The Dilbert Blog

No Sunday Post Today

There will be no post for this Sunday. TypePad hiccuped and was hiding the new posts after the old ones for the past few days. That has been resolved and I will resume blogging Monday morning.

The "Great Debate" post about what worldview is most dangerous got deleted by me in the process of trying to fix the problem last week. All the comments get lost when a post is deleted, so I didn't bother reposting it because the value was in the comments.

Best Entrepreneur Ever

I was reading a story about Iraqi insurgents, and how they often wear ski masks to avoid identification. This made me wonder, who was the genius entrepreneur who decided to sell ski masks in the desert? Man, talk about your “outside the box” thinking. Be honest, how many of you, at the start of the Iraq war, thought “They’re going to need a lot of ski gear”?

Any time there’s some huge disaster, my first thought is “How could I make a fortune off of this?” It’s more of a thought-hobby than a financial strategy. I just like thinking about it.

[At this point, about 30% of my readers are considering leaving a comment about buying land 100 miles inland and waiting for global warming to turn it into beachfront property. I’m saying it first so you don’t have to.]

I’d love to see a web site that tells you what companies to invest in depending on what events you believe will happen in the future. The web site would provide an ever-growing list of potential future happenings matched with companies that would prosper in those events. I’d enjoy watching the news a lot more if I had money riding on every sort of outcome.

For example, I’d like to know which companies will prosper when Mitt Romney becomes president. We usually elect the tall guy with the best hair regardless of his experience or policies. No one ever went broke underestimating the thoughtfulness of the American public. I’d like to put some money on that.

I also think the Iraqi civil war will be resolved relatively quickly once America pulls its forces back to protected bases. I make this prediction because the common wisdom is exactly the opposite. When was the last time the majority of Americans predicted world events correctly?

If you ask me whether the stock price of some particular company will increase faster than the S&P 500, my answer is always “Uh. . . beats the shit out of me.” But if you ask me whether my fellow Americans will make uninformed and irrational decisions, I’m willing to put some money behind that.

Happy Birthday to Me

Today I turned 50. It’s an odd thing. I sure don’t feel 50. I’m in perfect health. Apparently that mumbo jumbo about good diet and exercise actually works.

Today the radio and newspapers will report my age as if it is news. Throughout the weekend, strangers will see me from a distance, mouth “happy birthday” and smile. I’ll enjoy it every time.

When I was 20, I wondered what it would be like to be 50. None of my guesses were close. I assumed that “aging” was automatically bad, so I didn’t look forward to it. No one told me that having more friends and fewer zits would feel like a good tradeoff. And if you told me I could have my twenty-year old body again, but I had to take my twenty-year old brain with it, I’d pass.

My cat Sarah is sitting near my feet, as she has every day for the past eighteen years of my cartooning career. She spends the first ten minutes of my day yelling at me to pet her before I do anything productive. I hate the distraction, but not as much as I love it. Today she’ll get a little extra petting.

I love my wife. I love my family. I love my job. I love my life. And I love you too, even when you’re grumpy. And I love being 50.

Here’s what I want you to do for my birthday. Send someone an e-mail and tell them how much you appreciate them, or love them. Do it right now. Then tell me about it in the comments. That’s what I want. It’s my birthday so you have to do it.

Go.

Frequently Disappointed By Mice

Mice keep yanking my chain. Today was a perfect example. The headline said scientists produced mouse stem cells from mouse skin cells. This could be a huge breakthrough, both ethically and medically. The only problem is that the method used on the mice would cause cancer in humans. Fuck you, mice. Give me something I can use!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19067616/

My disappointment could have been worse. It’s not clear I’ll ever need that particular medical breakthrough anyway. The stories that really chafe my nuggets are the ones that sound like this:

“Researchers announced a breakthrough in gene therapy. This new technique gave mice an IQ of 700, grew hair in bald patches, doubled the size of their peckers, and made them immortal. The mice also showed signs of telekinesis, unlimited male orgasms, and x-ray vision. In lab tests, the mice beat leopards in paw-to-paw combat.”

This makes me all excited because I think “I could use a few of those things.” Then I read the rest of the story and it says something like “The researchers cautioned that this sort of gene therapy in humans would make their eyes turn into vaginas.”

It’s bad enough that I live in a country that ranks 37th in health care. The thing that really pisses me off is that I have worse health care than mice. If I were a mouse, I would start smoking, drinking, overeating and having unsafe sex, because those tiny bastards can be cured of anything with a goddamned aspirin and a shot of their own skin cells.

