4 May 2005

Volume Two

One month later, I've finally gotten around to setting up "volume two" of the "God's ex-Boyfriend" site. From now on, all new entries in this category will go there.

Debt Free

It hasn't happened quite yet, but I'm about to become debt-free again.

I've lived most of my life without carrying any signficant debt. I borrowed money the first time I bought a car, and I've had a credit card since my last semester in college, but I paid the car loan off as soon as I could, and except for several "damn, I forgot to mail the check" incidents, I've always paid off the full balance on the credit card every month. I never charge anything that I don't already have the money to pay for, or at least I know I'll have it next month when the balance on the card comes due.

That all went to hell last year. I'd been working less than full-time and had gone back to college, so every dollar coming in was being spent, and my savings balance had been shrinking steadily. Then I got laid off (again), and living on unemployment benefits for nearly a year completely emptied the savings account. I had to get a student loan and borrow money from my parents to finish that last year of school. I also did something kinda foolish. When I finally got a job offer, I bought a new computer (my first in several years) on credit, figuring I'd be able to pay it off before long. Except that job sucked, the boss was incompetent and a homophobe as well, and for my own sanity I had to take a lesser-paying job to get out of there. I like the new job, but it doesn't pay enough to easily pay off all that debt. I've been struggling a bit just to keep making the minimum payments on it.

The "good news" - really more of a silver lining - is that when my grandmother died, she left me with some money. Not a lot, but enough to pay off those debts, with a little bit left over. It'll be a few weeks for all the paperwork to happen, but then I'll be free and clear.

The leftover cash will be nice, because it means I'll be able to put enough in my bank account so that I won't have to worry about cashflow on a week-to-week basis. I know a lot of people have to live this way all the time, but I'm not used to having to juggle expenses and time purchases based on which week I get paid and what bills are due at that time of the month. Living paycheck-to-paycheck sucks.

I used to look at people who lived that way with a bit of scorn. Now having been in their shoes I'm a bit more sympathetic. But not 100%. For a lot of people it's no one's fault but their own. If they get a little extra cash, they spend it on whatever catches their eye. This time of year people across the country are getting tax refunds, and often blowing it all at once as if it were some kind of free birthday gift from the government. But it's really their own money, which the IRS has been holding for them, as if their kindly Uncle Sam were trying to get them to save. They've been too well-trained as good little consumers.

My situation has made me more sympathetic to people who get stuck in that situation because of things they had no control over. Getting laid off is just one way. Any kind of unexpected expense can do it. I've read that most people in the U.S. are just one major illness away from bankruptcy. Even if they have insurance, it probably won't cover enough of their expenses to keep them financially solvent. Of course the Republicans are currently trying to make it impossible for economic victims to declare bankruptcy, as if - like abortion as birth control - it was just being willfully abused as a way to pay off their extravagant credit card debts. More likely it's people who either got into trouble because of some personal financial disaster, or got suckered into debt by credit cards egging them on to spend beyond their means.

I've managed to avoid building up any debt on my one credit card. One month recently I did use a check which charged to my credit account, so I could pay my health insurance premium on time, and the fees and interest just for that were ridiculous. If I hadn't had the cash a few weeks later to pay it off, it just would've compounded, and I'd be stuck. They keep sending me these checks, enticing me to spend more at their obscene interest rates. My credit limit has been raised over and over, to a level that's about equal to my current after-tax income for an entire year. If I used that much credit, I would literally never be able to pay it off.

There's only one reason that I can see that I'd be willing to go back into debt for: buying a house. If not for losing my job and going back to school 8 years ago, I probably would have done that by now. But even though they're usually good, safe investments, buying a house costs an obscene amount of money, and I'm a bit debt-shy right now.

Instead I'm going to use my new-found financial freedom to relax a very little bit on buying stuff that I want, like maybe a wireless network adapter for my iBook, or a backpacking vacation up north. But I won't be making any ongoing lifestyle changes, because this isn't an ongoing income. It's a one-time thing, so I'll keep saving my pennies for a rainy day. Because if I've learned anything in life, it's that there will be rainy days.

