Elon Musk Week – Page 10 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Clintoncide, John Bolton’s Waifu, and October Market Crashes: Knock on Wood

“Well, if you want to knock on wood, there’s plenty of that about.” – Space: 1999

And astrology teaches us that 9 planets and thousands of stars have spent billions of years lining themselves up just to let me know that “my energy will flourish in quieter surroundings” today.

I remember sitting in the classroom – the window faced to the south, and it was a cold winter morning. It was sixth grade and I was covered with more insulation than a flamingo in Canada, since the eighty-year-old steam heating system in the school was as reliable as Bernie Sander’s heart. For whatever reason, the teacher was talking about the phrase, “knock on wood.” I think she was doing what she referred to it as “teaching” but I guess we all have our quirks. Regardless, I remember it well. She said that the origin of the phrase “knock on wood” came from the Greeks.

Apparently, the teacher said, the gods really liked to mess with people’s hopes and dreams. If they heard that something was going well for you they would go out of their way to stop you, much like the Clintons if you know about Jeffery Epstein . . . maybe I should just stop there. The idea of saying “knock on wood” was to confuse that practical joker Zeus or make one of him think you were crazy, so that Zeus would just ignore the gibberish that you were saying.

I liked that explanation, at least enough that it stuck with me this far.

I hope she’s not offended. Knock on wood.

When I looked on the Internet, I wasn’t able to find a confirmation of that story. Wikipedia® says that the most likely explanation was ancient German folklore about touching wood to appease the druid tree-spirits. When I looked a little deeper into the Wikipedia© debate page where the nerds discussed what should be on the page, there was more than a bit of confusion among the editors, including one who just kept talking about his imaginary Japanese anime pillow-wife and whether or not you were still a virgin if you had kissed someone who was not a virgin.

You leave Isemi Kukikemi alone! If we had listened to her and John Bolton-san, we would be attacking Iran right now instead of trying to bring our troops home.

The concept and phrase of “knock on wood” or “touch wood” is widespread enough that it appears in cultures from Iran to Brazil, but is mainly centered in European nations. I’ll admit – I use the phrase to this day, probably weekly. In a pinch I’ll use a plastic countertop to replace actual wood. It’s covering particle board, right?

I think that “knock on wood” is just part of a wider body of superstition that’s deeply rooted inside our collective consciousness, and if we didn’t have superstitions, we’d invent them, like I invented that clever superstition to never to shave off all of my body hair and drive backwards naked with a cat while drinking plastic-bottle scotch – unless it’s on vinyl bench seats, then it seems to work out okay.

I made fun of trees once, I guess that was a knock on wood.

I think the reason for this is that life is complex, and so much of the future is uncertain. When I watch the financial talking heads, they exhibit the same behavior. “The market is down 2% on news that Elon Musk had creamed corn as a side dish for lunch.” The market is sometimes down because . . . the market is down. It doesn’t need an actual reason since the pressure on the stock market is made up on many days of an essentially random mix of buying and selling. Sometimes a bit up, sometimes a bit down.

But no one would watch the financial news if they said, “The market is down 2% because the market is down 2%.” In many cases, until the market gets built up so high that it can’t sustain itself anymore (The Funniest Post You Will Ever Read About Angles of Repose, Virgin Physicists, Economics, and Population), the market just fluctuates.

This just in, the market is down because of (shakes Magic 8-Ball®) trade problems with Greenland.

When I was in college I was chatting with a friend about economics lecture he had just seen. A student getting his doctorate in economics was presenting his dissertation to the class. The student was excited when he explained that he had taken the Dow Jones Industrial Average® since 1929. He had removed all of the variation from the market.

“When you remove the all variation from the market data, it turns out it’s . . . constant!” According to my friend the economist seemed very pleased with himself.

My friend raised his hand and asked, “Umm, isn’t everything a constant if you remove all variation?”

Oops. My friend was right – my weight has been absolutely constant if you remove all of the weight I’ve lost and all of the weight I’ve gained. Heck, using that statistical analysis, I’m still at my birth weight. My friend reported that the expression on the grad student’s face looked like he had just swallowed a whole frog after it had been rolled in Johnny Depp’s dryer lint after Johnny dried the cotton diaper he wore when he oil wrestled Nicolas Cage.

I was at dinner last night with Nic Cage. We had steak. The waitress came by – asked him if he wanted garlic bread. He said no. I was shocked – I heard he never turned down a roll.

So, we’re in the middle of October, the ultimate time of superstition. Oddly enough, some of the greatest stock market crashes have happened in October, from the Panic of 1907, the Crash of 1929, Black Monday in 1987, and the Crash of 2002. October was pretty bleak in 2008 as well, as you might remember. Overall, the stock market has gone up about 0.2% (on average) in October since 1950.

As I’ve noted before, markets are systems, and periodic crashes are actually helpful – they lead to removal of inefficient and failed companies that are producing products that can’t compete. The longer and higher the market goes, in general, the greater the correction when it comes. It’s been over a decade since there has been a significant market pullback. It’s up 325% since then.

But like housing prices, markets never go down, right?

Knock on wood.

I’ll leave you with this: It’s the Mighty, Mighty Bosstones, and it’s relevant. Also relevant? It’s not “I never had to knock on wood,” it’s “I never had to; knock on wood.” This song was playing on the radio the night I picked up The Mrs. for our first date, and was playing when I dropped her off after the date. A good omen. Knock on wood.

Bad Bosses, Part 2: Action Heroes, Guns, and Explosions

“Your boss is a woman? Now this is a strange bank.” – It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

In order to dress for success they tell you to dress for the job you want, not the job you have. So I found out where my boss shopped for clothes. I’d see what they wore, and then wear the exact same outfit the next day. My boss at the time, Marji, thought that was just a little weird since horizontal stripes weren’t at all flattering on me.

It’s both a blessing and a curse to get to the end of writing your post and finding . . . it’s too long. It’s a blessing because if I can break it into two posts, hey, I’ve already got my next post written, which might get me to bed by 2AM instead of the usual. The curse part is that the post has to have a natural break between part one and part two – thankfully this one did. The other curse part is that I actually look forward to writing a post – and the one I had planned for Friday will have to wait a week. But it’s gonna be funny. Part 1 is here: Bad Bosses, Part I, Including Garfield as Written by H.P. Lovecraft, and part 2 is below.

It’s been my experience that all good bosses look the same, since they are all clones of me, or at least the “me” in that first performance review (JW note: it was described in the last post, and it was a really good performance review). And I’ve had plenty of bosses in my career – in one two-year period I went through five bosses, and I am averaging a new boss every sixteen months over the years of my career.

Based on my experiences, the traits of good bosses that I’ve had are listed below. Good bosses are:

Concerned about doing their duty for their company. They display loyalty – they do their job.
Good at setting clear expectations on behavior and expected work outcome. You know what you’re supposed to be doing.
Never smelling of grilled onions.
Able to create an environment where honest questions are encouraged.
Good at providing the tools, time, and space the employee needs to get work done.
Available to do children’s magic shows for birthday parties.
Honest with employees, and give clear feedback meant to help them improve.
Quick to recognize that mayonnaise is not a French musical instrument.
Courageous – the truth is the truth, and they’ll share that up and down the line and damn the consequences.
Reluctant hold a knife to the secretary’s administrative assistant’s neck.
Genuinely concerned about the employee.
Treat people (generally) fairly.

It’s always a shame when you have a great boss and he breaks a leg and has to be put down.

There are times I’ve managed to screw up most of the rules I’ve listed above when I was a boss – that’s why I was able to list them off the top of my head – you remember your mistakes. But you learn from them, too: One of the biggest compliments I got was when I was leaving a job for a new company. The Chief Operating Officer came in to say goodbye and told me, “I hope you’re going to be supervising people at your new job.” Maybe he wanted the new company I was leaving to join to fail, but I took it that he appreciated my efforts to learn and be better as a boss and wanted to pass that legacy on to other companies through people like me. You’re right. He wanted me to mess up that other company.

I imagine this every time I walk into work and use the remote to lock the doors to my car without looking.

Notice I didn’t mention charisma as a requirement to be a good boss. You don’t need to be an Elon Musk to be a great boss – and I’ve heard he’s not a particularly good boss unless you’re his weed dealer. Notice that I didn’t mention intelligence – in some instances really high intelligence works against you as a supervisor since it can make it more difficult for you to communicate well. Would I rather have a smart boss or an honest one? Would I rather have a smart boss or a courageous one? Would I rather have a smart boss or one that didn’t constantly smell of grilled onions?

Most of the time, the cause of a really bad boss is due to their fear, namely fear of getting fired or fear of missing a promotion or fear of missing a rung on the corporate ladder. If that were to happen? He couldn’t afford to pay for the “hot stone massages” his wife was getting from Günter, her “masseuse.” However, sometimes you get bosses that are so strange they remind you of Cousin Eddie®:

One boss I had actually lived in his office, as in slept there every night five or six nights a week. He claimed to be a member of a biker gang, and told stories of holding a person upside down from a bridge as the gang gently convinced him to be out of state so he couldn’t testify at an upcoming trial. He told about buying a girlfriend a “little car” to convince her to have an abortion. And the time he broke a bottle to use as a weapon because “The Indian” was trying to knife him.

