Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Debt is Awful, But Useful Sometimes?

“You won’t Iose the house. Everybody has three mortgages nowadays.” – Ghostbusters

This is a picture of The Boy, circa a long time ago. His head no longer looks like a plastic fern after about seventy plastic . . . fern surgeries.

Pretty soon after I started dating The Mrs., things started to get serious. As such, I sat her down and had a meeting.

(FOR NEW READERS: The Mrs. is either my wife, or a very advanced schizophrenic construction who has given birth to two children like something out of Bladerunner or Total Recall or Man in the High Castle but they’re not really my children but maybe tiny robots who are programmed to kill me if I ever recognize they are robots. Did I just make a huge mistake??)

John Wilder: “I need to tell you a couple of things. Sit down.”

The Mrs. To Be sat down.

John Wilder: “The first thing is that I chew tobacco.” (I don’t anymore.)

The Mrs. To Be: “Okay.” Not really surprised.

John Wilder: “The other thing is that, besides being tall, blonde, muscular and eminently desirable to all women throughout the Northern and Southern hemispheres (but strangely repellent to those in one particular tiny town in South Dakota – I think it may be something bad in the water there), I am horribly in debt. Outside of the mortgage, I have tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. And tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt.”

The Mrs. To Be: “Whew – I thought you were going to tell me you’d been in prison.”

Thankfully she had a low bar. And that she wasn’t from that town in South Dakota.

Where did I get the debt? The old fashioned way – a little bit at a time, then all at once.

The student loan debt came from college. And college really did get me a great job – one where I had huge opportunity very early in my career. Thankfully I had about 20 years that I could keep paying on that. Because everyone wants a debt they can count on for decades. Right?
Then there was credit card debt. Nearly enough for a new Corvette®. Most of the credit card debt had been used to finance my divorce. If there is ever anything worth paying 18% interest on, it’s a divorce. I may not have a Corvette™, but I also don’t have my ex-wife. How many Corvettes© is not having her around worth? All of them.
Oh, and I owed on the house – that really didn’t count, since I’d been in it long enough to have enough equity in the house to balance out the amount I owed. I could dump the house if I needed to. And there was no need to park a Corvette© in the garage.

A month before we were married, The Mrs. and I also bought our first car together. It was a brand new car. When The Mrs.’ old car gave up the ghost, we bought a brand new truck.

We could afford it, right? It was only $600 a month! Oh, wait, plus insurance.

In retrospect, it was those cars that made me hate debt and analyze every precept I had about money. Pop Wilder had always purchased new cars. Pop Wilder was successful. I came up with the idea that Pop Wilder was successful, and thus successful people always bought new cars.

Going into debt on those two new cars was the mistake that made me re-evaluate my assumption. (Hint – I was horribly wrong, and I go into my car-related idiocy and the rules I learned in detail at this LINK). For the record – I was spending about $6,400 a year in cars before I stopped buying new cars. Afterward? My average spend on cars is $1,800 per year since then. And zero money went to interest payments. Because I paid with cash.

The debt became oppressive. We were scrimping every month, and getting by on as little money as possible each week. Steak? Only when on sale. Otherwise? Burger. Or tuna. Or beans. Or sometimes just mac and cheese . . . .

Thankfully, The Mrs. wrecked the truck while going to get me fried chicken four years later. I took that money (not from the chicken, from the insurance payout on the truck) and paid off the car with The Mrs.’ blood. I never did get chicken that day.

One problem down.

We also did a complete refinance of the house. Since there was equity, we used that money to pay off most (but not all) of our credit card debt. Did I mention that divorces are expensive because they’re worth it?

We scrimped. We saved. We had strict limits on Christmas spending.

And finally, four years after we decided that debt sucked, I wrote the last check to pay off the last credit card debt I’ve ever had. A decade later, I’d sent my last student loan payment in.

Some of the lessons I’ve learned:

You can’t afford a new car. I can’t afford a new car. New cars are for suckers. If you want a new car, come to my house with the money that you’d spend on one. I’ll buy you a used car, and burn the rest of your cash for a nice bonfire. After we used some of it to buy beer.
Student loan debt is good, if used for a degree that gives you money. Anthropology? Art? French literature? Medieval midget hammer fighting studies? No good. Engineering? Finance? Accounting? Probably good. Hint: if the degree has “studies” in the title, it is scam for Marxists to take your money and buy themselves nice things. If it doesn’t require calculus? It’s not college, it’s high school with beer. Downside of student loans? You have to either pay them off or die for them to go away. Bankruptcy is an option, but student loan debt survives bankruptcy. That sounds like a scam, too. If your degree was good, banks would invest in it . . . . Let’s face it: student loans are like Star Wars® – they keep coming back even when you don’t want it and you have to live with them.
Credit card debt is awful. The interest rates are high enough that Henry VIII would have executed you for trying to charge them, though admittedly that’s a pretty low bar, since snoring too loudly could have had Henry sign the death warrant. Use only in a last resort. Like a divorce. Or a really cool sale on PEZ® dispensers.

