guy at pep boys talks me into getting an extra 900 dollars worth of repair that was needed... and could go out any day. I was imagining being in a wreck if I didn't get the x, y, or, z fixed and losing my baby. Good God, what do I do?

So 1600 dollars goes on the credit card. We had enough money to pay down the balance in a few months plus I wasn't anywhere near the limit, I certainly wasn't going to use it for casual spending (and I didn't). So why worry.

Oh, I know Washington Mutual had gotten into financial hot water and so while my card lay with no balance on it for about a year they had jacked up the interest rate to 29 percent.

Suddenly I had finance charges of over $80 dollars a month. I was thinking I could pay $200 a month and be balance free in 8 months.... but no. When I saw the $80 dollar fee I was shocked.

Even when they had previously raised my rates I had never paid more than about 25 dollars in finance charges. So I decided the time had come for abandoning the Wamu credit train. I moved my balance onto an American Express card that would have 0 percent interest on balance transfers for the first year and a low fixed rate of 3.5 percent after that. Whew... dodged a bullet.

Thus begins the next credit scam, American Express.

So my husband and I decided that we weren't going to fall for any more accounting tricks from credit card companies. Our minimum payment was only about 10 dollars do we decided we would send them $10 dollars every week. Which we did.

They were getting at least 40 dollars a month, and this continued for over a year. Unfortunately I used the card for something. I don't remember what now, probably an insurance premium. But it bumped up the minimum payment to over $10 dollars.

Of course we were sending them well over that so why would it matter? The answer is that creative accounting always wins. About 6 months late we get a notice in the mail that went something like this:

"Due to the continued delinquency of this account we will be raising your interest rate to the default rate of 29.9 percent."

We were shocked? What the hell were they talking about?! We had been sending them money every week for over a year and a half, and had consistently well in excess of the minimum amount due.

We checked our account statement. Which naturally we hadn't bothered to look closely at for the past few months. On it we found 2 late payment fees of $40 dollars for the past two months respectively.

They claimed our payments were late. How could they be late?! We had consistently over paid!

We called them to find out. As it turns out there was an 8 day period (I think it was 8 days, its been a while so I may be a day or two off) in which a payment had to arrive to be considered "on time."

One of our payments came during this time each month but for the past two months they weren't receiving the whole minimum balance (now more than 10 dollars) in that limited window (a window they had never ever ever mentioned on any paper, verbally or otherwise.)

So all the money that came in in the first week of the month did not count toward the amount due. It counted as a payment on the previous month. They had to get the money between the 7th and 15th in order for it to be counted toward that month. Any additional payments received in the last part of the previous month also didn't count.

So since our payments were only in part we were "late," and being "late" twice made us "delinquent." So they charged us... I mean ripped us off of... I mean STOLE 80 dollars from our account and then tried to raise our interest rate. We were able to cancel the account in time to prevent the new rate from applying, but it still floors that anyone is allowed to get away with this blatantly fraudulent activity.

Of course when we complained we were told that "this is what all the big banks do," or "this is standard industry practice."

Translation: The big banks and credit card companies make most of their money by defrauding their own clientele.

These are the businesses that we were told were "too big to fail." They are all still out there and our tax money paid them to stay afloat.

Taxation and Equality

2011-01-23T12:19:00.001-08:00

So I understand that if you had a $300 tax that everyone was required to pay that it would effect people differently. People with less income would struggle with it, while those who were well off could pay it without batting an eyelid.

This is presented as regressive and "unfair." So the next argument goes that we should then charge a percentage. Lets say that everyone pays 5 percent... is that fair? Then we realize that for people struggling to survive 5 percent of their income could be the difference between them surviving or not surviving. While 5 percent of those with more income might not even effect them at all. One less trip per year on the private jet or something of that sort.

What does that leave us with. The response is that we should break income up into brackets and charge different rates for the different levels, the lowest level owing no tax and the highest level paying the largest percentage. Still people cry foul. This may help the poorest people but it leaves the middle class with a very high tax burden, while the richest still barely break a sweat with their "percentage."

At some point we have to realize that this whole process is insane. We would think it was horribly unfair and unreasonable to treat people differently under the law if they were of lower income, so why is it okay to treat people with more money that way.

Will we be better off if everyone has equal difficulty or ease paying taxes and how could you objectively determine that. I dispute the idea that if someone has more money than they could ever spend that they should therefore be carrying the rest of us on their shoulders.

Equality before the law means that you should not get to determine how to treat people based upon their socioeconomic status. We seem to spend a great deal of time in this country trying to make things "more equal." But that generally amounts to taking more and more and more money from those that have it to give it to those that do not have it.

Why is that equality? The person having their money taken is not being treated equally. The person who receives the money is not being treated equally before the law. Rather the legal system becomes an explicit system to create and maintain in-equal treatment. This is done in the name of "leveling the playing field."

The trouble is that it is never successful, and no amount of money ever seems to be enough. I have heard it said that the top 5 percent of income earners should have to give all of their money to the government. How could that be fair? And why would anyone continue to work if the government were taking that much of their money?

I think we should stop worrying about someone's difficulty to pay or not pay once they get higher than a certain income. Already someone who pays 5 percent of a million dollars is paying far more of "their fair share." Than someone who pays 5 percent of $100,000.

What I don't understand is why we have taxes at all. I don't know if anyone else has noticed but the IRS is a really nasty institution. Our income tax code is something like 2000 pages long, and every year we pay accountants billions of dollars to figure out and file our taxes for us.

How is it that we cannot come up with a more efficient system than this?

Taxation is inherently bureaucratic and therefore inefficient. Its enforcement is inherently violent. In this day and age we cannot come up with a better system for funding our government and public services... really? And yet most of the government is funded on bonds, and invisible taxes like taxes on gas and airlines.

So already we see that there are other ways just within the realm of what is happening now. But we are supposed to believe that these are inadequate by themselves in spite of the fact that the budget grows every year.

If we merely went back in time during my own lifetime (I'm 29) we could find national budgets that could be easily covered today without the use of an income tax. Forget about regressive, progressive etc. We should be working to figure out how to get rid of taxes entirely.

The best way to do that is by privatizing and deregulating services that the government does not need to be doing. Social security is at the top of my list, and then the school system. Follow it with medicare.

It was this idea that it was okay to tax the income of the top 5 percent that got us into our current tax regime.

The 16th amendment was sold to america on the grounds that only top income earners would be taxed and that it would be a very small percentage of their income 1-5 percent. Promises were made that the rest of us would never be taxed. Yet by the 60's not only was almost everyone being taxed but that top bracket was paying something like 90 percent of their income into the government.

Say what you will about Reagan, but I firmly believe he took the U.S. in a positive direction so far as reducing the tax burden, and deregulation is concerned.

My argument is that we should stop worrying about what the richest of the rich are doing, making, or paying. Instead let us figure out how to start removing the income tax from our nation entirely.

Dreams of Knowledge

2011-01-10T13:36:00.000-08:00

So I had a somewhat amazing dream last night. I say "somewhat" because it seems so simplistic looking back at it. I have been thinking a lot lately about college and learning. Specifically I have been thinking about how unreceptive I was to "learning" when I first went to college.

It is truly ironic because I went "to learn." That was my only purpose. But I quickly found that I resented being in classes I did not want to be in. As soon as I found a subject I wanted to study and was fascinated by all the other classes seemed to be a distraction from it. I resented any class I thought wasn't taught well enough, or that the teacher didn't seem knowledgeable enough on the subject. So there was a great deal of resentment floating around, resentment that cut off my receptivity to actually learning and sometimes even understanding what they were saying.

