Waffles

Waffles. 

So...  At some point in my life, I picked up the connotation that a waffle was a person who couldn't make a decision.  I have no idea where that came along.  I think I've also added a secondary meaning in that a waffle is a person who won't get to the point. 

Generally, I use it as a verb. 

Usage: Bob needs to quit waffling.

Urban dictionary agrees with me.  So I must have not been the only one who came to that conclusion.  Either that, or I picked it up somewhere. 

So I've been listening to a lot of Librivox as of late.  Librivox is a collection of copyright free books read by people.  Some are good readings, and some are terrible.  It's a crap shoot, really. 

I've been going through "The Book of the Damned" by Charles Fort.  Generally, I'm okay with listening to strange stuff.  But this guy just won't get to the point.  He basically goes on and on about nothing.  He waffles with the best of them.

I'm going to finish it.  But I'm going to do it at one chapter a day, but his "nothing is truth" spiel gets real old real quick.  On the plus side, the reader isn't a monotone. 

It's humorous, though.  People like him populate the work force and life.  The Internet is full of discussions like this.  Firefox pocket seems to be full of them.  Maybe their just the right level of click bait to get hits without ever purporting to solve the problem. 

I read one a few days ago about someone saying people should eat more meals earlier in the day.  And the end result was the suggestion that big government intervention was the solution.  "Solve poverty, and all these solutions solve themselves." 

No.

No they don't. 

Because poverty as currently defined is not "solvable". 

The current definition of poverty says the bottom X percent live in poverty.  So if you are in the bottom X percent, you will always be in poverty. 

You may have a million in the bank, and be eating high class meals every single day.  But because you are at the bottom in comparison to everyone else, you are in poverty.  No matter what you do, there will always be a bottom X percent. 

The answer "solve poverty, and you solve the other issues" is also in direct contradiction to the work done in Switch by Chip and Dan Heath.  They suggested that throwing money at the problem wasn't going to solve anything.  The best answers are small answers. 

The size of the solution doesn't have to match the size of the problem.  A good solution is almost always well smaller than the problem we perceive. 

Rearranging the diet of a bunch of Vietnamese solved their malnutrition issues without large amounts of government subsidies and financial spending.  There was no multi-million dollar solution with a super giant government study. 

Just a guy with a clip board and some questions, asking where things were succeeding.

That answer is too simple.

See... many solutions are like that. 

Me?  I'm opposed to a so called "living wage".  Not because I think people should be broke.  It's because the inbred fallacy that assumes if you start paying people more they will start making better decisions with their money.  A person broke at $8 a hour will be broke at $80 an hour.  The person didn't change.  Just some number that values their work.

The problem is not the amount.  It's the person. 

The wants of any individual are infinite.  The income of any individual is finite. 

All of your wants are not going to be met.

No matter how much you make.

Period.  End of story.

Even billionaires have limits to their wants.  They may be trying to solve bigger, more complex problems.  But their is a limit to what they are capable of solving.  It's simple math. 

Elon Musk is a billionaire.  Still can't do everything he wants. 

Maybe a lot of cool stuff.

But wants are always infinite.  And they always will be.