Hidden Shitty Things at Jobs

There's a tiny party whenever there's darkness at a time when there's not supposed to be darkness. If you go into any room with people in it and half the lights are off, everyone loves it. Then some moron walks in and flips all the lights on and ruins it. We know that bright blue screens cause depression and ruin sleep, yet millions of people stare at a bright blue screen all day with bright fluorescent lights bouncing off white walls.

My job makes me hate healthy food. I know I'm going to be in an environment with vending machines, free donuts, and gas station food. No one ever brings a healthy homemade lunch or even an unhealthy homemade one. No homemade food ever, no one cooks. What planet is this? So as a reaction I bring a big glass (no BPA!) thing of vegetables and a vegan protein shake and pb&j on high fiber bread with peanut butter that's made of just peanuts and jelly made of just fruit, every day. And the routine makes me hate healthy food and I treat garbage food on the weekends like it's a reward.

Uncomfortable chairs are a big deal considering what bad posture does to your life. And 100% of office chairs I've ever sat in are uncomfortable and I don't know anyone in my 400 person building that likes the chair they're in, and they're in it all day. You have to whine a little bit about the chairs because it's an office ritual, but it's ridiculous how much power an uncomfortable chair can have over your life.

In the middle of some important task, I'll suddenly notice a thick layer of caked-on grease all over my entire face. What the heck? Why does that happen when I'm not doing anything active, the room isn't that hot, I took a shower this morning. How do I get absolutely filthy sitting still in a temperature controlled environment? I suspect that a lot of other people get spontaneous face residue for no reason at their jobs... if not then I guess this post is embarrassing but I don't care.

If a bunch of important issues come up, it makes sense to occasionally have a meeting about it. What a lot of bosses do instead, is have regular recurring meetings and then invent issues so there's stuff to talk about at the meeting. I have never been to a meeting at work that was held because of a need to address some important issue. They have always been recurring time wasters where management comes up with fake issues right before the meeting, or improvises them during the meeting.

Why aren't there nap areas in office buildings? Literally every office worker wishes there was a nap area at their job and yet they don't exist. I discovered an unoccupied suite at a job once and used to sleep on the floor in there. Someone found out and then the empty suite was locked from then on and I couldn't get in anymore. There is nowhere in an office building to lie down and that is ridiculous. Lying down is comfortable and it would instantly improve everyone's job at minimal cost.

Break rooms are always sad and awkward, so smart people walk around outside on breaks. But then they get all sweaty since they have to dress up for work (for some reason) and then have to sit through the rest of their workday all sweaty. It's a brutal combination to have a lack of a nice break area, and a dress code together. Male business attire is engineered specifically for maximum discomfort, fabric covers the entire body and seals with buttons at the cuffs, tucked in shirt at the waist, thick socks, and tie at the neck, to choke off all entry points for fresh air.

It's nice that people like to socialize at work, it probably makes their jobs easier. Socializing is not a good thing for the few people that care about getting work done. It's impossible when coworkers are constantly bothering you. I've historically been great at stopping people from bothering me at my desk, but there has been constant loud socialization at every job I've ever had. I can only avoid distraction by listening to gnarly metal on headphones all the time. This can put you in the difficult position of either being looked down on for being unproductive, or being the office pariah for not socializing as much as others.

Good night, everybody. Have a great day of sweaty awkward meetings under blinding lights tomorrow!

Activity as a Cure for Pain

I was told my swollen, purple ankle would in heal 6 months if I rested it. I walked normally on it instead, which hurt like hell, and it was fixed in one month without medication.

It was the worst I've ever sprained anything. I got it by drunkenly stomping into a pothole on some jacked up San Francisco street, it hurt so bad I immediately froze and went silent. I hid it all night because I was afraid that acknowledging it would make it hurt more. The next morning it was on fire and I knew I wasn't walking anywhere. I Googled it to see if there was some way to get walking faster. Everyone said aspirin, rest, go to the doctor, get a splint, don't put weight on it.

Some marathon runner said he ran 50 miles a week and has had many sprains and some breaks. He said to walk on it normally, and don't limp or be visually obvious about the injury. I went to the doctor, she prescribed some high-dosage Ibuprofen that requires a prescription, and said to rest it for 6 months. The sprain was so swollen that it looked the same as a broken bone on the x-ray. She said "a bad sprain can be more painful than a broken bone".

I followed the marathon runner's advice instead it was all over in one month, no pills.

I've had back pain since an injury at age 17, but it hurts less now than ever before even though I work out like 8 times a week. Over the years I've read a ton about back pain, much of which is the same old advice. But a few people have pointed out the same principle as the marathon guy, basically "resting a stiff body part tells it to prepare for rest, moving a stiff body part tells it to prepare for moving". If movement is better for you than sitting around, why would that be any different (within reason) for an injury?

A piece of accepted wisdom in the bodybuilding community: "a sore muscle means you have to train it more frequently". Not an injured muscle, a sore one. If you look at random fitness sites they all say the same thing. Do your pecs hurt? Do pushups three times a week instead of one. Sore back? Do deadlifts twice a week instead of once. With correct form. It's somewhat counterintuitive, that using a sore muscle more would lead to less pain. Imagine if anything else in life was like that. Are your brakes squeaking? Drive more aggressively and slam on the brakes. Are your jeans frayed and faded? Wear them more and put them through the laundry more often.

More people are getting wise to the reality that a sedentary lifestyle is up there with smoking, diet, or booze in terms of how fast it will kill you. It can also lead to cancer, stroke, heart disease. It's incredible to think that most of the things we consider unhealthy are almost preferable to simply sitting too much. Movement is the best maintenance for me when I'm healthy, but it's also the best medicine for me when I'm unhealthy.

When I was a little kid I would run around like a maniac until every bone hurt. If something entertaining was going on, it was irrelevant how much things hurt because I was going to keep flailing until the other kids had to go home or the sun went down or my parents made me go home. I remember feeling completely worn out at the limit of tiredness... and then something good would happen and I'd keep flailing and nothing hurt anymore. Is there really even a limit when you're an excited little kid?

I can't do that anymore though, if I flailed around for hours every day I'd have horrible joint pain all the time or some other bad side effects. Wait a second, when I was a kid I used to do it for hours every day and the only side effect was excellent sleep every night for years. Huh.

