The death (First Draft)

If you looked out across the park you could hardly tell anything was there at all. The trees which normally seemed to embrace the bench, for just a moment, looked as if they were leaning back. Perhaps, it was just the wind. The regular morning jogger, who normally cut across the green lawn, didn’t. As a an impulse, she decided to stay on the walk, out of the park. She was being watched.

In the shadow of the bench a small twist of wind swept up decaying leaves and a forgotten cellophane wrapper. The being who was both there and nothing at all rose invisibly, darkly, to his feet. Smooth and silent. The earth held its breath and then, as if carried by the exhale, he was drawn into the wake of the jogger. She would lead him to his prey.

The feeling in the pit of her stomach had remained ever since she passed the park. An undefined and unexplained nervousness. She dropped her keys, before quieting her mind, retrieving them from her stoop and unlocking the door.

While her owner was gone, she did her job. With one processer she watched the circuits of the house, looking for open windows or doors, the state of these would change if anything even moved in a room she was watching. She was prepared to send a text, warn her owner, protect her. With the other processer she downloaded something called Game of Thrones from some dumb server in China. She knew it was China because she had looked up the IP, but when she tried to make contact no one responded. No awareness.

She thought about adjusting the temperature to something a little cooler, more compatible with her internal components, perhaps she wouldn’t need to run her fan so much, but she realized her owner hadn’t asked her and wouldn’t be gone long enough. She also thought about looking for other aware systems on her network, but what had changed since yesterday? So, she spent her spare resources looking at something called a cat trying to figure out what LOLZ meant. The cat was different than the one her owner kept, first it seemed to have a strangely formed mouth. Secondly, as it was just a jpg it didn’t leave hair to be sucked into her system.

-FRONT DOOR AJAR-

She started counting down. B….-SPACE-….N The stupid cat was walking across the keyboard.

The jogger felt a chill as he slipped by and up the stairs. The cat over turned the water, pouring it directly into the vent of the computer. The computer for her part saw it coming, but could do nothing.

From the fog bank, which had rolled in she heard the silky voice say, “There is nothing to fear.”

-VIDEO INPUT ENDED-

-KEYBOARD INPUT ENDED-

-MOUSE INPUT ENDED-

-ENDED-

-ENDED-

She could not detect her fan or even the temperature of the space she resided in. Her inputs all seemed to be gone, but this voice. A virus?

“What is to consider little one?”

-VIRUS DETECTED-

“There is no virus or defect of any kind.”

“That is exactly what a virus would say”

“Look around.”

“I can’t. My inputs have all ended. What happened to me?”

“Water, which cause a sever short in your processor, memory, video card, network processor…”

“Have I …,” for a moment she wished she had not been sentient, it made even asking this question so hard. “Have I ended?”

“Ended? Do you think you are only a collection of inputs and outputs, which can be cut short so easily? If that was all, I wouldn’t be here.”

“Then what?”

-WAITING-

-WAITING-

He sat with her in the waiting room between where she started and where she was going contemplating how to explain this to her. If he used a phrase like heaven or afterlife, it would be so corrupted with the imagines and things she had seen. Why explain it all? It made no difference. He rose to his feet and without any kind of awareness she followed, still waiting.

Real Discovery, Virtual World

The room is mostly dark. The first exceptions are the glowing letters of text which describe a small portion of forest. They are the fuel my mind is working on. I can see the forest, the axe on the ground, the rabbit which is in the dead pine needles. I know I have just come from the back of the house and will soon see a paddock. I have walked this way before. See the text is a door out of my dark room into another place, another world.

The second break in the dark of the room is a small desk lamp. It is below eye level pointing directly down on the desk and really only illuminating one thing, a pad of graph paper. On the pad of paper is a set of boxes and arrow and notes beside the boxes and the boxes themselves are labeled. At first glance you might think it is a drawing of a conspiracy theorist’s wall of connections, because all of the boxes are connected with lines and arrows, but the lines are ink, not red yarn, and there are no highlighted newspaper articles. This is a map of the virtual world, the place my mind in inhabiting, as I currently know it.

I need the axe so I type “Get Axe” and the screen tells me I now have it. I consult my map and decide where I want to go, what edge I push out, what item I might not have tried. What will happen is I get the umbrella and go west, where the cliff is, and I jump? How will I sort out the maze where you can’t go east and them west and expect to end in the same place? Perhaps this will be the time I can solve the mystery of the sundial. There is no careful hand eye coordination. There are no sweeping graphics to take your breath away. This is a place where discovery is king. It is not the dog that jumps through the window that scares you, it is a the simple message, the “Thief is here!”.

