The warp in time from the year 2000

 The numbers of the years we live in are just numbers. The religiously neutral way to refer to the year is "C.E." or "common era". Although the hypothetical "year 1" came from a Christian calculation, that was long ago, and (likely because of cultural dominance) that's what has stuck. People realize there is no other, more logical place to start. Older cultures that reset the year each time a new emporer ascended to the throne were surely nightmares if you cared about history.

As the millenium approached, there were arguments about whether the true millenium might be a year earlier or later based on whether the first year was "year one". One quote that dismissed that whole issue that I thought was exactly right was, "It's all arbitrary, and I'm in it for the zeros".

But I've noticed a certain warping in my notion of time, a sort of distortion in time caused by that number 2000 and its properties. In 1980 it was just 20 years to the millenium. In 1990 it was just 10 years away. In 1997 it was just 3 years away. All those numbers about a significant future event were small. 1997 was notably later than 1994 because it was only 3 years to the millenium instead of 6.

And then -- it happened. Y2K. Nothing major broke. But starting on January 1, 2000, how do we think of years? Well, the next millenium will be the year 3000, and that's a fair amount of time away. Maybe a reasonable milestone on the way will be 10% of the way, which will happen in 2100. It's 100 years from now... Wait! 100 years from now is a LONG time from now! Even though all those zeros showed up at once, to live on a human scale we have to ignore a couple of them. A century is a long time, and that happens in 2100. Decades happen in the meantime. Stunningly, 22% of that first post-millenial century has gone by already. "Turn of the century" when I was growing up referred to 1900 and nothing else. If someone used it to refer to 2000 in the first few years after 2000, I certainly would have thought it odd. Now, 22 years later, we have to ask which turn over the century? Perhaps some disambiguate by calling it the turn of the millenium, but that risks expanding our time horizons to a much bigger scale than intended or desired.

Frozen history in our own lifetimes

 

When we first become aware of the existence of history in a meaningful way, we learn that our life has been very short and history has been very long. I remember that the idea of years passing somehow got through to me at a certain level in 1963. For a while I thought 1962 was long ago and anything in 1963 or later was recent. I remember looking up in the local college bookstore at things you could buy related to the class of 1971 or 1972 -- perhaps this was 1968 or so. Those years seemed impossibly far in the future. A "7"in the tens place? Hard to imagine! Initial correct observation when young: Our individual life is very short and history is very long.

Perhaps this is a partial explanation of a phenomenon I've observed in myself. Everything that has happened since I was a teen is recent history, but before that point history is to be measured out in the real decades that make it up and stretch into the distant past.

As one example, I was pretty firmly plugged in to current events starting in 1968, when I was 13 years old. That is 54 years ago. If I think of the history involved in the previous 54 years, it covers enormous ground -- 1914 to 1968. Two world wars and a depression. The availability of nuclear weapons to both sides in the Cold War gave rise to a "nuclear peace". Everything that has happened since then is to me recent history because it was part of my awareness as it happened. But 1914 seems a year from the far distant past, and 1968 seems recent. Emotionally considered, perhaps 80% of the time from 1914 to now happened before 1968, and the other 20% since then! As the decades of my life have gone by, that original idea that "I've lived a very short while and history is very long" persists even as it becomes less true all the time. I'm curious if others experience this.

You could argue that in fact less has happened in these latest 54 years compared to the 54 that came before. That would be true in terms of wholesale destruction, perhaps, but is not true in a great many other areas. The internet looms large. Even cell phones do. An enormous reduction in poverty happened along with dramatically better medical care. Technological miracles are cheap and abundant.

In my home town of Durham, New Hampshire, my oldest brother went to his first year of high school arranged in split shifts, because there simply was not enough space to fit all the high school students in the building at one time. In 1965 a new high school opened that relieved that problem. I went to this brand new high school, graduating in 1972. It was several years ago that someone remarked that the Durham high school was definitely old and needed replacing. Wait, it's brand new! But not actually, when I do the math. If I heard this in 2016, it was 51 years old, which I guess is getting on for a high school.