Most Jobs Shouldn't Have 8-Hour Shifts

My regular coffee place in college would close for no reason whenever the managers felt like it. It was between my parking spot and my morning class, which was perfect. I'd be running late and have no time to pack food and it made me crazy when I'd try to grab something right before class but they were closed with no explanation.

The hours listed were something like "7ish to whenever", that was what the sign said on the front door. Or it might have said "closed whenever we feel like it", there was some funny sign like that. What a horrible business model, right? Who can expect to build a customer base with that attitude?

No, it made people want to go there more. Every successful trip to this place was a rare event and made you feel lucky. The frustrating closings made people more determined to get in, like they had to settle unfinished business. Their hours became this shared joke around campus, but only for people that went to that school, weren't brand new students, and had to go to the super early classes. They got constant free publicity out of it and students were always talking about them.

I had no idea why they were closed. It's possible they strategically closed during peak business hours so that the greatest number of people would see their sarcastic signs, but I don't think it was anything calculated like that. I think the manager would just run errands or go eat somewhere or whatever and close the place whenever he felt like it.

My favorite neighborhood bar right now has this weird ass bartender that will start singing or dancing for no reason. But he knows a ton about beer and gets right to business whenever you have questions or if you look ready to order. He said they have no set closing time, if things are busy they stay open til last call (4am around here), if things are slow they could shut down at 11pm. A four hour difference! He said "sometimes I'll stay here until 3am even if it's slow, if I'm having a good time."

At my current job, which if you work in an office is probably a lot like your current job, you stay for eight hours no matter how busy things are. You can sit there doing nothing for five hours on the off chance a customer walks in the door and spends $5, while the business owner spends thousands on operating costs. I have a finite amount of work to do every day, and if I'm done in three hours, I have to find five hours worth of whatever to fill the time. This is not only accepted, but encouraged. Just find something to do, get a head start on tomorrow's stuff, learn a new skill for the company.

It makes no sense for a company to pay for electricity, heating and cooling, security, janitorial crew, overtime, and a million other things because someone decided the job takes 8 hours no matter how much work there is to do. If a cubicle job announced that employees can leave for the day whenever they've finished their work, two things would happen: they would never ever be short on applicants, and their workers would increase their pace to superhuman speed to jam through everything and leave by 11:30am.

Workers would become ultra efficient. No one would want to quit. They would be the most loyal employees ever. If the company dumped extra work on them, they would work even harder in order to get all that done and still leave early. They would learn whatever they had to, and get as good as possible, to get everything done early and error-free (they could be fired for too many mistakes). They'd be less stressed and more excited to go to work. They'd drive less.

But jobs with hourly pay don't work that way. You're here for 8 hours even if you have one hour of work to do. Let's say you were hired at a $15 hourly wage to do customer service. If you're the superstar of your department, you get $15 for that hour. If you're the very worst customer service person in the building, you still get $15 for that hour. Every workplace has this person. By definition someone has to be the worst in the office.

Since you're getting paid the same no matter the quality of your work, why not reward the more efficient people by letting them leave? No one wants to be there, that's why it's called a job. And it's basic math that you won't be paid totally fairly, because the entire premise of employees is that you have to pay them less than the value they generate, otherwise there are no profits for the business. So it only makes sense to let people leave if they've done the amount of work that management has decided needs to be done. Real tasks don't follow a 24hr clock. They start at the beginning, and they end when you're done.

There are plenty of articles showing an inverse relationship between GDP of a country and the length of their workweek. Google it yourself, I've only got a few hours of weekend left before the next 8 hour shift.

Personal Experience Isn't Enough

I like being fed up with political articles and the news, because it covers up the fear that I'm horribly under-informed. It's easy to score coolness points by acting like current events are noise distracting me from some important life wisdom. It's easy to say "it's futile to try to keep up with current events".

That's better than admitting I'm being lazy by staying ignorant of what's going on. Or even worse, that maybe even if I did have the stamina to stay up on a lot of things, admitting maybe I don't have the intellect to make sense of what's happening in the huge space outside my routine. That space, by the way, is most of the world.

It's easy to distrust something that's hard to understand, or to discount things that have little to do with your daily life. I feel like I have so much to concentrate on every day, that I can get fooled into thinking that the long list of concerns has some kind of global relevance. It doesn't really. Think about the fact that there are societies separated from you by an ocean, speaking a language you don't speak.

I've been in plenty of arguments where the other person speaks mostly or only from experience. It's true that there are certain things we can learn only by doing, but it's a giant mistake to think we can only learn by doing. Other people have done, and have learned by doing. Some of those people wrote books, some of their doing has been included in statistics. No matter how strongly I feel a connection to something, I have to remind myself that there may be literal billions of people that do not relate to that.

And the longer I live, and the more attachments I develop, the harder it can be to care about events across the street. Which is why I always try harder to read more, try more things, listen more, observe more, look for patterns. And do my best (which is usually not very good) to remember I represent a very small amount of humanity.

There are over 7 billion people on Earth. Any personal opinion represents a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent of human experience. More people are on Earth every day, which means your views represent a smaller and smaller percentage of people every day, and every year. That means every year an individual opinion represents less and less of humanity. Which means as a person ages, any argument from personal experience is going to be less representative of humanity overall. So the older we get, the less relevant our personal opinions get.

Another issue is when arguments from personal experience ignore the experiences of people that are better in some way. Finding your own way in a craft, or to physical fitness, or to your life philosophy, is all well and good. But if you think personal experience is the ultimate authority, then what about someone whose personal experience led them to be better than you at your craft? Healthier? What if they have a cooler life philosophy than you?

Science, books, facts, statistics, it's easy to dismiss these as not being useful if you feel some intuitive truth that conflicts with what you're hearing. Other people also discovered amazing things on their own, off the beaten path, and maybe better than what you discovered. Will you dismiss those discoveries because they didn't come from your own brain?

There's not much difference between that reality and science, books, statistics. It's one of the major advantages of being a human being instead of a fish or a giraffe. You don't have to (and shouldn't) rely only on what happened to you, because smart people have already figured out lots of things and all you have to do is read them.

There Are No Extra Hours

One of the smartest people I've ever heard of recently said one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. I was listening to a podcast with Sam Harris, who has a PhD in neuroscience and is a world-famous bestselling author, media personality, philosopher, and makes me reconsider my life philosophy almost every time I listen to him.

