Action Figure Daniel

Author: Daniel

  • 25 Things to do with a Jerk

    I want to say at the beginning that I hope you’re not reading this because you have consciously chosen to spend time with a jerk, meany head or someone who is otherwise not good. I say this because these people shouldn’t really be associated with (at least not while they are being mean) if it is at all avoidable. I understand that sometimes forces beyond our control compel us to spend time with such people so I thought I would offer some suggestions.

    1. Punch them in the face, stomach or other random place. While this course of action might get you in trouble, it can be quite relieving for you and would effectively communicate your feelings to the injure person. The punch might also serve as a wakeup call in which the Mr. Mean might adjust his attitude while he adjusts his face.
    2. Go on a Roller Coaster ride because let’s face: when you’re zooming at high speeds on rickety rails you really don’t care who is sitting next to you.
    3. “Study” with them in the Library. The key isn’t to be studying the same thing with them, then you would have to study together. Rather, you should be studying as distantly unrelated a topic as you can so that you can sit in relative silence letting your feelings towards them simmer.
    4. Prank call them, especially while they are in class. If they spend so much of their time being mean chances are they forgot to silence it. This will give you the satisfaction of knowing you embarrassed them and even if you didn’t you would really never know. It also gives them a reason to continue to be mean to you.
    5. Go ice skating with them. While spending “quality time with them” you can imagine the ice suddenly melting and them drowning at the bottom of the rink.
    6. Actually sabotage the ice rink with them because you realized that if they would drown, so would you. Beside, industrial “accidents” happen.
    7. Kick them in the shin. Admit it; you would feel a little better.
    8. Better: Play soccer with them and then kick them in the shin. Admit it; you would feel a little better.
    9. Best: Play football, or another full contact sport, and tackle them every chance you get.
    10. Figure out who drives them crazy, then hangout with those people.
    11. Figure out who the jerk likes, then hangout with them. You never know, you might find some sympathetic spirits. At worst you would realize that the jerk is alone in the world.
    12. I was going to write “play tag and other children’s games” and then I realized that this could prove detrimental to your attempts to remain healthy and well after spending time with the not good person.
    13. Watch “Anne of Green Gables” with them. Now can be a jerk for long with all that talk of “kindred spirits”.
    14. Make a dessert with them. At least something would be sweet.
    15. Talk to them, it will be good for them and it will be good for you. You may find out that you are the only friend they have (a phrase here which means “the person closest to a friend they have”). Or, you may find out way they act the way they do.
    16. Give the meany head a sucker. Even if they don’t smile, you will. Sucker!
    17. Go on a long, long drive in the country. Really, it doesn’t matter where you go or even if you go at all. By spending mass quantities of time together the jerk will either begin to grow on you, you will become more like them, they will become more like you, or someone will have died from strangulation.
    18. Buy a small potted plant, name it after the jerk, and say wonderful loving words to it all night long (you can sing too).
    19. Remember that the jerk is someone’s child and that if the parents could survive raising them, you can survive a few hours with them.
    20. Be cautious to not mention, intimate or even hint at leaving on long trips even if you think they wouldn’t be remotely interested. Chances are, if you’ve spent this much time with the jerk you really don’t understand them or yourself and they will want to accompany, call or heckle you while traveling.
    21. Visit a museum with them. One of several things might happen: you might lose them, they might lose you, or the dinosaurs might come to life and eat them (hey, don’t rain on your own parade here).
    22. Go to a baseball game with them even if you don’t like baseball (you can count ad spots or something else productive), there is a chance that America’s pastime is jerk’s pastime too.
    23. Take an Interpersonal Communication class with them. They might take the hint, but even if they don’t you could your skills.
    24. Give the jerk a chocolate every time they do something good. Soon you’ll have them trained to good behavior.
    25. “Kidnap” the jerk, go on a long drive and drop them off somewhere.
    (P.S. These ideas are just for laughs, don’t actually do them.)

  • Error: Circular Reference

    In 2007 Oregon amended its wage laws to peg minimum wage increases to the Consumer Product Index (read the Press Release). This was and remains a bad idea. To start with most people on minimum wage are single and many still live at home. According to a Joint Economic Committee Report issued in 1996 more than half of workers earning minimum wage were single and a third were still living with their parents, thus not requiring as much money to live. More specifically the report states: “Minimum wage workers are not parents struggling to feed their children. Rather, they are high school or college students living at home.” While this report is a little old, it is not yet too old to be completely irrelevant. My real problem with having minimum wage tied to an inflation index is what Excel would call a ‘circular reference’ error. These are nasty errors that loop back on themselves and have to be used with caution. (In all my Excel experience I have never purposely used a circular reference in a spreadsheet, and I can barely imagine why they would be helpful.)

