If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It

This rant is a bit personal. I went out the other night to enjoy a nice meal at one of my absolute favorite restaurants with some of my absolute favorite people but I encountered something totally rant-worthy while I was there. This isn't the first time that I've run into them but it only recently was cemented in my mind exactly how big of a problem this is. I'm talking of course about those idiotic touch-screen, "Coca-Cola Freestyle," drink machines.

Seriously? No. Seriously. Who came up with these god-awful inventions? They're the worst. I can't stand them. I will admit that I was enchanted for the first five seconds after seeing one for the first time, ironically in the same place that I encountered the ones this weekend, but that childlike wonder was smashed shortly and I realized how absolutely atrocious they are.

So why do I hate these monstrosities? They're fun, right? It's like playing a little game to get your soda! Absolutely correct. They are fun. They are entertaining.
THAT IS PROBLEM #1: Every last idiot gets up to the machine and suddenly they're in this magical little world of wonder where they can mix and match drinks, add extra flavoring, and otherwise just stand there and consume time and halt progress. What are you doing? Pick a flavor and move on, idiot. You're not customizing your RPG character! Drink machines are already a bottleneck for idiots. It's bad enough when the options are just regular drink flavors and all you have to do is push your cup against a lever to get the soda. Now you have to wait for people to scroll through their options and find what they want. This brings me to...

PROBLEM #2: These stupid things necessarily limit themselves to serving 1 person at a time. It's bad enough that you have to go through like 3 decision trees to get to the point in the menu when you can make it dispense soda, but on top of that each machine can only serve one person at a time. This isn't the case with a good old-fashioned soda fountain. If the person currently using the machine isn't inconsiderate or wearing a sign that says, "Wide Load," you should be able to, AT THE VERY LEAST, get your ice while they're getting soda. Optimally, you should both be able to get soda simultaneously and still have room for 1 more person to start getting ice, provided that you don't want the same flavor as the first person. That's a potential for 3 people to be using the same drink machine at the same time. Even with that ridiculous potential for efficiency, most places typically have 2 drink fountains. That's upwards of 6 people that could be using the drink stations at the same time. No such thing could EVER occur with these things. AT BEST, you can expect 1 and a maximum of 2 people to be getting soda simultaneously and that's only if the restaurant actually went all out and bought two of these. They're 1/3 as efficient, assuming that a person knows what they want (which is a generous assumption [see problem #1]) and encounters no obstacles picking their flavor and dispensing it, and approximately 60% more expensive than a regular coke machine, according to Wikipedia. I have seen like no effort whatsoever to make these things serve more than one person so I see no reason to pretend that this isn't one of the biggest problems with these.

PROBLEM #3: They're self-contained. "Why's that a problem, Ben?! That makes them better!" No it doesn't. Have you seen the workings of a regular soda fountain? What you interact with is basically a small interface; it's the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The rest of the machine is much more extensive. There are a bunch of hoses running from the soda machine to a big rack of syrup that feeds into it and also to a giant CO2 tank that it uses to carbonate the water. Bear with me. All of these other parts being located elsewhere is a great thing. It allows for the machine to pull from much larger supplies of syrup. I'm sure you've noticed that these Freestyle machines are always out of the most popular flavors. On a regular machine, it's not that big of a deal. Usually, there are multiple spouts for the most popular flavors because they're fed by multiple giant syrup reservoirs and you've probably never even encountered a regular soda machine that's run out of CO2. That's because it's fed by a tank that's literally 6 feet tall. The freestyle machine uses tiny syrup containers and tiny CO2 canisters in order to remain self-contained. If one of these runs out of syrup, that's alright; you can still get another drink. If it runs out of CO2, it's done. All of the carbonated drinks are greyed out and you can only get HiC or Powerade. If you're lucky and there are two machines, you get to wait in line for 20 minutes while every last imbecile bumbles their way through the drink selections like they're filling out their eHarmony profile or something else that idiots consider equally as important. If you're unlucky and there is only one machine, you're not getting a drink because it's highly unlikely that there's an employee in the store who knows how to change the CO2. On top of that, these things hold like barely any ice so there also always out of that too. And like we've established, this all happens frequently since these things are self-contained. But wait, there's more!!