As a person concerned about the evolution, thriving, and well-being of the human race, he was answering the question from a listener "What will we look back on in 20 years with disbelief at how ignorant we were?". Harris said he thought the eating of animals would be a top contender. He said that he tried to address this by switching to a vegan diet for six months, but went to a doctor and had blood work done and a lot of measurements were out of whack due to his over-consumption of carbs. So he had to switch back for his own health.

If anyone wants to start some productive habit, such as reading more, working out more, they might start with the idea to spend 30-60 mins a day practicing this new habit. Obviously there's only 24 hours in a day, and the concept of opportunity cost tells us that there's no such thing as pure addition to one's day. You can't just add an hour of working out to your day. You are working out an hour a day instead of doing something else. In order to start this new habit, you also have to decide "What activity am I cutting by an hour to make room for this? Video games? Work? Sleep?"

From a financial standpoint, I find that opportunity cost is sadly often overlooked by young college students. You're not just paying tens of thousands of dollars to go to school, you're also sacrificing thousands of dollars that you would have earned working during the time spent at school. And of course countless hours of time spent in class and doing homework, that could've been spent at work or doing anything else.

On the flip side (way less obvious!), there's no such thing as pure subtraction from your day either. If you're going to cut something out, it must be replaced by something because 24 hours are still going to go by no matter how many activities you cut. Want to spend less time eating donuts? Hanging out with people you don't like? Practicing a hobby that no longer brings you any joy? Guess what, something else is going to fill that time whether you like it or not.

This is what bothers me  about Harris's comment, and what is such a shame about many people I've known that have attempted and failed to keep a vegan diet. To be clear, I'm not advocating a vegan diet to anyone. I'm pointing out that if you cut something from your life, it has to be replaced by something, and if you don't consciously choose what that something is, life might pick something that works against your main objective.

Cutting animal products from your life won't help you at all unless you replace those items with something else that contains the B12 complex, fats, calcium, iron etc that you need to thrive. If you cut yogurt and chicken from your life and don't choose a replacement, life will choose potato chips and gummy bears. The same goes for any other "quit in the name of health" quest. If you want to cut your TV watching by one hour a day, you have to increase your reading time, workout time, or beer-making time by an hour, or else you'll just increase some other unhealthy habit by an hour to fill the void. Doesn't make sense to cut TV time by an hour just to increase video game time by an hour.

Decision making got harder once I realized this and that's probably never going to change. I've spent a lot of time doing things without weighing it out. Which is fun. But now every time I want to do something, I have to think about what activity I'm giving up in order to do x. Which can still be fun. Make the decision to do x, knowing that you're giving up y, and then make sure that sacrifice was worth it.

Earth Food vs. My Alien Biology

I made excellent German potato salad for a potluck once and nobody ate it. It was an extra large batch because a million people we're going to be there, and I didn't know a lot of them so I did an extra good job to impress everyone. I wound up taking 90% of it home and the consensus around the potluck was that it was too spicy. Spoiler alert: it wasn't.

It was vegan but still tasted good. It's supposed to be vegan, German potato salad is just incidentally vegan, normally, in Germany. It tasted totally correct. And yet these Earth people told me it was too spicy. Ingredients: potatoes, mustard, vinegar, sugar, etc. Not spicy.

Did you know that some people prefer coffee that you can see through? Milk chocolate? Yellow beer? White bread? Provolone cheese? White turkey meat? White turkey meat!!! These are shared preferences among many people. I've heard explanations from otherwise great people about why these foods are good.

The entire concept of light food versus dark food makes no sense to me. In life, are we not supposed to want good things? If you learn about something better than what you had before, do you not want it? If somebody offers you a choice between one of two free options, do you not take the better one? And yet, there's a trap there.

I've picked the better one every time and it's only made my life worse. I let beer experts turn me on to pitch black 10% abv stout beers, now everything else tastes like apple juice. I let some Santa Cruz hippie talk me into trying 85% cacao chocolate and now milk chocolate is basically cotton candy. It works with music too. I've followed a trail of progressively weirder and more complicated metal music to the point that classical music bores the shit out of me and I have a Masters in it.

It's usually more nutritious too. Black plums are one of the most nutritious foods in the world. Know why chai tea is delicious and green tea tastes like a lawn? Chai is made with black tea. Black rice is better for you than white rice. Black beans have more fiber than pinto. Love blueberry pancakes? Try blackberry pancakes, friendo. Purple potatoes, purple carrots, red onions, all better than their light counterparts. But people don't eat them even if you prepare them well and give it to them for free.

There's always someone around me saying they can't get into the best foods in the world. I come from a planet where people have bodies that respond well to spicy foods and dark foods. Here on Earth people leave transparent coffee in hotel rooms, break rooms, Starbucks, all the worst places where you're most in need of color and flavor. Recently some Earth woman saw me getting coffee and said "Oh, I can't drink that stuff in the morning." I felt awkward so I said "Aw yeah, I like my coffee so dark that it absorbs all the light around it. When I make coffee at home the sky gets overcast. That's how I like beer too haha." She replied "oh... I'm a fan of Bud Light."

This isn't just blogging, that was verbatim how that exchange went. What do you even say to that. I'm ready to go home now, take me back. I miss the coffee from my home planet, it's nothing personal, people of Earth. Your Sumatrans and Ethiopians have done all they can.

I forgot to mention someone at the potluck brought homemade guacamole. It didn't have any cilantro or jalapeños in it.

It's Idiotic that Presidential Debates have a Live Audience

Most people I know get 0% of their election information from researching the candidates. It's usually from Facebook articles making statements that have been re/mis/de-contextualized so many times that they have nothing to do with the original claims. Those articles don't address real issues, they just take a stance on something and then pad it out with other stuff that's logistically unrelated. But you're supposed to care since members of your club all take the same stances on that set of unrelated issues.

Don't read a book on economics, reflect on it, then vote for a candidate that aligns with those views. Just click an article by someone who also didn't do that. Oh and it isn't actually about economic policy, Trump just said something idiotic so you're voting against whatever economic policy he wants.

It's become a cliche that social media is shortening everyone's attention spans, so I'm not gonna talk about that even though it's 100% true. But instant access to a million pandering pieces of media have turned legitimately world-changing issues into entertainment. And we take that philosophy with us to the debates when we watch them. It doesn't matter what happens at tonight's debate, which I won't watch. I'm just excited at all the memes that will be on my wall tomorrow.