What was worse was that I was very proud of how intelligent I believed myself to be and because I was also very introverted that made it unthinkable to me to ask anyone for help with anything. I had a final project, for example, that I failed to turn in because I couldn't get it to work after a great many hours (30plus) of trying. So instead of getting help with it I gave up... I didn't think I was going to pass the class anyway.... Turns out I would have passed if I had turned in what I had done... But it was actually impossible... unthinkable to me to ask or even to seek help on a project or in this case software that was confusing me.

So the dream was that I was taking classes with one of my brothers at a local college, and one of our classes was in a big out door auditorium. Most of the dream was about weird random conflicts with my brothers, and odd conversations I don't remember. When I finally got around to starting class and focusing on what the teacher was saying, he kept trying to teach us this old proverb.

It didn't make any sense to me. It was something like The crystal of knowledge lies in the sky and is illuminated in its time... I think it was a variation of one I learned in yoga teacher training: Mani Padme Hum: The jewel of consciousness lies at the lotus's center. That one didn't mean anything to me either.

So one day in the middle of class the teacher is talking to us about this proverb, and we had been wrestling with it for several days. We had stadium style seating on the side of a hill and could see some ways into the distance. The teacher was most of the way up the hill, and there I was arguing with him. I kept saying that what he was saying didn't really mean anything. I just know we were instructed to treat this proverb like we were on a treasure hunt and this "crystal" was the treasure we were looking for.

I was picking it apart, "what was this crystal, how could it be in the sky, why would it be illuminated... etc."

Suddenly, the sun hit the campus at the right angle and the entire campus was reflected in a mirage off in the distance. It was really beautiful, and everyone had this eureka moment.

We realized we were looking at ourselves. The treasure/crystal of knowledge arose out of our ability to see ourselves, and to examine a clear reflection of ourselves and thereby obtain self knowledge.

Moreover, we had to be in the right place, at the right time, and in the right frame of mind to see the mirage and thus find the "crystal of knowledge" we were looking for. It was like the dream was saying that sometimes you have to not only be present, but be receptive, to allow your mind to be changed in order to see and recognize the wisdom being offered.

I suppose I am making statements of the obvious. Still we had to be there to understand, we had to be actively seeking to understand at the right moment or it would have been just another sunset... perhaps a nice effect, but not a eureka.

It makes me think that maybe every class, every teacher, every subject just might have some jewel/crystal in it that I have to find. Some little or perhaps big speck of knowledge that will change how I look at things. Something that will change my perspective.

What I suspect is that I won't know what I am looking for, but will be trying instead to figure out how to look, and how to be receptive just in case said knowledge is staring me in the face.

Part II Design and Crowd-Sourcing

2010-12-30T02:12:00.000-08:00

I know I have been a little long-winded with some of my previous posts about design but it was all for a purpose. It was all to give those who have not worked in a design business a sense of how one might run.

Of course not every business is the same and different firms can run very differently from each other. However, what seems to be remarkably similar among design companies is client behavior and designer behavior.

Clients are supposed to be able to say, this is the material I have, this is my goal for this ad/logo/brochure etc. now do what you do best... That rarely happens. I had one time that I designed a full page ad, and the client said: "It's perfect... just make my phone number a little bigger," and they really meant it.

That was close to the response we would get from a regular client once you knew their preferences well, but even then there were almost always a half dozen small changes, or more. "I wanted you to focus on the steak dish this month, not the pie." "Can you do one with the website listed, and one without it." "I want to see one with my logo in purple and one with it in pink." "I need you to add our second phone number, and fax number, and can you make the vacuum cleaner bigger."

Some clients wanted to pick out the photos that were used, even though they had already picked the content of the photos for the photo shoot.

So it just happens sometimes that clients are weird, unpredictable, or just difficult to work with. Most of them had small reasonable requests that fit in with the needs of their company and advertising... (our phone number changed, we moved across town... we need you to replace our old logo with our new one etc.)

Occasionally you get the "I don't know what I want... but I know what I don't want... and I know that I will know what I want when I see it..." client.

"Just make me something and I will tell you if I like it."

It makes me cringe just thinking about it.

And as I mentioned in my first post on the subject you often get the crazy ego client that wants you to spend extra time just so they can have their ego stroked, or feel like they got their money's worth.

The worst case scenario is a combination of the two. These are the people that say "I don't like this... do something else."

"Well what don't you like about it? The colors, the photo used, the font, the style?"

Knowing what they do not like is actually important information, and even with these clients you could usually get something out of them. Such as: "well the style is all wrong. We are an elegant restaurant and this is too playful, and we don't even want to focus on that dish. I don't know why they took a picture of it and I was hoping for a script font...."

You see all of a sudden the person who didn't know what they wanted is giving you valuable info.

This is exactly what does not happen in these online design contests... and it is so endlessly frustrating.

It is like they are combining freelance design, with amateur competition, with ego mania clientelé, and gave you the worst of all three.

What is the worst part of freelance design? I think it is having to deal with subjectivity and whims of clients. You have to walk a fine line between meeting the needs and wants of the clients which can sometimes be at odds with each other. Ideally a designer could avoid those clients who do not truly value that specific designer's style and expertise, but that is generally easier said than done. It is actually impossible in design contests, because "clients" do not pick the designers, nor do the designers have any real knowledge of the "clients."

Second as a freelancer you do not always get to work with a team of other designers. In design contests it is every designer for themselves. What do I mean by that... well in the non-blind competitions and I would guess about 2/3rds of the contests are non-blind. Everyone can see your design and the contest holder has the ability to rate your design.

If you were part of a design team it would not be unheard of nor unreasonable for another designer to render the same concept differently. We know the client wants bubbles in their design that go from small to large and for one bubble to surround the word... There are many different ways this could be portrayed... It is possible they might like the style of another designer better or a different presentation better.... There is no problem with that because as a part of a team you are still going to get paid, especially if you derived the concept that is ultimately chosen... even if your application of it is not used.

In these contests the moment you get a 4 or 5 star rating all the other designers will start devising variations of your design. Or as 99designs likes to say "you do not own the concept but the implementation of the concept." Which means the other designers can use the same font, and the exact same idea, implement it a little differently... like using an ellipse instead of a bubble or a flat circle instead of a 3-d one etc., and it is permitted. But if their blatant copy-catting gets picked as the winner... you get zero and they get paid.

Not only that but sometimes the client will decide that your concept is the one they want... which means the other designers, if they want a chance at winning, have no choice but to devise an "implementation" of your concept if they want to stay in the contest. Your design in-effect becomes the new design-brief.

What is your reward if your concept is chosen but your specific submission is not? nothing.

I was in a contest once in which another designer put up a fairly generic design. Orange chromatic dots in a straight line over the name of the company in a black sans serif font.

It got 4 stars. The winning design, submitted by another designer, used the same font, the exact same color dots/font, the exact same shade and size of dots, but put them in a spiral pattern instead of a straight line. That is what the client wanted and paid for.

They see all these designers as "their design team." So it is perfectly natural to see an alternative to a design that they like.

The other issue is that you cannot submit the exact same design as someone else or it is considered copyright infringement and could get you banned from the site.

So the original designer could not at that point resubmit the spiral design as a variation of their own work because that would magically be copyright infringement of the designer who is blatantly ripping off the previous designer. I have seen some designers get around this by putting up dozens of variations of their own design the moment they get a high rating. The problem is that it is really not possible to come up with everything someone else might derive off of your work.

This brings me to the idea of a contest. You see the trouble with creative contests in general is that they are often a pass/fail scenario. You do not get feedback, you do not find out how to improve etc. You just find out that you did not make it. The upside is that there are usually specific standards that they have to publicly announce that they will be judging you on, and they generally have to make it clear how they will be judging it.... That's the benefit of a contest.

