Netflix Quandary

Dear James-

When I was at my daughter's home 2 months ago for a weekend visit, I used her computer to log onto my Netflix account. The computer saved my account information and since then, my daughter's boyfriend has been watching videos on my account. I am a very lawful person and I feel he is abusing my account privileges. James, how should I handle this situation delicately?

Sincerely Lawful Larry from Fresno

***

Rapid technological advances in the past few decades have created a rather sizable cultural dichotomy between individuals only a single generation apart. It used to be that to steal a video you'd have to leave your house, go down to the local video store, snatch what you wanted without being seen in those fish-eye mirrors and walk around the magnetic sensors without getting caught. What's more, all the clerk had to do was pretend not to notice and grab your license number as you drove away and you were suddenly in jail for a crime that saved you a buck and a half. In the old days petty crime was risky and difficult. This lead to a generation of people throwing up their hands at the whole premise of theft and developing a culture of lawfulness whereby instead of taking pride in things you do, you take pride in what you don't do (actually the same mechanism that rebellious teenagers use to gain social status by opting out of things that take time or energy).

The underpinnings of this cultural legacy have, however, been severely eroded by the advance of technology. Now that it's actually easier to take something illegally than to obtain it legally it just doesn't feel like stealing anymore. The whole process is now similar to more culturally accepted practices like scavenging or looting, except with fewer wild dogs to compete with.

Confrontation is usually somewhat uncomfortable, and may lead to a long speech by your daughter's boyfriend about how the corporations are stealing from artists and how free speech is being oppressed. This could take up to ten minutes of your time. For these reasons I'd recommend rationalizing his behavior. Fortunately Netflix is a fairly successful corporation that employs a large number of people, and you’re rationalizing a practice that has been growing in popularity since the advent of shareware in the early 90’s. This means that there are likely people that work at Netflix that are also illegally accessing copyrighted material. As I understand it by the rules of rationalization this fact allows you to steal anytime you’re in the vicinity of a Netflix product, or if the name Netflix has been mentioned in the past ten seconds. Please note that the rules of rationalization tend to be somewhat fluid, so make sure to check the most recent update before going on a shoplifting spree wearing a Netflix logo-emblazoned vest.

If mimicking the behavior of an amorphous and strictly hypothetical group of people for some reason doesn't actually assuage your moral sensibilities then there may be another option. Have you considered surrepticiously changing the password of your account and then denying all knowledge of what happened while feigning early onset senility? I hesitate to mention this classic gambit for fear that its ubiquity makes the advice nearly useless, much like saying "tie your shoes to avoid falling," however, I get paid by the word.

Best of luck,
Good tidings,
Merry Unbirthday
Daddy needs a new pair of shoelaces,

James

To Talk to Girls...

James,

How can I appear less creepy to the opposite gender. I just always seem to come off the wrong way when I'm trying to pick up girls.

Thanks,


Mallory


Normally I advice against empathy. It seems to mostly be a way to double the number of problems you have to deal with, while simultaneously halving the power you have to solve them. In this instance, however, a little empathy might actually be your best bet. Understanding what women find creepy isn't as hard as you'd imagine, you just have to walk (about) a mile in their shoes. With this in mind, put on a pair of women's pumps, or at least something sensible enough to get you to the nearest gay bar. Hang out there for a bit soliciting pick up attempts from the local citizenry. If you haven't blown your cover as a straight man completely after an hour you should have a fair sized array of pick up lines. Remember all the ones that made the hair on the back of your neck stand on end and your teeth grit? Don't use those. Now change your shoes, take a walk down the street to the nearest straight bar, walk inside and and strike up a conversation in the same manner that the more pleasant men you met earlier used. While doing this try to keep the number of times you glance at the girl's chest below the number of inches of cleavage her top displays.





These two tips should cover your bases if you're exhibiting any sort of standard level creepiness.





Best of Luck,


James

You're Fired: A guide to friendship.