Within the course of my life, time also speeds up. The attacks of 9/11/2001 that seem liked recent history were more than 20 years ago. Twenty years before that was when Ronald Reagan was elected. That seems far more than twice as long ago as 9/11. This, however feels like a more common observation.

There is no such thing as a dead person

 

Humans are gifted with the ability to imagine and plan for the future. And we are part of those plans. Our presence is the source of agency in the world, to get things done for whatever purposes we want to get things done, typically starting with the welfare of our descendants. But we are also cursed to know that not long into that future, we will die. The future will no longer contain us, but it will contain the things and people we care about.

I remember being troubled by the prospect of death in the past. The ones I remember are -- as a child of 8 or 9, as a teenager, and at some point in the early "decade starting in 2000". I was troubled enough to write this post: http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2007/11/cosmic-subtraction-problem.html, which still captures a lot of truth as I see it. It suggests thinking about the issue of death a bit, and then putting your analysis on the shelf. Indeed in the last 15-odd years I have largely ignored the issue. I do not recall it troubling me on the eve of my heart surgery in November of 2020. It has come up now once again -- perhaps in conjunction with some minor health scares.

I once read an explanation of how death figures in our lives. No matter how happy we are, no matter how successful or loved or at the peak of whatever we think of as the good life, there is that little worm gnawing away at the core: We will die someday. It's associated with a feeling: a little strand of dread if we think about it. That resonated with me.

So I write, "There is no such thing as a dead person." What could I mean? Be patient.

There surely is such a thing as a dead body. One way to feel bad about death is to imagine yourself as with your body -- bored, cold, alone, underground in a cemetery. Imagining yourself cremated might be a bit easier, as past the imagined traumatic even of incineration, there is less to imagine? But those who have examined a body that has been dead for any length of time can plainly see that there is no person left. I find it fairly easy in feeling as well as thought to dismiss the idea of us as dead people having any location in the world such as a graveyard. In part that's because what we mean by "person" is some entity with the same memories and thought processes as we have now -- our mind.

A distressing idea of death that I think arises naturally is imagining ourselves in silent darkness, as time ticks along, knowing things are happening that we will never be aware of, with nothing but infinite boredom. Those are both possibilities that I think arise just from feelings, with little rationale but still perhaps power.

Another vital ingredient of the situation is that the living must have some theory about what happens to their loved ones when they die. Religions would imagine heaven, hell, or reincarnation. I would suggest that sober people who look hard at reality rather than being guided by vague realms of hope and feelings will understand those are just not true.

Yet even those who accept that perspective have images of the dead. Our respected forebears in particular we can imagine looking over our shoulders at us, and they can inspire us to act according to our better nature as opposed to our lower instincts. In some cases (particularly true in the past, say around 1700), people traveled long distances and might well have no communication at all with those left behind. They might well not know whether their parents were dead or not, and if your parent in the flesh might appear to judge your life, you might be motivated to have lived a life they would approve of. It might be adaptive to think that way even if you know they are dead.

When we imagine our dead ancestors perhaps judging us, we envision them as immaterial observers of reality as it unfolds. I suppose this is one of the better ways you can imagine being dead, though again I think a sober person would say this is unrealistic. And there are problems. How long does this state last? Have we pushed off to the future the same problem of what happens after death when this dead person dies again?

One natural objection to death is, "But I want to see how it all turns out!" It's hard to address that one, to the extent it's our current, perhaps terminallly ill, self that is thinking it. We can reflect that over time "how it turns out" will be less and less relevant to our imagined dead self observing the world. When everyone we care about, and their descendants, die, and the world is concerned with new things we never even considered, we would care less. One future milestone is that scientists say it is certain that our planet will be incinerated when our sun becomes a red giant, in 5 billion years or so.

