I just think it’s the best Simon’s Cat cartoon, and have been giggling at it all day.

Ok…this one’s not about personal finance, or even the economy…it IS about artificial constraints and limits on free trade however…so it fits. And besides…I LIKE hockey.

So…the Chicago Blackhawks recently won the Stanley Cup, marking them as the best team in hockey this year. Now, as an old St. Louisian I can’t say I’m thrilled about the Hawks winning…well..ANYTHING…but I AM glad to see a very proud franchise with a long and storied history recovering from decades of crappy ownership at the hands of the late Bill Wirtz. It’s “important to hockey” if you will…and, honestly, much though i hate the hawks, i can still respect the organization.

The problem here is this…there’s really not much “franchise” or “history” or “image” left to ANY team. For example, those same Blackhawks just yesterday announced that they’d traded a key part of their Cup winning team, Kris Versteeg, to the Toronto Maple Leafs (arguably the WORST team in hockey last year) as part of a deal that sent considerably more talent to Toronto than Chicago received.

And it’s been happening everywhere. Our “own” Nashville Predators recently sent their team captain away in exchange for a draft pick, and a long standing stalwart on defense in exchange for a guy that’s ALREADY washed out of THEIR VERY OWN SYSTEM.

What’s going on?

Simple…welcome to salary cap and revenue sharing land, folks.

Not too many years ago (recently enough that many of the long contracts signed just beforehand are beginning to expire) the NHL and its players “negotiated” (which is to say, the owners rammed down the players’ throats) this new “Collective Bargaining Agreement” that was SO much better for the game, and all the ’small market teams” and what not. The major part of this agreement was that there would be an artificial and arbitrary cap on what teams could spend on payroll, and the teams that made the most money would, like good little socialist brothers, give money to those poor less fortunate “small market” teams.

Excuse me while I puke…just like I did back then.

Why must Nashville trade away 2 of its best players for little in return, including its Captain? Simple. The ONLY way the team stays profitable is by collecting money from other, more successful teams…it can’t, quite simply, make its own way in the world. For that to work, its budget is SO tight that it must stay below a certain payroll, one that is well below even the league mandated cap!

Chicago, of course, can make FISTFULS of money…they’re successful again, they have a long tradition and rabid fans. But…in their case, they not ONLY have an arbitrary limit (through no fault of their own) on what they’re allowed to spend to hire and keep the best people to work for them, but they have to budget for a few million to send Nashville’s way!

The end result?

NOBODY gets to keep talent they developed, NOBODY gets to hire the best people, train them, and reap the rewards, NOBODY gets to demonstrate or reward loyalty, and NOBODY sticks around long enough to become the “face” of a franchise. In short, the “Nashville Predators” don’t grow any sort of story, or history, or image…they are, from one season to the next, simply the collection of 25 or so guys who happen to have agreed to wear that uniform this year for whatever price the REST of the league says they’re allowed to be paid. Meanwhile, just up the road in the same division, the STANLEY CUP CHAMPIONS will probably have to mail half their cup rings to guys who couldn’t be there for the ring ceremony on opening night, because they play for a different team now.

There’s really no sense in rooting for ANYONE any more, other than the convienience of the closest arena.

Thanks, socialist mentality. You’ve left another corpse in your wake.

Long, probably boring, philisophical post follows. You have been warned.
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So, yesterday at the flying field, it was time to charge one of my flight batteries, using my new whizbangy Thunder AC6 charger. So, plugged the battery in as I had several other times, started everything up, and went to sit down for a bit.

About 30 seconds in, the charger beeped indicating an error. I went over to read the display, in order to determine the cause of the error, and was told…and I quote:

NIGGER OR ERR

*blink*

Being the rather “mission oriented” sort I am, my immediate response was “Um….wtf does that mean, and how do i fix it so I can charge my battery?”

Of course, the etymology geek in me pretty quickly jumped to “And whatever it means, how did THAT phrase get plugged in as the English translation???”

So, upon arriving home, I immediately googled the specific phrase. Very few results, even fewer in English. After checking a few forum threads, I became relatively frustrated.

