The Arrogance Thing Warning:This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with

unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy or opinion. It is not intended to change anyone's beliefs or actions. If you quote from this post or link to it, which you are welcome to do, please take responsibility for whatever happens if you mismatch the audience and the content. The interesting thing about arrogance is that it's hard to know when you're doing it. It's a challenge to be confident in your opinion without projecting an air of superiority. Objectively speaking, if you think you have the right answer for a given situation, it follows that anyone who disagrees is a little bit misguided, or ignorant, or just plain dumb. If you aren't a good actor, it's easy to slip from being confident in your opinion to being a pretentious douche bag. I should know - I'm all over that line. Today will be no exception. I learned I was arrogant when I moved from upstate New York - where people tend to be direct and plainspoken - to California, where honesty is considered rude. In upstate New York, you can say you're good at math and people take it as an objective statement of truth. In California, the nearest you can come to that sort of truth is saying you're bad at spelling, which suggests you might be better at math. I assume different countries have very different views of what constitutes arrogance. I was thinking about this with respect to Iran and their nuclear program. Ahmadinejad recentlysaid, ""Iran is ready for talks within the framework of equality and justice," and added they "will never enter talks if enemies behave arrogantly." If you take the view that Iran's leaders are religious nuts who lie about everything and plan to annihilate Israel and themselves in a nuclear war, we can end the discussion here. Maybe it's that simple. But no matter what you assume to be the underlying reality, it still behooves the United States to push for full inspections and leave no stone unturned for a peaceful outcome. That's what brings me to my hypnosis training. One of the most interesting things I learned in hypnosis class is that people often tell us exactly what they want, but we have trouble hearing it. When Iran talks, all we hear is "lie, lie, lie." But suppose, just for the purpose of discussion, Iran has been telling the absolute and literal truth all along. (I know - it's hard to imagine. Consider it a thought experiment.) First, Iran says it has no intention to build nuclear weapons, and can see no benefit in doing so. They even have a religious edict expressly forbidding it. Some observers have interpreted that to mean they only intend to build the capability to quickly make some nuclear weapons if they ever change their minds. From Israel's perspective, that's a difference without a distinction. When your very existence is at stake, you treat your enemy's almost-nuclear-weapon exactly the same as a definite nuclear weapon. When Iran says it won't negotiate with "enemies" who act "arrogantly," that sounds to our ears like "We don't have any intention of negotiating." But what if, as my old hypnosis teacher might instruct, we assume Iran is clearly and literally telling us the way out of this mess? What if the biggest problem is that we present ourselves as enemies, and we act arrogantly, albeit unintentionally? Wouldn't that handcuff the Iranian leadership and require them to be inflexible? Have we ever tried acting like friends to Iran instead of enemies, or tried acting less arrogantly? And if we were to try that approach, would it give Tehran political cover to open up productive discussions on inspections? The problem is that there's no way to test the hypothesis without losing forever our hardline stand. And in the end, the hardline stand might be the only thing that works. Further complicating things, our brains are wired to put a higher value on what we have (our consistent and credible hardline stand), than what we might gain by giving it up. Humans are not capable of objectively evaluating options that require giving up something they value, even if the potential payoff is worth it. But just for discussion, what would it look like if the United States stopped acting arrogantly toward Iran, and started to be more matter-of-fact about our needs while praising the Iranian people for their general awesomeness as a country? Suppose we say bluntly that we prefer to be friends, but given our histories, and some things that have been said about obliterating Israel, surely they can understand we need to take reasonable precautions against a potential catastrophe. Likewise, we can understand their ambition to have nuclear energy in a time when oil reserves in Iran have likely peaked. To keep the world safe, we need Iran to be our equal partners in bringing down the risk of war. Oh, and by the way, we're sorry about meddling in Iran's internal affairs in the past. We screwed the pooch with the whole Shah situation. That's on us. If we're being honest, we have to say we're not happy about Iran's role in Iraq, and in particular we resent the Iranian actions that caused American deaths. But realistically, we expect countries to act aggressively to protect their interests in their own backyards. We can understand without forgiving, and get past it. Iran's support for Hezbollah is still a huge issue. But as a purely practical matter, we could choose to treat it as a separate issue from Iran's nuclear program, even if we believe it's all related. And the chaos in Syria might change the Hezbollah