    The Cascading Effect

    A circular reference is a set of equations that reference each other in a loop. The looping causes the formulas to repeat infinitely and are thus difficult to use. For example, I calculate the cost of my widgets (a generic and fictitious product that economists often use in their models) by adding together my labor, facilities and materials costs times 1.5 so I can make some profit (the formula would be (l+f+m)*1.5). Let us say that each widget takes an hour to make and so they cost: $8.40 for an hour at minimum wage, $5.00 for the facility (building and utility costs), and $10.00 for the materials. At my 50% markup the finished product would cost $35.10 each. Next year, because the CPI increased, minimum wage increased to $9.00 an hour. My widgets now cost $36.00 each, a 3% increase. The next year minimum wage increases by 3% because I charge 3% more for my widgets and the new minimum wage is $9.27 an hour, my widgets now cost $36.41 each. These calculations do not take into account the increased expense of materials (labor increase affect the cost of raw materials as well) and so each year’s minimum wage increase adds to the next year’s inflation rate and thus the minimum wage endlessly increases except in a reccesion. In the Oregon law, minimum wage remains the same if the CPI is negative and so even in a recession or when a market is flooded with cheaper product the minimum wage remains the same.

    The Soaking Effect

    Remember the Joint Economic Committee Report said the employees getting paid minimum wage are: high school and college students working part-time, not people with families working full-time. Allow me to summarize what students spend money on in order of cost: school, toys and fun. Schooling, like most markets, is subject to the laws of supply and demand and most students can’t dream of paying for school by themselves and so it should not be part of the discussion. That leaves us with: fun and toys. This means that most of the minimum wage increase goes to pay for non-essential items that, while providing a higher quality of life, are really luxury items (e.g. iPods, cell phones, text messaging plans, music downloads, etc.). While money spent in these industries does reenter the economy, they are industries with incredibly high margins that reflect the level of demand rather than the cost of manufacturing. For example, no matter how many times a song is downloaded there will be another copy available for download for the next customer. The producers’ only worry is making sure they meet the original investment costs; everything past this amount is profit. Another example, the price of the highly popular iPhone isn’t a markup based simply of original developments and continued production costs but instead is based on the most the company can charge for the phone while increasing market share at an acceptable rate. Consumers pay the added expense for the “coolness” factor.

    Basically, these markets are much more flexible at soaking up disposable income than normal consumable products.

    The Squishing Affect

    Minimum wage increases affect more than just those on minimum wage; they affect everyone paid more than minimum wage. Imagine an employee getting paid $9.50 an hour instead of the $8.40 minimum wage. In theory this employee makes 13% more than the average cost to live, not bad for an entry level job. The next year, because my widgets increased the CPI, minimum wage increased to $9.00 an hour. Now the employee only makes 6% more than the average cost to live, in essence the State has issued pay cuts to all non-minimum wage employees. Continue to the next year when minimum wage increases again to $9.27 an hour and the employee only makes 2% above the average cost of living.

    A job that used to give an employee about $216 a month ($2,588 a year) as disposable income (money beyond the cost of food, transportation, residence, etc.) changed to $91 a month ($1,098 a year) then to $41 a month ($490 a year). While increasing the wages of part-time students (the ones the Joint Economic Report says is making minimum wage) the State is decreasing the wages of full-time working families (the ones who make more than minimum wage). The State has pushed the lower class towards to upper class and in the process squished the middle class and lower class together.

    The Triple Jeopardy Affect

    As minimum wage continues to increase each year, employers have to make a choice: increase wages, decrease wages or fire employees. This is a triple no-win situation for employers.

    The employer may not want to increase employee wages for two reasons. The first is that consistently increasing a worker’s wage gives the worker the impression that they are entitled to raises, which is often not the case. The second reason is that in most cases the worker is not worth any more year to year. Except in cases involving unions and minimum wage, the going wage for any job is determined by supply and demand. For example, a chain store may pay more for cashiers in a metropolitan store than in a suburban store because it is harder to find qualified workers in the larger market than the smaller market. Another example, doctors and lawyers don’t get paid a lot of money because their jobs are particularly hard but because there are not a lot of them to do the job. Job markets obey the laws of supply and demand for everything more than minimum wage.