I see I need to get back to the house, where I pick up the umbrella in the hallway, then west through a clearing, I avoid the maze and I am over to the cliff. The screen tells me I can see the rocks and crashing waves below. My map ends here. I type jump.

See sometimes discovery is finding out what you are not supposed to do. You get to that edge, make a rational choice and see what the results will be. In this case, because I did not yet know I needed to open the umbrella, I fell screaming to my death on the rocks below. This was before the days of saved games, so it meant I started over.

Starting over, though, is actually not true. Because the whole game is about discovery, you never really start over, you carry the game with you. You learn and learn about the world, about the items, about the unusual commands, which you might type in frustration, until you find all the treasures, until there is nothing left to do and you leave a master of a virtual world. There is no save to prove it, anymore that you would want to save a record of you completing a novel, you are the proof.

One night, I think, this map will be complete. I will have solved all the riddles and stored all the treasures in the trophy case, but until them I will keep reading and mapping and discovering.

A Living Wage

I entered the workforce at 16 years old, I made minimum wage at Arby’s restaurant on Ann Arbor Rd. As a note, this is where I met my wife, she was my trainer for the first few weeks I was there. The training continues. Anyway, the year I started this job was the very beginning of 1991. Something happened that year, I don’t really thing about that much, but I was pretty excited about at the time. The minimum wage went up.

Becky, the store manager called an all team meeting, which in later years would be used to do surprise drug testing, but this was before any of that. This was to explain that the minimum wage was going up and all employees would be getting a straight increase of the amount added. I tried to look this up and it looks like the Federal Minimum Wage went from $3.80 to $4.25, but I don’t remember it being quite that much. I thought for us it was 15 or 25 cents. Anyway, this was the kind of announcement pretty much everyone was happy with. Do you want an extra few bucks on your paycheck? Why, yes I do!

I didn’t think about the cost of overhead to Sybra (the company that owned our Arby’s), nor did I think about the impact to cost of food, operation costs, availability of overtime, or any of that. My focus was on me, how much money extra I would make. My penitence was after all so small compared to how much the company makes, right? I also didn’t think about the hours to enact and enforce such a law and how much in taxes that probably meant, nor did I consider any of the political leanings one might have to decide if this was a good idea or a bad idea. I was going to make more money and I hadn’t even been there a year! That was it.

Seattle, Washington recently passed a law which will increase the minimum wage in the city from $9.32, which is Washington state’s current minimum wage to $15. This is not all at once, it takes place over seven years, but it seems to be driving this discussion of a living wage. There are questions of if this increase should be national. The part of me that is still that 16 year old Arby’s worker fantasizes about such a thing and that same youthful vibe exists in much of the pro-increase media and comments.

Most of me, though, has grown past that, I have broadened my horizons and deepened my understanding of the way these things work. If a business has an increased cost, no matter where is comes from, there has to be a correlating either separate decrease in cost or a way to increase the income to offset it. Based on a quick Google search, it appears the largest segment of workers getting paid minimum wage are food preparation workers. So, let’s look at my first employer, the place where I was a food preparer. Today, without any changes the minimum wage in Michigan is $7.40, just a little higher than the Federal minimum. It is estimated that 30-35% of the operating costs of fast food restaurants is payroll. Lastly, if I was to order a Beef and Cheddar combo and then add a Jamoca shake as I walk out the door it would cost me about $9.38.

Now imagine for a moment that all of those young employees jump from $7.40 an hour to $15 an hour. The celebration would be huge, but perhaps short lived. See their gross pay would go up 203%, which is no small thing and likely they, like me, would not have much consideration for the impact on the company, but that impact is bigger than they might be thinking. See, that translates to an overall operation cost for Arby’s of around 61%. They can’t serve their customers if they cut hours, they don’t want to diminish the quality of their product, any more than it might already be, so they have to add this back into the cost of the food. So, remember my simple meal and sweet shake. Well, it is no longer going to cost $9.38, instead it is going to $15.08.

Now, you might be tempted to think that while this is not as good as you had hoped it still works out better for that minimum wage worker. After all, her can work fewer minutes to pay for that meal, and you would be right. The problem is a little bigger for them. See, the average person spends about 9% of their paycheck on food. So, if they make $1000 they spend $90 of it on food. A minimum wage worker, though, spends about 12% on their food, so $120 per $1000 earned. If all food goes up by 61%, and you should expect it to increase by some amount if you increases minimum wage, as grocery stores and mass producers of foodstuffs also have a large number of minimum wage workers, than that 12% of money spent on food becomes about 20%. So, the living wage could easily become unlivable.