This might not be a completely faithful adaptation from the original story.

And as a boss, whenever I needed help, or a risky event was about to occur, you could count on him to be three states away. As bad bosses go, he wasn’t horrible, since after I convinced him that if I looked bad, he looked bad, he had my back when we talked to corporate. Working for him was a really weird nine months. Normally I throw in a joke or an exaggeration in my descriptions – but in describing this boss? Nope. That all happened.

To be clear, with the exceptions listed above, almost all of the rest of my bosses have been great people who were of good character and really interested in helping me develop as a person and as an employee. But where all good bosses are similar, bad bosses are often unique:

The Seagull – The Seagull is a boss that gets a new job every year or two. Why? Because he flies in, makes a mess, and stays until he’s kicked out. Miller was a Seagull. Keep good notes for the aftermath.
The Shadow – Whenever anything important happens, they’re gone. Whenever you have a question? They deflect. Literally, it’s like not having a boss at all, or at least a boss that will make a decision. You will have a boss if one of your choices goes wrong, however, because the Shadow will quickly (and correctly) point out that he never told you to do such a thing!
The Burnout – The Burnout peaked twenty years ago, and is mad and bitter. His back hurts. You make too much money. He wants to retire, but has to wait another year for Medicare™ to kick in. Until then? He wants to inflict as much pain as possible on the office because he wants everyone to hurt as much as his back does.
Captain Ahab – Captain Ahab is great because he has a vision. Companies love Captain Ahab leaders because they become obsessed with obtaining a vision. The upside? Your mission is clear, Ahab makes sure you have everything you need. And you will work 80 hours a week to accomplish it. These aren’t 80 hour weeks of playing Minesweeper®, no, every minute is fully used because (Spoiler Alert) that Moby Dick isn’t gonna spear itself. Ahab doesn’t care about your family, at least during work hours.

He then tried to hypnotize the people in the meeting using a pocket watch. The work was rough – 90 hour weeks for months on end, but we got free coffee and he’d buy us catered dinner if we had to work past 9pm. On a Saturday.

The Sphinx – You’re always guessing. The Shadow won’t give you any sort of answer, but The Sphinx won’t tell you what he wants, but you can be sure that The Sphinx will tell you if it’s wrong. Generally loudly and when other people are around.
The Politician – The Politician cares about only one thing – does it look good? If it looks good and is immoral or illegal? Who cares? The Politician is most commonly heard saying “perception is reality.” The Politician always dresses carefully – almost as good as his boss. The Politician seeks constant movement. They can avoid being blamed for messes they make, but will loudly point out the mess they inherited in their new job. Your value to a Politician begins and ends with you being useful to them. Otherwise? You don’t exist.

Your defense if you have a bad boss in almost every case if you want to keep your job is the same: do your best at work. Work hard, and don’t break the rules or the law. Be nice. And if it sucks too much? Get a new one.

While traditionally thought of as a good boss, Washington had a few buttons you didn’t want to press, although he did light up Ye Olde Twitter® to piss of Adams: “King George . . . Washington. Verily that soundeth goode.”

One other note: if every boss working at a company is a Bad Boss, one of two things is going on:

The Bad Boss is what they really want. Unless you can make it work, you have to leave. Sooner or later, the messes a Bad Boss makes will stick to you.
It may be you. I know that there have been times in my career when my attitude wasn’t optimal. It’s probably the boss. But always leave room and examine that the real problem isn’t you.

Okay, I’m now officially sick of Mack the Knife. But I still don’t feel bad. And if you’d like to share a bad boss below, feel free.

Bad Bosses, Part I, Including Garfield as Written by H.P. Lovecraft

“Michael, we don’t have a lot of time on this earth! We weren’t meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements.” – Office Space

“That’s what she said.”

I had just gotten the greatest performance review of my life. It was outstanding in every way. My boss (let’s call him Miller, it goes with the song) went on and on about how I was a stunning example of every possible good quality a person could have, and how I was universally loved, admired, and generally made women fertile just through a fleeting glance, and made men better than they thought they could be through the slightest example. If the company needed someone to walk across a pond, on the top of the water, John Wilder was your guy.

For about a second, I bought it. Flattery works because your mind really wants to believe all those nice things. It’s like a horoscope, keep using nice adjectives, and you’ll find one that the person is already predisposed to agree with.

Then I thought about it – this guy Miller, my new boss, has been with the company about a month. He barely knows where his office is and he’d only visited my office once. For him to write a performance review like this? I didn’t believe it. As much as I’d like to think of myself in such glowing terms, I rejected his flattery.

Beyond mentally rejecting his praise as an attempt at manipulation, I also made the mental note never to trust Miller.

Why?

Anyone who will be quick to praise will be quick to condemn. Besides, when I looked at him while he was smiling, he only smiled with his mouth – never with his whole face. He was smiling because he was “supposed” to be smiling, not because the smile was genuine. During those smiles Miller had the dead, flat eyes of a predator, like he was attempting to see if you were fooled and really believed the smile.

I never did meet Miller’s wife – I think her invisibility suit worked pretty well.

I was careful to document every conversation with him. Always trust your gut, people, unless your gut says socialism is a good deal. If your gut says that, remember: never go full Bernie.

I worked pretty far away from the company headquarters, where Miller’s office was. I set up weekly calls to keep him informed on what I and my team were doing. I’d done this in the past for my previous bosses. These calls allowed them to understand what we were doing, and digest it for top management if they needed to.

Except.

Except I found out from a colleague that during these meetings, most of the time Miller was shopping for things online, teaching himself to play the banjo, translating Garfield® into cuneiform (did they even have lasagna in ancient Sumeria?) or, in general, not paying any attention to what I was saying. My colleague noted that Miller generally wasn’t listening at all.

If you get the cuneiform wrong and accidentally translate a passage from the Necronomicon© this is what you get.

Normally, that’s not a problem, I ran had been running my end of things for years, and after a few years you get used to the usual problems – and are expected just to handle them. But my boss had a boss – call him my Grandboss. When my Grandboss wanted to know about some aspect of what I was doing, he’d ask my boss, Miller. Since Miller had literally no idea (despite weekly written reports and the phone call mentioned above) what I was doing, he did the simple thing: he made it up.

Most of the time, it worked fine. My Grandboss generally had an idea of what was going on, even if the specifics were a bit off. But when the results my boss made up promised didn’t happen? The Grandboss got mad. Very mad.

So mad, in fact, that my Grandboss called me up one day and was yelling. I explained, calmly, the real situation and the plan, and that seemed to calm him down. He checked up a few more times to make sure what I said was really happening, and then went away. But the troubles with Miller continued. Our conversations became a random affair – one day he would be polite. The next day, he would be literally yelling over the phone. What had started out as a bad feeling based on that too-good-to-be-true performance review had morphed into a full-blown sitcom level bad boss.

I mean, can you imagine such micromanaging?

I had one or two advantages – first, I had been at the company much longer and had several well-placed friends, and second, I wasn’t a deceitful sack of weasel meat. I’m certain that my boss was lying based on my informants at headquarters, and I’m equally certain that the things Miller was saying weren’t very positive. It’s been several years, and my career is still recovering from his “help.”

I’m ashamed to admit it, but one of the happiest days of my life was when Miller got fired. “But, you can’t fire me! You don’t even know what I do!” were his comments as they took away his keys and allowed him to pop his personal possessions in a box and gave him a complementary cement bag (for the weight, dear). And, he’s right – the Internet sure won’t surf itself.

As near as I can tell, the company didn’t skip a beat in his absence. I’ll also admit that on the day he got fired, I had one of the best workouts of my life. The entire time I worked out that lunch, I just listened to Mack the Knife on a loop for 45 minutes of the best treadmill time I’ve ever put in. I smiled every second. Why Mack the Knife? I have no idea. I rarely listened to it before, and haven’t listened to it even one time since that day until tonight. As I write this, it’s on a loop in the background.

It may be a song from a Marxist play written by a Leftist, but it makes me happy that it made so much money – after the Marxist author died. Also? The most upbeat song about multiple murders. Bonus trivia: Lotte Lenya, mentioned in the song, played Rosa Klebb in the James Bond movie From Russia with Love.

As you can see, she’s the perfect Bond® girl for 2019.

I’ve tried to feel bad about feeling so good because Miller was fired. Even years later, it’s still a pleasant memory. Yeah. I shouldn’t feel good about that, but I do.

Okay, the choice was a single post that was twice as long as this, or this broken into two parts. I chose two parts. Next part is on Friday.

