Updates and a direction change

It's been quite a while since my last post. It's been an interesting period of time. Mostly due to busyness and getting interested in some various endeavors, I haven't really thought much about faith/god at all in the past month or so. For one, I got into some landscaping recently of our front yard garden. I think it turned out really well!

Before (well, after removing most of the other stuff that was in there):


Midway:


After:


My wife planted some lettuce in there, which is already starting to come up! She's going to plant marigolds along the perimeter, as we know it's the pit stop for the neighborhood dogs; don't want anything we'll eat too close to that sidewalk!

I also finally got the opportunity to start restoring the 1950's Craftsman table saw I bought last year. I have a running post at Old Woodworking Machines where I'm documenting my progress. It's a fantastic forum if you have any old, well, woodworking machines. Check out the post for lots of pictures. I'm hoping my final result will look something like this, which is probably my favorite restoration from the gallery of saws like mine.

Getting to the point. I realized a couple weeks ago that my compulsion of sorts for reading and thinking about god, arguments for and against him, and so forth just kind of stopped. Once I realized this, there was a sense that I could pick it right back up if I wanted to, but I kind of wondered what the point would be. Pushing almost 2.33 years of heavy investment in this area has been fairly fruitless, aside from the initial deconversion. Since then, all I've done is worry that I haven't done enough research to be justified in non-belief.

At present, I can only conclude that there's nothing wrong with me that I don't have whatever evidence it would take for me to believe in some form of god. When reliable, objective, universally available evidence exists, truth converges on it. We're no longer debating the shape of the earth. We are in a state that allows religions to coexist side by side for hundreds of years without one conclusively demonstrating that its god is actually real while the others are just imaginary. This is a pretty big state of affairs to ignore should one feel confident that the weight of evidence required to sway the world is there.

Also, I've recently contemplated what it matters anyway. If there's a god, and a compassionate one, he'll care about the state of my heart, how hard I've tried, how I've treated others, and all that jazz. Thus, my state as a human being matters the most, whether I'm a theist or an atheist. And lately, frankly, I've had a renewed desire to be a better human being. I'm not sure what did it, but Quantified Self had a least something to do with it. I haven't decided what I'll do quite yet, but I'll be tracking some things in the near future in an attempt to improve myself.

I've also managed to not snooze for three days which, for those who know me, is a pretty monstrous accomplishment. I've been reading study snippets from Barking Up the Wrong Tree and it's striking how much we control our longevity, health, and overall state/happiness/mind frame. I'm always on the run and feeling rushed. Then I get upset at myself because I'm embarrassed I'm late or worried my wife will be upset because I left work and showed up late for dinner again, which also reduces the little time I have with my kids again. Negativity brews. I'm hoping that a better start to my day can help prevent the initial momentum of rushed-ness and stress, which in turns helps me be kinder toward others.

On that note, I've picked up individual counseling again and had a couple sessions with 2-3 more on the schedule. They've been quite helpful. I think this has also contributed toward my desire to remedy some deficiency (which is good, as I should be doing some of that per my blog tag line, after all). When I'm down on myself, I tend to be unpleasant toward others, which is never good. It's funny (or not) how that works. Disappointment in myself seems to lead me to be hypersensitive toward the flaws in others, perhaps to boost my own ego and self-image (though falsely).

In any case, I just wanted to drop a line. I'm still alive and well. There's a lot of thought and reflection going on in this head. I'm not sure what direction I'll take with the blog. I've contemplated merging all of my "god stuff" into some master PDF and having that as a single link. I'm just not sure I want it to be so self-defining anymore. I'd like to shift my focus toward more practical current interests: quantified self, reflections, self-improvement, R/statistics/programming, and hobbies.

I'll end with a quote from the Tao Te Ching I recently started using as a source for some morning reflection time:

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

This was really striking to me, and returns to how much we control our own state. My identification of some hypothetical self or state of affairs as better/good forces me into seeing my real self and current state as ugly/bad. No good! May I always see where I am simply as where I am.

My thoughts on the DOL Child Labor Proposal

My wife told me about various posts on Facebook circulating about potential regulations concerning children working on farms that had everyone outraged. I tried to inquire about details, but she didn't have many. That's not her fault, as after logging into Facebook myself and looking at two of the articles, there wasn't much info there.

After digging around, as is my style, my conclusion is the whole thing is pretty empty. From a practical standpoint, the proposed changes appear to have been withdrawn, though this happened after all the hoopla, so no issue from me on that point.

What I do have issue with is the twisting of words and stretching if implications. Let's look some of the article from Catholic Vote.

