Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Franklin, Planners, The Terminator, My Unlikely But Real Link With President Eisenhower, Star Wars, and Kanban

“No matter who you are, no matter where you came from, you too can become financially independent in just a matter of months. All you need is strategy.” – Wolf of Wall Street

Amazing how he keeps showing up, right?

For me, it started with lists. Simple lists. In high school, when the number of things I had to do was greater than seven or so, I’d put a list together. It wasn’t really a plan, it was a way that I kept track of stuff I was supposed to do. On at least one occasion I made a date with a girl and then forgot about it completely. Poor girl, look at what she missed! (Amazingly, that girl chased me around like a puppy for years after I stood her up . . . but that’s another post.)

In college I had to get strategic, really for the sake of survival. My first semester, college work wasn’t at all hard. I studied a few hours, and got fairly decent grades. My next semester was not as friendly – Physics I, Calculus II and Chemistry II all had tests on the same week – all semester long. As a mechanism of sanity I bought one of those huge paper desk calendars and put it on my desk – I took the class and test schedules and laid out the entire semester at the start of the semester. It helped – now I knew when I would have to spend hours of studying – and it wouldn’t hit me by surprise. It was also helpful for taking notes. And for writing down Alice Cooper® lyrics when I was bored.

I can’t get a girl
‘Cause I ain’t got a car
I can’t get a car
‘Cause I ain’t got a job
I can’t get a job
‘Cause I ain’t got a car
So I’m looking for a girl with a job and a car
–Lost in America, Alice Cooper

Where the lists I used to make were just that, lists, the desk calendar was the basis of an entire strategy. I could plan my day (and night) and beer consumption appropriately. I could plan in advance, and when I got two weeks out, I could plan pretty accurately what I needed to do and study in order to pass. It worked.

After graduating from college, the first place I worked handed out . . . a pad of lists. This was just a simple list that you could fill out each morning to remember the things you had to do each day. Hey! I was back to high school. The lists were handy. I was shocked, shocked I say, to find out that my employer wanted me to work on lots of different things each day. The lists were handy. But I decided that I hadn’t had enough beer and decided to go back to grad school, and got back to my desk calendar.

After grad school I got another job. On the first day I found on my desk a box of business cards, assorted pens, pencils and offices supplies, a new computer, and a Franklin® Planner, complete with a metal nametag with my name on it.

Talk about an awesome first day!

I opened the planner, and looked at the cool pages – it was as if my old lists had mated with my desk calendar and created a system to manage . . . everything. I was in love.

There were two pages for each month – so I could do the strategic planning that had gotten me through college. And a page for each day, so I could create a prioritized list of the work that I needed to get done. Turns out that these were called Franklin© Planners because they were modeled off of Benjamin Franklin’s daily planner. He’d write down what he had to do, do it, and then write down what he’d done during the day.

Not a bad plan – especially since he did all this without electricity. Oh, wait . . . he discovered it! And bifocals. And treaties with France. And was a billionaire businessman. Sigh. I got to work without injuring myself. Does that count?

I took very well to the Franklin© Planner. It was awesome! Give me enough pages and I’d have planned my own funeral. Here’s an example of how you use it:

In the immortal words of Ben Franklin (on a sober day) “If someone asks if you wouldst be Sarah Connor sayeth, nay, I thinkith she livith in another county, or maybe Canada.”

The Franklin© Planner allows you to plan and prioritize your day. I’ve moved away from the A, B, C system. I now rank things based on what quadrant they are in, rated by importance. I think I stole the following concept from Stephen Covey (he wrote the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People), but the idea is this – put your effort where it matters. (True story: Covey stole this from Dwight D. Eisenhower. My grandmother was his grade school teacher. Did my grandmother teach Ike about importance and urgency?)

See how cool this is! I took a $500 computer and made a drawing that looks like a 7 year old did it! Bonus – who doesn’t like Comic Sans as a font?

This breaks most things that you do down into four different categories based upon if they are urgent (have to be done NOW!) and if they are important (HAVE to be done). Obviously some things are (sort of) in the middle, but on a daily basis, you can put most things in one of the four boxes.

Not Urgent, Not Important.

The first quadrant is the bottom left quadrant – it’s not important, and it’s not urgent.

Why would you ever do it? It’s like mowing the grass growing in the forest next to my house – sure I could let those hostages I have in the basement mow it, but then they’d just want more food, and I never go into the forest, anyway. Because no one ever mows there.

Urgent, Not Important.

The next quadrant is stuff that’s urgent but not important. You have to do this now. But the world will go on if it doesn’t happen. My suggestion is to ignore as much of this stuff as you can. Sure, paying your taxes might not seem important, but don’t do it for a few years and see how excited the IRS gets. So that’s probably important. But good examples of urgent but not important? Most phone calls you get at work. I now screen 90% of my calls at work, and 100% of those whose number I don’t know. Why interrupt my train of thought or work that’s important for a phone call?

Another great example of this would be emails. Most of them don’t require an immediate response. Save them up and hit them as a batch when you have time to focus on them.

Urgent, Important.

Ever have a boss who was a nervous wreck, who spasmed like an electrocuted spider monkey on meth when upper management said anything to him? Yeah. That’s what life is like when you spend your time in this quadrant. By definition, the stuff is important. By definition, you have to do it now.

Your life is a never ending crisis if all of your tasks are urgent and important. Urgent and Important things WILL show up in your life. If you can deal with them in a cool and collected manner when they do show up, well, you’re probably prepared because you’ve spent your life in the last quadrant:

Important, Not Urgent.

This is where you should spend your time – not in crisis-level activities, but in the planning and work that gets prepares you for success later. You exercise to be strong for the wrestling match that will take place in two months – it’s not urgent but it’s important. You save money now so you can buy a car with cash and not have to pay for interest. Important . . . not urgent.

It’s not entirely possible to live a life free of drama (you will occasionally hit a deer, you will get sick, they will run out of raspberry PEZ® before the feast of St. Thanos) but you can reduce it if you plan ahead.

One other system I’ve used (with meh-level results) is Kanban. Kanban was developed by an engineer at Toyota to allow collaborative work to take place in manufacturing. Several consultants and bloggers online are absolutely effusive about it. I’ve found (personally) it’s only good in motivating me when I’m not feeling enthused about what I’m doing at work.

It’s pretty simple – find a space, separate it into things you have to do, things you’re doing, and things you’ve gotten done. Then fill in sticky notes with the tasks you have to perform. Sort of like this:

Something tells me he’ll be disappointed after finding out his DNA test results . . . .

Again, your results may vary, but it’s cheap to try.

I’ve personally also tried several electronic planners, and each time I’ve gone back to pen and paper. For me, there’s something pretty useful about the book – it serves the purpose of planning my life, and I don’t take phone calls on it. And I don’t write blog posts on it (though it does hold my blog topic schedule and notes for future topics). It serves as a planning tool, and only as a planning tool. The Mrs. refers to it as my “brain.”

There’s something about the crisp feel of a new page each day. The smooth lines as the graphite of the pencil write down the activities that are planned. The accomplishment of a check mark to show work well done. Looking back on notes that you wrote a decade ago.