equation indirectly anyway. The important question boils down to whether or not you believe the root problem is Iran's reckless drive toward nuclear weapons. Is it possible that the real problem is the perceived arrogance of Iran's enemies, which forces Iran to continue on a reckless nuclear path to maintain some semblance of national pride? Put another way, if we started treating Switzerland the way we treat Iran, how long would it take the Swiss to start a nuclear weapons program? Gandhi would say we should be the change we want to see in the world. Cesar the Dog Whisperer would say the dog only calms down when the owner does. My hypnosis teacher would say people clearly ask for what they want, and all you need to do is listen. All of those guys might be wrong. It might be true, as many of you will be quick to argue, that the Iranian leadership is genuinely insane, and force is the only realistic way to deal with it. My only point is that we've never tried the alternative, and it's unlikely we ever will. In modern times, war is decided by the economics of the news industry, which is another way of saying war is the only option, at least until someone figures out a way to make peace newsworthy. Simplify Yesterday I needed to sign a form and mail it to my accountant. The form was my acknowledgement that I understand some new tax laws that, obviously, I don't understand. So I was starting off with a ridiculous task. Things didn't get better. I couldn't remember exactly what needed to be signed, or where I had left the documents. So I researched my email to find the instructions from my accountant, printed them out, and only later noticed that key parts of the instructions were eaten by my printer. No problem. I rummaged through my pile of documents until I found something that looked as if it needed my signature, and signed it. I considered taking a copy before sending it off, but 30% of the time that simple process ends in tears. Sometimes the printer eats the original, sometimes it begs for ink cartridges, sometimes I'm out of paper, and sometimes the printer software just doesn't work. I decided to skip that step. At this point, all I needed to do was slap some postage on an envelope, print an address label, and mail that puppy. Except I wasn't sure I had the correct address for my accountant. Her office has relocated several times. So I had to research that. Armed with the correct address, all I needed to do was print postage on my nifty Dymo label-maker and postage-printer. Except I wasn't sure if postage rates increased since the last time I used snail mail. So I had to research that too. The USPS website said postage was still 45 cents for less than one ounce. Perfect. But my letter included multiple pages, and it felt as if it might be more than an ounce. Luckily, I had a postal scale. I plopped my letter on the scale and the readout said, as always, "low battery." I use the scale about once a year, which is just the right frequency to drain the battery between uses. So I hunted down a battery, installed it, and weighed my letter. It came in at .8 ounces. I was good to go. Before I printed my postage stamp, I knew from experience that it was wise to print a test stamp to make sure the printer was aligned. So I did, and the test stamp printed perfectly. Next I printed the actual stamp, which, for some reason, misprinted just enough to make me uncertain the Post Office would accept it. Shit. I printed it again and set aside the 45 cent miscue. At that point there was debris all over my desk, including the backings from the label and stamp, the sticky note with my message to myself, the misprinted instructions letter, the old battery, the misprinted stamp, and the tear-away from the selfsealing envelope. I sorted the garbage from the recyclables and put the dead battery with my other dead batteries for eventual recycling too. I still needed to get this letter to the mailbox without losing it under the growing skyline of other tax documents crowding me out of my office, and I needed to keep it dry through the rainstorm. Typically, at that point in my snail mail process, I think of something I forgot to include in the envelope, so I reopen it, destroy the envelope in the process, and start over. My point - and I'm almost sure I have one - is that the time I wasted on this ridiculous tax-related legal nonsense is time I could have spent doing something productive for myself and for the economy. And this was just one of many hours I will spend preparing my taxes for my accountant who will then prepare them for the government. An assistant or bookkeeper couldn't help with most of it. Now consider all of the people and resources applied to this inefficient process and you might agree that the biggest cost to our economy from our tax system is not deficits, or tax cheats, but misdirected energy. Days like this suck the life out of me. I'm almost positive I could have done something useful if I had the time. When I'm President, I'll order a task force to figure out how to automate the process of tax preparation. It seems to me that every transaction you do should be automatically sent to your personal accounting system so your taxes are effectively done at the same moment your tax year ends. Then you can just review what you have and email it out. I would also phase out the Post Office so no one is every again tempted to ask me to sign something and mail it. I mean seriously, can't we figure out how to accept a digital signature? And when was the last time you were in court defending your actual penned signature anyway? I've lived my entire life without seeing that happen outside the context of bank checks,

