Marriage Equality

The topic of marriage laws came up in a Facebook discussion today, and I broke a months-long self-imposed abstinence from political discussions on Facebook to reply to it. I guess that means it is somehow relevant to me, so I figure it would be a good topic for my measly little blog here.
I take a pragmatic approach to marriage and how the government defines it. I see the legal recognition of marriage mainly as a financial concept. A state-recognized marriage allows the participants to:

• claim the other as a dependent on tax forms if only one works
• enjoy automatic transfer of possessions in case of death (depending on the state)
• cover the other with employer-provided health plan
• act on the other's behalf with automatic "power of attorney" in many situations
  etc, etc.

Which of these items is closely associated with religion? As far as I can tell, none. But marriage is a religious concept, and different religions define it differently. Some allow one husband to have several wives. Some might allow two husbands. Some might even allow for multiple wives and multiple husbands to be joined in a single union.
As is the case with most religious arguments, each religion thinks it owns the "correct" definition. The problem is that in the United States, we are supposed to have religious freedom, but this particular aspect of religion has been commandeered by the government in a way that only supports one definition.
This argument comes to the forefront now because of the gay community's fight for equal rights, but I think it goes beyond that.
Let us look at the idea of a household, outside of the context of any particular religion. Let's say that two families, each consisting of a husband, a wife, and two children, decide that they could operate more efficiently by sharing a single building (which we will call a "house") and sharing responsibilities. One person will be a wage earner, because they will need cash to survive in this society. Everyone else will help out. They will save money on power, on appliances, home maintenance, meals - pretty much everything. Now, it comes time to do the tax returns for the one wage earner. Under current laws and tax codes, the earner is penalized with respect to other "families" because he/she can only declare the people in the household who are related through the concept of marriage as dependents. So he/she gets 3 dependent deductions, instead of 7, while he/she is actually supporting 8 individuals with the one paycheck.
Is there something evil about this arrangement? Is there something unnatural about it? I think one could argue that in the US, it would be "abnormal," but I don't think it would be inherently harmful to its participants or the society at large. In fact, with all of the energy and resource savings, one could argue that it would be better than if the two families resided separately.
I suggest that this type of arrangement should be just as acceptable in the eyes of our government as any other family, and it should receive the same benefits. I do not care if it is called a marriage or anything else. The point is that the government should not be in the business of defining how people define their basic living groups.
If two people who are unrelated decide to create a household together, the government should be capable of recognizing that without offending anyone. The way to do that is simply to avoid the use of the term marriage, which has certain religious connotations for many people. Leave marriage up to the religions, and be concerned instead with the concept of a household, or living unit.
The government already has mechanisms for creating entities that consist of groups of people. They are called corporations, or partnerships, or businesses. The is no reason why we could not have a "household partnership" that could be defined for any group of individuals who want to create one. You would expect that in the US, most of such partnerships would consist of married couples, but other groups would not be excluded. We achieve freedom of religion and equality all at once, and there is no real or perceived devaluation of the term marriage for anyone.