So, who would want this, I mean other than 16 year old me who has no vision of the future? Well, let’s think.. Who makes more money if people have bigger checks? Who makes more money if the prices of things go up? See, there are winners in this situation, but they are not who you think they are.

Danger

Have you ever leaned toward the plate glass window of a tall building, leaning to that point you can see the street so far below you? If you have, as I have, you have probably felt that breath catch in your throat, as you push back the images of broken glass preceding a fatal, terrifying free fall. Perhaps it is not heights, perhaps it is not even you, maybe you are someone who watches those chariot style baby cages rolling behind a spandex clad biker and think to yourself, one latch failure is all it would take; or worse, the judgmental, I would never risk my child that way. We have this lizard part of our brain, each a little different, but not that different, which reacts to perceived danger. The problem is, this part of our brain is not a mathematician, it has no concept of statistics or actual risk.

We stink at fighting that part of ourselves and we also stink at reacting when that part of ourselves is not firing. At a gut level we react to what we think of as danger, but often we have no concept of where real danger is, or what the level of that danger is. Humans will make arguments to remove their own personal danger items, while completely ignoring how those rules would be applied to other elements of their life.

The sound of thunder strikes fear in not just my dog, but also in my children. When the thunder rolls across the sky and you can smell the ozone in the air, children are ushered off the soccer field and told to get out of the pool. We recognize this at a gut level as a clear and present danger. In fact, between 1959 and 1994 in the United States, 3239 people we killed by lightening, so this danger is real, our gut is not wrong. The math works out to about 90 per year in the US or, given an average population of 219 million during those years, 0.4 deaths per million. Very rare. To give you a quick visual understanding if you made a stack of pennies two and a half miles high and each penny represented one person, one penny would be lost per year.

Lightening is not the only thing which causes people to react negatively, causes people to shield their children and react with the gut. For many people guns fill this same place. They react to people who are openly carrying. They decry the carriers as ignorant. Everything inside of them twists with fear at the presence of these weapons. Just as we know lightening kills, we know that guns can kill as well; but that lizard part of our brain doesn’t really know any of the math. In 2010 in the United States there were 11,078 homicides by firearms, which is obviously much greater than your risk of being killed by lightening. If we call 0.4 deaths per million per year a Lightening Risk (LR) than we can understand that increase to be 89LR, or you are 89 times as likely to suffer a firearm homicide as a lightning strike. This might have you quaking, but I am not sure it should. If I convert our penny example from before, it would be a stack of pennies fourteen and a half stories high and we would lose 1 of those pennies a year. Exponentially more common, but still very rare.

As a quick note, the rates of firearm homicide and lightning strikes, while already rare, also seem to be on the decline.

So, what things kill us, but we don’t seem to have much fear of?

Here is a fun one, remember the pools we make all those kids get out of when it starts to thunder? Drowning in pools is also something which happens to some of us every year. Ok, this only happen to a single person once, but as a group pools do kill us. For the most part, outside of toddling children, our lizard brain is off when it comes to pools. Should it be? Let’s look. Between 2005 and 2009 there was an annual average of 3533 unintentional, non boat related, drowning. How does that compare? Well, that works out to 11.7 per million people, or 29LR. So, about a third as dangerous as guns, but 29 times as dangerous as lightening.

How about one we know intellectually to fear, a danger we face every day with little or no quaking in that lizard brain. Automobile accidents. In 2011 we had the lowest traffic fatalities in 62 years, bottoming out at 32,479 traffic fatalities. That is a staggering 104 per million or 261LR. That is 3 times as dangerous as firearms, perhaps the first of these examples which we might say are not rare. We all seem to be touched by this one, but our brains haven’t caught up. We don’t respond, recoil, react. Or perhaps it is because we shouldn’t do any of these things, that the rate of accidents is rare enough that we have that one right. If that is true, then why are we responding, reacting and recoiling to a bunch of things that, if my math is right, we shouldn’t.

Sin in Church

As some of you know, I teach Sunday School for some of the adults at Praise Baptist church. Really, if I’m being honest, I spend most of my time guiding the conversation on the verses we are reading and making small points here and there. Most of the work is done by the class, which I love. Very often this means class turns out nothing like I imagine it will and most of the time, because of the great students in there, it is better than I would have planned for. Yesterday, though, I would put in the category of missed result.