    If the employer chooses to not increase employee wages, they have in essences chosen to decrease them. In theory the minimum wage increase is due to an increase in the cost of living and if the employee makes the same this year as they did last year then the employee has less disposable income. This effect may not be noticed the first year, but will be noticed before too many years. Upon noticing this trend employees are likely to work less and become less loyal, demand a raise or search for other employment. Of course the employer may decide that with the spiraling increases in minimum wage the position is no longer worth the added expense and therefore the worker is expendable. Expendable employees don’t often last long.

    Minimum wage always makes showing the value of a job more difficult. If an employer wants to get an entry level worker that is above average they often offer to pay the position a little above minimum wage, say $9.00 an hour instead of $8.40 an hour. Being a little higher than minimum wage becomes increasingly more expensive as minimum wage increases.

    The Market Correction Effect

    I hate going through great lengths to identify problems in a system without suggesting possible fixes, so here is my suggestion: get rid of minimum wage.

    “But Daniel, if there is no minimum wage capitalist pigs will take over and the economy will be destroyed.” No, no my weak believer. I argue that if minimum wage were to be abolished that the job market might tank and but would then correct itself. Every free market (free from government intervention) always, always corrects itself. If wages plummeted so would income and costs. As income dropped margins would increase, making capitalists happy for a while but a lack of income would force prices down until local job markets balanced out paying employees what they should be paid. Getting rid of minimum wage might also take a significant dent out of unemployment because companies could afford to hire workers for things that don’t justify the expense of current minimum wages.

    “But Daniel, workers were abused before there was minimum wage.” Not so my young believer, well not because of a lack of minimum wage. Workers were abused because they had no right to safe working conditions but now we have things like the Bureau of Labor and Industry (BOLI) to enforce wage payments to employees and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to make sure employees are working in safe conditions. The problem of employee abuse was more of a problem of no enforcement of wage contracts and abuse of human rights than a problem of not paying them enough.

    Free markets always, always correct themselves.

    Notes

    A compilation of Joint Economic Committee reports about minimum wage can be found here.

    Disclaimer: I fully understand that there are exceptions in every case, especially in statistics. I fully understand the words of Doug: “You can’t manage to the exception.” They’re exceptions, not the rule and even if all our time is dedicated to handling exception we still would not be able to address them all. It is best to manage to the rule, especially when talking about a state full of people, and let the exceptions be handled on a case by case basis.

  • The Snowy Trip

    It was a cold and wintery morning when I was headed home from school. The semester had just ended and I was excited to be done. That morning I had woken up twice, once to take a roommate to the bus stop so he could fly home and the second time was my time to go home. Between the two waking up times several inches had fallen, but we headed out anyway. The going was slow and one of the mountain passes was closed for an hour, but we got out of the mountains safely. The storm we had been driving in front of finally caught up to us as night set in.

    The winds were blowing hard and the snow was pouring down and the trucks were going very slow. During the trip I was stuck behind three trucks in a row (caravan style). I was tired and it was getting late. I decided that I could pass the trucks and go at least a little bit faster than the trucks so I made the daring move into the left lane. The car was immediately hit by a blast of wind and snow. I couldn’t see anything and had to slow down more than I was already going. Not being able to pass the trucks I moved back into right lane, behind the trucks. Not wanting to go so slow I again tried to pass the trucks and was again met with a blast of snow and wind and again retreated behind the trucks. I then realized that the trucks were blocking me from the harsh winds and snow. Because of this shielding I couldn’t see, didn’t see, the true intensity of the storm.

    This experience has been played out many time, not on the road but in relation to our leaders. Let me illustrate:

    I have a friend who was recently promoted to be the manager of her department, replacing her previous boss. Before she got the new position she and I had talked about the slowness of progress that her managers made. After she got the new position we talked about how hard it was to lead the department in excellence. To fit with the story, she had been stuck behind the trucks and was waiting for an opportunity to pass them. She finally got her chance and realized that it was hard to lead in the face of the storm. Now her subordinates have a similar frustration that she had with the slowness of progress. (To prevent insubordination she shares with her subordinates the constraints of the process and allows them to try to pass up the organization and thus help bring innovation and change. This allows frustrated people to try their ideas; if they succeed then the organization becomes more efficient, if they fail then at least they better understand the difficulty of weathering the storm.)