Dear James,

I spend most of my social time around my two best friends. One of them is really a great, fun girl who enhances my life. The other is often sour, bored, or negative, and she spends most of our time together texting her boyfriend. How do I "divorce" one friend while still being able to spend a lot of time with the other?

Sincerely Susan

When laying off a friend from their position, many people will advise you to be open and honest with the friend. Beware these people for they are social parasites, seeking to incite gossip-worthy events in your life for their own voyeuristic pleasure. If you receive this advice from someone, try to quickly distract them from the topic by expressing disapproval of a nearby bystander's style of dress. If you're lucky the promise of immediate gossip-gratification will trump the slow and unreliable build up of drama in your own life.

Remember this: Always avoid being honest with someone close to you about their flaws lest it encourage them to do the same with you. In a poll of people ages 18-45, "facing our flaws" was rated the third most dreaded situation after public speaking and being eating by cannibals (in that order). Some might point out that suffering through a single honest exchange might, in the grand scheme of things, be easier on the other person as the single traumatic event could be quickly overcome as opposed to potentially months of being strung along in a state of growing disheartenment and insecurity. These people have failed to take into account how our sense of guilt "helps" us to assess what's right for other people. Guilt accrues only when we form memories of something to feel guilty about. These memories invariably form from acute instances of suffering. The dull ache elicited by passive aggression and its ilk just isn't going to register strongly enough with most people to actually evoke guilt in them. Thus we see why passive aggression is so popular, and why it's the exact right strategy for you.

To begin, start posting more on your facebook page about how busy you are. Try to exaggerate the amount of time you spend on any given task. Never just post about how you need to brush your teeth; You need to find your toothbrush (and man, you haven't seen it in like a nebulous large-sounding amount of time!) wait until your bathroom is available, and consult your dentist about your burgeoning concerns over probiotic imbalances caused by the removal of useful digestive bacteria. Facebook has created a culture of ordeals where all of life's annoyances or activities are made to sound Herculean in scope; Take advantage of this to sow the seeds of your future excuses. This will chip away at your friend's sense of your availability, and indeed should remove altogether their expectations for any sort of rational excuses, or rationality in general if you play your cards right. This sort of nonspecific approach should keep you free to see your higher priority friends, and may even make them feel special that you're willing to put aside such important sounding neuroses on their behalf.

No solution is perfect though and eventually you'll be cornered. This is particularly likely if you're still making time for mutual friends. For these situations you're going to need to be able to stave off the guilt from your avoidance of them by spending time with them. The important thing to remember is that your behavior is in no way engaging or entertaining. Naturally social and vivacious sorts may have issues pretending to be properly lackluster, but if you're this sort, don't worry; You have a perfect example of how to act right in front of you. Mimic the more noisome behavior of your friend. This should work to prevent any positive reinforcement for all that hard work they put into pinning you down while simultaneously giving you a since of cleverly ironic self-righteousness; Something more prized than silver in many communities(1).

Finally, make sure to instill a sense of abject confusion in the friend about your day to day schedule. The last thing you need is someone you're trying to avoid knowing where you are or what you're doing at any given time. Post more status updates explicitly from work at random times throughout the day. Frequently comment on vaguely imminent trips you'll be taking to maintain a sense of elusiveness, and finally, swap cars with your other friends "for fun" insuring that you'll always have a different car parked in your driveway.

Note that if all this fails and you find that no amount of flakiness can shake your friend without endangering your other relationships, then as a last resort you should consider going into business with your friend. An unwritten, poorly formulated business venture is the undauntable executioner that can end any relationship up to and including the infant/mother bond(2).

Best of luck to you,
James

Notes:

1: For the gold standard you need to be patronizingly faux-helpful.

2: Some claim that the data collected to prove this was somewhat biased by the tendency for most mother/infant buisness ventures to involve the sale of the infant by the mother.