Also, generally other people are not allowed to copy your work or derive work from it, particularly after it has been submitted. Imagine, for example, a poetry contest in which someone could read your poem after submission and use one of your stanzas as your own, or a drawing contest in which they could see that you used a tiger in your drawing and then use one of their own. This is almost universally considered cheating in normal talent-oriented contests.

But it is not "cheating" in a design contest because you are all a "design team," and why else would they be rating your designs except for the purpose of telling the designers what direction you want them to go in...

Then you get to deal with the huge crazy client ego that seems to grow out of these contests. There is something about having that "eliminate" button. I don't know what it is but I have been in so many contests in which hours of my work was eliminated without comment, even when there were very specific briefs, that were followed exactly with very skilled designs submitted.

Gone instantly... without any explanation, or criteria for what they are judging on.

So you don't get the benefit of even finding out what they don't like... only that they don't like your design... for some reason. Then if it is a visible contest you can only try and look at the designs they have rated or not-eliminated as some criteria for what they are actually wanting.

Sometimes these designs are very different from the "brief." Of course that wouldn't matter if they were your client... clients change their minds... but contest holders are not supposed to get to change their minds. They are supposed to have to stick to the guidelines they set out or its not really a contest. That is like changing the rules of a game in the middle of it.

So we are supposed to function like designers and be willing to give revisions if requested, as if they were our actual client... some clients request this... But even then, it is a delicate issue. If you rate my design one star and then ask for a different color... well what's the point? Will you like it that much more in blue instead of red and I've already wasted several hours on this... the prize is 250... do I want to waste a few more?

Honestly every time I have ever done a revision of my design at 99designs the "client" liked the new design less and generally rated it lower. Plus there is another issue: sometimes they don't exactly ask properly for you to revise it. Why does this matter? because you are not their design team and you are not getting paid. Since they are holding all the money, and all the cards most clients end up on a weird ego trip where they suddenly envision themselves your boss whom you are supposed to be bending over backwards for.

"I need to see this is 3 different colors." "You need to design some kind of symbolic icon to go with this." etc. My response.... "um I did as much as I am willing to do if I were getting paid $200 dollars for this design. Which I am likely not, seeing as you want some specialized icon designed which was not mentioned before."

Likewise your designs get dismissed sometimes with snarky comments. As if you were somehow foolish to think that that would be a good interpretation of their brief. Often when designers complain that no feedback was given on their design the contest holders says something like "the designs submitted varied greatly in quality and the ones eliminated didn't warrant any comments."

So is it a design contest in which it is reasonable to get eliminated with no real feedback... pass/fail style?

Or is it a designer-client relationship in which finding out what they do not like about your design is just as important as finding out what they do like.

For as a contest they get to change the guidelines without notice, extend the length of the contest, edit the brief, judge without any criteria, end the contest on a whim, and even withdraw the contest without awarding anyone. I have seen contests that did this after awarding designs 4 and 5 stars. They loved the designs and still didn't pick a winner.... mmmhmmmm.

If it is a client-designer relationship then I should get paid for work that is derivative of my own, I should get some feedback after I have spent hours of work for you even if it is simply to tell me what you do not like or how I failed to achieve what you wanted, and finally I should get paid for my time even if the client changes their mind about getting the logo.

Imagine if a client came to you and said... I love this design, and the concept is great... let me talk to 20 other designers and see what they will do with this concept before I agree to going with yours.... and BTW if I like their design better I will pay them and not you.

Meanwhile the one contest I have won thus far, the client didn't even know what file types he was asking for. He promptly emailed me to tell me he could not open the illustrator file I provided, that he had specifically asked for, because he did not have the right software. This guy wanted 7 different file formats btw. So he requested that I email him the software for opening it.

That's right he wanted me to email him software that was worth more than the award for his contest... seriously. I told him to download adobe reader.

Even nicer clients, who mysteriously do not end up on an ego trip, are still like your worst lunatic client. The one who thinks you should bend over backward for them even if they don't pay you, who has absolutely no sense of fairness or loyalty to you, and who will stab you in the back at a moment's notice. It's like having a contest run by a child that doesn't know what they really want, and has no clue what design is all about, and thinks any whim that fancies them is just fine, even refusing to pay anyone.

Meanwhile the commitment designers show by submitting a well rendered design that followed the specifications of the client is almost never honored. Why would it be... if 50 designers submit designs who has time to comment on them all, or even bothering to thank them before eliminating their entry.

And the worst part is, truly inferior designs often win over the more skilled ones. I actually created a custom text for one contest. I was really pleased with what I came out with. It was simple: two colors conveyed the idea very clearly, and was the exact sort of font they were looking for... I couldn't find one I was satisfied with so I rendered my own... with my pen tool, illustrator, and lots of time.

Someone else put the same words in a generic sans serif... in black with an orange rectangle over it to represent a "sales tag." It got 4 stars... mine got 2. (BTW it was a good thing that I lost... I noticed afterwards that they requested the winning logo be put into a business card design, website header, and stationary design, all for the same prize $200... seriously). I lost one to a design that was a messy recreation of the Ubuntu logo with a couple of large dots in the middle, it wasn't clear what the dots were for but it didn't really make any sense in terms of that contest.

There is often no rhyme or reason to any of the "client's" choices. But why would there be? They do not have a skilled professional walking them down the path helping them choose the right style, font, icon, colors for them. No one is helping them make an informed decision on what will best serve their needs. Their design team is a team in the same sense that a bunch of betas in the same bowl are a family, and the only incentive a designer would have for helping the client is some guarantee that they would get paid... a guarantee they cannot give them until the contest is actually won... and the final design is picked.

So ummmm... no you aren't "slapping other designers." If other designers can't convince clients to go for a real professional designer or design team, over the proverbial cock-fight of the design world, then they are a huge failure at marketing themselves, specifically at knowing what makes them, their skill set, and a working relationship with them valuable and great.

If they can't do that much for themselves how exactly will they be able to pull it off when designing a logo, a brochure, an ad, or a website? How are you going to help your client figure out a direction for their design that will appeal to their target market, if you can't communicate your own basic value as a professional to other human beings? Come on the slapping other designers thing is weak. Especially since many of the designers on these sites are from less developed countries.

The only designer you are slapping or perhaps should be slapping is yourself when you participate in these contests. Though I do think you may be doing a disservice to the "client" as well. It just kind of feels like doing a massage without knowing the contraindications for massage. Fever... what fever?

Another interlude on My Design Experience

2010-12-30T01:02:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, long ago when I was designing ads for a small local magazine, a brief came through for a regular client of ours. They owned a jewelry business, and to be frank they were generally a big headache.

For their very first ad for example, we had to "clean up" or rather "rebuild" the client's logo which someone seemed to have put together in microsoft paint... or maybe they just drew it right onto the business card... I'm not sure. In any case we had to rebuild it exactly, even to the point of rendering a unique font... just without all the mess that came with its initial creation.

Lots of fun, that I luckily did not have to participate in. Other quirky issues came about periodically with this client, but this particular month promised to be an easy one. The jeweler wanted to feature men's platinum wedding rings. The ad was to target men who were well off and thinking about getting married. So we got adjectives like "high-end," "sophisticated," and "male-oriented."

So what did I have to work with? Their photo shoot had produced some very nice close-ups of four of their platinum wedding rings for men. Unfortunately the light in the pictures came out very pinkish making the photo look more like it was advertising charm bracelets to little girls.

So I picked out a good shot of the rings and got to work. I decided that since there was so much pink and peachyness in the picture to adjust the colors more toward the orange end instead of pink. I also decided to work on increasing the contrast, and decreasing the color overall so that the shine, and silver color of the rings would really pop.

