Category: Rome, Yet Again

Success, Fight Club, Strippers and Socialists

“We have just lost cabin pressure.” – Fight Club

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The second rule of Wilder Club is if this is your first visit, you have to comment.

I had a conversation with a friend today.  Oh, sure, I hear you say, what would an iconoclastic iron-jawed individualist with a body odor redolent of medium rare ribeye (with just a hint of pepper) like John Wilder need with a friend?  I guess we all have our little weaknesses.  And dogs follow me.  Because I smell like steak.

In this particular case as with most of my friends, I’ve known this friend for years.  I’ve known most of my close friends longer than The Boy has been alive, and he’s in college now.  It’s nice.  If a day, a week, a month or a year goes by, so what?  We can still restart the conversation where we left off.  It’s as comfortable as watching a movie you’ve seen a dozen times.

I’ll make the observation that the only place where the character of people change is in a movie – almost all of my close friends have the same sense of humor and the same sense of values that they had when our friendships were forming.  Absent a significant emotional event, people are a constant.

And I like that.

There is a corresponding trust that comes with being a close friend – honesty.  That’s why when talking with my friend, I really enjoyed the chance to be honest.  Honesty is difficult because it requires that trust, because really honest criticism is hard to take, even when it comes from a friend.  Or a co-worker.  Or a relative.  Or someone you just met.  Or your UPS® delivery guy.  Oh, wait.  Most people don’t like honest.  But my friends do.

This particular friend is really in a good position in life, which seems to be a common pattern with my friends.  He has a spouse that makes more money than he does, and, in general, the household probably brings in enough cash each month so that Nigerian princes send emails to them asking for money.  They’re wealthy enough that they donate to the homeless.  This appears to be a more socially acceptable donation strategy than my “donation to the topless,” scheme.

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Yes, this is the only joke that I’ve ever seen that involves both the Greco-Roman philosophy of stoicism and stripping.  I’m sure that Seneca would be proud.

But lest ye want to class my friend as the evil, selfish, wealthy type, he’s not.  The family has a huge number of kids, and it’s a close family.  My friend is constantly taking time off to go to athletic events, and when we catch up, I can sense that the relationship he has with his kids isn’t a surface relationship – it’s genuine and deep.  I can tell, because I know people who understand genuine relationships, who listen to both sides of a family argument – my neighbors.

And yet . . . despite the wealth, despite the great family, my friend feels that there’s something missing.  He is as high as he wants to go in the company he works at – any higher and the travel demands would pull him away from family.  He’s long since mastered his job – there is little that can be thrown at him that he hasn’t seen in the last fifteen or so years.  So, his condition is one of high pay, mastery of work, and, improbably, discontent.

John Wilder:  “You realize you have an advantage that 99% of people would die for.  You’re financially secure.  You can quit your job anytime.  Literally, you could walk in to your boss this afternoon and quit.  Your lifestyle wouldn’t change a bit.”

Not Elon Musk:  “Yes.”

Unlikely Voice of Wisdom John Wilder:  “So, what is it you want to do?”

Really, I Promise It Isn’t Elon Musk:  “I need to think about it.”

Channeling Tyler Durden From Fight Club® John Wilder:  “No.  If you think about it, you’ll end up doing nothing but thinking about it.  You have to do something.  Physically start it.  This weekend.  I’ll check back on Monday to see how you did.”

There is a scene in the movie Fight Club™ where Tyler Durden holds a gun to the head of a liquor store clerk.  If you haven’t seen the movie, I strongly suggest it.  I probably watch it once a month while I write – I think there are few movies that communicate the human condition in modern life so well.

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Pugsley doesn’t miss many school days.

JACK, in voiceover:  On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

CLERK:  Please… don’t…

TYLER DURDEN: Give me your wallet.

Tyler pulls out the driver’s license.

TYLER:  Raymond K. Hessel. 1320 SE Benning, apartment A.  A small, cramped basement apartment.

RAYMOND:  How’d you know?

TYLER:  They give basement apartments letters instead of numbers.  Raymond, you’re going to die.  Is this a picture of Mom and Dad?

RAYMOND:  Yes.

TYLER:  Your mom and dad will have to call kindly doctor so-and-so to dig up your dental records, because there won’t be much left of your face.

RAYMOND:  Please, God, no!                            

JACK: Tyler…

TYLER:  An expired community college student ID card.  What did you used to study, Raymond K. Hessel?

RAYMOND:  S-S-Stuff.

TYLER:  “Stuff.”  Were the mid-terms hard?  I asked you what you studied.

JACK:  Tell him!

RAYMOND:  Biology, mostly.

TYLER:  Why?

RAYMOND:  I… I don’t know…

TYLER:  What did you want to be, Raymond K. Hessel?

Tyler cocks the .357 magnum Colt© Python™ pointed at Raymond’s head.

TYLER:  The question, Raymond, was “what did you want to be?”

JACK:  Answer him!

RAYMOND:  A veterinarian!

TYLER:  Animals.

RAYMOND:  Yeah … animals and s-s-s —

TYLER:  Stuff.  That means you have to get more schooling.

RAYMOND:  Too much school.

TYLER:  Would you rather be dead?

RAYMOND:  No, please, no, God, no!

Tyler uncocks the gun, lowers it.

TYLER:  I’m keeping your license.  I know where you live.  I’m going to check on you.  If you aren’t back in school and on your way to being a veterinarian in six weeks, you will be dead.  Get the hell out of here.

JACK:  I feel sick.

TYLER:  Imagine how he feels.

Tyler brings the gun to his own head, pulls the trigger — click.  It’s empty.

JACK:  I don’t care, that was horrible.

TYLER:  Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessell’s life.  His breakfast will taste better than any meal he has ever eaten.

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How dare you . . . make Greta uncomfortable.

And it’s true.  I tend to think that everyone’s life would be a little better if they had Tyler Durden to be a life coach, to ever so gently coax them to be the best they can be while holding a .357 magnum Colt® Python™ to their head.  That seems to be a bit frowned upon, so that leaves my friends with me.  See how lucky you are?

In my role as Dr. Durden, I’ve noticed that there’s a problem some people have.  It’s being too clever.  It’s thinking.  How do I know?  It’s my problem that I try to compensate for by writing and doing.  If I think about doing something, it will never get done.  I keep thinking about fixing the bannister that broke when we moved in to the house a decade ago.  It’s never been high on my list, since people falling down stairs is funny, with extra points if they are really old.  But thinking about doing something never accomplishes anything.

If I plan to do it, it will get done.  Half of my time driving to and from work on a day I’m going to write a post, I’m writing it in my head, selecting jokes, thinking of themes.  It’s also spent thinking of how I’m going to connect the idea I want to share with students who might be forced to read this post when Mrs. Grundy tells them to compare and contrast my work with that poseur, Mark Twain, in high school in the year 2248 (that’s when Kirk will be a sophomore).

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Okay, generally on my drive to work I have about five or ten minutes between cars, so it would take several hours to get a group of cars behind me like that.  But a man has to have goals!

It may look like I’m driving to work, but I’m really plotting out what I’m going to write about.  To be honest, it sometimes takes both lanes to do that.  I wish the State Patrol® would be a little more understanding to artists like me.

Thankfully, The Mrs. is.

The Mrs. and I had a conversation the other night.  It may or may not have involved wine – I’m not telling unless I’ve been subpoenaed and am under oath to a House subcommittee.  Actually, it wasn’t so much a conversation as The Mrs. describing to me how she felt about this little project I publish three times a week.

I don’t make any money on this blog, though I’ve made clear since day one that can change at any time.  I have plans for several (eventual) ways to do that including adding subliminal messages causing you to want to pay for my health insurance.  It looks like it’s already worked for Bernie Sanders.

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In a socialist paradise all bloggers make $450,000 a year, right?  But I worry that for this Christmas we won’t have an Elf on a Shelf, we’ll have a Bernie on a Gurney.

No, at this point, writing is a hobby.  But it’s a hobby that takes over 20 hours a week, sometimes closer to 30 hours.  I still have a job, and I won’t stop interacting my family, so most nights I won’t even start writing before 9pm.  A lot of that time comes from time I’d normally be selfishly engaged in what you mortals call “sleep”, but a chunk of that time comes directly from time I’d be spending with The Mrs.

When I’m writing, I’m simply not available.  I’m writing.

The Mrs.:  “You know, I would certainly have an issue with the time that you spend writing, if it weren’t important.”  There was more to this, where she detailed the number of hours I spend.  But I keyed in on the word “Important.”

I was a little surprised by that.  “Important?”

The Mrs.:  “Yes.  I can see that what you’re writing about is important.  People need to hear it.  So keep doing it.”

Okay, that proves she never reads this stuff.

But as I talked more with my friend, the concept of “meaning” came up.

My Friend Who is Really Most Certainly Not Elon Musk:  “So, it’s about meaning?”