I Hate Christmas

I am not a Grinch. I am not a Scrooge. I do not hate Christmas because it is a Christian holiday and I am agnostic. I hate Christmas because of the way it is celebrated in America today.
I spent most of my life as a Christian. My views on religion and the holidays are not based on some emotional rejection of beliefs that are different from mine. In fact, most of my distaste for the modern celebration of Christmas in America stems from a respect for the teachings of Jesus and the New Testament.
Today, Christmas (or "Giftmas," as it is sometimes known in our home) has become a hugely commercialized event. But I do not blame corporations for taking advantage of an opportunity to sell more stuff. This is what companies do, and they will never stop.
The fact that the opportunity exists is the real problem. Somewhere along the way, Christmas morphed from a celebration of giving to a celebration of receiving. It is enforced as soon as children are able to understand what is going on around them. It is called the "Season of Giving" but it has really become a season of getting. Our kids start making their lists on Thanksgiving or even earlier. All they know is that on one day in December, they will get stuff. And lots of stuff, too. Eventually, those who attend church will hear the stories behind the celebration, but it will always be about what they will get. Since there is no real relationship between being showered with wrapped presents and the birth of Christ, few will ever really understand the holiday before they are able to consider it in context as adults.
Let's consider what Jesus taught during his lifetime. Despite what some right-wingers may try to claim, Jesus's most common lessons were about compassion, tolerance, and the evils of greed. In fact, according to the Bible, Jesus taught the value of charity and tithing far more than he ever spoke about such hot topics as homosexuality or marriage. The one time he became angry it was about greed and money. He told his followers to reject their material belongings and live a life of austerity. He did not encourage people to get rich, and he did not suggest that they give each other presents. He suggested that people should care for (and about!) those who are less fortunate than they are. See, the "giving" is not supposed to be to each other; it is supposed to be to the poor.
Instead of thinking about the lessons of Jesus, Americans, most of whom would call themselves Christians, celebrate the anniversary of His birth with a day of excess, gluttony, and greed. Any true Christian should recognize this as the most obscene of insults. It is an example of extreme hypocrisy. And it is embarrassing. Even to this agnostic.

What Could Have Been...

This is the story of what was almost my third corporate job.
It was late 1996. I had been working for IBM Global Services as a Lotus Notes developer for about 8 months, and I had quickly become something of a star developer within my small team. I was very disappointed one day to learn that one of my teammates was working on a new project that I would have enjoyed - it was a Notes integration project for the National Hockey League. Being the huge hockey fan that I was (and still am), I thought it would have been nice to have been placed on that team.
But I got over it (not that I had much choice). My teammate who was on the NHL project knew how I felt about hockey, and she let me know one day that the NHL was actually looking to hire someone as a regular employee to work on their Notes infrastructure. This kind co-worker had spoken to the hiring manager at the NHL and got me his fax number so I could send my resume. I was obviously very excited about the idea of a job with the NHL. So I quickly updated my resume and sent it over. I had to add a cover page, and not being a man of many words (you'd never know it from this - haha), I just put my name and number, and "Hockey is my life!" in fairly large font. OK, so maybe this was a little immature, but I was excited, and I figured my resume would speak for itself. Also, I was confident that I would ace any interview, as I had done well in several interviews at other places before that and I felt like I had the hang of it.
So the next week I got on a train to Manhattan from the nearby Brewster, NY station to go to my interview.
Other than a pretty neat display case with hockey memorabilia including a full-size goal and some signed jerseys, the NHL headquarters office was more or less like any other corporate office. My first interview was with the IT guy for whom I would be working. I did OK, because it was somewhat technical. The next interview was with his boss, and I was told it was just for him to see if he was comfortable with me. After sitting with this gentleman for a few minutes, the manager comes back into the office where I was talking to the supervisor and shoves my fax cover sheet in front of me and says "Don't do this." I was stumped. I did not know if he was joking or if he was actually annoyed that I had tried to be lighthearted in a fax. It was just cover sheet, after all. I just grinned and said "OK" sheepishly. At that point my confidence was well shaken, but I pulled myself together enough to get out without completely embarrassing myself. I learned that the job would actually include going to the home offices of each of the teams in the NHL to install applications for them. I thought this could be very good.
Eventually, they did actually offer me the position, but the salary they were willing to pay was only about 20% more than I was making at IBM. This sounds good, but the fact that it would mean either moving closer to Manhattan or commuting for more than 2 hours per day, plus investing in real business attire (and the dry-cleaning bills to go along with that) made it a very poor financial deal for me. Add to that the lengths to which the manager went in order to convince me that the job would be no fun at all, and not related to hockey at all, and I finally had to turn them down. It was one of the toughest decisions I ever had to make.
I still think about what could have been, had I taken that job. But that's water under the bridge (or ice) now.