After over an hour of adjustments I ended up with a photo that looked at first glance like it was only using 3 colors: black, white, and a pale shade of orange. It was awesome. The orange tint was right along the shine on the ring that was the focal point of the photo and most of the other colors were effectively gone. The black and white really made the delicate gradient of the silver just pop out. It looked elegant, sophisticated, and very masculine for a jewelry ad. I got dozens of compliments from the other designers.

Everyone thought it was perfect... we even told our customer service rep to explain to the client in detail what the design did, and how it did it... and to compare it to ads in very expensive national publications... etc.

The client hated it. Our editor-in-chief even called to argue on behalf of the design because he thought it was that great... but it was to no avail. They requested we use the same image but without any adjustments... That's right pink, no contrast, washed out colors on the rings... It really did look like an ad for little girls.

Now, I'm not saying that the client was wrong and I was right. Though certainly I think my design did a far better job of what they asked for, than what they insisted upon later. However I didn't know their clients, and it is entirely possible that my somewhat stylized color scheme was all wrong for the real target market. It is also possible, and likely that the client went with their own aesthetic preferences over what would have been best for their target market.

I suspect the truth is somewhere in between. The target market was not as high-end/sophisticated as we were led to believe, and the local market may not have "gotten" the ad that I made. (That's right you aren't sophisticated enough for MY AD... or in other words if I run my beautiful, fabulous, amazing ad it will likely be a failure and waste of money for the client... same difference right...) Likewise, the client did not realize that the pink and low contrast of the original photo would not likely appeal to the intended audience.

But instead of trying to appeal to them on the idea of "not going in that direction" we were focused on trying to get them to go in the direction of the ad that we thought was best. So we ended up with an ad that the client liked, the designer hated, and that likely failed in reaching its target audience. Believe me, it was very pink.

The trouble was since we were primarily a magazine functioning as a design firm we were a little out of our league when it came to figuring out what were reasonable revision requests.

In this case a simple "I don't like what you did to the photo," would have sufficed. We could have come up with a softer version with the pink removed or even gone for a gray scale version. Once the client started telling us to do the same picture without adjustments... all of our designs skills and aesthetic/marketing knowledge got removed from the equation.

Just put this here, and that there, and our logo here and that will magically do what the ad is intended to do right?

But the fact is we weren't a design firm... we were the production team of a magazine who was "building their ad," we were not "designing their marketing." That was apparently a delusion we kept stumbling into whenever a client accidentally mentioned a target market, or an intended goal for the ad. Funny how that happens.

Design and Crowdsourcing

2010-12-29T21:50:00.000-08:00

I am going to be turning 30 in a few months. I only mention this as a point of reference, you see I got my first art/drawing program for a computer when I was 4. My first copy of adobe photoshop (3.0 in case you are curious) came around when I was 13. I designed my own wallpaper, tweaked photos, played with effects etc. for several years and then designed my first website with it when I was 17. So when I was in college an opportunity arose to do an internship with a magazine designing full color high resolution ads using photoshop. They were looking for someone who was skilled with photoshop and would work for next to nothing. By then we were using photoshop 7.0, and it was a very exciting opportunity for me.

So of course I did it. Turned out to be the best and worst job I ever had. It was so awesome to see your own work in print especially when I got to design full page ads with beautiful photographs. Of course sometimes it was infuriating, frustrating, pull your hair out, eat your time up till you have none and no money to show for it kind of work.

For example occasionally we had to beg clients to send us their material for their ads and when they did, it would be utterly unusable garbage. Then we would beg some more. Occasionally after all that the client would insist we use what they sent us because it worked perfectly well for "such in such" publication.

What do you do when you have unusable source material for photoshop, and they actually want real photos in their work. There are several options:

1. render something that looks kind of like what they are looking for.

2. Use a stock photo of a similar item.

3. Make an ad for them using their low resolution poorly scanned/printed photos and then compare that ad to one we made for another client... one who perhaps had allowed us to do a photo shoot (at no extra charge) for them to show off their store/product/food/service etc.

In case you are wondering we usually picked option number 3. Option number 3 entailed someone doing the best they possibly could to make a nice design, that they knew would not likely come out very good, and would most likely not get used. Who might you pick for such a frustrating job... how about your low-paid intern who is there seventy hours a week... I always took it as a challenge... "Well I can make this look good... just wait... you won't be scheduling that photo shoot after all!"

I changed my tune on this when a client decided to email us scanned images from a previous print ad in very low resolution. They were tiny for web images and you could still see the dots from its previous printing...

But that wasn't even close to the most frustrating thing we had to deal with. For the first couple weeks of our working month we would sit for hours with nothing to do. We filled this time learning new photoshop techniques, downloading new fonts, doing yoga, adjusting our massive back-stock of images we hadn't used, and going for long lunches. Later in the month when we got within about 10 days of our "send off to print" day, suddenly we would be slammed with 10 hours of work a day. All the clients we had been begging for material for weeks suddenly decided they had time to send it to us, or risk losing the money they spent on a placer ad or a previously run ad.

That's when all of a sudden you had an extra couple hours of work to do because... "I like this photo because my hair is hanging this way, but not this other one, but I like her smile in that one is their some way you could merge the two?" or "We decided not to use the hand model because the owner wanted to have her own hand in the shot but now she thinks her hand looks too old... I told her you could just "photo-shop-it."

Really? I get to do at least an extra hour of boring monotonous work in spite of the fact that the model was present all because the "owner" wanted to stroke her own ego by having her own hand in the shot... and is too vain to let us use it as is... really?!

And then there was the fact that occasionally our boss would come in, lean over our shoulder, and start "tweaking" our design for us... move the text that way... now make it yellow instead...

We always changed it back when he did that but he often managed to waste an hour of our time pretending like he had some editorial control in the design... which he didn't (we had an editor-in-chief, and a managing editor who filled those roles just fine and never felt the need to back seat drive our designs... the "boss" was the owner). Occasionally we had to let him feel like he was in charge, but generally he was focused on buying new bathroom fixtures for the office and eating lunch with prominent clients etc.

Our "boss" was continuously getting us into trouble by making stupid promises to clients. Once he told a client who was advertising a cookbook with us that we were "renovating our kitchen at the office" and when it was done we would cook one of their recipes, and do a photo shoot of it in our beautiful, newly renovated kitchen.

The problem was that our "kitchen" was a fridge, counter, and sink squeezed into what looked like a closet with shop lights over it and bland grey office-style carpet... in other words a very sparse break room that didn't even have chairs. The other problem: we weren't renovating it.

So when this gigantic lie got exposed, we were asked to go home and cook one of the more photogenic dishes in the book. This of course was right in the middle of print week, when we were all there from 7am to 9pm every day. I said "no" along with everyone else. So the "boss" decided he would do a photo shoot of a microwave pot pie... really... a microwave pot pie broken up and put in a nice bowl.

When our editor-in-chief saw the photos he called up the client, explained the situation, and profusely apologized. I think they ultimately got their ad for free that month.

The real frustration came when you spent hours designing an amazing, beautiful, breath-taking ad that you knew would win you amazing awards if people could just see it... and the client didn't like it.

Obviously this is pretty common and to be expected in the design universe. Sometimes your vision, and the clients wants/needs just do not match up. We honestly did not take it personally... except when they decided to "fix" the problem by suggesting a few revisions.

That is when the hair ripping starts occurring.

Imagine for example that you are making a full page ad for a upscale salon who never provides any photos and asks for a valentine's day ad. So you make a beautiful ad with a rose watermark and a stark red/black divide down the page. The black was to heighten the contrast of the red which is where the rose blooms were concentrated.

