John – Page 98 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Beer, Technology, Beer, Tide Pods, Beer, Civilizational Stability, and Beer

“We’ll soon stage an attack on technology worthy of being chronicled in an anthem by Rush!” – Futurama

In honor of Göbekli Tepe, I decided to take a morning run, but autocorrect changed it to “morning rum,” so, change of plans, guys!

Göbekli Tepe is an archeological site that dates back almost to 10,000 B.C. (12,000 years ago in metric). 12,000 years is a long time, in fact it is older than both agriculture and cities, but younger than my mother-in-law. But the other thing that it’s not older than . . . is beer. At Göbekli Tepe they found brewing vessels. And these weren’t small vessels, they were huge vats up to 160 liters in size, complete with chemical residue from brewing beer. If they can find chemical evidence of beer 12,000 years later, there’s no wonder mom could smell it even after I’d chewed a pack of minty gum.

This is how I like to imagine they figured out that beer was brewed at Göbekli Tepe.

Beer is older than farms. Beer is older than agriculture. The logical question is this: did people start cities and agriculture . . . just so they had beer on a regular basis? Is the reason that we have cities right now . . . the liquor store?

It looks like that’s the case. Nomadic man might not have had Netflix® or Ruffles©, but those weren’t necessary. Most studies show that when man was nomadic, the rates of leisure were higher than they are today. The things they did for food (hunting, fishing, and gathering) are enough fun that we do those as hobbies today. But what was missing?

Beer. Without a steady stream of beer there wasn’t any way they could say, “Hold my beer and watch this.” Why is this important? It’s important because everyone knows that no really good story starts with the words, “So, I was having a salad . . .”

The technology of beer brewing changed mankind. And I’ll assure you, living in the very first cities that we know of would be nothing like living in a city today – no Uber. These first cities were founded around 7,500 B.C. in Mesopotamia, and had really cool names like Eridu, Uruk, and Ur that remind me of Swedish death metal band names.

I think that someone triggered him by giving him a hug.

But the first residents of Ur weren’t like you or I. Exactly how they were different is probably difficult to even guess, but we’ve had nearly 500 generations between them and today’s humans. And that’s changed us significantly – back in the timeframe that Ur was being formed, most men didn’t reproduce, but most women did. When civilization was getting started around 6,000 B.C., only one guy in 17 reproduced. Yes. The average baby-daddy in Uruk in 6,000 B.C. was impregnating 17 females. So, your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandma was a tramp, all because people made cities to get beer.

What is not shown very well is that the woman’s side scale was nearly three times the scale on the men’s side. This is graphical evidence that your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandma was a tramp. Oops. Mine, too. Grandma, how could you?

In the United States today, about 3/4 of men father children while 85% of women reproduce. This is significantly better than the average I’ve seen that shows throughout history 80% of women had children while only 40% of men fathered children. Technology, in this case agriculture and beer, has changed humanity. Beer goggles appear to work both ways in the modern United States.

Regardless, change from nomadic human to agricultural/urban human has taken us thousands of years to adapt to, and, honestly, I’m still not sold on the cities. But I’ll keep the beer, thank you.

Other changes that were made possible by the move from nomadic human to urban human include the first:

Requirement for Money,
Economic Viability of Slavery,
Permanent Government,
Debt,
Taxes, and
Bar Tabs.

We don’t remember the things that were problems before agriculture, probably because we were having such a good time not living in cities that we didn’t bother to develop a written language to gripe about our problems. What’s to gripe about? I have to go hunting again? I don’t have a job because there aren’t any jobs so I get to go fishing? Bummer.

Over time, in the thousands of years since the development of agriculture, coping mechanisms evolved that created stability in the “new” urban-agricultural society. Pretty significant adaptations included:

Organized Religion,
Creation of Classes,
Division of Labor,
Eating Tide© Pods, and
Laws.

Shhh. Don’t warn the kids. Let evolution run its course.

These adaptations allowed post-agricultural civilization to become stable, or at least stable enough so that empires could form. But as people changed their environment, their environment changed them. It takes seven generations (at minimum) to create a new dog breed.

How long until a new type of human is bred by the new conditions in the city? If I were to guess, given that humans are much more complicated that it would take 20 or more generations. Rather than going off to hunt they’d have to do the same job, day after day, for years at a time. Rather than start a fight with a machete because they were mad about friends who put mayonnaise and strawberry jelly in their hard hat, they’d laugh. That alone probably took about five hundred years.

Some people didn’t make the transition. The result, if you’re a guy? You don’t breed.

Monogamy became more firmly embedded in society only in the West, and was primarily spread by Western society, being a recent (within the last 200 years) in most places that aren’t Western. This had an amazingly stabilizing effect on society as a whole – fathers have more of a stake in the future of society. Sure, kings and powerful guys had mistresses, but for the most part more men (on a percentage basis) got to have children than ever in history.

DEFCON 1: This would be The Mrs.’ reaction to me having a mistress.

Thousands of years of evolution of both society and of the humans that make up society led us to a fairly stable way of doing things. Monogamy, sex roles, class, and hierarchy allowed life to proceed smoothly, and wealth to be created in society. I’m not saying that it was better than hunting and fishing all day, but there was certainly more beer. And after electricity, cold beer. The 1950’s was probably the height (in the United States) of this society in many respects.

Women didn’t work as much – they didn’t have to.
Divorce rates were low – mom and dad stayed together.
Illegal drug use was low – yes, people drank. That was the point of society, right?
Church attendance was high.
Biggest problem of 1950’s schools? Gum chewing.

The last sixty years, however, has led to the greatest amount of technological and social change in any sixty years in the history of humanity. What changes?

Birth Control – The Pill was introduced in 1960 – graph below. You’d have thought this would have led to lower births out of wedlock, but, not really. I don’t really understand this, since very few babies are married when born, outside of Pakistan.

I was born out of wedlock. Not married at all. Oh, and neither was my mom. Sometimes the trend is your friend.

Significant Immigration from Non-Western Cultures – massive influxes of people in societies happens in history, but every time that it happens, it later gets called “an invasion.”

I’m still looking for examples of successful multi-cultural civilizations. I even went onto a communist website to search for them. Still came up empty, though I do realize now that real communism has not been tried yet. Whew! I was worried that the unending stream of failures meant that it would fail here, too.

Massive Welfare – In 1965 President Johnson proclaimed the Great Society – we’d make everyone rich. Despite hundreds of billions in welfare spending, the only thing the Great Society created was roughly the same amount of poor people, but poor people who now depend on the government. Might be correlated with illegitimate births?

Thankfully, we’ve seen no more need of welfare after spending this much and poverty and people protesting for more money has disappeared. Yay! I love winning!

Fragmentation of Communication – in 1983, the highest-rated television program in history (non-sports) in the United States happened. It will never happen again. Television has fragmented into hundreds of channels, plus dozens of online services, giving millions of options. But the common culture from communication is gone.
Decline in Religion – Religious observance has dropped in America, despite religious belief being vitally important during Colonial times, when it is estimated that up to 80% of colonists were regular church goers, compared with 37% today. You may not be a religious, but it’s yet another commonality that we’ve lost.
The Internet – prior to the Internet, most person to person communication was local. Now? Left-handed dentists with impaired vision can form their own FaceBorg® group. The Internet brings us together. The Internet also allows us to fragment.

The Internet might be the most significant technological change of recent memory. There was a time when we actually argued about facts rather than hitting Google® to solve an argument. Now? Nope. But the Internet isn’t a tool for unity, it’s a tool for fragmentation.

Start with Futurama™, end with The Simpsons©. Is there anything beer can’t do?

