#vote #RegisterToVote #choices #ChooseWisely
Decisions, not conditions, determine one’s future.
That paraphrases a partial comment by California Gov. Gavin Newsom when asked by Jen Psaki what keeps him up at night these days.
Psaki is host of “Inside With Jen Psaki” on MSNBC. The show aired Oct. 20, 2024.
Newsom was discussing the upcoming presidential election. He was explaining that voting is a decision we all can make to help determine the future.
But, digging deeper into his comment, let’s analyze how each of us determines our future.
Do we let the conditions – most of which we cannot anticipate – determine our future? Or, do we take action to determine our future?
Some believe that no matter what actions they take, their future is somehow predetermined.
Perhaps that’s what they were taught as children. Did you ever have a parent, teacher or other elder tell you that this is what you were going to do — or were meant to do — for the rest of your life?
Or, have you been affected by circumstances, from which you believe you will never recover? Some victims of recent storms may feel that way, while others are determined to rebuild, or otherwise carry on.
Many are busy creating their future. They are saving and investing their money to help ensure security. Or, they are building a business with the intention that it will succeed, perhaps beyond their wildest dreams.
Perhaps one’s imagination does not extend that far. A person may just be looking for contentment rather than wild success.
Undoubtedly, there are small things one can do to ensure that.
But, regardless of your desires for the future, it’s largely up to you to make it happen. Generally, things don’t just happen serendipitously, like winning a lottery.
Usually, they are the result of decisions one makes throughout his or her life. One may decide to go to college – or not. One may decide to work for Employer X – or not. One may decide to get married and have children – or not.
Each of these decisions individually can really help determine one’s future.
But Newsom was talking about collective decisions – decisions made by lots of people individually that can determine everyone’s future.
Voting is such a decision. If everyone who is eligible to vote registers, and then votes, the future will be different – likely better – from having many decide not to vote because, say, they don’t like the choices.
When one is starving, usually he or she grabs what’s available to eat. Choices are immaterial.
There are choices in this election. Some may not like the choices offered. But, choosing the one you think is the best alternative – not necessarily the ultimate alternative – can help determine one’s individual and everyone’s collective futures.
Choose wisely, but, whomever you choose, vote.
Peter
Tag Archives: California
CLEAN-POWERED CARS BY 2035?
#CleanPoweredCars #GasolinePoweredCars #California #cars #transportation
California wants to ban the sale of new cars solely fueled by gasoline by 2035.
Used gas-powered cars will be allowed, but no new ones can be sold, according to the plan.
Certainly, climate change is real, and California is among the places hardest hit.
But it begs the question: how many used gasoline-powered cars will still be on the road?
It also begs the question: how long will it actually take to eliminate all gas-powered cars? The big issues are having enough rapid-charging stations, and how governments will cope with the decreased revenue from the gasoline tax, according to David Wickert, transportation writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Georgia is poised to become a leader in the manufacture of electric cars and the batteries that fuel them.
Here’s a thought: what if someone could come up with a way to convert internal-combustion cars to electric, hybrid or hydrogen power?
But, first things are first. As previously stated, there have to be more rapid-charging stations before we go entirely non-combustion.
Then, we have to look at auto manufacturing. It appears the big car companies are moving quickly away from internal combustion engines. That’s a good sign.
Then, the price of the clean-powered cars has to come down. The recent bill passed by Congress offers assistance in purchasing clean-powered vehicles, but to qualify, the vehicles have to be priced in a certain range. In other words, there are no subsidies to buy expensive cars, even if they are clean-powered.
Getting back to a previous thought, what does one do with a perfectly good gasoline-powered car? The body may be good enough to last for years. Would you spend, say, a few thousand dollars, or perhaps a bit more, to change out the guts of your car so you can drive your “new” clean-powered car?
Many would, perhaps. But now, there is no technology to do that. One might predict that someone, somewhere is working on that technology.
This news reminds us that transitions are hard. We may all want to do the right thing — the world may command us to do the right thing.
But moving from one era to the next requires infrastructure changes, innovation and the courage to move to something different. It’s also requires government to re-imagine revenue streams, as Wickert points out. All of these things can take time.
California is trying to provide that transition time. Can the innovators pull it off within that time?
Transitions are also messy. For example, if your gas-powered car craps out on you between now and then, and you can’t live without a car, what do you do that will solve your practical problem now, yet comply with the future new rules?
The lesson here is that we should have been preparing for this transition long before we did.