But, oops you forgot that the client is sitting right next to a university whose colors are red and black, and they did not see your ad as "valentine's themed" but university-color-themed. Ouch. No harm... we'll scrap that ad and try something else... but no... instead... the client says... well it would be fine if you just changed the colors... I like lilac and sage.

I protested... I fought... I argued... I still ended up with an atrociously ugly full page ad that I get credit for designing. The client approved it when all was said and done... lilac over rose blooms that you can barely see with a green so soft no real contrast was possible... no sense of valentines... nothing that said anything about the store... and on top of that the only color that worked on top of all of that for the font was yellow... It was so ugly.

I insisted on designing a different ad the following month, and the client did not protest. I asked her later why she approved the previous ad. She said the only thing she liked about it was "the color," but she was too busy to worry about revisions.

So sometimes a client tweaking a design here or there is fabulous. If all we have to do is change a font and it is perfect that would save us hours of work. On the other hand sometimes a little tweaking leads to designers disowning the work, sometimes even refusing to do it.

What was nice was that you were a part of a design team, and while we didn't do every design as a team, often the work was making small revisions to previous ads that others had done.

We would get instructions like "take this ad from last month and drop this photo into it." Move the text if necessary to make it fit.

Of course the original designer was always welcome to take the work but usually they were happy to hand off that kind of work to someone else so that they could work on new designs.

What was nice about this? Sometimes you effectively did a whole new design in a matter of minutes, especially if the ad was mostly photograph. You didn't have to spend hours "cleaning-up their logo," entering all their info again, building new graphics, or even rebuilding a previous design or logo. Basically all the grunt work was already done. You only had to color adjust the photos, reposition/resize them, move the logo and text to a sensible position... and wa-la.

Since we had a tight-knit design team this was never a problem. Everyone benefited from everyone else's work when it was done well. Likewise if you made a mess or edited a photo wrong (as I accidentally did once in my first week), then a small revision can turn into completely redoing an ad. (I got called at home at around 10pm with "what did you do to this image file?!" oops).

I told this story purely as exposition to make a point which will have to be in my next post. I have now participated in almost 3 dozen "design contests" over at a certain crowd-sourcing site and my opinion of the process has become pretty firm.

I love doing freelance design work as I decided to start my own business in a completely different field, mostly because I was tired of sitting behind a computer all day. So why not get involved with a few design competitions?

The argument is often made that participating in these "contests" is "slapping other designers in the face."

I completely disagree with that. You aren't slapping the "pros" in the face, you aren't distorting the marketplace, and if other designers can't compete it is because they are not bothering to educate their clients and the public about what makes professional design superior to amateur design which is decidedly what these sites are.

You are however deciding to slap your own face by participating in these contests. From someone who worked as an intern working 70 hours a week for less than minimum wage. I can tell you, I felt like a queen at that job by comparison. I don't buy the market saturation, devaluation argument. Mainly because I have seen that same argument in massage and more often than not massage-in-a-box usually expands the market by introducing more of the public to the benefits of massage.

A small percentage of those (I am going to say small because I am being optimistic) will of course have a bad experience, and be turned off from massage. But more people will be interested in spending money on quality, knowledgeable therapists, once they discover how beneficial massage can be.

I think some people need a little coaxing to spend money on someone else doing design work for them and lowering the barrier to entry is usually a good thing... provided they realize that it is not actually "professional" work, but skilled (sometimes unskilled) amateur work.

For the designers though, if you are trying out the contests I cannot emphasize this enough... real design businesses, even the most insane, poorly paid situations are not like these contests.

More to come in part II.

Rendition is BullShit!

2010-06-05T12:03:00.000-07:00

So I'm a little irritated... We were sent this "rendition" form from our local government to fill out for our business. The premise being that we owed them taxes on OUR business property... Bullshit if I ever heard it... however imagining governmental goons knocking at my door and causing infinite red tape hassling I figured we might as well fill out the form especially since we had very little actual business assets.

So the form was pretty straight forward list items your business owns (assets) and your approximate valuation. We (being apparently very gullible) listed all our major business assets and an approximate value to the best accuracy we could based upon what we had spent originally and what state the stuff was in now. We came up with about $400 dollars worth of stuff. Then we send in our form.

Meanwhile the local bureaucrats take this form and send us one back informing us that our business assets have been "appraised" at $1600 dollars. I use the term "appraised" lightly because these goons never once even asked to look at the items in question... What does that mean?

It means the whole initial form was nothing but a con-game. It wasn't about us giving an accurate representation of our business assets and their valuation, it was about us giving a list to the local goons of what they could tax. Once they had that list they made up their own valuation of the items and informed us of what they were worth and how much we "owed" them.

The new form they sent us included instruction in how to "contest" the "appraisal." Once again utter bullshit. By "contest" they mean if I have a problem with their massive over-valuation of my assets, they will schedule a hearing and I can try and prove that the government's completely invented appraisal was incorrect.

So I can dredge out years old receipts, take photos of the wear and tear on my items. Try to prove that they have exceeded even the brand new, retail value of the items or I can pay my bill which amounts to about $43 dollars.

F'in Muther f"n @#$%^%#^%^@&@$&%&@#@$ scam-ass goon con-men.

That is what they are banking on. The idea that my time is worth enough that I would rather pay their B.S. fee than make a big stink to go through the process of contesting their so-called "appraisal."

I have to prove my items aren't worth an appraisal amount of an official government appraiser when everyone involved knows damn-well that no real appraisal was EVER actually done!!!! That is the last time I try to be a good citizen and give an accurate accounting of my assets to a government entity. This city is supposed to be business friendly well @#$$ that. Whoever heard of taxing business assets. I mean if you are a big store with lots of inventory you would be forking out thousands of dollars to these people for the privilege of owning goods you later intend to sell.

I can just imagine this bureaucrat "appraiser" sitting in their office. "All you have to do is take the value they entered for their items, multiply it by four and enter that as the appraisal value. Then calculate their taxes based upon the new figure."

The Good

2010-03-27T00:18:00.001-07:00

As you may have noticed from previous posts I consider the ultimate standard of good and evil to be human life. In the case of personal ethics that would be one's own life. If I value my own life I must then see as good those things which would help to protect and preserve my life. The bad is that which would destroy or be destructive to my life.

But this is a simplified definition. A starting point on which to build and not a catch-all end-all definition.

For example I must first recognize that humans are a social species and that being able to live in peace with other humans is a good thing. That is to say that most of our lives would be severely deprived without other humans. Some people even go insane without other humans. There are always exceptions but by and large being able to live as a part of society is good.

If I want to live in peace with other humans it can therefore only be okay to kill other humans in very extreme and unique circumstances. The main possible circumstance being when another person is about to kill you and the only way to stop them is by killing them.

The other important thing to consider is one's own mortality. Since I cannot live forever do I consider it important to leave some sort of legacy? In my own personal case I believe having children so that I can at least have some genetic contribution to the future is incredibly important. But it is also important because I believe our children will carry some part of ourselves into the future and into future generations. Beyond that children make us value our own lives more. They bring joy to the present, and help us to rediscover joy and delight in the little things we take for granted.

Thus because I value myself, I value my children. Because I value myself, I value other people. Because I value myself, I value my family. Because I value myself, I value human life. All of these contribute both to my own well being and to the future of humanity. Thus we must have some way to choose between these values.

For example I would not sacrifice my children to myself, but I would also not sacrifice myself to a member of my family simply because they were a blood relative. I believe I would sacrifice myself for the lives of my children if I believed it were necessary to do so. But I would try to find an alternative first. My standard is thus: if choosing between a future well being and a present one I must prioritize the future.

