A thought occurred to me, which strikes me as a different way of stating the importance of shared values:

The best relationships are between two people who respectively value most highly the things which they naturally do well or the qualities that they most reliably emulate.

Not that I'm an expert or anything; relationships are not my strong suit.

But this seems like an efficient relationship. It would entail the least amount of change and compromise. While we shouldn't resist change where it constitutes improvement, the idea of changing simply to become more compatible with someone else strikes me as inefficient, among other things.

Fiscally Conservative Solution to Homelessness

Consider the following hypothetical:

One night, a homeless man breaks into your home. He does not harm anyone but the event is very disturbing for you and your family. The man is not mentally well.

You have two choices:

1. Have the man arrested and sent to jail. He may spend some time there, but will eventually be back on the street. This will cost you $97. There is a 2% chance you will have some run-in with this man in the future.
2. Have the man taken to a cheap, but secure and clean apartment where he will have a meal and a place to sleep. He will stay there. This will cost you $35. There is a 1% chance you will have some run-in with this man in the future.

Which do you choose?

It would cost $20B to end homelessness. That's $132/year from each adult American who is in middle class or greater. Per that article, apparently it's much cheaper to provide permanent supportive housing per homeless person per year than pay for all the other costs the homeless cause a society to incur. ($12,800 v. $35,578; I used those numbers to calculate the hypothetical amounts: these numbers divided by 365.) The housing would not be extravagant. Something very simple yet comfortable and secure.

Fifty-nine percent of U.S. adults are in the middle to upper class. That's 152,397,000 people who can probably afford to pay $132. Would you pay that amount each year to not see any more homeless camps, or any of the other inconveniences and crime that come from homelessness? 

I would.

Whom the narcissist needs

 My mom thinks my dad is a narcissist (they're divorced), and I can see that I take after my dad in many ways...so, here goes...

I think the type of significant other a narcissist needs is someone who highly values the things that the narcissist does well or comes naturally to them. This is because the narcissist, above all, wants to be wanted. 

The maximum want you can get from someone is a function of how much they value you. 

You are a collection of traits, skills, talents, knowledge, personalities, etc.

I assume narcissists wish to reach the stage of maximal "wantedness" by the path of least resistance. There's an inherent efficiency to being wanted for how you naturally are--this requires the least amount of deviation from equilibria. 

I suppose this applies generally to everyone. But I think it has particular application to narcissists. Not that it'd work in every case, of course, but I think on average narcissists would have better relationships if they sought out partners with this in mind. They will most value the person who values them most.

Am I completely out in left field on this one?

LOST: good riddance

I had this written up somewhere and thought I had posted it over a year ago. Guess not. Here it is.

***

Yes, you read that right. LOST is over and I am happy. No longer will I be embarrassingly hooked to this poor excuse for entertainment.

I have written about LOST elsewhere already. There I cried foul as the writers ruined whatever good thing they ever had by taking their show into a circular, impossible time-travel loop. That was season five.

Now for season six, the final season, the writers understandably steered back from the whole time-travel fiasco. It was wrap-up time. Time to give our fans all the answers they've been waiting for! Time to start answering all the questions and mysteries we've created over the last five seasons, right? WRONG! Suckers. Did anyone really think they were going to explain how things worked? Of course not. There was too little time. And besides, ending each episode with some suspenseful mystery that would never be explained had worked so well for them on every previous season--why stop now?

When I first started watching LOST, I was sucked in. The former psychology major in me was excited to see the psychological dynamics of a group of strangers isolated on a deserted island and how that would play out. I was, of course, quickly disillusioned of this hope as I realized that these characters actually weren't normal. In other words, they didn't act like normal people. They kept weird secrets from each other when a normal person would have just spit it right out. They fought over silly little things. They just....did things that made you go "What the...?" (And of course, you never got answers for those questions, either.)

Then as the show progresses, we discover that this is no ordinary island. We don't know why, but we trust that answers will be forthcoming. The survivors meet the natives on the island, who turn out to be hostile. We never discover why they are hostile. At first they all seem like crazy, primitive jungle-dwellers. There's talk of this "sickness" and "infection." Oooh, what is that all about? (Hint: we never find out.) Later, we discover that these natives are actually just normal people who like to play dress-up sometimes. Oh--and they all work for Jacob, apparently. You know, Jacob, the "good" guy we later found out BROUGHT all these people to the island, to help him or be his candidates or whatever.

You know what, I'm boring myself with this recap. If you've seen the show, then you know all this. If you haven't, then you don't care. Let's just move on to the stuff that bugs me.