Beef Stock

I've been seeing this guy lately. He's kinda cute, with a sort of harmless puppy-dog scruffiness to him, letting his facial hair getty prickly and letting his dirty-blond locks go a little wild. A subtle smile and totally dreamy eyes.

I first ran into him on a men-for-men dating web site. What's cool is that we seem to have a fair amount in common: he's a bit of a techie, who not only has a broadband internet connection, but he's already running his home phone on it. I'm smitten.

The bad news is that he doesn't even know I exist.

That's because I've been seeing him... in online adverts. The first one is for the gay dating site I mentioned, where he serves as bait for other lonely homos. "Next week he'll be someone else's boyfriend," the caption warns browsers such as me. The second one is for a voice-over-internet-protocol service that advertises heavily on Slashdot.org. No come-on... just eye candy.

Of course there's a chance he's unaware of either use of his likeness. He's clearly a professional model who's posed for a stock-image photographer, who then sold the rights through an agency to use pretty-boy's face in their ads. For all I know, he's straight as a jacket and married, and uses a Hotmail or Yahoo address as his only e-mail account which he logs into at the library. He's just whoring himself out, using his looks to make some cash, attracting customers he has no feelings whatsoever for. Not that there's anything ethically wrong with that, of course. It's just another form of prostitution.

On the other hand, if he's really the person he's presented to be, he's quite welcome to drop me a line.

The Irony of Product Liability

Today a co-worker sent me one of those ha-ha-snicker e-mails that get passed around the 'net like the sniffles. It was a list of warning labels and disclaimers found on various products, the point being to show how stupidly obvious some of them are. Things like a package of peanut brittle saying "contains nuts".

Of course the real purpose of these warnings is for businesses to avoid any and all legal liability, but more often they're the result of stupid executives listening to stupid/dishonest lawyers scaring them with outlandish tales of how dangerous civil courts are. After all, nobody's really that stupid... are they?

Public opinion polls - on topics like stem cell research, economics, cloning, foreign policy, and anything else that requires some critical thinking skills and general thoughtfulness - tend to indicate that, yes: many people really are that stupid. Just look at the 2004 election results.

The irony is that it's mostly the Republican party that's trying to use these examples of liability-gone-amok to loosen regulations on corporations. That's ironic because, if these warning labels disappear, the first to die will be the epsilon semi-morons who - in addition to, say, buying "peanut brittle" despite severe peanut allergies - are most likely to vote Republican. The commerce-worshipping troglodytes in Congress are working to drain and fill in the neanderthal gene pool that they depend upon to stay in office.

Which is why I've decided to fully support the removal of product liability disclaimers on packaging. Yes, we'll lose some good-hearted mentally-challenged people along the way, but in the long run the collective intelligence of the species will go up enough that the Republican party will lose its electoral power base, and we can get a little smarts percolating up into Congress and the White House.

Tourism: Economy of Last Resort

It seems like every time community leaders and government officials talk about the future of the local economy, they talk about tourism as one of its pillars. You hear it about cities and towns of every size, state after state, and even occasionally on the national level.

Around here the economy has always been based on manufacturing (furniture in this part of Michigan, cars in the southeast of the state), but as anyone who follows business news knows, those industries have been heading overseas. For a while they talked a lot about high technology as the source of new jobs, but since the dot-com bubble burst you don't hear quite so much about that.

(Not that they've stopped saying it, of course. Last year when a bunch of plant closings were putting huge numbers of people into the job market, the "experts" kept telling them to get certificate training or 2-year degrees in "high tech"... while, I - a laid off computer specialist with a 4-year-degree and oodles of experience - couldn't even find jobs to apply for. All that advice did was to take some people out of the job market for a little while and put some federal grant money into local schools; those people will be just as unemployed when they're done with school.)

So they keep coming back to tourism. It sounds attractive, because it's all about getting people from other places to come here and spend their money. When it works, it's great for the locals. Tulip Time has been an ongoing annual infusion of cash into Holland, Michigan for decades. Sure, the people who live there have to put up with busloads of (mostly) senior citizens cluttering their streets and sidewalks for a few weeks in May, but the money they spend makes it worthwhile.

