Why do bad things happen to good people

An old question. If you think about it a bit you can come to understand it. It's actually not a rhetorical or unanswerable question.

Anyone asking the question I think would agree that these are all true

• there are good people
• there are bad people
• good things happen
• bad things happen

From there it should be immediately clear that these must all be true

1.  good things happen to good people
2.  good things happen to bad people
3.  bad things happen to bad people
4.  bad things happen to good people

That bad things happen to good people is the inescapable consequence of the existence of good and bad people, and that good and bad things will happen. Still I've only ever heard complaint about case 4. Nobody is unhappy if something good happens to a good person, or objects if something bad gets thrown in a bad person's face.

Can it be fixed?
Can the fact that bad things happen be fixed? Could it be that bad things no longer happen.

Alas, probably not on the Earthly realm where we all live. Lifespan is finite. Resources are finite. We have to compete with others both as individuals and in groups to navigate through life.

There is large variance in the natural world and how events unfold. Luck is a major factor, which means bad luck must also be a factor. A rising tide lifts every boat. Rain falls on the just and the unjust.

The human body is an incredibly complex machine. Generally it is pretty robust for several decades. However it can malfunction resulting in major illness or death in your prime or well before. Bad luck and natural variance.

Then there's free will. People are able to choose their own actions through life. That means people can choose or intentionally cause bad things to happen to others. Bad people and bad things happening also go together. So as long as there is free will then there is a reality that bad things can happen.

Prince Charles had a good weekend

It was a sight at the royal wedding last weekend. After a series of events, Prince Charles, the father of the groom Prince Harry, walked the bride Meghan Markle down the aisle. It was a classy and versatile gesture by the crown prince. At weddings sometimes you have to improvise a bit and cheerfully make the best of things. Charles performed admirably in this impromptu role.

How would you describe Charles' role? Father of the bride for a day? meh he's already the father of the groom. Perhaps husband of the mother of the bride for the day would work. It was good for the bride, surely it made her mom feel welcome and look good there. Charles actions generously lent a lot of credibility to mom Markle, a nice gesture at Harry's wedding that could be remembered into the future.

There seemed a kind of zeal to Charles on Saturday in his ad hoc role. He seemed chuffed up coming out of the church. Smiling and pleased with himself with a woman on each arm.

And with this the rehabilitation of Prince Charles is now complete. To the extent that Charles ever required rehabilitation. After the divorce and Diana died it was a black mark on Charles. He's worked hard over the years on his image. He's conducted himself well in public since at least 2000. The thing is, through history the crown prince has always had a discreet mistress. Charles understood his prerogative. It was Diana who rejected centuries of tradition and precedent about her role and upset everything. A lot of good it did her. It is what it is for Charles, he took his reversals around this fairly in stride, kept a thick skin, and fairly regrouped and kept going.

Charles has aged well. Along with some of his contemporaries from about a generation ago, maligned at the time, who have also aged pretty well from then to now. That is Homer Simpson and Murphy Brown. By today's standards, Charles, Homer and Murphy are just regular folks with regular lives. They could have done a lot worse for their kids and spouses we recognize now by contemporary standards.

Diana will always be the people's princess. Charles will have to live the rest of his days in that shadow. However Charles comes across pretty well as a regular guy prince. ahem, compared to the Markle family trainwreck Charles looks good by comparison, not such a bad guy or bad father after all. I suspect Harry understands that, especially after dealing with the Markle clan up close.

Thoughts about Bitcoin

It is an interesting phenomena the rise of Bitcoin. In many ways Bitcoin questions and challenges how we have thought about money, banks, and government the last several decades at least. As long as I've been around.

Like many I wish I'd thrown $100 into Bitcoin back when you could buy them for $1 each. Oh well.

One concept is there's no "they" with Bitcoin. No central bank. No ultimate federal government authority. That takes some getting used to. With traditional currency, money and state tend to be pretty closely tied. Also with traditional money we accept there is some kind of central bank authority somehow controlling some unseen money supply with interest rates or whatever. We accept the state, perhaps in conjunction with a central bank, can as it deems necessary print money, aka "quantitative easing" to use a more polite term.

