Category: Elon Musk Week

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.

Whoonfirst

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?

WHOHQ

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.

mammothreview

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?

vicburn

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!

WHO LEADER

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

ike

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.

Richards.jpg

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.

rocky.jpg

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.

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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.

yogi.jpg

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

unemployment

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.

martha

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 19th 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.

pezgirlz

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.

firstworld

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.

inigo

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.

marx

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).

crashtest

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®!

Never Give Up, Never Surrender

“Never give up, never surrender.” – Galaxy Quest

reeducate

Originally I’d intended or the interview with Dr. Dutton, co-author of At Our Wits’ End which I reviewed in two parts (Review Part One At Our Wits’ End Review Part The First:  Increasing Intelligence and Civilization, Review Part Two At Our Wits’ End Review Part II: I.Q. and the Fate of Civilization (Hint, It’s Idiocracy)) to be here – I’m still working on the transcription.  It’s not done because the raw transcript is over 10,000 words, and family came in from out of town unexpectedly via parachute assault, and we were poorly defended.  I should have the interview complete by next Monday’s post.

One of the themes and concerns I see on a continual basis in my wandering around the web is that we are living in the endgame of a society.  Dutton and Woodley quoted Charles Murray discussing the eerie way that we get the sense “. . . that the story has run out.”  There is a sense of national exhaustion.  It’s hard to do things.  It’s like we have become a nation of teenage boys on summer vacation with no summer job.

As a nation, the United States built a continent-spanning railroad in about six years, mainly by hand, with the only explosive available being black powder.  I don’t know about you, but that just seems like so much work when I could be in my basement eating Cheetos® and playing Fallout™ instead.  California, at least, has the right idea.  They have been spending billions of dollars on a high speed railroad to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco.  This project was started in the 1990’s, so it must be nearly complete now.  Oops.  They’re pretty sure this high speed rail line will never be built, likely due to the high concentration of Cheetos© and video games in the state.

train

From a societal standpoint we seem to be at or near the point of no return, headed in the wrong direction on multiple fronts.  It’s not just the inability to tackle or construct big things.  Heck, the Empire State Building was designed in weeks and built in a little over a year.  Freedom Tower in New York City?  Over seven years of construction, and that doesn’t include the years of design that had to take place before anyone was even bribed.

wtc

It’s not just railroads and buildings that seem to be headed the wrong direction:

  • Political Violence. Wearing the wrong hat will get you fired – the Left has Hataphobia©.
  • We all know that the bad math is eventually replaced by firing squads, but like winning the lottery, we get to dream first.
  • Pink?  Purple?  Are you an anime character?
  • Bad tattoos. You’re gonna have to live with that tattoo sleeve when you’re in the rest home and have to explain to the kids changing your bedpan how cool Justin Bieber® was.
  • Constant remakes of television shows and movies that weren’t that good in the first place. Why won’t they remake some quality television, like Hogan’s Heroes®?

It’s easy to give up.  In fact, every bit of the media challenges us to give up our values.  We’re told we should celebrate children being pumped full of hormones after they make the brave and courageous decision at the age of seven that biology was a mistake and they’re really DeeAnn instead of Dean.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust a seven year old to find the remote control around my house.  Trust them with decisions about pumping chemicals into their body that will utterly change the future?  Sure.  Makes sense.

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The politics of the media have reversed:  it used to be that free speech was celebrated.  Now?  Free speech is celebrated, but only if the free speech in question follows the values of the elite.  For a brief moment in time, platforms like Twitter® really were able to amplify voices that cared about values.  Now?  Those voices will be silenced from those platforms.  From financial systems.  From jobs and eventually housing, if the Left can manage it.

I’ve seen this world-inversion where every value that was known to be good and true is vilified and every value that was known to be evil is celebrated.  It’s at this time I really need to pause and remind our viewing audience that the central tenant of Christianity isn’t “Do what thou wilt.”  That’s an utterly different religion with a boss who smells like sulfur with shiny horns and a pitchfork.  Except in Clown World™, “do what thou wilt” is the single highest value.

Alright John Wilder, you’ve convinced me and depressed me.  Why should we bother to continue?

It’s simple.  We should continue because it’s what we’re born to do.  Going gently onto that goodnight?  If you’re reading this blog, that’s not your style.  And despite what media is trying to convince you – what is good and right is not finished.  That’s why they’re so desperately attempting to use the media at this point – to create despair.  Despair is the main tool of evil – it causes us to curl up like we’ve been eating too much soy and give up without a fight.

reboot

Don’t give in.

How should we continue?

We continue by living our daily lives and living them unashamedly.  Living them devoted to what is good and true.  By having wonderful children.  By teaching those children the values that we know are true.  By teaching them to discriminate between good and evil, and how to choose good.  By being good role models.  By being fit.  By being prepared for the tougher times ahead.

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We continue because that’s what we do.  I do think that times in the next decade will be tougher than the times a decade or two decades before.

That just means we’re lucky.  Calm seas don’t make good sailors.  Easy lives don’t make moral men.

But I will get that transcript done before next week, paratroopers or not.

The Pros and Cons of Working for a Corporation (As Written on a REALLY Cynical Day)

“Could you tell me something about the Corporate Wars?” – Rollerball (1975)

accountingirregularities

My CEO says this is the wave of the future for corporations, or at least he does when we go visit him at San Quentin.

“Dad, where should I go to work to make a fortune before I win a Nobel Prize®?”  The Boy actually said this to me when he was in fifth grade one day while just he and I were out driving.  I think that his expectations might be more in line with reality right now.  In his defense, by that time he had already made the equivalent of $2,500 by trading in Bitcoin and other crypto currency in his bedroom on the computer he had built when he was in fourth grade.  I had no idea that he’d set up a trading shop in his bedroom until Wired® showed up to do a profile on him.  Needless to say, his computer moved to the front room the next day.

