Category: Wealth

Risk, Vladimir Putin on a Cat, and Death by Playground

“I respect what you said, but remember that these men have lands and castles.  It’s much to risk.” – Braveheart

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I would say I want a cat I can ride, I’d just settle for one that wears sunglasses and doesn’t buck me off after explosions.

When The Boy was tiny, he was afraid of slides.  Any slide.  Short ones.  Long ones.  Plastic ones.  Metal ones.  Forget tall ones.  I would stand at the bottom of the slide, waiting for him to slide down.  Often there was crying and yelling from behind a tear and snot-covered face.  And The Boy was even worse.  But there was no real reason for him to have any fear – I was there and the playground equipment met every Federal standard, even the regulations that made sure that the swings were safe for handicapable lesbian migratory waterfowl of size.

Playground equipment was more dangerous back before the dawn of recorded history, when I was in kindergarten.  At my school, our playground equipment included a merry-go-round that was missing part of the wooden deck (this is true).  The missing deck part was close to the center, and a kindergartener could stand in there, and could run and push the merry-go-round a LOT faster.  The downside was if any of us had fallen under the merry-go-round while pushing it up to speed?  At that point the merry-go-round would become a quite efficient kindergartner decapitation machine.  Thankfully, we had already gnawed all the lead and asbestos off of the handles so it was safer for the next batch of kids, and the headless zombies were already our mascot at good old Sleepy Hallow Elementary, so a decapitated kid would have been just displaying a very large degree of loyalty.

Don’t fault a kid for being true to his school.

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Our school nurse was excellent at re-attaching spines.  Lots of practice.

We also played with, I kid you not, the dry ice they used for packing the food they shipped to the school.  The Lunch Ladies® tossed it on the ground behind the kitchen after they unpacked the peas that had DONE NO WRONG before they turned them into the most ghastly smelling split pea soup.  They had to stop making that soup after the United States© ratified the Geneva Convention™ against chemical weapons.

Anyway, we had dry ice.  Let me write that a bit more specifically:

WE WERE KINDERGARTNERS WITH LIMITED SUPERVISION IN POSSESSION OF DRY ICE!!!!!!!!!!!!

Naturally we competed to see who could hold the dry ice in our hands the longest.  Dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide, and has a temperature of -109.3 F (which really is -78.5 C).  The unsurprising answer to “How long can a kindergartner hold dry ice in their hand?” is: “Not very long.”

We did much better holding it against each other’s arms, I liked to hold it until the skin of my classmates turned white.  To a kindergartner, the pain of other people doesn’t exist, their brain isn’t developed enough for empathy.  Or maybe I was just a sociopath.  I will admit that I enjoyed it when the other kindergartners made funny noises.

Okay, I’m probably a sociopath.

Oh, and I forgot about the high jump pits.  We’d crawl between the top foam block and the bottom foam block and then the other kids would jump on the blocks.  When you have a dozen kindergartners on a foam high jump pit, it pretty effectively blocks out the light in the second layer.  As well as the air.  The last time I crawled between them I recall waking up with stars in my eyes after the bell rang and all of the other kids had gone inside.  Who says near suffocation can’t be a fond memory?

Playground equipment had evolved to the point when The Boy was a young Wildling™ the only way to actually hurt yourself on the equipment would be to take a hot glue gun and affix razor blades to the slide, and my restraining order prevents me from being near hot glue, so that’s right out.  A good slide designed in the last 20 years will be scary, but yet cozier than a mother’s womb.  Word is that a Federal Commission is looking to redesign wombs to meet current safety standards, including encasing the fetus in breathable bubble wrap and removing the word “mother” from association with the word “womb” because it’s something-ist (I lost my scorecard) to assume that only women can have wombs.

But returning to the original thought – it was hard to get The Boy to take risks as a kid – I remember how he cried the first time I made him rappel out of a helicopter.  What a baby!  You’d think that it was child abuse making a three year old do that!

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Isn’t fear the way to overcome fear?

I kid.  But The Boy really did plug a speaker directly into a power outlet.  That made a hell of a noise and tossed out some sparks.  And was far more dangerous than the plastic four-foot high slide at the park.  This led me to an observation about The Boy.  What he thought was safe, was risky.  What he thought was risky, was safe.

And it’s not just kids that judge risk poorly, adults can suck at it, too.  Pop Wilder got more afraid of ordinary things as he got older – for example, he became unwilling to even attempt to adjust anything electronic – so he left his lights on continually.  Again, I kid.  But if it was more complicated than an on/off switch?  Nope.  Not his thing.

He also cut off many life choices due to this fear.  When everyone with three HTML programmers and a business plan was scheduling Hall and Oates® to do a business kick-off concert and was an instant Internet millionaire back in 1999, Pop was complaining about how much his medicine cost.  I got online (via a 56k modem) and found that his prescriptions could be had for about 10% of what he was paying.  Just by changing to GonnaGoBrokeSoonRX.com, we could save him about $1000 a month.

A month.

He wouldn’t do it.  “Well, it might get warm.  One of these medicines needs to stay cold, and only my pharmacy has the Wee Cuckold Striptease Elves© that keep it at the right temperature.”  So he paid $1000 a month more than he needed to.  I guess he owed something to the Elves.  Stupid Elves.

casinorisk

It’s natural to not want to risk it all.  Unless you’ve been drinking.

As I’ve observed you humans my fellow humans for the past few decades, I’ve discovered that Risk is poorly understood.  Pop Wilder had fallen victim to what I’m now calling Wilder’s Rule of Risk:  What he thought was safe, was risky.  What he thought was risky, was safe.  He ended up outliving his savings due to decisions that prioritized “safety” over even minimal risks.  He built barriers to action over unreasonable and unlikely fears.

monaco

Eyepatches.  I’ve always wanted one, or a glass eye that has a snow-globe inside.  Sadly?  Two good eyes.