Zen and the Art of Marshmallows, Delayed Gratification, Soviet Tanks, and Russian Motorcycles

“Look, the marshmallows aren’t even toasting! They remain a comfortable sixty-eight degrees!” – The Tick

Come on, we know that the real villain in Stranger Things™ should have been Stay Puft®.

Once upon a time when I was a five-year-old Wilder, my kindergarten teacher gave me a marshmallow. “Johnny, if you can wait five minutes before eating that marshmallow, I’ll give you a second marshmallow, and you can enjoy them both.” The teacher then walked out of the room, closing the door behind her.

I thought furiously. This must be some sort of trap, with stakes that high. I looked around for cameras. Aha! There they were, disguised cleverly as a new box of chalk and a pencil sharpener. They’re monitoring me, just as I suspected. Little did they know, I had anticipated this entire scenario when I had debriefed my friend Thomas A. Anderson* (known on the Dark Web® as Neo™) the previous day.

Also? Keanu never ages – he saves that for the picture in his attic. He looked the same in kindergarten as he does today.

With effort, I slowed the beating of my heart using a technique I had learned from Master Ginsu® during the years I had spent training in Tibet to be a Fake Purse Ninja©**. I had trained. I was ready for this.

Very slowly and subtly I pulled a second marshmallow from the front pocket of my Tough Skins® jeans from Sears©. I put it in my palm. Quick as a cobra, I then reached out for the marshmallow the teacher had left, but only appeared to leave it there on the plate. In reality, I had swapped out the marshmallow on the plate for the one I’d brought in my pocket.

In a practiced move, I pretended to pick my nose while in reality I was eating the marshmallow the teacher had left to tempt me, leaving the imposter I’d brought from home in its place. I felt the rush of the sugars dissolving in my mouth. Now I could finally understand what Spot was trying to tell Dick and Jane. The fools!

But I shook my head to clear it of these deep thoughts. I had finished my surreptitious swap just in time – I heard the footsteps in the hall outside the room, and saw the two dark shadows under the door, letting me know that the teacher was looming like a monster that had slowly slithered out of the bowels of the Earth and decided to go into elementary education. My heart, despite all of the training began to race again. The door knob turned.

Who knew it was that easy?

The teacher had another marshmallow, and started to place it next to my cleverly replaced fake. She stopped. She picked up my marshmallow, the one that had brought from home that had been sitting in my pocket for six hours before I made the swap, and studied it.

“Oh, Johnny. This is gross. There is lint in this marshmallow. And bits of string. And, is that a BB? This won’t do, this won’t do at all.” Drat. I never counted on the relative filth of my pockets giving me away.

I had been caught. I knew that this would go in my Permanent Record. Ruined! And all at the age of five. Perhaps I could salvage my defeat and defect to the Soviet Union so I could be closer to Bernie Sanders?

Before I could go to Plan B and steal an F-15E from the nearby airbase and leave the country at Mach 2.5 my teacher continued, “No, this won’t do at all. Let me get you a fresh marshmallow.” She left the room and came back with two clean, pristine, marshmallows.

It also felt like this when I swapped our baby for a baby with a better jawline at the hospital just after “Pugsley” was born. Those nurses hardly ever look away.

Success. And she never knew what hit her, which would make this the perfect crime. I ate the second and third marshmallows.

Maybe I overthink these situations?

Nah.

I left the school and then a helicopter exploded behind me as I got into the school bus for the trip home, because that just looks really cool. And I didn’t even look back.

Okay, absolutely none of that was true, except the exploding helicopter.

But what is true is that a Scientist did a study where they gave a four or five-year-old a marshmallow and promised them a second marshmallow if they didn’t eat the first. They then followed these kids for 40 years. Yes. 40 years. Here’s a (LINK). Turns out that those kids that waited for the second marshmallow had higher SAT scores, were skinnier, drank less, got stoned less, generally dealt well with stress and had a lot of friends.

The best way to win an argument with your wife is if it never happened. Enough vodka works, too. Does that make this the “Ketamine Maru” scenario?

To be clear: they never gave me the marshmallow test, because I would have completely Kobayashi Maru’d*** it. Besides, they were too busy taking knives away from me. Yes. In kindergarten. That’s how you spell freedom.

The concept of the marshmallow test is that the ability to delay gratification is good, and leads to better life outcomes. We see this all of the time – the ant and the grasshopper was a famous fable – the ants work all summer while the grasshopper goes to meth parties. Then winter hits, the ants start to party, but the grasshopper is left all tweaked out, tapping at the window of the anthill. The ant party then intensifies to drown out the tapping and then everyone cheers when the grasshopper finally shows the good sense to just die already.

Ahhh, Darwinian fables. They skipped over the part where the ants eat the grasshopper’s frozen corpse.

There is a balance that defines a struggle between now and the future. If you’re skewed too far to the now, you can certainly bet that all of your decisions will be made without regard to the consequences. I want the marshmallow now, dangit! The teacher might not bring me a second marshmallow. There might not even be a second marshmallow. Heck, the teacher might not even come back and I’ll be stuck in this room forever.

For most of my life, I’ve lived the “marshmallow later” life. I think the biggest example of this is that I buy life insurance. On my life. I use money that I could use to pay for buying a vintage Soviet T-34 tank (I found one for sale in Poland) and spend it on life insurance. Okay, $60 a month won’t buy a vintage Soviet T-34 tank from Poland, but you get the picture.

But for the rest of this post, I’ll use (sometimes) Marshmallow to refer to future orientation, and Anti-Marshmallow to refer to “eat it now” orientation.

It’s a project car, honey. The guy who sold it to me swore it was one owner.

Future orientation is spending money on something that pays off ONLY IF YOU ARE DEAD. You will never, ever in your life receive a dime from your own life insurance, unless you have a comically complicated plot to fake your own death. Yet, if you’re like me, you pay for it so your family can have the best tier of Internet service after you die, because after all, YouTube® isn’t going to watch itself. In my mind, life insurance is the ultimate Marshmallow test.

Preparing for disasters is another Marshmallow test (Be Prep-ared) that over 90% of your neighbors don’t do at all. Sticking to a diet is another (The Last Weight Loss Advice You’ll Ever Need, Plus a Girl in a Bikini Drinking Water) that’s not real popular. I will admit that I buy my share of silly crap on the Internet. I have several hobbies worth of kits and tools and stuff ready to build when I retire, and that’s Anti-Marshmallow behavior, but the only real hassle with them is finding a great place to store them until I’ve got the time to mess with them, what with the basement being full of ants, grasshoppers, and empty ketamine argument winning bottles.

A few weeks back I made a joke, “I could either spend it on me now, or spend it on an extra box of Depends® when I’m 90.” If one were to truly be Marshmallow, one would always pick the future comfort, over the comfort of today. But life is a balance. If all you do is pick the future, you become the janitor who worked 80 hour weeks for 80 years cleaning schools to leave Harvard® an extra $20 million to turn liberal rich kids into CNN® anchors.

If you become completely Anti-Marshmallow, well, you’re broke. Those are two extremes. Maybe this time you want Moderation?

Last week I mentioned that Moderation is for Monks, and Adam Piggott, Gentleman Adventurer added some great thoughts. You can read it here, and you should (LINK), in fact you should be reading him daily. Anyone who says, “Be the very best bastard that you can be,” is worth your time.

And he says moderation is good – moderation in having a cigar, and not the box. Splitting a bottle of wine with your wife on Friday, but not on all days ending in the letter y. And that’s Discipline, which is very Marshmallow. But is Discipline moderate in 2019 when the motto of the Western world is if it feels good, do it? Probably not.

But yet, there’s a time to be Marshmallow, and a time to be (at least a bit) Anti-Marshmallow. Maybe a T-34 is overkill – I don’t live anywhere near Kursk****. But maybe, just maybe, I should get a Ural®. The Mrs. has already signed off on it and said “You should get that. It looks cool.” To Marshmallow or to not to Marshmallow. I guess to be Marshmallow, at some point you have to eat the marshmallows. Otherwise Harvard© will.

I hear Elon Musk is including anti-gravity as a new Tesla® feature. If I bought a Ural®, I’d skip the Russians and the machine gun, because the Russians would drink all my booze and then invade Colorado only to be thrown back by a plucky school Spanish club.*****

Me? I don’t like marshmallows all that much. Except on ‘smores®. And then I roast mine slowly to get the full mushy goodness without it turning into something that looks like a cat caught at Hiroshima.

Which, I guess is the Marshmallow way to eat marshmallows.

*The Matrix. Too bad they never made a sequel to that movie.

**Bowfinger. If you haven’t seen it, you’re dead to me. Yes, it’s that funny.

***Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan. Really? Please tell me you already knew this one.

****Sort of like Burning Man®, but for tanks. 1943.

*****Nope. You can figure this one out.

The Impending End of The Age of Oil. But Not This Week.

“You have raw emotion deep under your surface. Frack it!” – The Simpsons

From the movie Sad Max®: Beyond Soy Latte™.