Today, The Boy’s expectations are a bit more in keeping with what most adults consider reality.  He’s thinking about college and career.  The Boy is now contemplating a life of drudgery where he spends his time at a dull, faceless gray job working long hours so he can fulfill his obligations by existing only to pay bills until he dies.  Oh, wait.  I guess I misspelled, “looking to go out and conquer the world!”

revenues down

Seriously, who touches people at work besides strippers and Joe Biden?

The sad fact is, however, that most Americans nowadays work for mid or large-sized organizations of more than 100 employees.  What’s the definition of most?

70%+.

I guess that makes sense.  We live in an age that celebrates the collective, the large, the behemoth, and that’s just our sodas and underpants.  And working for a corporation/large organization has to be nice, right?  Of course it is.  Otherwise, just like vaping, all the cool kids wouldn’t be doing it.

Well, there are upsides:

  • Steady Paycheck: Large organizations have figured out how to get money.  Notice I didn’t say make money.  Some borrow it.  Some get suckers  A friend of mine once did a calculation on a large corporation – I think it was GM©.  At the point of his calculation, if you took all of the money invested in the company, and all of the profits the company had ever seen and subtracted the investments from the profit, GMâ„¢ had lost money over its 100 year plus history.  But the check cashes every payday, so what is there to complain about?
  • Benefits: In theory, a large organization can negotiate discounts that save the organization money while providing valuable health care to employees, but in practice it’s a choice between selling the kidney the didn’t operate on to pay the bill or Fred’s Medical School Discount Surgery®.
  • Relative Disconnect Between Pay and Performance: So, why is this listed as an upside?  You have bad days.  Bad weeks.  Bad months.  So blame it on the business cycle.  Or on some competitor.  Or on someone.  Certainly it wasn’t you.  Mostly, a boss will buy this as long as you didn’t take a pellet gun and shot customers/other employees in the butt as they walked by while spraying mosquito repellent in their eyes.  Heck, even if you did do that, blame it on Phil from Marketing.  Everybody knows Phil is crazy.
  • Autocratic Governance: Your boss may be horrific, but can you imagine how bad they would be if you had to elect them?  Can you imagine the campaigns?  Then Phil from Marketing would start a Political Action Committee . . . .
  • Specialization: This is a true upside.  It’s nice that large organizations offer positions where you can study and become a true expert on a narrow slice of the business to improve results through superior knowledge.  Thankfully, after you’ve done this you can train your replacements from India who work for wages paid in cardboard, broken furniture, and used dental floss.

nigerian prince

“I wonder if McDonald’s® is hiring,” wondered wonderful Karen wonderingly.

  • Increasing Rewards: The farther up the organizational ladder, a strange thing happens.  It’s mentioned above that pay gets decoupled from performance, but the higher you go, the more likely you get raises and huge bonuses if the business performs poorly.  You’d think that this would require more work, but it really doesn’t.  Please tell me the last time you took off in the middle of the day to smoke weed while you were on a podcast?  Yeah, looking at you, Elon.
  • Occasionally, Working With Great Teams For A Great Boss: By accident, you are occasionally thrown together with a likeable group of competent people with good hygiene who share common interests.  These people are dedicated to producing good results and in helping each other for both individual success and group success.  Please notify HR if this happens so the team can be broken up and reallocated through the business.

seance

Apple’s® 2024 business strategy.

But it’s not all wine and PEZ® coffee and bagels.  There are downsides to large organizations, too:

  • Politics/Egos: This is the biggest one.  You might be humming along, doing great work, and achieving great results.  Then your boss gets promoted and you get his replacement:  Politics Manâ„¢.  Politics Man© doesn’t care about what you do or how you do it or the results you get.  Politics Man®, in fact, won’t pay any attention at all, since his superpower has replaced normal logic with a finely tuned sense of how he looks that day to his boss and/or the CEO, along with his other power, to turn Perception to Reality.
  • Perception is Reality: I had one job where my boss may have been a biker who indicated that he paid a witness in a felony trial to “be out of state” on the court date.  I have no idea if he was telling the truth, but he was weird enough that we all thought that he actually lived in his office.  His particular brand of Business Fu (ancient New York martial art) was to convince everyone that he was blameless.  In one particular instance he decided to blame me.  Thankfully, I had a friend who heard about this and tipped me off.  I walked into his office and used Wilder Fu:  “You know, I’m glad you’re my boss, since if I look bad, you look bad and perception is reality.  I know you’ll take care of me.”  He switched from blaming me to blaming Phil from Marketing.

drawing on windows

That’s what we do at work, just draw random words and circle them.  It’s motivating.

  • Random Compensation: One year I saved the company $800,000 dollars – and not made up dollars, actual dollars.  Result?  A 2.13% raise.  One year I didn’t contribute a whole lot at all but looked great doing it.  20% bonus.
  • Increasing Rewards: If you’re getting the increasing rewards, they’re awesome.  If you’re working and read in the paper how the CEO is off to Monaco after buying a New York penthouse, maybe not so much.
  • Most Decisions Don’t Matter (Pareto): As I’ve discussed before (Pareto and the 80/20 Rule Explain Wealth) a small number of decisions you make are the most important ones.  It’s the same for a company.  Most decisions simply don’t matter if you get them right.  I’ve noticed that if I want to keep management busy, I’ll ask them what color they want something to be.  They’ll spend (nearly up to the CEO Level) hours and hours with meeting after meeting just to pick carpet color.  One time the president of a multi-billion dollar corporation had to pick who got what office at a facility located somewhere in BFE.  As an aside – The Boy heard me say “BFE” the other day and was greatly amused when he found out the definition.  You can Google it® (not safe for work).  I’ll wait.
  • No One Knows Which Decisions Matter: Which decisions are important?  You can’t really be 100% sure – the chain of events started by a typographical error on a McDonald’s® menu that led to Joseph Stalin’s clone destroying Europe in 1978 and the rest of humanity having to escape to another dimension where they never invented the virus that wiped the memory of everyone that with an IQ of less than 160 . . . oh, I’ve said too much.  Never mind.

participationcheck

It was even sadder when they started fighting about who got to keep the trophy for “Nearly On Time To Work This Week, Tied For Sixth Place.”