I read the above passages to The Mrs. and she (rightly) noted that the risks I’ve taken in my life have been measured.  I’ve never taken all of my money and put it all on red.  The career choices I’ve made have been (generally) ones that led to more money and more security – they’ve been bets of winning versus winning more.  And when the stock market goes down?  I lose very little of my net worth.  Yay!  But if the stock market doubles, my wealth doesn’t double.  I’m giving up some of the upside in return for the safe.

bondi

But did I mention there were really good benefits?

But what am I missing?  I’ve won enough with the bets I’ve made that I’m playing life with house money now.  The question is, what if I’d dreamt bigger?  What if the subs you had delivered were Wilder Johns©?  Or Buffalo Wilder Wings™?  Yeah.  I do have a list of great ideas that I’ve had but never acted on.  Primarily because I’ve followed a path that led to me being pretty comfortable.  But is that always really safe?  Probably not, especially when you look at the big picture, and I recognize that.

Oddly, we often don’t realize on a day-to-day basis that some things in life aren’t risks, they’re certainties:

  • You will Did that rip the Band-Aid© off?  Oh, wait, I forgot that you’re the immortal one.
  • Taxes will go up.
  • Freedoms will disappear. They might come back.  You might have something to do with that.
  • Your money will be worth less. Hopefully not worthless in your life.  But in the long run?
  • Systems you don’t expect to collapse, will. Like Medicare®, or Pringles©.  Imagine life without Pringlesâ„¢!
  • If I described the year 2049 to you in detail, it won’t be like you think, unless you can imagine life without noses. Noses are so 2022.

So, we’re all going to die!  Let’s give up.

Never!  But understand other certainties that may or may not happen in your lifetime.  They’re certain, but their timing isn’t:

  • The dollar will collapse.
  • We will run out of economically viable/thermodynamically viable oil. We’ll never run out of oil, what’s left will just be too hard or too expensive in dollar or energy terms to harvest.
  • Star Wars® movies might be good again.
  • Global Warming© won’t doom humanity. Not even close.  It might flood New York, but probably not in my lifetime, if ever.  Darn it.
  • An asteroid will hit George Clooney. A small one.  (Small asteroid, not a small George Clooney.)

Stein’s Law says:  If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.  Wilder’s Corollary:  But it might go on so long you can’t make a buck off of it failing.

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Seriously, this may be from Risky Business®, but Tom’s still four foot three and nearly old enough for Social Security©.  Oh, and he drinks only vegan free range chicken juice.

Life is like Tom Cruise.  It’s short.  Life is also like having sex with a Kardashian.  Hairy and risky.  But you have a choice.  You can be afraid and live in fear.  You can also live gallantly, and die nobly.

We want to live with certainty.  We want to, especially when we’re young, and when we are old, avoid risk.  But we can’t.  The absence of risk is the absence of life.  The thrill of the first kiss, the thrill of winning when you’ve bet it all on red, those are life.  Life is struggle.  Life is fighting.  Life is also all about risk.

Step one of living gallantly and nobly?  Don’t be afraid of risks that aren’t real.

Step two?  Don’t spend too long in the high jump pit.

Health, Wealth, and Chainsaw Hands

Captain Murphy:  Wait a minute, he gets eye beams, but I can’t get x-ray vision?

Sparks:  Okay, everybody gets x-ray vision.

Captain Murphy:  Yeah, and big chainsaw hands! – Sealab 2021

tats

Hail to the King, Baby.

Recently there was a fairly large windstorm across large parts of upper/lower Midwestia.  We live in a fairly calm region, but, it’s Midwestia – there are no mountains or even ambitious ant hills to slow down the wind once Global Warming® causes it to blow.  I am reliably informed that the entire Earth was sunny and 72°F (0.15°C) with no wind and gentle rainstorms before Global Warming©.

Despite all that, I also live on the slope of hill – which shelters us on the days the wind acts in ways entirely unapproved by several Congressional committees.  But this windstorm brought a very special wind.  One might call it a mighty wind.  Since it did damage all over Modern Mayberry, one might even call it a breaking wind.  Stupid Global Warming™.  I guess that they could even use it as a symbol of Global Warming®:  they could call it Breaking Wind©.

The Breaking Wind™ came at night, while I was asleep.  And make no mistake, I was really, really asleep, I’d been up late the night before, lovingly crafting these thrice-weekly missives for you out of Elven dreams and stud weasel chum, so I was exhausted.  The rest of the Wilder Family was up, doing whatever it is those people keep doing in my house which as far as I can see consists of making all that noise, leaving a trail of unidentified sharp plastic objects on the stairs, and a creating a continual kaleidoscope of weird smells.  What does a thirteen year old do, exactly, to make the hallway smell like bigfoot’s armpit after he ate a lot of asparagus, broccoli, and cabbage?

So, I was sleeping.  Soundly.  The Mrs. threw open the door to the room and turned the light on, which is how I like to be wakened at 1:15AM.

“You need to get up.  We just had a huge gust of Breaking Wind© hit the house and Pugsley says that there are trees down everywhere and possibly an attack of people from Ecuador.  It even pushed my stapler off the table.  The wind pushed the stapler, not the Ecuadorans.  I don’t think we need to worry about the Ecuadorans, they’re not even taking cover properly as they advance up the driveway.”  I may have mangled part of this, like I said, I was sleepy.

stapler

It’s that exact model, but the one that blew off the table is blue.  I’d work for a better joke, but I’m already up to my armpits in elven dreams and stud weasel chum.

The Mrs. had one window open on the windward side of the house, a two foot by three foot (16 meter by 27 liter) sized window.  Not very big.  But the gust had blown leaves and debris into the screen on the windows.  Not on to the screen – the leaves and other biological material had been embedded into the screen like rap fans attempting to leave a polka shindig.

I knew with winds that severe, it might be dangerous outside.  Very dangerous – heck, there could be branches even now getting ready to tumble out of the sky like a camera-seeking-Kardashian missile.  So dangerous.  Then I realized the best way to brave the wind, rain, and hazards of falling hairy women outside.