Certainly, it’s easier said than done. Hindsight is always 20-20.
But just because we are starting the transition in earnest later than we should have been doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.
The warming planet certainly isn’t waiting for us humans to act. It will keep warming, causing all sorts of disasters.
We just have to do the hard, messy things as we can. In fact, most of life’s journey involves hard, messy things. What’s convenient at the moment is not always the right thing for the future.
So, if you are not ready to ditch your gas-powered vehicle for something that runs much cleaner, your best bet is to hope you can buy enough time until the technology allows you to convert that vehicle, or the vehicle craps out on its own. Hopefully, you’ll be able to afford the change.
Peter
ROBOTS SERVING AT RESTAURANTS? INDEED
#robots #restaurants #FastFood #novelties
Maybe you went into a certain line of work thinking that a machine could never replace you.
Now, they have robots at restaurants.
Ligaya Figueras, food columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, found one such robot at Big Bang Pizza in Brookhaven, Ga. She featured the topic in her Sept. 23, 2019, column.
One customer, age 4, was excited by the robot greeter at the pizza place.
But, if you earn a living, or make a little extra money, as a restaurant server, you may one day be replaced by a robot.
Not only is it happening at Big Bang Pizza, some restaurants cut down on server time by allowing you to order at your table by computer.
That’s a modern variation on the “order first, be seated later,” restaurants.
If you are in the restaurant industry, the news is not all bad.
Restaurant workers are getting difficult to find in some places. Some restaurants or restaurant chains that would like to open in Location X, decline to do so for lack of good help.
If you live in a community where younger people are in relatively short supply – that means high school and college students who need to earn a little part-time income or summer income – you may be deprived of certain dining options for that reason.
The Big Bang Pizza owners used the robots as a hook to stand out among the plethora of pizza joints, Figueras points out.
“Here is your food. Please take it away from my tray and when you’re done, touch my hand so I can get back to work,” the robot named Pepper tells a Big Bang customer, according to Figueras.
The pizza place still has many human employees who take orders, mix drinks from the full bar, cook the pizzas and program the robots to deliver food to the table, Figueras writes. The employees actually like working with the bots, she says.
At Big Bang, the attraction becomes a practical alternative to people. It requires no benefits, no salary, no tips – nothing a human would require. In another article by Sam Dean for the Los Angeles Times, a robot named Flippy, being used in Pasadena, Calif., had sensors to tell it when to flip a burger, or pull a basket of fries out of the boiling oil. That article was published March 9, 2020, in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. By the way, the restaurant’s cost to lease Flippy: $3 per hour, Dean’s article says.
Couple the food robots with the coming of driverless vehicles, delivery services by drone etc., and you can see where some jobs are headed.
But there is good news for workers. There are programs out there that can allow you to invest a few part-time hours a week to earn a potentially substantial income that could dwarf what you are earning in your W-2 job. You just have to be open to checking them out, since they may not be for everyone. To check out one of the best, message me.
Some jobs are inevitably going away, perhaps sooner rather than later. If you can prepare ahead of time for that day – remember, you may not get a warning from your employer – you might be able to be shown the door, yet leave with a smile.
To do that, you may need an open mind, a willingness to be coached, and a willingness to do something you may have thought you would never do.
So, open up, take a look and, perhaps, see your future.
Peter
DOES YOUR PERSONALITY AFFECT EARNINGS?
#personality #earnings #PersonalityAffectsEarnings
Many of us have witnessed people being belligerent a t work. Perhaps they got fired.
We may have seen others who suck up to the boss, and get promoted.
But what about more subtle personality traits? Do they affect how much one might earn?
Tyler Cowen tackles this subject in an article for Bloomberg. It was also published Sept. 17, 2018, in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Cowen quotes a study by Miriam Gensowski at the University of Copenhagen. She revisited data from California schools, back in 1921-22. She culled out the top 0.5 percent of student in the IQ distribution, meaning they scored 140 or higher on the IQ test.
What did she find? Cutting through a lot of numbers, she discovered that conscientiousness mattered for men. Men who scored higher on the conscientiousness scale earned an extra $567,000 over their lifetimes, the article says.
For women, extroversion correlated with higher earnings – even more strongly than conscientiousness, unlike for men, the article says.
The article quotes the study saying that more “agreeable” men earned significantly less. Remember the saying, “nice guys finish last?”