To put it succinctly: Lost sacrificed story coherence for "suspense." The writers hooked their fans through this irritating practice of introducing one suspenseful mystery after another, without resolving anything. They expect and hope (and were not disappointed) that their fans forget that their story has no answers or resolution to it by introducing simply more mystery and intrigue. Fans forget that they never received an answer to their last questions because suddenly they have new questions to wonder about. And so it goes, episode by episode. More questions, no answers.

Take Sayid's death and resuscitation, for example. That was the big suspenseful ending to the final season premier. Did they tell us why or how that happened in the next episode? Of course not. Did we ever find out? Absolutely not. But the typical fan will have forgotten all about that a couple episodes down the line. The producers banked on the collective short attention spans of their viewers and fans.

The stuff I really take issue with involves the Lost storyline not following its own rules or producing impossible results. Lost tries to pass itself off as a story that more or less follows regular laws of physics. The island isn't a fantasy land, despite all its mystery. We're given the impression that there is a method to this madness. The characters aren't supernatural beings. They're mortal and can be cut and hurt and die just like everyone else. On that note, how do Desmond, Locke, and Echo survive the implosion? How are they tossed out into the jungle? Doesn't make sense. Don't make the hatch implode or explode if you want the people inside it to survive.

Another example. At one point, we find out that the smoke monster was in Jacob's cabin. He took Claire there after she went nutso (why did that happen, again?). But we also know that the cabin was surrounded with that ash substance that we later find out repels the smoke monster---it can't cross the stuff. If the ash stuff is supposed to keep smokey out, then don't go and put him right in the cabin. Play by your own rules or don't play at all. Or at least, don't make up stupid rules in the first place if you're not going to follow them. If you're going to produce impossible events, don't just ignore the obvious questions they create. Don't be lazy. At least make a respectable attempt to resolve the inconsistency according to the parameters of your own storyline. Don't just leave people guessing. Don't cop-out and say that part of the value of your story is that it leaves things "open for interpretation." Give me a friggin' break. How do I interpret my way out of Jin impossibly surviving an explosion of hundreds of pounds of C-4? Is he like Wolverine or something? Is this Heroes? Does he have superpowers? Please.

Oh Aaron, stop being so nit-picky! These are just minor issues. They pale in the context of the entire storyline. Okay, maybe, but what if there are hundreds of similar unresolved or unanswered holes? Do we just keep ignoring them? Do we accept the undoubtedly PR-inspired defense of declaring that LOST is about the "characters" and their development and relationships to each other? I'm sorry, but that is simply another cop-out. Good character development does not excuse a horribly convoluted storyline.

See, what I think happened is the writers were more or less making things up as they went along. This is one possible explanation for the story's lack of coherence. Remember when Ben Linus' character was first introduced? That guy was only supposed to be around for like three episodes. But then all of a sudden he's the leader of the "others." The writers were seriously just winging it. I can picture them going "Hey, I know what would be cool and trip people out, let's put POLAR BEARS on this island!" And yeah, it is kinda cool and trips people out, but then the writers ignore the part about it not really making any sense or fitting in with the overall theme and context of their story.

Here's my "problem." I like internal consistency from the shows I watch. If they can't even play by their own rules, then I'm turned off. It's a sign of laziness. If you're a writer, and you've got a mysterious jungle island where people occasionally crash and it's nowhere on the map, then you're basically in a position where you can do whatever the heck you want with the story. But after you've set the stage a little bit, established some basic parameters and rules, well then you'd better follow them. If not, then it just means you lacked foresight in the beginning. You didn't give yourself enough room to work. You didn't plan well. You were unprepared. And so you're forced to break your own rules to make things interesting. Even then, you can make a colorable attempt to adapt the story line so as to assimilate new twists to the plot. But the LOST writers made no attempt to do this. They just broke the rules, and kept on breaking them. It's like when you tell a white lie. Each subsequent lie gets bigger and bigger. Either you have to come out and tell the truth (in this case, that your story is off its rocker), or you just have to keep making it more and more ridiculous so that people don't think to question all the lies you've been telling--they get too preoccupied with your latest tale. (Perhaps season five really was the writers trying to tell us the story was off its rocker, as they resorted to time travel. Maybe that was their cry for help.)

Eventually, something like that will blow up in your face. That's when you give it a nice, feel-good happy ending. Focus on the characters, which all your fans love and adore. Yay, they all go to heaven! Aww you were so nice to those characters, we'll forgive you for that crap story you just told us.

