TED Community » Chris Cavalari

About Me

Finish carpenter, writer, photographer, musician/composer, abstract artist, environmentalist. Age 51

Location:
United States, New Windsor, NY
Gender:
Male


Comments

  • TEDCred score: +0.80 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

  • A reply on Conversation: What are the best and worst laws and practices of your region/state/country

    Sep 24 2012: Yeah, subsidies are often stupid. How about tobacco? It couldn't possibly get much stupider than that. We pay taxes to smoke it, and they grow more, and it's deadly. Also, because we've insisted on growing so much corn over recent decades, countries that farmed it for centuries before we came into existence, like Mexico, can't grow it on small farms and compete anymore. We grow the corn, and the jobless Mexicans can come cut our grass and carry our Sheetrock up the stairs, so we don't have jobs and they don't have jobs, and we do their jobs and they do our jobs and its a big happy global economy. But it ain't. It isn't a free market. There has never been a true free market in a country or a region ever. Name one.
  • A reply on Conversation: Is our math wrong? Is it our assumption of zero, or absolute nothingness?

    Sep 23 2012: Good Day Casey. I meant that the one person has zero apples, so zero matter.
    If he leaves the room to the next, there are zero apples in the next room.
    A person can have zero of any specific matter.
  • A reply on Conversation: What are the best and worst laws and practices of your region/state/country

    Sep 23 2012: Pat Gilbert. I apologize to you and he, I'm new with Ted, and new with an ipad.
    Thought I was replying to his comment.
  • +2

    A comment on Conversation: Do people love or hate their job?

    Sep 23 2012: I think your a, b, c, and d are a little pedantic. No one loves their job every single day. I think an e is in order. e) they have been doing their job for decades, they are very good at it, they make good money at it, and to change careers and learn something different is not going to come even close to the income of their occupation they've gotten very knowledgeable about and good at. I'm a finish carpenter, I'm very good at it, and have many references from satisfied customers. I'm fifty, it's getting a little physically tiring, but there is not a single thing in the world I could do for work that would come close to the pay.
  • A comment on Conversation: What are the best and worst laws and practices of your region/state/country

    Sep 23 2012: Yes, WE (The benevolent government) will make that decision. Do you disagree? Are you implying that in the society in which you dwell, you would prefer it if people were left to their own decisions about drinking while driving cars?
  • A comment on Conversation: Is our math wrong? Is it our assumption of zero, or absolute nothingness?

    Sep 23 2012: This is pretty fascinating, I read most of the replies. I know little of math, the most advanced math I ever used was bulk specific gravity calculations on construction materials. But let me see if I can stimulate some of your physics brains.
    Can it be that there is zero matter of one particular matter? Two people in a room, one holding an apple, one holding nothing. The particular matter that makes an apple, is zero, no? Zero of that matter, as opposed to oxygen in the room.
    I don't know, it's mind boggling. It reminds of of the novel The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco. Nothing from nothing leaves nothing - Billy Preston
  • A reply on Conversation: What are the best and worst laws and practices of your region/state/country

    Sep 23 2012: Wow, that's a low limit. Depending on body weight, one drink per hour can keep a person under the .08 limit. So you can't even have that, you probably can't have one drink at all. I hear stories from friends who blew .2 or more. That's gotta be twenty drinks, thirty, and you're driving! Terrible.
    Probably don't even know what day it is.
  • A reply on Conversation: What are the best and worst laws and practices of your region/state/country

    Sep 23 2012: My oldest son probably isn't a fan of the drinking and driving laws in this area either, as he recently got his second charge, and is doing weekends in jail for a few months. This after he already went to jail, to get off probation, and had it all licked, but he had to drink and drive again, now he has a new five years probation.
    He's 24. I don't see him much, but if I did, I guess I'd say, don't drink and drive. This time he crashed into someone in a parking lot and a kid was in the car. I've been to jail also, but not for drinking and driving. I met a guy in there, in county jail, awaiting sentence for drinking and driving. He hit a lady in her car, and her teenage daughter is no longer with us. He payed a lawyer thousands of dollars, and was hoping for a minimal sentence. I read in the paper after I got out that he got 5 years. Hey, the child's dead. He was a nice guy. We watched baseball. One or two shouldn't be over the blood alcohol content limit. Fifteen or twenty are, or two nice huge glasses of booze by a friendly barkeep. I've gotten pulled over a few times drunk and let go. Good cops know who's okay and who isn't. I don't know the breathalyzer limit in canada, but I find your one or two claim a little dubious. One or two isn't going to get anyone a driving while intoxicated charge in my neighborhood.
  • +1

    A comment on Conversation: What are the best and worst laws and practices of your region/state/country

    Sep 22 2012: I believe one of the best modern laws as practiced in the US is the drunk driving law. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, many people I knew, myself included, drove drunk. The police hardly ever caught anyone, they simply didn't persue it. This was the 1970s. In the 1980s, the police began aggressively finding and stopping drunk drivers, and now drunk driving is very much a serious offense which can result in jail time. Drunk driving is such a serious issue, as often innocent people are harmed or killed in accidents involving drunk drivers, that it's important and effective that the police spend much time and energy enforcing the law. Certainly, lives must be being saved. It is taxpayer dollars well spent in the justice system.
  • A comment on Conversation: When will Wall Street be kicked out of politics?

    Sep 21 2012: It isn't only Wall Street. Everywhere in politics, money talks. If I owned an asphalt paving company in any town USA, and I contribute to your campaign for congressman in my district, I'm going to expect that when you sponsor a bill that has road construction as part of it, that if the bill gets passed, and paving gets done, my company is going to get the work.
    It's all very cosy. See Whitewater and the Clintons.
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