But when it fails... it's a complete waste of resources. Back when Flint (the former auto manufacturing city in east Michigan, whose economic collapse was spotlighted in Michael Moore's first big film) was in freefall back in the 1980s, they tried to attract tourism with Autoworld, a big automobile-focused theme park. Disaster with a capital D. No one came.

Even when tourist attractions prove successful, that doesn't mean that they're succeeding as an economic tool. There's an article in today's Grand Rapids Press about who's dominating reservations at Michigan's state parks for the upcoming camping season: us. Michigan is supposed to be a great tourist destination, with hundreds of miles of sandy beaches, inland lakes for fishing, forests for hiking, etc. But instead of drawing Kansans, Missourians, Kentuckians, Indianers, West Virginians, Alabamers, and whatnot to the Great Lakes State to spend their disposable income, we're mostly just passing the same dollars around with our fellow Michiganders. That's no replacement for the money we're not getting from making and selling cars, office furniture, refrigerators, and so on.

If that's how well the tourism economic strategy is working for Michigan - a state that has some natural and obvious reasons for people to come here - imagine how badly it's going to fail in all the places that are trying to make up tourist attractions. More Autoworlds.

Tourism has been a great windfall for various Old World capitals, and for some Third World countries and island-states in the tropics, and it's been good for a few select parts of the United States. But it's not a cure-all for an ailing economy. When everyone's trying to use tourism as a cornerstone of their local business model, you'll just end up with a bunch of hotels that people can't afford to travel to and stay in... because no one's coming to and staying in their hotels. It's kind of like you can't build an all-service economy where everyone's trying to make a living serving food or cleaning houses... and no one can afford to pay them for it. Or an economy based on information and other intangible "products". You need people doing things that are actually productive: growing food, making things, etc.

So unless you live in the Carribean or next to a Disney park, the next time you hear someone discussing local economic strategy, and he starts by talking about tourism... be afraid for your future.

Middle-Class White Suburban Punks

There's an article in The Grand Rapids Press about some arrests today, involving a recent rash of public vandalism in several inner-city neighborhoods. You can probably picture the situation: former middle-class homes now somewhat run-down, maybe vacant... closed businesses... most of the white folks moved out a few decades ago... lots of low-income tenant and homeowners... and now the scourge of "tagging": graffiti signatures and symbols in spray paint, repeated on any blank vertical surface. There goes the neighborhood, right?

Except that it's not homies or gangbangers doing the tagging. The teenagers they arrested were white kids from the 'burbs.

They had Dutch last names (this area was settled by puritans from the Netherlands), and they were students at East Grand Rapids High School, Grand Rapids Christian High School, and Byron Center High School, so it's a pretty safe bet they're white. EGR is the traditional upper-class suburb of the area; not quite the top of the economic pyramid anymore, but still the home of moneyed powerbrokers, and the high school a powerhouse in prep-school sports like tennis, lacrosse, and golf. GR Christian is your typical Calvinist parochial school, where the Bible is considered a textbook; it's still located in the city but its students are largely white suburbanites who can afford the substantial tuition. Byron Center is the until-recently-rural suburb where a highly talented and well-liked music teacher was run out of town for having a private commitment ceremony with his male lover, died from the stress of suing to get his job back, and the school board then refused to pay up on his severance settlement on the grounds that he was dead.

Which is a long way of explaining what kind of morality these schools and these parents are teaching their children. EGR lauds hereditary capitalism and preaches against liberal social programs. GR Christian rails against evolution and other secular science. Byron Center is hysterically anti-homosexual.

But apparently none of these schools is teaching the fundamentals of respect for other people.

Furthermore, these kids seem to be getting the message - gosh, I can't imagine where - that the neighborhoods to vandalise are the ones where the residents are less white and less affluent (and middle-class white families are often all-male or all-female). They're not picking on each other, or even the middle-class Dutch or Polish neighborhoods in the city. They're coordinating these nighttime assaults on the 'hood. I can assure you they're not coming here because they're less likely to get caught; it's pretty well patrolled, certainly better than the sprawling 'burbs where GR Christian students tend to hail from, and the subdividing farmlands of Byron.

For decades, white middle-class people have been fleeing cities for the suburbs, pointing to crime rates and quality-of-life issues such as graffiti as reasons why they just aren't safe here and don't want to live here. Well evidently it isn't just the fault of the poorer brown people who've stayed; Whitey's kids are coming back to make sure the place runs down.