Energy rules our world. Advanced civilization depends entirely on the availability of inexpensive energy, and wars have been fought for energy, and lost because of the lack of energy. Every task you or I do during a day is made easier by the availability of that energy. Every task. Even something as simple as a hike in the woods is made easier due the hiking shoes I wear that incorporate polymers and plastics and artificial fabrics made possible through cheap energy and more specifically: cheap fossil fuels. Cheap energy gives us fresh strawberries in winter, and baby oil for sunbathers in summer.

Even though the oil changes are more fun, I imagine the upkeep is more expensive than a Buick®.

I’d even make the case that when energy is cheap, freedom flourishes. Why have a slave? It’s much cheaper to have a gas powered weed trimmer. Slavery is immoral, but cheap energy removes that pesky incentive. Why have serfs? You have to feed them, which is a big drawback. If the Russian Emperor had used tractors instead, he might have lived long enough to be on Dancing with the Czars®.

Cheap energy is freedom.

One of the biggest recurring questions that has popped up (again and again) during my lifetime has been the impending end of the Age of Oil. If you say “impending end of the Age of Oil” in a really deep, booming baritone like Brian Blessed it sounds even cooler. The first time the impending end of the Age of Oil reached mass public consciousness was in the 1970’s, and for good reason. Texas had passed its peak in oil production in 1973, it was thought that every year after would see the production decline.

True Life Snippet From Stately Wilder Manor: Whenever I agree with The Mrs. by saying, “Indeed” she says, “Now say it like Brian Blessed.” And she’s serious. She won’t let me say the word “Indeed” without impersonating Brian Blessed.

How crazy were we for oil in the 1970s? When oil was found in Alaska on the North Slope, several major oil companies put together a four-foot wide (16 meters) pipeline that brought oil 800 miles (6 kilometers) from the Arctic sea down to the Gulf of Alaska. At the time, the project was one of the most ambitious construction projects in United States history, and cost the equivalent of $34 billion 2019 dollars, or about what Elon Musk spends on weed and hair implants in a year. It was expensive, and even in the 1970’s the lawyers and environmental groups had their knives out. In 1970, they were all NIMBY – Not In My Back Yard. In 2020? They’ve gone BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

Nothing as grand or great as the Alaska Pipeline will ever be built again in the United States.

After the Alaska Pipeline oil started flowing and the United States sweet-talked the Saudis into making oil cheaper than a date with Miley Cyrus, oil concerns continued – with oil companies looking for oil in ever more remote locations, including the a mile under the sea, couch cushions, and the faces of teenage boys. Billions were invested in both conventional oil (think about a Texas oil derrick) or unconventional (think about the oil platform used by a James Bond villain as a secret hideout). Exxon© even spent millions trying to learn how to mine shale, crush it, and cook it so that it could be turned into Happy Motoring™ gasoline, but gave up.

These concerns disappeared in 1999 when it became obvious that if you wanted a barrel of oil, in the future all you would have to do is order one on the Internet via Hotmail® after you looked it up on AltaVista™. At that point The Economist© had a woefully stupid cover proclaiming that oil would be cheap from here on out since it was trading as low as $15 a barrel at that point, even though oil doubled in cost over the year. In 2008, crude oil would hit its (so far) all-time high in 2019 dollars of $173.

On a positive note, with her skin Meg Ryan could now do commercials for Jack Links® beef jerky.

The thought in 2008 was that we were certain to have hit impending end of the Age of Oil (indeed!). How certain? George W. Bush, an oilman president from Texas, was in favor of creating incentives to add ethanol to gasoline, despite the anguished cries of people who would rather have consumed the alcohol directly. Ethanol plants appeared throughout the corn belt of the United States, turning seed, sunlight, fertilizer, and diesel fuel into food. Which was turned into fuel. Farmers loved this.

This led to yet more investment in energy alternatives – schemes to turn natural gas into ammonia for fuel, yet deeper wells into the ocean, fracking, turning coal into liquid fuels, turning “switch grass” into fuel, and any other silly idea that would could come up. People even touted the coming “hydrogen economy” because they forgot that hydrogen had to be made using some other form of energy. The world was needing an energy savior.

Or, could he be the foretold Anti-Cat?

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Apocalypse

Of course in 2008, the trend was clear: impending end of the Age of Oil (indeed!) was upon us. But one of the unlikely saviors had turned out to be real.

In 2012 if you would have asked me, I would have told you that fracking was just a great way to turn money into wasted fuel – it took almost as much fuel to make fracked oil as you got out of it – not a good investment. In 2015, I would have told you the same thing – the fracking companies were losing money like there was no tomorrow – if you had to invest more energy (think Btu or kilowatts) into getting oil out of the ground than it was worth in energy terms, you were just sinking yourself faster by using that kind of energy – it’s like burning your blankets to keep your bedroom warm in winter.

I was putting together my notes for a Big Energy Post in October of 2018, and had even written the first few paragraphs (okay, 500 words or so) when my research was showing something different. I skipped the Big Energy Post and moved on to another topic, since it was clear to me that my preconceived notion that fracking was a waste of energy might be wrong. My research was showing something other than fracking was a waste of energy. It was showing that fracked oil might actually be . . . worth it?

It turns out that when anyone first starts doing anything, they suck at it. And unless it’s me practicing singing, I have learned that if I practice, I’ll get better. There’s even a curve that describes this – it’s called an “S-Curve” or logistics curve or learning curve. When you first start walking, you suck. When you first start driving, you suck. When you first start, well, anything you’re awful at it. Over time you get better, and the more you practice, the more competition there is? The better you get.

If you have hundreds of people practicing something with billions of dollars on the line? They get better. Quickly.

And that’s the story of fracking oil in the United States. Water usage in fracking is down. Chemical usage in fracking is down. Drilling costs, energy expended, and labor per barrel are down. After practicing thousands of times on thousands of wells, companies have figured out how to frack a well to maximize crude oil production and minimize cost (and energy) put into it. One metric I saw showed that fracked oil was now competitive (with a profit) compared with the cheapest oil on the planet – oil from Saudi Arabia. Companies have gotten so good at fracking that natural gas in the United States is essentially free.

I guess I’m not a fan.

Fracked oil is on a trajectory to be competitive with the lowest cost oil produced conventionally any place in the world. And fracked oil has some other advantages – it’s “lighter” than conventional crude – that means it contains more gasoline and diesel, and less of the “heavier” stuff that is harder to turn into gasoline and diesel – think asphalt.

The United States is the largest crude oil producer in the world. I never thought I’d type that sentence and it represent a real fact, but in 2019, it does. The United States is, as promised by every president starting with Nixon, actually, really and for trues, energy independent.

[Edit – Chart added after Lathechuck’s comment]

Was it alternative energy, like windmills? No. Was it the communist fever dreams of The Teen Girl Congress Squad®? No.

Is it “sustainable”? Kinda. It is for a while. There are an estimated (as of 2019) 1.7 trillion barrels of recoverable shale oil in the world, 293,000,000,000 of them are in the United States. At 20,000,000 barrels a day in just the United States, using just United States resources, that’s forty years that we have from 2020 – until 2060 – to find an alternative, like, oh, nuclear. And don’t believe me – here’s an actual clean energy evangelist who finally did that math and discovered . . . windmills are worse than natural gas as far as carbon emissions.

We still face headwinds – economic, exponential growth, two billion people that would love to hop the border to the United States, and communists that want to tear the place down. But oil? Oil isn’t the place to look for an apocalypse, at least this week.

And, trust me, if I hear a whiff that any of the above is wrong, I’ll pop it right back up on this blog as soon as I can confirm.

So, at least for today, Happy Motoring©. We have maybe forty years to fix this, so let’s not waste it. This has obvious foreign policy implications we’ll discuss in future posts. Upside? Why do we care about the Middle East anymore?

Financial Advisers, Christianity, and Elon Musk’s Hair

“It’s getting exciting now, two and one-half. Think of everything we’ve accomplished, man. Out these windows, we will view the collapse of financial history. One step closer to economic equilibrium.” – Fight Club

My financial adviser checked my balance – she didn’t manage to push me over. I’m sturdy and built low to the ground, The Mrs. says.

One of my biggest joys of having children is giving them unsolicited advice. For example, my daughter, Alia S. Wilder texted me the other day:

The Unsuspecting Alia S. Wilder: “ . . . also, Lars Úmlåüt (her boyfriend) and I met with a financial adviser about retirement and investment portfolios.”

The Evil John Wilder: (I Swear This Was My Actual Text Answer) “That’s like talking to a mechanic about your Gulfstream® jet. You don’t have any money. And this will be in next week’s blog.”

Yes, I really said that to her. The idea of needing a financial adviser when you don’t have any money is like buying flowers when you don’t have a girlfriend, at least until the restraining order expires. And The Mrs. was the one that christened Lars. After he cuts his hair, we’ll have to think of another name. Although if they get married, Alia S. Úmlåüt does have a ring to it.

It’s rare that a picture describes a concept so completely.

