Perhaps you're unaware of the current Detroit issue. If so, a bit of background is in order. Detroit is best known for it's previously successful auto industry, which has completely folded since the recession. Since the major auto plants shut down, there's hardly any way to make money in Detroit any more. The unemployment rate in Detroit is the highest in the nation at 28.9% as of last July. Previously, Detroit was the eleventh most populous city in the nation, but I guarantee that isn't the case now. The average listing price of houses in Detroit, from a quick look at Trulia, shows that a mid-to-upper-range house in the Detroit suburban area is $49,000. That's peanuts, and that's actually better than I thought it was. People are fleeing. Michigan is just completely hosed. The Pontiac Silverdome, built for $56,000,000 three decades ago, just now sold for $583,000. That's $7.25 a seat.

This mass exodus from Michigan sets the perfect stage for a James Bond Villian style plan. Think how many airships you could store in a gigantic but deserted football dome. So this is where I come in.

The Volkswagen Beetle

The Beetle, as I'm sure you know, was one of the most prosperous vehicles ever. The original 1960s Beetle had a production run from 1938 until 2003. Holy crap! It's no question that the Beetle was successful. But why?

I don't know if you've ever had the chance to actually look inside a Beetle, but it's really simple. And I don't mean just the interior, I mean the trunk (the front of the car) or the engine hood (the back of the car). It's a super simple car! There's wheels, lights, an engine, a place for people to sit, a steering wheel, and not really much else. Basic basic. I was seriously shocked how minimal the internals of the car were. It makes my manual 1996 Saturn, with its simple onboard car computer, look like an advanced spaceship. When production of the Beetle slowed to just the few remaining Mexican plants, many people bought extra Beetles so they had parts with which to fix their current Beetles.

Not only was the car simple and easy to repair by yourself, the parts were mass produced (so, at the time, readily available), and of high quality. The engine used in the Beetle is one of the most widely used and most versatile engines in the world. People even use the Beetle engine to power small aircraft. Every auto mechanic had parts and knew how to fix the Beetle. It was study, high quality, well known, and everywhere. I'd love to know what cars these days match that description.

Lastly, because of it's ease of construction and simple parts, the Beetle was a pretty cheap vehicle to produce, so the cost of buying one was not very high. It wasn't the fanciest car on the road, but people who wanted fancy bought different cars. For a while, Volkswagen had just cornered the market.

The car I want

So as I said, I drive a 1996 Saturn. It's a nice car, fairly easy to maintain, gets good gas mileage, and is all manual. There is nothing automatic about the car, and I love it. But it's still way too complicated. I recently had to go get a little device that tells me the readouts of the car's onboard computer to figure out which O2 sensor had gone bad or whatever the current thing is. I just want a box on wheels. And not this kind of box; I seriously would be okay with something that had the visual appeal of this box on wheels. I just want to get from A to B, you know?

I looked around, and for the life of me I cannot find a car company that makes a car that has just the bare minimum required to be road worthy. Why not? I know people would buy it. Just build a safe steel frame, put an engine in, a transmission, put some tires on, etc. Who needs all this extra crap? Like, think about what a car needs to get anywhere. I guarantee you won't list most of the things you'll see if you go open your car hood. Air conditioning? That can go. Speaker system? Bring a boombox instead. Automatic tire pressure checking? I'll check my own tire pressure, thanks. In fact, I'll check my own gas and oil levels too. And I still think automatic windows are silly. Okay, so maybe no one would buy the car I want, but that's okay; I'm kind of a Luddite. All those things that aren't really needed to haul your rear around probably can be modular.

Basically, what I'm suggesting is a car that is built out of cheap but rugged commonly-available parts and designed to be the simplest to repair and maintain as possible. That would bring the cost of manufacture and the cost of ownership down. Cheap to manufacture, cheap to own. Easy to fix, easy to run. Quality, highly-available parts, so you get a dependable and rugged car with no frills that gets you from A to B. And by frills I mean things like being able to unlock all the doors to your car at the same time even if you aren't incredibly flexible.

Clearly there would need to be market research to find out the things that people have truly decided they can't live without in a modern car, but am I crazy thinking no one would go for this? I would totally go for this in a heartbeat.

Saving Detroit

For this next section, let's just presume that my car idea can possibly become something like a modern day Beetle.

I was thinking about how I would go to market for something like this, and of course I started thinking about it in terms of a venture-capital-funded startup (hey, the startup industry worked well for Tesla). But then I started thinking, well, crap, I only know a handful of auto mechanics, and I certainly don't know thing one about building a running car plant. Where could I find a bunch of people with skills in the car industry looking for work?