  • Rules: Big organizations have rules.  Silly ones like having to show up on time.  Showering at least weekly.  Not flirting with the waitress.  Oh, wait, that’s not work, that’s home.  But big organizations do have rules, too, and they have to.  Why?  Because somebody always has to push the limits.  Every single rule in every company’s HR policy manual has a story behind it.  And every story has Phil from Marketing behind it.  Stupid Phil.
  • Weird Bosses That Got Promoted Beyond The Level of Sanity: See above.  This has happened often enough that I think that being a psychopath is a predictor of business success.  Oh, wait, it is? (LINK) That explains everything.

philfuneral

My bad.

  • Depersonalizing: You can be replaced.  That’s really part of the strength of a corporation – everyone from the CEO to the accountants to Phil from Marketing can be replaced.  In most cases, unless the CEO is visionary (and most aren’t) you’ll never notice the difference.  Who else is part of this faceless collective?    And the system will put you into a gray box with gray computer and gray walls and a gray chair.  Why gray?  Because it goes with everything.
  • Nobody Really Cares: I’ve worked with hundreds of people during my career.  Outside of a few coworkers from decades past, I’ve lost touch with most of them.  It’s not just that I’m a jerk (I am) but also that people are busy with their jobs, their lives and the only intersection they have with you revolves around that 8AM to 5PM time slot.  They’re like people your mom paid to have come to your birthday party when you were five.  Or that porkchop she put around your neck so the dog would play with you.

conference room

This wasn’t on my physics final.

  • Large Organization Jobs Only Prepare You To Work For Large Organizations: Let’s say you hit mid-career and decide you want to open up your own Sushi-Pizza chain called Samurai Luigi’s – it’s okay, I won’t tell anyone that your secret is serving the pizza raw, too.  Chances are you haven’t learned anything about business that’s useful beyond a small narrow window of “capital tax law related to manufacturing investment for Spork® production in Toledo, Ohio.”  See, corporations want you to be good at that.  But it won’t help with your garlic-salmon-tiramisu or knowing who to bribe to get the local building permit.

So, chances are you’ll be working for a large corporation, but that’s okay.  And to all of you soon-to-be graduates out there, look forward to a life of drudgery where you spends your time at a dull, faceless gray job working long hours so you can fulfill your obligations by existing only to pay bills until you die go out and conquer the world!”

Pareto and the 80/20 Rule Explain Wealth

“Well, you know, 80% of all homeless rickshaw businesses fail within the first six months.” -Seinfeld

pareto

Pareto:  He was into economics before anyone else was, but it was only because it was ironic.

Vilfredo Pareto was born in France in 1848.  At birth he was given the name Fritz Wilfried but his parents changed it to Vilfredo after the realization that they weren’t German (really – this sounds like a goofy fact I would make up because it might be true, like Lutherans being secret space-vampires, but Vilfredo/Wilfried’s parents actually were kinda nuts).  Vilfredo died in Switzerland.  The logical conclusion?  He must have been Italian.  And he was.

Outside of his extensive collection of Abraham Lincoln-themed women’s undergarments, Pareto is best known to us for the Pareto Principle.  As the story goes, Pareto was in the midst of trying to figure out what laws governed the distribution of wealth, and had pulled together historical economic records from all around Italy.  Now, modern Italian record-keeping is on a par with modern Italian engineering – I mean, has anyone ever been able to keep the oil on the inside of an Italian engine?  But the story goes that while working on this economic problem, Pareto was messing around with the peas in his garden and noticed that 20% of the pea plants produced 80% of the peas.

I don’t believe that story for a second.  It’s a well-known fact that Italians explode like watermelons dropped from the Empire State Building if they are in the same room with a pea.  Don’t ask me about how I know what a watermelon dropped from the Empire State Building looks like – Homeland Security® still hasn’t figured out how the watermelons were smuggled up there.  I’m just saying, never go to Olive Garden™ on Fresh Green Pea Night.  It takes them a week to clean the place up from all of the exploding Italians.

olivegarden

The pea proportions that Pareto allegedly observed, that 80% of peas came from 20% of the plants, seemed to match up with his data in economics.  80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people.

Looking further, 80% of a business’s profit comes from 20% of its customers.  20% of the words in a language account for 80% of the words used.  80% of crime is caused by 20% of criminals.  80% of car accidents are caused by my Mother-In-Law.  Seriously, do NOT be around the woman when she puts the car into reverse.

The numbers aren’t exactly the same in every example but 70/25 or even 75/30 is close enough to prove the point.  80/20 is nice because the math is simple.  It also adds up to be 100, which is nice and makes the number taste better on the tongue, just like watermelon that has been pulverized by being dropped from a great height, even though there is absolutely no reason for the numbers to add up to 100.

To me, however, this proves the idea that the universe isn’t fair.  Talent isn’t equally distributed, and, when you toss in the idea of chance, the result is inequality.  And it’s a vast inequality:  the 80/20 rule holds for wealth.  But you have to dig deeper:  the top 20% that owns 80%?  The top 20% of the top 20% (that’s the top 4%) owns 80% of the 80% (that’s 64%).  So, the top 4% owns 64% of the wealth.  Going one more time:  the top 1% owns roughly 50%.  The real number for the amount of wealth owned by the top 1% is around 38%, so it’s pretty close for an approximation and the missing 12% is probably under a mattress at the Elon Musk’s house.  Pareto’s rule is alive and well in 2019.