I’d send Pugsley.

He’s younger than The Boy, and we have less time invested in raising him at this point, so he’s the most expendable.

“Go check it out.  Take some pictures.”

I kid. It was just wet and I was in my footed Yoda® pajamas.

yodajoke

The only appropriate use of Yoda© themed apparel.

Okay, I don’t really have footed Yoda© pajamas, but I still had a fantasy of being able to get back to sleep, and being soaking wet at 1AM would lower the odds that would happen.  I mean, under those conditions, sometimes it takes me minutes to get back to sleep.  Minutes!

Pugsley came back inside, thankfully Kardashian-free.  “A tree hit the house!”  I walked outside into the torrential downpour.  Nothing of the sort had happened.  A tree fell, but it missed the house.  So much for my housecat-like fantasy of not getting wet.

The next morning, we surveyed the property around the house.  Only one entire tree was down, but there were huge branches that had been ripped off several other trees, including a big branch off the apple tree in the front yard that nearly blocked the driveway.  Nearly.

The Mrs. was not enchanted with my “just wait a few years and they’ll rot away” strategy.  The Mrs. is not in favor of nature’s way, and I bet The Mrs. even doubts Global Warming®, even after having firsthand evidence of the Breaking Wind™.  The bright side?  I had a good excuse to buy a chainsaw.

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You get more attention with a kind word and a chainsaw than with just a kind word.  Frankly, all you need is the chainsaw in that situation.

I had owned two chainsaws when we lived in Alaska, but I hadn’t cranked them since Bush 2 was in office, and they were “somewhere” in the garage.  Why two chainsaws?  Two is one, and one is none.  The last thing you want is to be 35 miles from home in the middle of getting firewood and have to stop because you have a broken chainsaw or if you need to have a duel with a grizzly bear.  It wouldn’t be sporting to not have two for a duel.  Also:  best way ever to die – having a chainsaw duel with a grizzly – not that I’m planning anything, but that’s really something for a tombstone . . . here lies John Wilder – Died in A Chainsaw Duel with a Grizzly.  My pallbearers would grow immediate beards from the testosterone oozing from my coffin.

I realize the frugal thing would be to spend the three hours required to get my two old chainsaws back up to speed, after spending the six hours to find them, but I was out of frugal.  Thankfully, Wal-Mart sells chainsaws.  Also, thankfully, I also had a good reason to buy one.  Since my chainsaw work would be around my home and there were no grizzly bears here, I could just go inside and get some iced tea if the saw went south.

Guilty admission:  I like running a chainsaw nearly as much as I like shooting.

When we lived in Alaska, we heated our home exclusively with firewood, getting massive amounts of firewood each summer.  But it’s been a lot of years and a lot of carbs since we lived in Alaska.  But I figured that Pop Wilder ran a chainsaw until late in his life, much to the consternation of the people running the nursing home.  If he did it, I certainly wasn’t too old.

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And his Instagram® is made from real grandmas.

But with my brand-spanking-new chainsaw I discovered that in three hours, I can cut more branches and trees than my two boys could move to the burn pile in eight.  And when you have a chainsaw in your hand, everything looks like a branch or tree that needs to be cut and added to the burn pile.  That may explain why the cat was scarce.

Oh, and in Modern Mayberry, whenever I want to burn my burn pile?

No permits?  No permission?  No problem.

It’s a thing we call freedom, baby.

But I come by my love of chainsaws, firewood, and the forest honestly.  Pop Wilder also heated his exclusively with firewood when I was growing up.  Cord after cord after cord of wood.  Pop was prepared, and needed to be:  the winters were often -40°F (-273.15°C) for an extended time.  So every summer weekend when Pop wasn’t working at the bank, it was off to the forest to make the forest a little less susceptible to forest fires.

I was the youngest, so I wasn’t allowed to run the chainsaw – they seemed to like the idea of me having two hands.  Pop Wilder and my brother, John Wilder (Yes, we have the same first name, for reals in real life.  My parents forgot about him once I was born and saw my magnificence and accidently named me John, too.) ran the saws.  They told me I had the easy job.  I got to pick the wood off of the ground, put it on the tailgate.  Once there was enough wood on the tailgate to stack in the truck bed, I’d hop up there and stack the wood in the truck in rows.  Then I’d hop back down and repeat the process until the truck was full.

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The Boy with the firewood we got in one weekend when we lived in Alaska.  It was a busy weekend.

Once we got home, Pop and my brother would go into the house to shower up and get some cold drinks.  Me?  I got to unload the truck, sweep out the truck bed, and finally go in to see my freshly washed father and brother having a snack and some cold lemonade.  Some weekends we’d get four loads of wood.

We were a fun family at parties.  Firewood?  Well, there’s split firewood.  Blocked firewood.  Kindling firewood.  Stacked firewood.  Piled firewood.  Fireplace firewood.  Stove firewood.  Burning firewood.  Firewood ashes.  Aspen firewood.  Pine firewood.  Birch firewood.

And that’s all we know about firewood.

But one thing was certain – cutting, loading, splitting, and stacking firewood is great summer exercise.  It’s not bad exercise in the winter, either, bringing the wood in from the piles to the house.  In Alaska, not only was it great exercise, we figured it saved us about $1000 a month in fuel oil – in January it was regularly -55°F (-7,000,000.15°C), and if the house was 65°F (4.15°C) inside, there was a 120°F temperature difference between outside and inside.  And we were living in a log cabin.  Holy Dehumidifiers, Batman!  We kept a pot of water boiling on the wood stove continually.

I was in great shape then.  Now?  I’m 14 years older, and I’ll admit even though I now had The Boy and Pugsley hauling the blocks of wood and branches, I was more than a little sore the next day.  That was okay, because when I got finished with the all the hard chainsawing work?  I was soaking my sore muscles in the hot tub while Pugsley and The Boy worked on hauling wood to the burn pile.  From time to time I made encouraging noises.  I’m sure that they appreciated that.  Thankfully they were on hand to get me some cold beverages.