Detroit, obviously. I wouldn't trust any of them as far as I could throw them in regard to actually running the business, but Detroit is hurting so bad right now you could cut tons of deals. Cheap housing for your employees, cheap factories you can buy off the hands of GM, cheap football domes for your airships, tons of cheap labor (the cost of living is just dropping like a rock there).

But, there's a few problems. The great auto people (designers, architects, engineers, etc) have all probably left. You'd have to lure them back. I don't really have a feel for how hard that would be. Second, Michigan is a unionized state. That would have to go (do you think Toyota's employees are unionized? No. Can you think of any unionized automotive companies that aren't getting throttled by the ones who aren't unionized? I can't). The government of Michigan would probably be pretty resistant to changing something like union laws, but I'm sure none of them are really interested in staying with the status quo.

So?

What do you think? Crazy idea? I would buy 5 of this car. If this car even anywhere near approaches the success of the Beetle (which I think was successful for many of the same strengths I would want this car to have), Detroit would be totally revitalized.

I think it's worth pursuing. Maybe after I get off the couch though.

I have to write this down before I forget more of it.

I just woke up from watching this amazing Michael Bay/Christopher Guest collaborative summer blockbuster. The only bit of background I remember is that there are these aliens living among us disguised as humans. The main character of the show was this one who looked like one of my professors from the University of Minnesota named Jeremy Rose. Most of the dream has completely faded by now, but I remember some of the final scene.

The Jeremy Rose alien, who I guess was named George Lazlo, just narrowly avoided being destroyed by the evil alien who was hunting him. He did this by turning his 1960s car into a large robot suit and throwing the evil alien somewhere. I don't really remember what happened to the evil alien. Anyway, the Jeremy Rose looking alien is standing there and is negotiating a peace treaty with the local authorities and decides to turn himself in because he has just discovered he is both the last of his kind and the last of the Methodists. So he says, "I, George Lazlo, as the last [some crazy alien race name] and the last Methodist, resolve to live peacefully hence forward," and then he works out details for returning the scrappy band of college friends he made to their familes.

The movie closed with him living in a field with his dog looking at the sky.

I woke up thinking, "this is a fantastic movie! I love how he was so dedicated to being a Methodist," and then it all started to fade and I realized in horror that it wasn't a real movie.

Dear Christopher Guest and Michael Bay, please figure out the rest of the movie as I dreamed it and make it. Please. The Last Methodist. Instant summer blockbuster.

I want to talk a little about potential; specifically, what yours is.

This has been something I've been thinking and talking about a lot lately. I've been observing a near-surprising amount of people who are aiming too low, either because they don't believe they can aim higher, or because they know of no other way. I even came up with a pithy quote:

"Failure from lack of vision is much more common than lack of ability. Take some time to dream today." - Me

So, I'd like to elaborate a little more fully on that idea, but first, I'm going to define a few terms in a sort of indirect relationship to each other.

• Vision: goals for yourself and your future.
• Potential: the possible future realization of vision.
• Full potential: the best possible future realization of your best vision.
• Ambition: the combination of vision and determination.
• Complacency: a disinterest in aiming higher with regard to vision.

The question many ask is how they might go about realizing their full potential, but what I see less than I think I should is people with full ambition. Full ambition, I'm going to argue, is a necessary stepping stone towards full potential. If you want to maximize your potential, you will need to be ambitious.

As a quick note: I want to point out very deliberately that complacency and contentment are not at all the same. Complacency, I'm here to argue, is bad. Contentment, on the other hand, is incredibly important in all aspects of life. Exploring this difference is probably worth another entry some other time.

Vision

There are two main issues people hit when choosing goals for themselves and their future.

• People believe they are not able to achieve some goal.
• People believe that there is no further room for growth.

Both of these problems fall under the umbrella issue of what I recently heard referred to as limiting expectations. These are expectations of yourself that prevent you from aiming higher with your goals. Either you expect you can't actually achieve higher or you expect that the height at which you're aiming is all there is.

Both are complete lies.

Put another way, it seems to me that the biggest detractor from the phenomenal success you are more than capable of achieving is not setting your sights high enough. It is so easy to look around you, decide that you are doing adequately, and become complacent.

How can you reach your full potential if you don't even have your full potential in mind? More often than not, it is incredibly unlikely you have any idea what your full potential even is. So, dream big! Think of the coolest thing anyone is doing, and really ask yourself why you can't be doing the same thing. The answer, of course, is that you can. You'll just need:

Determination

Obviously, a goal might as well be just a dream if you don't act on it. However, determination is far more than that. It is one thing to act upon your vision and give up at the first sign of possible failure, but it is determination to be persistent until you succeed.