PROBLEM #4: There's only one spout. It doesn't matter what flavor you get, it's going to taste bad. Why? It just ran through the same spout as every single other drink that anyone ever selected on that machine. Why did this sound like a good idea? Was this machine pitched by people who have to clean up the old machines to people who have to clean up the old machines? You don't take your chip and dip it in salsa and then queso. You don't use your salad fork to eat your entree without licking is off. I don't really know what else to say about this problem because of how obvious it is that it's a problem so I'm going to move on to the last (for now) and probably the biggest problem that I have with these machines...

PROBLEM #5: It's touchscreen. This is so blindingly obvious to me. I'm baffled... absolutely baffled that nobody considered this when they were designing it. You don't have your food yet but you're kind of thirsty so you go to get your drink. You use the touchscreen drink machine without thinking twice, take a few sips, and then get your food and eat it. Do you see the problem here? Oh, you don't see it? Well let me spell it out, friend:

EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO GOT A DRINK AT THAT RESTAURANT BEFORE YOU ALSO TOUCHED THAT SAME SCREEN WITH THEIR DISGUSTING HANDS. EVERY SINGLE LITTLE KID, WITH THE MUD AND FILTHY STICKINESS COATING THEIR BACTERIA-RIDDEN HANDS, TOUCHED THE SAME SCREEN THAT YOU DID. 

They didn't wash their hands before using the machine. You didn't wash your hands before using the machine. They didn't wash their hands after using the machine. You didn't wash your hands after using the machine. WHATEVER ILLNESS ANYONE HAD THAT USED THE MACHINE BEFORE YOU, YOU HAVE JUST CONTRACTED. CONGRATULATIONS, COCA-COLA, YOUR MACHINES ARE SPREADING COMMUNICABLE DISEASES.

Are you happy? ARE YOU HAPPY? What about you, everyone who pretends these monstrosities aren't really that bad? Are YOU happy? I hope so. I really do. Thank you so much for your stupid progress. We really needed it. We really needed machines that take longer to use (it's exponentially worse for idiots, children, and the technologically challenged), only serve 1 person at a time, run out of everything constantly, dispense bad-tasting mystery soda, and are infinitely more likely to spread diseases. Good job. You deserve the Nobel Prize in ruining good things. This reminds me of one of my favorite redneck sayings, "IF IT AIN'T BROKE, DON'T FIX IT."

-Ben

Fat Fatty McFatso, Duke of Fattington (Fat People, Addendum)

Nobody is rushing to the defense of ugly cars. Nobody is bashing Ferrari for setting unrealistic body standards. Nobody is telling Car and Driver not to put pictures of photo shopped exotic cars on their magazine covers because nobody can realistically afford one. This whole "body diversity" movement is just a bunch of insecure crybabies screaming for validation.

I'm NOT sorry that you're fat. I'm NOT sorry that you lack ambition. I'm NOT sorry that it makes you feel bad to have all of this pointed out to you. There are only two ways for you to not feel bad about yourself when you look at a magazine if you base any part of your self image on your appearance (which you [probably] do): to destroy the natural standard so that you are equally as attractive as the models or to commit to diet and exercise and actually work and sweat and raise yourself to the same level of fitness as the models through sheer grit and determination.

Yes, I know which one you'll choose because just about everyone has already made the choice. You want the secret to weight loss? Diet and exercise. Absorb less energy than you expend. Boom. Done. It's officially your fault (probably) if you're not losing weight.

Fat People

This is a big topic. (AYO!) But in all seriousness, I have a problem with the fat acceptance movement and fit shaming and those are the topics of today's rant. I always say something about how much hate I'm going to get for my rants but there's like no way that this isn't going to receive backlash. Right? We'll see.

In my last rant I called out 50 Shades of Grey haters for being pathetically transparent. This time it's the fat acceptance movement. I understand that a lot of people are fat and that we shouldn't necessarily treat them as subhuman. That would be hard anyway since nearly 70% of Americans are overweight or obese. I agree with the idea of fat acceptance since I see living in denial as an even bigger problem. Fat people are real and they are everywhere; don't ever forget it. The problem I have with the movement has to do partially with the rhetoric but mainly with the fact that it's massively apathetic. The idea behind it isn't that it's shallow to have beauty standards and value people based on their appearance (that would require admitting that you are unattractive), an idea that I would be more than happy to not target in a rant; it's that the standard of beauty is in fact them (the fat people). I might have said something about this in a previous rant. (something about Everyone's Perfect?)