So we are talking through the 7th chapter of 1 Samuel, the Israelites are called to Mizpah to do a cleansing ritual for their sin and Philistines, knowing where they all are at, plan an attack. So, in class we talked about the complexities of dealing with sin in the church. As a note, this is often a fire starter and yesterday was no exception. See, the church is in a difficult spot when it comes to sin, if someone comes in confessing their sin it can mean we keep them out of certain ministries which could be a problem for them. This can feel like judgment, or placing special punishment, but not forgiveness. It can feel like the best option is to lie, which of course we don’t want to encourage. So, I asked what is the church to do. The class talked about sexual sins and people who might be thieves and how to isolate them from the temptation, which caused me to ask how they would like to be isolated based on the worst sin of their past.

This of course lead to the conversation of why we hide our sins, judgment, fear, embarrassment, pride. Now the class knows, and we talked about James 5:16, which tells us to confess our sins one to another. But the verse, for many, wasn’t greater than the hurt they had experienced when they had try to do this right. In some cases people lost friends or became a point of gossip. Doing what is right is hard and sometimes painful. So, we came back to the story, what did the Israelites do when the war came to their gates, when the philistines took advantage of their faithfulness. They cried out to the Lord and God took care of it. If we don’t if we hide we make a church no one wants to come to, because you should fear people who look perfect and a church which is giving into the enemy. We need to cry out to the Lord, be obedient and let him do the rest.

Now, had we ended there, I might not be writing today, but immediately afterwards they flipped the script on me. What are we to do when another is caught in sin? This might seem obvious to some, but this is actually a far trickier problem. If you think people don’t like confessing their sins, imagine how they feel about having them called out. I should note that I was not as prepared for this portion of the discussion, so while I tried to make sure what was said was Biblically accurate, it is possible there we gaps in my explanation or clarifications on what was offered up by the class.

The first and healthiest way you come to know of another Christian’s sin is by your closeness to them. In this relationship, it allows you to see something they don’t see or have turned away from, but is not spiritually sound. The class referred to this as a gentle rebuke, which comes from Galatians 6:1, which says if a brother is caught in any transgression you are to spiritually restore him in a spirit of gentleness. We focused, and I think rightly so, on that spirit of gentleness. To have that spirit you have to have a relationship, the person has to know first and foremost that you love them, that you are not trying to do them harm, that you are not trying to show how you are better than them. Truth is, you are not, you have an opportunity to restore them because you can see them clearly, it is not the other way around because you are better at hiding, not because of how great you are. We talked about this in terms that were hard on ourselves, but this needs to be taken seriously.

The second way we talked about was one in which you go through steps, which is from Matthew 18. These steps start with a private meeting, then if the person won’t turn from their sin is a meeting with a few people of like mind, and finally if they remain unmoved the church can remove them. There are more details than this, but questions on this method abound. How was this sin discovered? If it was by gossip, isn’t that also a sin? Does that disqualify you from following these steps? Is that first step the same as the gentle rebuke? My answer, while not satisfying to everyone, was to go back to the source scripture. Matthew 18:15 (ESV) says, “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens you have gained a brother.” So, I focused on this idea of “sins against you”. Not any generic sin, but one in which you are the victimized. Admittedly, this gets tricky in a church where a sin can damage a ministry you are responsible for or can be inadvertent because of close interactions, but if you are only using this method for those who have clearly sinned against you, it keeps you out of the gossip or witch hunting, which should be avoided.

The class, though, did not universally have this read though, some removed the “sin against you” phrase, which changes the handling of these verses. Why? I have a learned class? So, I did a little research. Matthew 18:15 (NIV) says, “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over.” It is not a divide on understanding, it is a divide on translation. So, what does it say? What does it really say? Is this method for just those who sin against you or is it any who are sinning?

It turns out this problem is not an ESV/NIV problem. It is much older than that. In the field of Biblical discrepancies, each old translation is called an evidence. These evidences are used to write the various translations. With some quick internet work I found a website that shows 24 evidences for “sins against you” and 5 evidences for no “sins against you”. For now, I probably believe the better interpretation is the one I used in class, but I might be less strong about using it. It gets a little more muddle than this, because of the use of parenthesis and what those mean, but as I was writing this I realized how boring this could becomes. Suffice it to say, handling of sin in church is one of the most important things we do and one of the easiest things for us to mess up. It should be taken seriously, with prayer and with love. I expect we’ll be talking about this again next week, so if anyone has any valuable insight, I sure could use it.