  • Quorum Sensing (or Natural Leadership Vetting)

    Quorum sensing is the component of swarm intelligence that allows a swarm (or group) to settle on a decision and begin acting on that decision. It is used in a large variety of natural and artificial systems. I’ll use a rock dwelling ant colony to illustrate the concept of quorum sensing:

    A colony of ants happily dwells in their rocky home until the rocks shift causing extensive damage to their colony. The shifted rocks are no longer a suitable habitation for the colony and worker ants venture out looking for a new home. Every possible nook and cranny is explored until one large enough is found. The individual worker ant inspects the crevice and assesses its suitability for the colony including lighting, water flow and air ways. After the inspection the ant heads back to the colony and waits.

    The waiting period is inversely tied to the quality of the new site. The poorer quality the site is the longer the ant waits, the better the site the less it waits. Once the waiting time is over the initial worker ant solicits other ants to follow him to inspect the new site. After the second inspection is complete the ants return and again wait, the same waiting rules apply, before soliciting yet another group of ants to inspect. At a critical point, the worker ants that remained in the colony realize that enough ants have approved a site and they pack up to follow them to the new site and the whole colony is relocated.

    The timing of the waiting period is critical. The worker ant is basically waiting to see if another worker returns bursting into the colony with a ‘must have’ site. If no other ant solicits before they do then the ant can assume their selected site is the best site currently available. If a better site is located the returning worker ant would also start soliciting ants and the cascading effect ensues but at a faster rate because of the superior site.

    The quorum part is the large number of ants going to the same prospective site. The sensing part is realizing that the quorum has reached a critical mass and thus a decision has been made. Quorum sensing is used in nearly every type of swarm including ants and bees, fireflies, light emitting bacteria, fish that swim in schools, even mobs and businesses. Each organization using quorum sensing differently, but the principles remain the same. Fireflies use quorums to determine where they should gather, light emitting bacteria to know when there are enough of them to make their light noticeable. Ants and bees use it to determine the most suitable location for the swarm without the time or danger of each member inspecting each site. Mobs use quorum sensing to determine why they are mobbing and what or whom they are going to mob.

    Often in society we like to think that we are above such a fundamental practice of quorum sensing, but in reality we are steeped in it. No change can ever be effected unless a significant group, either is quantity or quality, approves the change. This is true in the corporate boardroom where leaders are appointed and even for the president of the United States who is elected. Swarms of people wait when new technology and products are introduced for a quorum, usually a select group of famous people, to endorse them new items before they themselves begin using them. Have you ever heard the phrase “I’m waiting until the next version to buy it” or “we’ll see how well to works”? These are both cases of waiting until the quorum concludes that the change is acceptable. Another version implies that enough ‘ants’ approved the earlier version, usually by purchasing it, that the manufacturer could survive long enough to make the next version thus the quorum has been reached. Waiting for reviews of a new product is waiting for another ‘ant’ to solicit your use of the product; the early ‘ant’ is convincing you to inspect the new ‘site’ thus building the quorum.

    Quorum dynamics are the governing principles behind quorum sensing. Quorum dynamics consists of two parts as briefly mentioned earlier: quality and quantity.

    Quality is the voting power a particular member has. Some members have a lot of sway, unofficially and officially, while others do not. Some people can give a thousand word opinion and not convince another soul while others can give a single look and convince the whole quorum. In a family the mom would be expected to carry a higher quality rating than a child and an adult child more than a juvenile. Quality ratings aren’t always along predictable or constant: an adult child would carry a higher quality rating than their mom on their wedding day.

    The second attribute in quorum sensing is quantity, simply the number of agreeable members in the quorum. The total number of members is of little importance as few decisions rely on raw votes. For example, the decision over where a family will eat out likely rests with the parents not the four children. The parent’s decision may be overruled if the children orchestrated a loud protest, thus exercising their voting power and the quorum decision would have achieved critical mass.

