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.

Advice for parents

Aside from being a parent myself, I’m old enough to have known many parents with kids already out of the house, teenage kids, and relatively young or newborns. Being one to do a lot of research, I read quite a bit about parenting and child development – especially when I was new to it. Through all of that advice, there’s one thing I never heard or read anywhere, but I wish I had: Your kids don’t leave the house at 18. They leave the house at 13. That’s a five years difference. If you’re at all like me, you…

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Sandals: The thinking man’s shoes

I’ve never understood why anyone would wear sandals. If you wear shoes, they’re secured on your feet. You put them on and you don’t have to think about them anymore. They just do what your foot is doing. When wearing sandals, you have to crunch your toes, arch your foot, turn your ankles, and any number of machinations to make sure your shoe doesn’t come off. Wearing sandals just seems like too much thinking that I just don’t want to do. The constant flapping as people with sandals walk around the office is also really distracting. People should wear…

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“Must be nice” isn’t very nice

In the last week, I was with a co-worker when we heard that one of our other co-workers went to Monacco. Later that week, I was driving with a friend when we passed a really nice house in a local, upscale neighborhood. In both cases, the person I was with responded by saying, “Must be nice.” I got to thinking about that saying. It’s fairly common. Certainly not the first time I’ve heard people say it. But it’s nothing I’ve ever said or would be inclined to say. Some would tell you it’s a way of acknowledging someone having…

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Solving the gender pay gap

Like everything that’s fun or good, the U.S. women’s soccer team’s victory has evolved from a quick moment of pride to a political issue. In this case, the women’s team is suing because they get paid less than the U.S. men’s team, even though the revenue generated, in total, by the women’s World Cup is a fraction of what the men’s version creates. I think there’s an easy solution to the entire gender pay gap issue that should put it to bed once and for all. Just have the entire women’s team identify as men, and they’ll get paid…

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If a tree falls in a forest, who has the greatest interest in planting another?

No one plants more trees than the people who cut them down. Deforestation has been an issue for a number of decades, but it really started taking off as a popular concern in the mid-1980s, when organizations like Greenpeace and Earth First!, along with Al Gore, started gaining media coverage. Earth First!, in particular, initiated tactics like blocking logging roads, tree-sitting, and tree-spiking, to stop logging and raise awareness. People who tend to take things at face value, isolate their thinking to the “fact” they’re given, and shy away from critical analysis will hear something like “there are 8…

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Is security making us less secure?

Is it me, or are all of the personal online account security questions we’re answering, in the name of further account security and protection, actually just providing even more detailed, personal information to the hackers who inevitably break into and steal our account information? It seems like now people will know my mother’s maiden name, my first concert, my first car, my third grade teacher, my shoe size, my pet’s name, etc. That information makes it much easier to pose as me than just the surface information. Seems like the intent to make things more secure is just going…

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How did the death of the Polish joke slip by unnoticed?

I recently watched Bob Einstein’s last appearance on Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee with my teenage daughter. In it, he tells a Polish joke about three men – an Irish man, an Italian man, and a Polish man – who are all going to the electric chair. When Einstein refers to the Polish man, he uses the derogatory word for a Polish person, “Polack.” As I was listening to the joke, which I thought was very funny, I looked at my daughter, through my own laughter, and realized she wasn’t laughing. When I asked her why, she…

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At a stoplight, you only have one job

If you’re at a stoplight, you only have one job: make sure the person behind you gets through. Stay focused, and think of the people behind you. When the light changes, go, and go quickly. When the car in front of you starts moving, go. The goal should be to get you and the person behind you through the light. If that happens, you’ve done your job. To meander through is to think only of yourself and be in the way of the person behind you. Be courteous. All of the time.

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Diversity, but from who’s perspective?

One of the popular trends in management these days is giving the entire staff a personality test so we can understand what kind of people they are. Then managers are to learn how to speak to each individual in a way that resonates best with their varying personality types. One manager learning countless different ways to say the same thing to X number of employees. At the same time, companies are racing to see who can create the largest “diversity and inclusion” department in the their industry, so they can publicize their “commitment to diversity” and attract the employees…

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