Debate for the Masses

Sometimes we are called upon to enter an argument on a topic we know nearly nothing about. This could be for any number of reasons; Pershaps somone is trying to convince us of something that fits uncomfortably with our pre-existing beliefs, or worse, maybe they're trying to get us to actually do something we don't want to. Now of course there's always the option of refusing to listen, shutting them down outright, and in fact this has worked wonderfully for many a two year old. The problem comes when you want to avoid appearing closeminded and obstinant in a situation where you'd rather these traits go unnoticed. Offering a few specious(1) rationalizations to justify your position can be a very effective means of passive-aggressively frustrating challenges to your worldview. True masters of these tips can even appear rational throughout the conversation. One of the best ways to do this is to quote well-respected people. Within our culture it has come to be a venerated tradition to back our positions with out-of-context, unverified quotes of people that are highly respected for reasons unrelated to the subject. As these quotes are usually historical in nature and quite short it doesn't naturally occur to most to expect them to contain anything explicitly linked to the decisions they are meant to inform. Vague and tangential relationships more than satisfy the standards we as a culture hold.

One apparent drawback of this technique is the requirement of memorizing quotes that can be used to support innaction and resistance to change in a wide variety of topics. Thankfully a study published by the Bureau of Derived Social Mathmatics(2) has found that adding together the average inaccuracy of a quote taken out of context, to the average inaccuracy of a quote that hasn't been verified, and the inaccuracy accrued by applying it to a self-assessed tangentially related topic result in an erroneous rating of 1.2(3) times that of the average brazen-grade lie. This means that if you just substitute a brazen lie in the guise of a quotation you're actually being 17% more honest than if you try to say something genuine.

Who could fault you for that?

Of course not all of us can come up with legitimate sounding sound bites on the fly. Sometimes we're taken by surprise and need something simple quickly. For these instances I find subtly changing the topic from what is being discussed to how you feel about what is being discussed comes naturally to most, and can completely shift the playing field in your favor. After all, you might not know the first thing about the issue of public healthcare, but on the matter of how you feel about it you're the world's leading expert. The trick to making this transition is to take a claim that is hard to pin down and add "I feel" to the front of it. Say for instance the idea of publicly funded water fluoridation rubs you the wrong way, but you don't actually know anything about it. Try saying something like "I feel that adding chemicals(4) to our water is an unhealthy trend, and who knows where it could lead next?" Note that you haven't actually made any real claims about the outside world here. How are they to respond to something like this? There's nothing to contradict, so they have to rely on just saying more than you. If this is the tactic they take though, you are at the advantage. There is a nearly infinite number of non-statements you can make about any given topic, whereas they, who rely on an ever-dwindling supply of related facts, are squandering their resources. For them it will be akin to laying siege to a twinkie factory.

These tips will carry you through a lot of arguments, but be careful; They tend to work best when you're responding to somone that's actively challenging your position. If you want to go out and challenge other people, you will have to make an attempt at sounding genuinely knowledgeable. In our society ignorance is fine, but aggressive ignorance can leave you a social pariah if you don't follow some very specific rules. Rule one is to establish for yourself some credentials that are seemingly related to the topic; "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV" is a classic, or there's the ever-popular "I have a bachelor's degree.(5)" To avoid having to deal with your lack of knowledge keep these arguments short, either by feigning frustration with your target's ignorance, or by pretending they started the argument and switching to one of the above techniques.

A combination of these techniques should ensure that you never precisely lose an argument, and, if you want to avoid change and new ideas, "not precisely losing" is exactly where you want to be in life.

Footnotes:

1: This is one of the best insults available in polite company. If you don't know what it means, look it up and began using it immediately at dinner parties. If you're not regularly invited to dinner parties crash them so that you can use this word.

2: Information on the BDSM and their mission statement can be found by the power of google.

3: Some BDSM members actually argue that this should be considered higher now, as the calculations were done previous to the spread of facebook meme culture.