    Every person with voting power, regardless of quality rating, is a “valid quorum member” and every “valid quorum member” has voting power. Valid quorum members can be adapted to members present and as the situation dictates. For example, when a visiting uncle arrives, though not a member of the immediate family, he becomes a valid quorum member and can affect policy decisions. On the other hand, if a grandfather dies, his grandchildren may have no voting power in funeral arrangements though they might have voting power in decisions about the family’s summer vacation. It is also possible to be part of the quorum but to have no voting power. Parents to give a lot of advice to their newly married children and thus influence the outcome of the vote, but they themselves have no voting power.

    Quorum sensing’s critical mass is a function of quality times quantity. For a decision to be made enough people with enough voting power must reach consensus. In the example of the children going out to eat, their consensus overrode the decision of a single parent, but likely would not have withstood both parents’ consensus. The threshold for each decision varies based on the importance of that decision. Children will are more likely to influence important decisions like where the family will move to but have less influence over what kind of car the dad buys for commuting to work.

    Organizations use quorum sensing to sustain leaders and managers. A president may appoint a new department head, but the new department head will still need to get his department to ‘sustain’ him as a leader. While the quorum is vetting, the employees of the department will lack both trust and confidence in the leader. The quorum is likely to consist of key department staff, key in the sense of office politics and likeability not in the sense of job level or authority. A well liked janitor may have a higher quality rating than an annoying mid-level manager. It is important to remember that only valid quorum members can vote. The bimbo mail boy’s vote won’t be counted and neither will the department head even though he is part of the quorum. The length of the vetting depends on the perceived quality of the leader, just like the ant’s delay in soliciting others to inspect the new site is determined by the perceived quality of the site. The more confident quorum members are in the new leader the more excited they will be to rally behind them, the less confident they are the less excited. Once a quorum member approves of the new leader they will solicit others to rally with them. This process will continue until a critical mass is reached, in both quality and quantity or until the vote fails by default because it takes too long.

    If a sufficient quorum consensus is never reached then the quorum will either remain divided over the perceived competence level of the new leader, probably causing the larger quorum to divide into small quorums, or the quorum members who voted in the affirmative will retract their vote, and their support, until the new leader is left without a sustainable platform.

  • The Floor’s Non-Original Coloring

    (If the following paragraph seems a little out of place, it is. It originally came much later in the document, but after realizing that you are not required to read any, much less all of my blog as my teachers are, I thought it best to use the paragraph as a hook to explain why you should continue reading.)

    Why does any of this matter? Each of us will at some point will, and most probably already have, socially interact with other people. Each of the people we interact with has a varied potential for dysfunction, dysfunctions that may have a great impact on the quality of our interactions. Understanding where the dysfunction, the dirt and oil, come from can greatly improve the social interaction and also help the person to release some of the dysfunctions and become clean from them (if they choose to, of course).

    (I now return to the original document)

    Saturday was a busy day for cleaning. I cleaned the kitchen from top to bottom. My roommates made some baked beans (literally, baked beans) and had managed to get traces of the beans from one end of the kitchen to the other. I had cleaned the dishes and the fridge and moved on to the floor. As I scrubbed the bean patches off the floor I made a startling discovery: our fake wood floor was no brown with specks of dark gray as I had long assumed, but rather brown with no specks in it at all. I realized that the gray specks were really dirt that was wedged into the tiny crevices of the boards and it had built up over the years until they were semi permanent coloring.

    The Dirty Floor. (Note the darkness of the grain, that is not the original coloring.)

    As I began to scrub the floor my mind began to wonder and having the random thinking that I have, my mind began to drift to the recent Conflict Management portion of my Communications class. Conflict resolution steps are few but critical. One of the most critical is to understand the view of the other party. This translates to a solid listening skill.

    Over time relationship dysfunctions (we can call them “little packets of dirt”) are tracked across the floor of a person’s life. Some of this dirt is brought in by the person themselves, others come from parents, friends, spouses, children, basically everyone and anyone that crosses our life. The dirt also comes from just being in a normal environment. As we settle into our work, play, relaxation or any other aspect of life, so too does dust and debris settle with us.

    The dirt itself is not the problem but is in fact a normal part of life on earth. It only takes sweeping and other basic maintenance to remove. The problem comes from memory (we can call it “natural oils that are emitted from our bodies and are around us everywhere”) which collects, stores and preserves the dirt in the tiny crevices of the floor. This oil and dirt storage issue is compounded by pressure (we can call it “outside forces of pressure, whether for good or bad”) from people walking on them, thus layer upon layer our commingled dirt and oil until enough is gathered to be noticeable to the naked eye.