You see, every thread had three things in common:

1) The original poster was doubted. The usual reaction was that he must be trying to spread some sick joke, or pull some sort of internet prank.
2) An argument ensued about whether or not the original post with the phrase should be edited to remove the “offensive” word.
3) Nobody ever actually resolved the issue, identified the meaning of the error, or how to resolve it. in other words, the problem remained unsolved.

Unwilling to give up so easily…and, frankly, at this point feeling as though I had something to prove, I started asking around, looking for some more etymological help. Eventually, I stumbled across this gem. It is, of course, a portugese forum. A little playing with google translate however, will reveal that the 6th post in the thread includes the following definition for “nigger”:

um motivo oculto ou fator desconhecido que afeta uma situação de maneira adversa

The English translation? “an ulterior motive or unknown factor affecting a situation adversely”

Later an RC thread in Thai found a very similar definition and resulting translation.

Ok…so mystery solved. There are at least a FEW languages where the word “nigger” is defined, roughly, as some sort of unknown error. In other words, something went wrong, we’re not quite sure what.

Even more significantly, in English itself, it’s not at all unusual to see the word used to indicate precisely such a situation. Agatha Christie, W Somerset Maugham, and even the fictional Frank Hardy of The Hardy Boys all use the phrase “the nigger in the woodpile” to mean strange, suspicious, or unknown circumstances. See : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger_in_the_woodpile#Literature

You’ll even note that EJ Dijkstra used the term quite specifically to mean that something (the term software engineering in this case) was a suspicious or dubious term.

So…with just a bit of due diligence, we find that it’s perfectly reasonable that one ignorant (by which I mean truly unaware) of the connotations of the word might, in translation, quite legitamately select the word “nigger” as a short (remember, this is a small LCD display…space is at a premium) way of expressing the concept that some error of unknown origin has occured.

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So what’s the lesson in all this? Simple. Here are a few comments culled from such sources as http://www.rcshortcourse.com/forum/showthread.php?p=48944 and http://www.flyinggiants.com/forums/showthread.php?t=43991

“Maybe someone from whereever did it on purpose as a sick joke.”
“I think you are some kind of joker.”
“I believe this is either some kind of joke, or someone who believes we should only buy American trying to sway people away from China made products”
“no way will that show up on the charger.”
“you may want to consider editing your post.”

Note, throughout, that the MEANING of the error…or what steps to take to resolve it…are the last thing discussed, if at all…and no solution is ever forthcoming in ANY of those threads.

We…as a culture…LOOK for chances to become offended! We prefer to cry “offense, offense”, and point out how grand we are for not using such words, rather than consider the possibility that a simple mistake of ignorance has been made, and seek to address the problem.

We prefer, in short, to point out how self righteous we are, AT THE EXPENSE OF ADDRESSING THE ISSUE AT HAND.

The most OBVIOUS of answers…that a simple error has been made…is not only the last solution we’ll consider, we REJECT IT OUT OF HAND! Impossible! That CAN’T be a typo! it MUST be an evil, nefarious plot by some inconsiderate boob hell bent on causing offense.

Indeed…we even label the WORD ITSELF as offensive! A word CAN NOT BE SO. A word is a harmless collection of letters, with no power of its own to be offensive. It is the fault neither of the word, NOR THE PERSON QUOTING ITS APPEARANCE in an unexpected location that a group of people decided in the 1800’s to turn it into a sickening pejoritive.

Quiote bluntly…we’re more interested in finding fault with others than we are with fixing the problem…and we will falsely accuse without evidence, critique with bias, and indeed lend traits to inanimate objects they can not possibly posess in our effort to do precisely that.

I have 3 words for all of you.

GET
OVER
IT

You who find offense at the mere presence of a word, and are UNWILLING to even CONSIDER THE POSSIBILITY that its presence might be legitamate, if unfortunate, simply are NOT as important as you think you are. You are not only not as superior as you believe yourself to be, you are, in fact, destroying the very idea of what it means to be productive.

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Our lesson then for the day, boys and girls, is as follows:

When you allow your perceived rank or status amongst others to determine your approach to a situation, YOU are a second hander. YOU are not contributing to the solution, you are EXTENDING the problem.