4: Say "Chemicals" with foreboding if you can. This is one of those key words that can make or break an uneducated opinion.

5: If you have more than one, mention this. People will be impressed, probably because you managed to avoid the real world for twice as long.

Daddy Issues

"Dear James,

I find that no matter what I do I am always a dissapointment to my father. His comments and manner always seems to make me feel inadequate, like I could have done better or more. I can't stand it any longer! Is there anything I can do?

Thanks,
Inadequate in Illinois"

Dear Inadequate,

As with most social problems, inadequacy can easily be combated with a capitalistic approach. Our society evolved to encourage resource expenditure for every conceivable social ill, and feelings of inadequacy are in fact the premiere example of this phenomenon. In fact, it is the exploitation of inadequacy that pioneered the modern day marketing strategies.

So what am I suggesting, precisely? I’m telling you to go out and buy stuff. Getting new toys to play with, new cloths to attract, and new status symbols to flaunt doesn’t just alleviate sadness, it can also build up other’s opinion of you. This will not only make you feel good about yourself, but eventually you may actually garner more respect from society than your father. Then you can begin the satisfying process of making him feel inadequate.

But what happens if you don’t base all of your opinions of human worth on material possessions? The answer is that you need to start now. Obviously you’re not living up to your current values, probably because of their abstract nature. If you value being a good person, how exactly do you measure how good you are? Is there a system of points? How much is sending grandma a get-well card worth in comparison to returning an old man’s wallet? Without any guidelines to judge such things you end up basing them off your current emotional state, which will create a never-ending cycle of despair and self-loathing. Of course if you’re the sort of person that’s into that, and I know that it’s a “lifestyle choice” which is growing in popularity, then go for it. Since you’ve written me about it as if inadequacy were a problem, however, I’m assuming you’ve decided to go for mainstream happiness (usually measured in Kilo-Kittens). For that you need to have some measurable success, and what could be easier to measure than the dollar value of your lifestyle? Just look at your monthly bank statement. As long as it remains at or close to 0 then you must be as happy as your income allows you to be. If that’s not happy enough for you, consider borrowing money from your father. This works the dual purpose of restricting his access to wealth while increasing yours, making you comparatively a better person than him. Make sure to throw this in his face no less than a few weeks before you borrow money from him next and your feelings of inadequacy are bound to be replaced by a sense of smug superiority in no time.

Best of luck,
James

Indecision about Pregnancy

"Dear James,

My husband and I have been married for a number of years, and of late he's begun to talk about having children. The thing is, I'm not really sure I'm ready for a child. How can I handle this decision? How can I handle my husband?

Thanks,
Lost in Los Angeles"

The easiest way to make a decision between two things is generally by flipping a coin. This can be a particularly good idea if you’re prone to making bad decisions, as it’ll raise your odds to 50%, a sizable improvement for many people. That said, some people in your position would have a problem explaining to any future children what a controlled accident is.
Still, while the coin flip may help you avoid the stress and worry of a decision, when others are involved you still have to devise a method of getting your way. Because making major decisions like this are often important to others in your life (say, a husband for instance) stating a position openly can lead to conflict, and conflict can lead to discomfort should be avoided at all costs (to others) you need to find a means to get your way without others becoming aware of it. For this most choose to delve into the wonderfully safe world of passive aggression. The premise of this strategy is that the best way to win an argument is to keep your opponent oblivious to it. As long as your husband isn’t aware that you’ve made a decision counter to what he wants then he won’t try to change your mind, something that is frequently unpleasant. One way you can consider keeping your decision against having children on the lowdown is to fake your own infertility. For added power within your relationship you may even try to blame your husband for “his” failure to impregnate you. Fortunately you’re female, and most forms of birth control were designed by men for men’s convenience. As a symptom of this phenomena most birth control can be used almost invisibly to the male partner. Can you imagine being male and trying to slip on a condom without your partner’s notice*?
Bare in mind that several problems can arise from using this technique for too long. Your spouse might start to get suspicious, or he may simply want to start seeing a fertility consultant. Either of these could start to put a lot of pressure on you and entirely defeat the purpose of your passive aggression. At this point you’re probably going to want to cave entirely to his desires without ever having mentioned your hesitance. While this seems like quite a commitment, potentially creating a mistake that will haunt you for the rest of your life, at least you’ll never suffer the discomfort of having an occasionally reoccurring argument.