We’ve been living with technological change for thousands of years and trying to cope with it since we started the first cities. Who knows where this will all end up? And to think, it all started with some guy founding the first city 10,000 years ago saying, “Hold my beer, watch this . . . .”

Wedlock, Divorce Graphs, H/T Secular Patriarchy (LINK).

Göbekli Tepe picture via Teomancimit [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

This post was spawned by some comments with James over at Bison Prepper (LINK), but no bison were harmed during the production of this post.

Currency Collapse Explained Using Sexy Bikini Girl Graphs, Part II

“You’re the one that’s collapsing. Been sitting at that contraption for twenty-two years. It’s time you tried a girl.” – The Addams Family

It is related to the post. I promise. That makes it literature, so you have to like it. It’s sophisticated and swanky.

This series of posts was inspired by a great e-mail from Ricky. This is Part Two. Part One can be found here (Big Swedish Coins, Italian Women Pole Vaulters, and the Future of Money, Part I).

Let’s – again – state the basic thesis in Ricky’s words:

“I’m right there with you that collapse is coming to our house of cards because of the way they were dealt. But after all of the individual survival dramas play out, survival ultimately depends on a community rising from the ashes. And the glue of a community is ultimately the deals made between its individuals. And money is the encapsulation of those deals.

“So when the dust settles and the smoke clears and the phoenix rises from the ashes of the eagle’s nest, there’s gonna need to be a reset on money. On what it is, and how it works.”

Last time we looked at the financial history of the United States up until the Civil War. The first Civil War, not the next one (Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming), I mean.

Just a few generations after the Revolutionary War, in the 1860’s, both halves of the United States defaulted on currency during the Civil War. The North defaulted on gold redemption in 1863, and the South printed Confederate currency like they were trying to make the Founding Fathers look like that one sailor that stayed in his bunk reading the Bible when the Seventh Fleet hit Sydney. My father-in-law swears that’s what he did, and no one with an Australian accent has shown up claiming to be The Mrs.’ long-lost sister.

Okay, after the Civil War, the United States is at least done with defaulting, right? I mean, we started up the Federal Reserve Bank™ in 1913 to stop these sorts of shenanigans, so that must have worked?

No. If the Federal Reserve ever pretended to have the mission of maintaining the stability of the dollar, it failed like one of Oprah’s diets.

Ricky sent this one. It’s perfect, with the exception that it doesn’t contain girls wearing bikinis. I think . . . we can do better. I think . . . we can Make Economics Sexy Again!

See, fixed that for you, Ricky. Graph is now 1000% better, unlike our currency. You can see her toes are pointed down into the sand, which shows that the value of the dollar is lower. Also, if I can point your attention to the years between 1950 and 1965 you can see what an amazing, um, time span that was.

In 1933, the United States had $4 billion in gold. Sadly, it owed $22 billion in gold that it would have to pay off in just a four years.

Solution?

Make owning gold by your own citizens illegal, and make them hand it in on penalty of going to jail if they don’t. After you’ve got those dollars, redefine the dollar so that it’s worth a lot less. Presto! You’ve stolen all the gold and then made the resulting “dollars” that your citizens have worth a lot less. Then you can give your cheaper dollars to other governments in payment. It’s like being Enron®, but with 100% less jail time, so it’s exactly like being a Kennedy.

So, yeah, I’d call that a default, too.

Finally in the 1970’s, the French decided that they could wake up from their wine and cigarette haze long enough to see that the United States was way short on the amount of gold necessary to pay all the debts that Johnson and Nixon created to get elected.

Defaulting on your currency is like a divorce: once is a mistake, twice is a trend, and by the third time….maybe, just maybe, it’s you. The French decided to be sneaky, and took all of their dollars, showed up at the bank, probably with a baguette under each arm, and requested gold. The United States essentially said, “Umm, we didn’t think that you thought we were serious about that. OMG, LOL!” and stopped giving anyone gold in exchange for their dollar. My scoring: yet another default.

Since August 15, 1971, the United States dollar is backed by our sterling record of fiscal responsibility, along with thousands of nuclear warheads. As Pop Wilder always used to say, “You get farther with a kind word and a sophisticated professional military and thousands of nuclear warheads than you do with just a kind word.”

I would my own discovery, the John Wilder Rule of Sexy Economics™: “You get more attention with bikini girl economics graphs than with just economics graphs.”

As careful study of this graph will show, the glorious years of 1970 led to the bare times to follow and a sensitive employment time in the early 1980’s. Unemployment never looked so good.

So, that’s a little bit about money along with some recent history. Looking at all of history, though, I’d say what happens with money depends upon the kind of collapse we expect to see. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll break collapses into three sizes. Why these three sizes? As of the time of writing I’m a bit thirsty, and the local convenience store only has three drink sizes. Here they are:

Medium: The definition of a Medium failure includes monetary easing. It could also include a default that may cause economic hardship, but doesn’t impact the government of the country or the ability of a country to issue its own currency. This describes all of the defaults of the United States.
Large: This involves the complete destruction of a currency. Common examples are Weimar Germany or modern-day Wakanda© In both cases, the currency imploded as the major engineering problem of the day was how to print more money, faster (hint: the Germans only printed on one side to double press production). In Germany, the change led complete dissolution of society and a rebuilding under . . . well, Literally That One Guy Nobody Can Mention. In Zimbabwe, it led to complete destruction of the currency and eventual loss of power for the guy who had been President for as long as Zimbabwe had been Zimbabwe.
Big Gulp®: This is the complete destruction of the economic as well as political system. Rome, long laboring under a fiat currency, finally imploded and left behind a smoking crater that took hundreds of years to fill. Thankfully, refills are only $0.29 with purchase of the official mug!

So what happens to an individual in one of these failures?

In a Medium Failure, you can keep your currency, if you like it, but what cost $100 a few years ago probably costs $1000 now. Everybody adapts and you can generally go about your business, but you’re poorer and not at all happy, and it looks a lot like the Housing Bubble of the 2000’s. Another analogy: it’s like you were forced to spend way too much time with my ex-wife.

The Housing Bubble can be seen pretty clearly here. Somewhere. Keep looking. You have my permission.

In a Large Failure, ultimately the currency is toast. Your money is gone. But the country will restart the economy using either a new currency, or just by adopting an outside currency that’s moderated by someone marginally more adult than you. Zimbabwe’s unofficial currency is the United States dollar, but there aren’t enough of them to go around, so many people use mobile currency that’s (more or less) run by cell phone companies. When your cell phone company has a much better record of fiscal restraint than your government? Yikes.

A Big Gulp© Failure is social collapse. The biggest one in recent Western history is Rome. The Roman Big Gulp® was so big that it spawned collapse after collapse in nation after nation as Rome shrank away from areas it could no longer afford to protect or govern. Great Britain is an example of the collapse. After the last Roman Legion left people buried their money . . . and never dug it up. Why?

The silver content of Roman coins in the late Empire consisted of waving a bit of silver over the top of the molten metal before a coin was made. Rome had gone full fiat. Roman coins, in the absence of Roman troops, were worthless. Money itself was abandoned, and barter was the key, when local bandits and warlords didn’t just take what they wanted.

You want a worthless currency? This is how you get a worthless currency..

How do we get to these collapses, and how likely are they?

Medium Failure: I think that there may be as high as a 70%-90% chance of a Medium Failure hitting the United States in the lifetime of the average reader. The challenges we will face with medical care (More Budget Doom, The Rolling Stones, an End Date, and an Unlikely Version of Thunderstruck) and the possibility that the politicians won’t resist the lure of free money promised by Modern Monetary Theory (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs). Read the articles at the link. They were written by a cool guy I know, but before he really focused on getting better.