It makes me wonder if mice are easily cured because of the placebo effect. Mice don’t know anything about science, so they think whatever the scientist is doing must be helping. For example, if a lab mouse sees the janitor beating off in a test tube, the mouse thinks “Hey, my tumor is shrinking!” And then it does. You can’t underestimate the power of positive mouse thinking.

Just once I would like to see a headline that said, “SCIENTISTS DISCOVER A CURE FOR HUMAN DIABETES,” followed by details that say, “Scientists caution that this treatment in mice would give them inverted erections and make them hump themselves to death.”

Well, I can dream.

How Rational Are Terrorists?

Successful groups, whether they are Al-Qaeda or the Founding Fathers of the United States, tend to start out with brilliant people who have clear objectives. Those brilliant people attract other smart people by the power of their arguments.

But as an organization grows, you rapidly run out of bright people. The average IQ of any organization starts dropping, and before long, the power of identifying with a group overwhelms the power of reason.

Take Republicans and Democrats for example. Most members vote along party lines no matter who the candidate is or what that candidate does while in office. While there are plenty of bright, independent thinkers in both groups, the majority would vote for a sea monkey if it got the party nomination.

Consider religion. I’ve made this point many times, but it is necessary context for this discussion. At most, only one religion can be “right” because religions are mutually exclusive. It can’t be true that a Christian goes to heaven while at the same time he burns in Hell (according to Muslims). It can’t be true that we only have this life, as Jews believe, if it’s true that people reincarnate. There can’t be new prophets such as Joseph Smith if Mohammed was, as Muslims believe, the last prophet. So no matter who is right about the “big picture,” if indeed anyone is right, we can all agree that at least 75% of the world would serve their souls just as well as in their current schemes if they started praying to Sponge Bob Square Pants.

As soon as you tell me “Carl joined a group,” I can tell you Carl is no longer as rational as he used to be. His judgment will start to conform to the group’s judgment, and the group’s judgment will be based on some ever-drifting sense of values that lost its rational connecting tissue long ago.

This gets us to the question of whether changing the foreign policy of the United States (or Israel) would end terrorism. If Al-Qaeda is like every other organization on Earth, it is irrational. That means it is relatively immune to reason, just like Republicans and Democrats and Methodists and Jews. If the U.S. stopped support for Israel and withdrew all troops from the Middle East, would it be good enough for Al-Qaeda? No. America would still support the Saudi government by buying their oil. Private citizens would still send financial support to Israel. Our intelligence services would still share intelligence with Israel. There is no practical way for the U.S. to get off the target list simply by changing its foreign policy.

The government of the United States is the quintessential example of an irrational organization. No matter what your political leanings, you can find mounds of examples where the government was – in your own irrational opinion – being irrational and working against its own best interests. If you think Al-Qaeda can act rationally, you are holding it to a higher standard than the U.S. government.

So what makes us think terrorists are more rational than any other organization? I believe Al-Qaeda is adrift, their ranks filling with an ever-growing influx of irrational bearded guys who like to blow shit up. If you believe they would take the U.S. off the target list because Al-Qaeda achieved 75% of its goals (say we stopped supporting Israel so much and withdrew our military from the region) then you have no understanding of how groups “think.”

I knew a guy who worked privately as “muscle” to get rid of stalkers for women who could afford his services. He was an expert on stalker mentality. His view, based on years of experience, is that you can’t make a stalker give up stalking. The best you can do is encourage him to stalk someone new. His job was to make it so dangerous to stalk his client that the stalker would move on to a new and more accessible victim.

We have the same stalker mentality situation with Al-Qaeda. Our best bet is to divert their focus to more accessible targets, just as the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan shifted their focus to us. Ironically, the civil war in Iraq might have accidentally accomplished through irrational means what good foreign policy could not. Al-Qaeda is using far more resources fighting other Muslims than fighting the U.S.

I don’t buy into the bumper sticker thinking that we’re fighting them over there so they won’t follow us home. But it’s entirely possible that a civil war in Iraq is the best way to divert the stalker, even at the expense of recruiting new terrorists. Over time, Al-Qaeda’s mission will drift to become whatever it is that most of its people are spending most of their time doing. And that could be fighting other Muslims.

Good foreign policy is overrated.

Rational Evil

If you love it when I admit I was wrong, you’ll enjoy this post.