So, the question is simple. “How did it turn out?”

I don’t have a new car. I haven’t had one since Clinton was president. Maybe when Chelsea is president I’ll get a new car.

My student loan debt is paid off. I had the option to pay it off, but when the next “Payment Due” date was December 21, 2012 showed up, I decided I’d not pay it. Why? If the Mayan® calendar was right, I’d want to die owing them the money. (Spoiler alert: The World Did Not End in 2012)

I haven’t paid interest to a credit card company since my children have been alive. Or do I have children? Or are they robots? If they’re robots . . . they suck at cleaning their rooms. I hope Elon Musk will make better robot children.

Elon Musk Update: Elon Musk Versus NASA

“Also available in Arctic Slut, Morning-After Melon, and Elon Musk.” – The Simpsons

Artifacts from another time – when NASA actually flew rockets into space. In the 1990’s NASA lawyers made them wire the rockets to the ground so that they couldn’t fly and maybe hurt someone. Also, NASA HR has made fart jokes grounds for termination.

When I was a young Wilder, I was in awe of NASA. I was expecting that the moon landing was just a start for manned spaceflight. Successes like the Voyager probe were confirmation – NASA would be leading us into a great new era that would end up with a man on Mars. Spaceflight would be available (at least) to rich people. We’d have great cylindrical colonies up in space, and mining on asteroids would produce massive amounts of wealth. Solar power satellites would beam power via microwave down to receiving dishes and eliminate energy shortages on Earth. And probably some birds.

Ahh, the future. Now back off to the Moon mines honey! Go deal with hard radiation for a week. Then we’ll have Swiss steak! (Source – NASA Ames)

The Space Shuttle was a hopeful idea. Built on the idea of being reusable, shuttles were going to revolutionize space travel. We’d shoot one up every week or two, and the cost would be less than $700 (today’s dollars) per pound. That was the idea, anyway.

Over the course of the 135 total missions it cost about $27,000 per pound. Each mission cost about $1.5 billion. And NASA would send up a Space Shuttle to launch a communications satellite. Yes. Every time we wanted to launch something, we’d put 25% of our space launch ability along with seven astronauts on the line. The shuttle was further crippled by added weight, which limited the orbits it could reach.

In 2007, NASA estimated they could have flown Saturn V (the same rocket that went to the Moon) missions six times a year, with two trips to the Moon, each year for the same price as the shuttle. With the amount of payload that the Saturn V could have sent up, our space infrastructure and time in space would have been significantly higher than with the Space Shuttle. We’d have been on Mars. Actual people.

Yeah. NASA essentially burned our future in space on a crappy space truck. But it’s gotten worse.

The current NASA rocket program, the Space Launch System, has consumed $11.5 billion dollars over seven years. And produced no rocket.

Pictured: Actual rocket. Not pictured: NASA rocket. Because there isn’t one. (Source: SpaceX)

Elon Musk spent $500 million on the Falcon Heavy to develop it, and launch costs are $90 million to $150 million per launch, and it has a greater capacity than any rocket on Earth right now. And a greater capacity than the Space Launch System will ever have. Musk’s only competition is Jeff Bezos, who has a LOT of money and the same ideas.

In perhaps the biggest NASA troll ever, Musk sent his car into space. With a Matchbox® car of his car glued to the dash. Playing David Bowie. With a spacesuit in the car. NASA? Unable to launch bottle rockets – probably because of all of the procedures required to launch one.

How can Musk do this when NASA cannot? Several reasons:

NASA is observably stupid. It started spending money on a launch pad for a cancelled rocket. It spent $200+ million dollars. Then it decided to change the pad for the Space Launch System. As of now, NASA has spent $300 million more. It anticipates spending another $400 million. But the launch pad leans. And it might only be used . . . once. Don’t believe me? Here’s a LINK.