Bitcoin is more like true property. To own Bitcoin is to truly own it. Bitcoin cannot be frozen, zeroed out, seized, transferred to another, garnished, blocked access. Also if you have network, you can have access to your Bitcoin wherever you are. Unlike traditional money in a bank, a central authority can access your funds, or block your access, without your consent. With no intermediary such as banks, you can both direct access your Bitcoin, and prevent third party access through the intermediary.

Speaking of property. Banks are required to report cash withdrawals over $10,000 to the government. The individual is required to fill out forms saying what the withdraw is for. No wiretap, warrant, or court order is required. Why is this? Is the balance in your bank account not your own private property? Apparently not entirely. And yet nobody questions this, it's just passively accepted.

The withdraw reporting rule just shows that with traditional currency, in a real way it isn't entirely your property. In a way it's akin to a passport. You can hold it and use it within certain boundaries, but underneath it is the property of the nation state that issued it.

From its mathematical structure, Bitcoin cannot be created by a central authority. That is a powerful concept. It basically cuts "them" out of the picture from the outset, with no way to muscle in. With traditional money, we have to trust and rely on the national government and central banks to guard and maintain the integrity of the national currency. However there's nothing really preventing a government or central bank from creating raw new money out of thin air. So if you come to own a Bitcoin you don't have to be concerned that an identical Bitcoin could be legally counterfeited by a government or central bank straight off a printing press, thus diluting and devaluing your property.

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A note on how bad and corrosive printing money can be. A short tale. Suppose a businessman owns two apartment buildings side by side in a lower middle class neighborhood. There's a fair size lawn around and in between the buildings. The landlord wants the grass mowed so that his site looks good and the tenants are happy. You agree to mow the lawn for $100. He provides the lawn mower and gas.

On the agreed day you arrive at 9 AM. You spend several hours mowing the lawn. About 5 PM you are finished and packed up. He hands you a $100 bill as agreed. You take the $100 you earned and decide to go to a local bar for a $20 burger and beer deal.

Now at the same time a government truck rolls by with a printing press producing $100 bills. The government hands your neighbor a $100 bill hot off the printing press, just for being fabulous. He takes his $100 and goes to the same local bar.

Now at the bar your $100 spends identically to the printed $100, there's no difference. The difference is that you had to do physical work in the sun all day to obtain your $100, while the other did not have to do anything to get an identical $100.

Alek Minassian and incel

It was a sad story coming out of Toronto about Alek Minassian and a van attack that killed 10 people.

Apparently Minassian was part of something called incel, or involuntarily celibate. Like most, I'd never heard the term incel before. So if I understand, Alek, 25, wanted to be part of the Toronto dating scene but I guess didn't get any traction. He was apparently angry, frustrated, jealous, and resentful about his lack of success in the dating market. He may have been most angry with women specifically. In the dating scene he found himself shut out of, it was women who were not interested in him. He ended up taking out his rage in a murderous van attack against random civilians in Toronto.

Well what to make of it. It's sad how it all ended with the mass terror and killing of innocents. They personally didn't do anything wrong to Alex. meh the dating scene is like a market. In the long term the market is rational. Looking at Alex life, it is not surprising his lack of success at dating. socially awkward, 7 years at Seneca college and not able to complete a basic community college technical program, not much to look at. The market, the women on the market, don't owe Alex anything. Why would they want him? he had little going for him and an oversize sense of entitlement.

The thing about this "nice guy/gentleman" act. Alex's actions demonstrate he wasn't such a nice guy or gentleman after all. So perhaps the women saw right through his nice guy facade and what was underneath was dark and sinister. The nice guy thing is a waste anyway. Just be yourself. Women don't respect or want a male who lowers himself or treats himself as lesser or inferior to them.

I will divide the dating market for men and women into 4 groups ABCD from top to bottom. A is the alphas, the Chads and Staceys. The tall, good looking, fit, confident guys with money. The most attractive, socially connected, ladies in the prime of their looks. B can be generally regular folks. Regular guys with pretty good jobs in trades or white collar. Presentable and likeable women. C is the marginals, maybe not much to look at, some baggage or personality issues, lack financial resources. D is undateable.