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It also tells me that even though intelligence and other human attributes follow a bell curve, wealth does not – it grows geometrically.  An old story I use to illustrate this is:  If you have fifty people in a room and bring in the tallest person in the world, well, the average height in the room goes from 5’ 9” (16 meters) to 5’ 10” (30 centimeters).  But if you add Bill Gates to the room, the average person in the room is a billionaire, though your credit rating might not improve as much as you are expecting.  Our brains are used to dealing with that normal distribution, but are inadequate when dealing with these quantities that grow geometrically.  And I think the thing that fosters that geometric growth in today’s society is increasing returns.

When I was just starting at work after college I knew a little more about computers than the folks I was working with.  Just a little.  But because I knew just a little more, my coworkers would ask me questions if their computer broke or wasn’t working right.  I didn’t necessarily know the answers, but I was able to learn more because I (and another coworker) kept getting all the questions.  Pretty soon I knew lots of arcane stuff about how the computers worked and how the network worked.

computer2

The point isn’t that I’m a computer wizard, or even an apprentice magician anymore.  I got better at computers because I had a tiny advantage over my coworkers.  Magnified by a couple of years?  Expertise.  But expertise has to be used to be kept, and I didn’t keep my computer mojo.  The Boy and Pugsley have me beaten (by far) at this point.  The point is clear, however:  increasing returns is the rule, rather than decreasing returns.  You get better the more you do, and those slight advantages, that slight edge in competence adds up.  You get better by solving those problems that exist around you – much better.  And you don’t have to be perfect – you just have to be a little better than anyone else.

That was the story of manufacturing in the United States.  There is a ton of knowledge in books about how to make things, but what’s not in the books is the everyday know-how that’s required to actually make the machines run.  The more manufacturing we did as a country, the better we were at it, and the more know-how we had accumulated.  In one story that amazes me still – the SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest manned, air-breathing aircraft that officially exists, was built from contract to flight in just over two years in the early 1960’s.  The X-15 was faster, and also built in the 1960’s but it’s not a fair comparison, since it’s essentially the same as flying a rocket.

sr71

Now?  Fighter development takes decades.  Sure, they’re more complicated, but it took eight years from contract to prototype, and a further fifteen years to be put into service.  I doubt we could make the SR-71 today in less than a decade, if even then.

I think that one of three things is happening:  the first possibility is that we’ve forgotten how to make great stuff quickly, which Pareto can easily explain.  The second possibility is that we’re stupider, which I’ll cover in a post within the next month.  The third is we’ve forgotten how to make stuff AND we’re stupider.  It’s like we’re sitting drooling drinking warm Coca-Cola® because we forgot the recipe to make ice.

You can wipe away the drool because the bright side is this:  most of the decisions that you make don’t impact you all that much.  Pareto is at work here, too.  20% of your decisions, actions, and habits account for 80% of where you are in wealth, health, and wisdom.  The nice thing is that you already know what habits are good or bad, which ones take you away from your goals, and which ones help you.

The best part?  You don’t have crazy Italian parents who can’t decide what your name should be.

What Hockey Taught Me About My Life and My Career (Bonus: Broadswords)

“This is hockey, OK? It’s not rocket surgery.” – Mystery, Alaska

goal

“You da goalie, not Yoda® goalie.”  I have to get my hearing checked.

When I was in middle school, one week we played hockey for P.E.  Where I grew up it was certainly cold enough for water to freeze – but we didn’t have any water, it being nearly a desert and all.  A typical backyard mud puddle in Midwestia is bigger than things we called “lakes” growing up, and you could wade across the local river at flood stage and not get your pants wet.  We did, however, have a gym and roller skates.

A group of uncoordinated seventh graders attempting to roller skate on a gym floor for the first time probably looked like a gaggle of hippos juggling wet sheepdogs.  I wouldn’t know exactly what we looked like, I was busy studying the wood grain of the floor by repeatedly falling onto the free throw line as my skates stubbornly refused to stay underneath me.  The nearly frictionless wheels kept twisting my legs at angles only experienced by crash test dummies, Thanksgiving turkeys, and a stoned Elon Musk.

Why were we so pathetic?

The nearest roller rink was 30 miles away, and what passed for concrete in town was concrete in concept only, with the newest patches of sidewalk having been put down personally by President Roosevelt as he raced Hitler in a sidewalk building contest to determine who had to have Italy on their side.  Anyway, what concrete existed in town was broken, jagged, and was used by NASA to simulate walking on the Moon because it was so rough and powdery.  If we wanted to skate that left skating in actual dirt, because skating on the highway was illegal in every state in the nation until Virginia just recently legalized 30th trimester abortions.

team

I got to be team captain, and no one really argued when I picked goalie as my position.  In two teams of horrible skaters, I was the worst.  Being goalie didn’t require much skating, just being quick and a lot of intentional falling.  As I could fall unintentionally, intentional falling was even easier.  The puck was a hollow plastic disk that weighed next to nothing, and I was quick enough to stop nearly every shot.

It didn’t hurt my goal-tending streak that this was the first time that any of us had ever played hockey and everyone was a horrible shot. I’m pretty sure that our P.E. instructor had only the vaguest idea of what the rules were since he informed us that in order to start the game we had to sacrifice the smallest and weakest player in the middle of the gym for the strength of the tribe while drinking Moosehead® beer.  Since we were underage, he drank all our beers for us.

We’ll all miss Benji.

As I grew older, there was a period of a few years where I watched actual NHL® professional hockey, until they just stopped showing it on any network I could find.  But watching hockey was different than watching other sports – in an average game the players are (at times) going 25-27 miles per hour, and the puck itself is often moving in excess of 100 miles per hour.  In the NFL®, the top receivers run about 20 miles per hour for short bursts, but average much less.

Because of the increased speed in hockey, minor differences in starting position resulted in big separations between players as they accelerated across the ice.  The importance of that separation is the same in all sports, but I really was able to see it when it came to hockey due to the faster speeds.  What’s really important is time and space.  With enough time and space, a hockey player can break away from the crowd and attack the goalie one on one.  With enough time and space, players can be where the action will be five seconds from now.