No. The reason we have these incredibly fit and attractive models in magazines is the same reason we have fast and exotic sports cars in magazines: we like to look at awesome things that are rare to have but that definitely do exist. That being said, the standard sure is falling. Models from even ten years ago needed WAY less Photoshop to look like the pinnacle of beauty. Nobody is calling out Car and Driver for having pictures of the beautiful cars you dream of someday driving. "What if someone with a crappy car saw that picture and felt sad because they didn't want to work hard enough to someday drive one? That's jalopy shaming!" That's weird. I've never heard that particular line of reasoning. It's almost like fat acceptance is just fat people looking for universal permission to not confront their problems.

Caveat: There are some people who do not value their appearance. I understand and accept this fact. That's fine. You know what, if you really don't value your physical appearance whatsoever, that is perfectly fine with me. Just understand that these people probably make up less than 5% of the population. Okay, I don't have any actual statistics so that's just a guess but I would be very surprised if there were many people who didn't value their appearance. 

Most people value their physical appearance. They want to be called beautiful. They want to be attractive. How do I know this? Let's go back to the entire premise of fat acceptance: everyone is beautiful. It's the idea that everyone is entitled to be thought of as beautiful by everyone else. It's the idea that you are not allowed to have an opinion about what is or isn't beautiful because it might hurt someone's feelings. The fat acceptance movement could not exist if people did not widely value their own appearance.

What does the fat acceptance movement represent to me? It represents apathy. It represents defeatism. It represents the rampant entitlement mentality of today's society. (Apathy = being unmotivated. They don't have it but want it. Apathy is what it takes to maintain that disparity. It's the opposite of motivation.) Being fat is like the most straightforward personal issue to resolve. It requires minimal self awareness (understanding that you are fat, that you don't like that you are fat, and that you will remain fat unless you exercise) and minimal intervention. The solutions are there in droves but it all whittles down to one key tenet: absorb less energy than you expend. If you do that, weight loss is absolutely inevitable.

Buckle up everyone; this rant is about to go even deeper than fat people: People don't care anymore; not just about their appearance but about anything. Nobody wants to be or do anything. All that anyone wants to do is stay drunk for two days every week in the hopes that they will forget about the previous five days of the week. "Everybody's working for the weekend." That is abominable. I mean, I get it. Sometimes you have a crappy job and it's nice to just take it easy after work but you don't care enough about yourself to find a job that you can even enjoy? 

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that most fat people are aware of that fact and also dislike that fact that they are fat just like they're aware that their job doesn't suit them and hate their job as a result. What is it that keeps you alive? No, really. I don't understand how you can live with this ideal self in your head of you being all sexy and having an awesome job and whatnot while you consistently fail to put any effort into achieving it. How do you not kill yourself at some point? Don't take this as me saying, "go kill yourself." That's not what I'm saying. It's a genuine question and in fact I would encourage you to do quite the opposite: get motivated and fix your problems. I couldn't not kill myself if the disparity between my ideal self and actual self were that large and I also completely lacked any motivation to ever change that. Do these people somehow believe that they are working on it? Have they duped themselves into believing that things will some day get better spontaneously?

Fit shaming. It's gotten to the point that fat people are so self-conscious about their bodies that they've taken to making fun of people who exercise and care as if they are the ones who have a problem. While it is certainly unusual to care, it's also unusual to find someone who is militantly apathetic. These fit shamers care so little about everything that exists that it's come full circle; they care about not caring and they feel like they're dealing out some twisted sort of justice when they shame fit people. Have you ever seen a pretty girl post a bikini picture on facebook or whatever and ALWAYS there is one person who comments saying, "eat a sandwich," or some variation thereof. Disgusting.

They used to tell me that bullies were just people who felt insecure and so they made fun of people and beat them up to make themselves feel better. That is literally what is happening here. They can't handle looking at a picture of someone who cared enough to achieve something so they have to mouth of and make fun of them. Obviously this isn't quite as widespread as fat acceptance but it's more likely to be damaging to others and is 100% the result of the fat acceptance movement.