which should also be phased out. On a related note, I also think trusts and corporations and LLCs need to be simplified or eliminated while somehow keeping the protections they provide. Likewise, insurance and banking need to be simplified. The free market favors complication over simplicity, because confusopolies are profitable. So the market isn't likely to simplify anything on its own. While I oppose overlarge government in principle, I think battling complexity on behalf of consumers is a legitimate role. That's doubly true when the government itself has created the complexity. The smart way to approach all of this is to get some state or county to volunteer for a pilot program. If it works, the program can be expanded. Vote for me for president and I'll make your life simpler. Today I Review Everything Today I will review an eclectic collection of stuff. I don't know why you would care. Best Television Shows Modern Familyis the best comedy of all time. (Yes, of all time.)Happy EndingsandThe New Girlare in the top tier right behind it.Up All Night,Whitney, andBig Bang Theoryare always solid. The best shows you might not be watching areJustifiedandSons of Anarchy. They both work best if you start from the beginning, so you get to know the worlds they create and their multi-year story arcs. If you were a fan of the TV show24, you would enjoy bothJustifiedandSons of Anarchy. WhenGame of Thronesreturns to HBO, don't miss that either. I'm not a fan of the swords and castles genre, but this series is a home run. Best Movie The best movie you might have missed isThe Descendants. It grabbed me in the first minute and made me curious and invested in every scene that followed. It accomplished that rare feat by never being predictable. In that way, it reminded me of real life and made the characters feel like friends whose adventures would naturally interest me. I feel sorry for whoever had the job of making the trailer for the movie. There was no way a few clips out of context could captured the feel of the film. All DVD Players My DVD Player has black control buttons on a black faceplate. Yes, the designers intentionally made the user interface invisible to the user. Even with the lights on, I need to search the house for a flashlight to operate the unit. When I press the eject button, I get no feedback that something happened, or is about to happen. Apparently there's a ten second delay. And if you get impatient and press the eject button again, it cancels the first press. About half the time, nothing happens when you push the eject button, no matter how long you wait. It took me months of experimenting to figure out I need to push the eject button, count to ten, and try again, for up to five times before the disc tray decides to open. It might have something to do with the unit being in sleep mode, or not powered on, but I can't tell by looking at it. Sometimes I think it helps to hold the power button down while cursing at it. You might be wondering what brand of DVD player I'm talking about. I'm not going to tell you because it's my tenth DVD player in a row with the same characteristics, and the units spanned several manufacturers. The last nine devices malfunctioned within months. Based on my experience, I'd say all DVD players are bad. My question to the DVD player industry is this: Are you even trying? All Computer Printers I've owned dozens of printers over the years. None of them worked for long. And they're all prone to some form of software rot. Last night, as often happens, my printer decided to stop working for no obvious reason. If it were a car, you would label it "totaled" because calling a tech support service to the house would cost almost as much as a new printer. The smart path was to try a few obvious fixes, and if that didn't work, drive to Best Buy and get a new one. But I am sometimes more stubborn than smart, so I spent hours narrowing down the problem to a software glitch. If history is my guide, the fix will last two weeks before some other part of the software rots. Based on my experience, I'd say all computer printers are bad. Presidential Candidates I think the candidates for President of the United States are stronger than in any year I can remember. Both Romney and Obama are brilliant, experienced, pragmatic, and invested in the best interests of the country. They differ on the details, and details matter, but in terms of pure baseline competence and character, you get an A+ with either one. I feel good about that.