I mean, the hot tub is sweaty work, right?

No staplers were injured in the creation of this post.

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Dependence, Freedom, and Toddler Hammer Fighting

“I’ve been kidnapped by K-mart!” – Ruthless People

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I love George, going out of his way to join the English for breakfast and all.

I frustrate my children a lot.  A lot.  Here’s an example from 2018:

The Boy, Pugsley, and I are out shooting.  Fun times.  Heck, here’s even a description of that particular day (12 Strong Movie Review, Exploding Tide Bottles, Rifles, and Significance).  When we finally got home, it was nearly dark.  I handed The Boy a cleaning kit and the AR-15 and .22 we’d been shooting.

“Clean these.”

I didn’t explain how.  I gave a short lecture on ammunition safety and “always treat it like it’s loaded” and “don’t get involved in a land war in Asia” and “don’t point it at anything you don’t want to kill,” and “never trust a liberal with your rifles.”  I even checked the rifles to make sure they were empty.

I handed The Boy a cleaning kit, and walked away.

“How do I do this?”  He was talking to the back of my head as headed down the hall.

“You figure it out.”  I heard The Boy’s long-suffering sigh as I went into my bedroom.

Ten minutes later I was walking back through the dining room and was pleased to see he’d already disassembled the weapon.  Ten minutes later when I walked back through he was putting the finishing touches on a cleaned and lubricated AR-15.  I gave it a look, cycled the action.  Smooth.

The Boy had done a good job.  I told him so.  He looked proud.

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Dads.  We just love to share the work . . . 

I know that when I tossed that task to him with little information, he was irritated.  That makes sense – we’re all that way.  I also knew that it probably took longer than it would have if I would have done it myself.  It certainly took longer than it would have if I would have spent the time going step by step, leading The Boy through cleaning the rifle.  It wasn’t really efficient.

But if I wanted efficiency, I wouldn’t have taken either The Boy or Pugsley shooting.  I would have done it all myself, the shooting, the cleaning, all of it.  But because my goal is to teach my children that there’s no shortcut, and the only way out is through I took them.  They were the point of the whole trip.  Their struggle was the goal.  Their prize?

Independence.

Sure, we’re dependent upon a lot of things.

And those are all reasonable things to be dependent on.  I guess.  But there are some things that are much more corrosive to the soul.  Most of them are self-explanatory, some less so.

  • Parental handouts.
  • Government handouts.
  • The opinions of other people.
  • Alcohol.
  • Anti-PEZ®
  • Paychecks.

I’m against being dependent upon those things, and I want to make sure I make my kids strong so that they’ll have that reserve of strength when something unexpected happens.  You never know what’s going to come at you, because life is like a weightlifting toddler, short and hard.  I guess you could say I went to the Charles Darwin School of Parenting:

John Wilder:  “The child will eat if it has the will to eat.”

The Mrs.:  “But it’s only three hours old.”

John Wilder:  “Why do you coddle it so?  Do you want to make it weak?”

darwin

I’m probably the only person who thinks toddler hammer fighting would be funny.  But I think it’s really funny.

But the approach has paid dividends for those children that survived.  I turned control of the mowing of the yard for Stately Wilder Manor over to Pugsley some time ago.  It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that he knows much more about the mower than I do.  My role in the house has been changed from decision maker to provider.  Pugsley tells me what he needs for the mower, and I get it.  He fixes it.  Pugsley has even re-wired one of the safety systems on the mower – when you get off the mower, it’s supposed to kill the engine as soon as your butt leaves the seat.  Not anymore.  Pugsley has defeated that safety device.

I’m hoping it doesn’t defeet him.  I’d hate to have throw him a block of wood and a knife so he could whittle himself some wooden feet.  When it comes to my kids, I’m attempting to use everyday situations to create radical independence.  I’m a fan of the old Robert Heinlein maxim:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

I expect my children to be able to do all of that.  If I can help them be competent, I may or may not have been a good parent, but I’ll have met my own goal.  One of the proudest moments of my life to date was when my eldest child, Alia S. Wilder and I were arguing about her college major, Medieval French Basket Weaver Equity Studies.  Her response to me?

“Listen, Pop, it’s my degree, it’s my choice, and I’m paying for it, every cent, so if you don’t like my major, tough.”

Game, set and match: Alia.  That’s the sort of independence that makes a parent proud.  I suppose I could have paid for her school.  But last time she was down to visit, she thanked me.  “You know, by you letting me find my way, it means more.”

I then told her, “I’m proud of you.”  She cried.  Then we had a Lifetime® TV moment and some International Coffee™ or whatever it is they advertise on Lifetime©.

mow

I mean, seriously.  Straight lines, people.

The other side of the coin, however, is the conscious creation of dependence.  This is commonly achieved by using manipulation, guilt, low self-esteem, anxiety, and fear.  I’ve seen it done to people.

Fear is the key.  Some parents hobble children, in a conscious or sub-conscious attempt to keep them dependent.  The downside is that this dependence creates resentment.  How many times do people, when given something for nearly nothing complain that you’re not doing enough?  Since 1964, the welfare system has cost taxpayers more than three times the total cost of all wars that the United States has ever fought.  All wars – every single one of them.  Yet poverty hasn’t gone down at all, and the people in poverty hate those they are dependent upon.  They know that they are indebted, and they are both slaves to the system, as well as haters of the system.

Once you’ve got a grievance, it’s never enough.  Someone always has it better, so why don’t you deserve what they have?  This is the consequence of free stuff.  A trip to Wal-Mart® might cost you $221.32 if you pick up the two-fer bag of charcoal, but free stuff costs you your soul.

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“Give me liberty or give me medicare?”