All of this being said, I don't condone fat shaming, not because of any sort of moral objection that I have to making people care, but because it's objectively ineffective. Shaming people tends to have the opposite effect of what is intended. So say you go out and shame a fat person, laugh at them, call them names, the whole shebang. The likely result will be that they start identifying more with being fat and subsequently make even less effort. Even if they did start working out because of being shamed, it would be because they're afraid to be shamed even more and fear, while a powerful motivator, isn't very healthy.

If you read this and felt inspired to do something about the apathy epidemic, go out and inspire people. Set goals and follow through. Healthy motivation is all about visualizing the result. After you've achieved something, go find some fatties and mentor them. Coach them on how to do something about the things they care about, not just their appearance but the rest of their life as well.

It's much harder to stop being fat in spirit than physically fat.

Sorry if the truth hurt your feelings.

-Ben

"50 Shades of Abuse"

This is something that I feel needs to be said because at this point it's just embarrassing to watch. I'll preface this rant with a few disclaimers: I don't like 50 Shades of Grey. I don't enjoy or partake in BDSM. I haven't seen or read 50 Shades of Grey. I know that 50 Shades of Grey is a stupid romance novel about a woman who meets a man who's dominant and into BDSM. She happens to be submissive so that works out. And while I'm at it, I'll go ahead and cut the head off of 90% of the rebuttals that might be made in response to this that could, perhaps in a drunken stupor, be perceived as anything close to relevant: I AM NOT HERE TO DEFEND ANYTHING WITHIN 50 SHADES OF GREY OUT OF ANY PERSONAL INTEREST IN THE BOOK/MOVIE.
Without further adieu:

50 Shades of Grey haters are sad and lonely. It's pathetic. It's stupid. It's petty and base. Nobody likes to have happiness and success flaunted in front of them or held above their heads but at this point, just writing about what makes you happy seems to trigger this natural aversion to other people's happiness.

They have to criticize the positive depiction of BDSM relationships because they're looking up at it from like 5 levels of happiness below. How else can you explain it? I will grant, just for like two or three seconds, that this book/movie is about abuse simply because I haven't yet gotten around to that point yet, but also to prove another point. Even if it is a depiction of an abusive relationship, that isn't what anyone cares about. It's not like anyone cares about artistic depictions of terrible things. It's not like anyone watches The Hunger Games and then says, "Boycott The Hunger Games because it depicts murdering children." It's not like anyone watches the show Dexter and says, "Boycott Dexter because it glorifies murder and vigilantism." NO! Nobody cares about that. This whole, "It's about abuse," campaign is a facade to mask the true problem that they have with the book/movie which is that it challenges their own ability as an individual to find a mate and reproduce and enjoy doing so. So it's understandable why a lot of people are on board with hating 50 Shades of Grey since there are so many sad, miserable, lonely, idiots with no idea how to identify, much less deal with, their own problems, shortcomings, fears, and insecurities due to rampant neglect of self-awareness but I digress.

It's not about abuse. You can't look at a happy relationship, a relationship in which both parties are content and enjoying themselves, and say that it's an abusive relationship simply because it doesn't adhere to the standards that you've established in your own relationships. Maybe if someone treated you that way it could be considered abuse because (this will be the real revelation for some people) IT'S NOT CONSENSUAL. In the case of 50 Shades of Grey, IT IS CONSENSUAL. If someone takes something from someone without asking but they had established that it was okay for that to happen, it isn't a case of theft, you slobbering halfwits! Sure, you might be upset if they took something from you without asking but this isn't your life. It's not you. Go away. Stop trying to apply your standards for acceptable interpersonal relations universally. I mean this is why physician assisted suicide should be legal. If two people agree that one of them will kill the other, the one who does the killing should not be charged with murder but I digress.

Laws about domestic violence were not established to protect people who get turned on by being slapped; they were established to protect people who don't like getting hit. Laws about murder were not established to protect people who want to be killed; they were established to protect people who are afraid of being killed. How arrogant do you have to be to say that a person in a particular type of relationship is not actually enjoying the relationship but is, in fact, being abused? What are you, the mother of the entire human race? Please, tell me about all of the things that I personally do that I'm not actually enjoying because of your crazy contrived worldview that everyone is literally you.