I guess my key point (if I have one) is that while it's natural and sensible for the living to imagine the dead as continuing to exist somewhere, this is no help at all as an individual person approaches death. Then it is time to throw off that idea, and emphasize the reality that when the living imagine the dead living on, this is happening in one place only -- inside of their living heads.

The sober reality is that none of these things will happen when we die. We will not even be in sweet oblivion. We simply no longer will be. There will in no sense be an "I' to be anywhere.

One way to possibly get a handle on this is to look at the other end of life. If we see a living, breathing baby, do we wonder where they were before they were born? Did they live in boredom through the eons, hoping some day to be born, to inhabit a body, and have a time in the world of life? No, they simply did not exist, in any sense of the word. They as a conscious being came into existence through the interplay of extremely complicated biochemical events that we are nowhere near understanding. One's nonexistence after death is just as complete and unmysterious as the nonexistence of a baby before conception.

Phrases like "Mr. Jones passed in July" are harmful in suggesting that Mr. Jones went from here to somewhere else. They presume an afterlife. "Mr. Jones passed away in July" is better, because "away" at least allows for the possibility that "away" is nothingness. "Mr. Jones died" is better still, though it leaves open the question of what happened to him. "Mr. Jones ceased to exist" might be best of all.

Corpses, ancestors who judge us, entities that hang around to find out how it turns out -- they are all natural thoughts. But when we face our own demise with the natural anxiety that comes with it, we do better to discard those ideas completely. We will cease to be. There will be no clock ticking to measure our nonexistence. There is no way to measure nonexistence. Nonexistence is... How do I finish that sentene? Nonexistence isn't. For me, entertaining this thought makes my emotional self calmer as I consider death. There is no seuch thing as a dead person.

Note: I've probably never had an original thought in my life, but that is especially clear on a subject like this, which has been debated by great minds for millenia.

Astronomically speaking, there is no "up"

 

Of course when we think about our immediate surroundings, the meaning of "up" is entirely clear. If you let something go and it falls, "up" is the other way. But suppose you back up and imagine yourself looking at the earth, the solar system, and what's beyond. Do you have an "up" in mind? I think most of us do. In diagrams, the solar system is always portrayed with the earth's north being up. There is no geophysical or or astronimical reason for thinking of things this way. Thinking of south being up makes just as much sense. The European cultures that dominated when we were standardizing our thinking about the geography of the earth and discovering details of the solar system were quite far north of the equator ("Greenwich mean time" is clearly UK-centric). North as up is a cultural decision. The fact that 90% of world population is estimated to live in the northern hemisphere would be a strong force against reversing that decision, but I suspect it did not actually have much influence on why it was chosen in the first place.

For me that is all old news. But I was surprised it took me so long to think of this next part... When you see a picture of some galaxy or other astronomical object, which way is "up"? Why is it oriented the way it is? It is not its relationship to the earth's north pole. The actual answer is that it is whatever direction the photographer chooses. It was one more tiny support for the reality of our planet being at an unremarkable spot in an unremarkable galaxy, and even "up" and "down" are arbitrary, even when we are looking out from our own particular world.

How might US political gridlock end?

 

Gridlock in US politics has been with us for twenty-odd years now, and there is no sign that it is going away any time soon. I googled for all of 15 seconds before concluding that this issue hadn't been addressed in a way I found interesting.

The gridlock could end with a series of constitutional amendments, or a constitutional convention, but surely both parties would ensure gridlock continues in that process, and even if one side got a sizable advantage they would be unable to muster approval from the required 3/4 of the states -- the ultimate supermajority.

Another way political systems change is after defeat in a war. The prospect of the US being defeated in a war seem quite remote. Our geographic isolation on our own continent, sharing borders with only the much weaker Canada and Mexico make that highly unlikely.

One way it could end is by demographic shifts that gradually bring one party to power consistently. Democrats are the candidate. But some traditional Democratic groups have significant numbers becoming Republicans, and birth rates are falling among all demographic groups, not just white people. If Republicans do see this change coming, it lends an urgency to their efforts to achieve a sufficient corruption of the democratic process that they can retain power.