As a reminder of how close this might be to happening, a penny costs about $0.02 to make, so to get your two cents worth only costs a penny now, and that’s after they took out all the copper. The copper alone in an old (pre-1979) penny is nearly $0.02. It would cost about $0.04 to make a copper penny today. A nickel costs $0.06 to $0.08 to make. A dollar in pre-1964 silver coins is worth $10.60 at the time of this writing, which tells you that we’ve really already failed at keeping the value of our money up.

Ricky points out some interesting alternatives to currency in some of the supporting links he sent. Just like Zimbabwe leaned on cell phone providers to be less insane and more trustworthy than the government, Facebook® is betting that its new currency, named the libra (LINK) will be less insane than the dollar, and has the added bonus of having the word “bra” as part of its name. Honestly, I would have thought that Facebook™ would have denominated its currency in selfies and named it the lookatme.

Student loan debt makes you feel like you can’t afford much clothing, and you’re between a rock and a hard place. And very fit and tan and covered with oil.

Large Failure: Large failures are big. I mean, it’s in the name “Large.” It generally comes after really horrible financial malfeasance for years. Our current medical payment system (which is really bad) will, if not fixed, lead to a large failure. Other notable large failures? The start and end of the Soviet Union. North Korea. Nationalist China. The country is still a country, and, with outside help and a new government, can, after a generation emerge from chaos.

I think there’s as high as a 40-50% chance this will happen within the lives of the average reader.

Big Gulp© Failure: What would lead to a modern Big Gulp™-Level, end of Rome type event? Nuclear war. Running out of hydrocarbons. Meteor impact on George Clooney’s ego. Catastrophic disease. Reuniting the Spice Girls®. Regardless of the cause, I could easily see a failure of this magnitude ending 90% of the human lives on the planet.

Big Gulp® failures might last 1,000 years, since the last one lasted 500 years. That means, since the time of Christ, Western Civilization was in a Big Gulp™ failure for 25% of the time. Still – it only happened once. I’d give a likelihood of 5-10% of this occurring within the lifespan of the average reader. Pray some of the Spice Girls© have bad tickers.

Okay, these aren’t the Spice Girls™, but their ascending height from left to right is the perfect way to show that whatever lines are on this graph are going up from left to right. I assume the thing going up is bad.

Checklist – Signs of a Currency Collapse:

Gasoline is priced in goats.
Bankers take cold pizza as mortgage payments.
You can pay off your medical school student loans with the change from buying a candy bar.
Bill Gates is bumming cash by cleaning windows of passing cars.
$100 bills are too cheap to use as notepaper.
Americans are caught sneaking into Honduras.
George Soros begins laying off politicians and selling some on E-Bay®.
The IRS starts giving a 25% discount for cash.
Your financial adviser will have helped you get to a small fortune, but only if you started with a large fortune.
You try to make a withdrawal at the bank and they tell you they have insufficient funds.

So, Ricky, there it is, Part I and Part II. See you in Stockholm to pick up our Nobel Prize™!

Don’t forget to bikini wax.

Big Swedish Coins, Italian Women Pole Vaulters, and the Future of Money, Part I

“Dollars? There’sa wherea my uncle lives. Dollars, Taxes!” – Duck Soup

We’re gonna need a bigger purse . . .

This post was inspired by a great e-mail from Ricky, which makes it the second reader-inspired post I’ve done this month. Heck, it’s the second in seven days. We’ll see the post I was originally going to do next week, probably. I plan these posts out weeks in advance and have a backlog of over a year’s worth of planned post topics, but the requests are just so much fun.

Here’s the basic thesis statement in Ricky’s words:

“So when the dust settles and the smoke clears and the phoenix rises from the ashes of the eagle’s nest, there’s gonna need to be a reset on money. On what it is, and how it works.”

There’s a lot more information from Ricky which may lead to yet another post, but this statement alone is a great taking off point.

To address this question, let’s go back to first principles. First, I’ll restate:

What does money look like after the collapse?

I’ll start from first principles so that everyone has an idea of where I’m coming from. The most basic first principle about money is this simple question:

What is money?

I can’t answer any better than to say that money is an idea. Sure, you’d look through all of the piles of money I keep at Chateau Wilder and say that those stacks of cash and piles of gold and silver doubloons were money. And they are money.

Heck, the Swedes once mined and refined so much copper (around the year 1600 A.D. or so) that they couldn’t sell it all, since the tuba, which uses approximately 89% of world copper production had yet to be invented. Being crafty Swedes they came up with the idea that the best way to use all that extra copper was to put Sweden on the “copper standard.” Since these Swedes were apparently very strong but not particularly bright, they took the concept to 11 and used nothing but copper coins as currency. Okay, sure, it’s silly. But we can make it Wilder-level silly: let’s not use lots of small coins, let’s make ludicrously large coins. I mean the Rosie O’Donnell of coins. Some of the coins they used were quite O’Donnellesque, with the largest one weighing about 45 pounds. You could get your lifting in by just going grocery shopping, which may explain why Planet Fitness® franchises were so unprofitable in Sweden in 1620.

Yes, a 45 pound coin. Don’t get me started about how large their pockets were, but as a hint they could hold an entire twelve pack, a dozen clowns and the case of Avengers: Endgame. FYI: This was a 10 “Daler” coin. Daler came from the Bohemian coin name “Thaler,” which later became Dollar.

In the simplest definition, money is just something that we agree is money. Money is perhaps the most abstract concept people deal with on a regular basis, and we’re forced to deal with it practically and emotionally even though most money doesn’t exist physically even as a dollar bill: it’s a ledger entry on a balance sheet on a bank, and it’s not backed by anything. At all.

Counting spare change was how the Swedish women trained for the 1644 Olympics®. But that’s back when men were men. In 2019, however, “men” can be pregnant and “women” can drive well. Soon enough? Men will cry and be in touch with their feelings.

Money can be a gold coin, or a promise for, say, a bushel of wheat or a cigarette. Money can also be a string of numbers or just a piece of paper. As long as there’s someone who will trade you a rifle or a beer or a T-34 tank for it, it’s money.

We’ve been dealing with “money as just an idea” for so long we even have a name for money which has less backing than a third Hillary™ presidential campaign: Fiat© money. Fiat comes from the Latin for “found on roadside dead” – oh, wait, that’s Ford®. Fiat™ is “fix it again, Tony,” which is more literally translated from the Latin as “let there be.” This means that fiat money is “let there be” money. Those Italians were good with language. It’s good when we keep Italians working on language, wine, and hot Italian chicks doing pole vault because Italian engineers can’t seem to figure out how to keep oil on the inside of the car.

In the best version of Europe, Germans chicks do shot put and car engine design. The Italian chicks do pole vault. Preferably in slow motion.

Money in the United States today is fiat money, made up money.

The net result is that we send money that we printed from cool paper and people from around the world fight for the opportunity to give us oil, gold, PEZ®, flat screen televisions, and other physical things. Heck, they even ship it to us using our made-up currency as payment for the shipping costs. To top it off, if we’re feeling lazy that day, a guy in comfortable shoes working in a windowless office in Washington D.C. will press a button and a computer will spit out strings of digits that we’ll use for money because paper is just too much trouble.

If the United States doesn’t have enough money, the solution is simple: we’ll print (or make up) some more.

If you’re shaking your head wondering how we convinced the world that this was a good deal, well, I am too. It might have something to do with all of those nuclear missiles and the strange thing that happens to world leaders that announce that they’re going to start trading internationally in currency other than the dollar. Or, heck, maybe the United States has a track record of really being super fiscally responsible?

Yes, there are many good reasons to take the dollar.