Suddenly as Wise as the Roman Philosopher Seneca John Wilder:  “That’s silly.  You don’t go off chasing ‘meaning’ in your life.  Pick out something you like to do, and do it.  But figure out how to make it important to other people.  You like to woodwork, right?  You say you never have time to do it.  Do it this weekend.  Film it.  Put it up on YouTube®.  I’ll be checking up with you on Monday.”

I asked myself, why is my friend working at all?  I think because he feels he’s supposed to work.  That having a job is a rule, it’s what he’s always done.  The problem that many of us have is that we tend to create rules where there aren’t any rules.  I’m not sure why.  Perhaps we need to justify what we do.  Perhaps it’s like my two important rules for life:

  1. Don’t tell everything you know.

Success?  My friend is already successful in most ways a person can be successful.  Their life is really good.  I told them, directly, “You’ve been given so many gifts.  If you don’t make something special of your life, you’re wasting it.”

Interestingly, this applies to you, too.

And me.

How will your breakfast taste tomorrow?

Too Big To Fail: Banks, Bikinis, Toddler Throwing and an Amy Schumer Joke

Stan:   I got a hundred-dollar check from my grandma and my dad said I need to put it in the bank so it can grow over the years.

Bank Manager:  That’s fantastic, a really smart decision, young man.  We can put that check in a money market mutual fund, then we’ll re-invest the earnings into foreign currency accounts with compounding interest aaaand . . . it’s gone.  – South Park

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I hear the Slovakian banks moved to digital currency.  They ran out of Czechs.  It’s okay, it’ll be fine.

Last week we talked about the Angle of Repose (The Funniest Post You Will Ever Read About Angles of Repose, Virgin Physicists, Economics, and Population).  The conclusion, stated briefly is that our economy and indeed our civilization can be compared to a sandcastle.  Like a sandcastle, the economy is built out of a myriad of individual particles, glued together by innovation, hope, aspiration, and desire to watch free naught movies on the Internet.  Like a sandcastle, if the conditions aren’t just right, the walls of the sandcastle can crumble in a growing cascade.  An even faster way to make the castle fall is to drop a shot put on it.  It’s especially fun if the five year old that made it is still working on it when you drop the shot put.

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Sadly this Canadian shot putter was disqualified after it was identified she was taking age-accelerating drugs to age more quickly so she could qualify for the Senior Olympics®.  Her only defense was, “I identify as 86 years old.”

Unlike a sandcastle, our economy isn’t made of grains of sand of rough uniformity.  If the average person’s net worth of $97,000 was a single grain of sand weighing 0.011 grams, Jeff Bezos’ $110 billion dollars would be a 28 pound steel ball, the perfect size to ruin a kid’s day.  But even that isn’t large compared to a bank.  JP Morgan’s® $2.5 trillion dollar assets when compared to that single grain of sand would weigh nearly 624 pounds.  If I had to pick between lifting 624 pounds of steel or 624 pounds of butane, I’d choose the butane.  Why?  It’s a lighter fluid.

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I imagine this toddler weighs about 28 pounds.  It’s a perfect competition size toddler, depending on the shape of its head, of course.  Sadly, I can’t throw one farther than about 35 feet.

The size and scale of international banks today is huge, and I’ll admit when I put together the weight comparison above, it was the first time that the vast scale of the international banks was even slightly comprehensible, though mind boggling – it takes me from a weight I don’t notice, to a weight that I’d have to use both arms to lift.  Okay, I’m lying.  Maybe if I put my back into it I could lift it with one arm.

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Thankfully, my net worth actually weighs less than pocket lint.

In the 1984, a bank named Continental Illinois® was failing.  As the cratering price of crude oil hit, the bank experienced massive losses.  Fearing a bank collapse, depositors pulled their money, but of course the bank had loaned it out.  Continental Illinois™ was bailed out through a combination of cash infusions ($5.5 billion), emergency loans ($8 billion), and change the Federal Reserve® found in Paul Volker’s couch cushions.  In congressional hearings about the matter, a congressman noted that Continental Illinois© was “too big to fail.”  The phrase had been used before, but this time it stuck – a Google™ search for “too big to fail” brings up about 5 million pages, most of which are about Amy Schumer.

The reason that they bailed out Continental Illinois© wasn’t that they were good natured.  The reason that the Federal government bailed out Continental Illinois was that they were scared to death – they had no idea what would happen if they just let the bank fail.  Would it bring down the economy?  No one knew – and just like wondering exactly what’s in a hot dog, no one was willing to find out.  And don’t tell me what’s in a hot dog, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know.

What were people worried about?

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I asked my bank teller to check my balance, and he tried to push me over.  Nah, I’m kidding.  He threw a snake at me.  I should stop keeping my money at the river bank.

A bank failure to most people is nearly risk-free.  The FDIC® (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation©) extends insurance to cover more money than the average family is worth.  But a small business or farm, even one that doesn’t have a multi-million dollar net worth, might have enough money moving through the account that a bank failure might trigger that small business to fail since its cash was . . . gone.

If that business had debts to other banks, it would then be in default, and cause a loss at the next bank.  If the next bank doesn’t fail, there are still problems.  The next bank will lend out money only to customers that it knows will pay it back – if it has sustained losses it won’t want to make loans that are risky.  A small town farm bank failure is bad and might devastate a community if it causes other businesses to fail.

When Continental Illinois™ started to fail, it was the seventh largest bank in the nation.  No one had any idea what its failure would do to the country, so it was not allowed to fail.  The government looked for someone to buy it, but they had no luck – like a Leftist spending his own money, a buyer for a massive bank that is failing is fairly difficult to find.

But let’s go back to JP Morgan®.  How did it get so big?  If you rewind the clock, the average size of a bank used to be pretty small, operations used to be limited to a single state, and there were no branches – each bank in each town was an independent entity.  Sure, one person might have owned more than one bank; even dozens of banks.  Each bank, however, had to stand on its own.

With that kind of small exposure in both size and location, banks limited the damage that they could do if they failed – over 9,000 banks failed during the Great Depression.  Sure, that was devastating, but I would argue that the failure of just one bank, JP Morgan®, would far exceed the damage that was caused by the failure of those 9,000 banks, each of which certainly weighed less than a toddler.

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I was going to add transparent bikini graphics, but The Boy went off to college so you’ll have live with these. 

Is there an argument for large banks?  Paul Krugman thinks so.  And if Paul Krugman is for it, I’m probably against it.  If Paul Krugman said that Wilder, Wealthy and Wise™ was his favorite blog?  I would argue with him, even if it involved a knife fight, which would probably work out okay for me because he’s old and weak and I smell like hamburger.  Krugman’s argument is, more or less, that bigger banks are more efficient so we should regulate them properly and let them live.

My counter to Krugman’s drivel is that is that the banking regulators are not working for the Federal government, they are working for the banks.  Most banking regulators want to work for the big banks, because that’s where the money is.  Actually regulating the bank would doesn’t look good on your resume.  This isn’t my imagination:  I actually had this conversation with a banker who had been a regulator.  His conclusion was the only real way to get fired as a Federal banking regulator was to do your job.  Come in late?  Go to sleep at work?  Surf porn on the Federal computers?  All that’s fine.  But ask Wells Fargo® to follow the law?

I smell a firing.

Big banks create a risk to the very existence of our current economic system since they have the unique ability to take profits when things are going well, but if they screw up?  You and I are paying.  I rate this risk as not as bad a risk as the drunken sailors masquerading as politicians in Washington, but still a pretty big risk.

From the above, I think it’s obvious what the downside is to having larger banks, since they risk our economy as a whole, and that’s not even mentioning Modern Monetary Theory (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs), or fiat currencies (Rome, Britain, and Money: Why You Can’t Find Fine China after the Apocalypse).  And, make no mistake – the failure rate for all businesses nears 100% over a long enough timeline.  Just ask Tyler Durden.

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I Am Joe’s Inflamed Uvula.

What’s the downside of breaking banks into smaller units, and perhaps limiting their capitalization to what Jeff Bezos keeps in his “spare mistress” account?

  • First, there’s more overhead. You need competent people to run the various independent branches, but what you get is the resiliency of an inefficient system – the risks that will cause all of the banks to fail are remote.  So, breaking apart banks would lead to more jobs for competent people.  Yes, that would lead to lower profits for the banks.  Yes, I’m a capitalist.  No, that’s not bad.
  • Second, if they’re limited to geographic regions, the banks that are in regions that might become economically depressed would have less money to lend. That’s probably okay.  I’m pretty sure I don’t want money from my state going to those heathens in Rhode Island, so I’m okay keeping it nearby.  Besides, if there are good opportunities here?  Money will flow in.
  • Third, smaller banks could That would make investors more likely to keep an eye on their investment.  And if bad things happened?  They’d be limited to failures that we could deal with, like forgetting to pay the cable bill.  Somebody nag me on Friday.
  • Fourth, it would be harder to borrow a few billion dollars. Okay, this can be solved several other ways for the legitimate requests to borrow a billion dollars, like needing to buy a first edition .

Even with smaller banks, some of the conveniences like ATMs could still remain in business – that sort of networked information exists now, so it could exist in the future.