Yes, this is a billion dollars. Oh, the alternative? Yeah, build a complete new one for a couple hundred million. (Source: NASA)

NASA is a jobs program. There are many fine scientists at NASA. Not sure NASA needs any scientists – NASA needs engineers to build rockets and rovers. I’m sure there are plenty of universities that NASA can go to if they need scientists. But let’s pretend that NASA needs a scientist or two. Does NASA need to make braille books for blind kids about eclipses? No, but they did. (LINK) Does NASA need a writer to write about how NASA helped make the statuettes that they give out at the Oscars® shiny? (LINK) They did.
NASA has been given no fixed mission. In the 1960’s, the idea was we’ll get men to the moon by the end of the decade. And they did. The entire world watched while young (less than 40 years old, most of them) men (almost overwhelmingly) conquered the moon. What’s the mission now? To watch while Elon Musk and eventually Jeff Bezos do more than NASA ever could? How demoralized must the government workers be watching future Bond® villains take over space?
Related to the above – NASA has no consistency. Rocket programs start/stop based on the political climate of the day. Bush proposes a rocket, Obama deletes the rocket and proposes another rocket. Manned spaceflight should take second place to unmanned probes. Unmanned probes should take second place to manned spaceflight. It’s like trying to negotiate between Mom and Dad when they don’t even speak the same language.

So, the solution?

Make Elon Musk NASA Emperor For Life®. Give him the money. If we gave Musk the money, we’d be on Mars in five years. We’d have a base on it in seven years. In twenty years, there would be a million Americans living on Mars. We’d start turning the atmosphere into something we could breathe. We’d make the place homey. Maybe in a several hundred years. Maybe a thousand.

Don’t get me wrong. Living on Mars is hard. It’s tougher than living on the top of Mount Everest. It’s tougher than living at the South Pole. But it’s worth doing. Why?

Intelligent life may be very rare in the Universe – it might even be rarer than intelligent life at NASA. The one thing we owe to our posterity is that they be given a chance to live. And even though planets appear to be fairly common in the Galaxy, there’s no real sign of intelligent life around here besides us. This previous week, we saw the nearest planet to our Solar system get torched by a solar flare that we could see from Earth (with huge telescopes). This happened four years ago. If anything was living there before, it was nuked, microwaved, and fried. Colonel Sanders could only sell Kentucky Fried Alien® there, since there certainly aren’t any living ones.

And for how much time of the existence of the Earth have we had intelligent life. 20,000 years? 100,000 years? If you generously (how could intelligent life exist without beer?) assume 200,000 years, only for 0.004% of the life of the Earth have we had intelligent life. And how long has that life been observable? 0.000002%.

When we look at the threats that mankind realistically faces, putting ourselves on Mars should be the ultimate, number one goal of the human race. We face economic disruption (LINK), we face the potential for artificial intelligence being a really tough child (LINK), big asteroids (LINK), super volcanos (LINK), and diseases and other stuff (like reality television) that could wipe us out.

The alternative are space habitats. The LaGrange points (which have nothing to do with ZZ Top®) are relatively stable orbits that math provides around the Earth-Moon system. In the diagram below, you can see that LaGrange 1, 2, and 3 are stable, but tiny places. LaGrange 4 (L4) and LaGrange 5 (L5) are awesome places because they are large – you could put a lot of stuff there and not worry about bumping into each other. And you can stay in those areas for millions of years without expending any fuel.

Here are the LaGrange points, courtesy NASA and ZZ Top®.

The L5 (or L4) colonies are perhaps tougher than Mars. Or not. Manufacturing these habitats would be difficult – you’d have to set up an entire manufacturing complex on the Moon (likely) and pull some choice asteroids into L4 or L5 orbit for raw materials. It’s certain that this work would cost billions and take decades for the larger colonies that would host millions of people. On the plus side? There’s already a song built for the colonies:

Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects,
We possess, so it seems, two of Man’s greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.

-Home on LaGrange (The L5 Song)
© 1978 by William S. Higgins and Barry D. Gehm, via Wikipedia

Here’s a NASA depiction of a space colony at the L5 point. Only NASA would create a colony where you’d have to build a bridge. (Source, NASA Ames)

I really love humanity. I want it to live on until the Universe can no longer support life. I’d like to think that in 2 trillion years that young Wilders (whatever they look like) are out viewing the birth of a new black hole, or watching the latest episode of The Simpsons. Why? All of the Universe, all of creation is meaningless unless we have someone there to watch it in joy and wonder. And to make fart jokes.

Steve Martin, Bob Segar, and Interviewing; or How I Met The Mrs.

Five Year Old: Sounds like a subdural hematoma to me.

Doctor: Three years of nursery school, and you think you know it all! Well, you’re still wet behind the ears. It’s not a subdural hematoma it’s epidural!