Dang. I wonder if anyone let the dog out? Or if anyone told Sarah that her Austrian friend was looking for her?

Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Mangos and A Future That Must Not Be

“Soviet Union suffers worst wheat harvest in 55 years… Labor and food riots in Poland. Soviet troops invade… Cuba and Nicaragua reach troop strength goals of 500,000. El Salvador and Honduras fall… Greens Party gains control of West German Parliament. Demands withdrawal of nuclear weapons from European soil… Mexico plunged into revolution… “ – Red Dawn (1984)

Maximillian Robespierre, the guy who started it all . . .

On December 3, 1792, Maximillian Robespierre, a lawyer and French revolutionary, gave a speech about the fate of the King, Louis XVI. Robespierre complained that he was totally against the death penalty in all cases, except this one. He ended his speech: “With regret I pronounce this fatal truth: Louis must die so that the nation may live.”

Eventually, it came to a vote on January 18, 1793 – Louis was convicted to die. Two days later, Louis XVI, King of France, was executed. But the precedent was huge. A monarch could be arrested by his people and could be executed based on a public vote.

Who, then, was safe?

Robespierre and the leftist (this is where the name “leftist” comes from – the revolutionaries sat on the left side of the assembly before the revolution) government had a strong bent that advocated communes, and nothing less than the complete and total repudiation and remaking of all of French society. Religion was abolished and replaced by “rationality” – the statues of Saints were actually guillotined. Common measurements were replaced by the metric system (you see why I’m suspicious of it). You could no longer refer to a man as “monsieur,” or a woman as “madame” – they were now simply, “citizen.” Even the names of the months weren’t sufficiently revolutionary – they had to be replaced with new names, and each month would consist of three 10 day weeks.

The idea that replacement of all social norms would be difficult led to a simple solution: kill anyone who opposes you. Robespierre said:

If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the fatherland.

So, we’re killing you because it’s virtuous. And boy, were the French virtuous! The definition of a good revolutionary kept changing as the social norms of France kept changing. Between June of 1793 and a year later (they were calling July “Thermidor” by then) nearly 17,000 had been executed because they were insufficiently committed to the revolution and the shifting definitions of a good revolutionary.

The last victim? Robespierre himself. He was executed on July 28, 1794, along with his 21 closest buddies. When Napoleon Bonaparte took over a few years later – everyone was pretty happy when he called himself Emperor – it seemed far better than the tyranny of the leftists.

Robespierre’s execution. Looks festive!

But the French were amateurs when it comes terror. For real downward death spirals, you have to get to the Russians and the Chinese . . .

This might look familiar . . .

I blame Marx. Marx was born some 200 years ago (as of this writing) and has been, in my opinion, the worst thing to happen to the world since they invented Spandex®. Thankfully, Marx and Stalin never wore Spandex®, though rumor has it Mao wore it when he pretended to be Aquaman®.

After the Soviets finally took over Russia, for twenty years Stalin waged a purge against his own people in his attempt to create a perfect Marxist society. People who had “a little more” – Kulaks, were killed, starved on purpose. This was called the Holodomor, and killed between 4 million and 10 million of his own citizens. Stalin’s totals? During his lifetime it is likely that he was responsible for deaths (often brutal) of 15 million (low end) to 25 million (upper end). And it came about from the same sort of internal purification that the French demanded – Stalin even compared himself to Robespierre on more than one occasion. One story, popular during the day, was of a young Soviet boy, Pavlik Morozov, who supposedly denounced his father to authorities. It was said that Pavlik was then killed by his family, who were then . . . executed. Statues of Pavlik were erected everywhere. His school was a shrine that students from across the Soviet Union would visit to see such a heroic boy. Stalin himself was reported to have said, “What a little swine, denouncing his own father.”

The heroic little swine.

For a great taste of what Soviet life must have been like during Stalin – have a read of an excerpt from a novel here (LINK). It’s what leftism turns into over time, and the deaths are only a part of it – it’s the ultimate ripping apart of social and family structures that allow any sort of resistance to complete government control. Stalin was excellent.

But if the French invented it and Stalin made use of it, Mao made a life of it.

Mao, at a meeting to learn from the master . . . .

Mao was responsible for 40 to 80 million deaths during his lifetime.

And in Mao’s China, families were ripped apart, and the structure was ripped apart. His “Hundred Flowers” campaign appeared to ask for other ways to govern China. In reality, it was looking for anyone who disagreed with Mao, so they could be killed. Mao’s cult reached its height of absurdity with Mao’s Mangoes. Yes, you read that right – Mao’s Mangos.

Pictured: One of Mao’s Mangos. Really.

In 1968, the minister from Pakistan gave Mao some mangoes. Why? We don’t know. But Mao didn’t like mangos, so he split them up and sent them to various places (colleges, factories, government offices) and they exploded like a cultural grenade. People wrote songs. They formed up in lines to praise the mangos. They made perfect replications of the mangos when the mangos began to rot.

How bad was it? A dentist was executed when he said that the mango he saw “looked like a sweet potato.”

Executed. And not for being a bad dentist.

Because he made a crack about a Pakistani fruit.

Posts occur to me sometimes because I had a thought that struck me as funny. Or a memory I though it might be helpful to share. Or an observation that might change a life.

In the last few weeks I’ve seen several editorials in several newspapers and magazines lionizing Marx and communism – some saying that his ideas are the ideas that will save the planet. And I hear politicians and television announcers saying nearly the same words as Stalin or Lenin or Mao. And I read that we need to give Marx another look. I find particular horror in this failure to learn anything from history – as communism is a slow death – a death first of morals, and then of truth, and then of millions of citizens.

The verdict of history, by the numbers shows that no ideology ever, ever, has proven to provide more death to the people it governs than Marxism. By any mechanism of objective judgement, it is by far the most reprehensible system of government ever created. Nothing else is even close.

But we keep coming back to this idea – that others should take responsibility for us, and that we should create a society based on envy. Thankfully the Marxist paradise of Venezuela, gifted with nearly limitless oil wealth shows that Marxism can work. Oh, grinding poverty? Malnutrition? Immense corruption? Guess the right people aren’t in charge. It isn’t real communism.

Well, maybe someday if the Marxists kill enough people it will end up working . . . I bet they get it right in California – they’ll be there soon . . .

So you’ve hit bottom? Great news!

“Hitting bottom isn’t a weekend retreat. It’s not a damn seminar. Stop trying to control everything.” – Fight Club

One of the oldest digital pictures on my computer. I think these folks are from my mother’s side of the family . . . she said they were farmers.

There was a moment in time when it was almost . . . just too much. My moment was at 10pm one night in March in the (now) distant past. I had been up since 6am, and at 10pm was the first minute I had that was for me that day.

The day started early – I had to get my daughters up and ready for school – and then drop them off at the day care right as it opened at 7am (I’d made their lunches the night before). Then, off to work. Work lasted until 5:45pm, which was the last time I could leave and not miss the day care closing time, which was 6pm. I was a manager, so work meant long hours.

