Beggars and ducks.

Now I usually never do handouts or buy random shit from people on the street. Not because I'm against what they are doing, but I decided this time, what the hell. Today when I was downtown I gave a guy a dollar cuz he was selling newspapers to support homeless people. I didn't take the newspaper. I knew I wasent gonna bother reading it anyways. He was friendly and what not, but that wasent the problem. See, what I wasent paying attention to was that he wasent the only one out there tryin to sell shit. The other guys saw me give him a buck so they targeted me to try to sell me shit too. oops. I found myself with more attention than I prefer, which happens to be none.

So what does that have to do with ducks?

There is a group of ducks that live in my complex, contrary to the landowners preferences, whom explicitly tell everyone NOT to feed the wildlife. Most people around here don't understand why it's a BAD thing to feed them. They need to eat too after all. But when you feed a couple of 'em, more will come next time for food, and the crows and gulls will catch on that there is a smorgasbord being had. After all, its all about survival when you're a wild animal. Competition and stuff. And when you routinely feed them, they will have more babies, which will mean the group of ducks and what have you will get larger. Feeding wild animals is skewing the population equilibrium, causing an explosion of a species that eats and shits and the rest of the critters and plants in the environment cant buffer the change and well it can fuck up the whole food web. Cuz nature isn't just a sprinkling of random critters and vegetation sitting out there just hanging out waiting for you to go take a pic if you happen to be so inclined. It's that whole circle of life thing like what they vaguely introduced in that lion king movie.

Perhaps you reading this might be annoyed that I compared entrepreneurial sidewalk sellers with wild animals. Well I wrote this to note the similarities of behaviour; feed one duck, others come rushing over in hopes to get a piece of the action. As with these people; I gave one a dollar, others came rushing over in hopes to get a piece of the action. Looks like that whole survival competition thing applies in the business world too. But one thing I think is different is the population growth issue. These sidewalk sellers are trying to grow a business, not necessarily babies. I haven't done the detailed research on the correlations between income and how many babies people have on a small scale, and unsure if the global statistics on this matter translates to a more local intracultural scale. But it is worth a look at some point.

So yeah, moral of the story, if you give money to people on the street, all the others will target you in hopes you give them money too. And unless you're as rich as bill gates or whoever, you just may well end up begging on the street like them if you give a dollar to every homeless or sidewalk seller that is out there.

I honestly don't have a solution to this problem. It's not nearly simple enough for mainstream media to digest and throw up for the general consumption by the baby bird viewers. You know who figures shit like this out? Specialized motherfucking scientists. They learn about the world out there and how it works and they come up with solutions to mind bogglingly convoluted problems. Like the ones I just mentioned, which could be seen as easy to solve, but if you don't know this already, I will tell you. The more you learn, the more you realize you don't know NEARLY as much as you though you did. i.e. the more you learn, the less you know. So when I hear roumors about how science is on the down and out with Americans all I think is that this damn country is in a decline and China and India and who knows who else are gonna be up there on the successful chart and this experiment called America will be destroyed by ignorance.