The live studio audience is absolute idiocy. A debate is supposed to be a series of arguments between two people, with the winner decided by panel based on the strength of their argument alone. In real debates, people get thrown out for making noise. At the presidential debates, people can boo and cheer and make faces on camera, all of which sways public opinion and none of which has anything to do with the strength of the arguments. My favorite moment in all non-fictional TV this year was when Bernie Sanders made some comment that caused a raucous cheer, and Anderson Cooper said "I know that plays well with this crowd, but you didn't answer the question."

There are real articles in the world that say a given candidate "won" a debate, and base part of that opinion on how the crowd cheered for them. Then that gets passed around the internet until it eventually reaches you, helping to add to the vague mush in your mind that tells you the candidate is superior. They won the debate because they are better, which I know because it's all over the internet, in articles written in response to something other than the candidate's argument.

The only reason Trump has gotten this far is that he's been practicing this longer than Hillary and has way more experience. Oh no no no... not in politics, no. In entertainment. He's been practicing every day for years, so he's great at entertainment now and no one cares that he will literally contradict his stance on major issues mid-paragraph. And hey, whether you're talking about Gwyneth Paltrow or Kim Kardashian or Trump or Rush Limbaugh or whatever, there is no law of man or of nature saying that only good, skilled, competent people are allowed to succeed.

Much like Trump himself, these articles (and the people posting them) can make any moronic claims they want to with zero fear of repercussion, and people pay attention. And if those claims get soundly debunked and revealed as being moronic, does the author write a retraction? Does the FB poster do any clean up? No. They don't post a status saying "Hey I apologize, I've recently learned the status I posted on 10/23/2016 was based on a lie and I retract the whole thing, I highly suggest anyone influenced by that status reconsider their position, as I have done." That will never happen.

Not in a world where a debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton has a live audience. Where the studio invited (non-debating) women allegedly harassed by Bill Clinton (also not in the debate), and gave them closeups, purposely to influence public perception (not a deciding factor in declaring a winner) of the debate.

Anyways my wife and I are gonna go run a 5k and then do homework and drink beer. My personal favorite beer, Xocoveza (made by Stone) has come back on the market after previously being declared a seasonal one-off and retired. It's an imperial stout that tastes like Mexican hot chocolate.

I Prefer Rudeness to Obliviousness

Some purple explosion had happened in the fridge, leaving dried residue on everything. I had to pull hard with both hands on a mustard bottle, until it loudly cracked free. Every item I removed sounded like velcro. 

Me and two friends were cleaning the break room fridges, three large ones full of expired food left by 120 people, some as old as a year. Elbow deep in grime, harsh cleaning agents, stinky gray sponge water. We only had an hour to accomplish this, everyone in the building had been notified by email to stay out of the way for this single hour. We had to run to the sink every 30 seconds to rinse something off.

And yet one woman needed to meticulously wash a dish in the one sink during this one hour. With a towel laid out, a sponge, dish soap, hand soap, paper towels, waiting for the water to heat up, building up a lather, scrubbing, drying completely, getting the water temperature comfortable, building up a lather of hand soap, washing her hands, drying completely.

I stood right behind her, fantasizing about what I could yell. What's the point? Would yelling be any more obvious than three grime-covered people doing a gross cleaning project? With several warning emails and a shared calendar event? Fluorescent signs on the three fridges? On the break room wall? This isn't hyperbole, that preparation actually happened. 

Standing there with this leaking sponge, I'm wondering what else I can do to make this person understand that there are other people in the room. I thought that was already obvious because there were other people in the room. I thought of a few things that would have a lasting impact but were illegal.

We were throwing things away. Every two minutes someone would come in and say in an annoyed rhetorical tone "wait are you guys just throwing stuff away?" And I would answer "yes, we're cleaning the fridges. Several emails were sent saying that every expired or unlabeled item would be thrown out." No matter what spin I put on that idea, it always came out sounding rude. So every two minutes I felt like I was in the wrong, because at some point we decided bluntness is worse than bothering everyone around you for years.

Every time my downstairs neighbor smokes, plays guitar, has someone over, or has a phone conversation, the eight apartments that share walls with his have to participate. But if we ask him to be quiet, we're rude, like New Yorkers. It happens almost every day. Does he think that some days the smoke doesn't smell like anything, or that his loud guitar playing isn't loud? As a human being, he knows about sleep and what will wake someone up.

I was at the gym this week and three others were working out. This smiling friendly looking man came in with his gym stuff and switched on every overhead fluorescent light and the TV, which came on at a very loud volume and was set to Trump/Clinton election coverage because of course it was. He walked right out of the gym to the locker room, all these changes were so that the room would be set up the way he wanted when he came back.

When he came back, an older man in better shape asked him to turn everything back off, and was immediately accused of rudeness. The older man would have been breaking the rules by swearing at him or punching him in the face. Most workplaces would rather be at a constant simmer of low level resentment and frustration.

There's a lot of misrepresentation about people from big cities, and how rude they are. But they're used to a faster pace, busier life, more complicated transit, more money at stake. Whenever someone's rude I consider whether they're being that way because they're trying to get something done and I'm slowing them down. I'm rude sometimes, but I'm almost always monitoring the people near me and I think that trait has more karmic importance than rudeness.

It's amazing to me that the older man from the gym is still motivated to confront people about their obliviousness. I think it's futile and I don't have the energy for it anymore and I'm half his age. Which is pessimistic. But I'm optimistic in deciding that some people are oblivious to those around them. Because the other option is deciding that they are aware of other people and choose to inconvenience them on purpose.

10 Ways To Play Guitar Sooner

What's this awkward title? I'm not talking about playing faster, or better, I'm talking about going from someone who doesn't play guitar to someone who does. That's it. If you want to get crazy with buying gear and learning musical theory later, that's great. Most new players just want to start making musical noise as soon as possible, so let's do that.

1. Listen to a ton of guitar based music all the time.
If you don't listen to a lot of guitar based music, you will never get good at guitar. It's simple. People listen to what they like, if you listen to guitar that means you like it, if you listen to it a lot that means you love it, and if you love it that is the best motivation to get good enough at it. Also you need a lot of songs in your brain for later when you decide which songs to play. You don't need to be well-rounded.