Have I made my point? I hope so. I'll leave you with a list of questions that I feel were left unanswered from the LOST storyline. A lot of these may appear trivial, granted. But again, I feel that as a whole, these unanswered questions represent the overall laziness and lack of foresight on the part of the writers, as well as everything else I've mentioned. It was just one question after another. The writers never let their fans crash off the "high" they experienced after a suspenseful mystery was introduced. Because then their brains might start working and they'd begin to question what the heck they'd been watching. So for all you LOST fans out there, now you know what it's like to do drugs.

***

WHAT is the island?

If the "others" were under Jacob's command, and Jacob is the good guy, why did they attack and murder the crash survivors? Why are they such jerks to the candidates?

How did Jack survive being hurled hundreds of yards from the plane crash, out of his seatbelt, into a bamboo forest?

Why are there polar bears on the island?

Why was Libby in the mental hospital where Hugo lived?

How was Locke cured of his paralysis after crashing on the island? Why did he suddenly become paralyzed again while hunting boars with Boone?

When Jack and Locke questioned the value of pushing the button, why didn't Desmond tell them about the System Failure he witnessed when the countdown timer reached zero? (another example of people not acting "normal")

Why did a dharma supply drop come in if the dharma initiative has been wiped from the island?

Why does the information sent via the pneumatic tube just end up in a pile in a meadow? How are reports being made if the dharma people aren't around anymore?

How did Locke, Echo, and Desmond survive the implosion of the swan station? If it imploded, how did they end up in the surrounding jungle?

Why did Walt tell Locke not to open the hatch? How did he know anything about it?

What did Walt see that frightened him enough to leave the island? How did he see it?

Why did the others want Walt? Why do they want children and only certain of the survivors?

What is the "sickness?" Why are people worried about being infected?

Who said "help me" to John in Jacob's cabin?

Why did women who were impregnated on the island die during childbirth?

Why do Shannon, Sayid, and Locke see Walt in places he cannot be?

Who lit the brazier? If it was Danielle, how did she do it while on the other side of the Island, and why did Sayid see no footprints in the sand around it? If it was the Others, what was the smoke's purpose?

When Ben pushed the wheel, why did the island start spinning through time? Why did it stop?

Why does pushing the wheel transport the person to Africa or wherever?

Why does Farraday have an American accent if he lived in England as a child, attended Oxford University, and both of his parents are English?

How did Miles know "Kevin" wasn't Michael's real name on the ship?

How did Locke's dad get on the island?

What was the "box" that Ben was talking about?

How did Widmore's mercenaries survive the black smoke when bullets are useless against it?

How did Jack, Kate, Juliet, and all them get zapped forward in time to "real" time when Juliet tried to blow up the bomb?

Why didn't Sun get zapped back in time with the rest of them on the second flight?

How did Sayid COME BACK TO LIFE? How did the others save him?

If the others want to kill Sayid, why don't they just shoot him? Why does he need to "willingly" take the pill?

How did Jin survive an explosion caused by hundreds of pounds of C4 explosives?

How did Miles' father survive the atomic blast if he was still on the island when it "sunk"?

Why did the island sink? Did it even sink?

If the blast never went off, what caused Jack, Sawyer and company to conveniently jump forward to "real" time?

How did the atomic bomb get down in the chamber where Sayid extracted the nuclear component?

Why was Walt "special?" Special in what way?

How did Jacob get off the island? What are Jacob's powers? Why couldn't he keep Ben from stabbing him?

How did Richard get off the Island to go see the young John Locke?

If Sayid was "claimed," why did he end up with his friends and not Locke? What does it even mean to be "claimed."

How did Jacob and smoke monster's mother kill all the villagers on the island and collapse the well? Was she the smoke monster back then? How did that wheel ever get put in place if she killed the project?

Why did Claire abandon Aaron? Why did the monster take her to the cabin? How did the monster get in the cabin with the ash stuff around it?

How did Jack survive putting the "cork" back in the hole, if he's not immune to electromagnetism, like Desmond?

If Hugo became the next "Jacob," why was he in purgatory with all the rest?

The demise of the boob guy: how plastic surgery is making this creature extinct.

I've decided to also post things on this blog that I'm too embarrassed to display on my main blog. So I can't promise that anyone reading this entry will find it particularly "deep."

The other day a friend on gchat had a status message that said "guys don't even like boobs anymore." (This female friend happens to have large breasts.) At first I thought in disbelief: "Yeah, right!" But then I got to thinking, and thus was born my new boob theory.

This theory is based on simple principles of economics: supply and demand. (I've never taken an economics class, but my best friend in college was an econ major so I heard enough about it.) As the supply of any product increases, the demand decreases. The reason: everyone ends up getting one. So how do I relate this to boobs? Well, with the increasing availability and affordability of plastic surgery (breast enlargement, in particular), the "supply" of big boobs has increased dramatically. This is especially noticeable in certain areas of Orange County, where I live. Now, as the supply increases, wouldn't the principle of "supply & demand" predict a simultaneous decrease in the "demand" for big boobs?

