
<a href="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-30-cantabrian-clubs-without-courses-championship-2012/7125459489_a15a4d660a_o_d.jpg" target="_blank" class="flickr-image post-thumb" title="Santa Marina Golf Club - Tree">
  <img src="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-30-cantabrian-clubs-without-courses-championship-2012/7125459489_c394705c4e_t.jpg" alt="Santa Marina Golf Club - Tree"/>
</a>

This weekend, I represented my local golf club of Laredo, of which [I happen to be the reigning champion](/2011/10/22/golf-in-asturias/), in Cantabria's _Clubs Without Courses_ championship. You may snicker at that, but golf courses in Spain are pretty scarce. Part of it has to do with the lack of popularity of the sport and the ingrained notion that it is a sport for the rich, and part of it is the strict land usage laws. Laredo won the very first _Clubs Without Courses_ National Championship five years ago, and the two best players from the winning club from this weekend will go on to represent the region of Cantabria in the national championship in Córdoba.  <a href="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-30-cantabrian-clubs-without-courses-championship-2012/6979385424_6fa2dd3293_o_d.jpg" target="_blank" class="flickr-image" title="Santa Marina Golf Club - Practice Green">
  <img src="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-30-cantabrian-clubs-without-courses-championship-2012/6979385424_b030866355.jpg" alt="Santa Marina Golf Club - Practice Green"/>
</a>

The practice putting green. The course was near the seaside tourist town of _San Vicente la Barquera_.

With my new handicap of 12, I was in the 13th of 22 threesomes on Saturday, so my tee time was 10:40. Even though the temperature was only about 15Â° C (59Â° F), the course was just so hilly that I was down to short sleeves after the first hole. All the golf I had played this year in the States was the lazy American kind where you sit on a cushioned seat and zoom right up to your ball, but this was _Man vs. Wilderness_ Cantabrian golf, and I had to catch my breath before each shot.

<a href="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-30-cantabrian-clubs-without-courses-championship-2012/7125445959_176cbcd5e3_o_d.jpg" target="_blank" class="flickr-image" title="Santa Marina Golf Club - First Hole">
  <img src="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-30-cantabrian-clubs-without-courses-championship-2012/7125445959_4c22f35771.jpg" alt="Santa Marina Golf Club - First Hole"/>
</a>

The first hole was a steep climb.

Very soon into the round the rain began. This meant donning an impermeable outer layer. I had specifically made a trip into Santander earlier in the week to buy some rain pants for this exact occurrence. It never really poured, but a mild drizzle was maintained for the rest of the round. My woolen felt golfing cap absorbed several pounds of water and had to be rung out several times. I had four spare gloves in a ziplock bag in my golf bag (I learned [in Ireland](/2011/06/23/lahinch/) that my golf bag is not water proof when my HD video camera stopped working and needed a $300 repair). It wasn't until the eighteenth hole that I had any problems with grip slippage. The only casualty of the rain was my scorecard. It was a disintegrating lump of pulp when we finished the round, but the scores of the guy I was keeping score for were barely legible, so we transferred them to dry card and turned it in.

Since there were eight local golf clubs competing against each other, it was possible to form the threesomes such that no one was playing with a member of their own team. My two playing partners on Saturday were an amicable pair. One guy thought he was a lot funnier than he really was. He's the kind of guy who, when we finished the round and the secretary took our scores, told us that they would send everyone an SMS to tell us our tee time the following day, and said, "Okay, give me your mobile," obviously asking for his phone number, he said, "But if I give you my mobile \[phone\] how can you send me a message?" She had to ask three more times to nail the syntax of "Please tell me the number assigned to your mobile phone," such that he couldn't escape into jokester-land. Exhausting.

He did, however, tell me a lovely story about how he was invited to the inaugural day of the course we were playing, which was designed by none other than Cantabria's golfing son, Severiano Ballesteros. During his round, he saw Seve playing another hole and went up to talk to him. He said that Seve was kind enough to stop and chat for a few minutes and have his picture taken. He was a great man. May 7, a week from the date of this post, will be the first anniversary of his death.

