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Monthly Archives: July 2012

Standing, and Other Ideas for Promoting Public Health

25 Wednesday Jul 2012

Posted by Oren Litwin in Health

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

ball chair, cap-and-trade, exercise ball chair, health, Health care, politics, productivity software, stand up, standing desk, wellness

If you’ve been reading the internet at all in the last year or so, you’ll probably have noticed the sudden spate of articles and research studies about the perils of sitting down too long at a stretch. In a nutshell, our bodies were designed to be active; sitting down in one place for hours at a time, as most of us do for work or play, causes a whole range of ill effects, such as increased cholesterol, weight gain, changes in gene expression, poor circulation, and all sorts of goodies.

Since my focus for this blog is in restructuring your environment to make the world better, I’m most interested here in what you can do to change your situation so you can stand up more often. The most drastic change most of us can make is switching to a standing desk. That way, you can get your work done while also strengthening your back and circulation. (Needless to say, Talmud students have been way ahead of us.) It may sound like a lot of work to change your whole desk setup, but the health benefits are profound. (This has been widely discussed in the blogosphere, with examples here, here, and here.)

Sadly, I do not have a standing desk myself; I’m not ready to lay out the cash for one. Nor do I have the next step down, which is to use a therapy-ball chair like this one (blog discussions here, here, and here, for starters). It’s not exactly standing, but it engages your core muscles and your legs so it’s nearly as good.

Still, people looking for a quicker fix, without disrupting their workspaces or shelling out cash, may want to just focus on standing up at least once an hour, and taking a single step away from your chair (or more than one). Fortunately, there’s been an explosion of free productivity software that you can use to remind yourself to stand up every so often. I use a Mac computer, and my favorite software for this is called Time Out Free. At programmable intervals, Time Out will gray out your screen so that you can’t click on anything until the timer runs out. You are supposed to use that time to look up from the computer, stretch, or even take a ten-minute break to recharge.

This is one of my favorite health aids ever, because it is so easy to use. It’s free, and you can skip a given break if you want to. (You can also keep using keyboard commands even during the breaks, so long as you don’t click with the mouse.) So there’s no rigid constraints you have to obey, just a self-imposed structure to remind you to take care of yourself.

Some experimentation will be necessary to see what works best for you. The default settings are to have a ten-minute break every hour, with short breaks every ten minutes or so, which I found too disruptive. For a long time, the Time Out software languished on my hard drive, unused. Once I was clued into the benefits of standing, I remembered Time Out and reprogrammed it so that now I get 20-second breaks every half hour, and 20-minute breaks every two hours. This works for me, and it feels really good to stand up and stretch out my back when I’ve been working hard. I’ve noticed that I feel more alert and energized since I started doing this as well.

And now, permit me a short digression into current politics (not normally a focus of this blog). It’s exciting that a lot of people are getting into this whole topic; still, we need more. Especially since our health care system is increasingly funded with government money, the truth is that our personal health is now a public matter. Therefore, it seems obvious that the government should be mandating that employers take steps to get their workers to stand up more. Considering the dramatic health benefits, such measures as public subsidies for standing desks should be reasonable. On the flip side, there would have to be penalties of some kind for companies that insist on being somnolent and sedentary, instead of standing up as good citizens should.

Of course, it is true that some industries have an easier time getting their workers to stand up than others. Indeed, it may be quite burdensome to make some types of workers stand up more (including, of course, the disabled). But an easy way to solve that problem is with a cap-and-trade system, whereby some firms can make dramatic improvements in their sitting-to-standing ratio, and sell “Chair Credits” to other firms having more trouble. One can even imagine having public markets, where investment banks can facilitate the trade of such Chair Credits between companies. The advantages of this approach should be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.

Fortunately, and in all seriousness, we needn’t wait for anyone to impose behavioral changes on us. All we have to do is put a little effort into restructuring our environment, so that actually developing a standing habit can happen without effort. That way, we can conserve our precious stores of willpower and use them for other things, even as we enjoy our improving health.

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Random Fiction Excerpt #4

16 Monday Jul 2012

Posted by Oren Litwin in Politics, Self-Promotion, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

congress, fiction, government, representation, voting, writing

Bruce Leggett leaned forward intently, placing his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “So, Dave, can I have your vote?”

His neighbor Dave Crenshaw grinned. “Heck, Bruce, you don’t have to give me the whole song and dance. I know you’re a good guy.” He took out his smart phone and fiddled with it, logging into the centralized electronic voting portal. “I’m your man, Bruce.”

“Great,” Bruce replied, with a blinding grin of his own. He held up a piece of paper with his personalized bar code, and Dave snapped a photo with his phone. Within seconds, Bruce Leggett had been appointed as Dave Crenshaw’s official representative in the Voters’ House, and Dave’s vote transferred to Bruce’s control. That made a total of 73 votes for Bruce. When he voted on new laws, Bruce spoke with the voice of the people.