I seriously think that this particular issue makes me more upset than almost anything. It represents such a wide array of ignorance. And, I don't know, maybe I'm coming across as condescending here, but this all seems like super basic stuff but... like... come on, people! Can you not stand to run your brain for like 5 consecutive minutes?

Let the inevitable hate I will get for challenging the idea that consensual relationships are abusive ensue.

-Ben

High School Seniors: Going Straight To College Isn't That Smart

We live in a society that fancies itself fairly educated. Typical advice is as follows: graduate high school, go to college, get a degree, work in whatever field you have a degree, retire, die. I am here to challenge that.

Gone (LONG gone) are the days when a college education was something only the best and brightest could hope to obtain. Gone are the days when a genuine interest in learning is what drove a person to attend a University. We live in an era where going to college is practically considered the status quo. Indeed, 40% of all working age adults currently have a college degree. Why is that a problem? Education is good, right? Of course education is good. The problem lies not in the fact that more people are "educated" but that people who don't value education are being shoved through the education machine.

There is a difference between enabling people with a genuine interest in learning to attend a University and promoting universal post-secondary education because "JOBS!" The idea that everyone needs that level of education is ridiculous and the enactment thereof serves primarily to wedge barriers between educators and people who actually want education while postponing the period of self-discovery that is absolutely necessary in such a diverse, individualistic society.

So here comes the part specifically targeted at you, High School Seniors. If you are 18, there's a good chance that going to college is not a wise decision; at least, not immediately. I have a couple of good reasons:

You could probably do with a break. You've been battered by homogeneity since you were 5, at the very least, all the while being told you're a special snowflake. What a steaming pile of festering hypocrisy! The public school system is absolutely and entirely fixated on creating and maintaining standards. I'm not talking about grading standards necessarily but teaching standards. The goal, so it seems, is to provide every single person in The US with the exact same education. Aren't you tired of that? I can tell you that probably your first two years of College will be no different. In fact, if you thought as I did, that dual credit was a waste of effort, you will inevitably be sitting through your first two years of college getting credit essentially for things you've already learned. Take some time off. A semester or two will do you some good. The primary argument against this is that people who take a semester off are far more likely to never attend college. I'm sorry, but is there a problem with adults gaining enough internal and external awareness that they can see through your you-won't-be-as-successful fear-mongering well enough to figure out that where they ought to be isn't necessarily a University? No, there isn't.

You will have time to figure out who you are. Gaining self-awareness in high school can be tough. You've realized that you are not necessarily what other people say you are but that's usually about as far as you've come by graduation. You pick a major that sounds lucrative or at least not painfully soul crushing and you're off to college. I've gotta tell you, I don't think I know a single person who started college immediately after High School and didn't change their major at least once. You owe it to yourself to know yourself. Spend some time figuring out who you are. Before you attempt any education beyond high school, you should be fairly sure about what you like, what motivates you, what you dislike, and where you'd like to be going. This internal awareness will make any sort of education that you undertake that much easier to grasp. When you aren't wrestling with questions like "how do I fit in to all this?" or "what do I want to do for the rest of my life?" you can learn with relative ease. Self-awareness is like WD-40 for learning and just about anything in the universe that requires thought and practice.

There are definitely people who are driven by learning and acquiring new knowledge. They are the ones want to study the universe, solve problems, and understand everything they can for the betterment of mankind. Universities used to be giant collections of these very people. It was a distillation of the very best minds that humanity had been able to produce. Professors pushed boundaries, unabashedly flooding their students' minds with fringe ideas and concepts that required study and scrutiny; things that might later be taught at lower levels of learning.

Look at how far we've come. Professors are often forced to teach homogeneously due to the fact that like 98% of their students are there for the sole purpose of acquiring a degree which they can then hopefully trade for a job. It is begrudgingly and with the utmost contempt for the process that students sit through lectures. "What's on the test?" is the only thing they want to know. They trade time for credits and credits for degrees and degrees for jobs. Nobody is there to test the boundaries. Nobody is there to compare ideas. Nobody is there to learn. That is not what college is about now. It's just how you get the currency with which you purchase a credential.

-Ben