    While these dysfunctions can be noticed, they are often not. This can be due to several reasons, one of the biggest is that those who come in contact with the dysfunctions assume (for varies reasons) that the floor is the way it was meant to be, it is its natural color. Only when closely examining the floor, at much closer levels than most ever care to get, does it become evident that the floor should be a different color. The issue of color frequently comes when we have not associated with a particular person for long (in comparison to the longevity of their life).

    Even for those who grew up with or around a person it can be hard to notice the often slow and methodical accumulation of the dirt, oil and pressure. The change happens so slowly that it is hard to remember back to a time when the dysfunctions weren’t there. Even then, the changes are still so subtle they can’t always be certain that the color was different, it could just be a glitch in memory.

    My personal favorite is: the comparison. A visitor comes over and notices the floor, it seems permanently dirty but they can’t remember their own floor clearly enough to be sure. After the visit is over, the guest returns home and analyzes their own floor to find that it is similarly marked but they can’t remember their friends floor clearly enough to be sure. Not wanting to make a big fuss over nothing, nor wanting to realize that their own floor is dirtied with dysfunctions and certainly not wanting to find out that their floor is dirtier than most, they continue to journey and make notes of comparison between their own floor and the floors of the various houses they visit. Due to a faulty memory (on purpose or not) and a lack of thorough comparison the observer never determines what the ‘normal’ state of the floor is or should be.

    Why does any of this matter? Each of us will at some point will, and most probably already have, socially interact with other people. Each of the people we interact with has a varied potential for dysfunction, dysfunctions that may have a great impact on the quality of our interactions. Understanding where the dysfunction, the dirt and oil, come from can greatly improve the social interaction and also help the person to release some of the dysfunctions and become clean from them (if they choose to, of course).

    Ideally, everyone would recognize their floor is dirty and take the proper actions to clean it. They don’t, not usually anyway. It is much easier to simply sweep the floor clean and maybe wipe it down with something wet every week or two. This was in fact my normal cleaning routine every month I have lived here. That changed this fateful Saturday. I tried three different techniques before finding the most efficient one.

    I started with a wet wash cloth. Some backed beans had stuck to the floor and I was wiping them up. After finally getting the beans off the floor I noticed that there was a ‘hole’ where the beans had been. There wasn’t really a hole, but there was a definite lack of dirt in the floor grain. This is very similar to working to change something in your life, perhaps a bad habit or distancing yourself from a negative influence. The ridding of the related dysfunction was not the intended benefit but rather an unanticipated side effect. This is a common person with a common goal. While this method works, it is a slow and tedious process that may take an entire lifetime to complete.

    My roommate upgraded me to a bathroom scrub brush (the kitchen brush flexed too much) and a bowl of soapy water. This is the method that cleaned most of the floor. It took a long time and a lot of effort. The bristles of the brush moved through the crevices to break apart the compounded dirt and the soap worked its magic to pull the oil away. This is a common person with an uncommon goal: the improve themselves by seeking out and eliminating dysfunctions and neutralizing bad memories. This is a noble and good work for anyone.

    Our brush started to die so I went to the store to get a new one and in so doing found a wonderful “wood floor cleaning solution”. When I got home I applied the solution and marveled at how quickly the solution, in conjunction with the brush, removed the packed in dirt and oil. The last quarter of the floor was done in minutes, not hours. This method is similar to the last, only improved. No longer is it simply a common person but a person with superior reaching and strivings. This is a person who does not simply work to become better, this person uses their intellect, experience and creativity to seek out (or develop as needed) and use new tools to help them become better. They are a better person before they even start working on their actual goal. Their goal becomes a reaching into the deeper possibilities of their humanity. The goal is specifically designed and catered to their exact position, strength and life plan. Though the goal might have been inspired by another, it is their own and they reach into the fathomless depths of personal effort to achieve the goal for their own sake, not because some else told them to. This is an uncommon person with an uncommon goal. When these two mix, limitless potential becomes available as the increase of self betterment and the far reaching goals unlock exponential growth. This is not because the person is a superior being, one set apart from the rest of humanity and destined for greatness. This is because the common person chose to be more and thus did become more.

    Now our kitchen floor is clean and the cleaning detail has been augmented to include the broader and more intensive cleaning that will prevent this buildup from happening, at least as long as I live here.

    The Clean Floor. (Note the absence of dark grain. This is the original coloring.)