[UPDATE May 1, 2013: This excerpt is from an early draft of the short story “The Suffrages of the People Being More Free,” which is now published in a collection The Best Congress Money Can Buy: Stories of Political Possibility. You can read the first story for free here, and then buy it if you like. Enjoy!]

Random Fiction Excerpt #3

08 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by Oren Litwin in Writing

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Tags

Fantasy, fiction

“Have you thought about how you will make your way in the world, child?”

Rafaela frowned. “I thought I would be like you, mistress,” she said. “Traveling around and healing people.”

“With your skill at healing?” Carlisa burst out laughing; a red flush rose in Rafaela’s cheeks. “No, child,” the sorceress continued, still chuckling. “You seem to be better at breaking things than putting them back together.”

“Well then, what? And stop calling me child,” Rafaela burst out suddenly. “I’m almost seventeen. I’m a full woman! I am your student, your servant even,” and oh how it rankled her to say the word servant, but she managed to spit it out without changing her tone, “but I am not a child!”

Carlisa sighed, an amused look on her face. “And how old do you think I am?” The question brought Rafaela up short; she started to stammer something, but the sorceress held up her hand. “Never mind. It’s not polite to guess at a woman’s age, mage or no. But believe me when I say that compared to me, you will be a child for years yet.”

Writing Interesting Characters with Transactional Analysis

02 Monday Jul 2012

Posted by Oren Litwin in Better Fantasy, Self-Actualization, Writing

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Tags

aspiring author, character creation, character sheet, eric berne, Fantasy, fiction, games people play, transactional analysis, writing

By now, every aspiring author has been thoroughly brainwashed that to write a good story, you need strong characters. When you browse the web for resources on writing, you will commonly come across all sorts of checklists or creation tools for developing detailed characters. (Examples are all over the place, but some good ones can be found here, here, and here.) But I’ve noticed something interesting about 99% of these checklists: they focus on a given character, in isolation.

Yet think about yourself for a second. At all times, do you behave the same way? Or do you evince different behaviors, different emotions, different patterns of interaction depending on who you are with? I know that I behave very differently when I’m around my parents than I do when I’m around my professors, or my brother, or my friends in the community. Each of those patterns of behavior comes from a part of me, to be sure, but they are so different from each other that a single global “character sheet” would be unlikely to capture all of them.

Yet very often, we find fictional characters who always behave the same, because their authors seem to think that the characters must at all times be displaying their Traits with a capital T. There’s nothing particularly bad about this, when done well; character archetypes are a staple of mythic stories from time immemorial. But as writers we can expand our toolchest if we remember that people often act out different personas in their different relationships.

Fortunately, there is a tool we can use to make such characters. It is a heterodox brand of psychology called transactional analysis, first introduced by Eric Berne in his excellent 1964 book Games People Play. This book introduced a number of terms that have diffused into common speech, such as “stroking someone’s ego,” and so is interesting if only from a sociological standpoint. But beyond that, it provides a powerful lens for understanding how people might change depending on who they are with.

Briefly, Berne argued that people’s childhood experiences leave them with certain psychic needs that must be met, by subconsciously seeking out certain types of relationships that confirm preexisting beliefs about the world and one’s place in it. Think of the woman constantly complaining that all the guys she dates are losers, or the man who can’t hold down a job for more than a few months before lashing out at his boss. Berne provides examples of “games,” or scenarios that the multiple players in a relationship enact in order to fulfill their psychic needs.

For example, in “Why don’t you… Yes, But,” person A presents some problem that he or she is dealing with (“People annoy me at work,” for example), and persons B through Z then list off a series of solutions. “Why don’t you ask for a raise?” “Why don’t you wear earphones?” And so on. To each of these suggestions,  person A responds with an endless litany of excuses for why the solution could not possibly work. However frustrating and pointless the exercise might feel to an outsider, the participants are on some level satisfied. Person A gets to combine the illusion that he or she is trying to fix the problem with the true goal of the game, “confirming” that the problem cannot be solved and so no attempt need be made. The others get to feel as if they are being helpful, i.e. superior. And so it goes on and on.

Other games can be found in the book or summarized in the Wikipedia article. Some good ones include “I’ve Got You Now, You Son of a B****,” “Look What You Made Me Do,” “If It Weren’t For You,” and “Look How Hard I Tried.” The point is that these are recurring pathological types of relationships between two or more people, which meet the unspoken and perhaps unconscious needs of the players thanks to various kinds of emotional harm that has marked their personalities.

I should note here that I am not a psychologist, and am not necessarily advocating the use of transactional analysis for therapeutic purposes. It may work for you or people you know, or it may not. Additionally, modern TA has gone off in several different directions, so Berne’s book should not be relied upon as the last word. Still, I am focused here on TA’s relevance for writing fiction, and for that it can be quite valuable.