Well . . . no. In actuality, the United States defaulted on the very first debt it ever took on, represented by the Continental dollar, which was supposed to be (at the start) the same as a Spanish silver dollar. How badly did we default on that debt? Well, we ended up printing $241 million dollars, which doesn’t include the huge numbers of British forgery notes that were created during the Revolutionary War to mess with our economy. It was like we were trying to pay for muskets and wooden teeth with Tribbles® instead of real money. It was worse than Tribbles© – at least you can make good soup with a Tribble if you pluck it right. Nope – most of the creditors ended up with nothing, which makes a pretty poor soup unless you’re fasting (The Last Weight Loss Advice You’ll Ever Need, Plus a Girl in a Bikini Drinking Water).

Worst thing about Tribble© soup? The bones.

This particular default stung our Founding Fathers Parental Units (it is 2019, after all) so much that when the Constitutional Convention met, they added into the Constitution that “No State shall . . . make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts . . . .”

So, the United States learned its financial lesson and never ended up with financial problems again.

Just kidding. We’re still a financial basketcase. But we have nukes.

I hate to leave you on a cliffhanger, but this is now an average length post, and I’ve already written more than you’ve read here in Part 1 for Part 2, and I haven’t put the funny bits in yet. So, more coming on Friday which will work towards answering the thesis that Ricky put forward above.

Thanks, Ricky!

High Trust Societies, Low Trust Societies, Red Dawn, and Castro

“There is no promise you can make that I can trust.” The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Anyone seen my hobbits? I know I left them here. Or maybe the name was similar?

Note: I’ve had a tremendous number of emails since the Civil War post. If I haven’t gotten back to you, I will shortly. Thanks!!

On Friday and Saturday, The Mrs. and I took The Boy and Pugsley off to the nearby Big City for the weekend. The Boy and Pugsley had a 10 hour class, split between two days. That left The Mrs. and I to ride around the town. The Mrs. and I had lived in Big City years ago, so Big City was familiar, even though 8 miles of what had been vacant farmland when we moved away had been converted to strip malls, chain restaurants, big box stores, and the rest of the standard commercial establishments that make up nearly every generic copy of Big City in the Midwest. The farms had character. Each was different. This? This was as featureless and bland as Bernie Sanders’ forehead covered in mayonnaise and Monkee’s® music.

We stopped at one fast food restaurant for a snack while we waited for the boys to finish class for the night. We ate for a bit, and then I got up to get more iced tea. I walked back to the table.

“Now that’s why I’m glad we don’t live here anymore!” The Mrs. was furious.

Confused, I looked around, and back at the table. Nothing seemed to be amiss.

“Okay, umm, why?”

“That little kid,” she gestured at a little blonde guy of about 10 who was busy running around the table near his parents, “just ran between your chair and the table.” I had only slightly pushed my chair back in when I went to go get tea, but there was less than a foot between my chair and the table.

He also had a pretty cool boomerang that he kept throwing at me, but I never could quite catch it.

As far as indiscretions go, it wasn’t up there with armed robbery using a chicken as a weapon, but the point was made. These parents were letting their kid run wild in a fast food restaurant. We never saw that behavior in Modern Mayberry. We’d figured out the “why” of that fairly soon after we moved there.

People here in Modern Mayberry don’t have the option of anonymity. If I cut a person off in traffic, it might be the principle of the school. If I am a jerk to a clerk at Wal-Mart®, we’ll hear about it, because the clerk knows someone I know. Who? I’m not sure. But in a small town, there’s someone in common.

In Modern Mayberry? You have a reputation. Your family has a reputation. People aren’t horribly nosy here, but word spreads.

When I was young, I liked the concept of libertarianism, enough to even join the Libertarian party and vote for people who had zero chance of being elected. It wasn’t too bad – you could always see that you were one of the 10 or so votes the candidate got on election night. The idea of Libertarianism is simple: Go do (more or less) what you want. Don’t hurt other people. Enjoy. Repeat. Libertarianism is really just individualism on a large scale, but with more Star Wars® t-shirts and fewer showers.

I never had braces. But I also never raced across a field to give a beat-down to the British.

The United States was (more or less) founded on this type of individualism, though I have no idea how Ben Franklin smelled, and I think he was a Star Trek© fan instead of Star Wars®. Liberty was one of the few things that all of the members of the Constitutional Convention could agree upon – the folks from Massachusetts weren’t entirely sure about the folks from Georgia, and vice versa. But if Massachusetts would promise to leave Georgia pretty much alone, Georgia figured they could at least try to make it work.

This lasted until 1860, but that’s another story. Spoiler: Massachusetts won’t take, “It’s not you, it’s me,” for an answer.

Thankfully, the American people also had a built-in safety valve – they could move West at any time their neighbor (or state!) annoyed them. This added, especially in the Midwest and Mountain areas, a strong sense of, “Leave me alone, you’re not my supervisor.” People would move into an areas with a weak government that couldn’t do much for them. It also couldn’t ask much of them.

First two seasons of Archer were pretty good. I wouldn’t go much past that. Not for kids.

Individually was the norm, if I can get away with saying that, and the individuality was, like a hipster convention, nearly identical from one person to the next. Generally, as long as behavior was circumscribed by the predominant values of the time, it was all good. The values that were both required by and created by that streak of individualism were:

Fair Play – that there were rules, and, generally we were all expected to abide by them. Sure, rich people got a better deal, but even they were not completely above the law. I don’t care if you are my supervisor – you’re not cutting in line.
Meritocracy – the best person generally got the job, generally got the promotion. Was there nepotism? Was there political favoritism? But those words still have negative connotations. And when smart people get hired into a family business, they know that the goofy, entitled son will get the corner office before they do. But if your kid has the highest GPA? They’ll be valedictorian.
Personal Restraint – Just because it’s illegal doesn’t make it moral. And just because you have the right, doesn’t require you to do it. Either by guilt or by shame or by good common sense, Americans had generally shown the prudence to show restraint.
Generally Accepted Norms – One of the lessons that I’ve shared with my kids is a simple one: where politeness fails, laws follow. The one guy in the subdivision decides he wants to recreate Jurassic Park®-level vegetation in his front yard will mow because his wife doesn’t want to catch abuse from the other wives as they sacrifice puppies to Gorto or play cards or whatever women do when men aren’t around.
Faith in Fellow Citizens – If your car breaks down on a lonely night in winter, it’s likely that the next person who passes by will stop and to help. The colder it is, the lonelier it is? The more likely they are to stop. They feel safe in stopping, because of the next point, an obligation to stop.
Sense of Community – On Friday night, the local football stadium will be filled. People will know where you sit, and you’ll see familiar faces every game. You know the owner of the restaurant you go to every Friday. The auto repair place knows the names of your kids, as does the barber and the dentist. The superintendent of schools has sent you handwritten notes, at least one of them good.

Yes. These are generalizations, and I could certainly generate examples of when we didn’t live up to these values in the United States in the past. But these values are, generally, the rules that we have to all follow to make things work in a high trust society: recognized property rights, independent courts, and faith in our elected officials. You don’t trespass, because that’s old man Smith’s place. Yeah, the judge likes to drink a bit too much on Friday, but he sentenced the robbery suspect to 10 years and didn’t charge the shopkeeper who shot him up. And Sheriff Buford sends your kid a certificate, just for graduating high school.

Actually, we’re pretty welcoming, as long as you don’t send paratroopers first.

The result is that you get a society where people can work together, voluntarily. Things like park boards and school boards and town councils and county supervisors are the most effective forms of government, and have the most impact on a typical person’s life. The Sheriff is more important than people in Washington, because the Sheriff is actually accountable, and has to live with the people he’s protecting. He also knows when not writing a ticket is the right answer.

