My Op Ed Piece.

If you're flying from New York any time in the foreseeable future, avoid the American Airlines terminal at JFK. The brand new terminal, despite being quite beautiful and the billion dollars American Airlines spent on it, is a modern disaster of management. It is as if American is trying to make life miserable for its customers. To begin with the airline has very few security check points, making getting through security a long an arguous task. To compliment this, the airline has provided nice card tables for you to put your stuff on. But don't worry; you'll probably spend just as much time waiting to get your ticket as waiting through security. Instead of installing the new kiosks that other airlines like United have adopted, American has opted to go with the old style customer interaction which is almost three times as long. It is almost as if American Airlines is single handedly trying to bring back 80s style airlines. I do however recommend United Airlines as they have a very modern outlook. Of course United is in bankruptcy, along with most of the industry.

But how could an airline like American make such a colossal mistake? How come the airline that is doing is right is the one in bankruptcy? Let’s turn back the clock to the mid nineties.

Back in the 90s Northwest Airlines and Continental decided to merge. In 2000 United moved to acquire US Airways. Both deals were blocked. American Airlines however, did manage to buy out TWA in the same year. Had all three deals gone through it would have left three major airlines. Unfortunately Congress decided to block two of them, leaving us with a large spattering of different airline companies. You may ask, what is the advantage to such a consolidation, after all, it is engrained in American youth that competition is what's good for everyone. Consider this though; competition leads to lower prices, so consolidation would lead to higher prices, which is exactly the kind of thing a company in bankruptcy wants. Theoretically the heads of the 6 major airlines (Delta is the only one I didn't mention) could get together and put aside their animosity to raise prices and save the crippled industry. That is if there weren't laws against such a thing. Which hasn't stopped other industries from adopting such a practice, so why not airlines? The answer, is the flaw in capitalism that Jesse first pointed out in his post: Capitalism is not Patriotic. Simply put, the heads of these companies have too much to risk.

We often think of companies as their own autonomous bodies which act in their self interest and perpetuate the capitalist agenda. This just blatantly isn't true. Instead companies are run by men. Greedy men, who are more concerned with looking out what is best for them rather than what is best for the company (or country in Jesse's example). What's best for the individual isn't what is best for the company. These executives make their millions whether they are in bankruptcy or not (sometimes more when they're in), and there is no reason for them to risk these gains for the benefit of the company or the industry at large. What is worse, attempts to regulate both the company and industry are what has gotten us into this mess in the first place. First the regulation that prevented the large buy outs in the late 90s, and then the forcing of competitive behavior.

So the question becomes: If we can't trust laissez faire capitalism, and we do more harm than good by regulating it, what place does capitalism have in the modern world?

taken from an Op Ed piece written by Jim Tzenes to the New Yorker

A retort. A short.

To break the third wall for a second: If you haven't noticed I've been mixing in serious posts with less serious one. I've designated the two through the symbolic marker Short. If you see that word in the title, try not to take the content too seriously, as I don't. Also lately I've been trying to comment on more ‘blogs both liberal and conservative. I've always seen it as my prerogative to play devil's advocate and argue liberalism to the conservatives and vice versa, but both of you feel free to argue with each other too.

This story takes place two years ago when the college I was in made me take an engineering design course. This course was centered on small groups of engineers (like myself) designing a product. Unfortunately the course was far more concerned with the technical aspects such as, reports and documentation, rather than the actual finished product. So to make up for this lack of emphasis on the designs which we made, the esteemed professors decided to have a competition where our products would be compared and then sold off to the RIC (which is a hospital in Chicago for the disabled). Our assignment had been to design a book holder for quadriplegics. People who couldn't hold the book open themselves.

I had been assigned to a crack team of engineers, who had done a great job on the documentation and left actually building the thing to me. I'm actually fairly proud of how it came out, considering I wrote the blueprints after it was finished (a method I highly suggest), but it wasn't great or anything. In fact, no one’s was. We'd been given ten weeks to do something we had no experience in, so the results were less than stunning. So there I was sitting in front of the odd look book holder that I would be presenting, and a half assed poster which had a single picture, when some members from another group strolled up. It took me a few minutes to realize that they had been going from one group to another "sizing up the competition."

I cannot begin to explain how incredibly stupid I thought this was, but after they demanded a demonstration I decided to tell them. "Are you joking me? Who cares whether it can hold open a textbook or not? Its not like a text book needs to be held open, anything that heavy will hold itself open by weight alone. But more importantly why do you care? This is a stupid project we've all been forced into so the school can pass us off as if we are engineers without actually haven't to go through the bother of training us first. Do you really care whether or not your design is considered the best? Do you think winning this thing is going to get you some prestigious job somewhere? Make your career? You're designing a book holder for people who are stuck in a hospital all day because they can't move around on their own. Is this your way of pretending to care? If you actually gave a shit about them you'd go down there and spend time with them. I'm sure they'd much prefer some actual human interaction to some crappy book holder prototype. Let me ask you this, when you went down there for initial testing, did you ask any of them how they were doing? Did you pretend to care about their lives then? You're the one using greed as a poor substitute for moral fiber, and you have the gall to question me about my commitment? Don't worry though I'm sure no one here will mistake your Hypocrisy for actual Engineering."