I just wish these kids would stick to vandalising their own neighborhoods, and keep the malaise of graffiti out of our law-abiding communities here in the city.

Wireless TV

I've decided to switch how I watch television: I'm going wireless. Now that I have a wireless phone, and I've done some consulting work for wireless networking, I've seen the light, and I'm switching my television to wireless technology.

Which is mostly just a futuristic spin to put on "I'm canceling my cable service".

I've spent most of my life without cable (or satellite) service. Of course there was the first decade and a half, before cable TV was invented (or at least before it reached my city). I had the necessary cable channels like MTV during my teen years, but not for my years in the dorm at college. I paid for cable for a few years after graduating, but when I moved into a 4th-floor-on-a-hill apartment where I got great broadcast reception, I didn't bother subscribing there. And although my current first-floor apartment doesn't get the channels quite as well, I was also a student again, with a part-time job, so I went without.

That changed last year, when - flush with a new well-paying job and frustrated at trying to pick up the low-power UPN affiliate when they moved their transmitter farther away - I finally subscribed to cable service and got wired. All I signed up for was "basic" service, which includes the must-carry channels (local broadcasters, public access), a few shopping channels, and a couple of the less glamorous "cable" channels: TBS and WGN. The filter to cut out the "standard service" channels doesn't work completely, so I could also pick up a few extra channels on the low end of the scale, including Cartoon Network, TNT, Oxygen, and ABC Family. All for only $13.64 per month.

The thing is... I've found that I don't watch much of anything on those extra channels (just the Justice League cartoon and the occasional commercial-interrupted movie), and the only show on UPN that I'd ever want to watch (Star Trek: Enterprise) is being cancelled. The other thing is... I quit that well-paying job for one I'd actually enjoy, so money's tight again. That $13.64/month would add up to over $160/year, and yeah, that would really make a difference. So I'm clipping the cable.

Instead I'm putting the rabbit ears back to work. These are somewhat better rabbit ears than we used back in the old pre-cable era; they're amplified, and do a pretty good job of picking up most of the local broadcast stations. Too bad I can't easily put a "real" antenna up on the roof; that'd be really nice.

I can't pick up the local CBS station (which actually transmits from two counties south of here) in my interior living room, however. So I've got another set of rabbit ears hooked up to my spare VCR in another room with a better southern exposure. There's only one show I watch on CBS anyway (Two and a Half Men), so I'll just set the timer and watch the tapes for that one.

I admit that I'm going to miss the clearer signal on a few of the channels. But broadcast TV still gives me at least an hour/day of decent shows to watch. (For the record, in addition to those already mentioned, that includes: Malcolm in the Middle, The Simpsons, Arrested Development, Scrubs, House, Lost, The West Wing, Smallville, Jack & Bobby, ER, and Nova.) Granted, someday when I'm old and feeble and can't motivate myself to do anything else with my time except watch TV, I might again subscribe to cable (or its future replacement) so I can sit and vegetate in front of it for hours on end. But not yet.

Amway: Cancerous or Benign?

I narrowly avoided "the invitation" again the other day. Living in West Michigan, I've received a few of them over the years, and I know what they're about, so I recognised that it was coming and managed to deflect it by explaining that I just don't have time and (lying) don't need the money, and thanking him for thinking of me.

"The invitation" is a sales pitch, to become an Amway distributor. Because Amway is based here, we probably have one of the highest distributors-per-capita ratios on the planet. That's reason enough right there for someone around here to hesitate before adding oneself to the crowded marketplace for soap and other household products. But there are more universal reasons to steer clear of Amway.

At its heart, Amway is a pyramid scheme. It doesn't violate the various federal regulations, which prohibit scams in which there is no real product or service being sold, but that doesn't mean it isn't a pyramid scheme; it just means it's a legal pyramid scheme.