It’s ironic that the surest form of enslavement occurs not with a whip and a lash (though I imagine those really suck, because outside of bondage clubs on the East and West Coast, not a lot of sane people like that stuff) but with voluntarily accepting kindness.  Generosity.  Free stuff.

You’ll notice I put paycheck into that list up above, too.  For those almost every one of my readers, the paycheck isn’t a problem.  You work hard.  You pay your dues.  You’re compensated fairly.  You go home without a chip on your shoulder, without blaming the rest of the world for your job.  Beware:  once a person starts feeling like they’re a victim, that someone owes them that check, they’re deep into the free stuff zone.

It’s as true today as when Pop Wilder repeated it to me again and again when I was growing up, “What you work for matters to you.  If you have to spend your own money, you’ll take care of it.  Because it’s yours.”  The most costly thing I could ever give them . . . is free.

I paid attention.  I hope my kids have.  And if only I could get The Mrs. to give up that weakness of hers, insulin.  She should “just say no.”

Creative Destruction and a Girl in a French Maid Outfit

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

unemployment

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

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

“I’m looking for anything.  Anything.”

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

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

martha

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

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

Ahh, the Victorian Era.

pezgirlz

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

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

firstworld

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

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

But I digress.

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

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

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

inigo

Does Creative Destruction mean what I think it means?

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

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

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

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

marx

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

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

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

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

crashtest

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, I’ll give you another one:

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

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.

Death, Taxes, Ancient History, and Bad Advice

“I have to do it alone.  Don’t you get it?  Everybody dies here.  It’s just a rule.  Death, taxes, more death, and I don’t pay taxes.  So all I know is death.” – Ash vs. The Evil Dead

taxtime

Don’t delay on filing your taxes . . . any longer than me.

If I could write a book about taxes, it would be a very short book:

“Avoid paying taxes if you can and do in such a way as to not be thrown into jail.”

That would be the title.  That would also be Chapter One.  There would be no Chapter Two.

“Tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes,” wrote Christopher Bullock in The Cobler of Preston in 1716.  There is, however, biblical evidence that Bullock was only partially correct:  in the New Testament, Jesus was hanging with Peter and they were talking about taxes.  Jesus tells Peter to go down and catch a fish, and money would be inside the fish, and Peter could go pay taxes for both of them.  Peter did, and they even have the picture to prove it since they didn’t have receipts back then:

peter

Is that Jesus or John Lennon behind Peter?

So, even though Jesus could both return from the dead as well as make dead people live again, he still paid taxes.  This therefore means that the only real certainty in life is . . . taxes.  If you’re an atheist, however, it’s okay to plan for both.

The biggest tax (for me) is income tax.  But the list of common taxes is mindboggling:

  • Federal Income Tax
  • State Income Tax
  • Sales Tax
  • Social Security Tax
  • Medicare Tax
  • Property Tax
  • Liquor Tax
  • Gasoline Tax
  • Tobacco Tax

I was going to make up some joke taxes for the list above, but throughout history, I believe that government has taxed . . . everything.  New York City has a tax on food, but if the restaurant slices your bagel that means it’s prepared food, so thus you get to pay yet another tax for the privilege of living in New York.  But taxes aren’t new – taxation spans recorded history – the earliest documents relating to accounting go back to at least 5,000 B.C.  I suspect taxation goes back even deeper into the past – there are tally sticks that go back at least 40,000 years, and I imagine that they were counting out taxes on profits from sales of knickers made out of baboon fur even then.

egypt

Is it just me or does it look like the Egyptian accountants have huge Egyptian bongs?  Talk about creative accounting . . . 

As tribes wandered around in the distant past, the idea of supporting others within your tribe was probably pretty natural – these were your people, after all.  But as tribes grew bigger, and connections more tenuous, taxation started.  I think the idea of taxation came as soon as one man could count and see that another man had a little more than he did, was a little bit better of a hunter, a little bit better at fishing.

That man (or maybe his wife) then got other men and planted the idea of envy.  “Why Oog need three bearskins?  Me have only one, so Oog one percenter.  He am greedy for having thing Thag want.”  Thag went on to write the first tax regulation.  Humanity, I guess, has evil people who are filled with hatred that show up all throughout our history – we call them the IRS® now.

taxreturn

Okay, sometimes I use colored pencils and also write quotations from Moby Dick. 

For all of that time, governments have taken taxation seriously.  Murder?  Arson?  Burning an elementary school?  Overthrowing the government of a small (really small) country for fun and profit?  All petty crimes when compared to cheating on taxes.  I think the current punishment for tax evasion includes snakes and having to share a cell with a Hollywood® C- list actress-mother who bought her kid into USC®, so I certainly don’t advocate that – I mean, snakes are not so bad, but Hollywood™ mothers?

So what can you do?

First, file your taxes.  TurboTax® makes it easy, sadly.  I wish that taxes were difficult to pay.  I wish that every person got paid weekly, in cash, and had to count off actual cash payments to an IRS© agent.  Or that there was no withholding so that people HAD to write a check every year for the full amount of taxes due and didn’t live with a fictitious “I got a refund – the government paid me” mindset.

Second, max out any things you can do that lower your tax burden.  401K’s are nice for that – they allow you to invest money (often in the stock market) before taxes are taken out so you make stock gains on the pre-tax dollars.  This puts your tax burden out into the future when you will need Depends® and a walker and worthless paper dollars will be used by barbarians for heat due to the new ice age due in 2028.  But at least you avoided taxes now.

filing

Actually the records are in an envelope under my camping gear in the basement in that back room.  I think.

Third, set yourself up as a corporation and have your employer hire the corporation to do your job and pay yourself minimum wage.  The rest of your salary can then be paid out in dividends to you, which are taxed at a lower amount and you can be just like Warren Buffet.  Really, Warren does just that, and then he complains that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary, although there’s really nothing that would stop him from paying your taxes, or mine.  But he won’t because he’s busy having cheeseburgers in Margaritaville.  Oh.  Wrong Buffet.