How can you use this technique? Remember when writing your characters to consider how they interact with each other. Grunthor the Merciless might be gruff and unsympathetic to Lewellyn the Delicate, but be a devoted kind husband to Helga the Bonecrusher. The same person, acting out different patterns of relationships, based on how his particular impulses line up with those of the other person.

Still, there is a unifying thread between all of a person’s relationships, and that is the psychic needs of the person. Explaining this in detail would take me far afield; but suffice to say that this can provide the continuity between all of a character’s different interactions, allowing you to build a larger theme around each character’s relationships.

In short, think of your characters together, and not just alone.

An Idea for How to Make Renting Homes Better

01 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by Oren Litwin in Credit, Economics, Finance, Investing, Real Estate

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

banking, Borrowing, finance, financial engineering, foreclosure, interest rates, intermediation, investing, investment, Real estate, real-estate, real-estate law, renting, subletting, term occupancy, time-value of money

Many fortunes are made in real estate. And, lured by those stories of success, lots of people have tried their hand at real-estate investing as well, with highly variable results. Meanwhile, many people who cannot buy homes of their own decide to rent instead.

But the present rental market has a lot of flaws in its structure. Take, for example, a common strategy used by new investors who don’t want to sink a lot of capital into a house. They will instead rent a place, perhaps for a long term to bring down their monthly rent, and then turn around and sublet it out to someone else for a higher price.

Now, these people are certainly providing a service of some kind. They are providing income to the owner of the property; if they chose a longer rental term, they are also providing a guarantee of long-term occupancy. But the eventual renter is paying a higher rate for his home than the owner is receiving. It’s possible that the renter has low credit and would not otherwise qualify, or perhaps would not have heard about the apartment without the marketing efforts of the investor-renter; but still, it seems that there ought to be more opportunities for mutual benefit.

One thing that’s always struck me about renting is that most landlords do not allow you to prepay your rent. There are good legal reasons for this, but it still seems to be a missed opportunity. The typical landlord carries a mortgage with an interest rate of more than 5%, sometimes much more. By contrast, 10-year Treasury notes are yielding around 1.6%. If a renter could sink extra cash into prepaying rent, with an annualized discount of (let’s say) 3%, and the landlord used the extra cashflow to pay down the mortgage, it would benefit both sides. All that is necessary is to create the appropriate legal structure.

When you think about the components of a property’s value, you could break it down into two parts: the right to live in a place for a given time, and the actual ownership of the property. Suppose you actually broke them into separate pieces. For example, I could have a house I wanted to rent out, but I wasn’t interested in collecting a rent check every month. Instead, I created a product: the right to live in my house for ten years. I then assigned that product a value, just like a piece of real estate. Say the house itself is worth $100,000; I then value ten years of use at, say, $40,000. If I find a buyer, I can get all that cash upfront and not have to worry about collecting rent every month. At the end of the term, I still own the house and can benefit from its price appreciation, tax depreciation, and so on.

Now suppose I’m a renter, or investor-renter. Buying a ten-year lease gives me a discounted price, compared to having to pay for it month by month. It also lets me lock in the price for the entire term, giving me stability. Plus, since I don’t actually own the house, I don’t have to worry about property taxes. But how might I come up with all that cash up front? If this becomes the norm, it ought to be easy to borrow that money from the bank—especially when you consider that a ten-year rental term is an asset like property is, and can be used to sublet the house in turn, or repossessed by the bank if necessary.

It would be easier for a bank to repossess rental rights than a full property, meanwhile. At all times, there is an actual owner who is interested in maintaining the value of the property, as opposed to home foreclosures that often sit vacant and get trashed, destroying massive amounts of value. And it is easier to rent a property than to sell it, and lots of managers that the bank can call upon to fill up their newly-repossessed asset. Finally, it ought to be easier to appraise use-rights than the actual underlying property, making underwriting easier. So from the bank’s perspective, this might be an attractive asset class.

Subletting a rental-agreement house will provide more gains from trade, in this scenario. I, the investor-renter, have provided the benefits of upfront capital, allowing me to get a good price. I can then sublet to a traditional renter, who does not have to provide upfront capital but can still pay a price comparable to the going rate. I make money from the difference between my discounted upfront payment, and the month-by-month payments of the renter, without having to “overcharge” as subletting investors must do today.

This all will need fleshing out, of course. Navigating the legal minefields alone will be an effort, not one that I care to undertake right now, and people would have to work out the practical problems involved with any new asset class. And this kind of structure will not be appropriate in many cases. Still, its mere existence would cause ripple effects out into the market that would benefit everyone. And perhaps someone more enterprising can see this idea and make use of it.

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