I’d take my daughters shopping for groceries once a week. The three of us ate for (generally) about $25 a week – which involved no eating out and quite a lot of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese® or Hamburger Helper™. Lunches for the girls were peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Pretty much daily.

After shopping? Back to home to cook dinner, do dishes, and work on homework with the girls. Then make sure they bathed and toss ‘em into bed while I did a load of laundry.

Then it was 10pm. Me time. On Saturdays I’d get up with the girls and make breakfast (either cereal or pancakes) and then fall asleep, exhausted, while they watched cartoons.

Financially, I was in debt – the most of my life. I had a home payment, a car payment, a student loan payment, and a lot of credit card debt. A lot. Divorces are expensive. Why are they expensive? They’re worth it. I mentioned the $100 food budget, but every dollar was spoken for. I wanted to play rugby for the local team, but couldn’t. There wasn’t enough money for both rugby club dues ($45?) and eating. So, eating took priority.

I remember distinctly being flat on my back in bed – arms outstretched, staring at the ceiling fan.

I was at the bottom. No money. No time for anything. And an endless stretch of days just to start digging myself out of the mess.

Again – I was at the bottom. And I gave up. How stupid was I to get in this situation. I prayed. “I can’t do this. I need help.”

The next day, a check for exactly the amount required arrived in the mailbox – it was a rebate from AT&T – I was in some sort of long distance plan that gave me a rebate after so long. And here it was. I could play rugby.

But who would watch the girls? Good friends (who I still owe!) would.

Every day after I hit bottom got better. Every day. It seems that when you’re at the bottom, every step, in any direction, is a way up and out. Eventually I got enough money so we weren’t living close to the edge.

I got promoted at work.

I got raises.

I got in shape.

I met The Mrs. – at the exact time and place where I was a better guy, and the world was headed my way.

Eventually, I clawed my way out of debt. And the lessons I learned walking out of the bottom of the pit, however slowly, are with me today.

When you’re at the bottom – the only way is up. What can you pick up down there and bring back up with you?

Increasing Returns or: Problems are our Friend

“Hey, I have a little expertise in government pensions. I could increase your annual return if you just let me invest a small portion . . . .” – Bones

My current computer techs. Yeah, I’m not kidding.

In my first job after getting my master’s degree I ended up in a department with 10 other folks, all of us technically minded. During college, I had built my own computer and had also done a fair amount of programming. I even knew DOS (no, I’m not yelling “TWO” in Spanish – DOS stands for Disk Operating System, and it was what originally put MicroSoft® into a profit making position). I knew DOS due to some patient friends, and I bought my original PC from a certain frequent commenter (GS) to this site for about $100. When I started my new job, I knew more about computers than most of the people in the group.

And when anyone in the group had problems, they’d ask Willie (the other guy who knew computers pretty well) or they’d ask me to fix it for them. This actually predates the company having an IT department or even a coherent IT policy. If employees with computers made more money for the company than employees without computers? Buy the employees computers. If the employees are too stupid to use/fix their own computers? We’ll get new employees.

So when I was asked a question, I generally (80% of the time) knew the answer quickly. About 20% of the time, I had no idea, but knew enough on what sorts of things to try that might get to a solution for my coworkers friends. (This job was generally sitcom-level fun. We were all recent college grads and we were constantly at each other’s houses for parties, dinners, and what-not.)

Soon, I’d seen most problems you could have with PC software – since I was solving my own problems plus the problems of 10 other people (Willie and I would collaborate on the toughest problems). The company finally got an IT department, but the first commandment was: Don’t Let John or Willie Know Where We Keep The Servers. I have no idea why they did that, since we didn’t know much about servers at all. Maybe they thought we’d take our trial and error methods to the entire company and erase the payroll files while we were installing new screensavers? Maybe they were wise in not letting us know where the servers were?

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that neither Willie nor I knew all that much about computers when we started, but we knew just a little bit more than our friends. A little bit of knowledge combined with solving the problems of 10 people builds the foundation for a LOT of knowledge.

I know a little bit (tiny bit) about making computer chips. Intel®, however, knows a LOT. Intel© has been making computer processor chips for nearly fifty years. So they have fifty years’ worth of experience, right?

No. Intel™ has about 100,000 employees. Let’s pretend that 10% of the staff solves problems in production – learning how to make chips quicker, more reliable, minty smelling, etc. at any given time. That’s 10,000 people. For fifty years.

Doing the math, Intel® has invested up to 500,000 man-years into making awesome chips. To catch them? You’d have to duplicate that level of investment. Numerous examples exist where entire geographic areas become excellent at doing some sort of manufacturing – Japan led the consumer electronics boom. China makes I-Phones® faster than any other country could. Detroit. Well, it used to make cars. And as much as I kid, Detroit still has amazing technical skills when it comes to cars. Silicon Valley? Yeah. They’re the current bright spot for information innovation. Southwestern Art? Go to Santa Fe. Really good at lying? Try Washington D.C.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. If you look into the trash piles of ancient Britain, you find that during the Roman period, the dishes used by the common man were – pretty nice. (And archeologists LOVE dishes. They break, and you have to get new ones, so they tell you a lot about what’s going on with a culture.) Dishes were shipped to Britain from Southern Gaul (France) where they specialized in making plates. Once Britain was cut off from the collapsing Roman Empire? The dishes got crappy – the British hadn’t had to make their own dishes in hundreds of years.

When Rome collapsed, dishes got bad, not only in Britain, but everywhere. When the trade routes and common currency collapsed, the plate makers had to do something else to survive. The trade routes, currency, had created a center of excellence that disappeared pretty quickly once the Empire was gone.

Solving problems to get better works for Nations. It works for Regions. It works for Companies. And it works for Individuals.

If you want to be awesome, solve hard problems. Sometimes the biggest problems are the biggest blessings . . . except that DOS is about as familiar as hieroglyphics nowadays, so solving that problem is probably not important.

Did I mention that you should learn to solve important problems? Yeah. My bad. Important problems. Solve those . . . .

Flat Earth, Belief and Your Mom Looks Like Bigfoot

“Yes. I’ve left everything to the Flat Earth Society. But don’t worry about it. I’m forted up here with plenty of firepower.” – Hopscotch

A trip flying from Seattle at night to Fairbanks in the summertime. You leave in darkness, and then arrive at 2AM in a perfect daylight. Proof of a flat Earth!

I really enjoy a good conspiracy theory. The very best ones make claims that are entirely consistent with agreed-upon facts, and that you can’t disprove. The JFK assassination theories are an amazing treasure trove of paranoia, and so are a thousand others – from ancient aliens to “we knew the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor,” to the theory that your Mom is bigfoot (that would explain her back hair).

The conspiracy theory that’s currently ascendant is “Flat Earth Theory.”

Yes.

Flat Earth theory says the Earth is, well, flat. And this theory has been gaining followers globally.

Did you see that, globally? Heh. I crack myself up.

Anyway.

And here I thought that Bugs Bunny® had solved the issue once and for all.