My children are my future in many ways so in most circumstances I would prioritize their well being over my own, if and only if I had to choose between the two. What I mean is that I do not consider the two to be mutually exclusive, and thus I expect it would be rare case in which I had to chose between the two.

Finally whether I would sacrifice my life to save the life of someone who is not a member of my immediate family would depend entirely on the circumstance. For example if it were a situation in which I would have to choose between the destruction of myself or all of humanity certainly I would choose to save humanity. This is because living without the whole rest of humanity would really suck, and I don't suspect I would last long regardless.

However if sacrificing my life would mean everyone in the world became a thousand dollars richer I would gladly say, "Too bad So sad, you'll have to get by with what you currently have."

I dispute the idea therefore that egoism must be some sort of monomaniacal system that cannot value other human beings and could never involve trading one's own life to save others.

Rational self-interest does not equal instant self gratification. There is no reason to assume it means sacrificing others to oneself or even sacrificing long term interests to short term ones. On the contrary as a rationally self-interested person who holds her life as her highest value I must consider how terrible my life would become without other humans, and how valueless it would become without a future.

The Evil Self-Sacrifice Paradigm

2010-03-26T18:57:00.000-07:00

I think most people are not likely accustomed to seeing the terms "evil" and "self-sacrifice" in the same sentence much less in the same title, so I would like to say first that I do not put the two terms together lightly. That is I have strong reasons for using the two terms together and the point of this post is to explain that.

We are generally taught that self-sacrifice is a good thing. It is generally considered to be a standard of morality and an underlying basis of moral and ethical thought. The trouble is that sacrificing a person regardless of whether or not that person is yourself cannot be a stand alone good thing. That is to say that if it is ever a good thing it would take a unique context, and unique reasons for it to be so.

If I were to sacrifice another human for my own benefit for example most people would see that as inherently evil particularly without some context that could lend it some other meaning. If that situation were killing someone who was an imminent risk and explicit threat to my family we would not necessarily define the action as "evil." In fact most people would probably not call it "sacrifice."

Sacrifice is supposed to be a term with religious and/or sacred undertones. In the context of killing we generally mean it refer to some sort of ritualized and/or religious ceremony with the ultimate goal of bringing some believed benefit to the greater community. Human sacrifice is thus something we generally see as archaic. The idea of sacrificing a member of our community or family (perhaps even an enemy) to honor some perceived deity is something we now view as barbaric and superstitious.

So why does the word "sacrifice" become a perceived good or virtue when applied to the self? If we are still discussing sacrifice at the level of killing we would thus be talking about suicide. Is it good to commit suicide for the benefit of a community, society, or even our family? Certainly we can all develop situations and contexts in which it might make some sense, but the bigger the perceived beneficiary population the more the act starts to blend into the realm of ritual human sacrifice.

For example if you sacrifice yourself because you believe it will save your town from dying from a disease how is this different from those who would sacrifice themselves because they believed their death would insure a good harvest for their community. These people believe they would be saving others in their community from the starvation that would occur after a poor harvest.

Perhaps it is because our understanding of disease is better founded than our ancestors understanding of how plants grow, but might future generations look at this as a needless death brought on by ignorance?

My main point is that what we generally call self sacrifice is the things we do for the benefit of our loved ones and family at some cost to ourselves. I submit that these things are not in reality "self sacrifice" but are actually prioritizing our needs and wants in such a way as to benefit those other people we value the most. That might be our friends, family, or neighbors. If I decided to stop pursuing some cherished hobby, so that I might spend more time with my children for example, I could potentially call that a "sacrifice."

But if I would rather spend time with my children than pursue said hobby then it isn't really a "sacrifice" at all. In reality the only reason to phrase it as such is due to the perceived virtue of the term "self-sacrifice." But if that term does not always create good results why use it at all.

Imagine instead someone who "sacrificed" a loved hobby to benefit their children because they believed "self-sacrifice" was virtuous, however they did not feel love or affection toward their children. In the end this act of "sacrifice" would not add to that which they valued but instead create resentment in the person. I'm not saying they should not take the action, merely that if the action was unnecessary it cannot be made a morally good action simply be it being an act of sacrifice. Instead the action would be detrimental to the person making the sacrifice and create undeserved negative emotions in the person towards their children.

If someone were constantly mean to you, called you horrible names, never listened, couldn't be bothered to help when you were in trouble, wouldn't even listen without verbally smacking you down etc., would it matter to you how many "sacrifices they had made" on your behalf?

Having lived with several such people, I object to the term "self sacrifice." Sacrifice is not a virtue in and of itself and I believe the times when it could be considered a virtue are times when it would be better described as some other quality. When I am generous I do so when I see a benefit to myself and/or my family and/or my community. I do so with self-interest and only when I understand what the gain is and truly believe that that gain will ultimately be achieved.

I do not give just to give. I do not sacrifice just to sacrifice. There are too many organizations and people out there that exist just to be the recipients of other's perceived need to "give back" or to be "altruistic."

Why for example would anyone donate to a charity that pays their top administrator 900,000 dollars per year? Surely a more thorough search would reveal someone with the same talents who would work for a fraction of that price.

Why would anyone donate to a charity that spent 60% or more of their donations on administration and organizing more fundraising events? Surely a little more work on streamlining and efficiency would yield a more cost effective means to run the organization.

The "why" is because we give blindly. We believe altruism is good, so all we have to do is donate. Then we can describe ourselves as "givers" or "altruists." We have done our part and who can complain if it was to a poorly run charity?

I say that "I give" because I believe there is value in helping those who have been struck by natural disaster or disease. The value comes not only from the valuation I have for my fellow human beings, but also because I want people to be generous with me when my family and community face a disaster. As such I consider it unconscionable for my donated money to be eaten up by administrative costs, or for it to be used to pay some big name administrator.

When I choose between my various options and decide to do what would most benefit my family, even though there may have been some option more beneficial to me exclusively. I do so because I value my family, and not because I value sacrifice or perceive sacrifice to be a good. My family is an important part of my world, my identity, and ultimately my values. They are as much a part of my self as my body is, so why would I call it self sacrifice to choose to benefit them over the immediate needs/wants of my own person?

As such I do not see the point of using the terms "altruism" or "self-sacrifice." They seem to be terms bandied about by people who do not value those they are giving to, but have adopted the belief that giving is somehow a self-justifying action. I have however seen the evil created by those who used these terms without understanding them or with the goal of solidifying power and controlling those beneath them.

Ethics & Virtue

2010-03-22T11:48:00.000-07:00

So, it occurs to me one day that almost all complex activities have some sort of purpose to them. Most of what we do could be considered a "complex activity." Thus if the previous statement is true, then it follows that most of what we do has some sort of purpose to it.

I'm not interested in debating the merits of whether or not activities should have purpose. I am operating on the presumption that almost all of them do even if that purpose is unstated or unknown. So, if almost all human activities have a purpose, it follows that in the context of that activity some actions would help to achieve that purpose and some actions could undermine that purpose.

For example, if my purpose is to make a tasty dinner and I burn the rice I am cooking for that purpose, I undermine that purpose. I haven't made the purpose unattainable by any means. I simply have failed to achieve it with the activity I had chosen to achieve it with. Thus, I must try again or try something different if I intend to achieve that goal.

This is all pretty basic, I think. That is why it may surprise you that I think this concept should be the underpinning of all ethics. I don't mean just the personal ethics, either. Of course, it is too broad to be the entire field by itself, but I think it is a meaningful start.

Ethics, from this perspective, is easy to imagine in the context of any major sport. Let's take football as an example, and I mean the glorious American variety of football. All football fans know that a poor "official" can ruin a game. Last year, this happened two consecutive weekends in the SEC. Both games, I happened to be watching and both times the winning team got a last minute advantage due to a bad call that ultimately led to comebacks in the last seconds of the game. Afterwards, it was revealed that the same officiating team had been at both games and the team got suspended pending an investigation.