Fourth, don’t make up your own currency to pay your taxes.  As cool as “Bi$onBuck$” sounds, unless you want three free meals a day for the next 33 to 60 months, you should probably not use ‘em to pay your taxes.

fake

Yes, I know they’re Euros, but don’t they look like Christmas wrapping paper?  Besides, all you can do with Euros is buy baguettes, bassinettes, marionettes and cigarettes in France.

Fifth, put off doing your taxes to the last minute.  It lowers your risk of audit, and, if you’re like me and have to send off a check most years, you can keep your money for just a few more weeks so you can roll on your bed in it.  Unfortunately the pennies stick to my butt, so be careful if I give you change.

Sixth, remember that John Wilder (me) is an Internet humorist and is not licensed to be a financial advisor or tax consultant or provide legal advice, because what would the fun be in that?

At Our Wits’ End Review Part The First:  Increasing Intelligence and Civilization

“Give the likes of Baldrick the vote and we’ll be back to cavorting druids, death by stoning and dung for dinner.” – Blackadder

ba2

I love accurate historical dramas.

What happens when you find a set of ideas that might explain the world as we see it, that ties together dozens of topics you’ve written extensively about over the course of years?

You smile, even if it means civilization might be ending.  Heck, if civilization ends, no more mortgage!

Let me go back to the start.

I was listening to YouTube® on my way to work.  YouTube™ has some interesting algorithms that select your next video.  From time to time the videos presented have been horrific, but on this particular occasion, a gentleman was interviewing Dr. Edward Dutton about his new book At Our Wits’ End.  I enjoyed the interview so much I ordered the book that night, and have watched many of Dr. Dutton’s YouTube© videos as well since then – he’s named himself quite appropriately the “Jolly Heretic.”

I was not disappointed when At Our Wits’ End arrived and, in my first spoiler alert for the review, I heartily recommend the book without reservation.  Dr. Dutton wrote the book along with his colleague, Dr. Michael Woodley, and together they have put together an interesting and compelling scientific narrative.  I research many of my posts, and some research takes hours and has dozens of notecards of notes.  In this case, I typed my notes about the book – the notes alone are sitting right now at 1725 words.  We’ll see how many posts that ends up being:  I’m betting it will be two, and I’m certain that not all of my notes will be used.  I may end up posting the combined review when it’s complete as a separate page on the blog, along with the interview of Dr. Dutton that he was gracious enough to agree to.  I’ll be posting that interview after the review is complete – I think it will form an excellent post script.

Last week’s Monday post (I.Q. – uh- What is it good for? Absolutely Everything. Say it again.) was a warm up – it dealt with how I.Q. shapes the present.  In it, the relationship between I.Q. and national wealth is fairly obvious.  This week’s post deals with (to me) the more crucial and compelling question – what will the future of Western Civilization and humanity be?  This is the core of At Our Wits’ End.

But first, from page 108 of At Our Wits’ End:

One problem with science which many people find difficult to get their heads around, is that the aim of science is to understand the nature of the world and to present the simplest explanation, based on the evidence, for what is going on.  Science is not there to be reassuring, to make people feel good, or to help bond society together . . . . Those who call for suppression are, in effect, arguing that scientific pursuit is fine until it forces them to question the worldview that they hold for emotional reasons.  Once it does this it is ‘bad science’ or ‘a higher standard of proof should be demanded’ or ‘it is immoral’.

This is perhaps the quote that impacted me the most strongly from the book.  We live in a world filled with truths – and the most uncomfortable questions are perhaps the most important to ask.  We may not like the answers, but when dealing with reality we cannot make rational decisions without that knowledge.  In my personal life, the questions that I hate to ask myself are nearly always the most important ones.  Strangely, I also seem to know immediately the answers to those questions, at least when I have the courage to ask them.

ba3

The first question posed by the book is a simple one:

What is intelligence?

As discussed previously in this blog, intelligence is the ability to solve complicated problems, generally with some speed.  For this review, I’ll use I.Q.  and intelligence as well as ‘g’ – the general intelligence factor – interchangeably.  Although these are all very different terms for a scientist studying the subject, for the purposes of this review I’ll mangle the language and call them all the same thing and use them more or less similarly.  It’s like calling a zebra a horse, but hopefully it excludes centaurs and giraffes and makes for clear reading for the lay reader.  Also, keep in mind that these are group numbers – we all know and can cite examples of individuals who don’t follow the group correlations we’ll discuss – the genius level smart dude who has bad body odor and lives in his parent’s basement.  The sort-of dim kid who developed a business and makes $350,000 a year.  They exist.  But they’re the exceptions, not the rule.

Intelligence has a most interesting property:  it’s inheritable – with a correlation of about 0.8, which is pretty high.  1.0 is perfect correlation, -1.0 is perfect negative correlation.  Educational attainment and economic status correlate with intelligence, as does salary – at about 0.3.  Other things that are correlated with intelligence include impulse control.  People with higher IQ are also more trusting.  On an individual level to predict a person’s performance you also have to have information about their personality, but on a group level I.Q. has significant predictive power.

It’s generally the dream of every first grade teacher that all of her students are equal.  But she knows that’s a lie.  Every student isn’t equal – some are much better at some tasks than others.  Some are much better at every task, and people who do well on one task generally do well on other tasks – intelligent brains just seem to have more bandwidth in general – it’s like they have an overclocked nervous system.  Again, this doesn’t mean that they’re more virtuous, simply that they have greater capabilities.

The average IQ also determines interests to some extent – the average IQ of someone who studies anthropology is lower than someone who studies physics.

ba4

What are the properties of IQ?

  • IQ test scores fall out on a bell curve.
  • ~70% of the population has an IQ between 85 and 115.
  • 95% between of the population is between 70 and 130.
  • Intelligence is “polygenic” – lots of genes are involved in making a smart kid.

