When Government Experience and Political Promises Don't Line Up

I received the "Personal Property Consolidated Tax Bill" from Montgomery County, Maryland yesterday.

Apparently, I owe a few dollars.

Here's where things get interesting.

• It came in the mail
• It's paper
• There's a return envelope in and I need to send in a check.
• There is no website to go to and make the payment
• The envelope is being sent to a PO Box in Philadelphia

Now, if you go to the County Executive's (Marc Elrich) website, you see statements such as:

"A Growing Economy" and "A More Affordable and Welcoming County."

I guess my question for our County Executive would be:

If you really want a better economy, why are you so comfortable with 

• wasting the taxpayer dollars on the back-end processing associated with check deposits?
• wasting the time of the taxpayer who needs to write a check, put on a stamp, and mail it
• sending the payments out of state? If you are going to do that, may as well offshore it to make it cheaper

It's 2019. The idea that I can't pay this tax on a website is just downright offensive.

Plus, I'd love to understand how these paper-based, ineffective, costly processes contribute to a growing, more affordable county?

(Updated: Thanks to Ari for pointing out that it is possible to pay online. I admit, I didn't check. I still maintain that the URL should be on the paper bill and that, in reality, there shouldn't be a paper bill in the first place.)

Impeachment

I haven't watched any of it.

On the one hand, I certainly understand the need to keep the democracy in check.  That's pretty important.

On the other hand, this whole process was tainted for me from the outset as the Democrats kept saying "we're going to impeach him."

For me, that made it look like a Kafka-esque trial. "We want to nail him, we just need to find a good thing to pin on him."

There's no doubt in my mind he strong-armed Ukraine. That's politics.
I'm not sure it's really worth of impeachment and I'm certainly not sure that it's worthy of it w/less than a year to the election.

If I were Mitch McConnell, I'd drag out the trial for 2-3 months and make all of the Senators be present to attend.

I'm no fan of Trump at all, but it's tough for me to see the Senate convicting him, and the process has been questionable. This doesn't even take into account how his supporters are going to react.

What makes me even sadder is that it takes the country's attention away from some really important issues.

Granted, keeping a President honest is super critical, but this isn't like Watergate....or even Clinton, where it was "we found something he did, let's impeach him."

I'm sure there are many who disagree with me.

The Democrats Get an Internet Election

Was thinking about the fact that former Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick just the Democratic race.

There's a really interesting article in Rolling Stone about what this means, but it seems like the Dems are doing what the GOP did in 2016.

It's their "Internet Election."

But what I mean by that is that the fragmentation of information creation and consumption (anyone can create content and people can read whatever they want) that begin in the late 90s is rolling over the political establishment.

The idea that a candidate can join the race right before Thanksgiving when the Iowa caucuses are in early January would have been insanity a few years ago.

You needed a "ground game" and all of that.  While the "ground game" is still important, I am sure, the "air game" that the Internet/social media enables is akin to the invention of the forward pass in football, a literal game-changer.

That ability to spin up a campaign (in theory, we'll see how it works for him) and solicit donations cost-effectively nationwide is something that was only made possible this decade.

Howard Dead started it. Obama really made it work, Trump exploited it, and now a centralized institution (the political parties) are breaking at the seams because of it.

This isn't just a US phenomenon. Yesterday's WSJ had an interview with the former Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar.

Mr. Aznar also sees a “trend of political fragmentation” in countries of the democratic West, with Spain as a prime example. “The results of Spain’s election has meant the presence in Parliament of 16 parties,” he says. “You cannot guarantee reasonable government in these circumstances.”

I suspect that the political fragmentation is going to get worse in the near future. 

We can certainly lament it. It's frightening.

But we have to accept it.

Then, we have to figure out what to do about it.

But the Internet's wave of disruption which has hit retail, manufacturing, taxis, and everything, continues to have impact and will for a long time. We're just seeing it at the highest levels.

Learning to be a teacher

I taught a meditation class for the 2nd time yesterday, which is funny because I don't really think of myself as a "meditation teacher."

The night before, Friday night, I found myself in one of those light sleeps. In the back of my mind, I kept having questions pop up.

One set was of the "how will I make sure that the experience is good for the people who attend?" [there were 4].

But another set was of the "what if they think I'm silly?" type.

Those are even worse. That little voice in the head that casts doubts upon yourself before you even start.

A few hours before the class, I was talking with one of my teachers and said something like, "I'm teaching this class even though I don't know what I'm doing."

His response was simple and profound. "None of us do."

That helped.

I told him, "I have a lesson plan for the session mapped out. There's a part though that really feels like it will push me out of my comfort zone."

His response, "Good. Do That."

So, I did.

It's not a profound insight or anything, but I think the opportunity in all of this work is to really internalize the idea of just doing things 1% beyond where they were the day before.

Still not easy, but easier.

The key, for me at least, is to do these things every day.

China Go

There's a part of me that thinks the best candidate to support for Presidency is Andrew Yang.

After all, his family is from Taiwan and if we need to confront the growing threat to America and Western civilization that China represents, maybe the best thing we can do is to get someone in the job who understands the Chinese mentality.

I am FAR from an expert on China. I have been there twice, including the 1997 handover from Britain of Hong Kong...which is playing out pretty much as we expected.

Still, I have been thinking that I need to spend more time trying to understand China.

The country and its leaders are impacting every facet of life and will continue to do so.

I asked a friend of mine recently, who does know a lot about China, where to start.

He said, "a friend once told me, 'if you want to understand China, you need to learn how to play Go."

So, I started doing that.