<a href="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-30-cantabrian-clubs-without-courses-championship-2012/6979368816_eea59bce8a_o_d.jpg" target="_blank" class="flickr-image" title="Santa Marina Golf Club - Tree">
  <img src="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-30-cantabrian-clubs-without-courses-championship-2012/6979368816_763261c65d_c.jpg" alt="Santa Marina Golf Club - Tree"/>
</a>

We were playing at [Santa Marina Golf Club](http://www.golfsantamarina.com/), which was built near this 19th century chapel, which curiously has a tree growing from its bell tower. You can't build anything in Spain without it being near some stone relic from another time.

I was very happy with my play on Saturday, especially my back nine that started with a string of eight bogeys. The eighteenth hole might be the hardest hole of golf I've ever played. It's a par 5, but I never managed less than 8 strokes.

The rules of the tournament were that only the six best rounds (gross, no handicaps) from each team would be counted. The team from Laredo had a final score on Saturday of 519, an average of 86.5, which included my 93. The next closest team on the leader board had 520, but that was with only five players (an average of 104), so it didn't count. The actual second place team was 36 strokes behind us with a 555.

Sunday was gorgeous and sunny…but very, very muddy. There was what the golf rulebook calls "standing water" on every square centimeter of the course. I made a slop-slop-slop sound as I walked up and down the steep inclines. If you didn't visually identify the square meter where your ball landed in the fairway, it was a lost ball, because they plugged down into the mud such that just a tiny square centimeter of the ball was visible. Every single player on our team scored worse the second sunny day than on the first rainy day. That should give an indication of just how difficult an already nearly-impossible course was playing. One guy playing in a pair of [wellies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellies) looked ridiculous on the first tee, but like a genius on the eighteenth green.

On Sunday I witnessed an event that would definitely win the storytelling competition my golfing group has every year in February. My threesome had finished a hole and was walking to the next tee when we saw a heavy set gentleman from the group in front of us returning to the tee with his driver. His ball had missed the fairway by a couple meters and had plugged into the ground and been declared lost. He teed up his ball and sent it slicing off into the woods. He shouted some Spanish curses about defecating on the mother of the ball he just hit and flung his driver with all his might. His intent was probably to fling it straight down the hole towards the fairway, but he held on to it a split second too long and it went careening over our heads and up to the very tip top of a tree, where it lodged itself securely. We tried shaking the tree vigorously, but the driver wasn't going anywhere. This was a pretty serious situation, since a driver costs easily $300, which is probably 300€ (400 USD), if golf clubs are priced like other consumer goods. One guy from our group had the idea to use his golf ball retriever, a telescoping tube used to pull golf balls out of water hazards. He extended it out about 6 meters (20 feet), but it was still way too short. I suggested we could throw some rocks, but really I was imagining it either staying there forever or having to hire a cherry picker to fetch it. Just then, the other guy from my group, who was in his late forties or early fifties, jumped up into the tree, which didn't look at all conducive to climbing, and promptly climbed about 25 feet into the air with the agility of a chimpanzee and grabbed the club. And somehow he made it back down without breaking his neck. Just then it made sense how he could only take the club back until it was perpendicular to the ground and whip it through the ball and hit it further than I can with a full swing. Amazing.

<a href="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-30-cantabrian-clubs-without-courses-championship-2012/7125481823_ebf4aed39d_o_d.jpg" target="_blank" class="flickr-image" title="Santa Marina Golf Club - Lake">
  <img src="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-30-cantabrian-clubs-without-courses-championship-2012/7125481823_30ae7708be.jpg" alt="Santa Marina Golf Club - Lake"/>
</a>

Every time I golf in Spain, I am amused by the fact that there is some law that requires them to put life preservers near the big water hazards. It's a practice that strattles the line between reasonableness and silliness. I wonder how many golfers drown every year in water hazards in the US. If it's more than 0.3, I'd be surprised.