But certainly, John Wilder, intelligence means different things to different cultures?  In the very succinct commentary of Dutton and Woodley, “No it doesn’t.”  I realize that’s not an argument, it’s a refutation – I’ll let you read the book for details.  Scientifically it appears that IQ is a valid concept across cultures.  It’s valid if the culture is literate.  It’s valid if the culture is non-Western.  IQ (or intelligence, or “g”) is potentially one of the most predictive and studied properties in social sciences, which tend to be a bit squishier and less science-y than, say, physics or chemistry, so give the social science folks a break that they found this gem.

ba1

So can a civilization get smarter?

Yes.  If a trait can be passed on via sexual selection (like my butt), then it will be selected for.  But in, say, the year 1400 a great butt wasn’t as important as regular food.  If you look at the data as generated in the study Survival of the Richest (Gregory Clark) – as quoted by Dutton and Woodley, between 1400 A.D. and the mid-19th century, the top 50% had more surviving children than the poor 50% – nearly twice as many.  Since economic status is strongly correlated with I.Q., society became smarter each generation.

Brutal?  Yes.

Concerned with sexy butts?  Not at all.

Why would smarter people have more surviving children?  Less intelligent means less money.  That means less food, less heat.  That means the poor children are all weaker when the ice weasels (extinct since 1745) came.  There’s plenty of evidence for this, as Dutton and Woodley note:  the average height on the ship Mary Rose was 5’7” around the time Henry VIII lived.  Henry VIII was 6’3”.  Henry got better food.  He got better genes.

tudor

No, it was the genes, silly.

Henry wasn’t especially good at having children, but most of the nobles around that time were good at it – with or without their wives.  There is evidence that as many illegitimate children of nobles survived as legitimate children.  Most people have to work their whole lives to become a bastard, but like me, those lucky kids were born that way.  And some of them did okay – William the Conqueror was illegitimate and managed to invent the paperclip (I made that up) and invade England at the head of the Norman Conquest (I didn’t make that up).

According to the genealogical records I’ve seen, I’m related to William the Conqueror.  This would be an amazing story.  Except . . . I won’t polish my claim to the crown just yet and become known as John Wilder the Usurper©, Eater of PEZ® and Defender of the Remote Control™ anytime soon:  European society became one of constant trickle down – sons of nobility would have sons that were merchants who would have sons that were farmers who would have sons that worked on farms.  The poor fraction was replaced by the rich fraction over time.  The children of the wealthy replaced the poor in a silent way.

I don’t know the percentage, but I’ll bet a sizable chunk of England is, like me, related to William.

Genes for being wealthy, which is correlated with intelligence, spread throughout society.  This still doesn’t explain my sexy, sexy butt.  But there were further selection pressures in place:  2% of males were either executed or died in prison.  Presumably these were the worst 2%, so society was pruning itself.  But mobility worked both ways – people could move up the social strata as well based on their (generally I.Q. related) merits.

Also pruned were the children of unmarried women who didn’t have the position of mistress to someone higher up the social strata.  Unmarried mothers have an average I.Q. of 92 in the United States.  Childless or married women have an average I.Q. of 105.  Today children live via welfare, but back in 1741 (when one study in particular was done) moms would have abandoned them.   71% of these abandoned children in 1741 were dead by the age of 15 versus 40% in the population as a whole.  Presumably there would be even less child mortality in the upper incomes.

These selection pressures led to the gradual increase in intellect, culminating in what Dr. Dutton mentioned in one of his YouTube® videos as his estimated date for the smartest generation in recorded history – those born in and around 1750.

So, all is well, and humanity keeps going on an ever-smarter upward march of intelligence?

Spoiler alert!

No.  And Soylent Green® is people.

We’ll discuss that (the intelligence piece) in Part II of this here:  At Our Wits’ End Review Part II: I.Q. and the Fate of Civilization (Hint, It’s Idiocracy).

Meanwhile, go out and buy the book.  It’s good.

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

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

accountingirregularities

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

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

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

revenues down

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

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

70%+.

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

Well, there are upsides:

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

nigerian prince

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

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

seance

Apple’s® 2024 business strategy.

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

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

drawing on windows

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

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

participationcheck

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

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

philfuneral

My bad.

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

conference room

This wasn’t on my physics final.

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

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

Want Some Short Term Gain and Long Term Pain? Also, Malta.

“In 1539, the Knight Templars of Malta paid tribute to Charles V of Spain by sending him a Golden Falcon encrusted from beak to claw with rarest jewels.  But pirates seized the galley carrying this priceless token and the fate of the Maltese Falcon remains a mystery . . .” – The Maltese Falcon

M1

In Malta they don’t check your bags for guns, they check them with guns.

Sometimes advice that is good for a country is really bad for an individual.  I tried building my own navy once, and it was an abysmal failure, since I’ve never lived near water all the ships just sat on the gravel.  Thankfully it was still enough of a navy that France surrendered anyway.  So, memo to self:  don’t build a navy 1000 miles away from water unless you want to take Paris.

But why beat on France?  I’ve discovered that on this blog, it’s really okay to trash-talk the French because in the last year I’ve gotten more traffic from Malta than I have from France on an absolute basis.  On a per capita basis, Malta is ahead on visitor count of any place in the world.  The United States is second, but it’s gaining ground.  Malta, spread the word!

I digress because it’s late and I’m a bit punchy – so I’ll get back to the point.  One place where the advice for a country and the advice for an individual both make sense is when it comes to know-how.  Where does know-how come from?  Sweat.

I had a boss fairly early in my career (technically a grand-boss, i.e., my boss’s boss) who was fairly fond of saying, especially when assigning a task that would entail huge hours of overtime and personal sacrifice, “Think of it as short-term pain for long-term gain.”  He’d smile when he said it, but that didn’t make it better.