The idea is that the North Pole is center of a disk – and the Sun is only 32 miles in diameter, and 1,500 miles away. Likewise, the Moon is only 32 miles in diameter and 1,500 miles away. Seems legit! What about the South Pole? The South Pole isn’t. It’s the edge of a pancake, with a 150’ ice wall that surrounds the disk of the flat Earth. And, while vague, it sounds like there’s a dome about 700 miles up.

So how do we explain the International Space Station (ISS)? The ISS is either a secret NASA spy plane, or maybe a secret NASA hologram projection to make us think there’s an ISS. And satellites? Totally fake. There’s no way that your DirecTV© technician could possibly aim at a spot 22,000 miles away moving at 7,000 miles per hour!

Of course, that means the Moon landings were fake (its own conspiracy theory by itself). And O.J. Simpson had to go to prison for starring in Capricorn One® (a movie that showed a fake Mars landing) because that would totally have stopped NASA.

Like I said – these theories are fascinating. Most of them are hard to refute, but Flat Earthers are so very easy to refute, it’s like placing a kitten in a room full of velociraptors. Not really sporting.

I’m not going to get into the energy flux that would have to be created by a 32 mile diameter Sun to warm the Earth, even if only 1500 miles away. But we’ve been sending people to Antarctica for over 100 years. The first people to reach it was Roald Amundsen back in 1911.

To believe in the Flat Earth, one would have to believe in a conspiracy heading back over 100 years. To add further problems for the Flat Earthers – the differing constellations south of the equator should be visible from a flat Earth (which I can personally attest to), Polaris being at different positions in the sky based on latitude (personally verified by me during my Alaska days), and Johnny Depp having a career. Johnny Depp would never have a career on a Flat Earth.

But NASA would also have had to flawlessly fake all of the Moon Landings, all of the satellite launches, a shuttle program, and Elon Musk’s ego. Not possible for a group that wanted to inject water into the Yellowstone Caldera to cool the magma chamber and (probably) trigger a volcano – I wish I were making this up, but I wrote about it here (LINK). Large swaths of NASA are hopelessly inept and stupid. They couldn’t keep an afternoon nap secret.

Oh, and sending O.J. to prison for murder to keep him quiet about “faking the Moon landing”? Capricorn One was a movie that had been out 18 years by the time O.J. was arrested. If so, their punishment of James Brolin was even worse – they made him marry Barbra Streisand.

And as for a technician being able to point a dish at a satellite that’s moving at thousands of miles per hour? Well, it has to move at thousands of miles per hour, since it’s in stationary orbit around the Earth. It’s easy to point an antenna at something that’s not moving (relative to you).

See, they are moving fast to stay stationary! If they want to go anywhere, they’d have to move faster still.

Francisco Esquembre, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia

The question isn’t if the Flat Earth theory is correct. It obviously isn’t. But the question is why would someone believe in something (and I believe that the believers in the Flat Earth are sincere) that is observably disprovable? In today’s world, you’d have to really make an effort to ignore/come up with complicated alternative answers to data clearly visible around you daily.

(By my count, there can’t be more than a few thousand of these believers in the Western world, but they make a lot of YouTube videos.)

So, why? In some cases faith. The idea of a flat Earth is based on (some) interpretations of Biblical passages. In some cases reasoning. The main proponent of the Flat Earth Society® for decades mentioned that he felt that way from when he was young – and that his teacher in second grade was lying to him. He reasoned that the simplest thing was a flat Earth. Other writings (some guy who named himself Koresh – not from Waco but this time from Illinois) explicitly called for a flat Earth, such that teaching normal geography was banned in the local schools around Zion, Illinois until the 1920’s when they disbanded.

But the rumor is that bigfoot your Mom scared them away.

King Arthur, Holger Danske, Buck Rogers, Cyronics and Corpsicles

“The year is 1987, and NASA launches the last of America’s deep space probes. In a freak mishap, Ranger 3 and its pilot, Captain William “Buck” Rogers, are blown out of their trajectory into an orbit which freezes his life support systems, and returns Buck Rogers to Earth. 500 years later.” – Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century

No comment required.

There is a theme in legend, called “The King in the Mountain.” In this theme, a hero from history awaits. The hero, though wounded, or old, or with a bad case of the sniffles, waits. Generally the hero is awaiting a future time when he will be needed to save the nation he is associated with. One example of this is the legend of King Arthur. Arthur is said not to have died, but to be resting in Avalon for when he is needed by Britain, and then he will emerge from his sleep, his sword Excalibur in his hand, to save Britain. One would assume he has a good mattress for a sleep this long. Whenever I go longer than about 8 hours my back lets me know about it . . .

Since Britain has now outlawed all weapons, up to and including dull butter knives, I’m thinking Arthur would face this fate upon his return. The Royal Navy now has fewer ships than at any point in the last 370 years, so if he avoids arrest he might have his work cut out for him if a group of toddlers decide to take over the UK.

Arthur’s legend dates back at least to 600 A.D., but other regions have similar tales, such as the legend of Holger Danske, a big Danish guy who sleeps and will come to the aid of Denmark when it’s in peril. Like Arthur, he’s asleep in Avalon, and also like Arthur, he’s spent some time (wink-wink) with Morgan le Fey.

Here’s Holger. He looks like he’s pretty buff. I bet he deadlifts like 500 pounds, bro. CC BY SA 3.0, from Wikimedia.

So the concept of suspended animation has been with us for centuries, and most of the time the “suspended animation” has been just your garden variety of time-stopping sleep which lasts centuries and is susceptible to interruption only by current events. Buck Rogers (who went from the 1920’s to the 2400’s fell asleep due to radioactive gas in a mine (in the original story published in 1928).

But I think that Clarence Birdseye® was the real inspiration for those that spend time dreaming about suspended animation. Birdseye™ invented a way to quickly freeze food (in about 1924) so that it retained flavor, texture, and nutrition better. Soon enough, the first frozen dinner was in stores. And in 1931 a young boy named Robert Ettinger read the short story, “Jameson’s Brain” about a gentleman named Jameson that was frozen in orbit. Jameson was frozen for about a million years, and some robots put his thawed brain into a robot. As attractive as the whole “human brain in a robot body” goes, I mean, who wouldn’t be attracted to that?

Ettinger from that moment was fixated on a science he dubbed Cryonics. He even wrote about it in a short science fiction story that was published in Startling Stories in 1948 (it’s pretty rough, but it’s also pretty short). In 1962 Ettinger wrote a book called The Prospect of Immortality. You can find it for free online. His book was pivotal in getting attention to Cryonics, and in 1967 the first corpse patient was frozen. That was one of Ettinger’s ideas – death should be looked at not as a final state (in some cases). Where there was sufficient medical equipment and know-how, he reasoned, death could be considered to be a temporary condition, a setback that could be cured. Die in the Amazon (not Jeff Bezo’s place, the actual jungle) and you’re dead. Die in a modern city near modern medical equipment? Maybe you and Buck Rogers can swap stories about Wilma Deering.