My kids’ friends that I like the most are farm kids. It’s simple. Working on a farm makes kids hard-working and responsible...

Well now the federal government is stepping in to regulate the kind of work kids can do on a farm – no helping out in the silo, grain bins or elevators and no working at the livestock exchange or auction. While the regulations technically exclude kids working on their parent’s farm, but what if Jimmy works on grandma’s farm or Uncle Joe is paying his niece to help him out with the livestock? And where does it end? It’s a slippery slope. Like an octopus, government’s tendency is to reach further and further into our lives...

As a parent, I can’t think of a more cautionary example of the perils of big government. The sense of purpose gained from contributing to a family or neighbor’s enterprise harkens us back to a traditional American model of self-reliance, precisely at a time when nearly half of US kids and 90% of African-American kids are being raised on government food stamps.

Bold words! Rachel, the author, is correct when she admits that the regulations have nothing to do with children working on their own family farms. By "children," I believe we're talking younger than 16. Just to make sure we're clear, this is from page one of the actual Aug 2011 DOL proposal itself (does anyone writing on sites like this ever think to link to the actual texts they're criticizing instead of forcing me to use google-fu?):

The proposed agricultural revisions would impact only hired farm workers and in no way compromise the statutory child labor parental exemption involving children working on farms owned or operated by their parents.

Next, the regulations, as far as I can tell, only apply to moderate to high risk activities anyway. Nothing's stopping you from teaching your kid good work ethic around the farm. They simply don't want younger-ish folks working on things that might harm them. I don't quite understand the livestock auction clause, but there's apparently a lot of dangerous stuff in agriculture. Enough that that Bureau of Labor Statistics has it rated pretty darned high in terms of annual fatalities, and especially the fatality rate (deaths per 100,000 full time workers), in its most recent report (main report page and charts; see charts 16, 18, and 19 for occupation breakdowns).

Also, there's already regulations about operating this type of equipment. Like, right now. Like, with the same force as minimum wage regulations, as in everyone is supposed to be following them. Go read the current Child Labor Standards Act and you'll see that the proposals above, from what I can tell, only bump up the age from 16 to 18 for the same exact tasks already regulated (to be fair, I don't see mention of helping with livestock transport/auctions in the current FLSA). To pull the actual text:

The Secretary of Labor has found and declared that the following occupations are hazardous for minors under 16 years of age.
1. Operating a tractor of over 20 powertake-off (PTO) horsepower, or connecting or disconnecting an implement or any of its parts to or from such a tractor.

2. Operating or assisting to operate (including starting, stopping, adjusting, feeding or any other activity involving physical contact associated with the operation) any of the following machines: [a bunch]

3. Operating or assisting to operate (including starting, stopping, adjusting, feeding, or any other activity involving physical contact associated with the operation) any of the following machines: [a bunch]

4. Working on a farm in a yard, pen, or stall occupied by a:
a. bull, boar, or stud horse maintained for breeding purposes;
b. a sow with suckling pigs, or a cow with a newborn calf (with umbilical cord present).

5. Felling, bucking, skidding, loading, or unloading timber with butt diameter of more than 6 inches.

6. Working from a ladder or scaffold (painting, repairing, or building structures, pruning trees, picking fruit,
etc.) at a height of over 20 feet...

It goes on until #11, but you get the point. The comments I've seen about all of this make it sound like the government is just now preventing 10 year olds from pitching in by driving the tractor at harvest time. And if the backlash is because family farms already break those regulations... then who cares about a change to something that isn't followed and isn't enforced? Regarding the comment about little Jimmy working for his aunt or uncle... he already couldn't do that unless he was 16. At most, his aunt and uncle lose some portion of two years of part time work. The stuff above already doesn't apply to family farms... and, again, wouldn't have under the new proposals either.

The bottom line is that there's nothing preventing anyone from helping out around the farm; there's simply a proposal to prevent doing certain things. This isn't about "big government;" they're just regulating a potentially dangerous set of tasks. One quote from the initial Department of Labor announcement concerning machinery regulations I found interesting was as follows:

Additionally, the proposal would prohibit farmworkers under 16 from operating almost all power-driven equipment. A similar prohibition has existed as part of the nonagricultural child labor provisions for more than 50 years.

In other words, we figured out 50 years ago that children probably shouldn't be working on certain types of equipment. This proposal seems to have just been extending it to farming as well.

I truly don't want to use scare tactics, but I was curious as to how hard it would be to find instances of children dying while conducting farming work. Turns out, it's really not hard at all. Not even close.