But the financial conversation continued.

The Still Hasn’t Seen It Coming Alia S. Wilder: “We have very little (money) but the financial adviser will help get us going in the right direction. Life is going to suck financially, but you gotta live like no one else wants to, so you can have the future everyone dreams of.”

The part that I’ve italicized above is the part that scared me when I read it in her text message. That’s nothing but pure sales pitch. It’s a good sales pitch, too. It sells the virtue of sacrifice now for future rewards. And it is a philosophy I fundamentally agree with. Deferred gratification is the key to most success – work hard now, and the benefits accrue over time. I wrote about that here (“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”-Steve Martin Plus? A sniper joke.). Steve Martin spent a decade learning and four years refining before he ended up in wild success.

To be great, you have to put in the time. You have to work. But the very best sales pitch will be like a virus – it will work into your brain. When you have your potential client quoting you? You have an effective sales pitch. Back to the texting.

The Sage of Wisdom John Wilder: “Get a 401k. Invest in stocks. Don’t mess with it. Ten words. It’s all you need to know right now.”

Alia and I had already talked about other investments – having a month’s worth of food around the house. Being prepared for emergencies. Having a set of jumper cables in the car. These are small things, but they can do everything from making your life more convenient when you accidentally leave the lights on, to saving your life when that first aid kit pays off.

The Probably Getting Irritated Daughter Alia: “We have a 401k. We are starting the stocks. And we’re treating investments like an expense.”

Investments like an expense? Where did I hear that before? Just from every financial adviser that tried to convince a Young John Wilder Who Had No Money to sign up for some sort of financial product. Strong the sales force is in this one. His sales technique was so good he’d managed to get a second slogan injected into Alia’s mind.

The force commissions are strong in this one.

Not Going to Let it Drop John Wilder: “No. Just the 401K. No other stocks. Pay off your debt first.”

As someone in the “Alia owes money to” category, I think I’d be a bit irritated if my loan wasn’t being paid back while Alia was investing in Elon Musk’s latest venture, a time machine that only Elon Musk’s hairline uses. But investing in stocks when you owe money (outside of a mortgage) is, well, silly.

Or was it the future? Musk’s mane mangles moments in the multiverse.

A 401k is different.

Why? Many employers match some percentage of what you put in one. The most common amount I’ve seen is a 50% match up to 6% of your wages. Said differently, if you put in 6%, the company will put in 3%. This is a good investment – you make an immediate 50% return.

Irritated As A Yak That Just Got Called A Weasel Noggin Alia S. Wilder: “That’s what (Financial Adviser) is there for. He works for (Company Name).”

Cool Voice of Experience John Wilder: “No. Don’t trust him. No individual stocks. Just 401k, and pay down your debt, until the debt is gone. Then add more to your 401k. Financial advisers are salesmen. And this company (After Looking It Up)? Whole Life Insurance? STAY AWAY.”

Whole life insurance has two components – life insurance and some sort of investment. It costs a LOT more than regular “term” life, but has the benefit of paying you back if you don’t use it. How can I tell that whole life is a bad deal? The salesmen get huge commissions.

For the record, he’s also sad he got caught.

The Feeling Like Napoleon Retreating from Moscow Alia S. Wilder: “No. They do more than investments. They look at the whole picture. He said he was going for more investments if we moved forward.”

The Not Needing to be a Psychic John Wilder: “No. Stay away. I’m sure he’s a nice guy, good sales patter, but you will regret dealing with people like that.”

Now As Defensive as the Maginot Line Alia S. Wilder: “It doesn’t hurt to get information and a direction on our future. (Company) is a Christian company for Christians to help with money management on all fronts.”

Rolling Like a Panzer Through The Ardennes John Wilder: “Sure. Just don’t give them any money or sign anything. He’s not doing this for his own health or because he’s a Christian. He’s doing it so you can help make his car payment.”

Enough of this Nonsense Now, Has to Go Back to Work Alia S. Wilder: “I appreciate your advice, Dad. I love you lots.”

Won’t Let It Rest Because Apparently She Kept Thinking About It During Lunch Alia S. Wilder: “So why are you so against investments? If you don’t mind me asking.”

Sweaty Back from the Treadmill And Smelling Like Teen Spirit John Wilder: “A 401k is an investment. I’m in favor. Paying off debts. Also an investment. Investments are smart, but individual stocks aren’t an investment, they’re speculation. Stock funds before your debt is gone? Stupid. Using Christianity to sell a service? Awful.”

What is an investment? When you’re young and paying off debt, pay off the debt. You need a financial adviser like you need a staff for your private lair underneath the volcano in the South Pacific. And for most people, buying individual stocks is similar to gambling. I heard one person make the comment – “I only invest in individual stocks if I can change the outcome.” As I recall, he was on the board of several companies, so he yes, he really could change the outcomes.

The overall market is different. It has had up years, and down years. If I’m going to invest in stocks, I’m going to invest in aggregated stocks, like an index fund or a targeted fund, which is what I have in my 401k. Yes, I have bought individual stocks. And, yes, I’ve lost money on them – not enough to change my life, but enough to change my philosophy.

There’s an eternity of good deals!

I’m not against Christian businesses – not at all. I’m not even against Christian financial advisers – Dave Ramsey (at least on radio) talks about his faith, but doesn’t use it to sell his products. Heck, the guy gives away his ideas on the radio daily. Does he make money? Absolutely.

What about Chick-fil-A©? I love Chick-fil-A®. The chicken sandwich is the best I’ve ever tasted, and it amuses me how people get bent out of shape that they give up a day’s worth of revenue every week because of their principles. When I’m in a big city do I go to Chick-fil-A™ because they’re Christian? No. I go there because the food is great. I go there because the employees are uniformly polite and neat. I go there because the stores are spotless.

I’m not even against financial advisers in general – but when a financial adviser is attempting to “help” people who don’t have money invest? I’m not a fan. I’d prefer they charged a fee like other professionals – that’s upfront, and I think those people really are on your side.

I later called up Alia. “Did you sign anything?”

“No.”

I relaxed. The world isn’t short of people who want your money. In some cases, they work really hard for it, like Chick-fil-A©. In other cases, well, commissions are powerful motivators.

I’ll stick with the chicken sandwiches, they’re better with mayo.

Dang. Now I’m hungry.

John Wilder is not a licensed professional adviser and you should probably think twice about taking his advice and consult with a competent adviser. Unless you’re his kid, which you’re probably not.

Stonewall Jackson, Patton, Wrecked Cars and Dealing with Fear

“Yes, well, I imagine if it were fear, my eyes would be wider.” – Serenity

Sadly, I’m a Sagittarius and my name’s not Morris or this could have been comedy gold.

I had a Ford® Taurus©. Yes, that’s an admission of guilt. Even worse? It was a pale-lime green. I imagine someone in marketing called the color “seafoam”, but if the sea has foam that color, it’s probably in a congealed blob off the coast of China and consists of anti-freeze, extra kidneys, and despair. After 150,000 miles the Taurus© died on impact with a pickup whose driver decided stop signs were optional on Tuesdays. But the other driver made up for wrecking my car by not having insurance, so there was that benefit.

As I recall, there were three buttons on the dash of the Taurus® to program the display. Since I am a man, reading the manual was out of the question. The display had the option to show various things – it had a compass mode, a thermometer, and a countdown timer to show the number of days until Obama left office. I only knew it had a compass mode because when I bought it (used) it had the compass on. After I changed the battery, it reverted back to the “Only this many days until Obama is gone” mode.

I wanted it to show the thermometer.

Clearly it never gets hot in summer, so it must be global warming.

I had no idea how to change modes – since the manual was only two feet away in the glove compartment, it might as well have been in Mongolia, and not the easy to reach parts of Mongolia. I reached my hand out to start mashing the buttons with all of the skill of a baboon wearing a pink tutu attempting to clear a paper jam while making double-sided color copies at Kinkos®. I hesitated. What if I ended up turning the car’s language into French? Would I have to wear a beret and learn to smoke cigarettes while being nihilistic?

Then I started to panic. Being French was awful, but what would happen if I accidently turned the car’s units into metric? I don’t even know how to drink in metric. Is sixteen a lot of kilometers of beer to drink? How many metric days until Christmas? How many milliliters of cheeseburger do I order at Sonic®? Perish the thought of being French and metric. That’s how we got Canada, after all. Sure, the Canadians look like us, but that’s how they infiltrate.

Sure, they look polite. But just try to dissect one to see if it’s an alien from outer space and they get darn grumpy.

The thought then hit me – I’ve spent literally my entire life tearing stuff apart to see what was inside, and then trying to put it back together. That’s been my mode since, much to Pa Wilder’s dismay, I discovered screwdrivers. If I wasn’t tearing stuff apart, I was experimenting in other ways. Sometimes the result wasn’t that great, like the time in fifth grade when I took a letter opener and put it across both prongs of an electrical plug.

An electrical plug that was plugged into the wall.