So, the problem is simple. We, as fans, do not want to see a game determined by the officials intentionally or otherwise. We want the officials there to make sure rules are followed, and that the game remains as safe as possible for all those involved.

In this case, a somewhat overzealous official was causing most of the problem by not giving players the benefit of the doubt when he thought something might have happened that upon further review did not happen.

The point of the game (other than entertaining the public) is to determine which team is better. This will presumably be determined by winning the game. That superiority might come due to superior strategy, superior athleticism, a more creative quarterback, a stronger defense, a better passing game etc. We watch the game to see how these different elements interplay and ultimately to see which team can strategically take advantage of a strength of their own or a weakness of their opposition to come out on top. A bad official can instantly undermine this process which is why it is important for officials to be knowledgeable of the rules, competent in making calls, and committed to protecting that ultimate purpose we call the Spirit of the Game.

Thus, with a simple analysis, I have the beginnings of a set of ethics for football officials. We need merely look at what actions would undermine the purpose/spirit of the game and what actions would help to protect it.

This concept becomes particularly important in my own ethos when discussing Virtue.

Virtues, in my opinion, are qualities we seek to have because they lead to the attainment of our values. However, they cannot be practiced as floating abstractions. Every virtue must have a purpose and a context in which it would make sense to have that quality. For example generosity is not a quality I would want to have if everything I "generously gave" would be used against me or toward my destruction in some way. I wouldn't be generously sharing information with someone whom I knew wanted to destroy me even if I saw generosity as a virtue. So, we must ask not only what is the purpose of a specific virtue, but also if that virtue can even meaningfully be practiced in a given context.

This particular subject fascinates me due to one specific virtue: faith.

As an atheist living in an area where there are a great many christians, I encounter this term often. So, it shocks me how few people seem to truly understand it. First of all, I would like to say that there are some contexts that I think "faith" can be a meaningful concept and perhaps even a virtue for atheists. However, I would first like to analyze the christian usage.

Faith is a virtue perceived to be an absolute necessity for belief and obedience to God. I define it as a very deep variety of trust. To have faith in God is to trust that even if you do not personally understand why something is happening there is some ultimate reason which will result in things turning out for the best. It is to trust even without evidence that there is a loving God and that he personally cares about you.

What amazes me is how few "believers" who profess deep faith truly understand what it means or more importantly what could ultimately undermine it. Since faith has so much in common with trust I would like to use trust as an example here.

Once, I had a friend tell me that if he were able to put a computer chip in his teenage daughter's head it would increase his trust in her, because he would never have to worry about where she was at. He would know that she would know that at any given moment he could determine her location and thus she would be unlikely to ever lie about it or not be where she was supposed to be.

What's the problem with that? The problem is that in that situation you have not "improved trust" but simply removed the need to trust. If trust were a muscle, you would be choosing to let it atrophy. The parent that trusts their kid is the one that rarely checks up on them. They trust that their kid is either where they said they would be or that they have a very good reason to be somewhere else. Maybe they are wrong and most teenagers will likely violate their parents trust at some time or another. There are likely many teenagers who should not be trusted that strongly, but it still follows that trust tends to involve belief without knowledge but in a good way.

I don't have to check up on her, because I know she is a good kid. I know she will be where she is supposed to be. If you constantly checked up on a kid that you claimed to trust, they would immediately begin to think you did not trust them, and indeed displaying a lack of trust tends to undermine trust.

So back to faith. If you truly have "faith" in the existence of God, it follows that you would not spend hours and hours looking for proof that God exists. If you have faith that your version and interpretation of "creation" is correct, it follows that you would not spend time trying to prove your version correct or other versions incorrect. If faith is, as I interpret it, a form of deep trust, then you cannot have faith while simultaneously searching for validation of your faith.

Definitive and convincing proof of whatever you happen to have faith in would take away the need to have faith. It would not as most people believe, strengthen it. Searching for evidence of God's existence is the moral equivalent of constantly checking up on the teenage daughter. You are not improving your faith by doing it, but rather, you are displaying your lack of faith. Now maybe your God doesn't warrant faith, just as some teenagers do not yet warrant trust.

Faith is not necessarily always a virtue anymore than trust would always make sense in every context.

I am going to stop here, because this got a little long but part II will be a discussion of other virtues and what actions I believe could ultimately undermine them.

The Golden Rule

2010-03-15T01:01:00.000-07:00

This post will be a little bit of a tangent from my previous post but it speaks to a very deeply held ethos of mine.

It is based upon the idea of the "golden rule."

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Yeah I know it's still as trite as it always was. This particular rule seems to be used most often by parents trying to convince their kids to be nice to someone they do not like. I suppose it applies there, but I consider that a very shallow reading of it.

What I believe is that if I want other people to act a certain way I have to at least be able to function that way myself. Also if I want some something to be there for me I should be willing to put that some something out there for someone else.

What does this mean?

If for example I was struck by a catastrophic event like a natural disaster, I would personally want there to be ample shelter, food, blankets, and clothing for myself and my family. There is only so much of that I can have on my own, or prepare for in advance. I would also want there to be plenty of people helping me to rebuild.

What does that mean from the perspective of the golden rule? It means I have to be willing to be the "giver" even if I do not ultimately "get" in return. I have to be the person willing to go help rebuild, or at least contribute financially if I can to the rebuilding. I have to be the person willing to donate the food, water, clothing, or shelter.

Now this doesn't mean I am going to spring into action at every catastrophe or donate money even when it hurts me to do so. It just means I keep a look out for those opportunities that I can contribute. I want for our society to continue to be a generous one, because I think that generosity could ultimately be a life saver for someone I know and care about. Thus I intend to be a contributor to that generosity even if I do not get an immediate return for my effort.

The rule applies in a lot of other areas as well. I often find myself thinking about "how would I feel if I were in that situation." One of the things that breaks my heart is hearing about people who are suffering from terminal illnesses getting discriminated against because other people are afraid of them. I have encountered cancer patients who had trouble getting professional massage therapy even though we have known for many years that it is safe to massage clients who have cancer.

I have heard many stories of people with aids being mistreated because others were afraid of becoming infected -as if serving someone a cup of coffee could somehow infect you. That is another place where the "how would I want to be treated comes into play."

It has led to me having much greater compassion for people undergoing medical treatment or simply undergoing a difficult time in their life. Forgiveness comes a little easier when you imagine that that guy who just cut you off might have a sick kid in his car, or be rushing home to a wife in labor.

It is also one of the reasons I feel it is important to be respectful of religious differences, and this is the area where my efforts are the least reciprocated. I want other people to be respectful of my religious beliefs even if they wholeheartedly disagree, so I make an effort to be respectful of their beliefs -and believe me it can be a difficult sea to navigate sometimes.

I have been put on the spot many times about my beliefs by those who wanted me to echo their own. Many people do not realize that trying to convert someone of a different faith to your own is not really respectful of their beliefs, and in the case of atheism most people assume I have no beliefs and therefore it must be open season.

The golden rule teaches me to be patient with nonviolent people as much as my brain can manage it. So basically if you want the world to be a certain way, my interpretation of the "golden rule" would advise you to start planting those seeds yourself, to walk a mile in your neighbor's shoes, to give the benefit of the doubt, and to be patient with others where ever possible... and you thought you just had to be nice to the smelly kid!

My Monogamy Poem

2010-03-14T23:59:00.000-07:00

FYI: This is meant to be what I call a rhetorical poem. That is I make use of rhetorical devices and emotional language to get across the point and may have more in common with a soap box speech than a lyrical poem. Thus the "poetry" part of it comes from the fact that it is designed to be performed/shared within the context of verbally shared poetry. And I have done so on several occasions and gotten a very positive response. As such you will not get the full effect just from reading it unfortunately... :( sorries...