Huffington Post and Fox News As a form of entertainment, I love the Huffington Post. I read it every day. But apparently they have a strategy of manufacturing news by taking things out of context. Sometimes their content comes so close to unintentional parody that I have to read the articles twice to figure out if they are joking. But I give them a pass for the same reason I enjoy watching Fox News: Both are entertainment vehicles first, political vehicles second, and informative only by accident. If you judge them on their intended strategies, as opposed to what you might want them to be, they are both terrific. Cell Phones The battery in my HTC EVO 3D phone only lasts a few hours. It took me months of experimenting with different combinations of apps and network services to learn that the culprit is the WiFi function. If I only turn on Wifi when I want to use it, the battery lasts all day. And with my spare battery and charger, I always have a backup. That's still a soft fail, but it's better than my last iPhone, which was useless for voice calls in my area. At this point in the evolution of smartphones, all of them fall short in one important way or another. We're probably three years away from a phone that does everything well. Wacom Cintiq 24HD I do all of my drawing directly to the computer screen of my Wacom Cintiq 24HD. I literally feel sympathy for any artist who still works with pen and paper. The system cuts my production time in half and allows me to do better work too. If you're an artist, and you're still drawing on paper, you're like the seventy-year old author who swears by his manual typewriter. Birdseye Cameras My automobile has one unique feature that is the sole reason I chose it over all others. When you put the car in reverse, you have the option of seeing on your display screen an animation of your vehicle as if viewed from above, juxtaposed on the real road, thanks to cameras on the sides and back. When I park the car, I can maneuver the animated version of my vehicle into the space as if I'm playing a video game, without ever turning around. I can parallel park within an inch of the curb, in one clean and quick line. Don't buy your next car until it has that feature. I assume it will be a common option in a few years, just like GPS. That's all you need to know for today. Perceptual Super Power Suppose you lived in a country that guaranteed freedom of speech, but 90% of everything spoken or written was deliberately misleading, and you didn't have any reliable way to know which statements were accurate. In an environment in which people are buried in bullshit, would freedom of speech have any practical value? Now suppose that the biggest lie in this hypothetical land of free speech is the notion that you, and your fellow citizens, are skilled at sorting lies from truth. You readily believe in your own truth-sniffing abilities, but you're skeptical about the abilities of your fellow citizens. After all, they so often come to the wrong conclusions, according to you. Would freedom of speech have any real value in such a world? What I'm describing is an absurd situation. In that hypothetical world, 90% of what you heard would be out of context, intentionally misleading, or outright lies. And while you had no special ability to sort the truth from the lies, you'd believe you did. And you'd be darned glad you lived in a country with freedom of speech so you had lots of truth to enjoy. Thank goodness for confirmation bias. I'm mildly dyslexic, and the New York Times just reported that dyslexia is a sort of perceptualsuper power. I assume my dyslexia super power allows me to detect truth in ways that regular mortals cannot. Apparently we dyslexics can detect patterns better than people who are tragically normal. I know this is true because I have excellent powers of perception. And I know I have excellent powers of perception because I'm always right. And I know my logic makes sense because it forms a perfect circle. I'm just not so sure about you. The Right Priority

Right priority

If you had to pick one priority in your life, could you do it? That's an important question because focusing on the wrong priority would get you a bad result, and having multiple priorities isn't practical. For example, if health is your top priority, you might make choices that are good for your health and bad

for your career, such as saying no to having a few drinks after work with your boss. We humans want lots of things: good health, financial freedom, success in whatever matters to us, a great social life, love, sex, recreation, travel, family, career and more. The problem is that the time you spend maximizing one of those dimensions usually comes at the expense of time you could have spent on another. So how do you organize your time to get the best result? The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main goal: energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities. Maximizing my personal energy means eating right, exercising, avoiding unnecessary stress, getting enough sleep, and all of the obvious steps. But it also means having something in my life that makes me excited to wake up. When I get my personal energy right, the quality of my work is better, and I can complete it faster. That keeps my career on track. And when all of that is working, and I feel relaxed and energetic, my personal life is better too. At this point in my post, I must invoke the Dog Whisperer analogy. The Dog Whisperer is a TV show in which dog expert Cesar Millan helps people get their seemingly