The other way gridlock could end is basically a coup d'etat. Democrats are on the whole too committed to the rule of law to initiate such a thing, but as we have seen lately, notably on January 6th, the Republicans are not. If Donald Trump is re-elected without major election fraud in 2024 (as seems likely), he is likely to continue from where he left off in terms of undermining democracy. The constitution limits him to just four more years, but he could put forth his son Donald or daughter Ivanka for President, with the understanding that Donald Senior would remain firmly in charge. His Republicans could continue to impose voter registration requirements weeding out more and more of the likely Democratic voters. He could enable Republican legislatures or governors in actually submitting alternative or fraudulent vote counts in major elections. Last time around, Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell had enough integrity that they would not overturn the results of an election, but there are other Republicans waiting in the wings, likely selected by Donald Trump by way of "primarying" away moderate Republicans, who would. Trump could subtly and not so subtly intimidate the press until it is not a free press any more. The Supreme Court, with its 6-3 majority, might not invalidate any of this. If they did, Trump might simply declare that he is not bound by decisions of that Court. Would 2/3 of the Senate convict him if he was impeached for that? Surely not.

Who is left? The US military. The officer corps is (last I knew) rather firmly anti-Trump or at least pro-Constitution, and after January 6th there were purges of white supremacist officers. But if the Trump takeover happens slowly, what would provide the impetus for the military to move? The idea of a junta ruling the US for any period of time would offend just about everybody. Suppose Trump's son Donald says he won the election of 2028, when independent observers (who may be in short supply) say he didn't, by a considerable margin. Perhaps the military could decree that the Democrat actually won and see that he is installed as President. But what about Congress, which could also well be Republican, perhaps legitimately or perhaps because of the devious changes to voter eligibility? Surely the military can't simply declare the Democrats winners in all of those elections. What about the state legislatures? Trying to fairly sort out winners and losers in all those contests would be a nightmare.

With Trump in power for 4 years or more, you can imagine him starting his own purge of the military, removing officers who are not loyal to him, or at least those show any sign of taking their oath to the Constitution as meaning something beyond being loyal to their Commander-in-Chief. So then, how does the Trump family lock on power ever end?

Democrats may take to the streets in mass demonstrations at any point, but until Trump supporters change, it will not sweep the country. I think the key lies with the moderate Trump supporters. People grow tired of their leaders, and Trump would probably put in place initiatives they didn't like. Some might realize they actually have lost the power they thought they had gained by way of Trump. They may see in tangible terms that they are worse off than they were 4 years ago. If the Trump supporters in red-state America split, a substantial minority might join with the substantial Democratic minorities in (temporary, at least) support of Democratic nominees. If they can see that their candidates for Congress actually won the majority in an election and the Trump functionaries have declared for the Republican, they might take to the streets. And if people take to the streets in large enough numbers in the heartland as well as on the coasts, that is when the government might fall. I tend to think that the US military is unlikely to slaughter their countrymen in large numbers.

The US Constitution is so venerable that the pressure to keep that form of government might be intense, but if post-Trump majorities are large enough, they could put through amendments that could help solve the problem. They could vest all power in a majority in the House of Representatives -- the way a great many other democracies in the world work. They could do this by reducing the Senate to a ceremonial body, and giving the House the power to remove the President by a simple majority vote. They could seriously limit the power of the Supreme Court. Then we could have largely solved the problem of gridlock, and restored a working democracy to the US.

If the Trump operatives are sneaky enough, they might keep their fingers on the pulse of the people and do enough to placate moderate Trump voters so that this scenario would not play out. If the Trump forces gave only limited resistance to popular pressure, then the result of a reversal might be Democratic control -- for a while -- within the current Constitutional system, leading to further gridlock. It would be only the removal of a government very widely perceived to be illegitimate that could give the huge supermajorities needed for constitutional amendments.

