Knowing What We Want for the Future
Look back on your life. If you’re anything like me, I’ll bet you can think of a handful of things that, at the time, you would have surmised that you would have done or liked for probably your whole life but now you no longer do, like, or are interested in those things.
Let me give you an example. When I was much younger, like 14 or so, I was an obsessive Chicago Cubs and Sammy Sosa fan. It was the summer of 1998. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were both pacing to easily crush Roger Maris’ single-season home run record. Not only that, but the Cubs were a good team for the first time in years. Being that I lived just two hours from Chicago, I was hooked. I couldn’t get enough of Cubs baseball and Sammy Sosa. At the time, I truly believed that I would always be a loyal, undying fan of the Cubs. Fast forward to 12 years later and you’ll find that I am no longer a Cubs fan and regard Sammy Sosa as a benefactor of baseball’s steroid era and little more. I still like baseball. I love going to baseball games and betting on baseball games. But I really no longer care for the Cubs anymore than any other club. If anything, I actually root against the Cubs a lot since I’m regularly betting on their opponents on account of the fact that everyone loves betting the Cubs (well, not this season).
The point is that ten years ago, I would have found it unfathomable that I would one day reach a point where not only do I not avidly root for the Cubs, but that I actually come to hold such complete apathy for their club that I have no hesitation in betting against them. And this didn’t even take that long. It only took me about six or seven years to go from religious about the Cubs to apathetic about the Cubs. I just grew and became interested in other things. I started making money playing poker. I applied some of the things I learned making money playing poker to how I could potentially make money betting on sports. I started questioning and examining why people (myself included) are religious about things and if it actually serves them in the long run to harbor these obsessions. With time, I fell out of love with the Chicago Cubs.
I can pinpoint several other examples of this in my own life. When I was really young, like 10 or 11 I think, I loved building model cars. I was obsessed with model cars and cars in general. I can remember imagining myself as an adult with a huge model car collection. I held a similar outlook regarding baseball and football cards. At the time, I figured I would like both of those things for pretty much all of my adult life. Of course, I haven’t touched a model car in well over a decade and despite the gambler in me that occasionally entertains the idea of picking up a pack of baseball cards while I’m in Target just to see if I can pull some really valuable autograph card, I can’t say I’ve opened a pack in probably close to ten years.
And the examples I can think of like this aren’t just limited to things in my childhood that I falsely assumed I would maintain an interest in as an adult. There are some things I was avid about as recently as a couple of years ago and now no longer have any connection to. For instance, girls I’ve dated or friends I’ve had or hobbies (like skydiving).
So what can we learn from this human impulse to falsely assume we will maintain our current level of interest in something for the remainder of our lives? I can think of one thing: don’t over-commit to something on the notion that you’ll want that thing for the rest of your life since you’ll usually wind up being mistaken. Remind anyone of anything? coughmarriagecough
I’m always inclined to laugh when there’s that inevitable line in a movie or a TV show where one character says, “I want to spend the rest of my life with you.” I know it’s supposed to be romantic, but I just find it cheesy and unrealistic. Like anyone could possibly know exactly what they’ll want for the remainder of their life. It’s hard for me to take seriously anyone who thinks they do. To humanity’s credit, marriage is about the only example I can think of where we are socially encouraged to make a life-long commitment to something we are interested in. For the most part, no one minds if you waver on your interests unless it’s your interest in an individual of the opposite sex. Then you need to hold onto that interest for your whole life. But at least people aren’t encouraged to exchange vows with their favorite ball club (lol). We’re even expected to “retire” our interest in our career at some point.
Something else to take from this lesson is the understanding that we humans are pretty bad at knowing what we want for the future. So with that in mind, stop sweating the future so much. Stop worrying about trying to position yourself to be in a certain place twenty years from now because it’s entirely possible, likely even, that we won’t even want to be in that place in twenty years. How many of us can think of an example where there was something we really wanted and then once we got it we realized it wasn’t all it was cut out to be?
Another lesson is to not be afraid to diversify. Many people hold on to beliefs, attitudes, interests, hobbies, or relationships because they’ve done so for so long that they actually define themselves by that particular thing and aren’t sure what they’d do without it. Try something new! Anyone who truly loves you will still accept you and love you if you come to them and say that you no longer really care that much about whatever thing it was that they previously knew you cared a lot about. When you define yourself by just a couple of things, you live and die by those things. Diversify. Spread yourself around a little bit so you don’t get left behind.
