Dance Church as a religion substitute

Hard-core atheists often forget that religion provides people with lots of warm fuzzy things that make them happier.  (Religious people are happier than atheists... Seligman and other psych people have shown this).  They're great at poking fun at the inconsistencies in the Bible and showing how religion has been used to justify various unspeakable evils, but if they want to win over the believers to their side, they need to offer the good things that religion offers.

In my opinion, these things are:
1. A sense of purpose in the world and answers to the big questions in life.
2. A community of friendly, caring, like-minded people.
3. A chance to connect with a greater whole... a shared consciousness.

Dance Church attempts to address (2) and (3).  Dance Church occurs on Sunday mornings and is a space where people of all ages gather to listen to entrancing dance music and move together to it.   D and I went to it for the first time today.  It was a lovely way to start the day, and it left us physically tired but emotionally energized.  We'll likely go again in the future, so you local folks should join us. :-)

PS... as for satisfying (1), science does that job rather well for me.  I think it could do the job well for most people if presented in an engaging fashion.  Although he was before my time so I didn't experience him directly, Carl Sagan was in a way a televangelist for science, tantalizing us with the wonders of the universe.   

Thinking inside the box

My new place needs some love to turn it into a proper home.  The kitchen has almost no cabinets for storing food and kitchenware, but it does have a gargantuan fridge that I have all to myself.  I don't know why it took me almost a week to realize the perfect solution -- just use the fridge as additional storage space!  Would there be any harm in storing most dry foods at fridge temperatures?  If not I'll just start putting bowls and plates in there.

Longer term I should get a kitchen cabinet. :-)

 

Dear City of Oakland Police Department (a rant)

I know your budget is tight and that you're almost out of cash.

However, I object to your taxation plan on a number of fronts.  The area east of the bay bridge looks and feels like a normal highway.  People drive on it like it's a normal highway, going 65-70mph.  That's the speed of traffic -- a consensus arrived at by the various drivers on the road based on the conditions and appearance of the road, and the safest speed to drive.  However, by marking it with the same speed limit as the bridge itself (50), and then pulling people over when they are just going the same speed as the other cars, you're doing a number of things:

1. Preventing cops from doing real work.  I heard Oakland has a crime problem.  My girlfriend who lives there tells me that your city is in the second percentile across the state in terms of safety.  Training officers is expensive.  Police cars are expensive.  Why not put my tax dollars to real use?  

2. Collecting taxes in a horribly inefficient, economically regressive, and random sort of way.  Suppose the IRS collected its taxes this way.  Citizens wouldn't pay taxes, but undercover IRS agents would occasionally and randomly tap them on the shoulder while they're out buying groceries and tell them "It's time for you to pay", at which point they'd have to fork over thousands of dollars or face additional fines.  Some people would never get tapped, while others would get tapped every few months.  The frequency would depend on how often they shopped for groceries and if they knew which grocery stores the IRS liked to haunt.  Furthermore, the frequency would not depend on the person's income, so poor people would end up paying a disproportionate share of the taxes.

3.  Damaging your reputation.  This is a branding issue.  How do you want to be perceived by citizens of Oakland and the surrounding areas? Do you want to be seen as just and effective, or do you want to be seen as a Mafia-style organizations wanting to shake down citizens for their cash by tricking them into breaking the law?  Imagine that the City of Oakland offered a public services product that's so effective that people wanted more.  Imagine them collectively wanting to pay more taxes because they like your product so much they want to upgrade.  Sound crazy?  It happens all the time in the business world.  You may be a local monopoly but you still have competitors... people will choose to live in one city or another based on the amenities it offers.  Right now your reputation could use some work.

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Since I'm solutions-oriented here, I'm inclined to offer some suggestions:

- Use a system of cameras for enforcement, but with humans making the final call about whether a particular action merits a violation.  This will allow for broader coverage so that the speeding tickets go to the people who are truly driving recklessly instead of having fewer points of enforcement and having cops issuing speeding tickets for more normal drivers all day to meet a quota.  Videos from these cameras (with the license plate numbers obscured) could be put online and observed by anyone, so if you are driving and some drunk nearly clips you while swerving lanes and going 95mph, you could look up the video online from when you were there and then send a petition to the police department.
 
- Speeding tickets could only be issued if the speed of an individual driver is more than 15mph over the average speed of the surrounding drivers.  If all the drivers are going a particular speed, they have reached a consensus in a rather informal fashion about what the speed of traffic should be.  It's democracy in action.  There are some issues with this, as sometimes drivers are ill-informed (think CA drivers in the rain) and they reach a solution that is not globally optimal and leads to more traffic accidents, which then makes everyone slower overall.

- Distribute for free a GPS-based warning system for all cars that indicates the current speed limit and then warns if you're going over.  Then people can't get "trapped" into speeding.  I've received four speeding tickets in my life, and only one of them was on a road where I actually knew the speed limit.  I'd probably go slower if I knew what the actual limit was.  


For now, I'm going to try out the Trapster iphone app.