I feel like I have just pained a very unlikely scenario. A series of steps have to happen, and you could argue that many of them are unlikely, and the entire sequence especially so.

What is the alternative? A government that proceeds by inertia, keeping pretty much the same policies as it has now. There will be no major new initiatives. We will keep funding a huge and largely useless military. No infrastructure repair. China will dominate the world stage, offset to some extent by Germany and other key European Union members. The US will get poorer and shabbier. The Republican heartland is already getting poor and shabby, and it will spread to the areas that are now fairly prosperous and well-maintained. But the rich will keep getting richer.

That's how I see the political future in the US. Any alternative ideas for how things might go?

Thirty years ago was the milestone

Tomorrow we will all take note of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Some people suggest that we lost something profound that day, that fear changed our outlook, and it hasn't recovered since. This perplexes me. If so, it's been primarily a fabulous public relations coup by radical Islamic groups.

From the very beginning I feared the public reaction to the 9/11 attacks far more than any current or future damage. This public overreaction led to the disastrous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

What really changed the world was something that happened ten years earlier -- not to the day, but a mere 20 days before an exact decade. August 21, 1991 was the day that the attempted coup to preserve a hard-line government of the USSR failed. That was the day we knew the Cold War was over. From roughly 1950 to that day in 1991, the US and USSR led coalitions of nations in a global competition, where each side had a large arsenal of nuclear weapons. Huge budgets supported the military on each side. Small nations suffered as the two superpowers vied for influence or control. Perhaps the nuclear weapons kept American and Soviet forces from engaging each other directly in any military action, but the price was the uncertainty of nuclear war.

As of 1988, most people saw no end in sight to that Cold War -- we judged that we were nearly 40 years into a standoff that could continue for another 100 years. In hindsight, we can see that it would be over in three years, but that was not our mindset at the time. This was an unprecedented standoff. How could anyone dare to overthrow a government with nuclear weapons at its disposal?

After that date in 1991, the danger of nuclear war decreased dramatically. Military budgets were cut, former Soviet republics declared independence. It's not as if all is well. Russia has considerable power, but it is unable to seriously consider conquering Ukraine, the second-largest of the former Soviet Republics. NATO is watching closely and has offered Ukraine a measure of protection, and Russia knows it.

What has happened in the 20 years since 9/11? Here's a list of Islamic terrorist incidents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_attacks

They are tragic in their own way, of course. But they do not threaten the stability of our world. The casualty figures are nothing compared to the deaths in the wars in Vietnam or Korea, or any number of other civil wars throughout the world that were fueled by superpower confrontation. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a reaction to 9/11, but they were very much wars of choice. The US could have stayed home. We bear the primary responsibility for both wars and the resulting death and destruction.

The world improved dramatically for the better 30 years ago. If Islamic terrorists have made us feel profoundly unsafe in the past 20 years, it's a dramatic public relations coup on their part. The images of the twin towers falling are dramatic and stay seared in memory, but the real significance of that and every terrorist attack since has been minor. Public relations.

Profound change happened 30 years ago, not 20 years ago, but that anniversary was not marked, at least not to anywhere near the same extent.

Insurance

 

It's a sensible idea, insurance is. When a group of people is faced with the small chance of a future loss that would be catastrophic, each one puts in a small amount, and the unlucky individual gets paid from that fund and their loss is largely compensated.

However, one constant in the situation is that someone is making money by selling insurance. On average, you will lose money, so there's good reason to avoid it if you can cover the loss yourself.

One supposed benefit to whole-life insurance is that it builds a cash value over time. Yet you can build cash over time without those by simply saving some of your money. Perhaps it helps build value by fighting against the natural human tendency to spend what you have, and not save unless you are forced to do so.

My father bought for me at age 13 a whole-life insurance policy. I believed he waited until I was 21 to tell me about it and hand it over to me. I debated what to do with it, looking at various upsides and downsides. There were a couple years when I could borrow its cash value at the guaranteed 5% rate and invest it in the money market to earn 14%, but those days didn't last long.