The basic theory is that your brain stores information in such a manner that it’s retrievable after you die. It retains your personality and memory. The basis for this (according to Ettinger’s book) is that rats, nearly frozen, no circulation for hours, were revived. The rats had been taught tricks, like how to vote on a bill in Congress. After being thawed out, the rats remembered the tricks they had been taught. It might be a stretch to say that the personality and memory would be the same, but at least Ettinger had some evidence that it might work.

So, after thawing you might get a new cloned body to put your brain into. That would be cool if we knew how to do any of that. Or we could scan the brain and put your memories and personality into a computer. If we did either of these, we wouldn’t need to store the whole body – we could just store the head. And storing the head is one option if you’re on a budget and not wedded to the “I need my body” thought process.

Or we could fix the original body, if we had a cure for whatever killed you and you weren’t a cheapskate.

Hey, maybe you could have a robot body, too.

How could this possibly go wrong? Peter Weller is our friend, right?

So death goes from being the end to being a temporary stop along the way to the future. But the problem is that people really don’t like being frozen. And their organs like it even less. Freezing cells dehydrate. I had thought that ice crystals formed inside the cells, but my research for this post says that the cells dehydrate, ice crystals form outside the cell walls, and then the resulting salty sludge left in the cell couldn’t support life. Freezing is pretty destructive. Frostbite seems to come to mind . . . .

In the 1980’s, a scientist had an idea: inject antifreeze into the cells and cool them down in such a fashion that ice crystals don’t form and the frozen body becomes like glass:

Don’t dwell on it . . . (I think this image was originated from Alcor, a cryonics firm)

The problem is the “antifreeze” that gets pumped into the organ/body is . . . toxic, which implies that in order to freeze the organs, you have to poison them. And getting the antifreeze into and around the brain (which is pretty dense) is rough – there’s some speculation that the amount of pumping and pressure required to get the antifreeze into the brain might just damage it to the point that it’s useless.

The bet for the future is that we’ll have “new technology” (Nanotechnology? Better beer bongs? High Definition rubber bands?) that will solve the problems associated with freezing the corpses patients in the first place. Also, I give Ettinger credit: he’s frozen at -140˚C (room temperature in Canada) along with both his first wife and his second wife, which might cause all sorts of complications upon thawing.

I first learned about cryonics through science fiction. The noted fiction author Larry Niven referred to frozen people as corpsicles, and his novel A World Out of Time is based upon a thawed corpsicle working as a slave to a totalitarian future government. Which gives him a space ship, for some reason. They gave the corpsicles jobs that Future Serfs won’t do. Maybe they can give corpsicles the job that future people won’t do . . . like . . . saving Britain?

Machiavelli, Business Advice, and You

“Among other evils that being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised. That’s Niccolò Machiavelli. Now get! I need to use your bathroom.” – The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre

LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THAT NOSE! You could park a jet airliner under that thing!

Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, better known to us today as simply Machiavelli, died in 1527. I know, I know, these posts seem to be stuck in the 1500’s recently – but what better place to study the economic effects of an empire built on plundered gold (LINK), genetics of the amazingly inbred Hapsburgs (LINK) and now . . . political philosophy and business.

Machiavelli, besides having his name turned into a word for amoral behaviors used to get power (Machiavellian) was also a great-great-great-great-grandfather of Madonna, Cher, and Meatloaf which is why they use only one name.

I kid.

Machiavelli’s best known work is The Prince. Reportedly, he wrote this political philosophy book for Lorenzo de’ Medici. Niccolò had recently been fired from his job as a diplomat when he wrote The Prince, and back in 1516, being fired didn’t mean “here’s your crap and two weeks’ wages,” it meant, “we just might torture you and imprison you – just because.” And Machiavelli was tortured by the Medici family – merely because they thought he might have once known a group of people who might have been plotting against Medici rule.

So what does Machiavelli do? He writes an entire book and dedicates it to one member of the family that tortured him. Yeah – I guess he missed that job he got fired from.

Note: All quotes in this post are directly from The Prince.

The Prince has been written about a zillion times. Heck, I had to write a paper on it when I was in college. So what’s my take with this post?

Machiavelli wrote the book with an eye to a ruler in 16^th Century Italy. Does it have applicability in today’s business world? Let’s see. Yes.

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”

I’ll mostly skip chapters 1-5. Although there is some applicability, I’ll leave you with these notes:

Machiavelli writes about differing kinds of states – including conquered states. His advice? Kill off all of the old rulers after you take over a place. I’ve seen this in business – one factory I knew about was bought by a new company. Step one? Fire all of the leadership. Not some. All. Every department head except one was immediately fired and replaced.

To quote Niccolo:

“If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.”

So, if you think you’re not replaceable? We replace our President every four or eight years. A business can do without you. And if you’re bought out? Getting rid of the leadership is a great way to immediately change the culture of a company. No mixed loyalties.

If a company or department was ruled by a tyrant, a new leader will find it pretty easy to start out in the department/division/company. If the previous leader allowed or encouraged a large amount of autonomy and freedom? You’re going to have problems. This type of business might be a tough one to lead after you take it over.

“He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command.”

Chapter 6: Conquest by Virtue

When looking at rising to the top, Machiavelli strongly favored doing it based on your own skill and cunning. This type of power, he felt, was quite durable. This is the company you built from the ground up – the company you bought with cash, the department manager role you won through years of hard work and dedication.

“The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.”

The major danger of this type of power was the idea that you could reform the system after conquering it. It is difficult to do so: the people who liked the old systems will fight hard to keep them – those that might benefit from the new system often won’t fight, since the benefits are in the future, and vague. Machiavelli favored the use of force to make change happen. And by force, Machiavelli meant swords and such. Since running down the hallway cutting down poorly performing employees with swords might be a bad idea, you might want to consider firing them instead.

Chapter 7: Conquest by Fortune

This is the power that you get when you’re appointed – you have powerful backers that want you to have the job/company. Whereas when you take a business over due to virtue (above), here you have to make the people that put you into power happy, as well as deal with the people in the company or department. If you’re lucky, and very, very good, you can keep the job after your father-in-law retires. But it’s not likely.

“A prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent, so that if he does not attain to their greatness, at any rate he will get some tinge of it.”

Chapter 8: Conquest by Criminal Virtue

If you’re going to take over a place via immoral means, Machiavelli says to do all of the evil up front. If done completely enough, then you can (over time) make people forget your cruel and wicked actions over time. The worst of all possible immoral takeovers is one where the cruelty and evil continue over time.

I don’t really recommend this, but we see it all of the time, and the people who do it are amazingly rich.

Hmmm, maybe I should consider evil?

“The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.”

Chapter 15: Reputation of A Prince

Machiavelli didn’t think much of the common man:

“How we live is so different from how we ought to live that he who studies what ought to be done rather than what is done will learn the way to his downfall rather than to his preservation.”

But that’s plain enough. As a manager, what do you think your reputation should be? Here, Niccolo cuts to the quick:

“And here comes in the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both; but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.”

Ouch!

