The Romanian Dream » daily rant

Equilibrium

Mircea — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 22:20:27 +0000

I was listening to the radio (92.5FM) while driving the other day. As everybody has to make a living at some point the commercials started. Normally I wouldn’t pay attention to them, but since I was waiting at a rather long red light (http://www.bellevuewa.gov/trafficcam/cctv004.asp) I found myself listening. Wait, it gets better

The first commercial was for laser assisted liposuction. Cutting edge stuff for the narcissistic fatso. Exercise? Eating correctly? At least reading the damn labels on the ultra processed food we’re buying? Nah.. We don’t have time for this. Just aim the nice laser at me and suck the fat like there’s no tomorrow. Suck it. Now, if everybody would have the money the “laser people” are asking for, we would definitely eradicate obesity from the face of the Earth.

The second commercial was for McDonalds. It was advertising some cheap Coke that you can buy with some crap menu that they have. The commercial made some sense, I guess, if you were into this fast food shit or if you cannot afford anything else. We are, after all, in the middle of an economic crisis (do not go in the parking lot of your favorite mall if you want to keep living with this apocalyptic image).

Now, each commercial on its own made sense. They were trying to sell you something and were managing (more or less) to get the message through by using pleasant sounding people and light, joyful jingles. The really disturbing fact is that they played one right after the other.

Now what am I supposed to understand if I am listening to the radio? Is this a tactic? Are they just dumb?

After the traffic light turned green and I started accelerating on the interstate ramp I remembered the words of my math high school teacher (who was also a bit of a philosopher): “for everything in this world there are pluses and minuses so everything reaches a stable state, an equilibrium”. If you look at the commercials like that, one was the plus and one was the minus. The radio people had grouped them together like this to prevent an unstable state. Maybe they knew something. Maybe the time-space continuum would have been torn if only one commercial of these commercials was played.

On Linchpins and Tribe Leaders

Mircea — Thu, 27 May 2010 03:18:43 +0000

This are my thoughts after reading 2 of Seth Godin’s books.

In case you don’t know, this guy claims that he’s the most influential business blogger in the world. Maybe he is. The 2 book are are:

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

The recipe seems to be almost identical: take a simple idea and wrap it in a few layers of stories to make it more credible. Build around it using simple but somewhat hard to prove claims and keep repeating the main idea obsessively. Speak to your audience like they are the second coming of Jesus on this Earth and make them genuinely believe that they are a hidden gem ready to be uncovered.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against these kind of motivational tactics and I do get the fact that the author understands how his audience thinks. Actually I admire the fact that he can do that with such a simple message and get away with it.

What I do have a problem with is the “you’re special, you don’t need anything else, just take this pill” approach. Also I have a problem with the simple message which should be applied to any generic situation. But than again, if the message wouldn’t be in this form, he wouldn’t be the “world’s best most influential business blogger”

Leaving your mark… the snow edition

Mircea — Mon, 24 May 2010 03:47:15 +0000

Episode 4 from “human nature” series:

All pictures were taken during the fabulous Mt Pilchuck hike.

Mioritics

Mircea — Fri, 21 May 2010 15:19:51 +0000

Miorita is a pastoral ballad that defines the quintessence of the Romanian way (or at least that’s what we, the Romanians, like to thinks). In a nutshell, it’s about the attitude in front of death or by extension (we can only die once remember) the attitude in front of inevitable things. The attitude is: whatever will be will be, I cannot really change anything I might as well enjoy what I have until the inevitable happens. Powerful stuff here. This is basically the default way of thinking (and I would go as far as to say that it’s human nature) for all kind of situations, even totally manageable ones. We are so focused on the bad outcome that we don’t even try to do anything that will result in a different result.

Now if we look at what’s happening in Romania today (and for the last 20 years for a matter of fact), both from an economic and a political point of view, you’ll see that this is regarded by most people who live there as… inevitable. The situation was made worst by the global economic crisis and the shock waves have just started rippling through the Romanian economy (although people might like to think that we’re somewhere in the middle of the process I am guessing that this is just the beginning). The general accepted attitude is that something should be done about this situation. How this is to be done reflects the purest mioritic way: someone else should do it.

People are outraged by the measures the government takes. Everybody bitches about how unhappy they are and how the country that they live in should be and enabler for them – not a burden!. It’s sad for me to see that happening. Sad because most of my family and close friends are in Romania. Sad because everyone is focusing on the bad outcome and are listening to the sound of inevitability.

Almost 100% of the friends I talk to and are roughly in the same age group as me want to leave the country to make a better living elsewhere, anywhere. Most of them won’t probably take this step, but I guess it’s giving them a metal comfort cushion or an ultimate fallback plan that is keeping them sane in this situation.

The bottom line: whatever the situation is you can choose to be a bystander or you can choose to act when you’re unhappy about something. Yeah, easy to speak, hard to do. I’m not saying that the change you wish to make can be achieved overnight or that it’s gonna be easy. I’m saying that you are, in the end, the ultimate responsible for your life. If you don’t care no one will. Don’t expect anyone to act on your behalf.
If you want a better job to be able to cover your expenses go for it, if you think the country you’re living in doesn’t help you reach your full potential move to another country, if you’re in a government job and the pay is crappy start looking for another job, if you’re at a certain age don’t be afraid/too proud to ask others for help. Reach out and use the means that are available to you.