Or at least that's what I should have said.

Taken from the life of Jim Tzenes

Denver Legalizes Marijuana.

I shit you not. Actually, Denver voters approved a citywide ordinance that makes possession of under an ounce of marijuana by people over the age of 21 no longer a punishable offense. A subtle nod to the marijuana smokers of the city. Of course, the law is still trumped by state and federal law, but pot smokers all over the country see it as a step in the right direction. But hold that thought for a second because I'm going to talk to you about abortion.

Abortion supporters often think that anti-abortion supporters see abortion as a religious issue. Actually, most anti-abortion advocates see abortion as a moral issue, and see abortion as killing off young babies. The reason the two sides will never come to a compromise is they both have the same information on when life begins and come to different conclusions. Thus, to argue in favor or against abortion based on when life begins, is worthless. But I'm in favor of abortion, because I think the child isn't the only victim. However, I'm going to change the subject one more time.

It turns out lung cancer is one of the most unsympathized with cancers in America. As Americans we all fear cancer as by wiping out all other diseases, its one of the few left it kills more and more Americans every year. Yet, for some reasons, people can't seem to bring themselves to sympathize with lung cancer patients. And why? Cigarettes. People seem to think that these people got lung cancer through their own fault. They smoked, they deserve it. Which is odd because most people who have smoked long enough to get lung cancer didn't know it was a risk when they started, and by the time they did it was already too late.

I have a few friends who are pot smokers, and are quite excited about Denver's new laws. They assure me that pot is much less harmful than cigarette smoking. Which is odd, considering the Harvard studies showing just the opposite. That show in fact pot is almost four times as harmful. I wonder if anyone will sympathize when pot smokers start coming down with lung cancer. I know they don't when a woman becomes pregnant.


taken from: Hypocrisy, the New Religion by Jim Tzenes

In Your Eyes.

There is a theoretical limit to how good a camera can be. This is due to the fact that heat is nothing more than the presence of particles vibrating. As a result every image has an intrinsic amount of "noise" in it. Obviously you can play with this limit by cooling down the camera's components, but ignoring that, a camera at room temperature can only be so good. The human eye by comparison is within a factor of ten of this limit. This means your eyes are almost as good as is physically possible at room temperature.

Anyone who thinks their eyes are due to evolution alone is a moron. Don't get me wrong, I don't believe it was molded by the hand of the all mighty on day six or anything. However, the Intelligent Design argument does have merit to it. Unfortunately, the religious fanatics see Intelligent Design and think god, completely missing the much more obvious influence; one much closer to home. You.

The brain of a two year old has about twice as many neurons as the brain of a twenty year old. The eyes of a newborn have one and a half again as many. So who picks which stay and which go? It isn't some complicated process like separating introns and exons in a chromosome, but rather its much simpler. You do. Crazy as that sounds, its true. The way you use your brain in those early years determines what it will look like later on. In short, your thoughts shape your mind. This seems terribly backwards as your thoughts are generally considered to be a subsection of your mind, however it is easy to prove, but either applying or depriving newborns of certain stimulus. This kind of experiment would be terribly barbaric, so lets pick a much more human proof. Everyone knows children learn new languages faster. In fact, after about the age of six to eight, it is next to impossible for someone to develop a new accent. There are of course exceptions (remember people mold their own brains), but as a general rule, that area of the brain becomes set in a given accent.

Gestalt is another proof. People who disagree with Evolution often talk about gestalt, however their arguments often miss the mark. Lets consider for a second three dots equally spaced on a page. Each dot alone doesn't mean anything, and even looking at two of the dots doesn't do anything for you. But look at all three and suddenly you see a triangle. This is the essence of gestalt. None of the individual parts are suggestive of the whole shape, but when considered together a different image appears. But how does this apply to human visual perception (a subject I'm a published author in)? Well lets look at faces for a second.

The way the human brain interprets a human face is unique; and what's more, it is subject to gestalt. Show someone individual features of a face, and they won't be able to tell who's it is. Even giving them multiple features seems to some how foil the recognition process. The whole face is needed. There is a specific neurological condition in which the affected is no longer able to recognize objects (unless of course they are told what it is). People with this disorder cannot for example recognize a pair of glasses shown to them previously. These people are still able to recognize faces. There are also people affected with this disorder who are able to recognize objects readily, but completely fail when it comes to faces. This clearly indicates that these two actions happen in separate parts of the brain. What's more, children who grow up without looking at faces do not have these unique characteristics. There is no gestalt for them when it comes to faces.

Given all this I begin to wonder how people would treat Intelligent Design if it was backed by Neurologists and not Fanatics.
take from a lecture on vision given by Jim Tzenes

I've taken ill.

This will be updated... please be patient