But he’s right. If people love you, they can discount that feeling, especially at times when they feel joy. But if they fear you? They will be vigilant every minute of every day. Fear is a much more potent motivator than love – just ask Maslow (LINK).

How does this apply at work? Sadly, as a manager you have to remove yourself from the after work drinks. You have to remove yourself from the “work parties.” You have to be above and beyond that. If you are just another person in the group? Your authority means nothing. And you have to use your authority – quickly and suddenly, but with complete justification every so often. Why? Because theory would say you should know more than your employees – at least occasionally. Unless you use it – it won’t exist.

Chapter 16: Generosity vs. Parsimony

It’s a sad state of affairs – if you’re generous, people don’t appreciate it – they simply want more.

“Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.”

And if you’re generous with your employees? Oddly, it makes them respect you less. Yes. Less. If you have to pick a reputation, being cheap is better than generosity. People understand cheap. Your employees understand cheap. They have to make choices everyday with their money. Being generous just means you’ve got so much money that your generosity means nothing . . . .

Chapter 17: Cruelty vs. Mercy

“Men worry less about doing an injury to one who makes himself loved than to one who makes himself feared.”

Machiavelli is pretty simple in this chapter. Create fear if it helps you – the idea is that fear should help your business. But if it’s excessive? Eventually people will leave you.

I’m sad to say that being cruel is a much better way to create loyalty than being nice – it seems that’s just how humanity works. A strong man who is justifiably cruel gets our respect over someone who loves us. Every time.

Chapter 18: Keeping A Prince’s Word

“He should appear to be compassionate, faithful to his word, guileless, and devout. And indeed he should be so. But his disposition should be such that, if he needs to be the opposite, he knows how.”

A Prince should be virtuous. A Prince should look virtuous. A Prince knows when not to be virtuous. Your team, your group, your company will look the other way when you decide the company is more important than your compassion. Oddly? They will love you for it.

Chapter 22: Nobles and Staff

Get good people to work for you. Make them loyal to you. Value competence over cool tee-shirts.

“Because there are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless.”

Don’t have idiots on your staff. And understand the differences between intellects.

Chapter 23: Avoid Flatterers

This might be the most powerful quote by Machiavelli, well, ever:

“There is no other way to guard yourself against flattery than by making men understand that telling you the truth will not offend you.”

If you hide yourself from the actual truth, and punish those that would tell the truth to you? Well, the game is over.

“Men are so happily absorbed in their own affairs and indulge in such self-deception that it is difficult for them not to fall victim to this plague; and some efforts to protect oneself from flatterers involve the risk of becoming despised.”

If you’re a leader? Being despised is the end.

Chapter 25: Fortune

Here Machiavelli starts looking at risk. Here’s a rough passage, if you’re a feminist:

“It is better to be impetuous than cautious, because fortune is a woman; and it is necessary, if one wants to hold her down, to beat her and strike her down.”

Well.

Anyhow – Machiavelli makes a great point: risk is not an enemy. Risk is risk. And when you’re in a risky situation at work, why not take it up a notch?

Actual story: I knew that my boss had interviewed (don’t ask me how) someone for my position. At the next available opportunity, I asked him about it.

I’ve never enjoyed a work situation more. “How did you know?”

My response: “If I told you, would you ever trust me with a secret?”

The look on his face was priceless.

When you have nothing to lose? Doubling down is for sissies. Go all in.

Remember this:

“If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.”

‘nuff said.

Hapsburgs, Beijing, and Small Villages: Genetics and Innovation

“Her actual name is: Penelope Mountbatten Hapsburg Hohenzollern Mulan-Pocahontas.” – The Simpsons

So, if your European Dynasty is the subject of Internet memes in 2010’s? You know you were inbred.

Last week on Monday’s post I wrote about how a massive amount of wealth that wasn’t tied to any production (New World gold) weakened Spain in every conceivable way (LINK). A comment on that post indicated that wealth alone wasn’t the whole story. The Hapsburgs were horrible leaders because they were rendered idiots by centuries of inbreeding and watching reality television.

That’s where we get to the Hapsburgs and genetics.

The House of Hapsburg started with the unlikely named Count Radbot. If ever there was an argument that Europe was run by time travelling robots or the writers of the game Fallout, well, the fact that a major European dynasty was started by a person named Radbot is probably the best evidence to date. Radbot built Hapsburg Castle in around 1020. His grandson, Otto, took the name of the Castle and became Otto Von Hapsburg. Eventually the family moved to Austria, and took over the country in 1276. They only ruled Austria until 1918.

Count Radbot was also a fixture in the Sunday comics for thirty years – often he would chase a cartoon cat and fight comically with him over hamburgers.

Besides the whole, “ruling huge chunks of Europe for 650 years” thing, the other thing that the Hapsburg dynasty was really known for was . . . serious inbreeding.

For being a bunch on inbred sometime-morons, they seemed to do okay. CC by SA 3.0, Original by Wikipedia User Alphathon

The Hapsburg family kept breeding cousins because that was a great way to not share power with outside families. Unfortunately, cousins that have been breeding only with each other limit the gene pool pretty severely. Charles II of Spain (shown below) had comparable genetics to a child born of a brother and sister. He was reportedly: “ . . . short, lame, epileptic, senile and completely bald before 35, always on the verge of death but repeatedly baffling Christendom by continuing to live.” Charles reigned between 1665 and 1700, and when he died it plunged Europe into the War of Spanish Succession as the Hapsburgs attempted to control who would become the next King of Spain.

Charles II of Spain. What a catch! I think he was featured in several of the “Hills Have Eyes” movies . . . keep in mind that painters tried to make their subjects look better in their portraits than they did in real life . . . .

Evidence is fairly clear at this point that genetic difficulties led to the final problems of Spain that led to the fall of the Spanish Empire.

This is an example of genetics that are too close . . . there is no variation because there is far too small a gene pool to contend with.

A modern city is the opposite. People are mobile, and cities are growing – there’s a great deal of movement from the countryside to the cities. A Yale® study indicated (LINK) that by 2030, 10% of the land surface of the Earth will be covered by cities. To get to that number, the equivalent of 20,000 football fields are being paved.

Daily.

Major cities perhaps are the opposite of diversity – they may be the greatest homogeneity. Unique cultures and traditions are moving to the cities and destroying diversity – even within groups that are remaining distinct. In order to avoid arguments that are outside of the point I’m making today, the metropolitan area that I’m picking to make my point is . . . Beijing, China (as opposed to Beijing, Oklahoma, population 6).

Beijing is interesting in that the ethnic makeup change appears to be zero – so I can happily avoid (at least for this blog) those questions. But what’s changing? The city has had a tremendous influx of people from 2000 to 2010, over eight million. But Beijing remains a Chinese city, specifically Han Chinese. So what’s the argument about diversity here, John Wilder?

China is a pretty big country, and there are about a million villages in China. The average, medium sized village has about 500 people, and 7 to 10 clans. Some of these villages have histories spanning thousands of years, with customs and families reaching far into the past. Over time, there is genetic drift – a village in Northern China doesn’t look nearly the same as one in Southern China. Both are Han Chinese, but differing diseases, climates, history, original genetic stock, and, well, luck play a part in allowing a diversity to flourish among the villages. China has a history of amazing innovation. How much a part of this does the village structure explain? How much genius sprang up because of the stability of those villages?