The same principle holds in football.  With enough time and space, a wide receiver can break away from the defense and score.  I think it holds true in soccer as well, but too often the players are just sitting on the field knitting and drinking brightly colored cocktails with whimsical umbrellas and chunks of fruit before they go shoe shopping.  I think soccer would be much more interesting if they gave the players broadswords with no real rules or guidance on how they are to be used in the game.

soccer

Now, imagine with swords.  See?  Better already.

But what happens in sports also happens in real life, minus my really cool broadsword idea.  The analogy of time and space is incredibly important to people who are trapped on mountains as the storm comes in, or the logistics in supporting an army in the field, or even the position of the individual units in a battle.  Put 5,000 men in the right place and the right time and almost any battle in history swaps winners.  Heck, 300 Spartans (plus 700 Thespians) changed the course of history and saved Western Civilization.  Tell me that Xerxes wouldn’t love to have that one back – lose to the Greeks just the one time and you never hear the end of it.

leonidas

If only they had compromised, imagine how we’d remember them.

To “maximize” your financial potential, you should use your time and space to be where the action is.  Sadly, for my career the right place is bigger cities – huge cities, with populations of millions of people.  A bigger city would be okay, but from what I’ve seen of cities, most of those millions of people I won’t like.  They just seem to be in the way when I try to drive on the congested roads.  Broadswords would be helpful here, too.  The city is filled with activities, though.  Activities that I really don’t want to do – except for nice restaurants and museums, and getting to a big city four or five times a year is necessary, mainly to remind me of all the reasons why I don’t want to move back to a big city.

Thankfully, though, I don’t need to maximize my financial potential – the mortgage that I pay here in Modern Mayberry is less than 27% of the cost for an apartment in San Francisco, and on a per square foot basis?  My cost is 5% (that’s not a misprint) of what I’d pay per square foot in ‘Frisco (the locals love it when you call it that, I hear).  That 5% number just includes house square footage, and doesn’t include the 10 acres the house is on.

With life, time is still time, and space is still space.  And during a career, money is space AND time.  If you only have enough money for this month, you have that much time.  If you have years of money saved up, you have that much time (and more).  Savings is opportunity.  Savings provides options – and those options expand your opportunities.  Enough money gives you time and space – time and space to try things, risky things that have higher rewards.  Or?  Give you time and space to just do what you want.

Which for me is not hockey.  I’ve seen enough gym floors, thank you.

But . . . hear me out . . . how about hockey with broadswords??

hockey

Economics, Thermodynamics, A Bikini, and the Future

“It’s a little known law of thermodynamics:  the conservation of optimism – there’s only so much to go around.” – Andromeda

energykelvin

Okay, zero Kelvin is absolute zero.  Thus, Kelvin is really the coolest name ever.

Economics is often called the dismal science.  I’m sure that’s because economists look in a mirror, and are upset to see that the supply of economists is greatly in excess of the demand for them as dating partners.  Thus, economists have their Saturday night open for Hot Pockets®, box wine and the Internet.  See?  Dismal.  But if economics is dismal, thermodynamics will make you want to cut your wrists.  Yeah.  It’s worse than Hot Pockets™.

We know economics is defined as lying about the economy.  But I hear you asking:  “What the heck is thermodynamics and why are you ruining a perfectly good Wednesday morning by bringing this up?”

Let me explain.

Much like a three year old with a metal fork and an outlet, thermodynamics is the study of how energy flows.  The father of thermodynamics was a Scot named William Thomson, or Lord Kelvin if you’re nasty.  Proving once again that the British Empire was awesome for smart people, Lord Kelvin got rich and famous by being a total stud at physics and engineering.  He even had a yacht that he tooled around the Mediterranean on and held massive seagoing parties – sort of like Mark Cuban, but smart and with a Scottish accent.  Think Bill Gates with an artificial personality implant.  Lord Kelvin even had unit of temperature, the kelvin, named after him.  Top that, Elon Musk.

Lord Kelvin was the first to understand the fundamental and disturbing implications of the physics he was discovering.  Energy moves from a highly organized state to a poorly organized state.  A piece of firewood or a gallon of gas or a PEZ® is concentrated energy.  Once it is combusted and the energy extracted, what’s left becomes diffuse, the molecules mostly turned into CO2 and H20 that are mixed into the rest of the atmosphere.  You can never form that firewood or gasoline or PEZ© again – it’s a one way trip.

This is significant.  Kelvin discovered that the Universe as a whole is like a pizza after delivery:  it moves from a hot, high energy state on Saturday night towards a chaotic, cold, low energy state on Sunday morning.

But wait, what about oil the gasoline was made from?  Doesn’t the formation of oil violate this?  It went from icky goo and dinosaur bones into energy dense crude oil, right?  That’s energy from nothing!

No.

Every drop of oil, every piece of firewood, and all the sweet PEZ© on this planet came from the input of thermonuclear energy – the Sun.  Every time you use a gallon of gasoline in your car or a cubic foot of natural gas in your home heater, you’re burning millions of years of concentrated sunlight, which really ought to be a lyric in a pop song.  Our Earth isn’t a closed system – it is bathed in the life-giving thermonuclear radiation every day from the Sun.

energybikini

Tans are so sexy when I put it that way.

Outside of suntans for girls wearing bikinis, sunlight is a very weak energy source.  It took millions of years to make your gasoline.  Gasoline burns in a car engine at 500°F, and gallon of gasoline can move a modern car for 40 or 50 miles.  It would take (at minimum, under the best conditions) a one square yard solar panel 60 days to produce the equivalent amount of energy as one gallon of gasoline.  Add in storage losses and real weather conditions?  It might take a year.  Solar energy is weak and diffuse or else bikini girls would turn into piles of ash after a day lounging in the Sun.  Gasoline is awesome and full of energy and great for your skin.  I soak my hands in it while I drive, you know, for the ladies.

bikiniafter

Okay, this is a picture of a really hot girl.