However, when societies are built on nepotism, separatism, egos, immorality, or freeloading, that trust disappears. The Sheriff won’t arrest a murderer because he’s a cousin. Or of the same faith. Or of the same race. Cars are stolen with regularity, because everyone believes that anyone who is wealthy isn’t to be admired and emulated, but hated. Why? Because the only way to get ahead is to cheat. And anyone who has more than you has cheated, right?

High trust societies produce wealth. Polite children. People who act honorably. They have stable governments with an emphasis on rights for common men. People pay their taxes, and act together.

Low trust societies are characterized by poor social trust. High theft rates. Low wealth. Their governments are often stable, because they’re collective and totalitarian. At least the election results aren’t in doubt. How can you doubt an election where the winner gets 98% of the vote?

Is it ironic that someone who hated capitalism died on Black Friday?

The truth is that you can’t combine a low trust society and a high trust society. The values of a low trust group in a high trust society will destroy the high trust society after time. Why? You can’t win a game of cards when everyone else is cheating. You can’t have peace when another country has declared war on you. In a war of values, the lowest common denominator wins.

Our car ate up the miles between Big City and home. We finally crossed the last little creek and headed up the hill, past the farm that flooded every other spring, and heard the familiar crunch of gravel under our tires as I stopped near the mailbox. The mailbox was open, and had probably been open since Saturday, but our mail was still there.

We were glad to get home.

Mall pic by Dj1997 [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Cognitive Dissonance, Normalcy Bias, and Survival, with Wonder Woman, Bigfoot, Johnny Carson, Stalin, and a Bond Girl.

“So you really think Morgan thinks I have a racial bias? This is so unfair. I would’ve marched on Selma if it was on Long Island.” – Seinfeld

I’ll have to admit, when I was doing this meme, I forgot where I was going with it. Which was appropriate.

This post is the result of a reader request by frequent commenter and occasional photo contributor 173dVietVet, and I’m glad to do it because it keeps me away from plumbing. I had actually already started my notes for another topic (you’ll see it next Friday and it will be amazing, if I have enough beer before I start writing) when he suggested that I post about the interplay of Cognitive Dissonance, Normalcy Bias, and Survival.

This post sounded like way more fun than re-plumbing the drain line under my sink (this is true). Despite the protestations of The Mrs. that we need a silly old sink in the kitchen I dug right into the topic, especially since Friday is typically health day and this topic is broad enough to cover both personal health and the broader issues related to disasters and living through crisis that have recently become a theme here.

Maybe . . . it may have been a way for 173dVietVet to see if I’m not a computer mind sent from the future to influence the United States in 2019 to make more PEZ® workers for our PEZ© mines. Who can say? Regardless, 173dVietVet (and the other 10,000 people who will read this), here it is.

What is Cognitive Dissonance?

Cognitive Dissonance is the state of holding two opposing ideas in your mind, or of having beliefs that run counter to your actions. The best example I ever ran into in real life was when I was at a convenience store and two Spandex®-clad bicyclists came in – helmets still on, complete with wrap-around sunglasses and smelly padded butt shorts. One of the guys was loudly criticizing every item the other guy picked up. Trust me, the guy was loud enough that everyone in the store could hear him. I was NOT eavesdropping like I do with the neighbors on a Saturday night.

“No, you can’t drink that, man. Fructose will kill you, after it makes your children sterile.”
“Dude – the bleached flour in that is empty calories. It will screw up your metabolism and make the Martians attack.”
“Ah, man – that jerky has nitrates. Really bad for you. Also, no one has ever loved me.”

Then he got up to the counter.

“I’ll have this, and . . . a pack of Marlboros®.” He looked at his bicycling buddy. “Yeah, man, I know.”

That’s Cognitive Dissonance in action. I was buying Copenhagen® and Cheddar Ruffles™ at the same time, so my ability to criticize was pretty limited. I’ve since given up the Copenhagen©, but you can rip those Cheddar Ruffles® from my cold, dead, orange fingers.

If you get tired of Soylent Lays®? You can just gnaw on a neighbor! Spoiler: in the movie, companies were making food from people. But apparently it was tasty. Mmmm, tasty people.

Another example? An attorney that goes to church. Normally lawyers burst into flame upon entering a Holy Place, but I heard California filed a restraining order against God, and the Ninth Circuit upheld it. Last I heard, God is has appealed to the Supreme Court®. Sadly, he might lose, since he doesn’t have any lawyers in Heaven to represent him.

Like anything, Cognitive Dissonance goes from mild (our bicycling smoker in the example above) to extreme (pretending Trump® isn’t president because you don’t like mean old Cheeto™ man). In the middle is anyone who liked the latest Star Wars™ movies. Or are they in the middle? They might be the sickest of all of us.

In doing research about this topic, I found that studies of Cognitive Dissonance had different origins for different peoples. It turns out that Cognitive Dissonance in European-descended people is driven by the concepts of shame and guilt. Shame, in this case, is the feeling brought out by violating a group norm. Mental values based in Shame are built around what other people will think of you. Guilt is violating an absolute right and wrong. Everyone on the planet could be dead, and you’d still feel Guilt.

In East Asians, Cognitive Dissonance was only built around Shame. Guilt didn’t play a part in it. If everybody on Earth died? You’d be free at last! I have no other data on any other ethnicities, so don’t ask. I’m thinking the researcher did the study in Chinese restaurant in North Dakota.

Some other odd things I discovered about Cognitive Dissonance:

Initiations and hazing – people who are subjected to rough rites of initiation actually have increased commitment to the group hazing them. I guess the lesson here is, don’t skimp. Rent the goat. And get the extended insurance plan on the goat. You know why.
People highlight the positives of the choice they made … after they made the choice, not before. Rationalization is a way to smooth over Cognitive Dissonance, and also explains why I justify the late night tipsy Amazon.com purchases to The Mrs. Everyone needs a life size Bigfoot® statue, right?

The Mrs. took this picture after we bought Bigfoot One. I had this statue until The Mrs.’ dog ate it. Then I bought another one, but I keep it inside. Sadly, this is a true story. Bigfoot deserves to be free.

Essentially, when your brain is faced with the contradictions that spring from Cognitive Dissonance, it has (as far as I can tell) four choices:

Change a belief,
Change an action,
Pretend our actions don’t make us big fat hypocrites, or
Ignore it all and get a cookie.

Orwell even talked about it in his future history novel 1984. A great example of Cognitive Dissonance in action was the way that supporters minimized Bill Clinton’s horrible behavior in the Lewinski mess. (Actually it was Clinton’s mess, but this is a family-friendly blog.) And mainstream Republicans were no better in the whole “invade Iraq” mess, for absolute fairness. Supporters, like hazed college freshmen pledging Omega, seem to like politicians more when they lie to them.

Go figure.

If you haven’t seen Animal House®, that makes me die a little inside. It’s the Star Wars™ of anti-Cognitive Dissonance movies.

Okay, that’s Cognitive Dissonance. What’s Normalcy Bias?

First, Normalcy. Really? Did we really need that word? I guess I’ll allow it. Guys, the English language has 171,476 words according to the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language, and your ‘umble ‘ost only knows about 45,000 of them. Unless your new word involves ways that aliens have sex in clown costumes in a vacuum while in orbit over Mongolia on a Tuesday? There’s probably already a word for it.

Second, what is Normalcy Bias? Normalcy Bias is just a belief that things are going to return to “normal” at some unspecified point in the future, often through the actions of some unspecified savior, like Johnny Carson returning from the dead and eating the livers of all of the current late night hosts while they were still alive. Oh, wait, that was a dream I had the other night. Never mind.

The answer is no, not funny at all.