These days, all that stands in the way between a girl and big/perfect boobs is a few thousand bucks. You can even finance these things--so they're more affordable than ever. This means that more and more women are getting them. Thus, there is an actual increase in supply. However, there may be an even more pronounced, hidden, effect to this supply in that men know all of this about boob jobs. We know they're affordable. Many men are more than willing to flat out buy their girlfriends/wives boob jobs. So even if the actual supply hasn't increased that much (I haven't looked at any data), the perceived supply might be much greater in that the procedure is so widely available and increasingly affordable.

Let's bring this back to physical characteristics and what guys look at. In the past, guys have typically fallen into at least one of two categories: boob or butt guys. Some guys love boobs (my former roommate is one of them), other guys are more into butts (myself included), which normally refers to an overall nice physique, often accentuated by a woman's behind. Most girls assume that all guys are of the boob persuasion. This, of course, is untrue, but it may fuel many of the boob jobs going on all over the world each day.

Now let's assume, for purposes of argument, that all girls who wanted boob jobs actually got them. Suddenly, all women would have perfect boobs. If you equalize a female physical characteristic, a male's attention will automatically turn to other characteristics that differentiate and set those girls apart from each other. Some characteristics may be desirable, such as fit bodies or proportionally long legs. But no longer will a guy be looking at the girls' boobs--they're all equal, right? This is what happens when you get asked the question "All other things being equal, would you take X or Y?" In that hypothetical, you are assuming an equalization of all characteristics except for one. In other words, once those other variables have been equalized, they are essentially ignored. So if all girls suddenly had "perfect" boobs, then guys would automatically start ignoring them.

What would this then lead to? Well, to remain competitive in the beauty market, women would be forced to make other characteristics more desirable. (Male attention isn't the only incentive for being beautiful, incidentally.) Once you take boobs out of the picture, this leaves the rest of the body to work on. Viewing things optimistically, one might hope that it would encourage a new widespread surge in exercise and healthy eating. On the flip side, it may just drive many women back to the quick fixes of cosmetic surgeries designed to slim or enhance the figure in other areas. (However, such procedures may be more expensive, less permanent, and require more maintenance than a typical breast augmentation.)

Could increased popularity for breast enlargement ultimately lead to improvements in women's health? It might be a long shot. But I strongly believe that this increased popularity will inevitably lead to the extinction of the "boob guy." (This also assumes that most guys don't have a preference between real and fake boobs. That assumption may or may not be true--I don't know.) Don't get me wrong--guys will always like boobs. Even avowed "butt" guys like them (it's just not what they look at first). But if boob guys know that perfect boobs are just a few thousand dollars away, they will automatically focus on other physical and emotional attributes that differentiate women.

Your days are numbered, boob guy. I will miss you.

(Disclaimer: I express no opinion as to whether getting a breast augmentation is a good or bad idea. That is up to the women. All I will say is that while I am a "butt" guy, I still love boobs.)

Giving the gift of acceptance

You know the courteous car driver that stops and waves for you to cross the street at a crosswalk? Or maybe the person who holds the door open for you as you enter a building? Maybe it's just your coworker offering you some skittles. All of these are gifts being offered to you.

Accept. Acknowledge. Thank.

How do you feel when someone thanks you for doing some favor? Pretty good, right? What if someone opens the other door instead of entering through the one you're holding for them? Then you might feel a little foolish and overlooked.

With each gift offered, an equivalent gift is returned to the offeror upon acceptance. This return gift is simply a feeling of wellness, having done something kind for another. By rejecting a gift offered, a gift you yourself could deliver in return is withheld. Gift-giving is a two-way street. One shouldn't feel indebted to another for graciously accepting a gift, however small, that is offered to them. The gift-giver receives his/her "compensation" in the positive feeling derived from your acceptance.

This is why it's actually more selfish to refuse gifts than it is to accept them. By refusing a gift, or insisting on being the giver (imagine two people at a four-way stop sign waving each other on), you rob the gift-giver of the positive feeling needed to reinforce his generous efforts. The sheepish feeling he/she feels instead will actually discourage him/her from repeating the behavior in the future.

Don't think of a gift as a threat to your independence or self-sufficiency; most of the time you'll be fine, regardless. Rather, think of it as a mutually beneficial interaction where both parties are giving and receiving something in exchange. It takes humility to graciously accept a gift. Prove that you have some.