I brought up the example of Continental Illinois© bank.  The name wasn’t at all familiar to me, but I did look up what happened to them.  Continental Illinois® was sold to Bank of America™ in the 1990’s.  Bank of America© is the second largest bank in the country.

How to solve the problem of too big to fail?

Make the too big to fail banks even bigger.  Is that a problem?  Is dropping a 624 pound shot put on a sandcastle a problem?

Nah, it’ll be fine.

Be Prep-ared

“Be prepared, son.  That’s my motto.  Be prepared.” – The Last Boy Scout

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The most prepared person is my friend, Justin Case.

When I was a kid, camping meant backpacking.  I had the good fortune to live in the mountains, where it my daily view waiting for the school bus was what people took vacation from work to see.  Heck, it was valuable enough to them that they would buy an SUV to haul a miniature home to come and experience for five days.  But to me, that wasn’t camping, that was daily life.  It’s amazing how we can become bored by splendor when surrounded by it daily.

Backpacking was camping.  When you camp as a backpacker, everything that goes up the hill goes on your back.  You are the SUV, which may explain why Pop Wilder put a bumper sticker on my butt.

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Okay that wasn’t it, but if it were 2019 the sticker would say, “Hey, vegans, you can thank me for killing that cow that was eating all of your food.”

When you backpack for more than a day or so, you really learn what’s essential.  The Boy and then later Pugsley joined the ranks of a familiar organization in hopes of becoming . . . “A member of an elite paramilitary organization: Eagle Scouts®” so that they can avenge me after the communists put me in the drive in movie camp.  I just know that there won’t be Raisinettes©, because communists hate Raisinettes™.

When The Boy first joined Cub Scouts® (the younger version where parents have to camp with the kids), my brain still equated camping with backpacking.  The tent I bought for camping with him?  A good four-man backpacker.  If you know anything about tents, you know that a four man tent is not big enough for four normal-sized humans.  In fact, it was just big enough for me and The Boy and our gear, and it was one you had to get on your knees to crawl inside.  To sleep on?  Self-inflating sleeping pads.

Honestly, I’ve never camped with anyone that I wanted to kill more.  When I was sharing the tent with him, every time I’d start to drift off to sleep, The Boy would shake me back awake.  Every time.  Why?  Because, allegedly, I would snore.

If you have never spent two nights camping with someone who intentionally wakes you up just as you’re getting ready to go into deep sleep, you may not understand that’s the sort of thing that makes you think . . . “You know, The Mrs. could produce a decent copy of The Boy that looks a lot like this one.”

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I shouldn’t make too much fun of Charlie Sheen – I hear he’s got a new show set for later this year – Two and a Half Personalities.

Everything I brought camping for that first Scout© trip including the tent and cooking gear fit into one decent-sized backpack.  Surely everyone else had the same idea about camping, right?  No.  When I got there I saw that spacious, palatial multi-room tents with cots, tables, and even sinks was the norm.  On one camping trip, the leader even brought a gasoline-powered electric generator for powering his tent.  I’m pretty sure at least one family brought a television, but since I was sleep-deprived, my memory might be suspect.

It was at that point I realized that outside of where I grew up, camping meant “living in a fabric palace with every possible amenity known to man.”

Yikes.  Eventually I gave up and bought my own fabric palace for camping with the The Boy and Pugsley when they were Cub Scouts©, though I stopped before we bought a generator and sink.  But when The Boy moved over to the actual Boy Scouts®?  Things changed.

The idea of camping there was that the boys (not the adults) were responsible for their own cooking, cleaning, equipment, and logistics.  They planned the meals, they selected the cooks, they divided the work, and nobody considered a fabric palace with a generator – it was not quite the austerity of backpacking, but it was close.  One especially nice rule was “no phones” for the kids.  As I was an adult leader in this elite paramilitary organization, I got to go camping quite a lot – sometimes over 30 days a year.

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My first trip, packing took an hour.  My most recent trip, packing took about five minutes – I’ve discovered that if I forgot it?  I can live 48 hours without it.

I experimented with gear – what gear made sense, what gear should be thrown out.  Thirty days of camping gives a lot of testing time, and do it over the course of several years?  Soon enough you’ve put nearly 150 days into the field for gear testing.  I learned what was useful, and what was useless.  Probably the best lesson was about things that were sometimes useful.

What was always useful?  The list is in (more or less) order from “never give up” to “might give up based on the trip.”

  • Clothing – Fully half the days of the year near Modern Mayberry, if you chose to go camping and it wasn’t raining, you’d need no more than your camping clothes to sleep. Might it be a chilly night on some nights?    But you’d be okay.  We often forget that the first line of defense against everything from sunburn to bugs to cold weather that we have is our clothing.  Clothing also keep us from getting arrested, or at least that’s what my probation officer keeps saying.
  • Shoes – Foot protection is important – no protection on the feet, you won’t be moving around. Sure, people in the distant past . . . yada yada.  It takes years to build up the appropriate calluses on your feet to walk around.  Having good shoes is just a trip to buy them.
  • Tent – I know one leader that made due with a tarp. I know one that only used hammocks.  I liked actual tents – it keeps the bugs out.  I eventually caved, and in car camping I use a tent that I can stand up in.  I know the others could work for me, but that’s what I chose because I’m old.  It was also good down to -15°F (-456°C).
  • Knife – I always carry one. Can cut a rope, I can cut dinner, but I just can’t cut the mustard.
  • Matches – In the winter, staying warm is a must, and fire can cook food.
  • Sleeping Bag – I take a sleeping bag, even in summer – worst case, you can sweat all over it.
  • Cot – I experimented with sleeping foam, and inflatable sleeping pads, but a cot is about the best. Sleeping pads are a pretty close second.
  • Coffee Cup – Yes, for coffee. But also for soup.  Or stew.
  • Bowl – I started out using a fancy mess kit. I know one person who used a Frisbee®, but I just settled on an unbreakable ceramic bowl.
  • Cookware – The bowl could double, if it was metal. I’m all for having both a bowl and a cooking pot.
  • Spoon – Spoons are like bowls on the end of sticks. Amazing that people would invent a smaller bowl to empty a larger one.
  • Book – I always took one, I always read one. Nice during down time.
  • Toilet Paper – Better than using poison ivy leaves.
  • Folding Chair – Sure, silly, but it was always used. You can only stand so long.  A stump works, certainly, and when I backpack we’d pull up a log.  But chairs are nice.
  • Light for Inside the Tent – Mainly useful for reading the book.

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This was nearly as useless as that glass hammer that I got from E-Bay®, or that wooden frying pan that I got from Amazon©.

What was sometimes useful?  The order is less useful here, since depending upon weather or other conditions, some of these would really be essential.

  • First Aid Kit – I still always carry one, though mine is a bit more tricked out than an over the counter version – I’ve added Super Glue®, butterfly bandages, a foam splint, and blood clotting agent. It’s hard to be John Wilder:  Civil War Surgeon® without a bag tools.  Did I mention I have a knife?
  • Bug Spray – Depending on the time of the year, this is really nice to have. I tried not showering as an alternative, but that only works as a people repellent.
  • Rope – Paracord is about right – you could always use more if you were hauling something heavy, but we never ran into any situation where paracord wouldn’t work.
  • Rain Poncho – Useful when it was raining, in theory. In practice, when it’s raining and 80°F out, it’s not required unless you happen to be made out of sugar.  When it’s raining and 40°F out?  It’s a necessity.
  • Water Bottle – Why isn’t this useful for every trip? Well, most places we went had water.  If they didn’t?  We brought it.  If unlimited fresh water wasn’t the case, I’d revert to my backpacking days where a water bottle and a water filter were near the top of the list.
  • Saw/Axe/Hatchet – Most fires that we made were out of small wood that we could easily break by hand. We used saws/axes/hatchets more for making things.  In deep winter camping, we’d probably want better firewood, so a saw becomes more useful.
  • Map – This is listed in “sometimes useful” but only when we taught map reading. We never went any place so far off the beaten path where a map was required.  If you didn’t have a cell phone?  This might be useful once again.
  • Frisbee/Football – Good times. And football doesn’t mean soccer ball.
  • Flashlight – When I started camping, I thought this was essential. Between firelight, moonlight, and starlight, rarely did I use a flashlight after the first thirty days.
  • Cell Phone – Okay, I’ll admit I surfed Drudge® while I was camping. And it’s great to have as an emergency backup, if there’s signal.

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I always carry a knife when I have a flashlight – you won’t see me taking a stab in the dark.

What was rarely (if ever) useful?

  • Compass – Modern GPS technology and cell phones have made this of similar usefulness as a buggy whip. I have several.
  • Bear Spray – Not very good for spicing up my chili when camping. When hiking, scouts make enough noise that bears are afraid.  And my (alleged) snoring would keep any bear away at night.
  • Wallet – Nothing useful there for camping, unless they need to identify the body.
  • Keys – Useful before and after camping. Not so much during.