2. Decide who to copy.
Google the player(s) you like the most from step 1, learn their names, listen to everything they recorded on Spotify, watch YouTube clips of them playing live. Make a conscious effort to copy them and be derivative. Originality is great, but it takes time and years of experimentation and we're trying to get you playing right now. Important: if your favorite player uses a pick, you have to use one too or else you can't copy them. If your favorite player doesn't use a pick, you have to learn to play without a pick. I don't recommend choosing virtuosos such as Joe Satriani or Eddie van Halen.

3. Buy cheap gear.
A common phrase in music instruction: "buy the best gear you can afford". This doesn't work for beginners because they don't know enough to judge the quality of gear. I suggest buying a cheap piece of crap, because you might hate playing and give up, so it's better to not waste money. I recommend pawn shops and eBay. Get something with obvious cosmetic damage, these sell for cheap even if the functional parts of the instrument are high quality. I have personally done this and recommend it to everyone. You don't even need an amp, but the distorted sound of your guitar through an amp might be a good motivator.

4. Get Smartchord.
It's a great app that becomes more valuable the better you get. For now you only need the tuner feature, which tells you how out of tune your guitar strings are when you play them into your phone's mic, and it tells you which direction to twist your guitar's knobs to make the strings be in tune. It's my favorite tuning app, and has a million bonus features that will come in very handy later on. Tune your guitar, or else it will sound bad no matter how well you play.

5. Pick a few simple songs and get tabs, not sheet music.
"Tabs" are ultra simple sheet music for learning songs, and you don't need to know music theory to read them. Say you want to learn "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Google "Smells Like Teen Spirit Tab" and pick whatever tab is the most popular. If you want to figure the song out by ear, I salute that, but it is a much slower process unless you have great critical listening ability (most people don't). You will never have to learn how to read sheet music in order to play rock n' roll.

6. Play along to recordings instead of a metronome.
Everyone says to play along to a metronome and that's wrong. Two excellent reasons for this: recordings make you learn and play every part of the song from beginning to end, in order. Second, recordings make you develop realistic rhythm. Recordings are better than a metronome because you develop solid rhythm but with the variations and imperfections that great players have. If you get behind or forget where you are, the recording marches on without you. This helps you build musical reflexes and the habit of recovering quickly from mistakes.

7. (Optional) Learn every note on the two fattest strings.
Use one of the features on Smartchord that shows a diagram of the guitar neck, with little letters all over it to tell you which notes are which. Learn the notes on the fattest string, then if you want you can add the notes of its neighbor string. There is a predictable pattern to the note names, if you spend enough time messing with the diagram and playing each note on the fattest string, you'll figure it out.

8. (Optional) Learn these chords on the fattest string: F# major, F# minor, F#5 and  F#7.
Smartchord has diagrams to show you how to play these. Once you learn these shapes, you can move them all over the guitar. If you did step 7, you know where the notes are on the guitar. If you learn F# major, all you have to do is move it up to the note C, and now you're playing C major. If you learn F# minor, just move it up to the note C, now it's C minor. And so on. When you have a grip on that, learn them on the second-fattest string as well. Now you know 99.7% of all chords you'll ever need.

9. (Very optional) Learn the Ab Major scale, Ab minor scale, and Ab blues scale.
Again, Smartchord has diagrams for this. Just like before, you can use the knowledge from step 7 to move the scale to any note and it will be a different scale. Once you've learned Ab major, move it up to the note D and play the same scale and guess what? Now it's D major.

This isn't necessarily the best way for everyone in the world to learn to play, but it has worked well for me and everyone I've taught. It also minimizes the amount of dead time that you will endure before being able to start playing songs. And the amount of money you have to blow on equipment and books.

I cut out tip #10 so you can start playing even sooner.

The Hiring Process Is A Joke

I was the least qualified person at the interview, but I knew I was getting the job anyway. Because the boss was wearing the same outfit as me.

After 13 years of auditioning for singing gigs and getting turned down for most of them, I've been told many times " don't take it personally, the audition isn't about you", and I didn't realize how true that was until this interview. There's no degree you can get, no job on your resume, no research you can do that can replace the coincidence of showing up to an interview looking just like the boss.

And what's so bad about that, really? Having a degree doesn't mean you'll have any of the skills that all college grads are supposed to have, plenty of people graduate without communication skills, competence at technology, mathematical ability. Depending on the school and the professors, you don't need any special intellectual curiosity or perseverance to graduate.

The resume doesn't say much either, since anyone can put whatever they want on it. You could make ludicrous claims without the company checking up on it. If you put an amazing claim on your resume that is true, that doesn't mean those hiring are going to call anyone that can verify the claims. I've listed references that are casual friends I never worked with, just because they sound good on the phone.

Sure, you could do research on the company to impress the interviewers. I've definitely done that in the past, and then had interviews where I was never asked anything about the company. I've done research and watched people get hired who did zero research. If you research a company top to bottom, impress everyone and get the job... does that have any bearing on whether you'll be good at the job once you're working there?

The jobs pull the same stunts. Here's the classic one: the job lists Excel proficiency as an absolute must, you feel good about your Excel skills so you apply, you get hired, and then none of your coworkers can do anything on Excel. You remember seeing on the website for the job that the supervisor position requires a Masters in Accounting, which you don't have, so you applied for a lower level position. You start working there. The supervisor doesn't have a Masters in Accounting.

But you're not surprised at this nonsense. When you first applied online, the application made you attach a resume. After you attached it, you got an endless application asked you to type out every aspect of what's on the resume. The application specifically forbids you from typing "see attached resume". You also had to write the address of every previous job, and phone numbers of supervisors that don't even work there anymore.

One summer I read a dozen books and a hundred articles on financial matters because I felt like a financial illiterate. That year I had three job interviews (I got all three of the jobs) and asked these great detailed questions about the benefits, most of which the committee couldn't answer. At the third job, after already receiving an offer, I said I would need to see the informational packet they give to new employees so I could study it before accepting the offer. I was told the packets would be given out at orientation. But that's too late, I said, I need to know this information to tell whether I want to work there! I was told the packets would be given out at orientation. I took the job anyway because I needed the money.