“One possibility is that more agreeable men self-select into lower-earning, more subordinate professions,“ Cowen writes.
And, perhaps no surprise, the smartest ones among the smartest ones generally earned more, the article says.
OK, so you are who you are. You may think you aren’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, and the study referenced above may not have looked at people like you.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t make it above where you think you should be – if you want to.
Being conscientious will help. If that doesn’t come naturally, work on it – man or woman. Conscientiousness is something that can be acquired with effort, if it doesn’t come naturally.
To a lesser extent, extroversion can also be acquired but, for some, requires a good bit more effort. If you are naturally shy, you can change that, but you have to be motivated to WANT to change it.
Right now, you could be working in a job that you do not believe will EVER make you “successful,” as experts seem to define it, or wealthy. Don’t fret. There are ways out there for people, even shy people, to be successful. You just have to be willing to look for them. And, though you may be shy, you HAVE to be teachable.
If you WANT to change your life and are willing to check out one of the best such vehicles to potential success, message me.
Teachability can compensate for many natural personality traits. Conscientiousness, however, is easy to learn, in relative terms.
The lesson here, perhaps, is don’t let the person inside you take the best out of you. Be willing to find the best that’s inside you, and bring it out.
Sometimes, it takes another person to see the best that’s inside you and help you bring it out. Sometimes, you never know who that person might be. It may be someone you already know. It may be someone you haven’t met yet.
Don’t look at what someone is offering with the person inside you who wants to take the best away from you. Look at that person believing that the best of you has yet to appear.
Peter
STATES RESPOND TO RETIREMENT CRISIS
#retirement #pensions #401(k)s #SocialSecurity
“It’s clear there’s a retirement crisis,” Illinois State Treasurer Michael W. Frerichs told small business owners. “This is a problem not only for families but for all of us,” the quote continues.
Frerichs was quoted in an Associated Press article on the subject by Maria Ines Zamudio. It was published Feb. 22, 2017, in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Zamudio’s article focused on how seven states – California, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, Oregon and Washington, as well as Illinois, are in various stages of implementing state-sponsored retirement savings plans.
The plans, the article says, are tax-deductible IRAs with automatic payroll deductions, for which employees don’t pay federal taxes on the money until it is withdrawn.
Americans without work-sponsored savings plans are less likely to save for retirement, the article says. Zamudio quotes research from the Employee Benefit Research Institute that shows 62 percent of employees with an employer-sponsored savings plans had more than $25,000 in savings. Some 22 percent of those had more than $100,000 in savings.
Meanwhile, according to the quoted research from 2014, 94 percent of workers without access to those plans had less than $25,000.
We can certainly debate whether it should be the government’s role to set up savings plans for workers. What isn’t really debatable is that $25,000, or even $100,000, won’t get a person very far into retirement.
A good retirement savings would provide enough so that the person or couple could live comfortably off the interest and dividends those savings would kick off. If one does not have to touch his principal in retirement, he’ll never outlive his money.
Of course, those fortunate enough to get a pension from their employers, combined with Social Security, have a little more to work with, in terms of income.
But will those vehicles be enough to have the retirement you want?
Retirement should be about more than just living Social Security check to Social Security check. It should be about having the resources, combined with the time, to do things one didn’t have the time to do while working. Examples include travel, hobbies etc.
But so many at or near retirement age are not in that position. Some had signed on to work for an employer because of pension benefits, only to find that when the time came to access those benefits, they weren’t there.
Others, perhaps, were forced out of their jobs prematurely through downsizing, technology or other efficiencies. As a result, they lost of lot of work time that could have allowed them to save more. Or, they were forced to take a lower-paying job elsewhere, making saving for retirement impossible, or nearly so.
If you are among those facing tough decisions about retirement – perhaps you tell yourself you’ll have to work until you die – there are a number of good options for earning income that could augment or even enhance your potential retirement income. To check out one of the best, message me.
Meanwhile, if you have a job, make saving for retirement a priority. Closely examine where your money goes, and see whether you can trim spending to put money into retirement savings. Presume that there will be very little to bail you out if you are “retired,” but can’t afford to be.
Also, too, think about your time. How are you spending what free time you currently have? How will you spend your time when you retire? Will you be bored? Will you have the resources to perhaps do what you’d like to be doing?
Certainly, retirement is about more than money. But having enough money will take one worry off your plate so you can decide how best to use your time.
If you don’t want to work until you die, do something today to help eliminate that possibility.
Peter