So in reality Alex was basically a D. 7 years out of high school couldn't finish community college. living with parents at 25. socially awkward. no career, no car. below average height. There's a cognitive dissonance with Alex and incel. If Alex really wanted to date women he could have tried a lot harder to get out of group D and into group C. Finish school, or quit school and take any kind of steady work. Work untiringly on your career for several years and build up financial resources. Move out of your mom's basement. Work out and get some muscles. Take a Carnegie or heck even pua course and learn how to fake it to better talk to women and navigate socially.

Alex didn't seem to actually do any of these things to improve his ranking and status to the point that women would talk to him and he could get dates. Given that, I question whether he really wanted to have a girlfriend. Perhaps he was lazy and didn't want to do those things because they would have required hard work, personal sacrifice, and self discipline. Perhaps he resented the hand he was dealt in life that stuff that comes fairly naturally to the A-B-C guys he has to work for. He and incel seems to have this entitled attitude that if they affect a gentlemen image at least to themselves, that alone will vault them from group D to group A. It doesn't work like that.

Another thing Alex could have done was recognize his status as a marginal C-D player in the market, and focus his efforts there in meeting C-D women, if he actually wanted a girlfriend as incel claims. Forget about the beautiful Staceys, they earned their way into the A group, and have luxury of only talking to or dating the A group Chads. That is their option, nothing a C-D player can do about it. The market is broadly rational and A's will generally tend to pair off with A's.

So for the group C male, focus on your peers in the C group females. That means that even after Alex self improved to the C group, the women available to his group will be: a lot of single mothers, perhaps on welfare or making under $30k (a $40k tech job out of Seneca could be attractive to these ladies), maybe more than 1 child (but 3+ kids is group D), tattoos (though covered in tats is group D), a bit pudgy or a few extra pounds, they may weigh more than you do (but twice your weight or more is group D), maybe a bit jagged or a handful personality (but BPD is group D).

If he adjusted his sights a bit off the unattainable A group, was realistic and focused on his own C group of women, focus on self improvement, drop the attitude, Alex or any incel would have a reasonable chance of success in a dating scene. Also be careful about putting too many ladies into group D. The more Ds there are chokes off the supply of Cs, and can have the effect of dropping the incel from C into D himself.

The truth in between

Sometimes something happens, something bad or controversial. After the fact, someone who wasn't there is presented with conflicting versions of events. When faced with differing accounts, the third party has a dilemma. After all if stories conflict then they cannot both be right. It can be convenient to use a guideline to start out. There are different sayings but one variant goes

There's one side. There's the other side. There's the truth in between.

Another variant is "three sides to every story". One side, the other side, the truth.

Now this might seem a reasonable approach to being presented with conflicting accounts of things. But it can be a bit dangerous. The problematic part is the "in between", or insisting that there are 3 sides.

The issue is that there might actually only be two sides. It is possible that one side is in fact the accurate account, and the "other" side is either mistaken or intentionally attempting to mislead or obfuscate about what happened. The "three sides" up front conclusion can give undue credibility to the side which is presenting a false account. It also basically accuses both sides of "lying" to make themselves look better, or at least having a mistaken memory. That may not be true.

So to an honest person, just being involved in some factual dispute, they can be branded a liar under the "three sides" doctrine due to there being a conflicting account. That's not fair to the honest person, and allows the dishonest side (who may not care so much about his reputation) to smear the honest person by presenting a contrary account and then insisting they are both wrong/mistaken/lying, as "the truth is somewhere in between". It also invalidates the honest side if the third party insists up front that both accounts are inaccurate, and there is some unknown/unknowable truth in between.

I suspect the issue is, it may be impossible for a third party to determine after the fact what really happened when the events are in dispute. However it is better to just go with "we can't know for certain", or "there are differing accounts", than to reach a possibly false conclusion of three sides. There may not necessarily be a third side.