The Tyranny of Choice

I was talking with my wise friend today about all of the options I have. Because I am a single man with no children, the world is still wide open to me in a way that is not open to him. I would like to say this is liberating, but it isn't.

I feel paralyzed in my life because I am unable to choose from the many options I have available to me. I'm not sure if this is a bad thing because I think choosing is better than not being able to choose. But I am faced with the fear of making the wrong choices and the opportunity costs and all that. It is debilitating.

A long time ago, I made a decision to stay in South Carolina and not move all around the country. I spent five years in Florida, so I know what it is like to live somewhere else. In the end, I am happiest in the state of my birth. I like living in South Carolina.

By choosing to live here, I have forfeited some opportunities that I could have taken abroad. But I do not regret them. By choosing to stay here, I feel a greater degree of freedom. I might be persuaded to leave by a beautiful woman in the future, but I like limiting my options to this state. It frees me to make other decisions.

In the realm of dating, there are always other women. But I like the one I am with now, and I ignore the others. Each woman rises and falls according to her own merits with me. Comparison shopping ends, and you settle in with the one you love. The rest fade into oblivion.

Then, there is the realm of hobbies. We have so many choices and options when it comes to our leisure time. But I find that I can live my whole life without ever having gone scuba diving off of Aruba. I'm not going to regret that shit. I like what I do now which is mostly reading and writing and trying to get some exercise. I have yet to exhaust these humble hobbies, so I will leave the more spectacular ones to the people who like them.

While reflecting on the products of Apple, I am struck by the fact that what makes those products so cool is their simplicity. We have TVs and DVD players that take a Ph.D. to operate. But an Apple product like the iMac is very simple to operate. This is because it limits the options to the essential and eliminates the extraneous. This is the number one complaint of the things Steve Jobs gives us. They always lack some feature that some technogeek has to have.

Like I said, I am reflecting on all of this, and I know that leftwing fucknuts would like to limit our choices because of their inherent Bolshevism. But I do take it under consideration because there is some elemental truth to the fact that more is not necessarily better. Just some shit to think about.

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Im from the streets, bitch!!!

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Sports Leagues and the New Media

Good story in The New York Times (free subscription required) on the way that sports leagues are attempting to deal with changing sports media. The piece touches on some issues that we have discussed here in the past: credentialing independent bloggers and allowing them access to the locker room and other places; restricting audio and video clips on media web sites and blogs; and live blogging the games. Apparently, some members of the press have floated the idea that the First Amendment has a role to play in publicly funded stadiums, a point on which I have written and spoken a great deal.

The upshot is that leagues and the media are butting heads over the future of sports coverage. Everyone is staking out a position and the Media Law Resource Center is researching the issues for possible future litigation, including the First Amendment/state actor issues and more targeting of anti-trust exemptions. But no one quite knows where this is going to come out.

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New Sports Law Scholarship

Recently published scholarship includes:

Jon Boswell, Note, Fantasy sports: a game of skill that is implicitly legal under state law, and now explicitly legal under federal law, 25 CARDOZO ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT LAW JOURNAL 1257 (2008)

Jesse Crew, Note, In Irabu’s footsteps: baseball’s posting system and the non-statutory antitrust exemption, 7 VIRGINIA SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT LAW JOURNAL 127 (2007)

Christian Dennie, White out full grant-in-aid: an antitrust action the NCAA cannot afford to lose, 7 VIRGINIA SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT LAW JOURNAL 97-125 (2007)

Robyn R. Goldstein, Note, An American in Paris: the legal framework of international sport and the implications of the World Anti-Doping Code on accused atheletes, 7 VIRGINIA SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT LAW JOURNAL 149 (2007)

Russell Landy, Do the Washington Redskins hate deaf people? ADA claims for the captioning of football stadiums, 15 UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI BUSINESS LAW REVIEW 47 (2007)

Bennett Liebman, The trainer responsibility rule in horse racing, 7 VIRGINIA SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT LAW JOURNAL 1 (2007)

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Those who don't learn from history . . .

(H/T: Andrew Sullivan)

Twice actually--history has forgotten that the 1936 Winter Games also were in Nazi Germany, in Garmisch-Partinkirchen. We also let a brutally repressive totalitarian Communist regimes host: the Soviet Union (Moscow) in 1980 (my mistake as to Munich), plus a "less repressive" Communist regime in Yugoslavia in 1984.

Historically, in fact, the goal simply was to avoid offending the host nation. Thus, in part, did U.S. Olympic Committee officials, namely head Avery Brundage, replace Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller (two Jews) with Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe (two African-Americans) on the 400-yard (these were pre-metric days) team (Jews being more offensive to Hitler than blacks). And we remember Owens in part for the political context of his on-field achievements--in a sense, his greatness embarrassed the host country. This also is why the U.S. boycott of rhe Moscow games in 1980 (and the U.S.S.R.'s responsive boycott of the Los Angeles Summer Games in 1984) was such a big deal politically--it infused politics in a way that embarrassed the host country.

I have not been surprised by the ever-increasing uproar over China hosting the Games and I hope the International Olympic Committee, which made the decision, is not surprised. We are more aware of, and concerned with, human rights issues than we were even 25 years ago. There are more people, organizations, and nations talking about human rights. And, with technology, more ways to talk and hear about it. The protests and calls for boycotts that have arisen around the Torch relay, the Opening Ceremonies, and the Games themselves were inevitable. The IOC historically either had a tin ear or was too arrogant to care. That cannot be the case any longer.