Group Death Cooperative

Mircea — Wed, 19 May 2010 03:35:53 +0000

I’ve written about the American Health System before: http://theromaniandream.com/blog/2010/02/01/taboo-%E2%80%93-american-health-system/

It’s not that my naivety level has suffered any major changes lately, but my experience with my health care “provider” (aka Group Health Cooperative) is a surreal one.

Lately I have been having some mild pain in my right hip and I went to have it looked at. After a somewhat short visit at the primary care physician I was referred to orthopedics and physical therapy. The first surprise came when scheduling the PT appointment. The time I have to wait for someone from PT to consult me from the moment I made the appointment: 3.5 weeks. That’s not surprising considering my previous experiences, but 3.5 weeks is too long. But wait! After the visit to the orthopedics, I found out that I need an MRI for them to be able to tell what’s wrong. I attempted to schedule that today and the happy event will take place on the 20th of July. That’s about 9 weeks, or if you want it in months: more than 2 months. I’ll say that again: 9 weeks! What kind of health care is this?

What do you suppose will happen in the following 9 weeks if there is something fundamentally wrong with my hip? Do you think that the way these guys choose to provide medical services is at least flawed if not absolutely moronic? Do I need to say that this is for an insurance that’s supposed to be one of the bests that there is, at least in these area?

At least, back home in Romania, if you have the money and you are willing to shell it out for a quality medical service you can do that. Think about this for a second and you’ll see how wrong the system is over here on so many levels.

That being said, I’m officially giving the longest finger to the nice Cooperative and I’m looking forward to switching to Premera, where hopefully things will suck less and I will manage to get some bang for the buck the insurance company gets.

Cereal Label Fail

Mircea — Sat, 15 May 2010 15:33:15 +0000

Here is the label:

And the fail is the way the difference between cereal with milk and cereal without milk is listed.

Hey Kellogg’s, you have 2 columns in there. Use them to list the nutritional content in both cases (you do that for vitamins and it works, right?). Don’t be dumb and put this info in the foot note – nobody reads that. It makes you look like you’re either tying to trick me, the customer, or nobody reviewed your label. Either way, this is a fail.

And since we’re giving improvement suggestions, the site that you’re using to promote this products totally sucks. Good luck trying to read the nutritional information on the site.

Leaving your mark… the urban edition

Mircea — Mon, 10 May 2010 05:12:37 +0000

Time for episode 3 in “human nature” studies series.

All pictures are taken near Exit 13 I405 ramps.

Leaving your mark… the obtuse edition

Mircea — Sat, 01 May 2010 20:31:24 +0000

In a previous post I started to explore human nature. Now it’s time for episode 2.

Here are some samples of what people left inside the Heybrook Lookout:

feedback is king

all you need is love

mesage from evil robots from the future

You Will Respect My Authoritah!

The Catcher in the… Tulip Field ?!

Mircea — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 02:12:21 +0000

In the previous post I showed you some beautiful pictures (I hope) form the Skagit Valley Tulip festival. What the pictures don’t show is how much effort is involved in taking a nice picture when huge crowds of people are involved. Let me explain:

Each of the tulip farms/tulip fields that we went to had a sign similar to these ones posted where everybody could easily see it:

Now, what do you suppose happened when ‘the people’ saw these signs? Probably it takes a lot of work to keep those fields in good shape for everyone to enjoy (not to mention the amount of work involved in actually raising growing the tulips). So you would expect that people obey the signs. After all, we all obey, for example, traffic signs, right?

Now, let’s do a small exercise of lateral thinking by looking at the following pictures:

I will stop at these 4 pictures. I have roughly 50 on my camera, some of them intentionally taken, but most of them because I had no other choice. How cool is that?
So I kept thinking: What the fudge? What part of stay ‘out of rows’ is unclear? What part of ‘do not pick up the flowers’ is unclear?
Watching these beautiful creatures enjoying the sun and roaming the tulip fields, I genuinely had the sensation that I was back in Romania. I thought that only there you can find such disrespect for a simple, clear instruction. Well… surprise, surprise. I guess in the end it’s human nature not give 2 shits about the person next to you. You did pay 5 dollars to get access to the fields right? It’s your God given right to walk among the tulips, right?

And, in the end, if you do want to give a shit, although nobody else does, you can certainly do that too:

Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Mircea — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 03:23:25 +0000

Lately, I’ve been wasting my me-time by reading a book called “Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us“. The book is written by a gentleman named Pink, Daniel Pink and it’s supposed to expose some of the things that motivate us (by us I mean humans) by using an imaginary drill bit into the an imaginary subconscious of an imaginary human being. It fails miserably at accomplishing this task.

Take the following: A couple of [British] scientists discovered that intrinsic motivation is more powerful that extrinsic one (the carrot and/or the stick technique). Now expand this claim into a a paragraph. Wrap it into some experiments that were performed to reach this conclusion. Continue to add flour, baking soda and spices until it grows into a book. That’s exactly what the author did. Not only does it get boring to hear him repeat the same thing over and over, but the annoyance is even bigger as the impression he wants you to walk away with is that he’s some kind of expert in the motivation field. C’mon… Maybe if the reader is a primate or a mentally challenged human being he could get away with it. But you’re not going to get away with it in case of people we are genuinely interested by the topic.