Priorities

I'm shaking my head as I'm watching a video up on Patch.  ​And it's taking me back to my days at The Sound Observer​, when we reported on the insanity that is a school budget vote.

In many ways, the issues we ran into in those days at SWR weren't dissimilar to the ones faced by Sachem today, even though their situations are completely different.  The major difference is that we have this new and completely whack-a-doo process for achieving consensus on what ought to ​be budgeted for.  I think our school superintendent has done a reasonably good job at informing the public of the consequences of failing to pass the budget on the first try.  I think public understanding falls apart in the wake of the failure, though, and a lot of people need to be educated about the substance of what happens now.  I also think the process itself needs a ton of work, and that the community shouldn't be in a place where they're forced to make a bunch of false choices.  For instance, pass the largest proposed property tax increase on Long Island or lose full-day kindergarten.

What I'm about to post is going to seem inflammatory to some.  I've definitely got a dog in this hunt, as my daughter will start kindergarten next year, and I'm personally very disappointed by the proposal to move to half-day kindergarten.​  That said, I feel like there are two fundamental disconnects when it comes to making these choices.  Let's get the more obvious one out of the way...

Close the freaking middle schools​.  Enrollments are decreasing.  My understanding is that the BOE is reluctant to make the decision to close two of the four middle schools because they don't yet fully understand the economic impact of doing so.  First off, the fact that we don't have the right information in order to make the decision one way or another is an unbelievable disgrace.  That decision was looming for quite some time - to not have information at the ready is the fault of the BOE and they should be ashamed.  When you have districts on the island that have, in the past, considered consolidation as an option even when enrollments are flat or increasing, to balk at making that decision when enrollments are decreasing is irresponsible.  Close the schools, assess the savings later.  Such a move may prevent Sachem from having to make even more difficult decisions down the line.  I don't understand why the BOE is waiting.

Then there's the tougher one.​

Sports aren't as important as academics.  Period.​  There I said it.  I've covered school boards and written about them on many occasions and this is a classic problem that has grown worse on a macro level over the years.  We have an unhealthy attachment to sports programs such that we prioritize them above academic programs, and that's wrong.​  Over the years I've found that the attachment is driven mostly by emotion - parents who live vicariously through their kids and harbor dreams of sports scholarships and the NBA or NFL.  Or it's driven by some misguided argument that sports somehow teach our kids more valuable lessons about how to be part of a team, or about leadership skills.  Curiously, people who argue that notion are dismissive of how things like the Robotics Club can teach those things, too.  And they can do it while teaching skills that will be far more valuable to kids after they graduate.  As an employer, I can tell you I've never hired a kid because he could throw a ball around.  If he knows Python, on the other hand...

Wake up, people.  Employers are telling you what you need to do as far as preparing kids for jobs after they graduate.  And basketball ain't it.  Which is why it's nothing short of a fucking disgrace that something like the Robotics Club has to live with a 50% budget cut when it's giving kids the preparation for jobs in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics fields we so sorely need.  Yes, STEM jobs.  That thing the President keeps talking about in his State of the Union speeches.  He's not talking about football.​

And yes, it's even more of a disgrace that we'll consider forcing 5-year-olds to learn the same amount of material in half the time, while varsity sports escape the budget axe unscathed.  These short-term fixes at the expense of long-term education have already caught up to us.  Making more of the same mistakes will just increase the gap between the overall quality of our education and that of other nations.  Many Sachem residents won't care, until they notice that the low education standards have decreased the quality of life around them.​

​So this is why I'm shaking my head at the Patch video, as I watch the first woman to speak get it so right and then have to listen to idiotic comments from the second about why we should have respect for the notion that athletics are as important as academics.  Fuck that.  They're not, and yet we already behave as if athletics are not just equal, but a priority over academics.  Academic clubs have already been relegated to the role of second fiddle.  If it were otherwise, you'd have the sports boosters fully and privately funding the expensive equipment, insurance, transportation and other costly line items, instead of having parents have to make tough decisions about where their child should attend kindergarten three mere months before school starts.

Something I've Always Wanted to Write

For some reason I can't get it out of my head.  For over a decade, I've been thinking about writing a silly book.  Essentially, it would be an oral history of the invention and debut of the personal force field.​

Of course, no such invention yet exists.  And that's part of the fun.  I'd like to invent the characters, from the engineers working on one aspect of the personal force field's development to the marketing people to the early adopters who first use them and spot the first glitches.  Maybe throw in a chapter from some weirdo anti-technology anarchist dude who goes on a personal crusade to ban them.  Stuff like that.​

I think it would make an interesting book.  What's funny is that I've had dozens of weird ideas like this over the past couple decades.  This seems to be the only one with staying power.  Every so often, I mentally kick myself and go "Man, why the heck haven't I written that yet?"​

Maybe writing it would allow me to test out self-publishing.  What do you think?​

How Will My Kids Be Different?