Oops.

Immediately there was a big spark, smoke, the smell of ozone, splattering molten metal, and then complete darkness in my room. I knew where the breakers were, and went to flip mine back on. I’m pretty sure Ma Wilder smelled the ozone, but didn’t say anything since my bedroom wasn’t actively on fire.

I’ve done stupider things. Some of them even when I was sober.

So, there I was sitting in my car. Once I was brave enough to slam a letter opener between into an active electrical circuit, and now I was hesitant to push some buttons.

What? I came to my senses. It’s just a car.

I pushed buttons, didn’t turn French, and even better, just like the Apollo program, I avoided having to use the metric system entirely. And I got rid of the hesitation.

What led to the hesitation?

Fear. It’ll creep up on you, first in small ways, and then in large if you don’t fight it every time it shows up.

General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson said, “Never take counsel of your fears.” And Jackson didn’t – he even got his nickname by being famously fearless at Bull Run when he rushed his troops to fill a gap in the line. “Look, men, there is Jackson standing like a stone wall!” Not a bad way to get a nickname.

Stonewall understood that fear was his most potent enemy. Well, fear and that musket ball his own troops accidently shot him with.

For the record, he didn’t ever have a microbrew or a nonfat anything.

So, why is fear so bad? What’s wrong with a little fear?

That’s simple: fear is at the root of every significant problem in the world. Period. I understand that’s a pretty bold statement. Can I back it up? Sure.

Let’s take envy. It’s at the root of lots of bad things, like Leftism which is almost entirely based on envy. What causes envy?

Insecurity. Think Elon Musk feels envy? Probably not, and I could name a dozens of people who don’t feel envy. They’re not envious because they’re not insecure. They don’t feel uncertainty, anxiety, or self-doubt. All of these emotions are based in fear and lead to envy.

That’s the same with every other negative emotion – anger, shame, et cetera. It’s just another face of fear. And evil things come from evil emotion (and Disney®), not from rational calculation.

Frank Herbert got it right, writing about a rite in his novel Dune:

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

If Dune® had sandcatworms, would the spice be in the hairballs?

Okay, Herbert is a bit flowery. But the concept is right. Fear robs you, decision by decision, of your entire life. And fear is used to manipulate you. Today I was reading Google® News™ and counted 38 major stories on the main page. Here’s my analysis:

3 of the stories were mildly amusing or interesting.
2 of them were potentially useful to me – they were stories I could use to make myself better, depending upon my situation.
8 were useful only to manipulate and titillate readers through fear.
25 were utterly useless.

I read the amusing stories. I read one of the useful stories – the other didn’t apply right at the moment. I’ll admit, I got caught and read one or two of the useless stories. I skipped the fear manipulation stories. Fear is a tool that can be used against you, but only if it makes you forget your values. There should be no news, no story that can make you waiver from your values.

What’s the cure for fear?

Action. Press the button. Ask the girl out. Lift the weight. Press the button in your car. Successful or not, you will have overcome your fear. You will be stronger. You will have less fear the next time – the only way to escape your fear, is to go through your fear. And fighting fears when they’re small (like resetting a car dashboard) is easier than waiting until they grow to the size where they eat away your life like vintage Elvis© on a peanut butter and bacon cheeseburger.

Is fear useless? No. Fear can be used. Fear should be used.

General George S. Patton, riffing off of Stonewall, said:

“The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine. When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead.”

Fun fact: General Patton is tired of your whiney crap.

So, maybe Patton is saying I shouldn’t fear the metric French, but maybe I should stop the whole “turning a letter opener into a bedroom arc welder” because, in the words of Robert A. Heinlein:

“Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.”

The Who, The WHO, Cavemen, Child Labor, and We Won’t Get Fooled Again

Every Saturday we’d grab some fish and chips, head to the park, watch The Who. – The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret.

The motto of the World Health Organization – “There is no health problem so small that we cannot dedicate millions in government dollars on salaries so that we can look it up on the Internet, hold conferences on it in international vacation spots on the government dime, and also hang out in our palatial Geneva, Switzerland headquarters while eating non-GMO, free-range, gluten-free snacks that we also paid for with government dollars.”

In a bid to make sure that journalists have something to write about, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced this week that it had three new findings:

“Burnout” is a psychological condition of international importance,
“Gaming Disorder” is a psychological condition of international importance, and
They need some fancy new chairs for their office in Geneva, Switzerland, because sitting in chairs for grueling six hour days surfing the Internet are just heck on their spines. A masseuse and some spa time would be nice, too.

This new categorization goes into effect on January 1, 2022, and until then apparently you can’t have these conditions until then, so feel free to be burned out and while playing Pokémon nonstop until you pass out from lack of sleep all you want. But how does the WHO define these new menacing maladies that are the greatest threat to the world?

I imagine the view of Lake Geneva is to die for from the roof! Ha, to die for! That’s a health joke. (Photo by: Yann Forget / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0, snarky caption by yours truly.)

Burnout:

Burnout is an “occupational phenomenon”, which means that you can’t catch it from an AntiFa® member, because they’re allergic to actual jobs. Burnout is defined as:

Energy depletion or exhaustion,
A greater mental distance from one’s job, and
Reduced professional efficacy.

This describes every single employee at the local McDonalds in Modern Mayberry, so I guess WHO is right, this is an epidemic that we need an international agency focused on. I would say that I hope they don’t work too hard at it and risk burnout themselves, but then I recalled they work for the WHO, so I can rest easily tonight.

Honestly, that picture is the one I’d like to have taken of me in the last moment before I died – go out like a man. But in reality, I bet that today that guy is an unfrozen caveman lawyer who has to get his billing hours up or the other partners would come into his cave at night and mash him up with big rocks. For reals? If this was the last moment of my life? I would die a happy man.

I’m betting that this “burnout” isn’t a new phenomenon. I’m certain that our distant ancestors just couldn’t get themselves out of the cave some mornings because Oog, their supervisor, was going to get on them again for not holding the atlatl in just the right way to bring down the mammoth.

Stupid Oog. And I bet that Oog will tear me a new one on my performance review – maybe I should talk to HR – Hominid Relations.

Okay, so burnout is probably a product of today’s society, since at almost every point in history up until now, being “burned out” would have resulted in starvation. Perhaps all the employees need is proper motivation?

Also 1872: “I’m sorry to hear that you’re burned out. Allow me to show my condolences after I’m done with my fiftieth straight 12 hour shift at the mill.”

Gaming Disorder:

Gaming disorder is defined by the WHO as:

Inability to stop playing a game even if it interferes with relationships, work, and sleep, and
Lasts for a year.

I thought that the above bullet points were the goal of a good video game? I mean, the ultimate video game would have people divorced and starving to death on their couch because they couldn’t stop playing.

This isn’t a video game, but it is one of the funniest clips in the last 15 years.

I’ll admit that I’ve given video gaming a hard time in previous posts, but I’ll also admit that I’ve been the guilty party from time to time. I have a weakness for strategy games, and growing up there wasn’t anyone else interested, so I didn’t have anyone to play the games with. There are few enough that have sufficient complexity to be interesting. But when I find one . . . oops, it’s three A.M., where did the time go?

Also: Why a year? Seems random, just like every recipe says “bake at 350°F (771°C) for two hours.” Are you sure it isn’t 375°F (-40°C) for ninety minutes (400 metric minutes)? I think when your personal hygiene suffers to the point that your dead corpse would repel a starving hyena, you’ve probably hit any reasonable definition of being just a little too obsessed with Grand Theft Auto®. But WHO says a year . . . so I guess I’ve got 345 days left. The power company won’t care, right?

Now I won’t say that there isn’t a role for WHO. It might serve a useful purpose if it stuck to actual medical issues that are important. WHO helped eradicate smallpox, and that alone is worthy of actual admiration. And there are numerous missions that it works on today that are important:

HIV/AIDS,
Malaria,
Tuberculosis,
And the big granddaddy of all:

For a summary of how scary Ebola is, check out Aesop’s posts over at Raconteur Report – they’re chilling and make most horror movies look like a best case scenario. Here’s a link to his take: (LINK). If you’re not already, you should be reading him, daily – Aesop is an unrelenting voice for truth, and that’s a rare and dangerous thing. Everyone in Fort Wayne – you should read Aesop.

WHO really does have an important mission outside of these silly conditions that it makes up to get the monotone talkers from NPR® all atwitter. But how serious are they about spending governmental dollars for health?

Not very. Their offices are in Geneva, Switzerland. Geneva (from the pictures I’ve seen) is absolutely stunning. I’d move there in a heartbeat for the scenery and also because local residents vote to see if you can stay. Not “you” as a class of people, but you as an individual. If you’re a jerk? You’ll be kicked out of the pool. And when Muslims demanded that the Swiss remove the cross from their flag? The Muslims were told to pound sand. Oops? Can I say “pound sand” when referring to a Muslim, or is that soil discrimination? I mean, we all know that Europe wouldn’t exist without non-Europeans, right?