The starter (the guy who stands on the first tee and controls who begins when) told us a story of one member of the club that plays golf in shorts, even in the near-freezing winter temperatures. When asked why, he replies, "When I wear pants, my wife gets so mad at me for how dirty I've gotten them, that I'd rather play in shorts."

<a href="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-30-cantabrian-clubs-without-courses-championship-2012/6979397064_b7baf607bc_o_d.jpg" target="_blank" class="flickr-image" title="Playing Golf in the Mud">
  <img src="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-30-cantabrian-clubs-without-courses-championship-2012/6979397064_90348a8433.jpg" alt="Playing Golf in the Mud"/>
</a>

When I showed my wife this photo, she reenacted the shorts-wearer's story, telling me that I had ruined those trousers. Surprisingly, however, they came out of the washing machine looking like new.

I shot a 93 the first day and a 95 the second. The tournament officials didn't bother to properly add up the scores before declaring Laredo the winner. It wasn't even close.

<a href="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-30-cantabrian-clubs-without-courses-championship-2012/6979337652_7ab3511a92_o_d.jpg" target="_blank" class="flickr-image" title="Santa Marina Golf Club">
  <img src="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-30-cantabrian-clubs-without-courses-championship-2012/6979337652_5fb86cbde2.jpg" alt="Santa Marina Golf Club"/>
</a>

The best part of the course was the clubhouse, an old wooden structure that, as is common for golf courses everywhere, used to be the house that the owners of the land lived in. The greens were in a pretty bad state of disrepair. Apparently the club is running out of money because there's a lack of members. And I can understand why. Who would want to pay money to be abused like that every time you play? The course is just too hard. They've tried to make it easier by getting rid of all out-of-bounds and replacing the white stakes with red stakes, marking forests as "lateral water hazards", but it's not good enough. _Santa Marina Golf Club_ seems to be in a downward spiral where the course is so hard that they are running out of members and money, which in turn makes the course even harder as it falls into disrepair. It's a shame, because the location is visually spectacular, with views from the sea to the snowy _Picos de Europa_ with rolling hills and [luxury chalets](http://www.supertravel.co.uk/ski/) in between.

<a href="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-30-cantabrian-clubs-without-courses-championship-2012/7125490839_a2b4c074c5_o_d.jpg" target="_blank" class="flickr-image" title="Club de Golf de Laredo - Abril 2012">
  <img src="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-30-cantabrian-clubs-without-courses-championship-2012/7125490839_fdbd5fedcf_z.jpg" alt="Club de Golf de Laredo - Abril 2012"/>
</a>

_Laredo Club de Golf_, the best golfers in Cantabria who don't have a home course. That's a bronze Ballesteros behind us.


Cantabrian Clubs Without Courses Championship 2012


<img src="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-23-state-of-the-offspring-address-april-2012/7106668407_71f652e4ed_t.jpg" alt="Nora Portraits" class="post-thumb"/>This month included the holiday of Easter, which is considerably more fun (and tooth-rotting) for American children than for Spanish children. In Spain, most people get a week off of work and go on vacation. Nora and her mother went down to the family's house in Extremadura to spend a week lazing around with Nora's aunt and Spanish grandparents. After a suggestion from my parents, I seized the opportunity to travel to the United States to show my face at the office where I am normally only present via the internet.  One day this month, when we got to daycare, we could hear a child crying. Nora said to me, "Somebody is crying." Then, she paused for a second and followed up with, "Jimena is crying." Being the Doubting Thomas that I am, I peered into the classroom through the "high enough for adults" window, and sure enough, Nora's friend, Jimena, was the one in tears.

<a href="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-23-state-of-the-offspring-address-april-2012/7106584347_0245371f14_o_d.jpg" target="_blank" class="flickr-image" title="Headband">
  <img src="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-23-state-of-the-offspring-address-april-2012/7106584347_422ebb5b4e_m.jpg" alt="Headband"/>
</a>

In the mornings, when we are goofing around reading books or playing with toys, sometimes I'll wonder aloud about what time it is. When Nora hears this, she goes to find my iPhone wherever it is (sometimes it's in her hands at the time), and she knows how to exit the active application, lock the phone, and then press the home button to show the lock screen which displays the time. She then holds it out so I can read it, often with a "Here's the time, Poppy!"