Someone asked me in a Facebook thread how different I think my kids will be when they're my age.  Facebook isn't the place for things like that.  Blogs are.​

Having been paid to prognosticate many times in the past, I've learned that it's remarkably stupid to believe you can get your head around anything other than trends and concepts we ought to collectively pay attention to.  The second you put a stake in the ground and say "flying cars by 2036," you start to look like an ass.  But what ends up helping you predict are the various societal big questions that necessitate a solution in the near future.  Latch on to those, apply some intelligence, and maybe you'll be in a place to talk about what happens in 37 years, when my son has his 40th birthday.​

I can't tell you about flying cars, or lightsabers or whether or not we'll have cured cancer.  I can tell you there are three things that worry me.  No, not the minutiae regarding whether or not we'll get creamed by a big asteroid, or whether some rogue terrorist organization will get their mitts on a nuclear weapon.  They're things that concern the dynamic of how we interact with one another.  And they're worrisome.

Interpersonal Contact​

Nothing worries me more than the loss of intimate personal relationships.  If we can't communicate with one another on a meaningful level, we can't come together to protect our collective interests.  We also can't empathize effectively, learn tolerance or form healthy family bonds.​

Younger people these days seem to celebrate the notion of keeping others at arm's length.  ​It was wonderful that everyone collectively began to understand introverts and how they operate.  It's another thing entirely to celebrate one's detachment from meaningful relationships and look forward to replacing real human relationships with technology.

That's weird for an introvert tech-head like myself to say.  But it's profound.  Everywhere I look, I see people applying technology in ways that "protect" them from having to communicate face-to-face with other people.  I think about recent college grads who managed to get to their early twenties without having had the experience of striking up a conversation with a total stranger, or having to use a face-to-face visit or a phone call in place of an e-mail or text.​

Couple that with our society's seemingly increasing fear of germs, bacteria, viruses and the environment in general and you've got a recipe for isolation and loneliness.  It also doesn't help that we somehow believe our safety is continually under threat, and that we should react to threats with increased isolation.  I mean, parents have to meet their kids at the bus stop.  Doesn't that defeat the purpose of taking the bus to begin with?  Kids don't roam their neighborhoods looking for pickup games of stickball anymore.  Their interaction with other kids is scheduled and structured.

This is what I'm worried about - that my kids will never develop the relationship skills they need to communicate meaningfully with other human beings.  And they'll be in a sea of kids who have been raised in similar conditions, who also won't know how to relate.​

Celebration of Failure​

It also seems that wherever I look, we're celebrating the development of a new approach to achieving goals and getting stuff done.  It relies less on expertise, more on brute force.​

The pundits are all telling us to fail faster and fail better.  Everywhere I turn it's fail, fail, fail.  I'm a fan of learning by doing, and I also believe that should you fail at trying to do something, it's really advantageous to learn from it and land in a spot where you can more easily learn where you made the wrong turn and avoid repeating the error.​

​But I don't believe in celebrating failure.  Failure means that somebody is out money, time, emotional investment or all three.  Failure means that somebody who was depending on you to succeed got let down.  Failure means your reputation just took a hit.

It's okay to learn from failure, but it's not okay to have to perform tasks without having the requisite knowledge, or without calling in the expertise you need in order to make something successful.  Too often, that's what we ask young people to do today - if you don't have the guidance you need, don't stop, keep going because you'll fail and the failure will grant you some sort of epiphany.​

We're seriously taking a look at companies like Google, and giving them points for how they handle failure.  And it's taken as a given that this iterative try-fail, try-fail, try-succeed approach is somehow superior to using a considered approach and the appropriate subject matter expertise. to get where you need to go.

I don't want my kids learning that.  And I'm afraid that if they believe there's no consequences for failure, they'll be okay settling for it.  And I'm worried that culturally, we'll still be celebrating failure when they're 40.

Devaluing of Expertise​

Speaking of "appropriate subject matter expertise," our culture is moving toward not valuing it.  I'm not sure what's responsible - runaway corporatism or the Celebration of Failure or both.​  In any case, we're starting to devalue the notion of doing things that few other people know how to do well.

Maybe you teach your kids how to work on cars, or to play the piano or how to paint landscapes.  Maybe your kid's elementary school teacher told you to consider private gymnastics ​or dance lessons because they recognized a natural talent and want to see it developed.  Maybe your kid is in the robotics club and shows that they're miles ahead of other kids their age in understanding electronics.

Even if your kid does something really well - better than almost anyone - our business culture won't reward it.  Businesses no longer strive for perfection.  If presented with a choice - do it perfectly or do it at 80 percent for a lower cost, most businesses will choose the latter.  That means that subject matter expertise and talent are devalued and human resources are viewed as interchangeable and replaceable.