Determination is being certain and sure of both yourself and the imminent success of your vision. Determination is being persistent until your vision pays off. Determination is not giving up when it is convenient or easy, or when things get rough. You can achieve your big dreams, but big dreams require real work. Real work that you are totally capable of.

Determination, in this regard, goes hand in hand with confidence, and I could go on for hours on the importance of confidence. But I won't. Needless to say, you won't get very far if you don't believe in what you're doing, or believe you can do it. Many times failure is self-fulfilling. If you don't believe you can do something, you won't! It's a (rather unfortunate) fact of human nature that confident people are perceived as more correct, more capable, more trustworthy, and more likely to succeed than people who are unsure of themselves and their goals. So be confident in your goals. Or at least act confident. In all likelihood you'll sell yourself on your own ability to achieve them.

Ambition

As I said earlier, ambition is the confluence of vision and determination. The reason why I listed vision first as the more vital aspect of ambition is because the determination part is usually pretty easy once you know what you're shooting for.

For instance, say you want to get into an ivy-league college? Easy (really!). All you must show is that you have vision and determination. Vision in a field you're interested, and determination to contribute in that field. In pretty much all fields, that is totally a piece of cake, and might not take all that much work. If you are determined to get into an ivy-league, then you'll probably talk to some college admissions people or professors to hear about what sorts of things they're most interested in seeing on an application. In all likelihood they will say the usual things like GPA, but I guarantee that most of them are looking for stand out displays of ambition, such as already having some research published (also easy, as there's lots of low hanging fruit if you know where to look) or something similar. If that sounds daunting, it's not, and it's within your reach. It just takes the motivating goal of actually doing it, and the persistence to get it done.

The college admission example is particularly apropros right now for me as my siblings are starting to become concerned with college preperations. Further, my sister just started public school for the first time this year. As far as I can tell from her transition from private school, private school is far better than public school, but not for the reasons I would have thought. The main reason I can tell that is different between private school and public school is that public school students have a endemic and contagious lack of ambition. There is little interest in doing better than "good enough," because that's what everyone else is doing. But every single one of them has the world at their fingertips, and so do you.

There is a lot of hand-wringing constantly going on over the debate between the importance of raw skills versus the importance of hard work. In a nutshell, do people succeed because they are naturally gifted, or do they succeed because they work hard? I think both sides are missing a fundamental point. Raw skills are worthless without determination, and hard work is worthless without vision. So is it hard work or natural talent? Neither. Success comes from ambition.

So, how do you realize your full potential? Be ambitious. Set lofty goals. Drive hard for them. Don't give up. Never surrender.

Goals

Dream big! Set big goals for yourself. For every goal, make sure you pick something you're inspired by, and you can measure success objectively. For example, if your goal is to make a difference in the world, decide what "a difference" is.

Make sure that all of your long term goals have a clear next step for attaining them. If your goal is "sail around the world," your next step can be "start researching how others have done this already." And then follow through.

If I have any advice on picking goals, I highly suggest goals that involve helping others and include others. The benefit of having others in your life and serving others is well documented, and I could go on for a whole other entry (and probably should, but won't) about why doing things by yourself and for yourself is detrimental.

Be persistent and don't give up. Decide to do the thing you want to do and stick with it, even when you don't feel like it. If your goal is to be suave, no one had a less suave start than Archie Leesh, better known as Cary Grant. As he once said, "I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be, and, finally, I became that person. Or he became me."

Get started. The amount of things to do is far greater than the time you have.

Think of the three biggest hits in the technology space recently: Netbooks, the iPhone, and the Kindle. It's kind of hard to compete with entrenched products like the iPhone and the Kindle. Blackberry and Palm are having trouble and Sony similarly can't seem to do much. I'm not sure what's going on with Netbooks right now.

But check it out, Android runs on all those things. Companies can now easily throw together worthy competitors with little-to-no software development cost, and get tons of extra features for free.

I'm telling you, Android is the next big target platform. Not iPhones.

Yay privatized socialism!

Now, to be clear, this argument about James 2 is a very heavy and long argued one, so much so that when Martin Luther translated his first German bible, he put James at the end, after Revelation, in hopes no one would find it because he found it so confusing.

Luther, of course, is a big fan of Ephesians 2:8, which is "for by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God." Luther felt that this point is a core tenant of Christianity (which, it is) and was supported by other verses such as Acts 15:11, 1 Peter 1:5, etc.