The packet didn't have specifics about the dental plan. The HR rep couldn't answer my questions, my coworkers couldn't. I dug deep into the file structure of a shared hard drive only accessible by employees that have a company password, keycard, electronic profile... established hires that are already committed to the job. I found something explaining the dental plan. It covered all preventative care, but took $14.66 out of every paycheck. I only needed basic cleanings once every six months, but $14.66 out of every check means $381.16 per year... so I'd pay the equivalent of $190.58 per cleaning. That means it was cheaper to pay for cleanings out of pocket, an extra cost I didn't have at the last job. Suddenly the extra money earned at this new job has decreased.

And I got that job because the boss showed up wearing the same outfit as me. I matched his speech, leaned on the table the same way, cracked a couple jokes about things I figured he'd be interested in, and my whole past became irrelevant. I knew the three other people applying for the job, and all of them would have done better at it.

They should tell you about that in college. Or maybe high school. It might not go over well to tell college kids that a 5 minute conversation matters more than 4 years of sweat. That $50 spent carefully at Ross goes farther than $60,000 at school.

103 Bad Songs in a Row

Spotify is an amazing tool for discovering music, and I don't use "amazing" the way that people talk about a normal food that has bacon added to it - I mean I feel legitimate amazement at its usefulness. I'm learning more about music with Spotify in the background at my cubicle job, than when I was a doctoral candidate in music at the top-ranked music school in the world.

I've been listening exclusively to rock and metal for over a year, so I thought it might be nice to dive back into modern pop. For a while I was totally up to date, I made an effort to listen to the entire Billboard Hot 100 a couple times a month just to stay current. Using Spotify, I took the most direct route possible to get caught up: click Browse, then Pop, then Today's Top Hits, which at the time was a 103 song playlist of pop from 2016.

I always complain about sound quality in modern music, and there's tons of scientific research to explain and support that stance, which I'll get into some other time. Nutshell: recordings have become loud and dynamically unvaried, a consistent level of noise for every instrument in every moment of every song of every album. Our brains treat it as noise, and we're wired to ignore repetitive sounds for our own survival. We have no processing power for important things unless we can shut out a dripping faucet, traffic, the A/C humming, the fridge buzzing. Thus badly produced music gets ignored so we can function. We can only pay attention to modern pop is if it's ingenious enough to overcome that survival mechanism (it usually isn't) or if the lyrics are thought-provoking enough to hold our attention (they aren't).

Revisiting pop for a 103 track binge was an exercise in frustration that made me wonder whether

• All of it sounded like trash due to bad production only, and there was some good music hiding in there that my brain was biologically unable to appreciate, or
• The music itself was bad and the loud production was sadly its only attention-grabbing feature.

I'm inclined to think the latter. I tried something on the opposite end of the spectrum to test whether I accidentally made myself hate music: the second track from Aerosmith's "Get Your Wings", a song from the early 1970s that I had never heard before. The production was much clearer, with frequent, varied, and complex melodies, way more textural variety, the lyrics seemed to tell one continuous story from beginning to end, and the rhythmic content was way more advanced than anything from the 103.

An aside about rhythm. People seem to think that rhythm is a big feature of current music because the percussion is really loud and easy to follow. Rhythm doesn't get any less important than in modern pop, I understand that it's easy to confuse a really busy percussion section with rhythmic complexity but they're not the same. Percussion is locked into a quantized grid in a digital audio workstation and cannot swing, improvise, or subtly vary in tempo, and it never changes meter, it just counts to four over and over. 103 songs of machines counting to four in the same tempo. That isn't rhythmic.

The irony of the 103 is that modern technology allows musicians more variety in sound choices than ever before possible, but the loudness of the production tells our brains that it's white noise. How does more variety sound more monotonous? That's insane! There are more sounds but less texture, explicit lyrics sung to childish melodies, more percussion but less rhythm, complete musical freedom but zero improvisation.

I've since become more familiar with "Get Your Wings". I tried listening to it while writing this but it was too distracting, so I put on Today's Top Hits for some background noise.

Citation Isn't Explanation

Einstein said something close to "If you can't explain it to an eight year old, you don't understand it". I'm going to go one simpler since I'm not Einstein, and say "If you can't explain it at all, you don't understand it".

I appreciate it when a piece of non-fiction is informative and expresses an opinion. I appreciate it when an opponent in an argument is informative and expresses an opinion. What I don't appreciate, and what I suspect no one appreciates, is when an individual outsources all responsibility for their side of the conversation to somebody else. This is the worst in internet comment sections, but people also do it in spoken conversations. It's done heavily in articles even from respected journals, and to a massive extent in academic papers.

If you're going to write something informative, research the issue using whatever resources you want, including life experience, and then present it your version to the reader. If you can't figure out how to say it in a way that's different from your resources, there's no reason to write. This way of thinking is in direct opposition to the majority of online articles I've read lately, which are basically citation MadLibs, a series of blanks surrounded by placeholder text where all the important stuff is replaced with    (link)   . Whenever a major point needs to be made, an argument needs to be levied, or evidence needs to be provided, you get a lame sentence with this kind of text letting you know to quit whatever you're doing because the author is done teaching. 

This writing style is weakening people's ability to think critically, and to express written communication effectively. If someone else will take care of the important info, that saves you the work of explaining things. If you don't have to explain things, that saves you the work of understanding things. That is not a good way to communicate, and a reader shouldn't have to do research to understand your writing... that research is what you should have done before you wrote.

An album review containing 29 outside links. From the horrible website Pitchfork.

I'm not saying people shouldn't consult other resources - quite the opposite, research the hell out of the issue if you want. But once you have consulted whatever supporting materials, it's time to organize that info into something concise and consolidated and give some original insight. Do the research, then report. If you must cite an outside source, do an in-text citation like this (author, page number, title, whatever helps) so that the reader has less work to do instead of more... they can skip to precisely what idea you're citing instead of reading the whole book. It's safe to assume the following:

• Everyone knows about Google and can verify what you wrote if they want to
• Most people don't wanna do research when they're bopping around Facebook
• If you don't understand it, you shouldn't try to explain it to other people
• If you simplify things, more people will understand them
• If you don't have time to completely read a link you cited, neither do your readers

Most importantly, it's dishonest to send people to a webpage unless you already read through it. More bad news: if that webpage made any big crazy claims and linked that claim to an outside reference, you have to read that page too. I know it's inconvenient, but my life experiences are leading me to believe that people are becoming less capable of critically evaluating information for truth, and explaining it later. Don't be a person that never helps anyone and keeps referring them to someone else, don't be Comcast customer service.