insane dogs under control. Cesar's main trick involves training the humans to control their own emotional states because dogs can pick up crazy vibes from the owners. When the owners learn to control themselves, the dogs calm down too. I think this same method applies to humans interacting with other humans. You've seen for yourself that when a sad person enters a room, the mood in the room drops. And when you talk to a cheerful person who is full of energy, you automatically feel a boost. I'm suggesting that by becoming a person with good energy, you lift the people around you. That positive change will improve your social life, you love life, your family life, and your career. When I talk about high energy, I don't mean the frenetic, caffeine-fueled, bounce-off-the-walls type. I'm talking about a calm, focused energy. To others, it will simply appear that you are in a good mood. And you will be. Before I was a cartoonist, I worked in a number of energy-sucking corporate jobs, in energy-sucking cubicles. But I enjoyed going to work, partly because I exercised most evenings, and usually woke up feeling good, and partly because I always had one or two side projects going on that had the potential to set me free. Cartooning was just one of a dozen entrepreneurial ideas I tried out during my corporate days. For several years, the prospect of becoming a professional cartoonist, and leaving my cubicle behind, gave me an enormous amount of energy. The main reason I blog is because it energizes me. I could rationalize my blogging by telling you it increases traffic on Dilbert.com by 10%, or that it keeps my mind sharp, or that I think the world is a better place when there are more ideas in it. But the main truth is that blogging charges me up. It gets me going. I don't need another reason. As soon as I publish this post, I'll feel a boost of energy from the minor accomplishment of having written something that other people will read. Then I'll get a second cup of coffee and think happy thoughts about my tennis match that is scheduled for after lunch. With my energy cranked up to maximum, I'll wade into my main job of cartooning for the next four hours. And it will seem easy.riting
Yourself Off Write yourself off

One of the many disadvantages of being me is that sometimes I have awful ideas that get stuck in my head and I have to purge them to make room for what I hope is something better. Today is one of those days. I apologize in advance for the post that follows. You should stop reading now. Seriously. Don't say I didn't warn you. We humans can't tickle ourselves as effectively as strangers can tickle us. Scientists think it has something to do with the element of unpredictability. When you try to tickle yourself, you know what's coming just ahead of the sensation and your mind prepares for it. Likewise, it feels better when someone else rubs your neck. I suppose part of the reason is that your hand can't get a good angle on your own neck, and you can't simultaneously relax the rest of your body while rubbing with just one hand. Add to that the lack of predictability and a self-neck-rub isn't ideal. There is at least one other human activity that feels better when someone else does it for you. It's not exactly tickling, and it's not exactly a massage, and I can't exactly describe it in my otherwise PG-13 blog. But if I know my readers, all of you know what I'm talking about and 50% of you are doing it right now. That activity is the topic for the remainder of this post. I'll refer to it as noodling. And let's assume I'm only talking about females doing the noodling just to keep the engineering simpler. That will make sense in a minute. Suppose we want to invent a system that might be described as a self-noodler, and we want it to have the element of unpredictability. Could we make such a device? Yes, obviously you could write a program that would cause a hypothetical noodling device to vibrate at random intervals. But the problem I anticipate with that design is the lack of humanity. My guess is that a user would perceive machine-made randomness as boring and impersonal. Noodling is at its best when the recipient has the perception that some sort of human intention is behind the action. Can we solve that without the involvement of another human while maintaining a lack of predictability? Suppose you wrote a program that translated written words into vibrations. Perhaps the specific vibration would depend on the length of words, number of syllables, tone of the sentence, punctuation, and other factors. Presumably, Hemingway's text would create different pattern of vibrations from Shakespeare's sonnets, and so on. My hypothesis is that we humans are so wired for language that the patterns of the vibrations that originate from the written word would register to us as both humanmade and - here's the best part - unpredictable. That's the Holy Grail. If my hypothesis is correct, a user of this marvelous self-noodling system could choose whatever text works best in her particular case. One user might prefer translating the text of an interview with Brad Pitt. Another might find some emails from an old boyfriend and run those through the text-to-vibration system. Some might find a favorite author that does the trick. If the system works, it will give new meaning to the phrase "He wrote me off." I don't know what the other presidential candidates are doing today, but if they think they can make you happy by fiddling with your taxes, I would respectfully suggest they don't understand your priorities.its More?