I thought you mentioned economists?

Oh, yeah.  People confuse economic viability with thermodynamic viability.  In economics, the idea is that you can’t continually produce something that’s worthless, unless you’re the government.  If you’re the government, producing worthless things is your whole plan.  But any business that did this would be bankrupt faster than a whimsical elf buying reefer.  Economists have even developed a worse idea than that:  Modern Monetary Theory (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs).  Modern Monetary Theory is the equivalent of the government burning your country’s factories for lighting so you can make more fidget spinners at night, so of course certain people in Congress love Modern Monetary Theory.  It’s making infinite money from nothing!

Even without dim Congressmen, economics still fails when it comes to energy, because economics neglects the physics of energy.  An economist would say that if oil were $200 a barrel, why, there wouldn’t be a problem because while we’re running out of barrels of oil we can make at $10, there are LOTS of barrels of oil that we can pump if oil costs $200.

Sure.  If only everything about oil was measured in the price of a barrel of oil.  What economists miss is that producing energy takes energy.  In 1920, each barrel of oil produced between 20 and 50 barrels of oil.  We found and used the easiest oil first – we didn’t start off drilling in three miles of ocean.  No.  We went to Texas where oil was 10’ underground and you could pull it out in seemingly limitless quantities because it would jump into your truck like an obedient basset hound if you left the doors open.  We didn’t frack horizontal wells with thousands of pounds of pressure and special chemicals.  Why would we?  In Pennsylvania and California it was seeping into the rivers.  Natural gas?  What a nuisance.  Burn it at the well to get rid of it.  They originally tried to smoke the natural gas in California, but they couldn’t figure out how to get it in a bong.

Fracking has been one of the bright spots in oil production – millions of barrels of fracked oil are produced daily in the United States, so it’s good?  Well, maybe not.  Each barrel of oil invested in fracking produces, at most, five barrels of oil.

Five to one, that’s awesome, right?

Well, no.  That fracked oil is from the best portions of the shale.  Just like we didn’t start off drilling in the frozen tundra of the Arctic Circle in 1850, we didn’t start off with the hardest fracked oil.  It won’t get too much better, and if recovery technology improves, maybe we can stay the same.  Rune Likvern was the first (that I can find) to use the analogy of the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland as applied to the energy problems we face (LINK).

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

I’ll note that Likvern was quite wrong in that he felt the Bakken wouldn’t produce more than about 0.7 million barrels per day.  It’s producing in excess of 1.2 million barrels a day now, and I don’t doubt that it will produce even more.  Pipelines from the area clearly lower the cost of energy production, so the Bakken will continue to produce, at least for now.

energyjet

But at least you can make cool jet noises and pretend, right?

Our civilization is built on energy, and the more energy it takes to produce energy, the more of our economy that will be devoted to it, we’ll be like the Red Queen and Alice, running faster and faster just to keep in place.  Sooner or later you end up with the absurd situation where everybody has to be working to get the energy, all the time, and then who would give out free samples of aerosol “cheeze” at Costco™?  Don’t kid yourself – energy is that important to the society we currently have structured.  We don’t get fresh fruit in winter, daily commuting to the ‘burbs, climbing walls at colleges, pensions, Brady Bunch© re-runs, and all that health care without consuming a LOT of energy.

“But John,” you say, “certainly biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel and hemp-powered hippy busses will save us.”

It looks like (according to a lot of data) that corn ethanol and biodiesel actually consume more energy to make and transport than they provide.  These fuels have a return of less than one.  Why on Earth would we do that?  It’s like eating your own foot because you’re looking for a snack, which is actually a quote by The Mrs. when I was explaining this topic in the hot tub.  Well, farmers vote.  And why would The Mrs. suggest that we start with a foot?  I bet feet are all stringy, and not nearly as good as spleen.

If ethanol is so bad for the economy why would people make it, I mean, besides for drinking?  Because it’s mandated to use a certain quantity of ethanol each year in gasoline because farmers who vote like to sell corn.  That’s it.  And if it’s mandated, you can make a profit at it, even as you waste energy that could be used to make PEZ® instead.

Thermodynamics is a tough master – you can’t win, and you can’t even break even.  But at least there are Hot Pockets© and box wine . . . .

This is the first post in an occasional series about energy.

14 Magic Questions and Elon Musk’s New Quest for Genetically Engineered Cat Girls

We’ve been negotiating with men from outer space for seven years. – Real Men

Eloncataz

I don’t think he’ll remember that in the morning.

The other night I was talking about an upcoming decision/issue that was bothering me with The Mrs.  Don’t worry, that decision will be blog fodder when it’s all done, in some form or fashion, likely before Elon Musk invents and markets Electric Marijuana Boogie Panties©.  But as we discussed my problem, The Mrs. caught me with a question that I’d asked her months earlier about a different issue she was having:

Why does it bother you?

That was a particularly powerful question to me.  It was at that moment that I realized exactly how amazingly smart I was.  I had asked a really good question.  Why did it bother me?  I thought a long time, and realized that what bothered me about my current situation had very little to do with anything that would hurt me today.  Or this year.  Or next year.  Or the year after that.  So, nothing to worry about today.

So why was I letting it bother me?  In this case maybe it was pride, and in this case the worst kind of pride – wanting to win a game I wasn’t even interested in playing.  But the short answer is this single powerful question made me feel better.  Many problems die when exposed to this question.  If they don’t die, use bleach or go see a doctor and get a topical cream.

But the real next question for me should have been:  Who cares?  I hate to tell you this, but, probably very few people.  The bad news is I’m not the center of the universe that I thought I was.  The good news is that few people remember the past events that bother and embarrass you the most.  That one time I walked straight into the glass door at that party while carrying a McChicken® sandwich?  Yeah.  Nobody remembers that.  It was embarrassing at the time, but even if someone did remember?  They don’t care.  Who cares?  Family.  Good friends.  Santa.  Nancy Pelosi.

catrock2

Told you so.