Third, I think that Normalcy Bias is just a subset of Cognitive Dissonance. Here are some examples:

Underestimating the probability of a flood hitting your house. This is not a personal example – I’ve checked FEMA flood maps on every house I’ve ever bought – before I bought them. I remember talking to a friend who thought I was lying when I told him that. Right now? If a flood takes out my house, I’m expecting to see a little old man with an Ark.
Underestimating disaster impacts. FEMA is really good at this – in the middle of Hurricane Ike, FEMA was on the radio. Thankfully, we had a crank-radio and were able to get the vital advice that lists of available FEMA services were . . . on the Internet at FEMA.gov. Telling people with no power (and no cell service) to go to the Internet to get the latest updates. Yay, FEMA! Why don’t you suggest direct brain transfer?
The Roman citizens in Great Britain standing on the pier and waving goodbye to the last Legion in Rome as it went off to put down an uprising of those pesky Gauls. The Romans will be back soon, right? Things will be normal again? Right? (Rome, Britain, and Money: Why You Can’t Find Fine China after the Apocalypse)
King Arthur’s legend that he’ll return to save England – it’s just one example of the hidden and secret king that will return one day to Make England Great Again. Assuming any English are left when Arthur gets back.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about Normalcy Bias in his book The Black Swan. He describes the belief that his family had that things would “return to normal” in Lebanon, even after it was ripped apart by civil war between 1975 and 1990. They talked about how they’d be able to return, and how things would . . . return to normal.

When Taleb wrote this, this was a picture that was taken in Lebanon – 2006. I’m not thinking this is a great place for long term real estate growth. Unless you have quite a large number of Trident® missiles – 3 out of 4 despots recommend Trident© if you chew missiles.

I think that Normalcy Bias is pretty deep seated function of the human brain – I see too many examples, both in my own thinking and in my observations of others to believe that it’s abnormal.

During a crisis, that’s a problem. The biggest dangers in a crisis are:

Not accepting that the world has changed, maybe forever. People who change their world view soonest . . . win. An example: I was driving and saw a car pulled over on the side of the road. The driver had obviously just wrecked his BMW®. He was wandering around, dazed. “My BMW® . . . it’s wrecked!” He was distraught. I said to him, “Man, forget about the car – your left arm has been severed!” He became even more upset. “My God,” he screamed, looking down at the place his arm should have been, “Where is my Rolex©!” Okay, that didn’t happen. But I’m allowed to dream.
Not realizing or believing that changes could happen. This happens before the crisis, and the result is that you’ve never planned. Not having planned, you’ve got no preparations. The best cure for this is nearly getting caught up in a disaster. My daughter, Alia S. Wilder, recently found out that her house was in a zone that could be flooded. Even more oops? She had zero preparations. Being evil, I didn’t give her answers. I asked questions. “Oh, so you bought a month’s worth of food. Good. How much water to you have?” Her eyes were really opened to the huge vulnerabilities that she had. I slept well that night, even though I had to shower to get the evil off of me.
Thinking that other people share your values. They don’t. I assure you that there is no neighborhood in Modern Mayberry I would be afraid to be in at any time of the day or night. If you carry that same lack of awareness to, say, Chicago, the results might be less than optimal. Monday’s post will be about the implications of this logical fallacy. The sooner you internalize this, the better.
Failing to practice. Just as having the neatest nickel-plated 1911 with laser sights and the chainsaw attachment won’t help you if you don’t practice, if you don’t practice your disaster response from time to time, it won’t help you, either. You won’t be able to find your preps. They’ll be in the wrong spot. Or, worse yet, your child moved them and the mice got into your rice, the parakeet got into your wheat, and your dehydrated food has been mildewed. That’s a bad day. But it’s a much better day if none of the steers got into your beer.
Thinking that someone else will save you. They won’t. This is why I hate the term “first responders.” It puts the responsibility for a crisis on the wrong person. If someone is breaking into my house – I am the first responder. If Pugsley cuts deeply into his thumb while whittling, I am, again, the first responder. In any real crisis, the “first responders” have probably missed many of the issues I’ve listed above. During Hurricane Ike, I heard one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard – pleas from the radio announcer to bring food, gasoline, generators, and water to . . . the “first responders.” The “first responders” weren’t an asset. They were a liability that couldn’t even save themselves. I’m not bragging, but the Wilder family was at home, eating steak. We had enough food for weeks. Again, The Mrs. and I were the first responders. Mmm. Steak.
Not realizing the implications of changes. In apocalypse movies, one typical means of comic relief is the former banker/stockbroker/boss who, in a fit of self-important pomposity, asks, “Do you know who I am?” Immediately this character (who you’re not supposed to like), gets his ego shot down as either the hero or bad guy shows him that the rules have changed. One humorous version of this is in the underrated Kevin Costner flick The Postman, when he meets Tom Petty. The Postman says to Tom Petty, “I know you, you’re famous.” Petty replies, “I was. Kinda.” At the end, Tom Petty asks Costner, “Are you The Postman?” Costner nods. Petty says, “I’ve heard of you. You’re famous.” It was a brilliant way to turn that trope on its head, and pointed out a lesson we’ll talk about in a minute in item 1 of the list below. I guess that depends on your reading speed.
Not adapting to the reality of the changes. This is a little different than number six. A great example is the Kulaks that I wrote about recently. When Stalin came to power they thought they could negotiate with him since they were the economic engine of the U.S.S.R. Spoiler alert: they couldn’t. Score Stalin: 20,000,000, Kulaks: 0. A less sinister version of this is when you flip a light switch during a blackout, and a second later feel like an idiot, thankfully Stalin’s ghost doesn’t send you to the Gulag for that.

It always cracks me up that AntiFa© thinks they won’t be the first people sent to the camps. Loyalty? The commies can work with that. Being disloyal to the country that provides the framework for your material success? Gulag first. But you get to choose the top bunk. Yay!

Every single point I’ve made above can kill you, given the right circumstances. If I were evil, like an ancient emaciated grizzled she-demon direct from Hell, or Madonna® (I’m sorry, I repeat myself) I’d just leave you here to twist in the wind, stuck in a never ending cycle of Cognitive Dissonance and Normalcy Bias that spirals into a black hole of self-despair that ultimately leaves you as a tweeker midwife sitting in a ripped-up vinyl booth in an Ecuadoran Dairy Queen® with no Blizzard™ machine, delivering Ecuadorian children for leftover chicken tenders. And there’s no gravy in Ecuador. I think that’s because the toilets circle the other way. Maybe.

But I’m not that mean. Well, I am that mean, but I’m still begging for working for that Nobel® Peace™ Prize©, or maybe a lousy MacArthur Award™, so I’d best pretend to be a loving, caring human being. Besides, no body? No crime. Right? That’s what my lawyer keeps telling me. I hope he’s right.

I know what you are asking, “John Wilder, how can I learn to make comedy jokes like you?” See? You’re dead in a disaster already! A disaster is no joking matter, unless it happens to someone else. But, following are some preventive (the word preventative, while in the dictionary, has that stupid extra “ta” in the middle and I refuse to engage with a single ta – two ta’s only) steps that you can take to, well, live. And these steps apply to both a disaster and your life. In the end, your life is a disaster. I’m not judging, but if you treat your life like a metaphorical disaster, you’ll be healthier and more prepared.