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Goals

It is said that if you want to get anywhere in life it helps to know where you are going. I tend to agree with that, but I think people overstate it a bit.

It is good to have goals in life. With that said, life is what happens when you are making other plans. I like to have a direction in life but be open to possibilities along the way. I'll give an example.

Imagine you have a teenager named Bob. He has made it his goal to attend Harvard University, so he studies hard and does well in school and on the SAT. He applies to Harvard and gets rejected. Nevermind that he was accepted into Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Brown, etc. Harvard was the goal. He didn't achieve the goal, so he is now a FAILURE.

Success and failure are relative. I never could have gone to any of those schools even if I had been accepted into them. I don't really care because I will match my intelligence against any of those Ivy League grads any day of the week. They don't know shit. How do I know this? Who do you think is running our clusterfuck government?! But I digress. . .

I like to have broad goals. So, here's my list of things I want to achieve in my life:

1. HAPPINESS

I want to be happy, and I am happy. I embarked on a study on this subject a few years ago, and I found the answer. I am happy. I realize that we all want to be happy, and it is the ultimate goal in life. But it is readily achieved. Happiness is nothing more than losing yourself in rational activity. As long as I have something to do, I will always have happiness. The easiest way to become happy is to fill your calendar and work. Since discovering the secret of Flow, I have been very happy indeed.

It helps to understand what happiness is not. It is not being drunk or getting laid or what have you. These are pleasures which are always available even in prison. Happiness is different, and it doesn't come from money or women either. It comes from you and doing the things you love.

Lose yourself in a rational pursuit. It might be writing a novel, building a house, playing basketball, learning guitar, or what have you. But if you pursue these things, you will be very happy.

2. LOVE

I always have a girlfriend. I never stay available for long. What frustrates me is being in relationships that don't last that long. I admit that I am the one who ends them, but I don't believe it is my fault. I just get matched with the wrong women who like me a great deal and end up loving me. But they do things I can't go along with.

I am very pleased with my current love interest. I fit with her. Her personality and mine are very compatible. Consequently, I not only love her, but I like her. I realize this everytime I look at my watch and see that the time has flown away. I can't get any sleep because I love staying up just to talk to her. This is 180 degrees of difference from my previous relationship where I was afraid to speak because I would piss her off.

I don't know the secret to long lasting relationships except to say that you should fall in love with someone you can be friends with. If you can't talk to each other, it won't work. That is really the true dealbreaker. When she rolls her eyes at you and looks at you like you are the most despicable person she has ever met, get the fuck out of there. You don't need that woman. She is misery on two legs.

3. FITNESS

This is the easiest thing to achieve but the hardest one to execute on. I want to be fit, and I know the answer to this. It involves getting my ass out the door and pounding the pavement. It isn't rocket science. This is a goal I am working on.

4. WEALTH

This is harder to achieve. I am not rich. But I will be. Whether I will be rich before I am 80 is another matter and which I am working on. I spend my time reading business books, personal finance books, etc. But for me to become fabulously wealthy in a short time, I have to capture what Taleb calls a Black Swan. This is the rare event that no one expects. They happen on a regular basis, but they cannot be seen beforehand. This is the secret behind the book publishing industry and other industries where an unforeseen but serendipitous discovery takes place. I am laying traps for these Black Swans. I will catch one.

These are my goals. They are broad which gives me room to change course. I am flexible and open to new possibilities. I don't care about climbing Everest or any of that shit. I doubt my lifestyle will change all that much except for the impact of technology and government. But I have achieved two goals, and I am working on the other two. These are my goals in life, and they are unchanging even if my path may take turns I never expected. I like my life, and I believe the best is yet to come.

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PRINT-The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

I have been wanting to read this book for a long time but have just gotten around to it recently. It is a quality read.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is about social epidemics. It is about how little things make a huge difference. Gladwell explains the Broken Windows theory and how cleaning up the subways in NYC lead to a dramatic decline in crime rates. Galdwell goes on to talk about Sesame Street and Blue's Clues and a thing called "stickiness."

Gladwell's theories are fascinating. They are also useless. The Tipping Point is very descriptive but poor in a prescriptive sense. The reality is that a lot of things make sense in hindsight, and Gladwell does a good job of explaining why these things happened. But if you are trying to duplicate the tipping point effect, good luck. I doubt you will pull it off.

The reality is that society and human beings are complex. It is virtually impossible to figure out what they will like or choose in foresight. Reading a book by Taleb helps to take what Gladwell says with a grain of salt.

Finally, Gladwell could have it all wrong. Trying to explain the why of social epidemics is fraught with all sorts of complications. For instance, certain economists say that the reason crime has declined is because of a decline in the birth rate of fucktards since Roe v. Wade. Who is correct?

My personal belief falls along the lines of the thesis proffered by economist F.A. Hayek. You can't figure this shit out. Nobody can figure out the public. I'm still trying to figure out why Titanic became the biggest movie of all time. Then, there is Harry Potter which I like but can't understand why everyone else likes those books so much. It is just one of those things.

Ultimately, there is no accounting for taste. Humanity is so complex as to be utterly random. The downside of this knowledge is that you aren't going to be able to control the public. The upside is that positive social epidemics can, do, and will take place. This is is why The Tipping Point matters. It is why I will cling to my outsider viewpoints. You never know when people will come over to your side. It happens just like that which explains the matchstick on the cover of the book.

The Tipping Point is definitely worth reading. Just don't think it is a magic bullet for starting your own social epidemic.

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