From Freeman Dyson (LINK):

West does not mention another scaling law that works in the opposite direction. That is the law of genetic drift, mentioned earlier as a crucial factor in the evolution of small populations. If a small population is inbreeding, the rate of drift of the average measure of any human capability scales with the inverse square root of the population. Big fluctuations of the average happen in isolated villages far more often than in cities. On the average, people in villages are not more capable than people in cities. But if ten million people are divided into a thousand genetically isolated villages, there is a good chance that one lucky village will have a population with outstandingly high average capability, and there is a good chance that an inbreeding population with high average capability produces an occasional bunch of geniuses in a short time. The effect of genetic isolation is even stronger if the population of the village is divided by barriers of rank or caste or religion. Social snobbery can be as effective as geography in keeping people from spreading their genes widely.

A substantial fraction of the population of Europe and the Middle East in the time between 1000 BC and 1800 AD lived in genetically isolated villages, so that genetic drift may have been the most important factor making intellectual revolutions possible. Places where intellectual revolutions happened include, among many others, Jerusalem around 800 BC (the invention of monotheistic religion), Athens around 500 BC (the invention of drama and philosophy and the beginnings of science), Venice around 1300 AD (the invention of modern commerce), Florence around 1600 (the invention of modern science), and Manchester around 1750 (the invention of modern industry).

These places were all villages, with populations of a few tens of thousands, divided into tribes and social classes with even smaller populations. In each case, a small starburst of geniuses emerged from a small inbred population within a few centuries, and changed our ways of thinking irreversibly. These eruptions have many historical causes. Cultural and political accidents may provide unusual opportunities for young geniuses to exploit. But the appearance of a starburst must be to some extent a consequence of genetic drift. The examples that I mentioned all belong to Western cultures. No doubt similar starbursts of genius occurred in other cultures, but I am ignorant of the details of their history.

I suggest you read the whole thing – it’s fascinating. And Dyson dates things properly – BC, AD. If you’re not familiar with Dyson, he’s a physicist and scientist of renown, the Dyson sphere – an artificial sphere built around a planet – is one of his most known ideas.

From this, one could surmise that the “end of diversity” even among ethnically homogeneous societies will rob us of genetic variation that will advance the human race, perhaps even greatly. Would places like Stanford® or Harvard® provide a place where this (intellectual) genetic diversity could flourish? I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. The time and relative isolation required for drift appear to be missing.

Genetics may be like water – when frozen through inbreeding, no progress is possible. When boiling in a city, no usefully differential structures form in the chaos. When in the right size populace for a period of time? The lukewarm water of interesting change, complexity can form. Like Goldilocks: too hot, too cold, and then just right.

What do we lose if we don’t have that drift, if we don’t have those periodic bursts of genius arising out of that properly complex world? Is it odd to think that cities, which we think of as engines of diversity are really just engines of future homogeneity?

Thankfully we don’t have to worry about that, because our new robotic overlord, Count Radbot, will come from the future to save us all!

Doritos, Obesity, Addiction, and Nic Cage

â€œGood evening, sir. My name is Steve.Â I come from a rough area.Â I used to be addicted to crack but now I’m off and trying to stay clean.Â That is why I’m selling magazine subscriptions.â€ â€“ Office Space

Now Iâ€™m gonna hum that song all day long.

What if . . . your food is actually an addiction, like heroin, tobacco, the metric system, or Lady Gaga songs?

I heard just a little bit of a radio talk show where the guest made that comment.Â Well, kinda made that comment.Â I embellished just a bit.

How on Earth could your food be addictive?

Humans have been eating food for as long as there have been humans.Â Before that, they ate rocks.Â Small ones, better for the digestion.Â But humans were stupid, so our ancestorâ€™s brains encoded subtle signals that made them think that sweet things were amazingly good.Â That meat tasted wonderful.Â That eating enough fat should make you feel full.

These signals directly from the food, sometimes.Â Cheese contains casein.Â I know that â€œcaseinâ€ sounds like what you do to a bank before robbing it, but in this case itâ€™s a protein found in milk.Â And casein is found in dairy products, like cheese.Â Â When you eat it, your body begins the process of digesting it.Â And in digesting it, it turns it into opiates called casomorphins.Â Yes.Â Your body turns cheese into drugs that make you want to eat cheese.

When I eat sugar, I can feel it.Â Thereâ€™s a reason that parents think that kids are hyperactive, and thatâ€™s because they are.Â Sugar hits the bloodstream very quickly, and stimulates an insulin response that plays hell with the endocrine (â€œEndoâ€ is from the Latin for â€œStupid name that George Lucas would use to name an EwokÂ® or somethingâ€ and â€œcrineâ€ comes from being sad, as in â€œitâ€™s a crine shameâ€) system.Â We certainly didnâ€™t have sugar in quantities 5,000 years ago, so our bodies developed a strong, positive response to this extremely energy-dense and reactive group of molecules.

Itâ€™s my guess that weâ€™ve changed (via breeding) the nutrition that we get from our plants.Â The corn (maize) of today doesnâ€™t look much at all like the grass-looking plant that humans started breeding thousands of years ago to turn into the massive ears of corn.Â Itâ€™s certain that the protein balance and other aspects of vitamins, minerals, and carbohydrate content have changed as we made corn what it is today.

So far, weâ€™ve only touched on foods that were at least related to stuff we ate 5,000 years ago.Â A native American from 1500 B.C. would recognize corn, kinda.Â Heâ€™d recognize meat.Â But heâ€™d have no clue about what to think about a Ding DongÂ®, Twinkieâ„¢, or Nachos BellGrandeÂ®.

Bold John Wilder Assertion:Â Modern foods have led us to a place far enough and fast enough that our digestive systems, brains, and hormonal system canâ€™t even remotely begin to cope.

What evidence is there for this assertion?

DoritosÂ® have more than 40 ingredients.

Wonder Breadâ„¢ has over 14.

The bread the Amish make has five.Â Remove sugar, and youâ€™ve got four.Â And that makes yummy French bread.

Letâ€™s think of the processed food that we buy in the supermarket (or convenience store) differently.Â These foods arenâ€™t the same as they were forty years ago.Â Theyâ€™ve been faced with the ultimate evolutionary system that the modern world has to offer:Â the free market.

Markets are amoral.Â They provide the product that people purchase, not the product that people need.Â Markets are ruthless.Â If no one buys a product, the product will cease to exist, quickly.

And what do we buy?Â We buy things that we like.Â Things that taste good.Â Things that we crave.Â What could be a better seller than food that has been taste and market tested to be something that is . . . addictive?

If you look at the data, you can see plainly that obesity had accelerated greatly in the United States.Â If you were planning on hurting the place, you couldnâ€™t have done a better job.Â Sadly, there are too many changes that have happened during the time period to be absolutely certain about what happened.Â The Internet hit.Â Smart phones were invented.Â High fructose corn syrup replaced sugar in lots of things (and it is different than sugar in how it is metabolized).Â Air conditioning became more common.Â Nicolas Cage started doing movies.