Humility: Know what you don’t know. As Aesop (LINK) perspicaciously quoted Donald Rumsfeld the other day: “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.” People liked to bag on Rumsfeld, mainly because they were jealous of his mad dancing skills and that he bested John Cusack in an arm-wrestling contest once so he could win the chance to date Demi Moore. This was before she began to resemble beef jerky, so it was worth it at the time. Regardless, this is a great quote on humility. Know what you don’t know. Either learn it, or compensate for it.
Prepare Generally for General Disasters: Most things you can prepare for are the same, or at least rhyme like poetry used to rhyme before cigarette smoking smelly people in black berets with low-testosterone face hair (high testosterone for the females, which looks about the same) ruined it. Hitler’s ghost won’t re-start World War II, and Abraham Lincoln’s ghost won’t be around to start Civil War II, but human needs don’t change all that much, regardless of what disaster you face. You have to eat. You have to have water. You have to have Internet. Oh, wait – sorry. Water is optional now, according to the WHO (The Who, The WHO, Cavemen, Child Labor, and We Won’t Get Fooled Again). You can quote me on the following: A multi-tool is a crappy tool. Unless it’s your only tool. And it weighs less than your tool kit. Never expect that preparations will be exact replacements of what you really need. But as long as you have Internet, it’s all good, right?
Do Things That Take You Out Of Your Comfort Zone: No, this isn’t an excuse to try to convince you into a Multi-Level-Marketing© scheme to strain your friendships by selling a product that ultimately is the object of a 60 Minutes™ investigation (this happened to my ex-wife, for reals). Take a different road to work. How well do you know the lay of the land in the ten miles around your house? How well do you know your neighbors, I mean, reciprocally? The telescope views don’t count no matter how hot she is. Imagine you had to do without electricity. Do without it for a night. Two nights. Spend a night in a tent in the back yard. Go camping. Eat a burger . . . without fries. Your routine is your enemy, except for the lifting and healthy bits. Change it up.
Practice with your tools: Heh, hehe, hehehe, he said tools. Okay, Beavis, knock it off. If it’s a pistol. If it’s a chainsaw. If it’s a hammer. Heh, hehe, hehehe, he said hammer. Practice with it. 80% of your proficiency will come for 20% of your effort, unless you’re me trying to learn guitar, because that’s just hopeless. Become mediocre now, when there’s time, that will help with number one, up above. At least then you’ll know what you don’t know.
Play “What if?” mind games: I do this all the time. Sometimes I end up in crazy stupid places – as in the entire world is gone and leaves just me and the cast of The Breakfast Club and the cast of Who fighting over who gets the last deodorant stick in the world and Sophie Marceau is the only one who can save me. Okay, that’s not really productive. But when you think about what could happen, you become mentally prepared if it does happen.

Sophie is the one on bottom. James Bond® is the one on top. I guess I might need to explain that to the folks in California. I’m just worried that the next movie might have Jeanette Bond, who has never even been to England at all. Because what’s more British than that?

So, there it is. I guess I have a sink to fix. 173dVietVet, how did I do?

Also, if you have a pet topic, toss it out, either in the comments or at my email at movingnorth@gmail.com. I won’t promise that I’ll do it, but your odds are good. 100% as of this writing. If I don’t do it, it’s not you, it’s that I think I’d suck at it.

How Auto Manufacturing Makes You More Likely to Die in a Crisis, Plus, Ironman is a Mass Murderer.

â€œThe mostÂ efficientÂ killing machine ever invented; youâ€™ve got her doing the laundry.â€ â€“ Terminator, The Sarah Connor Chronicles

My first job was in a toy vampire manufacturing factory.Â I worked as part of a two man team, so I had to make every second Count.

Modern society is based on efficiency.

Efficiency in what?

Efficiency in everything, from the proper number of employees to completely mess up my order at McDonaldsÂ© to using the absolute minimum amount of labor and material to make a car.

Letâ€™s stick with cars, because the local McDonaldsâ„¢ in Modern Mayberry is primarily efficient only at serving me a Sausage McMuffinÂ® without sausage, egg, or cheese.Â Yes.Â They served me a plain muffin, which I guess is more efficient.Â In 2018, ToyotaÂ® sold roughly 8,000,000 cars, trucks and station wagons (I refuse to call them SUVs on principle) worldwide.Â Overall, 86,000,000 new cars were made and sold in 2018.

I think cars just might finally be catching on as a consumer item.Â Maybe theyâ€™re not a fad after all.

When you do something 86,000,000 times, though, you start to get good at it, or at least sore.Â I brought up ToyotaÂ© because they decided to get good at making cars, and were highly innovative in trying to increase quality while at the same time increasing efficiency â€“ they made better cars with less labor, less rework, less effort.Â While I can make the case that Detroit finally caught up with Toyotaâ„¢ by the early 2000â€™s as far as quality goes, ToyotaÂ® was leading the pack for decades â€“ thatâ€™s why theyâ€™re the number one auto manufacturer in the world today.

One particular innovation that ToyotaÂ® came up with was â€œjust-in-timeâ€ manufacturing, which is also known as â€œLean Manufacturing.â€Â The concept is simple:Â I make a car with parts that just showed up â€“ nobody has to go get them, they just show up right when I need them.Â The ideal would be the supplier delivers the part to the production line at the moment itâ€™s required.Â The windshield wiper salesman puts two in the bin as the next Corollaâ„¢ arrives at the windshield wiper installation station.Â There isnâ€™t a bucket of thousands of wipers behind the worker, just the few he or she needs right then.Â Hence?Â Just-in-time.

Just-in-time sounds really nice.Â The things you need just show up, right when you need them, as if teddy-bear angels with lace wings made them materialize from the aether as they used to when Victoria was Queen.Â In practice, you need more than two windshield wipers at the CorollaÂ© assembly station, but you might only need enough for an hour.Â Or two hours.Â That de-clutters the line, and makes the work actually go faster.Â Implementation of this system is one reason Toyotaâ„¢ went from a mass producer of cheap cars to a mass producer of high quality cars.

Why didnâ€™t they invent and do this just-in-time production in 1880?Â Transport speed.Â Slow transport requires stockpiles and large shipment.Â Also required is production coordination.Â Assembly lines break from time to time â€“ you have to make sure that the windshield wipers donâ€™t stack up like chocolates on an assembly line. Â There has to be sufficient communication, and the Internet helps make it easy.

Now?Â I can order prescription glasses online and have them shipped to my house directly from the manufacturer in China in less than a week.

Worth watching again even if youâ€™ve seen it before.

The rest of the world has, in the last thirty years, done everything they could to adopt this system, which is now called â€œLean Manufacturing.â€Â Accountants love it, because it reduces inventory, and turns that inventory into cash as soon as possible.Â An example:Â the average grocery story turns over its entire inventory nearly 14 times per year, which means lots of items hit the shelf and disappear.Â Some grocery stores even have the vendor stock the shelf, eliminating costs there as well, as they attempt to get the customer to do the job of a checker.

But the at least the cashier was dead sexy.

The result of this effort is a one-time boost in profits as inventory is reduced.Â There is also the ongoing benefit that the money that paid for the inventory (that no longer exists) can be used for some other business purpose like bonuses, bacon-wrapped shrimp, corporate jets or Harvey Weinsteinâ€™s sexual harassment lawsuit settlements.

But since thereâ€™s less inventory, you need fewer warehouses.Â And fewer warehouse workers.Â Yay!Â More money for bacon-wrapped shrimp!Â You can see how this was a dominant concept in the late 1990â€™s when most corporate jobs required that you sign over your soul to SatanÂ®, or Al Pacino if Satanâ„¢ had taken the corporate jet with Weinstein that day.

If I were to create a personal analogy, Lean Manufacturing is similar to the idea that when you buy gasoline you buy just enough for this trip, and this trip only.Â No more wasteful storage of gasoline inventory.Â And why keep more than a single meal on hand in the house?Â While weâ€™re at it, letâ€™s also reduce that inventory of money we keep in the bank.Â I bet we could make sure our lives are structured around a system that I think Iâ€™ll invent a snazzy name for:Â Paycheck-to-Paycheckâ„¢.

