What do you believe to be true that others would find highly controversial?

I find it an amusing question. So, as a thought exercise, I’m answering it here in an ongoing way.

I reserve the right to modify, nullify, contradict, and or otherwise dramatically change my position on these as my perspective evolves or they become less controversial.

  • Panel presentations are a waste: there’s never enough time to take full advantage of all the in-depth expertise on the panel and at any given time, most of the panel is sitting quietly.
  • Open borders & free trade has fewer unintended negative outcomes than policies restricting either. The vast majority of Americans are descendants of people who immigrated to the US illegally, or otherwise without the paperwork & abilities, these same people are expecting today’s poor and hungry to have. That’s un-American.
  • Quality healthcare is such a significant national security we should have a unified national strategic solution ensuring a path to fitness and resilience for all Americans.
  • Having more children has always been, and is still, better than fewer or none when success is measured on the selfishness of being cared about by others in old age.
  • More people with stronger health and greater wealth equals more opportunities to solve really hard problems like global climate change. Therefore, if we want to solve really hard problems at the global scale, our focus should be on lifting the world out of poverty.
  • Pollution doesn’t know political or national borders, therefore, to have any meaningful, sustained impact, environmental change needs to be driven by private multi-national corporations. Pollution is a sign of poverty.
  • Residential recycling efforts are more religion than responsibility. If our concerns about resource disposal malpractice were serious, there would be rationing and punishment for doing it wrong.
  • Paper is cheap, plentiful, easy to create, easy to use, easy to re-use, easy to re-create (they sell kits in craft stores) for an infinite number of things. “Wasting trees” and “Please don’t print” and similar statements are more anti-creativity than responsible resource use.
  • Creativity is mostly waste – and that’s when it’s working.
  • District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, US. Virgin Islands, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa must be proper US States, with Congressional representation, that they are not is un-American.
  • Owning a gun signals a belief in being able to get away with murder. Decreasing law enforcements’ access to firearms is preferable to increasing citizens’ access.
  • There are plenty of world views wholly independent of the platforms of the two dominant US political parties.
  • Minimum wage is more about stabilizing state and federal revenues & making bid/ask of the job market more efficient at the low end than it is about improving employees quality of life.
  • Job security is the ability to get another job.
  • Traditions exist to remind us of our ancestors’ poverty.
  • Western Europe is mostly a museum.
  • the Business Model Canvas is a fantastic tool for describing a business in a single page and a pretty good tool for taking about how businesses evolve. It’s a horrible tool for planning and developing new businesses.
  • Most everything is Chindōgu.
  • “First mover advantage” is a myth and “regression to the mean” is real.