Regardless of soil classification, I like the moxie of the Swiss. But the average rent in Geneva is $3000 a month for a two bedroom apartment that probably is smaller than the backseat of the Kia® Soul™ where Miley Cyrus lost her virginity to Joe Biden. If the WHO were (Great Britain) was (United States) serious, they’d move their headquarters to someplace like Detroit where the town is giving away property. I imagine that WHO hasn’t moved because skiing sucks in Michigan when you compare it to Gstaad. I’d post the obligatory picture of the urban wasteland that Detroit is, but, you have Google® too.

But burnout? Video games? These are not problems that require international attention or an organization of pampered international bureaucrats.

A threat we need an international organization to respond to: dangerous asteroids.
A threat we don’t need an international organization to respond to:

Butts don’t kill planetary life, it’s space rocks moving at an average of 17 km/s (3 mph) that are faster than your mother in junior high that will kill you. Okay, your mother may kill you, but the space rocks will depopulate Australia, if that continent even exists. I’m thinking Australia is something that map makers drew in because they were bored and wanted to prove to chicks that they were hip, or cool, or fly, or lit. Depends on what they said in on August 22, 1770.

Yo.

The WHO is like every other government agency. Over time they forget their primary mission because they’ve either achieved it (Centers for Disease Control), or it’s too hard (NASA) so they end up with scary stories about cookie dough (The CDC, Raw Cookie Dough, and Sexy Theocracy) or create braille books on eclipses (Elon Musk: The Man Who Sold Mars). Aesop over at Raconteur Report brought up the military in this context with a post that’s the best I’ve read all week. He’s right. (LINK)

Why does the WHO behave this way? Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy seems to still be in full force.

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers’ union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

When a cell behaves like the WHO and most other government agencies do, it’s called cancer. I wonder why no government agency exists merely to keep the other agencies working on what they’re supposed to work on?

I guess that’s just a mystery no one can solve. Unless we put Roger Daltrey on the case!

Real aside: when I finally listened to Won’t Get Fooled Again – I think I was 20 or so, I realized that The Who was on the side of freedom. I wish the other WHO would just . . . do their job.

Financial Advisers, Future Predictions, and Three-Breasted Mars Women

“Baldrick, I have a very, very, very cunning plan.” – Blackadder

I wonder if she inspired the military-industrial complex speech?

Financial advisers have a pretty standard set of advice:

Get a job. Opening your own business is risky, so it’s best if you work for someone else.
Max out contributions to your 401k. Put your money in stock index funds.
Work forty (or more) hours per year for forty (or more) years, depending on how much you lost in the divorce settlement(s).
When you are of no further use to the corporation* anymore financially ready, retire. Fortunately, by the time you retire you’ll be so exhausted from all of the hours working that you’ll (ideally) just sit on your porch in a daze staring off and wondering where your life went and why Bob Barker isn’t hosting the Price is Right® anymore.
If you’re lucky, your kids will put you into a retirement home that doesn’t require that you manufacture basketball shoes for Nike® on a quota in exchange for individually wrappedhard candies.

That’s pretty much what a financial advisor will tell you, if you strip out the cynicism. But why would you strip out the cynicism? That would take all the fun out of it – we ain’t getting out of here alive, so might as well smile on the way, like Socrates did after his trial. “I drank what???”

The problem with financial advisors, however, is that they give great advice based on what worked in the past. Any weather forecaster can tell you that the best possible weather forecast is that “tomorrow will be just like today,” since it’s 85% certain that’s going to be correct, or at least my statistics professor in college said so. The past really does predict the future pretty well.

Except when it doesn’t.

The thing the past doesn’t predict well is tornados, hurricanes, floods, volcanos and pollen. I strongly support just calling them all torhurflovolpols just so I can see television broadcasters talking about the Torhurflovolpol index. “Well, Brian, there’s a 45% chance of something on the Torhurflovolpol index. So get out your floating waterproof asbestos crash armor with built in respirator.” I think they sell those at Eddie Bauer®.

It is certain, however, that we will be really surprised by the events that lead to the future world we’ll be living in 30 years from now. Let’s jump back into the time machine and go thirty years in the past and look at some of the ludicrous predictions that would have been laughed at, but were nevertheless correct.

In 1989, if I told you that:

The Soviet Union would collapse in two years,
Donald Trump would be president,
China would be transformed from a communist totalitarian basketcase to an economic powerhouse and growing military power,
The United States would produce more oil per day in 2019 than the previous peak in output in 1973 and OPEC would be irrelevant,
People would willingly give all of their personal details to large corporations,
Music and long distance phone calls would be essentially free,
People would pay hundreds of dollars for “in-game” purchases on video games that seem more like a job than a game,
Keith Richards would still be alive with his original liver,
You could watch nearly any movie ever made, at any time, from nearly anywhere, and
People in Britain would be called fascist for rejecting rule by Germany.

If you have a really long term question, just ask yourself, What Would Keith Richards Do?

You would have laughed if I would have predicted those things, or called me a dreamer, insane, or just shook your head. The general consensus was all of the “predictions” above were absurdly unrealistic. The Soviets, for instance, looked nearly invincible. We were worried that they were masters of technology, producing better Olympians®, military tech, and Robotic Opponent Overlord Movie Boxing Antagonists (ROOMBA). From the outside, especially listening to certain journalists, people were worried that communism would be the ism that finally took down the country, although they looked a bit too happy when describing our glorious communist future.

The Soviets looked invulnerable, until it was obvious that they were so pathetic that they couldn’t even field a decent hair metal band.

Dolph Lundgren, the actor who played Drago in the Rocky movies has a master’s degree in Chemical Engineering, which means that he’s way more qualified in science than Bill Nye® and could also break Nye like a twig. I would pay $200 to see a boxing match between the two of them.

But these improbable things did happen.

This allows me to state, categorically, that the future we will have in 30 years isn’t the one you’re expecting. It will surprise you in ways that you can’t even imagine now. In hindsight, we all make up excuses in our minds to explain that we anticipated even the unanticipated. After the Soviet Union fell, all of the broadcasters and talking heads on television made the point that, unlike other people, they were the ones that had really seen this coming. “It was obvious to me, Brian, that the Soviet empire was just a house of cards.”

We can guess about the future in broad brush strokes, but the general wisdom just over a decade ago was that oil was going to be gone and that we’d be close to pumping dry holes right now and wearing football shoulder pads and studded leather jockstraps and living in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, sort of like walking into a Sears® or JCPenny’s™ in 2018. This explains G.W. Bush’s energy policy, and, let’s be real, probably the invasion of Iraq. Of major trends to miss, underestimating the amount of energy available for society was a doozy, even though he had the CIA, NSA, and every military intelligence agency working on that question.

And, I’ll admit, I never saw the amazing increase in oil production as a thing that could happen, either. My best excuse for not getting it right even though I thought about it quite a bit was that I didn’t have a billion dollar budget and dozens of flunkies to do research on it, though I bet they would have just done a lot of internet searches on studded leather jockstraps.

But Qwest® had a pretty accurate vision of the future. Qwest© was a communications company before it got bought out, but it had this commercial which means the future it predicted outlasted the company itself. Guess Qwest™ didn’t have a crystal ball that could predict everything . . .

We can look to the past and paint in broad brush strokes some things that are more probable than others. One thing that got me was a rainy Saturday re-watching of Total Recall, the 80’s Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. One of the things I was surprised by was the amount of technology they got absolutely right, from big screen flat televisions to communications to real-time airport weapon detection. In many ways, the “gee-whiz” feel of the original movie was just gone. Technology had made the miraculous (back then) “so what” today. And, again, this is the span of only thirty years. We still don’t either a Mars colony or three-breasted women, but I hear Elon Musk is working on both.

Duh. Three boobs exist only on Mars, silly.

Just like the collapse of the Soviet Union, unexpected things will happen. Huge things. And, if my guesses are right, the weather is ripe for big change in the next decade. The changes, thankfully, will be good, bad, or just plain amusing.

So where does that leave you and I? General Dwight D. Eisenhower said: “In preparing for battle, I have always found the plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” As a direct descendent of one of his teachers (this is actually true and not made up), I always wonder if Great-Grandma Von Wilder might have said that to a very young Eisenhower first, and then Ike re-used it after planning D-Day when it was actually Great-Grandma Von Wilder who did the heavy lifting on the logistics after he pulled her out of retirement and into a tent in London.

But if I’m right, the next twenty years will be the most momentous in human history, even more than when the police chased O.J. Simpson in his white Ford® Bronco™. I’m not sure if having a 401K or a 5.56mm is the number/letter combination that will be the most useful in a decade. I’m willing to bet that living far away from large urban population centers is wise, even if we end up living in the world with the best possible outcome. But I do know that planning is important, even if your plans are wrong. Hint: They will be.

Okay, I know someone is going to get this joke.