Who Benefits More Do the rich get more benefits from the government in return for their tax dollars? In a recent post, I casually mentioned that all citizens get roughly the same benefit from the government. Several readers objected. Let's throw some more gasoline on that campfire. This question matters because if the rich get more benefits from the federal government, some would say it is "common sense" that they should pay a higher tax rate. But, as regular readers of this blog know, common sense isn't a real thing. And its ugly cousin, fairness, is a concept invented so dumb people could participate in arguments. Fairness isn't a natural part of the universe. It's purely subjective. So let's agree that fairness can be ignored in this discussion. We'll stick with what can be quantified, sort of. (If it were easy, it wouldn't be fun.) We'll also limit our discussion to federal income taxes because that's the main topic of national debate during this election year. On the payment side, we all agree that the rich pay far more per person in taxes than the poor. And the vast majority of the rich pay a higher tax rate as well. The exceptions are some subset of the superrich, who are perhaps 1% of the top 1%. Let's ignore the superrich for now because any discussion of that special group drags us into the unrelated topic of capital gains taxes. We can also exclude from this discussion the 49% of American adults who pay no federal income taxes. They pay plenty of other taxes, but for now that is a separate discussion. To keep things clean and simple, the question boils down to this: Does the average millionaire get more benefits from the federal government than the average member of the middle class who pays federal income taxes?

Consider national defense. The rich pay far more per person to fund our military. Some would argue that is "fair" because the military is protecting far greater assets for the rich. For me, that doesn't pass the sniff test. If our military disbanded tomorrow, the rich would move their money and their families to a safer country and leave the middle class to become slaves to the conquering Elbonians. The argument that our military gives greater protection to the rich, because the rich have more assets, assumes our national enemies are nothing but burglars looking for loot. It also assumes money can't escape across borders with its owners. Granted, the rich might lose their mansions and businesses if they escaped with the rest of their wealth, but the middle class who can't afford to escape would end up working in the Elbonian salt mines. According to my calculations, the middle class get more benefits from the military because national security prevents them from becoming Elbonian slaves. The rich are only at risk of losing a portion of their stranded wealth when they head to Switzerland. And depending on the ambition of our hypothetical enemies, we all benefit equally by not being killed. A rich dead guy is not happier than a middle class dead guy. How about education? The rich benefit from an educated workforce because it allows them to staff their companies and grow their wealth. The middle class benefit by having job opportunities and a non-zero chance of someday becoming wealthy. In my case, a government-subsidized education system allowed me to go from lower-middle class to rich. And that makes me...oh, say 50% happier than I would have been otherwise. Meanwhile, the rich got richer, but I doubt they increased their overall happiness by more than 10%. If the goal of life is happiness, including health and physical security, I benefited the most from the government during my journey through the middle class, during which time I paid far less than I do now in taxes. Now that I'm in the top 1%, and paying at the top tax rate, even if I doubled my income tomorrow, it wouldn't have much impact on my happiness. So while a functioning government allows the rich to stay happy, it allows the middle class an opportunity to substantially increase their happiness. I'd call that roughly a tie. How about safety nets? Compared to the rich, the middle class have a far greater risk of someday becoming poor. That risk is magnified if they have relatives who might need assistance too. But arguably, safety nets also prevent the poor from forming marauding gangs of cannibals preying on the rich. If I didn't pay taxes to provide safety nets for the poor, I'd spend a fortune on a private militia to defend my house. Benefit-wise, I'd call safety nets an equal benefit for all. In discussions such as these, I like to call upon my automobile analogy. You can argue all day long whether a car's engine is more important than its wheels, but unless you have both, the car is useless. It might be true in some technical sense that one class of citizen benefits more from taxes than another. But from 30,000 feet, it looks to me as if you're arguing whether the engine or the wheels are more important to the car. So far, we've acted as though we can compare one average rich person to one average middle class person. That makes sense when discussing the present. But the future is infinitely larger than the present, and therefore should be weighted more heavily in this discussion. That brings us to the question of birthrates. If the middle class person has two kids, and the rich person has one, the benefits of a stable government flow disproportionately to the family with the most offspring. Keeping two people alive is better than keeping one person alive. So if it's true that birth rates decline with income, it must be true that the middle class get more FUTURE benefits than the rich from their tax dollars today. But the bottom line is that whoever has the most kids, regardless of income, benefits the most from the government. If fairness were a real thing, taxes would be based on your number of offspring, not your income. I look forward to your disagreement.