Monogamy is Obsolete

Our fictional standard is
relationships in TURMOIL.

Every Heroine cheats.
All Couples get divorced.

Men want STABILITY on A&E,
and women can't commit outside of
Lifetime & Seventh Heaven.

But those shows still reflect our belief
that Monogamy is somehow IDEAL.

The T.V. boyfriend says:
"I can forgive you as long as it didn't mean anything."

As if LOVE is what really makes
INFIDELITY dirty.

And the T.V. Husbands say:
"I can't stand the idea of another man inside of her."

Because nothing can
render a woman WORTHLESS like
another man's sperm.

And maybe that's it.
Maybe our whole attachment to MONOGAMY
comes down to our own revulsion
of bodily fluids...

To chemical markers
pheromones marking TERRITORY, PROPERTY

There's something to be said for
COMMITMENT,

But if the ultimate threat to MARRIAGE
is loving anyone else...

If my commitment is
"love you first and forsake all other loves that should arise..."

If it is to deny my future SOUL
for the sake of the present one,

Then haven't we turned our love into a
STATIC ILLUSION?

Haven't we tried to freeze a moment in time,
when our love was perfect?

Daring the universe to laugh at us?

Have we really committed to each other
via monogamy or simply
erected a wall against CHANGE?

I know I can love others because
I LOVE YOU so deeply.

I know I would not want to
live on this EARTH
if there was no one else
in the world
with at least a fraction of
your BEAUTY.

And I don't think this world
would be so TERRIBLE
if you could find someone
out there just half as SWEET
as I am.

Morals Vs. Ethics

2010-03-14T22:21:00.000-07:00

So I am actually going to throw out some of the standard definitions of these two terms, and by throw out I mean get rid of. I am doing that because it seems that even the "official" definitions of these are vague, interchangeable, and tend to be contradictory. For example from thefreedictionary.com:

eth·ic (thk)
n.
1.
a. A set of principles of right conduct.
b. A theory or a system of moral values: "An ethic of service is at war with a craving for gain" (Gregg Easterbrook).
2. ethics (used with a sing. verb) The study of the general nature of morals and of the specific moral choices to be made by a person; moral philosophy.
3. ethics (used with a sing. or pl. verb) The rules or standards governing the conduct of a person or the members of a profession: medical ethics.

mo·ral·i·ty (m-rl-t, mô-)
n. pl. mo·ral·i·ties
1. The quality of being in accord with standards of right or good conduct.
2. A system of ideas of right and wrong conduct: religious morality; Christian morality.
3. Virtuous conduct.
4. A rule or lesson in moral conduct

You see a little vague, a little interchangeable. The main difference you can see is that ethics appears to be about studying morality, but both morality and ethics are about rules of "right conduct", "right and wrong," and both terms can be used when discussing the formation of a "moral code."

Many interpret ethics as the abstract version, like the umbrella under which morality is only a part. So when discussing what a moral code should accomplish or what it should be for we turn to ethics. Or if we wish to study and compare different moral codes. The problem is ethical code and moral code are too often used interchangeably. It seems to be that people adopt one term or the other based upon which word they are more comfortable with. Are you an Ethical person or a Moral person?

I think the abstract category of ethics as a part of philosophy still has its place but I would like to utilize a more concrete variety of the term. So when I am using the term ethics in this discussion I am mainly using it to talk about personal ethics and a personal ethical code. Yes "ethics" is still a branch of philosophy under which morality could fit but I am not meaning to discuss the broader meaning and usage right here.

I see morals as being derived from the term "mores." As in social mores...

From wikipedia.com:

Mores (English pronunciation: /ˈmɔəreɪz/ or /ˈmɔəriːz/, singular mos) is the Latin term for societal norms, customs, virtues or values. Mores derive from the established practices of a society rather than its written laws. They consist of shared understandings about the kinds of behavior likely to evoke approval, disapproval, toleration or sanction, within particular contexts.

It seems "morality" is almost always used in the context of mores even when not intended. When people assume someone is immoral because they are atheist they often explain this by saying that morals necessarily come from God. However we function within a society in which most rules of conduct particularly the ones we describe as "ethics" clearly do not come from religious belief. How we behave in certain company, what ethical standards we practice in any given profession, our rules of decorum in certain environments (courthouses, libraries, classrooms etc.) have little to do with a belief in God.

So we go through most of our days regularly interacting in environments with specific rules of right and wrong conduct without any reference to deity or religion. So why would a person with a strong religious belief in God almost universally assume that an atheist is immoral, unless they are instead reacting to what they perceive as a deep societal norm -specifically the belief in God? If morality is more about societal beliefs, practices, and expectations then it makes sense to see someone who does not fit the mold as "immoral." I am not saying that the person is immoral or necessarily bad or evil just that it would make sense for those whose moral code comes more from social expectations and customs to see it that way.

The perceived "immorality" does not come from a violation of a code of conduct or the lack of a code of conduct but from violating a more, in this case the belief in a theistic god.

The same could be applied in a nonreligious context: when we are offended by someone who drives recklessly or is noisy in the library. "Rude and inconsiderate" become the equivalent labels of the more religiously charged term "immoral."

I am saying all this not to agree or disagree with the common usage of the term but to make an argument for the idea that "morality," while certainly not the same thing as "mores," has a social component, and most of us do in fact treat it that way. Which is why for my derivation of ethics I am categorizing qualities that I think should fall under personal code of conduct under "ethics" and those that necessitate a social context under "morality."

Consider it as societal virtues/vices vs individual virtues/vices. I will not be discussing the use of force and fraud in so far as it pertains to crime.

Example: Honor, Duty, Loyalty = Moral virtues.

Productivity, Integrity, Honesty (particularly with one's self) = personal ethical virtues.

Ethos (pronounced /ˈiːθɒs/) (ἦθος, ἔθος, plurals: ethe (ἤθη), ethea (ἤθεα)) is a Greek word originally meaning "accustomed place" (as in ἤθεα ἵππων "the habitat of horses", Iliad 6.511), "custom, habit", equivalent to Latin mores.
Ethos forms the root of ethikos (ἠθικός), meaning "moral, showing moral character". To the Greeks ancient and modern, the meaning is simply "the state of being", the inner source, the soul, the mind, and the original essence, that shapes and forms a person or animal[1]. Late Latin borrowed it as ethicus, the feminine of which (ethica, for ἠθική φιλοσοφία "moral philosophy") is the origin of the modern English word ethics.

So now we see the real difference... one term is Greek and the other one is Latin!

I am using ethics to refer to personal codes of conduct because the term "ethos" does seem to speak to a person's nature on a deep level. I believe that personal ethics have to evolve based upon the person and situation. I am not meaning to say that they are relativistic or subjective just that they are necessarily contextual.

One action that may be destructive for me may not be destructive for you. An action that may prove to strengthen your character and your well being and thus be virtuous in a personal sense could be a destructive action to someone else.

The objectivity comes more in the values that one is endeavoring to preserve or create with their ethical code. For example if the ultimate value is one's own life, then drinking wine to the point of death could be seen almost universally as an act of vice. However whether the consumption of 5 glasses of wine is a vice depends on the individual person and the ultimate effect the act has on their life.

My Ethics

2010-03-14T21:11:00.000-07:00

This is a kind of outline of what I consider to be my ethics. It is still evolving and thus I consider this to be a "rough draft" of sorts.

I. Morals Vs. Ethics

II. The Golden Rule

III. Humans First

IV. One life to live