Poker players can apply this reasoning to their strategy at the tables. Are there decisions you make because it was profitable two years ago? Is your style of play outdated but you don’t want to admit it? Or how about this one: is poker even the best thing for you to be doing with your life anymore?
What do you cling to? Why do you cling to it? Is it holding you back from anything?
People who are afraid to let go of things usually wind up getting stuck in the past. Don’t let the world pass you by because you’re still trying to squeeze juice out of the fruit of yesteryear. Each day there are people who go through life feeling miserable because they’re afraid to admit to themselves that their way of doing things just isn’t cutting it anymore. It’s a shame, isn’t it? Don’t be one of those people!
Daniel vs. Annie Rages On
The Daniel Negreanu vs. Annie Duke fued has reached new heights recently. It is no secret that neither player likes each other. Years ago, Daniel made several comments regarding Duke that ranged from claiming that she was unbearable to deal with at the poker tables to saying that she smelled bad. However, now things have really sunk to a new low due to a comment Negreanu made during an interview with the UK magazine PokerPlayer.
He Said What?
Daniel was asked about what his opinions regarding the Ladies Event at the 2010 World Series of Poker, he had the following to say:
“What irked me is that this woman has the audacity on her website to call herself ‘the best female poker player in the world.’ So I’m like ‘how offensive are you, you f***ing c***? You want to say you’re speaking for women, yet you claim superiority over all of them.’”
The Explanation
After the article was released, a firestorm ensured and eventually, Daniel was asked loosely about this in an interview with Kimberly Lansing at the Legends of Poker event in Los Angeles. Daniel then claimed that the comment he made about Duke was supposedly made off the record and was not supposed to be printed. He then offered a somewhat loose apology to women that may have been offended by the use of the “c word” but not to Duke herself.
Reaction to Story
Duke’s brother Howard Lederer said the following on Twitter in response to Daniel’s comments:
“Hey Daniel, nice job representing poker and reinforcing that our attitude towards women is still Neanderthal. I understand some agree w DN on the ladies poker event issue. Many do. But abusing those you disagree with is never cool.”
Duke later released an “Open Letter to PokerStars” on her blog where she criticized the site for not admonishing Daniel for his comments. In fact, one of the PokerStars support staff actually backed Daniel and his right to say what he wants, further drawing the ire of Duke. Online support is one of PokerStars Texas Hold’em poker site features that is not an official voice of the company.
PokerStars Official Reaction
After Duke’s open letter on her blog, PokerStars, issued the following statement:
“PokerStars does not support the use of derogatory or hurtful language directed at any other player. While this was a personal matter between two players, we wish that better judgment had been used in the choice of words.”
PokerStars also went on to state that the support representative that spoke about Daniel did so on opinion, and not at the request or approval of PokerStars. They went on to state that PokerStars did not support the comments made by the support person.
What Has Come Out of This
In the end, nothing really materialized from this story. The only thing that this did was put Daniel in a bad light. In a time of economic downturn and poker websites struggling to become legal in the U.S., this really equated to being a story that should have just stayed buried. However, it is probably safe to assume that this story has went a long way to reignite a long standing feud that really has no real signs of ending anytime soon.
Jeffrey Loria is a Greedy Pimp
Yahoo! doesn’t do a lot right, but one thing of theirs I like is their sports portal. Today, they ran a story about the greedy pimp that owns the Florida Marlins, Jeffrey Loria.
To summarize that article a little bit (though you should still read it because it goes into other atrocities that I am not summarizing here), Loria and team president David Samson concealed $48.9 million in profits from Miami-Dade county commissioners which prompted the commission to fork over more cash for the team’s new stadium. Of course, this extra taxpayer money doesn’t grow on trees; it comes at the expense of services and jobs being cut so the Marlins can have a 58 foot aquarium behind home plate that Loria could have paid for if not with his team’s profits that he covered up, then certainly with the hundreds of millions that he has accumulated over the years. No doubt part of this money was “earned” with the same greedy, deceitful tactics that he used to stick working class taxpayers with the bill for his new stadium that he will surely profit wildly from.
This guy is the anti-Robin Hood. He’s the rich guy stealing every last penny he can from the working class even if it means lying to their elected representatives. Forget indicting him. Miami-Dade county taxpayers should be rioting in the streets.