A camping trip isn’t the end of the world, so there are things that we plan to take with us that we consumed during the trip:

  • Water – Needed. Unless you’re a kangaroo rat.  Clean water is of great importance, but maybe we take it for granted – and remember, it’s no substitute for beer.
  • Food – Unless you have a medical condition, over the course of any short duration, food is not a necessity, it’s a comfort item. We were comfortable campers.
  • Paper Towels – 99% of cleanup is done with paper towels. Not a necessity.  But nice.
  • Soap – To wash dishes. Or yourself.
  • Trash Bags – In a pinch, you could use them for rainwater collection, as a poncho, or weave it into a plastic rope to let yourself out of a psychiatric prison again. We just put trash into ours.

“Here’s a lesson to test your mind’s mettle:  take part of a week in which you have only the most meager and cheap food, dress scantly in shabby clothes, and ask yourself if this is really the worst that you feared.  It is when times are good that you should gird yourself for tougher times ahead, for when Fortune is kind the soul can build defenses against her ravages.  So it is that soldiers practice maneuvers in peacetime, erecting bunkers with no enemies in sight and exhausting themselves under no attack so that when it comes they won’t grow tired.”

– Seneca the Dead Roman Dude

“It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress.  If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes.”

– Also Seneca the Still Dead Roman Dude

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Roman algebra was boring.  X was always equal to 10.

One of the best parts about camping is that it allows you to walk away from 2019.  It allows you to leave behind the past and live with virtually no technology younger than 70 years old.  Camping pulls you away from most of the meaningless parts of our world, and it’s interesting to see people cope with moving from an environment that manages to provide amusement on demand to one where high-tech includes propane stoves and fire.

One particular campout brings this one to mind – an adult was continually whining about the weather.  Sure, it was November, and there was a constant rain.  Thankfully, we had an adult whining about the weather every chance he got.  Since the boys were off doing their own thing, they weren’t exposed to the negativity – the boys loved it, cooking oatmeal in the rain for Sunday breakfast.  Several thought the campout was one of the best they’d been on.

The lesson?  You don’t need most of the things you think you need, not even good weather.

Things that you need that you don’t think you need:

  • Practice – spending that amount of time away from a house taught me a lot about what I need, and what I don’t.
  • Mental Toughness – The life we have on a daily basis isn’t really normal, especially when compared to the lives people have lived throughout history. We live in luxury, with a great freedom from want, and ample food for everyone:  whether it gets distributed is another matter.  Living without these luxuries for a week and learning you can be happy with less is a great way to prepare for emergencies.
  • Amusements – Simple things like a deck of cards can help with the withdrawals from 2019. The next step is meaningfully connecting with people.  Crazy idea, that one.
  • Purpose – Understand why you’re doing all of this. Having a purpose that’s beyond Facebook® is priceless.

Here are some lessons I picked up from Hurricane Ike:

  • 90%+ of people don’t prepare at all until the last minute.
  • Unless you’ve practiced, you’ve forgotten something. I forgot propane for the gas grill, my neighbor had some.  He forgot gas for his car.  I had some.  Even trade.
  • Unless your family has practiced, they’ll be mentally weak. Even just a few days without power had people missing it, and in the aftermath of the hurricane, it got hot.  With no air conditioning, Houston was just plain horrible.  None of us were used to that.  Another week of no power and I’d have shipped off the rest of the family to a hotel.

The basics of survival are simple:  Air for breathing.  A place to get out of the cold.  Water.  Eventually, food.  Survival is hard to practice for – taking a few days off and camping is easy.  Taking a month off is harder, and taking a year off is nearly impossible for anyone who has bills to pay.  But if you’re ready for a disaster that lasts a month?  You’ve already gone to the head of the class.  And if you’ve learned to not murder your child because he wakes you up every time you start to snore so that sleep is impossible?

Well, that’s a positive, too.

Remember:  just because it hasn’t happened, doesn’t mean it won’t.  And when you’re prepared for a range of outcomes, both physically and mentally, you’re ahead not of 90% of the population, but 99%.  What will the future bring us? That’s a big question, but if you prepare, remember that practice is a part of the preparation.

As Concerned American always notes over at Western Rifle Shooters (LINK), “This material will be on the final exam.”

The Roman Emperor, The Navy SEAL, Elizabeth Warren, and Your Future

“You were last seen hiking up Mount Ego.” – Frasier

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Jimmy Page could NOT believe it when he found out that Marcus Aurelius would be available as a lead singer.

I know what you’re saying, “John Wilder, how can you be so freakin’ funny three times a week every Monday, Wednesday and Friday?”  The answer is simple – my goal to be the funniest person on the Internet, with the exception of those anchors on CNN®.  I mean, how do they keep a straight face?

That goal requires work.  Really.  Oh, sure, “work” includes researching things I’m interested in anyway and (sometimes) drinking a glass of wine or two while I work on punchlines.  But I won’t hit publish or stop writing until it’s done.  And done means I’m happy as a twit in a toga with a toupee.  Speaking of  noble noggins in nighties, Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (notice that smooth transition?) said:

Don’t let your reflection on the whole sweep of life crush you.  Don’t fill your mind with all the bad things that still might happen.  Stay focused on the present situation and ask yourself whey it’s so unbearable and can’t be survived.

Whenever I quote him, I remind everyone that Marcus Aurelius was the Emperor of Rome while it was still at the height of its power.  This man had the freedom to make decisions on the literal life and death of citizens and non-citizens alike.  He was, no joking, the most powerful man in the world.

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What’s the fun of telling the Stormtroopers© that “These aren’t the droids® you’re looking for,” when the Stormtroopers™ work for you?  It’s like they were thinking, “Okay, play along, the Emperor is doing cosplay again.”

But despite this worldly power, Marcus took the time to write down his personal philosophy.  It wasn’t to pass down to posterity, it was for him.  His book is called Meditations because these were the things he meditated about on a daily basis.  These were the problems and doubts and issues he dealt with in his everyday life.

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You can tell this was the first page of Meditations – later on Marcus used glitter pens and stickers.  The historians were so happy when the found the key to the little lock on the diary.

When I was younger, I thought that the solution to my problems existed outside of me.  I thought that if I could get more power, I could be happy.  If you think being more powerful will automatically ease all of your worries and concerns, Marcus Aurelius is proof that power won’t help you in that way.

Sure, Marcus didn’t have to worry about making a mortgage payment or about not getting a tasty chicken sandwich because he showed up at Chick-fil-a® and forgot they were closed on Sundays, but the passage above shows that the decisions of running an empire and planning military campaigns were still overwhelming and stressful.  While outwardly Marcus had to be stoic in the sense of a strong Roman emperor, in his book he could share the truth about his worries with himself.

Let’s look at another quote, this one by Navy SEAL Jocko Willink (LINK):

This is what I want you to be afraid of:  waking up in six days or six weeks or six years or sixty years and being no closer to your goal . . . .  GET UP.  AND.  GO.

At first glance, these two quotes might seem separated.  They certainly are separated in time and pace, not to mention power.  Marcus wrote about the present and living through the moment.  He spoke of action in the small moment of “now” to allow him to get back to being able to deal with the big picture.

Jocko writes about failing in that future to spur action in today’s small moment of “now.”

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Or maybe he identifies as a SEAL?

Two men, writing about the same thing centuries apart, come to the same conclusion through different methods on escaping the paralysis of fear in day-to-day life:  action is vital for you to be the best you.  You can’t dwell on what might happen if you make a bad decision – but you have to be afraid of the person you’ll be if you don’t take action, or, worse yet, don’t have a goal.

Why don’t we take action?  Probably the number one reason is our egos.  Egos are fragile things, and ego in many ways is our enemy.  Aurelius wrote about getting through the moment, not being crushed by the overwhelming vastness of life.  That’s his ego not wanting to be wrong.

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I thought we’d have more of moved off to Canada by now?

Willink writes about wasting that future life.  That’s his ego avoiding action today because it might fail.  Ego wants to, above all things, not fail.  Taking yourself into a future where you have failed by not trying is a sneaky way of using your ego to help you improve.  Taken to extreme, it’ll make you single-minded.  The biggest danger is that you achieve your goal and don’t have another one.

Don’t let your ego drive your life.  Most people really don’t care about you, and that’s a good thing.

  • They don’t remember that your pants split during that presentation in college and you weren’t wearing underwear. At least I hope they still don’t remember that.
  • They barely remember when you made a fool out of yourself that one time at the party by walking into that glass front door, making you look like a 200 pound sparrow who left a face imprint, complete with Hot Mustard Sauce® that you were dipping Chicken McNuggets© in.
  • No one remembers that you time travelled into the past and that your high-school age mom tried to put the moves on you after you hit Biff Tannen.

Those that do care about you . . . don’t care about those oddly specific things I listed above.  They care about you and want you to feel better.  After you do something embarrassing, an inner voice beats you up.  That’s your ego.  Your ego is insulting you so you don’t embarrass it again.   And, I assure you, if anyone said to you the things you tell yourself when you’re feeling guilty or embarrassed and looking in a mirror, you’d cut them out of your life in a minute.  Unfortunately, when I tried to cut my ego out, my family stopped me because the electric drill I used couldn’t find it.  The ego is kept behind the drywall of your closet, right?