Nora has started following the plot of television shows for the first time. She now responds when Dora asks a question, for example. She likes _Dora The Explorer_ a lot, but her absolute favorite program is a Canadian cartoon called _Caillou_, about a little boy and his family and the adventures they get into. I had never heard of _Caillou_ before, but Nora already has a _Caillou_ doll that speaks Basque very loudly.

We have applied for Nora to start school in September. For obvious reasons, we requested the school that is literally 20 meters from our front door as our first choice. They choose applicants based on a points system, which ranks criteria in more or less like this, in descending order of importance:

- Does a sibling already attend?
- How close does the child live to the school?
- How close is the parents' workplace from the school?
- …other criteria involving disabilities and household income.

So we score very highly on the proximity criterion, but there are only twenty slots available for the three-year-old class, and we've heard rumors that there is a mass exodus of kids that are wanting to switch from another school to the one we want, so there might be competition. We will hear who got in in May. Our fingers are crossed…

<a href="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-23-state-of-the-offspring-address-april-2012/7106668407_14abab0489_o_d.jpg" target="_blank" class="flickr-image" title="Nora Portraits">
  <img src="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-23-state-of-the-offspring-address-april-2012/7106668407_71f652e4ed.jpg" alt="Nora Portraits"/>
</a>

The state of the offspring is strong!


State of the Offspring Address - April 2012


<a href="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-23-why-do-pilots-tell-the-passengers-about-the-wind/5354487777_3698eb022d_o_d.png" target="_blank" class="flickr-image" title="Another prohibition sign from Airplane">
  <img src="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-23-why-do-pilots-tell-the-passengers-about-the-wind/5354487777_b869167aa9_q.jpg" alt="Another prohibition sign from Airplane"/>
</a>

Have you ever noticed how, on a commercial airline flight, the pilot _always_ – without fail – informs the passengers of the speed and direction of the wind at the destination? I can understand telling us about the local time, temperature, and general weather (e.g. foggy, sunny, raining) at the destination. That's useful information about how much clothing to don before [exiting the aircraft](http://lancemccord.com/deplane-no-tattoo-jokes).  I also comprehend that it is absolutely paramount that _the pilot_ know the direction and speed of the wind at the destination airport, since that determines what runway will be used, and what techniques to use for landing. Sometimes the pilot doesn't even convert the speed to miles per hour, but reports it in knots. Great, thanks.

What passenger really cares whether the wind is coming out of the north or south? Maybe once in a hundred thousand flights one of the first class snobs is planning on having his driver take him from the airport directly to the marina where he will be taking his ketch for a sail that afternoon, and, with this handy wind data he can start planning his tacking course. But most of the time, all the first class folks want to do when landing in Madrid is [find car hire in Spain](http://www.holidayautos.co.uk/car-hire/spain.htm) at the Hertz desk, or via [carhirespain.net](http://www.carhirespain.net/) for cheap car hire in Spain.

My hypothesis is that the pilots receive a transmission with all the weather data, and rather than consider its utility to their audience, they just read the whole thing out to us verbatim. The practice amuses me every time I fly.

And now you will be unable to ignore it, too.


Why do pilots tell the passengers about the wind?


[![A Large Group of National Flags](https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-20-why-are-expats-more-liberal/2443412703_af638a0511_t.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/sabine01/2443412703/ "A Large Group of National Flags by psgreen01, on Flickr")I will never forget the feeling of terror and exhilaration I experienced when I first moved abroad as a twenty-year-old IAESTE exchange student to Copenhagen, Denmark. I was so far from everything I knew, and was thrust into a society that had its own way of doing things. There were weekly meetings of other exchange students in which I could converse with other young people from Argentina, Brazil, Ghana, Turkey, Norway, Thailand, Japan, France, Spain, Germany, Russia, Scotland and Greece. It was _incredibly_ mind opening.  The biggest lesson I took away from meeting all these people from around the globe was two-fold:

**My way is not necessarily the best way.**

and

**Cultures can be different without one being _better_ than the other.**

For one, I was in a country in which everyone over the age of five spoke perfect English, but they chose to speak a different language to each other. You mean my mother tongue isn't the inherently superior human language? It sounds stupid in retrospect, but I remember thinking that.