So, Luther was very frustrated with James 2:14-25. James 2:17 says, "In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead."

Everytime anyone decides to preach on this, I have this instinctive gut reaction of "oh no," mostly because I have close family members who have left specific churches based on how this topic was taught. So, I sort of keep expecting something hugely controversial and never understand where the controversy is.

Check it out, I'm now going to put the previous two quoted verses into propositional logic form and show there's no contradiction. It's awesome.

Ephesians 2:8:	Grace ∧ Faith	=> Salvation	(or, grace and faith imply salvation)
James 2:17:	¬ Works	=> ¬ Faith	(or, no works implies no faith)

Okay, so, if ¬ Works => ¬ Faith, then by the law of contraposition, Faith => Works. We can also rearrange Grace ∧ Faith to be Faith ∧ Grace due to logical-and commutativity. Yeah yeah, I enjoy pedantry. So now we have:

Ephesians 2:8:	Faith ∧ Grace	=> Salvation
James 2:17:	Faith	=> Works

If I wanted to be super pedantic I could show with logic rules that these two statements don't contradict each other, but even I have limits. By inspection, this seems very clear to me. In fact, here's a diagram:

Faith and grace imply salvation. Additionally, faith implies works. So, what's so hard about this? Is it that people are uncomfortable with the existence of spiritual health indicators?

Matthew 7:17-18: "So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit."

Obvious caveat, Matthew 7:1-2: "Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you."

Two developments today will help fill this hole, and instead of just sharing them on my Google Reader Shared Items feed, I thought I would make an explicit newsletter entry.

First, PubSubHubbub. This holds the promise to fix, for the long term, how feeds work. I'm about as excited about this as I am for Google Wave.

More immediately, though, is Superfeedr. I was just notified via Friendfeed of this new startup that does exactly what I've been hoping someone would do for a while now. So, yes! Now my stealth SnewsFlash project will be way easier. Thanks, Superfeedr!

Update: Well, I'll be. Gnip, too. Yay!

But I suck at printing and faxing. Hardcore. It takes me hours to figure out either, not to mention both at once. Weird.

So, I wrote a FileSafe service. JT FileSafe is a simple Google App Engine hosted tool that allows you to upload files over SSL. Once the file is uploaded, both a URL and password are automatically generated for you. You send someone the URL, and then you can call them or do something else you trust to deliver the password. Then only they (well, and Google) have your file.

Project links	Dependencies
JT FileSafe Code Repository	No dependencies are listed for this project. Hooray!

"Let us consider persons at one extreme end of the range of tolerance for dissonance, that is, persons for whom dissonance is especially painful. One might expect that in such extreme instances a person would act so as to avoid the occurrence of dissonance. Thus, for example, he would undoubtedly have experienced the unpleasantness that exists following a decision since there is almost always dissonance. If such a person, for whom dissonance is extremely painful, attempts to avoid the occurrence of dissonance, one would expect to observe that he tried to avoid making decisions or even becomes incapable of making decisions. At this extreme, of course, it becomes a pathological affair...One would also expect that such a person would react very vigorously to the introduction of dissonance into his cognition. This must follow if, indeed, the inability to make decisions is a reaction to fear of dissonance. There is at least one kind of situation where a person cannot avoid dissonance unless he makes an absolute recluse out of himself. That is, occasionally people discuss things, have disagreements, and voice their disagreements. Since the knowledge that someone like oneself holds one opinion is dissonant with holding a contrary opinion, a person for whom dissonance is extremely unpleasant would be expected to react very vigorously to the expression of disagreement from others. He might argue vigorously, be dogmatic, be stubborn, and the like. This syndrome of inability to make decisions, of being very 'decided' and 'one-sided' about issues, and of reacting vigorously in the face of disagreement from others, is one which would be consistent with an interpretation that the person has such low tolerance for dissonance that he has learned to react in anticipation of it...There are other, milder ways of reacting in anticipation of dissonance in order to avoid it. There are persons who, in avoiding post-decision dissonance, make decisions without making them. This can be done sometimes by assuming a passive role with respect to the environment so that, at least in some instances, decisions get made because the ground, so to speak, has moved under one's feet. Thus the decision is made but the person is not responsible for it...such avoidance of dissonance should exist only for persons who have very low tolerance for dissonance coupled with relatively inefficient mechanisms for reducing dissonance once it occurs."

From A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance by Leon Festinger.

I don't know anyone like that. That sounds completely unusual.