My First Corporate Job - 1994

I graduated from RPI in June of 1993 with a BS in Mechanical Engineering. After failing to receive any viable job offers with the undergraduate degree, I returned to RPI for an MBA in August of 1993.
Since I knew that having an MBA without any real work experience (not counting my summer job as a laborer and data-entry technician for my Grandparents irrigation business in the Hamptons) would probably make me less than marketable, I decided take a semester off of school to do a Co-op with a local company to get some real business experience. Since my intention was to get my MBA concentration in manufacturing (a good compliment to my engineering degree), I thought an engineering co-op would be a good choice. And, since most of the other applicants for those co-op jobs would be undergraduate students, I would have an advantage with a full engineering degree already on my resume.
I ended up vying for a position with a local manufacturer in the paper industry, Albany International. They are a multinational corporation, and the division for which I would be working made giant fabric loops that act as filters on paper-making machines. When I say giant, I mean giant - the fabrics were woven in continuous loops on looms that were as big as 60 feet across.
I was chosen to interview for the company, and I think they had selected only 3-4 candidates for the interviews. It turned out that one of the other candidates was one of my fraternity brothers from Acacia, and I felt kind of bad because he assumed (maybe correctly) that he had little chance of winning the position over me due to his status as an undergraduate student and mine as a holder of a BS in Mechanical Engineering. Of course, I did not feel bad enough to give up my quest for the job. This was for my future after all.
However, I began to have doubts about this job when I heard a rumor about the previous co-op student with this employer. Apparently, this previous student/employee, who was in my class at RPI but familiar to me, had actually been killed on the job a few months earlier. You see, these giant looms have lots of moving parts driven by very powerful hydraulics. Everyone who works on or near the machines is given a padlock to which only they have the key. If you are going to work on a loom, you would put your padlock on the main power switch for the unit, locking it in the off position while you worked. This young man had decided to take some measurements on an idle machine while the operator was on a break. But for some reason, he neglected to padlock the switch. The operator came back and started the machine, and the poor guy was crushed by huge metal arms that move about 4 feet in either direction with great speed and power. He lived for a few days in a coma, but never recovered.
To my surprise, the interviewer actually brought up the story and explained to me what had happened. He asked me if this scared me. I said it was unfortunate, but I have a "healthy respect" for large machinery. I had worked on concrete mobiles with my Dad when I about 12 years old, doing jobs that in retrospect were pretty scary, and a kid would probably never be let near the things today, but I learned to be careful, to understand the risks, and to keep myself out of trouble. Apparently, I impressed the interviewer enough to get the job. It did not pay much, but I was a student, so any income made me feel rich. It was more than I had made previously, and I had very little in the way of expenses.
The best thing was that the job was 7 AM to 3:30 PM five days a week. So not only was I making money, but I had no homework and afternoons, evenings, and weekends with no obligations.
The job itself turned out to be boring, at least at first. I was sent on a mission that I thought was futile - they wanted me, a rookie engineer, to take a whole bunch of measurements on these giant looms using slightly different settings to see if I could find a pattern in the effects of those settings on the overall quality of the output. Basically, this 100+ year old company thought that maybe I could somehow find a way to improve the quality of their products from 3% variation to 2% variation in a 6-month effort. Eventually, I tried explaining to my boss that if they really wanted to improve the quality, they needed to determine what was happening at the molecular level during the weaving process. They needed to do finite element analysis (FEA to us engineer). So he got me in touch with their R&D department, at which point I found out that of course they were in the process of obtaining computers capable of doing such modeling already. Meanwhile, I had already spent months gathering and analyzing data from my measurements (always taken with my padlock in its proper place). My results showed almost nothing of statistical importance in my opinion. A statistics expert from a local university was brought in and he confirmed this.