Being young and stupid, we grumbled about what he was saying:  “What does he know?  It’s always short-term pain.  We’ll never get to the long-term gain.”  This was exactly the type of short-sightedness you’d expect out of a kid.  And we were kids, really.  We also worked our butts off while we were in our twenties, and most people who started in that group did okay.  The short-term pain translated (finally) into long-term gain.

M2

Please donate to Malta so they can end this horrible poverty.

It’s that way for individuals.  Is it that way for countries, too?

Yes, absolutely.

When you do something productive, anything productive, you learn.  You learn as an individual.  You learn as a company.  You learn as a country.  If you do it right, it’s painful.  It’s hard.  It’s work.  It’s frustrating.  And when you finally win?  It’s exhilarating.

If you do a really, really, really good job?  You get rewarded, by trying to do it again.

And those results are consistent between an individual, a company, and a country.

Imagine a kid who was born wealthy.  Given tutors.  Given “help” getting into a good college.  Coasted in college.  Coasted in Daddy’s company.  Unless Daddy was very, very wealthy, the kid will ruin the company as he runs the company.  Why?  The kid never had to work, never had to learn.

The entire life of the child was built around pain-avoidance.

M3

Okay, I’ll admit, that water looks the complete opposite of painful.  I guess I wouldn’t learn anything there.

I’m not going to blame wealth – wealth is neither moral nor immoral.  I’ve known wealthy kids who were better people than I’ll ever be.  I’ve known wealthy kids who weren’t worth gum on the bottom of my sneaker.  But poverty is no virtue, either.  I’ve met horrible people who had no money.  And, again, I’ve met people who were dead broke that could qualify for sainthood.

Morality aside (for the moment) the one thing I know about effective people is that they know how to work hard.  They are driven.  Most of them, wealthy or not, were not spoiled.

Pain and sweat is good for companies, too.  It makes them shed employees, it makes them focus on the things they do that actually provide value to the customer.  Or they die.  And the death of inefficient companies is good – those resources can go to companies that can be efficient, can meet the needs of their customers, like PEZ®.

But the critical step is playing the game.  If iPhones® aren’t made in the United States, we simply won’t know how to make them.  Certainly someone knows how to make them, but it’s not Apple™.  I won’t argue that Apple© designed the phone, but there is a world of difference between designing a complex integrated electronic component and building it.  In building iPhones™, the Chinese have solved the technical details on how to implement that design and how to stack all the apps behind that sheet of glass so they don’t fall out.  I’m relatively certain (though I’m not in those meetings) that Chinese teams from the manufacturer meet regularly with the Apple™ teams on design.  The Chinese teams tell Apple® most of what Apple© wants to know, but the Chinese teams learn:

  • Global logistics
  • Effective employee training
  • What stock options are
  • Management of complex system integration
  • Where the best restaurants are in Palo Alto
  • Quality control

All of that’s pretty good, but they also develop the teams on ground – the engineering know-how to solve the production problems that invariably start.  You might have a complete set of drawings of a baby, but you certainly don’t know how to build one from start to finish.  Nobody does.

Oh, wait.  You probably do.  Okay, pretend the baby is a 1966 Mustang™.  That you don’t know how to build from start to finish.  You have to go all the way from smelting iron to figuring out how to put numbers on the AM radio dial.

That’s (one of) the problems that we have getting into space nowadays.  We forgot how to build the Apollo stuff.  Certainly we know, for instance, what chemicals went into the heat shield on the Apollo command module, but we had to figure out how to build one in 2018 – the engineers who did it in the first place are all retired.  My bet is that they didn’t figure out how to build it the way they did in the 1960’s – they probably figured out a new solution.

M4

More fun facts:  If you stacked all of the current residents of Rome in the Pantheon, someone would arrest you, unless they were at the bottom of the stack.

This isn’t the first time we’ve lost technology.  The Romans used concrete to build many structures, including the largest un-reinforced concrete dome ever – at 142 feet in diameter.  How do we know this?  The dome still exists today – it’s in Rome, and it’s called the Pantheon, and like your mother, it’s almost 2,000 years old.  Yes it’s made of concrete, as in concrete just like your garage floor is made of.  But after the Goths came over for an extended visit, the Romans . . . forgot how to make it.  Consequently, concrete wasn’t “invented” again until 1824, and we weren’t that great with it until 1900 or so.  The Romans had a quality of concrete that was so good, it wasn’t until the last few decades that we were able to match it, and some of the properties we still can’t figure out.

We don’t have records on all the failures and sweat that the Romans had as they perfected their concrete, but they were good at it.

M5

This floor could break a LOT of plates.

But as the Romans learned, if you don’t make stuff anymore, you forget how to do it.  You specialize it, you ship it abroad.  The Romans didn’t have time for nasty old industries like making dinner plates, so they shipped it off to a lower labor cost area in what’s now France.  Archaeologists know this because when they sifted through the trash, they found these really nice plates.  But after Rome fell, trade fell off with France, and the factories closed because they didn’t have customers.  Archaeologists love plates because people break them on a periodic basis, and even more often if there are teenage boys in the house.  Thus, they go into the trash at a regular rate, and you can date the trash by the style of plate.

In the trash 100 years after the fall of the Empire (in the west), the plates were rough.  Even the most wealthy people ate off of plates that were inferior in every way to the plates common people had easy access to in the past.  The future didn’t get better, because the Romans forgot.

I worry sometimes that we’re the wealthy spoiled kid, shipping off our work to other people so that they learn how to do it while we ship them money that we’ve printed out of nothing, short-term gain for long-term pain.  But that’s okay.

Based on the recent protests in France, I think the French are planning something.  Maybe they’ll surrender to Malta?

Nah.  The Maltese are too good for the French.

Pantheon photo:  By Mohammad Reza Domiri Ganji – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, via wikimedia

Malta floor photo:  By Sudika [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)] via wikimedia

Pareto and the 80/20 Rule Explain Wealth

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

pareto

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

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

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

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

olivegarden

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

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

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

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

math2

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

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

computer2

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

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

sr71

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

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

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

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