What does that mean for a child whose talents ought to be nurtured?  How does that child, as an adult, achieve satisfaction in his career without the positive reinforcement of being valued for his expertise or talent?  The wherewithal to see where those talents rank him against his peers?

This devaluing of what makes individuals truly special is worrisome.  I'm worried about my children living in a world where their contribution to society doesn't align with their talents or the things they work at being good at.​

How Will Things Be Different?​

So, if you're asking me what things will look like in almost 40 years, I can't tell you.  What I can tell you is what the things are that are currently manifesting and that worry me.  These three are things I'm paying attention to, just to see how they'll affect the world my kids are growing up in.​

Brought to you by the Housing Boom/Bust

So much is written about the careless lending part of the housing boom - robosigning, falsifying paperwork, not knowing who really holds a mortgage, etc. - that we forget about all the other things that were in high demand at the time.  With all the buying and selling going on, a lot of other things got rushed.​

We've come to understand over the past few years that our home inspector missed a ton.  For one, he never discovered that our entire HVAC system needed to be replaced right off the bat.  After the fact, I discussed it with the owner of the company.  The extent of the inspector's due diligence on the HVAC?  He turned it on and "it blew hot air."  He admitted on the phone that he hadn't even come to the rear of the house, where he would have discovered that the A/C units weren't even touching the concrete pads outside.  The ground had settled under them, and they were literally hanging off the side of the house, supported only by the copper pipe heading into the home.

The inspectors never mentioned the drainage problems that led to a closing-day flood in our basement, which led to our having to rip out the entirety of the finished basement and re-do the entire thing.​

They missed a ton of other things, too.  Dead electrical outlets, non-compliant wiring, a waste line leak and a bunch of other things.  In most places, where they couldn't get a good look at something, they stated so on the report they gave us.  In other spots, though, especially with the HVAC - they gave it a clean bill of health.​

In retrospect, I should have sued them.  Now, I'm coming to understand that many other aspects of my property aren't in compliance with Brookhaven Town Code.​

I will probably speak to a land use attorney about who was responsible for disclosing non-compliance to me at closing.  We want to put in a swimming pool and have waiting a significant length of time to save up enough money to do so.  I don't know the rules about disclosure of things like non-compliance with town code.  All I know is that I came into possession of a piece of real estate that had a bunch of hidden problems:​

1. The property is significantly overcleared.  I have to spend significant money to revegetate and ensure that revegetated areas contain a certain number of certain types of trees and shrubs.  Trees have to be a certain thickness.  Other vegetation needs to be from a specific list of native plants.
2. My shed is basically illegal.  It's over the 140 square feet threshold beyond which the town requires it to be permitted.  There was never a permit.  I'm unsure what it's built on, but code requires 12 inch wide concrete footings, 36" deep.  I could jack up the shed and pour footings, but I'm not sure it will withstand that kind of treatment and it will probably be cheaper to simply demolish it and put up another one that complies with town code.  No small task considering the shed has its own electrical subpanel.​
3. I have an illegal fence.  Our fence was falling down, and we got a contractor to come in and put up a PVC fence.  He had to set it back 40 feet from the prior fence line along one edge, or we would have had to make the fence only a 4' high split rail, which affords no privacy and wouldn't work for a pool.  But there was already a picket fence there.  I lost 40' X 153' of usable back yard. moving the fence closer.​  That's over 6,000 square feet of property.  Plus, I have to knock down the old fence sections and cart them away.

We had always aspired to put in a pool.  In fact, we mentioned it many times as we were considering buying the house.  Our last house had an in-ground pool, and my wife and I grew up with pools.  We're pool people, and we want our kids to swim as well.  Our kids take swimming lessons.  We were really looking forward to this.​

But instead of simply calling Swim King and plopping down our deposit, we're trying to figure out how to quickly bring our property into compliance with all these undisclosed code issues.  We're working with an engineer and a surveyor in addition to the various contractors involved.​

Now, let me ask you this...  How can all these issues skate by undisclosed without it raising any red flags with anybody?  The law is clear that the ultimate responsibility lies with the landowner, which is now me.  But what, precisely, was I supposed to do that I didn't do when I purchased the house?  Was I supposed to sit down with a copy of the outdated survey, break open the Big Ol' Book of Brookhaven Town Code, estimate the percentage of the property that was cleared myself and look for inconsistencies?  How the heck was I supposed to know that no one had a permit for the shed?  What would have tipped me off that the fence was illegal?​

All I know at this point is that I'm the one who has to pay for this lack of visibility.  And I do things the right way, which means whatever gets done will be in compliance with the town's wishes.  And it's going to cost me a ton, I'm sure.​