Look again at those two ideas. They are both inherently _Liberal_ ideas.

Over the years, I have noticed that I am almost always in political agreement with other expatriates that I meet. We generally hold similar values on the [left-right political spectrum](/2008/10/16/everything-is-gray/), both in financial and social issues. I always attributed this to the unavoidable epiphany brought on by immersion in a foreign culture. It necessarily shakes any conservative patriotism you have to the core.

Just recently, in the past couple years, I've been reading about the psychology of decision making and politics, and I think I may be mistaken about why expats tend to be more liberal. The positive correlation between voluntary emigration and Liberal values is still very strong, but I think I may have the causation backwards. **It's not that living abroad makes you liberal; it's that having a liberal mindset makes you want to live abroad.** People on the left end of the political and moral spectrum are much more open to having new experiences and hearing new, possibly conflicting, points of view. Conservatives are much happier with what they know. It's even right there in the meaning of the two words: Liberals are for change and rocking the boat, and Conservatives are for maintaining the status quo.

Here's a TED Talk on the subject:

<iframe width="505" height="314" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/vs41JrnGaxc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I just sent off an absentee ballot today for a state primary. Just as it's in the Conservatives' interest to make same-day voter registration difficult, which tends to disenfranchise poor and minority voters ([who will always vote Liberal](/2006/06/19/voting/)), it would also be in their interest to stymy the ballots from non-military expats, although I suspect there aren't enough of us for them to care…yet.


Why Are Expats More Liberal?


![IRS Seal](https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-18-taxation-and-equal-pay/200px-US-InternalRevenueService-Seal.svg.png)Yesterday, April 17, 2012, was Tax Day in the United States, they day when all citizens tax filings and payment was due. It was on a particularly odd date this year because the regular date, April 15, fell on a Sunday, and the Monday afterwards was Emancipation Day in the District of Columbia, meaning that federal employees at the IRS were off work. Thus, it fell on April 17, the 108th day of the year.  I have always heard that the reason that Tax Day is usually on April 15 is that it is a fairly close estimate that the amount earned by taxpayers in those first 105 days of the year is roughly equivalent to the tax burden, the amount of total annual income paid in taxes to the government. Every year, the [Tax Foundation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Foundation), a non-partisan public policy think tank in Washington, D.C., calculates the exact date upon which the taxes paid equal the amount earned so far that year. They call it [Tax Freedom Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Freedom_Day). This year, it just so happened that Tax Freedom Day fell exactly on April 17, 2012! So, if you're an American, all your gross income so far earned this year is for the government, and the income you make for the rest of 2012 is all yours!

By complete chance, April 17, 2012 was also Equal Pay Day, which sounds like a glorious day of liberal celebration, but is actually very sad indeed. [Equal Pay Day](http://www.pay-equity.org/day.html) is the day upon which a working woman has earned enough to fill the wage gap between her and her male colleagues for the previous year. Let me state that more concretely. The income American woman earned, on average, from January 1, 2011 to April 17, 2012 is equivalent to how much an American man in her same position made from January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2011. From the [Equal Pay Day](http://www.pay-equity.org/day.html) website:

> The next Equal Pay Day is Tuesday, April 17, 2012. This date symbolizes how far into 2012 women must work to earn what men earned in 2011.

Wow! I knew that women's salaries were lower across the board, but I didn't realize it was quite so much.

I love the coincidence that both these methods of representing a percentage of income by calendar dates fell on the same day. The fact that a man's tax burden is equivalent to a woman's inequality gender burden is quite striking. To my male readers, imagine working side by side with equals in your organization, but that you were the only one that had to pay taxes, and your coworkers kept all their gross salary. How would that make you feel?