Contrary to what you might think from looking at some of Amway's "double diamond" distributors, no one ever got rich selling Amway products. The only way to get rich with Amway is to sell distributorships. You sign up a few of your friends to be distributors, and you get a percentage of the profits for every item they sell... including a percentage of the profits from any distributors they sign up. That's how Rich DeVos and Jay VanAndel became billionaires: by taking a percentage of the profits from every person who ever became an Amway distributor. It's really, really good to be at the top of the pyramid.

Despite living in the heart of Amway's operations, I've never received a sales pitch from an Amway distributor to buy Amway products. Just to become a distributor. OK, that's not quite true. I have been asked to become a customer... my own customer. I was told that I could offset my losses (the cost of starting up an Amway distributorship) with the money I'd save buying household products from myself at wholesale prices. This is clearly a standard sales tactic.

Of course Amway does sell actual products. But its flagship product line isn't their legendary biodegradable soap or any other items for the home. Its for businesses... for Amway distributorships, to be specific. Amway is quite honest about the fact that to make a lot of money, you need to be motivated to sell sell sell. (That's their explanation for the countless unprofitable distributorships: they blame it on individual laziness.) Which is why they have an entire division of the company devoted to motivational materials, seminars, and so forth.

The seminars - especially the big ones - are a lot like evangelical revivals for the religion of Mercantilism. They trot out people who became highly "successful", to tell their stories, preaching to the needy and faithful about how they made a lot of money selling Amway (the business model, not the products), and pumping them up to do the same. Of course the kind of people who need someone to tell them how to do this are the ones who'll never be able to pull it off. They just aren't the kind of extroverted Type-A glad-handing salescritters that do well at that. Instead they're the "fallen" of Mercantilism, and they need regular preaching to stay on the road to riches. Fortunately Amway has plenty of that to sell them.

Of course most Amway distributors understand that the key to making money is to have lots of other people selling for you, which is why they work so hard on those invitations to join the Amway clan. And that's my main objection to Amway on principle.

The whole company is based on the idea of turning personal relationships into commercial ones. They want to destroy the traditional family of parents, children, and siblings, and replace it with the Mercantile family of distributors, customers, and clients. They want to supplant friendship with distributorship. Neighborhoods with business networks. The founders and executives call themselves Christians, but there is nothing genuinely Christian about them. They're devout Mercantilists.

You can see this clearly even from the founders early lives. Rich DeVos and Jay VanAndel were best friends in school. So what did they do together? They formed businesses. Not "I've always been interested in ____, so let's turn that into a job" businesses, but seemingly random "I think we can make money from this" businesses: a flight school, a drive-in restaurant, a vitamin sales network, and finally a company to sell soap to their friends and neighbors. They were true believers since their youth.

Of course they've also done a lot to promote certain "Christian" principles, with VanAndel funding an institute dedicated to finding evidence to support the foregone conclusion that the world was created in seven days by God, and DeVos single-handedly prevented local Grand Valley State University from offering benefits to partners of homosexuals by threatening to withdraw millions in funding for their downtown campus. And they've both bankrolled political campaigns to advance the agendas of right-wing religious organisations. All stuff inspired by the books of Genesis and Leviticus, not by the gospels.

But they've channeled more of their cash and time into promoting their core faith... building up the downtown Grand Rapids business district, serving on the Chamber of Commerce, etc. And Amway itself has been relentless in its missionary work in the third world, spreading the gospel of Mercantilism to China especially.

Of course not all of the effects of this have been negative. Downtown Grand Rapids is a better place because of their investments. I'm sure good things are coming from the VanAndel Medical Institute, and the DeVos Center Women & Children Center at a local hospital (both of which came about after the founders started suffering from major health problems, requiring DeVos to buy an overseas heart transplant, and VanAndel to watch his wife suffer from Alzheimer's while experiencing Parkinson's himself). Their ongoing support for the arts, education, etc. - even with the strings attached - did a lot of good. But at what cost? They didn't create this wealth of theirs out of thin air; they got it from other people. And who's to say what good the people they got it from might have done? (Even simple things like feeding their families, or making their mortgage payments.)

The name "Amway" is short for "American Way", and their headquarters is built around a shrine to "Free Enterprise". Maybe that's what America is about, but I'd like to think that it aspires to something more ethical and morally defensible than the Mercantile gospel according to Rich and Jay.

Like maybe even the teachings of Jesus.

For example.