Spout

This site is full of ideas. Some of them might make you cringe. They may not align with your worldview, perspectives, or experiences. That’s a great thing.

Not going to sugarcoat this one…

I’m not going to dress this one up or wrap it in a story. It’s pretty straightforward. If you’re pulling out of a residential area or parking lot onto a busy road, don’t pull out right in front of another car unless you are certain you’re going to drive faster than that car is going. And if, for some reason, you misjudged their speed, and you do, go at least as fast as that car, if not faster. It’s just courtesy. (This, by the way, is made worse when you pull out right in front of a car with…

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Celebrate success

Look at the successful people in the news or even the successful people in your life. Who’s jealous and resentful? Who believes those people lied, cheated or stole their way to success? Who believes they got lucky? Who wishes they were in that position? On the flip side, who congratulates the successful? Who works to find out how the successful achieved what they did so that maybe they can apply some of those same lessons to their own lives? Who sees inspiration in the successes of others? Who wants to work hard not to strip down the successful, but…

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Sports help kids solve their own problems

Yesterday, I wrote about how organized youth sports contribute to childhood obesity. But they also hurt our kids in other ways. When kids organically assemble in the backyard to play games, there are rarely adults around. (Or, if they’re around, they’re not really paying attention.) And when kids are left to their own devices, they have to self-organized, and self-police. They create the games, which means also creating and enforcing the rules. When there are questions or disputes, there are no adults around to mediate. It’s up to the kids to police themselves. In absence of adults, they’ll have…

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Organized sports create more childhood obesity

It may sound counterintuitive, but organized youth sports are contributing to childhood obesity. It used to be that the neighborhood kids would just assemble after breakfast, or after school, and start in on whatever physical activity they were going to do. Whether it was football, a game of pickle, or a bike ride exploring the neighborhood, there was no cost to entry. You went outside, joined in, and off you went. But now that parents have organized their kid’s time, and paid so much to do so, kids aren’t just heading outside to play. Now sports is highly organized….

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Solving road rage… or enhancing it

With all of the apps and in-car communication devices proliferating on our phones and in our vehicles, I think there’s an opportunity to solve our road rage issues. Like the anonymous internet, where everyone feels empowered to say whatever cold, ruthless, and heartless things to people that they would never say to their face, people freely sit in their cars and shout at each other or give other drivers the finger (or a variety of other meaningless articulations). So what if we personalized driving? What if there was a way to communicate with the drivers around you. Obviously, one…

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Making the practical impractical

Vinyl is back. That’s a good thing. For those who grew up listening to vinyl records, you know the warm sound that comes from the needle hitting the record. It also gives you hope for a society that has commoditized sound quality in exchange for availability. Everyone is attuned to, and accepting of, poor sound quality so they can share music files and download songs for free. Gone is the person who auditions speaker systems in an audio shop, looking for the perfect sound for exactly the kind of music they like to hear. Gone is the person who…

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Sorry for the early texts… Facebook made me do it

Thanks to sites like Facebook, we no longer think about the people closest to us and make sure we remember their birthdays. Now, we just wait for Facebook to remind us of who’s birthday it is so we can all receive thoughtless birthday wishes from our 500 closest friends. I’ve always taken pride in reserving the mental space to remember the birthdays of people I really care about. As Valentine’s Day levels the playing field for those not thoughtful enough to acknowledge that special someone without having to be told, Facebook cheapens real, remembered birthday wishes by piling on…

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How can such brilliant tech people be such poor problem-solvers on the road?

Yesterday, I was running through the crosswalk of a four-way intersection. The four-way intersection crosses a single-lane road with a two-lane road. I was crossing the single-lane road, against traffic. There were only two cars in view; both in the right lane coming toward me. They had a green light. Right when I started to cross, the lead car slowed down and put its right blinker on to turn right. He was going to turn in front of me, but waited for me to clear the crosswalk before he went. He came to a stop as he waited for…

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Tough love feels bad

Conservatives can seem very mean, cruel and uncaring. It’s because they often consider the results of their actions before they consider the feelings of those affected. Sometimes you have to be hard on people so they learn hard lessons early in their life and can cope with tough situations later on in their adulthood. It is better to let a child touch the proverbial hot stove so they learn never to touch it again, whereas many parents today would rather stand by the stove all day to make sure their children never have to feel the pain of having…

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