There aren't a lot of options on the [What You Can Do](http://www.pay-equity.org/cando.html) page if you're not an employer, other than raise awareness and complain to legislators. Perhaps all we can hope to do is instill a value of fairness and gender financial equality in our kids and hope some of them grow up to be CEOs.

If you're going to talk to someone about this topic – and I hope you are – there's one arithmetical error you should be aware of that is very easy to fall victim to. This coincidence of Equal Pay Day falling on Tax Freedom Day _does **not** mean that the tax rate and the female salary deficit are the same percentage!_ If a man earns 4 apples a year, and a woman earns 3 apples, she is earning 75% of the man's salary, or 25% less. But to make it to Equal Pay Day the next year, _she needs to work **33%** of the year_ (not 25%!), since the 1 apple she needs to make it to the male annual income is 33% of her annual 3 apples. If Equal Pay Day were to fall on Tax Freedom Day in this fruity hypothetical example, the average tax rate would be 33% and the female pay deficit would be 25%.

The real numbers are that, on average, American women make 77.5% (22.5% less) of an equivalent male salary, and the average American pays 29% of their income in taxes.

[![Gender Pay Gap in USA](https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-18-taxation-and-equal-pay/640px-US_Gender_pay_gap%2C_by_state.png)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_gap_in_the_USA)


Taxation and Equal Pay


<a href="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-16-paper-or-plastic-cash-is-dead/162257320_21c8abaf69_o_d.jpg" target="_blank" class="flickr-image post-thumb" title="Fourteen Thousand Euros">
  <img src="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-16-paper-or-plastic-cash-is-dead/162257320_21c8abaf69_t.jpg" alt="Fourteen Thousand Euros"/>
</a>

I just got back from a ten day trip to the USA in which I ran a bit of an experiment: I never carried a single dollar or cent of US currency on my person. All my transactions were electronic using a debit card, even the extremely cheap ones like buying a $0.99 bottle of water from a convenience store. None of the cashiers even batted an eye when I pulled out the plastic for such a tiny purchase. In Spain, I suspect they would refuse your business if you tried to pull a stunt like that.  As with many other things involving technological infrastructure, Spain is about 20 years behind the US on credit card usage. When someone in line with me at the grocery store has a purchase of over 50€, they pay with a credit card about 30% of the time. And the credit card companies charge the vendor a significant fee for the transaction, which is why vendors discourage card usage when they can. Almost everything is still done with cash in Spain. No one would ever, ever, ever pay for a drink at a bar with a credit card. A whole meal for four, perhaps, but never a drink. Yet paying for a drink at a bar with plastic is quite common in the US. Of course Spaniards rarely drink more than one drink in the same bar, so the "starting a tab" concept would never occur to anyone.

[![BOA Visa Logo](https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-16-paper-or-plastic-cash-is-dead/5264113387_a30522a42d_m.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/moneyblognewz/5264113387/ "BOA Visa Logo by MoneyBlogNewz, on Flickr")One thing I love about going plastic-only in the US is that it gets around that horrible sales tax that causes purchases to be higher than the price listed on the items in the store. _I hate that!_ In Spain, the VAT (or _IVA_, in Spanish) is included on all the prices, so if you've got one item that's 0.95€ and another that's 2.25€, you can go ahead and count out your 3.20€ while you're waiting in the checkout line and hand over the exact amount to the cashier. That sort of calculation is all but impossible in the States.

The second thing I love about using only a debit or credit card in the US is that it allows for more accurate tipping. Several times I've noticed items priced on bar and restaurant menus such that, if you don't want to deal with coins (who does?), you've got to give a 30% tip. For instance, say your bar bill comes to $3.05. If you drop four $1 bills on the bar and walk out, you've left a 31% tip. But when you are given the blank space to write in any value you choose, and you won't have to deal with change in return, exact percentages are more accessible.