What’s also alarming in the article is that county commissioners earmarked funds for the new Marlins stadium without ever seeing the team’s balance sheet. Basically, Loria and Samson lied to them saying they had $48.9 million less than they really did, and the county said, “oh okay, well we believe you and since you will leave Miami if we don’t build this new stadium for you, we will rape our taxpayers without their consent and give you what will amount to billions of dollars over the next several decades to build this new stadium.”
Got your picket signs and flaming clubs out yet, Miamians?
If not, try to look at it from this perspective: Miami-Dade county is cutting some 1,200 jobs this year, no doubt some of which could have been saved if that greedy pimp Loria didn’t need to add another few million to his net worth by hiding profits from the county to ensure that taxpayers forked over the lion’s share for the new stadium. So directly because of this guy’s greed and need for an extra piece of expensive artwork, there are people out there without work, there are kids out there in larger classroom sizes since the county has cut funding, and there are taxpayers who will be spending $1.2 billion in the next 37 years to pay off a loan of $91 million. And that only amounts to just 22% of their total financial commitment to the stadium!
But I’m sure in a few years Loria will announce that he’s donating most of his net worth to charity and everyone will praise him for what a great philanthropist he is. When that day comes, let’s all try to remember that the only way he ever got that money in the first place was by being a greedy, low-life pimp.
Eight Things Food, Inc Caused Me to Think
The other day, I watched Food, Inc. And then I watched it again. IMDB puts it better than I can, so I’ll just quote them: Food, Inc is a documentary film that provides an unflattering look inside America’s corporate-controlled food industry. The filmmaker, Robert Kenner, sets out on a fairly straight-forward mission to figure out where our food comes from. The answer he comes up with is deeply troubling. I’m not going to do a full plot synopsis or anything, so for that, I recommend just watching the movie. Instead, I want to touch on a few different things, eight to be exact, that the movie impressed upon me.
We don’t eat real food in our society. This is something I suppose I’ve always had an intuitive awareness of. I mean, you can’t grow up eating Pop-Tarts for breakfast without realizing that the stuff we put in our mouths is anything but natural. However, the extent to which our food is “not real food” is unbelievably troubling. The market has succeeded in putting a wide array of affordable and filling options in our face without anyone really stopping to ask, “should we really be eating this stuff?”
It’s all just corn. One of the more striking points in Food, Inc for me was when the narrator said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “when you go into a grocery store, it seems like you have a ton of options, but most everything is really just a clever rearrangement of corn [or soy, or both].” The film dives a little bit into the economics of corn and how farmers are basically “priced in” to growing corn because of government subsides to do so. Since corn is plentiful, corn is therefore cheap. Since it’s cheap, food manufacturers can afford to flood the market with corn-based products at a low price for consumers thereby basically “blocking” the consumer from really eating anything other than “clever rearrangements of corn.” In effect, we’re using tax dollars to make it so that the only thing it makes financial sense for us to eat is variations on corn. Do you think Joe Farmer is going to use his field to grow blueberries thereby driving down the price of blueberries when he can make significantly more money producing corn? Not a chance. Joe is only human, after all.
Greed is the main problem. The real crux of the food problem in America, and the crux of most (all?) problems for that matter, is greed. Greed is what has caused food manufacturers to put whatever cheap and tasty crap they can onto the market. They profit wildly from doing so and are able to use some of those proceeds to lobby Washington to create friendlier and friendlier laws for the industry. The FDA is in bed with American food manufacturers. It’s really little more than a front to make you feel like there’s a governing body looking out for your interests with regards to food. It might have originated with the right intent, but over time the FDA has basically sold itself out to the food industry. The food we currently eat are like what cigarettes were in the 1940s: awful for you but consumers have little access to information to help them realize this because regulators are in bed with the manufacturers too much to do anything about it.
I’ve been thinking a lot more about how greedy our culture is lately and how much we romanticize the idea of making another buck or seeing a stock price go up. But rarely do we ask, “at what cost?” In this way, we are a very foolish culture.
Poor people are screwed. People on fixed-income budgets who are living paycheck to paycheck are the real losers. They are almost certainly eating a bunch of processed crap. After all, a frozen pizza is a lot cheaper and has a lot more calories than an organic salad topped with grilled, organic chicken. What choice do you think they’re going to make? In short, people have less money than they think. People “think” they have enough to get by on what they’re currently making, but that assumes they settle for eating processed sugars, salts, and fats. Suppose these foods were no longer an option to them because they decided their health wasn’t worth selling out. They’d have no choice but to pony up a considerably more amount of money for organic, non-processed foods. On the back-end, however, they’ll recoup a lot of this money, and then some in the opinion of my friend Nat, through lowered health care costs.