However unimportant my work turned out to be for the company, it was very important to me. This was 1994, so my analysis was all done on a PC with a 33MHz processor. Yes, that's 33, as in my current PC runs at 2,400 MHz. And despite my very early request for a "real" database program to use like MS Access 2.0, I was forced to do all of the analysis in Excel 4.0. Since I had already developed my policy of "anything I have to do more than twice should be automated," I spent a good deal of my time programming in Visual Basic to make it easier to enter and analyze the data I was collecting. This was actually requested by my boss, too, because he wanted to be able to continue the measurements after I left, but he wouldn't know how to get Excel to do the analysis. So, I needed to create an interface that he could use without me.
It turned out that I really enjoyed the programming part of the job, but I did not really get anything out of working with the machines (despite the thrill of defying death every day). So when I returned to my MBA program the following semester, I changed my focus from manufacturing to Management Information Systems (MIS).
Whatever was happening at work, my life outside of the job during that time (July - Dec 1994) was nothing short of fantastic. I was living in an apartment near the RPI campus with my best friend Lars and another guy named Eric who was a good friend of Lars. I was still involved with my fraternity, but I really had no responsibilities other than work.
So my schedule consisted of playing soccer with Lars and Eric on a local men's league team, and playing hockey in intramural leagues and pick-up games. Fortunately, I also chose this time to go on a diet. That combined with my schedule of rigorouse exercise resulted in me losing about 40 pounds and getting into what is still the best shape of my life.
My normal weekday went like this: 7-3:30 work at Albany International. Come home and eat a salad as a snack. Go to nearby RPI field to play in a pickup soccer game (the students from Europe and South America played every day, and they always wanted another goalie) until 5 or 6 PM. Come home and eat dinner - usually pasta and meat sauce. Rest for a while (browse the then-infant internet at 14.4kbs). Play 1-2 hours of ice hockey.
On the weekends I would also have league soccer games and and lost of strenuous partying at the fraternity.
It was the "Summer of Dan." That was until I played in my first hockey game in a full-checking league at RPI in the fall. I went for a puck in the corner, and some overzealous player on the other team cross-checked me from behind. I went into the boards hard and got up slowly. When I got to the bench I realized my shoulder was sore, but I finished the game. The next morning when I woke up to go to work, my shoulder had become so sore that I could barely move. I struggled to roll out of bed and I literally crawled to the phone. I called my boss and told him I wouldn't be coming in. I got to the infirmary somehow (not sure if Lars took me there or what). It turned out that I had a separated shoulder. My arm was in a sling and would be so for the next 4-6 weeks. It was like an eternity for me. I went from extremely active to inactive overnight. I was not happy. I did recover and eventually played a few games in that checking league (after buying better shoulder pads for myself), but that would be my only season of full-contact hockey. It just wasn't that much better to make it worth the extra risk of injury.
So I completed my co-op assignment in December, 1994, and prepared to go back to school, now a semester behind all of the people with whom I had started the MBA program. I was also armed with some real corporate experience, more confidence (due to the experience and my new slimmer physique), and a new focus on information technology.
I'll end with this little quip that was the funniest moment I had on the job: My boss was named Richard, but his co-workers called him Dick. One day a co-worker was talking to someone near Dick's desk and wanted to write something down. So he looked over and said "Hey, you got a pencil, Dick."
"My wife seems to think so," was the immediate reply. I guess it's not that funny now, but it was my first exposure to off-color humor in an otherwise stuffy workplace, so I almost fell over laughing.

An Introduction to my blog

First of all, thanks for visiting. I am not sure what kind of content will end up here, but right now, I do intend to start writing some stuff. I suppose now that the 2008 elections are over, my posts will be somewhat less political than they might have been last week. I may even start to document my life story - not that anyone really cares, but it might be good to record it for my kids to read later (much later!), and a blog is a good excuse for me to write it, since I would not kid myself about ever writing an actual book. The stories just are not that interesting (although I will try to add some color).
I guess part of the reason I want to do this is that I have lately reconnected with some very old friends. OK, the friends themselves are not necessarily old. I mean the friendships are from 20 or more years ago. So, thanks to Facebook and other social networking sites, I now have friends who don't know anything about me from the last 20 years.
I do not think I will write in chronological order - so I'll probably have to come up with some organization scheme to put stories from my life back into the order of events later.

OK, enough babbling for my first post.