What do you want?  For a lot of people, that answer is money.  For others it’s success.  Fame.  A new car.  I’d add in the obvious follow up:  Why do you want it?  Money is useful only if you have a purpose for it, but it can become a trap, something you want just because you want it.  And success, fame?  Kipling said it best in his poem, If – “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same . . .” (The Chinese Farmer, Kipling, Marcus Aurelius, and You)  Understanding what you want and why you want it is one secret to happiness.  The other secret to happiness is television, according to this show I watched on television.

There are things we want that we shouldn’t, like sixteen bacon cheeseburgers, which is what I’d really like to eat tonight (Resolutions, Fasting, and Wilder’s Cult of the Blue Bikini).  What attracts you to ______?  Right now, my fill-in-the-blank is cheeseburgers.  But I’ve seen people who are like sorority girls on a Tuesday night tub of frosting over something that’s obviously bad for them.   Why?  It’s because we think that _______ fills us up in some way where we’re empty.  If you’re lucky, that fill-in-the-blank is something innocuous like fly fishing.  If you’re not lucky, it’s something dangerous and life threatening, like ballroom dancing.

What if it’s you?  I think these are the last words anyone wants to hear.  The human brain is set up to produce a protective reality distortion field (it’s called the Romney Effect) that automatically changes the past to make itself blameless.  Only real, unbiased thinking about the situation will allow working on the root cause, instead of the symptom.  Sometimes you need a friend or a spouse to slap you right across the face with the fresh fish of reality.

What would you do if you had one month to live?  Less mindless crap*, I’d bet.

What would you do if you lived forever?  Would you sell insurance?  Really?  If you had infinite days you’d sell insurance?  Okay.

Weirdo.

muskcat

So, we know what Elon would do if he lived forever.

Why does the outcome matter?  I know that sounds weird.  But the ultimate outcome of our game is the same for each of us.  We can postpone it.  We can have different twists and turns, but the end of the journey is the same destination.  And that destination is, of course, Minot, North Dakota.  But since the outcome is a foregone conclusion, why not focus on the important thing – how we play the game?  Every day there are choices between being virtuous and being, well, evil.  Making the virtuous choice doesn’t make sure you’ll be wealthy, or famous, or successful – life doesn’t work like that.  But it does make you virtuous, and I hear there are extra karma points for virtue that you can exchange in Heaven for extra minutes in the ball pit.

What if you did the opposite?  Look back at your past – how many of your decisions mattered?  How many things would have changed if you’d have picked differently.  Many of the things we sweat and worry about simply don’t matter at all.

What would make it better?  Cheese.  And bacon.  Those are universal constants – cheese and bacon make everything better.

catgirlz2

Maybe we can get the Cat Girls with bacon?

There are things we control, like the weather, and things we can’t control, like our weight.  Or did I get those backwards?  Anyway, that brings up the next question:  If it’s outside of your control, why are you sweating it?  How much of your life do you spend worrying about things that you have absolutely no control over?

What would you sell your peace of mind for?  A long life, lived in fear and regret is sad, like one of those clowns that terrorizes my dreams.

Was it worth it to spend a precious day of your life like you did today?  Every moment is one less moment of your life.  What you do with those moments is up to you.  I’d suggest that you pick the things that are important to you, and get busy.  Or, you know, there’s television.

*This blog may be crap, but it is not mindless.  Or was it that it IS mindless, but NOT crap?  I forget.  Whichever one is better is the one I meant.

Your Money or Your Wife . . . Take the First Wife, Please . . .

“Of course there’s a catch! You have to spend the thirty million, but after thirty days you’re not allowed to own any assets. No houses, no cars, no jewelry. Nothing but the clothes on your back! Now, you can hire anybody you want, but you have to get value for their services. You can donate five percent to charity and you can gamble another five percent away, but you can’t give this money away, and that includes buying the Hope Diamond for some bimbo as a birthday present.” – Brewster’s Millions (1985)

BREWFIN

Thankfully, they won’t let me down.

I’ve spent quite a few posts talking about money.  Money is important, because they won’t give me beer and PEZ® without money, so that’s why I write about money and the jobs that will get you money.  Money is also the underpinning of the financial system that runs the world that brings me that beer and PEZ™, so I get to write about that, too, and it’s fun since I’m an economics nerd.

But wealth is more than a 401K and a stock portfolio and stacks of gold coins hidden in a fake plastic pipe in a building somewhere downtown, though those are a good start. (And with a blowtorch and some pliers I managed to get the old man to tell me where that fake pipe was.)  Wealth, true wealth, mainly involves you.  And a blowtorch.  But don’t forget the pliers because you never know where their weakness will be.

If you’re satisfied with what you have, you’re wealthy.  It’s that simple.  And it doesn’t need to be as much net worth as a typical Congressman has ($900,000 in the House, $3.2 million in the Senate) to be wealthy.  Your wealth is determined by what you need.  If I could tattoo that phrase on every kid in America on their forehead (backwards, so they can read it every time they look in the mirror), then my kids would not look so out of place with their forehead tattoos with that same phrase.  I’m sure that interviewers for future jobs will be impressed by their dedication to personal financial management.  Or, you know, the blowtorch and pliers will convince them that these kids are a great fit for the position.

But the biggest determinate for wealth for many people is simple.  I’m surprised that I haven’t gotten to this topic in all that time, since it’s so very basic.

Your choice of spouse is the most important factor in being wealthy*.

*This doesn’t apply to Bill Gates or Elon Musk.  Nor, really, does it apply the really, really wealthy people in the world.  If you have so much money that your spouse can’t spend it all, you’re fine and you can skip the rest of this post, though there will be questions on the final about it.

Less than $15,000,000 or so net worth?  Keep reading.

Why is a spouse so important?  A spouse often determines the minimum lifestyle the family will accept.