I mean, that’s where the voices come from.

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And his shoes didn’t match his purse!

Ask yourself:  how does fear of embarrassment or fear of failure drive your behavior?  How many things have you avoided because of fear?  How many great things did you miss out on because you weren’t willing to take the risk?

Be the best you.  Start today.  And ignore or make your own use of that inner voice that your ego uses to punish you.

Currency Collapse Explained Using Sexy Bikini Girl Graphs, Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solution?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Checklist – Signs of a Currency Collapse:

  1. Gasoline is priced in goats.
  2. Bankers take cold pizza as mortgage payments.
  3. You can pay off your medical school student loans with the change from buying a candy bar.
  4. Bill Gates is bumming cash by cleaning windows of passing cars.
  5. $100 bills are too cheap to use as notepaper.
  6. Americans are caught sneaking into Honduras.
  7. George Soros begins laying off politicians and selling some on E-Bay®.
  8. The IRS starts giving a 25% discount for cash.
  9. Your financial adviser will have helped you get to a small fortune, but only if you started with a large fortune.
  10. You try to make a withdrawal at the bank and they tell you they have insufficient funds.

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

Don’t forget to bikini wax.

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

“The most efficient killing machine ever invented; you’ve got her doing the laundry.” – Terminator, The Sarah Connor Chronicles

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

Modern society is based on efficiency.

Efficiency in what?

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

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

I think cars just might finally be catching on as a consumer item.  Maybe they’re not a fad after all.

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

One particular innovation that Toyota® came up with was “just-in-time” manufacturing, which is also known as “Lean Manufacturing.”  The concept is simple:  I make a car with parts that just showed up – nobody has to go get them, they just show up right when I need them.  The ideal would be the supplier delivers the part to the production line at the moment it’s required.  The windshield wiper salesman puts two in the bin as the next Corolla™ arrives at the windshield wiper installation station.  There isn’t a bucket of thousands of wipers behind the worker, just the few he or she needs right then.  Hence?  Just-in-time.

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

Why didn’t they invent and do this just-in-time production in 1880?  Transport speed.  Slow transport requires stockpiles and large shipment.  Also required is production coordination.  Assembly lines break from time to time – you have to make sure that the windshield wipers don’t stack up like chocolates on an assembly line.  There has to be sufficient communication, and the Internet helps make it easy.

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

Worth watching again even if you’ve seen it before.

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

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But the at least the cashier was dead sexy.

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

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

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

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If you think no one cares if you’re alive, skip a month’s worth of bills.

So, all sarcasm aside, the paycheck example starts to illustrate the problems with Lean Manufacturing.  Inventory is a bad word in a manufacturing plant, and no manufacturing plant in the world would keep spare capacity that it doesn’t use regularly just sitting there.  Soon enough, a bright young soulless MBA from the head office will either start production on the spare capacity, sell the manufacturing equipment, or take a jet trip to a conference where there is a platter of free bacon-wrapped shrimp.

What has been profitable business advice is, as you can see, horrible personal advice.  Life isn’t about efficiency.  Life is about . . . life.  Being inefficient actually has some huge advantages.

People who regularly prepare for disasters (“preppers”) have popularized the phrase “Two is one, and one is none.”  I looked for the origin of the phrase, and I believe it is old enough that it probably originated in a Roman Legion stationed in Carthage, when a grizzled Centurion stuck a cigar in his mouth and was dressing down a new recruit for having an insufficiently shiny gladius.  And don’t tell me that it was another 1,500 years until tobacco was introduced to Europe – an outfit with a good supply guy can find anything.

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Okay, you don’t need two of everything.  A friend of mine has two ex-wives.

The philosophy of prepping is the exact opposite of Lean Manufacturing.  It says that we are stupid – we don’t know what’s going to happen so having extra supplies is crucial.  Stuff gets broken.  Stuff gets lost – just this week somebody found a batch of Revolutionary-era bayonets in a pit at Valley Forge.  You can bet there was a corporal that got his butt chewed over those by George Washington.  But I’m betting that the Continental Army had some extras.  Heck, it’s certain that even the Egyptians knew to store the extra grain in good years 6,000 years ago because:

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

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

I’m not making this up.  People spent $2.048 BILLION dollars to see that story.

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See?  Big Smurf® and magic rocks.  Told you I wasn’t making it up.

Anyway, Thanos®’ wish was that half of the people in the Universe disappear.  That’s just what happened.  Half the people turned to ash.  It really wasn’t that sad, at least for me, because it’s a comic book and Superman and Batman have each died something like fifty times, so death in a comic book movie is about as permanent as a Hollywood marriage.  The movie ends with lots of people, including Spiderman®, dissolving into ash.

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

After watching the movie I’m thinking that, like every member of Congress, the screenwriters had no training in economics.  Okay, a big Smurf© snaps his fingers and everyone disappears and I’m concerned they didn’t get their economics right.  Yeah, I’m an economics nerd.

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

Anarchy.

But in The Avengers:  Endgaming for Even More of Infinity Cash©, everybody who was turned into ash returns after one of the Avengers® (Tony Stark™) snaps his fingers.  Take that, Thanos©!

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

Massive famine and starvation.

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Oops.

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

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

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

Sweet dreams!

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.

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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?

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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.

I.Q. and the Fate of Humanity: Interview with Dr. Edward Dutton, Part Two

“Joe and Rita had three children, the three smartest kids in the world.  Vice President Frito took 8 wives and had a total of 32 kids. 32 of the dumbest kids ever to walk the Earth.  So maybe Joe didn’t save mankind, but he got the ball rolling, and that’s pretty good for an average guy.” – Idiocracy

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It’s better than the “Girls Gone Wilder” picture featuring Kardashians.  They don’t shave nearly often enough.

Again, a single meme today . . . more on Wednesday!

Dr. Edward Dutton is the co-author of At Our Wits’ End, which I’ve reviewed in two previous posts here At Our Wits’ End Review Part The First:  Increasing Intelligence and Civilization and here At Our Wits’ End Review Part II: I.Q. and the Fate of Civilization (Hint, It’s Idiocracy).  Dr. Dutton was kind enough to allow me to interview him, and the first part of the interview can be found at I.Q. and the Fate of Humanity: Interview with Dr. Edward Dutton, Part One.  The final part of the interview can be found below, and I’ll admit that cutting the interview down from 9,000+ initial words to the two published pieces was difficult, as you can imagine some great comments from Dr. Dutton had to hit the cutting room floor.  That makes me sad, but I hope you enjoy the gems below.

I heartily recommend the book, and get no compensation if you buy it.

As before, any errors in the interview below are solely mine.

JW:  Is there an optimum I.Q. level?

ED:  Well that’s an interesting question.  We touch on that in the book.  The problem is that high I.Q. isn’t inherently good.  What’s good from an evolutionary perspective is to survive.  If you are putting energy into having a large brain and having a large I.Q. that’s energy you’re not putting into being aggressive and having big muscles.  In certain ecologies that’s better for you to do that, to have the big muscles and the aggressiveness.  You’re actually less likely to survive – intelligence doesn’t help you.  You’ll die.  Intelligence is not selected for.  Intelligent genes will pop up by random mutation and they just won’t get selected for.  What’s happening now clearly is that there’s a negative correlation of about 0.1 among women between I.Q. and how many children you have and so what that inherently means is that there must be an optimum I.Q., because above the optimum you’re not having children.  There’s something to do with the environment-gene interaction.  That means you don’t breed.

JW:  So essentially you’re less fit for the environment . . .

ED:  They’re less fit for this zoo that we live in.  Even if we were living in a zoo there’s some evidence that very high I.Q. is a bad thing.  It correlates with things that are inherently bad in some ways like autism, being easily overstimulated, allergies, and not being very instinctive and therefore not really wanting to breed.  And if you’re an outlier in I.Q. you have difficulty talking to most people and dealing with them because you find them so stupid and facile.

JW:  One of the things I’ve noted from the data is that “higher I.Q.” [that’s in quotes] professions you end up seeing occupations like judge and engineer. There seems to be a cap of around 130 I.Q. or a little bit above 130 I.Q.  You didn’t see so many of that greater than 130 fraction showing up as judges, attorneys, or engineers.  In fact they ended up working in much less “high I.Q.” jobs . . .

ED:  As the I.Q. gets higher, the positive manifold between the different components of the I.Q. battery becomes weaker and as a consequence of that at the very high level they have very, very high g, very high intelligence, you can be absolutely crap at things which only weakly correlate with intelligence like social skill.  And this then will of course preclude you from climbing up the social hierarchy.  This is, I suspect, why the correlation between income and I.Q. is only about 0.3, 0.4.  With education it’s about 0.5.

JW:  Looking at the fate of civilization is as we head into winter, what are your thoughts on timescale?  Is there a minimum societal I.Q. beyond which the center cannot hold?