Drink to Forget

When I'm trying a beer for the first time (or a film, album, game) I want to know as little as possible about it beforehand, so that I can decide if it's good without being influenced by whatever I've read. Sometimes I look it up on a review site to see if there's a general consensus on its goodness, but I should probably stop doing that. It's important to form my own opinion, and I don't like the notion that my taste is shaped mostly by what others have said. There are at least three things that make this really hard.

• The placebo effect: where outside forces convince you a certain thing will happen, and then when it doesn't you still tell yourself that it did

• Confirmation bias: where you want something specific to happen, so you seek out information that agrees with you and ignore information that contradicts you

• Echo chambers: where a cluster of people all say the same things, constantly reinforcing the belief that those things are true even if they're not

People like to think they have their own opinions, but they're all affected by these three things. If you realize this, you still probably don't know the full extent to which these things shape your opinions. So I like to approach new beers knowing full well that this stuff affects me, and simply seeing a positive review on a beer site is going to skew my opinion. For that matter, having tasted anything at all will skew my opinion... humans can't assign absolute value and can only decide how good something is in relation to something else. Nothing gets an objective, untainted review. 

One question I had when thinking about this: if everyone is susceptible to the bullet points above, and everyone is going to rate a beer (or album, etc) in relation to something else, why try to escape the placebo effect? What is the point of trying to rate something objectively when no one can possibly accomplish that, and when everyone is going to have a past experience that skews their opinion?

The main reason I attempt it is that I want to feel like I have original thoughts. Surely being aware of the existence of the placebo effect, confirmation bias, echo chambers, and the impossibility of being totally objective is some kind of advantage. The Dunning-Kruger effect says that anyone that thinks they may be incompetent, merely by having such a thought, is getting closer to competence. If you know that you're influenced by outside forces to a huge extent, you're less controlled by those forces than someone who has no clue.

Maybe I'm less prone to these issues since I'm aware of them, but isn't it futile to attempt escape? I don't think so, because there's one surefire way to dodge the trap of hearing something about a beer and being affected by that when you try it: being the first person to taste it... being the brewer. Anybody that makes stuff is familiar with the doubt, pessimism, and punishing self-imposed standards that come with submitting your work to public scrutiny. The brewers are probably under a reverse placebo effect where they think everything is worse than it actually is because they expect it not to live up to their vision.

Are there any inherently good beers, since everyone's opinion is the result of everyone else's opinion? Well no, because again, we can't evaluate anything unless it's in relation to something else. But imagining the brewer's first taste made me think the first person to experience something gets the best chance at objectivity. So pretend you're the first person ever tasting it... or give yourself the reverse placebo effect by assuming that no one knows what they're talking about and whatever you heard about the beer is probably wrong. This doubting attitude helps you to decide on your own if an over-hyped product is really any good, or if a low rated one is enduring unfair bias. In the scientific community this is called skepticism. It will improve your beer tasting, with the minor bonus of making you better at critical thinking. Of course that skill will be shot after enough beer.

Mandeville Beer Garden, my favorite joint in Sarasota

No Accounting for Taste

It's a good thing that BeerAdvocate aggregates many reviews of the same beer into one score, because it would be impossible to choose based on individual descriptions. The descriptions given by individuals on the site, by the site owners, and by the beer companies themselves, are convoluted and flowery to the point of meaninglessness. The language on these sites turns people off from great beer, much the same way music criticism cordons off some great music. It's not just snobbish, it's intentionally confusing, alienating, and impractical. The language of booze tasting does have two advantages over the language of music criticism: 1) it's not as full of factual inaccuracies and 2) the people writing about it seem to enjoy the subject.

As an experiment, I'm going to visit BeerAdvocate and grab the very first beer review I see. I'm writing this at 6:40pm on 8/29/2016, so if you seek this review out you'll notice it has the same timestamp.

What? From the squealer, it pours golden amber with a moderate off-white head. Pleasant in the nose, some grass. Very pleasant in the mouth, enjoyable overall! I've rated over 120 beers on this site, and I've never heard the term "squealer" referring to beer. "It pours"? The beer got out of the glass, grabbed another beer, and poured that into a glass? Is that some kind of cannibalism? I think by "it pours" you meant "it is". "Golden amber" means the same thing as "amber", and "moderate off-white head" means "foam". I get that in beer-speak foam is called "head", but is anyone expecting it to be a color other than white? What made him write "pleasant in the nose" instead of "smells good"? What made him write "pleasant in the mouth" instead of "tastes good"? What made him write "enjoyable overall" instead of "enjoyable"? You could argue that switching up adjectives makes writing more interesting, but do these switches make this review more interesting? They sure as hell don't make the review more informative.

Though I can't credit the writer because I don't know who it is, I remember some quote about beer connoisseurs "aping the language of wine" which sums up a vague annoyance I couldn't articulate. Did anybody notice the little ratings categories listed near the 3.79 score this dude gave? Does "look" refer to the bottle design, or the appearance of the beer inside? The website doesn't say. Why does the "overall" rating say 3.75 if the review's total score is 3.79? How is the overall rating of the beer different from... the overall rating of the beer?

We've got to take a break to acknowledge something about the act of rating beverages. I'm not talking about how every rating is inherently subjective and can't be trusted unless your taste is identical to the rater's taste, everyone knows that. I'm talking about the well documented fact that professional wine tasting is total bullshit, and it's been firmly established in these and many other studies that wine "experts" can barely distinguish between a white and a red in a blind taste test, much less the vintage or country of origin. There's a hilarious Wikipedia entry on The Judgment of Paris, a notorious 1976 Paris wine competition where blind testing was introduced for the first time. Parisian judges measured Bordeaux wines grown from centuries-old vines against young California reds, and California won every single category. By the way... the studies I linked to that debunk wine tasting? Published by the Journal of Wine Economics. The snobs themselves are the ones admitting that the snobbery is actually just fakery.