Best of Luck with your new child,
James

*Some scholar’s believe that the bondage fetish actually started from a particularly clever male infantaphobe.

As a reminder, please remember that my advice is open to the public and anyone wishing help on their personal matters to be published to an internationally read forum should email me at advicefromjames@hotmail.com.

Dating and Dollars

"Dear James,

I have a great job that I love, and it has great benefits. Perhaps not official benefits, I suppose, but the office supply security is pretty lax. Anyhow, the problem is that I just started dating this really great girl. Well, maybe not great, but certainly very pretty. My job doesn't really pay me much though, and I'm not sure if I can afford to keep her interested. What can I do?

Thanks or somethin',
Jersey Jim"



Dear Jersey Jim,

Most guys, myself included, have run into this very same dilemma. Now for some of us, we’re not actually too poor to afford our girlfriends, we’re just generally cheap. The theory, however, remains the same. You need the services of a dating financial advisor. These professionals can help you get the most date-related bang for your buck in a wide variety of scenarios ranging from blind dates to 10-year anniversaries. My own dating finance expert, Mr. William Taft, gave me a number of money saving tips that I will now illegally pass on to you. First, remember that many clothing lines considered fashionable are actively trying to emulate second-hand apparel or out of date trends. You can cut out an expensive middleman by just shopping directly at second hand stores. Seems so obvious, doesn’t it? Well there is one tiny hang up. Most of the status of wearing a certain type of clothing these days comes from the label, so you’ll need to find some way of duplicating that label onto your old clothing. The easiest way to do this is to go to expensive clothing shops with a pair of scissors and start stealing the labels specifically. Most store security systems are ill prepared to defend against this tactic, but just in case you do get caught remember to always go in with a partner you can use as a scapegoat or distraction. It helps if said partner is a racial minority, but if that’s not doable just get anyone that looks poor.

Second, remember that ebay is a great place to get deals on stuff you don’t actually want. The problem one usually runs into with auction sites is that if you’re looking for something specific, then others probably are too. What’s more, they might have the audacity to offer a reasonable price. If, however, you’re purchasing something for someone else you can base your search almost entirely off of pricing parameters. The ability to look for good deals independent of any actual desire for the product puts you, the consumer, in control. This way you can afford to give your date gifts that appear far more expensive than they actually are. And if it’s not something she’d actually want, don’t sweat it. You’re a guy; just play up how clueless you are at every opportunity and you should be fine.

Finally, a good financial planner will remind you to be constantly on the look out for cheap ways to raise your social status. Buy a sleek looking second-hand cell phone. Don’t get service for it; you don’t need to actually be able to call people to cash in for the social status. Just pull it out to periodically check your messages. You’ll never have any, of course, but she doesn’t have to know that. The other advantage of a cell phone without a service plan is that you’ll never have it go off in movie theatres, the car, or on the toilet. This added convenience is easily worth not being able to send or receive calls. More importantly than a cell phone, see if you can’t get blackmail material on someone with a nicer car. Some good leverage should be enough to wrangle it out of ‘em for the occasional date and may even save you money in the long run when you suffer your first quarter/mid/two-fifths life crisis.

All of this should get you off to a great start, but to maintain the subtle deception and dollar squeezing ballet that is dating above your means I strongly suggest a professional. Tell him James sent you.

I get discounts that way.

Best of luck,
James

*This column sponsored by William Taft Dating Financial Services, where our service is as great as our girth!