ED:  That’s hard to say because it’s never happened before in a way that we can measure it.  If you look in the book, we’ve got those graphs where we compare the collapse of our society, and the difference with us is that we’ve got so much further because of industrialization and we’ve got past the contraception.   What we know is that in terms of our linguistic I.Q., we’re back at the level that we were in about 1600.  That’s where we come back to from a peak [vocabulary] in 1850.  Now we’re back to 1600.  The factors that make that an overly simplistic comparison is that first, the standard of living was much worse in 1600.  That’s going to make people more violent and more impulsive.  Secondly, we’ve gotten high in extraversion – we’ve been selecting for extroversion for a long time, which makes people adventurous and risk taking.  So, we’re not like 1600 in that way, but that was when we were last at this level of vocabulary.  There has to be some clever person you could get to do mathematical modeling of how this works, we could calculate what the boost is to our behavior patterns by the level of, say, low child mortality.  We can probably calculate that.  Then perhaps we could make an estimate, ideally better than guesswork, but I’m sure you could find somebody, maybe my colleague Emil Kierkegaard.  I imagine he might be able do something like that.  Once I.Q. starts to decline at the genetic level, which is definitely happening, then this sets off an environmental decline as well.  It’s a cascade effect, a snowball effect, because once I.Q. is declining then you can’t teach kids as well, the teachers are of low quality, the conditions are of low quality.  Then you have this environmental effect so you will push things down quite quickly.

JW:  When you talk about the Flynn Effect being having the potential to have arisen from environmental factors that means it could go away within a generation.

ED:  Well yes, if you think about what the Flynn Effect is underpinned by, this capital that we’ve built up is almost like a catapult.  I was in an interview once, and the interviewer used this metaphor:  it’s like a catapult that’s given us momentum and once we run out of that that momentum means that we can just do these little micro interventions but there’ll come a point where that momentum will run out. And when that runs out then it will undo everything quite quickly because we simply won’t be able to do things that we used to be able to do in the past.  We can’t do Concord anymore or go to the Moon, but there’ll be other things we won’t be able to do, and so it’ll collapse quite fast. That’s why I suspect it’ll collapse into war quite fast.

JW:  Nothing can stop it because even if you have some sort of smart fraction left the vast majority of people have dropped so much.

ED:  Exactly. So it reminds me that this concept they talk about in global warming research of a global dimming.  They say that it’s pushing the temperature down.  It’s causing this effect which is which is actually keeping it less warm than it would be and that once that goes then the temperature will spike up very, very, quickly.  That’s the theory anyway.  There’s this idea that there’s this effect: all these micro innovations are creating this better environment where we can control more things which is masking the evidence that should be there of us getting stupider and stupider.  When that goes then the sudden stupidity will hit. If we were suddenly put in Darwinian conditions overnight, our inability to cope would be quite extraordinary in comparison to that of previous generations, even my grandparents’ generation, because we’re so totally protected from having to think.

JW:  When you look at altruism as a whole do you think that it might be the big enemy of intelligence?

ED:  It depends.  That’s quite a complex question because if we think about group selection then it was as a consequence of us having relatively high altruism and cooperativeness that we were able to develop farming.  And farming selected for intelligence, because it pushed out those that were too stupid to be able to farm, that had such short time horizons they couldn’t farm.  In a direct sense altruism was the friend of intelligence.  But then on another level you would argue well it’s altruism that’s stopping people from introducing eugenic policies, stopping people from getting rid of the welfare state which definitely promotes low I.Q. as my colleague Adam Perkins showed that there’s no question about that – it does cause people who are lower I.Q. to have more children, and stopping people from stopping low I.Q. immigration.  You could argue, perhaps, under Darwinian conditions maybe altruism is the friend of intelligence to some extent, because under Darwinian conditions we’re under group selection and the group that is internally altruistic although externally hostile will survive.  But once you get to non-Darwinian conditions then what tends to happen is that the levels of stress are so low that religiousness, which people become more religious when they’re stressed, the religiousness collapses and religiousness tends to promote ethnocentric attitudes that tends to promote focused altruism.  Your altruism is only focused on your own group and not to outsiders because they are the devil.  Once that collapses, then you have a generalized altruism and that would seem to be perhaps in an indirect sense the enemy of intelligence.  Actually, altruism does correlate with intelligence weakly.  People who are intelligent and who are altruistic because they are better able to reason through, not where you instinctively know how someone will feel that – that’s empathy, but they can reason through how someone else might think and they can solve social situations better.  Thus there’s a weak relationship between the between altruistic behavior and intelligence.

JW:  So for intelligence, perhaps an optimal level of altruism might resemble the Spartans then? [chuckles]  Entirely an in-group focus extraordinarily trusting of in-group, but even your own offspring are outgroup if they don’t meet your specifications.

ED:  Yes possibly. But the problem was with the Spartans was that it was taken to such an extreme and that they were almost like Nazi Germany. I mean they were they were so unfree that perhaps there wasn’t sufficient space for people to sit down and be creative.  Because part of being a genius and coming up with an original idea is that you have a moderately antisocial personality combined with very high I.Q. in an environment where it’s awfully conformist like that and those people perhaps didn’t cope well. So that there’s an optimum there as well. I’ve got a book that’s just come out called Churchill’s Headmaster:  The Sadist Who Nearly Saved the British Empire and it does what it says on the tin.  It’s about Churchill’s prep school headmaster.  Anyone that knows anything about Churchill knows that his prep school headmaster was this evil sadist and I show that he’s not.  He’s actually a jolly nice chap and it’s Churchill that’s the evil sadist.  If Churchill had had more time with this headmaster then maybe he would have been molded into more of a gentleman.  Now that system of public schools like Eton was deliberately and consciously modelled on Sparta.  Everybody knew that Sparta was the way forward.  Plato said that the upper class should never know their parents.  It wasn’t as bad as that.  But for nine months of the year that you wouldn’t see your parents.  There was a degree to which the Victorians got the balance right because look at the growth of the British Empire.  It got the balance right.  It made basically militarized the upper class but it was sufficiently open to nonconformists that geniuses could develop.  I wonder if Sparta was just too far, too conformist.

JW:  Versus some of the ideas that came out of Athens.

ED:  Perhaps those ideas were ideas that came along once Greece was in decline.  That’s what happens. The best idea, the original idea, all that critical thinking . . .  that comes along in the autumn [of a civilization-JW].  Same with Victorian England. Science and whatever. It’s in the autumn of civilization that these things tend to flourish.

JW:  You mentioned that as well with Islam and Rome, that the best ideas came in their autumn.

ED:  That’s when you’re engaged in critical thinking, but by the end of autumn you’re critiquing everything and you take it too far and you destroy everything, including the things that hold society together like militarism and religion and . . . just everything.  Nothing is sacred.  When that happens then there will be people for whom things still are sacred.  We see this now with the Muslims who are more ethnocentric, more motivated.  So the desert tribesmen creates the city and it becomes decadent and the new desert tribesmen invades.  This is the problem we have.  I look at this in my new books Race Differences in Ethnocentrism and The Silent Rape Epidemic: How the Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers.

The only problem is I’m afraid I can’t think of a solution, neither myself nor my colleague Michael Woodley of Menie can think of an adequate solution to the problem of declining intelligence and so we are kind of resigned to this idea that it’s that there is an inevitable cycle.  It’s in the nature of things.  I was thinking that it could be something to do with human survival itself.  If we get too intelligent then we get too low in kind of basic instincts and violence and these kinds of things.

Therefore we can’t survive.  It’s like humanity somehow regulates itself, with the invention of contraception for example, such that intelligence never gets too high that humanity dies out.  You probably get this with other animals as well.  All of them are probably going to go in cycles. There are probably periods of time where frogs were more intelligent than frogs are now.  There was probably a period of time when frogs were less intelligent.  Not within a large range, for frogs.  I think it’s probably the same with humans.  Humans will go through these periods of high and low and ultimately the species survives.  That’s evolutionary perspective.  That’s the important thing.

Retirement, Bikinis, Churchill, Blake, and Luck

“As a matter of fact, you can hardly call me a fortune hunter.  Because when I first proposed to Mrs. Claypool, I thought she only had seven million.  But the extra millions never interfered with my feelings for her.” – A Night at the Opera

Roth

Update:  I just saw David Lee Roth in a rowboat . . . .

Pop Wilder was generally a cautious man.  Adopting me was an example – one of the few – of when he stared Caution straight in the eye and said, “I would like to ruin any chance of sleeping well until he’s 18.”  He likewise glanced at Fortuna and said, “I really don’t need those thousands of dollars that I’ll have to spend fixing the house.  And the television.  And the car.  And the other car.  And the other car.”

Pop really was restrained in his spending.  While we never wanted for anything in particular, I certainly wasn’t spoiled, especially by today’s standards.  The first vehicle I got to drive around was a pickup that had a rubber mat covering steel a steel floor, vinyl bench seats, AM radio, no air conditioning, and was a decade old.  It also had an “engine” that was perhaps slightly weaker than an Ebola patient after a marathon.