We’re fat because it’s affordable to be fat. We’re fat because our policymakers and corporations have allowed a system to arise in which it is affordable to stuff your face with yummy fats, sugars, and salts. Since we naturally crave these items ahead of the spinach, and since they’re cheaper than the spinach anyway, we stuff our faces. This is why even the poor people in this country are fat. Everyone can afford to be fat because being fat has been made to be so cheap!
Non-organic meat is disturbing. No text authored by me can come remotely close to doing the scenes from Food, Inc justice. You really just have to see the film. The source of our meat in this country is just downright troubling. Take for example chicken. Chicken is healthy and yummy, right? Well because Americans like white meat, companies engineered the chickens to have breasts about twice the size as they are in nature. Additionally, since a chicken that can grow to full size in 48 days is cheaper to produce than a chicken that takes nearly twice that long to grow to full size, we figured out a way to make chickens grow so fast that their bones and joints simply cannot keep up. What does this mean for the chicken? It means that in it’s final days, the weight of its breasts is so immense that it’s underdeveloped legs don’t stand a chance. The chickens can take one, maybe two steps (not like they’ve got very much space to work with anyway) before they plop back down onto the ground waiting for death. All so we can have a big, fat, juicy chicken breast on our plate for dinner at half the cost of the organic ones that are half the size. I’ve always avoided veal since I thought it seemed pretty cruel to keep them chained to the ground. I never realized that if I applied that same logic to chickens, it would have made sense to go organic before now.
Corporations are remarkably capable. This movie really demonstrates the brilliance that companies are capable of. When left to their own devices, they are able to create jaw-dropping “optimizations” (I put that in quotes because putting a toxic chemical on something we plan to eat so that we can have more of it to eat shouldn’t really be viewed as “optimal”). What our corporate food companies have managed to do is really quite remarkable. It’s depressing and seemingly void of any ethics, but remarkable all the same. They have directly engineered an entire country full of people who unquestioningly eat stuff that they don’t even know where it came from and balloon to unparalleled sizes in the process. I mean think about that, how many of us can truly say that we’ve ever thought about where our food comes from? How many of us can honestly say that they’ve thought, “hmm, I wonder what xanthan gum is?” I know I can’t say that. Since I was a toddler until just recently, I never questioned the origins of the food I put into my mouth. I just ate without really knowing what it is. Remarkable, isn’t it? Do you think humans from a century ago could have said that?
Where corporations succeed, they also fail. When left to their own devices, corporations are only concerned with one thing: profit. Profit does not have to be an evil word, but to many people, increasingly myself, it has an evil connotation. This is because any entity concerned only with profit will do anything, including things detrimental to the health of humanity if they think they can get away with it, in order to see that “profit” number increase. Our society has become more concerned with seeing a stock price go up on one day than it is with asking if what they had to do to make that price go up actually added value to society or just stole from many to give to a few. And make no mistake, food corporations are stealing from the many, in this case, their health, in order to increase their own bottom line. Our obsession with money is literally killing us and will continue to kill us until we decide that it is not what’s most important.
Consumers are incredibly powerful. Food, Inc succeeded in restoring the viewers’ feeling of power after spending most of the film making them feel helpless and disturbed. They did this by reminding everyone that every time you scan an item at a grocery store, you are “voting” for that item. If enough of us begin to “vote” for the items that we are meant to eat, companies will get the message. The film recommends buying organic foods wherever possible, buying locally-grown foods wherever possible, and basically getting used to the idea that food is supposed to require more work than we’re used to. Food was not meant to be something we could get from a window out of our car for $1 and be full. Food is work. For the majority of human history, the majority of the work humans did was directly related to cultivating food and sustaining life. We have found a way to cheat ourselves out of having to do this work and in doing so, we’re cheating ourselves. Budget more time and money for the gathering and preparing of food. Real food.
I’ll close with two links to related stuff. First, the story of aspartame. Read that and tell me if it doesn’t make you want to burn Donald Rumsfeld at the stake. Finally, read here the text of a New York girl’s valedictorian speech from a few months back as she bashes the very system decorating her.