[![The Visa- Bird](https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-16-paper-or-plastic-cash-is-dead/6117242647_10cab4ceb1_m.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/cola21/6117242647/ "The Visa- Bird by Cola21, on Flickr")The third thing I love about using plastic rather than cash is that you automatically get a record of your purchases. Sometimes, in Spain, I'll take a couple hundred euros out of the ATM and then, after what seems like a few short days, I'm out of cash again and I have to rack my brains to remember where it all went. Sure, it's _possible_ to keep a diary of each transaction, but it's such a bother that I would never do it. Knowing where you've done business before can help the next time you have to [search for car hire USA](http://www.holidayautos.co.uk/car-hire/usa.htm) or other repeating transactions.

<a href="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-16-paper-or-plastic-cash-is-dead/3345809603_16e929c469_o_d.jpg" target="_blank" class="flickr-image" title="Coin Bouncing">
  <img src="https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-16-paper-or-plastic-cash-is-dead/3345809603_a1e44c90ba_m.jpg" alt="Coin Bouncing"/>
</a>

I've lived so long abroad now that when I go back to the States, the green money looks funny and fake to me, not like the colorful Euro notes and coins that are valuable enough to take the time to bend over and pick up off the ground. The US coins are so worthless I'd rather just _not have_ a quarter than lug one around in my pocket all day.

I dare say that one could live quite comfortably in the US with a wallet only big enough to hold a drivers license and a single credit card. That's something I miss in Spain.


Paper or Plastic: Cash Is Dead


![thumbnail](https://d1js6qm6cshi0v.cloudfront.net/oldblog/2012-04-04-the-golden-age-fallacy-and-our-social-decline/1.jpg)Remember back when you were a child, and the world wasn't so complicated and messed up? That was a simpler time, wasn't it? WRONG. It was a simpler time for _you_, because _you were a child_, free to play and almost entirely free from responsibility. We live in [the most peaceful time in all of human history](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0670022950/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=eriksblog07-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0670022950). Thinking that things were better in the past is called the Golden Age Fallacy, and it annoys the crap out of me.  Every single generation does the same damn thing. People my grandparents's age thought that rock-and-roll was corrupting the nation's youth. People my parents's age thought that video games and rap music were corrupting the nation's youth. Yes, it's true that running outside and playing with sticks and balls is far more healthy than sitting on the floor with the Playstation™ and eating Cheetos™, but don't you think for a second that an average 12-year-old from the 1950s, if given a free choice, would choose to be outside playing kickball rather than playing _Entrails of War: Bloodlust Savages_ in HD. The latter is just more fun. In the same way, whatever my daughter enjoys doing as a child will seem totally lame and boring to her kids. It's just the way we are. Get over it.

Another way that this fallacy presents itself is when someone from a wealthy nation travels to a poorer nation, which is the only way to virtually travel back in time. Some tourists think, "Oh, how quaint that the people here take their clothes down to the river by donkey and wash them in the fresh river water! How natural! _This_ is how humans should live. I envy these people." Shut the hell up. No you don't. There is no rational person that washes clothes by hand that would not prefer to have a washing machine to do it for them in a tenth of the time with a hundredth of the effort. Anytime the adjective "quaint" comes to mind, ask yourself if you really mean it in a positive way. As an immigrant back to The Old World, I catch myself falling victim to this fallacy sometimes.

What set me off on this little rant was a TED Talk, by Sherry Turkle, that I saw this morning about how the internet and smartphones and texting and social networking is making us more lonely. _What?_ Are you out of your mind? I disagree with just about every point made in this talk.

<iframe width="505" height="314" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/t7Xr3AsBEK4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

As with absolutely everything, you can do smartphone social networking too much, but reasonable people set [reasonable boundaries](/2006/08/23/moderation-proof/). Yes, I have been in a room with two other people, and every one of us was using their smartphone. But I've also been in a room with two other people in which all three of us were reading books. Does that mean that books are destroying our relationships? Down with reading! Why aren't we talking to each other?! Give me a break.

The world is getting better for humans by almost every metric, but something in our brains makes us long for days of yore when life was actually harder than it is now. You know that quote by Stephen Hawking?

> Time travel might be possible, but if that's the case, why haven't we been overrun by tourists from the future?

Perhaps it's just that no one wants to come back and live in the relative squalor.


7 posts from April, 2012