When I had children, I needed insurance with a much higher death benefit than that policy provided, ($15,000?) and got some term insurance (was it for $250,000? I don't remember). After debating another year or two, I just cashed out the old policy. The main benefit was that I would no longer wonder what to do with it. The decision was made. Life was a little bit simpler.

I held the term insurance until my daughters grew up, then canceled it. I got the term insurance through Amica, a company my family had used for auto insurance, based on a sense of good customer service and loyalty. I later was told that if I had known how to shop around, I could have gotten the term insurance for half the price. Well, I didn't know how to do that.

A few years ago all my peers were considering long-term care insurance, and a fair number bought it. My instinct said not to. I still don't know if it was the right thing to do, but news stories recently tell of troubles in the marketplace. There is always fine print... my memory now is that when I checked, I found it would not cover care provided outside of the US or care needed due to self-inflicted injury. I believe that without insurance, if a person of modest means needs expensive long-term care, they spend down their assets to $2,000 and then they are covered by Medicaid, as they are then poor enough to qualify. They are not put out on the street. That seemed like a reasonable fallback position.

I owned a house jointly with my then-wife for 9 years, and of course insurance is required, and I don't recall having much choice about it. It was the only time in my life that I have been in debt.

Car loans require insurance on the car, but I have been fortunate enough to always be able to buy my (simple, no frills) cars with cash. I kept collision and comprehensive for the first year or two the one time I bought a new car, but I've mostly done without. I'm a good driver. In general, good driver discounts are not as much as they should be in a hard-nosed rational system. Even with the discounts, good drivers subsidize the drivers who would otherwise rapidly price themselves out of the ability to get any insurance at all after a few accidents. Being a good driver who avoids extreme conditions and rarely parks in hazardous places, I'm less of a risk than the actuarial tables would suggest.

With Amica, my current annual auto premium is $409. That puts an upper limit on what I could save if I shopped around.

I recall hearing a few years back that air bags did not actually reduce fatalities from auto accidents. Knowing the air bag was there reduced the caution of some drivers. Less caution combined with air bags led to a constant death rate. I suspect that my knowledge that I don't have collision insurance makes me a little bit more cautious as I drive.

Insurance always comes with hitches, or so it seems. There's a deductible. For minor accidents, the advice is to pay to repair collision damage yourself, or else the increase in your premium will outweigh any benefit you received.

For a couple years towards the end of their lives, I was managing my parents' finances. They owned a house near the beach on Cape Cod, and insurance was considerable. The house was considered a "tear down" -- anyone who bought it would tear down the modest house and build a bigger one on the lot. Sentiment about keeping the house versus selling it was divided in the family, and any sort of major damage would push us over the line into selling. I had the brilliant idea of canceling the insurance. There would be no point in rebuilding a house if it was to be torn down. A smoldering cellar hole was no less valuable than a house that was to be torn down. The other purpose of the policy was liability. I inquired if we could get a cheaper policy that covered only liability, but was told that a custom policy would in fact be more expensive. Given the incredibly low chance of liability for a simple house that was vacant most of the time, I suspect we would have been better off without the policy. But as an agent for my parents, prudence dictated we keep it.

I mentioned that part of my judgment on not getting collision or comprehensive was comparing myself to the pool of people who would pay similar rates. You may have reason to think you are at a higher risk than the pool, in which case insurance becomes attractive. Apparently there was a period in the early days of the AIDS epidemic when people understood the symptoms that implied imminent death, but the insurance companies did not have the mechanism to take AIDS into account in setting policy premiums. Some of the AIDS victims bought very expensive life insurance policies, and surely their heirs benefited greatly.

When I bought my current car, a used Toyota Yaris, the seller looked at me like I was crazy when I said I would not be getting collision or comprehensive. Reaching the conclusions I have about insurance seems to be rare. I wonder if others have different perspectives.

As for health insurance (shudder)... That's a topic for another day.