  • Keeping up with the neighbors isn’t a factor with your spouse. Overheard story:  “I’m so jealous of Sheila, she’s rich enough she doesn’t have to drive a brand new car.”
  • The spouse may make the majority of the spending decisions in the house. In my case, I bought our present house without The Mrs. ever having been to it.  The Mrs. only saw a few dodgy photos from my cell phone, which was a really cool Blackberry® with a keyboard.
  • Open and honest communication about money is crucial. And I assure you that money conversations can be brutal when you don’t have a bunch of cash in the bank.  The conversations can be brutal even when you have money.  Conversations about money are conversations about values, about choices, and can be the most emotional conversations outside of who gets to pick the next movie on Netflix®, since we all agree that Netflix™ is serious.

Way back in the 80’s, there was a movie called “Brewster’s Millions.”  A guy (Richard Pryor) had to spend $30,000,000 in thirty days and have nothing to show for it so he could get $300,000,000, which was exactly like my first marriage, except that it didn’t involve John Candy and we didn’t get $300,000,000 if we got ourselves into debt servitude forever.

brewster

My first marriage, in a movie involving John Candy.

I’ve been married once, even though the law says twice.  I’d say that the first marriage was an assignment in creating as much debt as possible in the shortest amount of time while leaving nothing to show for it, but that minimizes the hate and discontent.  Let’s put it this way – it was like a Mad Max® movie, but with less civility and shotguns, and more lawyers and spreadsheets.

As the marriage unwound, we both agreed it would be best if X moved while we had a nice meal at Taco Bell®.

X:  “I think it would be good if I moved out.”

John Wilder:  “Yes, I think it would be good if you moved out.”  (Inside John Wilder’s head: OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD YES, SHE’S GONE!  GONE GONE GONE!)

On her last day at the house, she put a plastic grocery bag filled with bills on the kitchen table.  She then handed me a checkbook.  “I have no idea how much money is in there,” and walked out.

Several hours later, after going through eight inches of bills (this is not an exaggeration) I realized that I was, outside of my mortgage, more than a year’s salary in debt.  Adding my mortgage? The debt went up to everything I made for three years.  And that didn’t included all the other bills like food, water, power, bubble bath, and PEZ®.  And you, Internet, know my maxim is:  “if you can’t solve it with a spreadsheet, you can solve it with a shotgun.”  The spreadsheet was gloomy.

BREW2

The spreadsheet may be gloomy, but wine never lies.  Until the alarm goes off at 6AM.  Then wine is a big cheating liar.

All in all, I guesstimate that the first marriage cost me $250,000 directly, and more than that indirectly when you count up the money I could have made if I could have saved that money.  A lot more.  Let’s just say that it’s not a lie to say that my first marriage probably cost me $1,000,000 in the long run.

But Henny Youngman answered the question of, “Why are divorces expensive?”

“They’re worth it.”

X did not see eye to eye with me on a lot of things, and money was one of them.  Spending now for fun now that you had to pay for later, was okay with her.  It wasn’t so much with me, and that was not good for either of us.  We didn’t agree.  Divorce eased a lot of stress.

When I met The (soon to be) Mrs., I was curious about her relationship with money.  The fact that she managed to live in a tiny apartment with minimal needs, infrequent and small purchases of frivolous items like PEZ® dispensers, made me pretty sure that we were on the same page as far as money and PEZ™ went.  If you don’t need it, don’t buy it.

And in our relationship, we eventually set up spending rules – if it wasn’t food for dinner or at a cost of $20 or less, we had to confer.  Yes.  $20.  Amazingly small for 2018, so let’s call it $60 today.  It’s not our current limit for buying stuff without conferring, it’s a bit higher, and, honestly I’m not sure it’s defined at this point.  But that limit, back then, was important.  We had mutual accountability, and we had to want something enough that we were willing to pitch it to the other.

“Really honey, I need a framed poster of Daffy Duck©, and look at the price!”

dduck

Yup.  Miss that poster.

So, we drove used cars for years.  Just kidding.  We still drive used cars.  They’re nicer used cars now, but still they’re used cars, even though we stopped being in debt outside of our mortgage after only three years after being married.  We haven’t bought a new car . . . this century.

We go out to eat more than once a month now.  A lot more than that – often between picking up kids from practice and the other million things we do in a week, well, we end up eating dinners of fast food that cost more than ribeyes for everyone grilled to perfection at home.  These are tradeoffs.

But we don’t have as many “needs” as we did even a decade ago.  The Mrs. gets a very nice bottle of scotch for Christmas and manages to snort it down during the year – The Mrs. even shares that scotch when The Mrs. is in a good mood.  If I didn’t get any presents for Christmas?  I’d be fine with that.  If I had enough time to devote to the hobbies I already neglect, that might be the nicest present.  One day I’ll build my own ICBM.

blue

I’d call it Johnny Wilder Blue™ but they never asked me.

But if The Mrs. needed a new BMW each year?  If we had to have the nicest house in town?  If we had to have furniture that was new and coordinated?  If The Mrs. needed the newest fashions from whatever place in New York?  If the elastic waistbands in our underwear needed to work?

We’d be poor.

Because we don’t need those things, we’re wealthy.  An example:  I bought The Mrs. a new car.  It was actually used with 28,000 miles on it, but it was new to us.  The Mrs. hadn’t even seen it, outside of a crappy cell phone picture I sent to her.  When it arrived at our house, The Mrs. liked it.  Mostly.  Then I told The Mrs. that it cost 25% less than she thought it cost.  I’d put the car on my credit card, and got six hotel nights, too, as long as we were willing to spend the night in Albania.

“I love it.”

Tonight, I was driving one of our cars across the state to go watch The Boy wrestle tonight.  I realized I had more cash in my wallet than the car was worth according to the Kelley Blue Book®.  I’m thinking that if you can say that and you’re happy?  You’re wealthy.

Oh, and The Boy won.  He didn’t even have to use the blowtorch.

See how wealthy I am?