If you think no one cares if youâ€™re alive, skip a monthâ€™s worth of bills.

So, all sarcasm aside, the paycheck example starts to illustrate the problems with Lean Manufacturing.Â Inventory is a bad word in a manufacturing plant, and no manufacturing plant in the world would keep spare capacity that it doesnâ€™t use regularly just sitting there.Â Soon enough, a bright young soulless MBA from the head office will either start production on the spare capacity, sell the manufacturing equipment, or take a jet trip to a conference where there is a platter of free bacon-wrapped shrimp.

What has been profitable business advice is, as you can see, horrible personal advice.Â Life isnâ€™t about efficiency.Â Life is about . . . life.Â Being inefficient actually has some huge advantages.

People who regularly prepare for disasters (â€œpreppersâ€) have popularized the phrase â€œTwo is one, and one is none.â€Â I looked for the origin of the phrase, and I believe it is old enough that it probably originated in a Roman Legion stationed in Carthage, when a grizzled Centurion stuck a cigar in his mouth and was dressing down a new recruit for having an insufficiently shiny gladius.Â And donâ€™t tell me that it was another 1,500 years until tobacco was introduced to Europe â€“ an outfit with a good supply guy can find anything.

Okay, you donâ€™t need two of everything.Â A friend of mine has two ex-wives.

The philosophy of prepping is the exact opposite of Lean Manufacturing.Â It says that we are stupid â€“ we donâ€™t know whatâ€™s going to happen so having extra supplies is crucial.Â Stuff gets broken.Â Stuff gets lost â€“ just this week somebody found a batch of Revolutionary-era bayonets in a pit at Valley Forge.Â You can bet there was a corporal that got his butt chewed over those by George Washington.Â But Iâ€™m betting that the Continental Army had some extras.Â Heck, itâ€™s certain that even the Egyptians knew to store the extra grain in good years 6,000 years ago because:

Spare capacity is freedom,
Spare capacity is resilience,
Spare capacity gives you time and space when both are precious, and
Scarcity is the enemy, not inefficiency.

Recently, there have been a series of movies about obscure comic book heroes from the 1970â€™s.Â You might have heard of them â€“ The Avengersâ„¢.Â In one of them, The Avengers:Â Quest for Infinity CashÂ®, the villain (a very large Smurfâ„¢ named ThanosÂ©) had been hungry as a child and decided nobody should ever be hungry again.Â ThanosÂ® then gathered a bunch of magic rocks which allowed him to make a super glove so he could make a wish.

Iâ€™m not making this up.Â People spent $2.048 BILLION dollars to see that story.

See?Â Big SmurfÂ® and magic rocks.Â Told you I wasnâ€™t making it up.

Anyway, ThanosÂ®â€™ wish was that half of the people in the Universe disappear.Â Thatâ€™s just what happened.Â Half the people turned to ash.Â It really wasnâ€™t that sad, at least for me, because itâ€™s a comic book and Superman and Batman have each died something like fifty times, so death in a comic book movie is about as permanent as a Hollywood marriage.Â The movie ends with lots of people, including SpidermanÂ®, dissolving into ash.

I took The Boy and Pugsley to go see the sequel, The Avengers:Â Endgaming for Even More of Infinity CashÂ©.Â Whether or not the people who turned into ash were going to come back was spoiled before the movie started â€“ one of the trailers was for the new SpidermanÂ® movie. Â EndgamingÂ© starts five years after half the people in the Universe turned into ash.

After watching the movie Iâ€™m thinking that, like every member of Congress, the screenwriters had no training in economics.Â Okay, a big SmurfÂ© snaps his fingers and everyone disappears and Iâ€™m concerned they didnâ€™t get their economics right.Â Yeah, Iâ€™m an economics nerd.

What did they miss?Â Well, after all the people disappeared the economy would have cratered.Â We would have gone from producing 86,000,000 cars to producing . . . zero.Â The economy would stop completely.Â Grain would rot in the fields because half the people who ate TwinkiesÂ® were ash.Â In 2009 when the Gross Domestic Product dropped by 2.5% and the economy nearly locked up.Â If half the people disappeared, the economy would drop by 70%.

Anarchy.

But in The Avengers:Â Endgaming for Even More of Infinity CashÂ©, everybody who was turned into ash returns after one of the AvengersÂ® (Tony Starkâ„¢) snaps his fingers.Â Take that, ThanosÂ©!

Except by doing that, Tony StarkÂ© just sentenced most of them to death when they showed back up.Â Why?Â In five years, the economy on Earth had contracted to serve not 7 billion, but 3.5 billion.Â When an extra 3.5 billion people show back up?Â Our just in time world only has food for 3.5 billion.Â We only planted enough corn for 3.5 billion.

Massive famine and starvation.

Oops.

Thanks, IronmanÂ©.Â Instead of a nice, peaceful death youâ€™ve condemned some large fraction of beings on every planet to a horrible slow death of starvation, misery, and violence, mainly thanks to the lack of resilience in our planetary production systems.Â I guess that I should stop expecting economic accuracy in a movie that features a talking raccoon.

Only be the last guy to the supermarket during a disaster if you want to take amusing pictures.

But I am concerned â€“ our economy is based on a global experiment in efficiency that frees up capital for bacon-wrapped shrimp, at the cost of making our lives less secure.Â What could go wrong?

Sweet dreams!

Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming

John Wilder’s Civil War II Weather Report Number 1

“Yeah. There were horses, and a man on fire, and I killed a guy with a trident.” – Anchorman

With apologies to Gary Larson, in my defense there are only so many John Brown jokes out there.

Way back in 1998, I ended up with one of the neatest jobs that I had – assessing risks to a major corporation. The Internet was new at work, and I was being paid to research potential disasters. It was so interesting and so much fun I felt guilty. In researching disasters and risk, I came across Y2K. For those that don’t remember, there was a concern that, as a result of programmers only using two digits to store year information in computers, that many computers and computer programs would cease to function when the calendar flipped over to 00.

There were multiple websites and personalities that were writing about Y2K, and one that I went to from time to time was Cory Hamasaki’s Y2K Weather Report. Hamasaki was a programmer (he has since passed away) and he had an inside perspective of the ongoing work that was required to keep the systems working. As a result of his insider knowledge he bought an AR, a lot of food, and spent New Year’s Eve at his remote cabin.

Obviously, the systems kept working.

Not my original. And I’m sorry.

We live, however, in spicy times, with the potential for them becoming even spicier (I got the Spicy Time meme from Western Rifle Shooters (LINK), which really should be on your daily reading list). I’ve written several articles about the potential for Civil War, and studied and thought quite a bit about it. As such, this is the inaugural edition of John Wilder’s Civil War II Weather Report. I anticipate putting it out monthly. This first issue will probably be a bit longer than later issues, since I’m putting the framework together and explaining the background.

I’m attempting to put together a framework that measures where we are on the continuum between peace and war. I’ll even try to develop some sort of measures that show if the level of danger is increasing or decreasing. Civil wars don’t happen all at once, and like a strong storm, they require the atmosphere to be right. A weather report is probably a good metaphor.

If you haven’t seen it, the guy with the trident was the weatherman in Anchorman. And when he has a trident? People die.

So, to review the future, let’s start by looking at Civil War I so we understand what happened, and what the potential differences are.

Civil War I was:

Based on philosophical differences – the views of the people, North and South were pretty similar, except that the Northerners were descended from Puritans who sailed on the Mayflower, and the Southerners were descended from the Norman conquerors that took England in 1066 but got booted out after having lost a war in England. Although the North and South were the same people, more or less, with the same heritage, there were enough differences to lead to a war. And it was a doozy.