I used to think America needed to change its foreign policy if it had any hope of ending terrorism. That sort of opinion is never better than a reasonable guess about what is most likely. But it seemed to me that even terrorists have specific objectives, and if they achieve those objectives, they stop terrorizing.

My thinking was that the terrorists were asking for things we’d be better off giving them anyway, for our own selfish reasons. For example, Israel is strong enough and wealthy enough to no longer need our support. And it’s unclear that our heavy footprint in the Middle East is guaranteeing us more oil and less terrorism. It seemed like a win-win scenario to give the terrorists what they were asking for, since the only impact on us is saving some money. Or at least it would save me from transferring my wealth to the pockets of U.S. military industries.

Recently I changed my opinion. While I think there was a period in the past when a different foreign policy would have brought us to a different point, we don’t have a time machine. We are where we are. And where we are is totally fucked.

The problem is with the loose cell structure of Al-Qaeda, and the fact it has become a lifestyle for its members. If we remove all the original reasons for Al-Qaeda’s existence, I believe they would find new ones. It is unlikely the members of terror cells would decide to quit and become insurance salesmen.

While the cell structure of Al-Qaeda is an excellent way to wage war, it’s a bad way to stop a war. If all the existing cells around the world made lists of their reasons for being terrorists, and compared those lists, I think they’d look very different except for the parts about hating Israel and the United States. If the leadership of Al-Qaeda told its cells to disarm, half of the cells would just splinter off and keep on terrorizing. It’s permawar.

One of the problems is that there is a complete disconnect between reality and what terrorists believe. They think God gave them specific real estate, that a horse can fly, there are virgins waiting for them in heaven, and Jews orchestrated the 9-11 attacks. There’s no reason to believe that reality intrudes on their decisions. Tweaking reality would be a waste of time.

(To be fair, the same can be said of America’s government. Just replace “flying horse” with “a guy who walks on water,” and “virgins in heaven” with “the rapture.”)

This leads me to Israel. I used to think Israel was making a mistake to occupy disputed land and give their enemies more reasons to attack and fewer reasons to make peace. Again, perhaps if we had a time machine there was a period in history where that was true. But we’re long past that. Now I believe there is sufficient perpetual hatred against Israel that it would be irrational for them to offer any concessions. It makes more sense to grab as much land and water as they can get their hands on. And it makes sense to keep the Palestinians in a permanent state of wretchedness and powerlessness as Israel consolidates its hold on those resources. In five hundred years, they’ll be glad they have more land and water.

I don’t think there’s much chance of Israel getting nuked. Even the craziest Muslims wouldn’t irradiate their own holy lands while standing downwind and hoping for the best.

While I think Israel’s policies are a dark grey form of evil, I support them because at this point they are being entirely rational. It would be hypocritical to deny any other nation the right to pursue their self-interest.

If the Palestinians ever display an ability to offer a credible peace, I’m willing to revise my opinion. If not, the best advice I can give them is to say goodbye to their shit.

Meanwhile I’m going to invest in Halliburton and see if I can get back some of my money.

Golden Happiness Ratio

I have a theory that you can predict how happy people are – and perhaps how successful – by their ability to tolerate imperfection. The Golden Happiness Ratio is about 4/5ths right, also known as “good enough.”

Once you achieve about 80% rightness, any extra effort is rarely worth the effort. People who can’t stop until they get to 100% are usually stressed to the point where they can barely function. And don’t expect them to do much multitasking.

People who are happy with results much below 80% right are usually serial losers. Those are the people who show up for work when it “feels right.” They generally have money problems, which lead to social problems.

I consider myself the master of the 80% rule. Everything I do is shoddy by most people’s standards. For some reason this does not bother me as much as you might think. I have a high tolerance for imperfection. I consider it a key to my success.

For example, it might surprise you to know I’m a better artist than my comic strip indicates – about 20% better. But to reach that level consistently would double my workload and give me little in return. The art in Dilbert is, roughly speaking, “good enough.” And the lack of complexity arguably adds something in the “x-factor” category.

When I started this blog, I announced that I wasn’t going to put any real effort into my grammar, spelling or factual accuracy. For every person bothered by those imperfections, there’s another who appreciates the rawness of it. I could double my effort to get that extra 20% of quality, but it wouldn’t buy me anything.

Today is another perfect example. This blog entry is about 80% of where I think it could be. I could work for another hour to get it up to 85%, but it’s Sunday morning and my family has awakened. They beckon.

I declare this Sunday blog post “good enough.”