When you plan, you expand your mind, you think about future possibilities that you’ve never considered. A mind not stuck on business as normal is crucial. Yesterday’s weather be a good predictor of today’s weather, but it won’t predict volcanos very well. The future is unknown. The future will surprise you. If you’ve prepared for the volcano, the tornado isn’t the same threat, but you’ll be ready to adapt. Assuming you have your floating waterproof asbestos crash armor with built in respirator. I think they sell that at Wal-Mart®.

When it comes to being prepared for the future, remember this: It’s better to look silly having prepared for a disaster that never comes, than not having prepared for the disaster and having to explain to your children why you didn’t.

Bet you never hear that from a financial adviser.

*For the record, my view of corporations is that they’re a tool, a convenient legal fiction to allow Very Large Things to get done. The very name “corporation” comes from the Latin root word “corpus” which means a “place to have spring break”, or a “body” – corpus is also where the word corpse comes from. Regardless of the definition, either of those can get you put into jail. However, “incorporation” means, “giving a body to.” A corporation is legally a person.

And, just like people, some are naughty, even if they once had as their motto, “Don’t be evil.” I guess being evil pays pretty well.

I am not a financial adviser, paid or otherwise, so there’s that. But I have seen Better Call Saul™, and that’s at least some sort of qualification.

Creative Destruction and a Girl in a French Maid Outfit

“Well, they’re wrong. You are creative. You are damn creative, each and every one of you. You are so much more creative than all of the other dry, boring morons that you work with.” – The Office

Hmm, you’d think the road sign outside of the office might be a hint?

A good friend of mine works out in Silicon Valley, and related a (fairly) short story about being a hiring manager after the dotcom bust – he works in the dreaded Human Resources Department. Somehow a gentleman with a Ph.D. in multiplexing signals on fiber optics got a job interview with him. This particular job interview was fairly short. My friend said, “Umm, we’re looking for a mechanical engineer. With no experience. Why would you be looking for a job with us?”

“I’m looking for anything. Anything.”

“I hope you saved your money,” my friend thought. What he said was: “We’ll be in touch.” That’s what recruiters say when you’re in their office and they’re really tired of the stink of failure and hope that it won’t wear off on them. They especially don’t like getting it on their shoes.

The economy is in a constant state of change, and has been since 1800 or so. Joseph Schumpeter, the dead economist, is credited with coming up with a name for this – Creative Destruction. That’s an academic foul for two reasons: First, some other dead economist else came up with the idea. Second, yet another dead economist, a different one this time, used the name before he did. So, like Columbus, he got credited for something someone else did. The nice thing is that you can spend your spare time wondering what you can do with a dead economist. I like to drag mine out at Christmas and decorate him with little graphs, sort of like Martha Stewart.

I like to add cinnamon to my economist. Makes him smell more festive.

Whoever first used the name is unimportant. Like I said, he’s dead. But the idea of Creative Destruction originated with Karl Marx. Karl came up with the idea (by observing economics in the 19^th Century) that existing production and existing productive forces were periodically destroyed by the economy. This was a phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution. Innovation among clever people kept changing the world. First the loom replaced weavers. Then the factory replaced artisans. And finally the PEZ® dispenser replaced scores of servants that would unwrap and gently place the PEZ© in your mouth while wearing fancy-schmancy servant clothes (including white gloves!) after executing a perfect curtsy and pulling the PEZ® off the silver tray with hand-crafted PEZ™ tongs.

Ahh, the Victorian Era.

I can only afford a single PEZ®-maid. Talk about frugality.

This change in production had the side effect of making lots of weavers, craftsman, and PEZ™-maids unemployed. The transition was difficult, and it very much was a First World Problem. It’s not like goat herders in Botswana become unemployed when a goat factory comes online – no. There’s no factory for goat herding, at least not yet. And, for the record, I have no idea if there are goats in Botswana, and I don’t care enough to Google® it, and, honestly, have only the basic knowledge that Botswana is somewhere near where people get Ebola and you can’t get decent Internet. That’s enough knowledge about Botswana for me.

The above is an example of a First World Problem and a good example of Creative Destruction – I kept one cell phone for six years, and had museums calling me to see if they could have it.

Even though Creative Destruction was (and is) a First World Problem, and even though this Problem has created more wealth than any other system in the history of humanity (poor people in the United States today have better nutrition and entertainment available to them than Roman Emperors did) it still sucks when the Creative Destruction Fairy picks your job to be the one that gets axed. Marx echoed this and predicted Silicon Valley when he wrote that capitalism grows “ . . . by the conquest of new markets and the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.” Strangely, that also describes my high school dating career.

But I digress.

Silicon Valley is built on just quote from Marx in the paragraph above. The concept of “business disruption” is exactly what Silicon Valley does best.

Cabs? Let’s disrupt it with Uber™. This refinement will allow people to have cheaper cab rides. Oh, and the money will be more concentrated, and the “cab drivers” will be paid less. Nearly every business model out of Silicon Valley is based on this disruption – from consumer goods (Amazon®) to communication (Apple©) to “friends” (Facebook™). If you look at the most successful companies the world has ever seen, each of them was founded on the destruction of an old economic paradigm. The more fundamental and important the paradigm, the larger the success.

It’s like the economy is a game, and the more fundamental the rules violation, the bigger the payoff – say for example you were the only guy in the NFL® that recognized that there was no rule preventing you from using an axe however you wanted during a game. My guess is that you’d have a pretty good pass rush if you did that – and sacking the quarterback would be permanent.

Does Creative Destruction mean what I think it means?

Marx felt that Creative Destruction, over time, would lead to people that “produce” losing all of their money to people who were merely financiers. And, if you look at it, he’s right. The financial sector produces less (directly) but finances all of this disruption. If you’ve been a reader of this blog for very long, I’m certain that you won’t be surprised by my conclusion: just because Marx was right in understanding disruption, don’t for a second think that I agree with him on his solutions.

Similar to Darwin’s theory, capitalism requires competition. The stronger business survives. Islands of the economy free from competition (government sponsored monopolies – like electric companies, or government sponsored businesses – like electric cars) don’t generally provide innovation. Elon Musk must be some sort of weird innovator, because in one sense he’s disrupting the undisruptable – government monopolies on electric cars and space launch systems.

But Marx was no Musk. Marx’s solution is simple. Charge people what something costs to make, rather than for what value it provides – which means that every worker, for instance, makes the same wage. Rip the production from the hands of the owners and give it to people who don’t innovate. Free the economy from ruinous competition. Power to the people! Oh, and a totalitarian government to enforce it all because people don’t work the way that Marx imagines they do.

Creative Destruction is real. But in the end, this replacement of old versus new generally increases the overall wealth in society. I’m not speaking of the virtual importation of slave labor and environmental degradation through “free” trade agreements that are derived in secret and written on thousands and thousands of pages. No. But actual free trade among equals generally makes everyone wealthier. And the reality is that regardless of what controls a (fairly) free government puts in place, disruption is going to happen.

From each according to his ability, to each according to your mother.

So what can you do about it? Get a Ph.D. in fiber optics? Well, my friend was right. If it pays enough that for the short time it’s extraordinarily valuable, sure. But that’s like hitting a career lottery. If I were to give advice to a younger person, I’d say something a bit different. I’d suggest that you look to careers that minimize the ability of Creative Destruction to ruin your Friday.

Let’s look at bad career ideas: number one on my list of “sounds good but it’s really stupid” is software engineer. Any career that pits me against a billion people in India and a billion people in China is a bad career. Remember, if you’re one in a million in China, there’s a thousand other dudes just like you. The numbers are really bad – and they don’t even have to come to the United States to compete with you. Heck, they can pay recent grads $5,000 a year. So they can hire at least a dozen people to do what you do. Those are not good odds.

So, a good quality of a Creative Destruction-resistant job would be that it has to be local, or has some sort of license requirement that prevents everyone in Shanghai from applying. Lawyers, doctors, and engineers have gotten the licensing-thing down. It’s been so successful that some states even apply it to nail polisher-people (whatever the term is for that).

New openings daily! And that’s just in your skull!

Construction is has a lot of the attributes required, but it seems like Honduras has moved here to do that for us. So that’s kinda out. But it does point out that a job that requires actual citizenship might be a good thing. Teaching would fall under that designation, but so much of teaching today is following a set curriculum that’s based on a set of tests that the process itself is rigged against deviation.

That may be part of the point. Today Creative Destruction’s plan is to replace you with the lowest cost alternative, like:

An App
An Algorithm
A Process
A Batch of Cheap People Working Remotely
Artificial Intelligence

Avoid jobs where you can be easily replaced. I’m not going to sit here and make a huge list and rank it and put a likelihood that you’ll be a victim of Creative Destruction in the future. I’m not that psychic, unless I’m following my strict broccoli and chocolate diet. No. But I’m betting you can start to come up with your own list.

Okay, I’ll give you another one:

Blogger! Heck, the pay may be zero, but you can always work for the fame, glory and sweet, sweet PEZ®!