Pop kept his cars for a decade or more.  He always bought cars with cash – and never paid interest on anything that I know of, ever, even our house.  The house was built it in stages over the course of years (by a local contractor crew of farmers who built houses while the crops were growing) until it was exactly the way that he and Ma Wilder wanted it.  He owned it outright.

He retired while I was still in school, not long after I got a scholarship.  Those things might have been related – after I got the scholarship I think he was pleased to hang up his hat and sit on the porch, and I was the last risk he needed to manage before he could do that.  Pop had been working at the same place since he was five, with the exception of a certain all-expenses-paid trip that the government provided him in Europe.  He got to see places like London, Normandy, and even the Rhine.

dday2

Pop says he saw him.  But I’ve never seen any pictures of Pop with Winston Churchill . . . .

Pop’s life was built on the idea of financial stability.  That would make sense – he’d seen lots of people do finances poorly.  He’d been a small-town farm banker, back when there were such things.  Banks back then didn’t have branches, they had roots:  the lessons learned from the Depression had led regulators to build resilience in the system by only allowing banks to serve a limited area.  A big bank with branches all across the state or even across a county was seen as an unacceptable financial risk and a concentration of power so large that it would invite corruption.  I’m glad that we have figured out how to avoid systemic financial risk and that our politicians are now beyond corruption.

voters

Oh, wait, this isn’t the cover for the remake of Dumb and Dumber?

Thus, if you wanted to deal with a banker, you’d drive into town from your farm and go talk to Pop.  Pop wouldn’t loan you money if you couldn’t repay it.  When he retired, he felt that he had his risks covered.  The same year I met The Mrs., Pop Wilder headed off to Europe to revisit the location where he saw a certain Mr. Churchill taking a stroll on a French beach.

I can’t speak to the financial condition of The Mrs.’ family in as much detail.  But at the time I met her, her dad had to sell several head of cattle (there weren’t all that many to begin with) to cover a debt from his wife’s business.  He was retired, but it was obvious that they were counting on Social Security to cover the bulk of their retirement costs, especially after my mother-in-law shut down her small business and entered semi-retirement herself.

Who does it look like would have the most trouble-free retirement?

Sure, we’d all say Pop Wilder.  But in the end, my in-laws have had the better run.  What happened to my in-laws was a temporary setback.  Within two years, several oil and gas companies began knocking on their door of their farmhouse.  Soon enough, they’d sold a lease.

The oil company drilled.  Within a few years, my in-laws had their old house (it was held together, The Mrs. said, by the termites and mice holding hands very tightly so it didn’t collapse) demolished.  They replaced the house with a new one, and filled in the pit where the basement of their old farm house had been.

My in-laws had been frugal all of their lives, but at this point, retired and on Medicare, they were doing beyond okay – they were thriving.  Were they “buying a brand-new Ferrari®” okay?  No.  But there’s nothing like the peace of mind that having a producing oil well on the property creates.  And, yes, production has gone down, so it’s not as much money.  But it’s still been a big help.

And whatever happened to the ever-planning Pop Wilder?

distracted

No, really, voters, I have eyes only for you. 

Pop Wilder spent it all.  Slowly, and not at all frivolously, outside of the trip to Europe.  Pop had gotten to the point where he was just a little bit under water each month.  Not by much – my brother (also named John Wilder) and I could easily help him out by kicking in $200 each month.  And that was a small price to pay for all of the cars I’d wrecked.

When Pop passed on, I think he was down to $100 in his account.

William Blake died in 1827, and was far from a conventional thinker.  I’d spend more time studying his writing, but from experience I’ve found that when you pick up the book of an esoteric author that died 200 years ago, you miss a lot of what they’re talking about without a great deal of study.  I bought a book about the Knights Templar back in 1999, and after reading about eight other books I was able to pick that first book up and follow it.

There’s a lot that they don’t teach you at school.

Anyway, back to Blake.  There is one quote from Blake that’s not unconventional and you won’t have to study for three years to figure out:  “Life can only be lived forward, but understood in reverse.”

I’ve always loved that quote, and the longer I live, the more that quote makes sense:  most of the time as you go through life you can’t really understand the reasons for what’s happening to you.  And I wonder what lessons Pop Wilder learned – was it the ability to let go and let fate guide him while he had friendly hands to help?  Maybe.

geometry

That was a tough final – we had to construct our own universes – from scratch!

And for my in-laws – was the lesson that a life frugally lived can be paid off with comfort in the end?  Again, maybe.

I can’t be certain.  Those lessons were theirs, not mine.

The Romans had a goddess, Fortuna, who represented luck – both good and bad.  This particular goddess had a long life in Rome, she showed up around 600 B.C. and was hanging around in the Medieval days when St. Augustine wrote (not approvingly) about her work as a goddess in his 5th Century book, City of God.   Perhaps the version of Fortuna that inspired Blake was from St. Boethius who reflected in his 6th Century book the Consolation of Philosophy that (from Wikipedia) “the apparently random and often ruinous turns of Fortune’s Wheel are in fact both inevitable and providential, that even the most coincidental events are parts of God’s hidden plan which one should not resist or try to change.”

That sounds more like Blake.

fortuna snack

Is it me, or has Fortuna been lifting?

As for me, by observing this the one thing I know is that the future is uncertain, and as I get closer (not there, yet) to retirement, I begin to understand that, while I can put together spreadsheet after spreadsheet, I certainly cannot control Fortuna.  There are too many possibilities in the future that are simply beyond the ability of anyone to control.

Will:

  • there be inflation?
  • they strike oil under my house causing Granny, Jethro, The Mrs. and I to move to Beverly Hills?   We thought about it, but live next door to a banker?  I hear they bring down property values.
  • civilizational decay make it so I can’t get a decent chili dog?
  • I live to be 190? I hope not.
  • government have to change the deal as Medicare eats all of the Federal budget? Nearly certain.

And what will I do in the face of such uncertainty?  In the immortal words of David Lee Roth . . . “I’ll just roll myself up in a big ball . . . and fly.”

Unless, of course, my lessons revolve around being Pugsley’s house-television-car repair service.

At Our Wits’ End Review Part II: I.Q. and the Fate of Civilization (Hint, It’s Idiocracy)

“As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point.  Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits.  Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent.  But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction.  A dumbing down.  How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence.  With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.” – Idiocracy

idiocracy2

The pictures from this post are mainly from Idiocracy©, which you should watch before it’s an actual documentary.

This is the second part of the review of the book At Our Wits’ End.  The first part can be found here at At Our Wits’ End Review Part The First:  Increasing Intelligence and Civilization.  Again, I recommend the book, and the link is below.  As of this writing I don’t get any compensation if you buy it here.  Buy it anyway.  It’s an important book.

When last we left Western Civilization, we’d reached the smartest point ever in history.  Isaac Newton was an example of the genius produced at this time in history.  Dutton and Woodley have data to suggest that 1750 was the peak of intelligence for Western Civilization.

Is there any evidence for this?

Certainly.

Life in 1770 was fairly comparable to life in 1470.  Given three hundred years, things hadn’t changed much at all.  But by 1804, life was dramatically different.  The Industrial Revolution® was a product of the accumulated intellectual capital of the preceding five hundred years and it changed everything.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution©, natural selection occurred in society through the culling of the poor via disease and poverty along with the execution/prison death for about 2% of the stupider males.  This led to the population getting smarter.  But the Industrial Revolution© created an economic abundance in the West like never seen before.  Surplus food and goods were now available in society.  Medicine improved and kept the weak children of rich people alive.

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Ahh, selection in progress.

Medicine also kept more of the children of poor people and poor single mothers alive.  As established previously,

  • Poor impulse control is correlated with lower I.Q.,
  • Single motherhood is correlated with lower I.Q.,
  • Less overall wealth is correlated with lower I.Q., and
  • Having more children is correlated with lower I.Q.

Again, none of these predict the behavior in individuals.  The friend I have with the greatest number of children has a very high I.Q.  There are several very smart people I know that don’t have a lot of money.  And anyone under the influence of testosterone and being 18 has really crappy impulse control.  I will also remind everyone being rich doesn’t mean you’re virtuous.  Neither does being smart. But in group behavior, the correlations above are well documented.

Dutton and Woodley note that they’re not the first ones to see the inherent problems with the removal of natural selection in a wealthy society.  Benedict Morel, named after a mushroom, observed this problem in 1857 between surrenders in France.  Francis Galton wrote in 1865 that “Civilization preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands.”  Ouch.

But it’s true.  As of this week, every member of our family wears glasses as Pugsley was the last to leave the “good eyes” club.  And The Mrs. developed type I diabetes when she was 12.  Prior to the 1920’s this was a near immediate death sentence.  However, since insulin was isolated and entered the market in the 1930’s, she’s alive and had kids, namely Pugsley and The Boy.  Her genes would never have reproduced without the Industrial Revolution™.

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Spoiler alert:  they’re never going to be ready.

Charles Darwin wrote an entire book on the problem:  The Descent of Man.  It really wasn’t a light “summer at the beach” read as it described humanity getting progressively . . . worse.  Smarter people use contraception more (remember, the prohibition against birth control went away as religious beliefs changed).  And lower I.Q. people not only have more children, they actively desire more children.