Petting

What do you think about when you pet a dog or cat? There are three typical categories:

1. You imagine how it feels for the animal so you can maximize its pleasure.

2. You think about how it feels to you and your hand.

3. You think about whatever you were going to think about anyway.

If you imagine what it’s like to be the animal, you are probably a generous and giving person who gets shit upon by everyone who has your cell phone number.

If you think about how you and your hand feel, you are probably a selfish, egotistical douche bag.

If you think about whatever you were going to think about anyway, you’re either a sociopath or too busy to enjoy life.

Lately I’ve been trying a new cat-petting method. I keep reading about how pets make people healthier. So I try to visualize the health benefits I’m getting from petting the cat. As I pet, I imagine my blood pressure and cholesterol dropping while my white blood cell count is rising. I tell myself this symbiotic relationship is healthy for the cat too. It’s a win-win scenario. Eventually my mind drifts off to whatever topic I plan to write for my blog.

I realize my petting method makes me a selfish, egotistical, sociopath, douche bag. I figure that’s a small price to pay to live long enough to be an old coot and a burden on society.

It’s important to have goals when you pet. Otherwise you’re just rubbing another mammal for no reason.

My Newest Impractical Peace Plan

I’m so jealous of Switzerland. Those neutral bastards found the perfect scam to avoid being attacked. Terrorists and dictators don’t even consider attacking Switzerland because that country is famous for being, well, the country you don’t consider attacking. That’s what I call good homeland defense.

It’s too late for America to try the neutrality scam. And no one in their right mind would believe it if we tried. We need our own scam to avoid being attacked. I think I have an idea.

Obviously we’d have to stop attacking other countries, no matter how tempting it seems at the time. And we’d need to cut back on the “all options are on the table” talk. That sort of thing makes other countries jumpy. Presumably we only do those sorts of things for tortured reasons of self-defense, but a country with a good Switzerland-like concept doesn’t need so much self-defense.

First, some background to explain where my idea comes from. I might have the history wrong, since I’m working partly from memory, but I think it goes like this. In the late eighties, President Reagan was starting to get chummy with Gorbachev, the head of the Soviet Union, our Cold War nemesis. In 1988, a devastating earthquake hit the Soviet Union. Reagan offered the help of the United States.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1079/is_n2143_v89/ai_7465081

Millions of Americans donated money to help the earthquake victims in the Soviet Union. I remember giving some money myself, before I had much to give. And I literally remember standing in my kitchen in San Francisco and thinking “Why do we have nuclear missiles aimed at each other?” It suddenly seemed a little extra absurd.

In June of 1989, the Iron Curtain started to come down. Historians say it was Reagan’s military build-up that caused the Soviet Union to see the futility of the Cold War. I think it was the earthquake that caused them to see the absurdity of being enemies with a country that has your back when things get bad.

A good definition of “friend” is someone who offers help when you need it, and from whom you would be willing to accept it. Reagan’s offer of assistance after the earthquake, and Gorbachev’s acceptance, made us friends in fact if not yet in policy. The rest followed naturally.

Okay, so my plan is this. America becomes the disaster recovery center of the world. To some extent, we already are. We generally offer help when needed, and we have lots of assets for that sort of thing. But we haven’t taken it to the next level and “Switzerlandized” the concept. We need to be more known as the country that finds people under rubble, as opposed to our current plan of being known as the people who put people there in the first place.

Think of it this way: Who attacks a hospital? Even terrorists avoid that sort of target. America could become, with the right PR, the world’s disaster recovery go-to nation. We could even sign agreements with other countries offering our help in the event of natural disasters, no strings attached. If a country accepts that offer of help in advance, they become friends in fact, and it makes any actions to the contrary seem absurd to them internally. How much of your money are you willing to spend trying to kill the people who will help you when the earthquake comes? It makes more sense to attack Switzerland.

We could even charge for our world-class disaster recovery service, with a sliding price scale depending on the GDP of the nation affected. Germany would pay top dollar. North Korea would be free.

The beauty of this plan is that while Americans would not want to fund direct foreign aid to unpopular nations, few people would object to helping in the event of a natural disaster. And because of the “insurance” nature of the model, we would be giving something of great value to all nations while only spending the money for a few actual disasters. And best of all, we’d have the best disaster recovery resources for our own disasters when needed, especially if global warming pushes the hurricanes into overdrive.

We’d still need a bad-ass military, just in case. But it would be efficient if they were trained for dual purposes, both fighting and disaster recovery.

This plan is impractical of course, as are all of my peace plans. I just think it’s entertaining to figure out why.