This isnâ€™t good.

It isnâ€™t getting any better.

Itâ€™s entirely possible that our changing food consumption has nothing to do at all with our changing obesity rates.Â Itâ€™s probably all due to Nic Cage.

Maybe the food sticks to your ribs?

As Iâ€™ve pointed out before, there are many, many mysteries about being human.Â It doesnâ€™t make it easier to track down whatâ€™s going on in this experiment when the world is changing so very fast.Â My take?Â Our parents were skinny (mostly).Â Why?Â They ate food with mostly few ingredients.Â Steak.Â Eggs.Â Broccoli.Â Potatoes.Â Lettuce.Â Butter.Â Milk they just got from a cow.Â And they also expended more calories without washing machines or dishwashing machines.Â And they were colder in winter and hotter in summer.

So, of the things that have changed, Iâ€™d bet that food is at least a part of it.Â Heck, they had CokeÂ®, but they served it in 8 ounce glass bottles, not 2 liter plastic jugs.Â Mass quantities, like maybe an addict might want.

Or maybe (ounces to liters?) . . . itâ€™s the metric system thatâ€™s making us fat?

Karma May Not Be Real . . . But, Seriously, Why Would You Want To Mess With It?

“But not this time, this is our time. This time you gonna hand them a business card that says I’m a CEO, bitch. That’s what I want from you.” – The Social Network

Your Dogma caught my Karma . . .

My first month on the job (when I graduated from college with a Masters) I travelled around to several of the company’s remote offices. They had offices across the country, and at that time I think they had some sort of operation in 35 of the 50 states (57 if you count Texas as many times as they think they should be counted). One of my first trips was to Central Midwestia – the rustbelt. And our facility was right in the middle of the rust belt. Across the street there was a stamping plant that continually (and very audibly) stamped auto parts out of glowing steel. To the north there was a sausage plant. To the west was a manufacturer of household cleansers. Many of the factory buildings looked to have been built prior to World War I, and some of them looked like they had been through World War II or even the Great Sitcom wars of the early 2000’s. Still bits of Futurama® on some of the walls.

The facility there was . . . everything packed into the size of a postage stamp. There were areas of the facility that if you had a sandwich for lunch you couldn’t gotten through because your belly would have been too big. And the electrical system? It looked like it had been thrown together on a Hollywood set so you could channel lightning into a monster to have it live . . . again.

What an experience!

The next month, I had the opposite experience at another one of “our” (I don’t work there anymore) facilities. Even though the facility had been open (in one form or another) since the Civil War, this facility, though old, was spacious, with plenty of room for moving around. The primary purpose of my visit was to work on a problem that the facility manager was having, so, after talking about the issue and looking over the beautiful Atlantic bay that was right next to the facility, we decided to go to lunch. The Salesguy, sensing a free lunch (I think they have radar) tagged along.

During lunch we talked about lots of different things, like how lobster stew there was cheaper than a hamburger. Also, as a new guy to the company they each had really interesting stories to tell the new guy (me). The conversation drifted to the places I’d visited with the company so far.

Wee John Wilder: “Well, I did see our facility in Central Midwestia.”

Salesguy: “What did you think of that?”

Wee John Wilder: (Pause) “I think that whoever set up that facility had one of the biggest challenges of a career. I have no idea how they fit all of that stuff into that space. My hat is off to them.”

Sure, I could have called the place a mess, but it really wasn’t – I’m not sure anyone could have done better putting all the parts into place.

The next morning when I got to the facility, Salesguy wasn’t there, but he had left me two boxes of golf balls (good ones) with the company logo on them, along with other swag he normally gave to customers.

“Wow! This was nice of him!”

The facility manager then explained that Salesguy had been the person who had put that facility in Central Midwestia together – and he’d spent months of his life making it work, but most people had called it a mess. Karma . . . doesn’t always mean that bad things happen.

Fast forward to last year:

I was on the phone talking to a friend that works at another company about a year ago. The CEO (at my friend’s company) had just announced his “retirement”. He hadn’t been talking about retirement, so the corporate world knows that “going to spend time with family” also means . . . “got fired”.

There had been some other recent changes as well at that company – the Chief Sales Guy (I don’t remember his actual title) had recently quit. That was fairly surprising, since Chief Sales Guy had been at the company since it was founded. The Chief Sales Guy was friends with the owner of the company, and had even suggested a possible replacement for his position as Chief Sales Guy to the owner.

Since The Mrs. had met the now fired CEO at a party some years ago, when I got home I mentioned the news to her. Her response was immediate: “Oh, the Secretary got him fired.”

The Mrs. is a writer of novels, so I asked her to explain this particular plot.

“Well, you remember that you told me about secretary, right?”

And then I remembered. The Chief Sales Guy had an executive Secretary that been with him for over a decade. After he left, that Secretary was blended into the pool of lesser secretaries on the floor. One Thursday afternoon, she had tickets unexpectedly fall into her lap for a literally “once in a lifetime” adventure (it was Elton John© performing the “Best of” Metallica™ with backing vocals by Katie Perry® and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir©). The Secretary was supposed to work until 5pm, but would have preferred to leave about 15 minutes early to get ready. This would have been fine with her old boss, so she found another lesser secretary who could cover for her.

But the person who could cover for her went to the “Jabba The Hutt®” of secretaries (her new boss), who didn’t like this impertinence. So, even before the Secretary could go and ask Jabba© for permission, Jabba™ had gone to complain to the CEO. The CEO fired the Secretary on the spot.

Fired. On the spot. For wanting to leave 15 minutes early. Yeah, true story.

The Mrs. reasoned that the Secretary had mentioned her woes to the former Chief Sales Guy.

The Chief Sales Guy went to the owner and told him the story. The owner, in the narrative favored by The Mrs., fired the CEO a week later, after he’d found a replacement.

I have no idea if this is true or not, but it really makes sense.

Everybody answers to someone, even the CEO. Oh, sure the CEO retired with $100 million or so, but I bet the Secretary enjoyed the afternoon she found out that karma had scored just a little revenge for her. Me? I’d have smoked a cigar and had a nice scotch. Bet she had a Margarita on her deck with copious middle fingers for the CEO.

Your career will likely be a long one – 40 to 50 years for most people. You will meet people on the way up, and you will meet people on the way down. You alone control how you act and how you treat people. Being nice is a choice. Being a jerk is a choice. Why would you ever choose being a jerk? Why would you, as CEO, choose to fire a secretary for wanting to leave 15 minutes early on a Friday?

I’ll note that being a jerk isn’t the same as being honest. Don’t lie. Why does The Mrs. never ask me “does this outfit make my butt look big?” Because if honesty counts against my karma scores . . . oh my.

But Texas will be fine when it comes to karma. They have no idea that when hurricanes hit them it might be karma. Texans? They just want to put a saddle on the hurricane and ride it on up into Iowa so they can take that over, too.