Further factors that have developed as society absorbed the wealth of the great capitalist expansion include the development of a welfare state.  That’s a problem if you want smart people around.  Welfare states support and encourage single mothers (lower I.Q.) to have more children and ensures that those children survive.  Dutton and Woodley also note that data suggests that welfare may encourage those who are also low in “personality factors” (agreeableness and conscientiousness) to have more children.  What does that lead to?  A population that is more impulsive, paranoid, apathetic and aggressive.  By coincidence these traits are also associated with lower I.Q.

So, numbers increase on the lower end of the I.Q. scale.  What about on the upper end?  Are smart people are having lots of babies?  No.  Opening high value careers up to intelligent women causes them to have fewer babies.  Higher I.Q. people also use birth control more frequently, and actually desire to have smaller families.  So not only are lower I.Q. people having more lower I.Q. babies, smarter people are having fewer high I.Q. children.

brawn2

But at least they have what plants crave!

Having a wealthy society also increases the desire for people from less wealthy countries to immigrate to the rich countries.  As we shown in the previous post (I.Q. – uh- What is it good for? Absolutely Everything. Say it again.), less wealth generally correlates to lower societal I.Q.  Does this translate to real-world outcomes?  Yes.  Dutton and Woodley cite Danish studies that show the average Dane I.Q. to be around 100.  However, the I.Q. of non-Western immigrants is roughly 86 in Denmark.  Immigrants certainly aren’t making Denmark smarter.

futuretown

To think, you could live in a paradise like this . . . .

Since intelligence is 0.80 correlated with genetics, they and their children actually can’t make Denmark smarter.  This result would indicate that wealth, quality of life, and ability to self-govern would decrease in countries facing high immigration, while crime would increase.  As a completely unrelated note, the United States has more immigrants than any country on Earth, with 40% of the population (How the Constitution Dies) now being either first generation or born of a foreign mother.

But What About The Flynn Effect?

The Flynn Effect refers to a general rise in IQ scores between 1930 and 1980, noted by a guy named (drum roll) Flynn, James Flynn – he’ll take his data shaken, not stirred.  For whatever reason I.Q. scores seemed to be increasing.  However, Dutton and Woodley explain that the Flynn effect is most likely environmental in nature (i.e., better nutrition) and not genetic.

Apparently the I.Q. test sub-scores that show improvement tend to favor very specific areas of intelligence, namely those areas that are environmentally influenced.  There is a parallel with height, they point out:  in 1900, average height in Great Britain was 5’6”.  In 1970 it was 5’10”.  But growth has been in leg length (which is more correlated with environmental factors) versus torso length (which is more genetic).  People are taller due to nutrition.

Additionally, schools train more for abstract thought than they would have in a mostly agrarian society, which would have been the norm throughout the West in 1930.  Country schoolhouses didn’t need to teach logic puzzles, since they were focused on traditional subjects.  Now children are drilled in the kinds of questions that are used on I.Q. tests – and if you practice, you do get better even if you’re not smarter.  On some I.Q. tests administered to youth, they’re not considered to be valid if the child had the test in the past year, so practicing the kinds of questions on the test will likely improve scores.

The bad news is that evidence suggests that the Flynn effect has stopped around somewhere around the year 2000 and is now headed downward.  Reaction times (a proxy for intelligence) have dropped.  Reaction times aren’t as closely correlated with I.Q. as many of the other things we’ve talked about, but they are directly measurable.  It may be a bad ruler, but it’s a ruler that we can use to compare across time.

Also confirming the I.Q. drop is work done by Augustine Kong, a Chinese researcher at the University of Iceland studied genetic components known to increase I.Q.  They’re declining.  The average Icelander born in 1990 wasn’t as smart as one born in 1910, and the genetics aren’t there to support an increasing I.Q.  The opposite appears to be happening.

Dutton and Woodley conclude that based on the metrics they reviewed, the “average” Englishman of 1850 would be in the top 15% of intelligence today in England.  Oops.  And apparently all tests surveyed indicate declining I.Q.  That’s a problem:  if average intelligence is declining, and intelligence is a bell curve, there will be fewer geniuses and a smaller “smart fraction” that is able to put run and hold together a technologically advanced society.  Or build a SR-71 Blackbird.  Or a Saturn V rocket.

Just like a bad horror movie, it keeps getting worse.  The very temperament of genius is changing – from stereotypical genius – a very driven, self and work-preoccupied Einstein to Todd from corporate:  intelligent, socially skilled, agreeable, and conscientious.  Thankfully the genius “Todd” will provide us really detailed policy manuals and snappy PowerPoints® instead of that useless groundbreaking physics.

Creativity is correlated with I.Q. but only up to an I.Q. of 120.  As a further confirmation, creativity scores have declined, therefore . . . expect less Monty Python® on TV and more “Ow, My Balls©.”

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And people say that there’s nothing good on TV.

On the bright side, the murder rate is down.  Why would that be so?  Murder, violence and impulsive behavior is correlated with lower I.Q.  Dutton and Woodley theorize that the environment that creates violence is down – given a robust welfare system it’s less likely that financial pressures or social pressures are as high.  You kid won’t be starving to death as they stuff their face full of Cheetos® while they sit on the couch playing X-Box™, and since obesity is up, killing people is such hard work, anyway.

Why do Civilizations Rise and Fall?

Like your mother-in-law, early civilizations have a low I.Q. – they’re dangerous places to be.  But over time group selection pressures intensify, the people become highly religious and ethnocentric – the hill people want to kill and eat the valley people, and vice-versa, and everybody wants to kill the group whose god makes them wear purple.  The nice thing about strong religion and ethnocentric behavior is it allows your group to compete well.

If your religion is good enough, and if you get enough selection for I.Q., you just might end up with a baby civilization on your hands.  Once I.Q. increases, conditions get better.  An elite is formed, and, since they have nothing better to do, they begin to question all of the social traditions that made civilization smart and wealthy.

The elite begins to compete on who can be more altruistic and ethnocentrism (favoring your own people) becomes badthink.  All of the values and norms that created the civilization are despised and thrown out.  Society begins to decline.  “. . . extreme views . . . eventually become the norm.”

Resources are then taken from those that are more capable and given to those that are less capable, which is called fairness since all people are equal, right?  I.Q. drops.  Innovation drops.

Then?  The elite is purged, and the civilization collapses.  The authors anticipate the following response, that:  “. . . it doesn’t work precisely with some obscure civilization or other; or demand that we respond to an infinite regress of every unlikely possible alternative explanation . . . .”  Yeah, even academics get denial.

whitehouse2

Okay, maybe it won’t take that long.

Does This Explain Past History with Other Civilizations?

Sure.

  • Ancient Greece.
  • Islamic Civilization. 64% of important Islamic scientists lived before 1250.  100% of them lived before 1750.
  • China.  It came very close to its own industrial revolution.
  • The Roman Empire.  Why didn’t Rome (as awesome as it was) have an industrial revolution?  Contraception and abortion were approved of.  Higher IQ women generally had fewer children, and this collapsed Rome prior to that great leap that would have led to Maximus™ brand Ocelot Bitez® and Roman tanks.  Man, I wish we would have had Roman tanks.

What About Western Civilization?

Western Civilization has followed the same cycle, but with this important difference:  Christianity had a taboo against contraception and abortion which kept higher I.Q. women having children.  The Spring of Western Civilization was from 1000 to 1500.  During this time, it was highly religious and highly ethnocentric, just like the model.

The Summer lasted from 1500 to the Industrial Revolution©.  This period was more rational, questioning, and the Renaissance brought culture and art to the forefront.

Autumn – Industrial Revolution™ to last Tuesday.  We find ourselves with the elite questioning society.  The ideas and thoughts that the civilization is capable of are reaching their highest level as we harvest the fruit of hundreds of years of human advancement.

We may be in Winter or close to it.  The hallmark of winter is a declining I.Q. as the less intelligent spew out children like a society-destroying genetic AR-15.  Culturally, Winter is characterized by the reproduction of good ideas from the past rather than coming up with new ones.  Multiculturalism and Marxism are “anti-rational” and “their adoption should show how far g (I.Q.) has fallen.”  Dutton and Woodley quote Charles Murray with the phrase that describes the era – “The feeling that the story has run out.”

The authors are not certain we are there, but feel that it’s worth noting that things don’t look very good.

Thanks, guys.

Are There Solutions?

I’ll leave you to read the book for those alternatives.  I’ll summarize it by noting that the solutions provided are not easy choices, and unlikely to be implemented in any democracy.  I.Q. drop is caused by our society and values, and won’t be undone by a society with our values.  The authors further suggest that maybe we should spend some time saving our knowledge so it’s easier for the next group through.

Dark.

I still recommend the book.  I also recommend Dr. Dutton’s YouTube® work.  I’ve linked to a good one down below.  Next week I should have the transcription done of my interview of him, and it’ll shine a bit more light on these conclusions.