I bring this up because craft beer snobbery is the new wine snobbery, but it's way more widespread and annoying because of the intersection of two factors: everyone can afford great beer, and the craft beer explosion started at the same time as the social media explosion. So everyone has the ability to buy and write about great beer, but for some reason they choose to do it in a way that's disingenuous and not informative. Just for fun, I'm going to pick through the site real quick for some choice lines:

Its moonscape surface contains multiple bubbles of various sizes that create pits and craters as they burst.

Pineapple to grassy aroma with some small dank earthy tones and pine. Quite a bit diverse, slightly juicy sensing character, with mild malt sweetness.

Smooth and full in mouth, with a crisp, effervesced, and dry finish.

APPEARANCE: As I began to pour this beer it slowly came gurgling out like it was waiting for an invitation.

Explain to me how this is supposed to help someone determine whether they should buy this stuff. Somebody made the obvious suggestion that I stop reading these things if they annoy me, a suggestion that would help a number of craft beer fans I know. But BeerAdvocate is the biggest database of beer reviews on the internet, and you're not supposed to have to ignore huge databases of knowledge about a subject in order to enjoy that subject. What would be better is if the reviewers remember that reviews are supposed to relate a personal experience, and inform the reader. Most of these writers seem interested in writing a lot of words without doing either of those things. I doubt when this fellow poured Alesmith "Speedway Stout" that he thought "this beer seems like it's waiting for an invitation". And how is the speed of the pour a factor of appearance? And how does any of that tell you if the beer was good?

But check this guy out:
I am really amazed at the praise this beer seems to be getting from most reviewers. In fact, I disagree so much with this that I had to register an account and submit a review of my own. This beer is extremely sweet with a strangely artificial chocolate aroma and no bitterness, hops or roasted barley to balance it up. I would hesitate to describe this product as a stout or even a beer. I have tried many chocolate stouts in the past and liked every single one of them, but this one is just terrible. On top of that it was also expensive. 1.52/5

That review is negative, sure, but it's full of info and tells you exactly where he's coming from. No reason to spend a paragraph describing the foam on top. How about a positive one?
Drank at room temperature. Dark brown color, thick creamy brown head with strong retention, smell of dark/milk chocolate, nice carbonated mouth feel with medium body, sweet long lasting chocolate with a hint of cream soda flavor. Compared with Young's double chocolate. Smiths is hands down a better stout. Very tasty! 4.59/5

A review of the same beer but with the opposite reaction, using straightforward language and imagery accessible to anyone. He gives you the info and lets you draw your own conclusions, without using insane metaphors or trying to tell you how you should feel about it. The best part is when you compare the two, they basically say the same thing but lead to totally different scores due to the writers' personal tastes. All to say that if you're not describing an experience or providing information, your review is unnecessary.

Budgetary Exbeerimentation

I love buying beer at stores that let you make a custom six-pack from a selection of single beers. There's no faster way to learn about beer's countless styles and substyles, endless variations in alcohol content, flavorings, price, seasonal/limited releases and multi-brewery collaborations. Beyond the educational aspect, it allows the most variety since one sixer equals six different experiences. Grocery stores rarely cater to this style of buying, so I hunt for specialty shops with the largest possible selection of singles.

This is the most expensive and inefficient way to buy beer, since as with most other products, buying a larger quantity of one product results in a lower price per ounce. The excellent Founder's "Breakfast Stout" is $3.50 per bottle at Total Wine and Spirits, but only $12.00 for a four-pack. That's 15% less per beer, which compounds quickly since I make weekly trips to buy custom six-packs. If you drank one a day for a month (monotonous, but a delicious monotony) you'd spend $108.50... but for some reason, introducing a four-compartment cardboard sleeve reduces that price to $92.00.

Depending on your philosophy, the time cost is even worse. It takes time and mental stamina to scan hundreds of individual labels, especially since good stores put helpful info cards under each beer (more reading). The clock ticks while you juggle all that information, running dozens of tiny cost-benefit analyses in an attempt to whittle the store's inventory into only six choices. And the trip repeats every week, in my 2004 Mustang that's about 60 cents and ten minutes per trip, for a cost of $2.40, 40 minutes, and a gallon of gas monthly.

There's got to be a way for me to learn about beer and have a ton of variety without wasting so much time and money. After weeks of the custom six-pack method, I discovered the swanky craft beer "bomber" area of Total Wine. A bomber is a 22oz bottle instead of the usual 12oz, meaning you get almost two beers per bottle, plus breweries often release their craftiest (and rarest) beers in this format - which means more education. Great! So this $10.00 bomber of tasty Southern Tier "Crème Brulée" stout is only 45 cents an ounce, and since the aforementioned Founder's is only 29 cent per ounce for a single beer, that means buying bombers is 1.5 times as expensive! Wait... what was I trying to do again?

• Goal: drink a large variety of beer for both educational and entertainment purposes, and waste less time and money.
• Obstacles: the cheapest buying method is the least educational and varied, and the most educational/varied method is the most expensive and time consuming.

An easy improvement is to buy for the whole month in one trip, which automatically cuts shopping time in-store, and driving costs (both time and money) down to 25% of the original amount. Doing all the shopping in one trip also means I get to buy more at one time, which exposed an incredibly obvious solution that would never have come to me if I were buying a single six-pack: buy multiple six-packs and rotate them for variety.

The best beers come in 22oz bombers at around $10.00, but the best six-packs are about the same price, for triple the servings (six beers versus two servings per bomber). For $50.00, I could grab five top-notch six-packs (30 servings) and have a great beer every day, rotating them to revisit the same beer only once every five days. Since a bomber has 1/3 the servings as a six-pack, it would cost three times as much to buy a month's supply: $150.

According to my records, I spent $153.00 on craft beer last month (I recommend Mint.com for budget tracking), so these numbers aren't just theoretical. Eventually I settled on a compromise:

• Two good six-packs to rotate at $10 each (running total: $20, twelve servings)
• Two excellent four-packs to rotate at $10 each (running total: $40, twenty servings)
• Three excellent bombers at $10 each (running total: $70, twenty-six servings)
• Five random weird singles at around $3.00 each (final total: $85, thirty-one servings)

By sacrificing a little variety, but no quality, I was able to cut the month's beer expenses by 43%, while cutting gas and time costs by 75%. It's always nice to save money, but it's beyond nice to spend less time at the store. I'm going to see what other areas of my life would benefit from the "do more in one trip" method, remembering that the benefits can extend beyond saving money.

Partial picture of the haul (click to enlarge)