–The Man With Two Brains

Steve Martin does not officially endorse my marriage. Officially. And the restraining order says I can’t show up at his house at 4am to ask him to endorse it anymore. I’m sure his advisors aren’t aware that we are really best friends.

It’s Friday, so technically this should be a health post. It’s about health because married couples try to live longer so they can win that final argument, like two old pythons arguing about who is older and has more wrinkles from squeezing Mongolian herdsmen. So, there.

What follows is a mostly true story, except for the exaggerations for the sake of humor or whimsy, I’ll point out when some of the more incredible facts are Really Odd But Amazingly True with the flag (ROBAT). And ROBAT makes me think of a robot bat superhero who texts in ALL CAPS JUST LIKE THIS. But, it’s still amazing because he’s a bat who texts.

Anyhow.

Let’s rewind our clocks back to when Bill Clinton was still indicating that he did not have sex with that woman, and The X-Files® was not starring some wrinkly old people. Cell phones were for the rich and insecure. iMac® was a thing, but iPod© wasn’t and iPhone meant you were talking with someone for whom spelling had little meaning.

I was in the basement of Casa Wilder 2.0 (I’m on 5.0 now) on a stair climber. This particular stair climber was one of my favorite pieces of exercise equipment I’ve ever owned: it used hydraulic pistons that look like shock absorbers for resistance. After about 20 minutes on the climber if a drop of sweat fell off my intensely furrowed brow and hit on of the hydraulic pistons, it would immediately boil off with a sizzling sound and the smell of boiling sweat. And it had cables and rollers that could easily chop off a toddler’s finger. Sadly, they don’t make them anymore.

It might have something to do with all of those nine fingered toddlers.

I was nearly divorced. I’d been separated for over two years, and the paperwork was finally winding its way through the courts for final approval. Why do divorces take so long?

Because good things happen to patient people.

I’d dated several girls, but none of the relationships had gone particularly well. Nothing horrible, mind you, except for the married Internet girl (honestly, it’s like we’re roommates,) and the other married Internet girl (we never even see each other). I stopped the relationships pretty soon after those facts came out.

I had, in fact, said in a prayer one night (in frustration), “Okay, I give up. You figure it out.” I assumed (and assume) that God has a sense of humor. It was a Monday in March, about this time of year.

Recently I’d gotten very, very tired of the same twenty classic rock songs on a seemingly permanent repeat cycle, especially Bob Segar. I can’t listen to any of his music anymore: it was on a rotation of about 2 Bob Segar songs an hour . . . . the same old cliche, is that a woman or a man . . . . No, Bob, if you have such a problem with people making fun of your long hair, cut it.

Sheesh.

The result was I started listening to the post-Nirvana® 1990;s rock on station B which was entirely Segar-Free. It might not have been metal, but it certainly had the virtue of not being Bob Segar. Seriously, you have no idea the depth of my loathing for Bob Segar.

But yet I owe him something . . . .

So, listening to Station B on a Tuesday the day after my cheeky prayer. Every night there was a game show or giveaway. And on Tuesday, the game show was Hollywood Movie Trivia® – the DJ would play a clip from a movie, and you’d have to have to call in first to name the movie. And this one was (for a super-genius like me) ridiculously easy: it’s the movie quote at the top of the post.

The DJ played the clip and then went to a commercial.

I called in. Note that my phone at this point was still corded. Stuck to the wall.

Busy signal.

I hit redial. Busy signal.

I hit redial once more.

Still busy.

The commercial break was almost over, so I gave up and went back to sweating on superheated pistons.

“We still don’t have a winner . . . ”

Redial.

Phone answered . . . “this is Station X. What’s the name of the movie?”

“The Man With Two Brains.”

“We have a winner.” Queue sound effect of ringing bell and applause.

I’d won a CD. White Town, “ Women in Technology. Yeah, it’s not real memorable.

https://youtu.be/_-rbS70uufA?si=MNAOAzswqtRvLu-H

Also, Iâ€™d won a free photo session at Glamour ShotsÂ©.Â Glamour ShotsÂ® was a strange phenomenon in the 1980â€™s and 1990â€™s.Â Essentially you went and the photographer would gussy you up with feather boas, makeup, soft fuzzy light and background.Â Essentially time consuming selfies.

Not pictured: Me. I’d attribute this if I could, but I have no idea of where it came from.

After reveling in my newfound photographic and CD wealth, I started talking to the DJ.Â Seemed kinda cool, we talked for 10 minutes or so. We never would have had the chance to talk for those 10 minutes if the DJ would have had to dump me after the commercials. As it was, the only chance to talk to her and not sound creepy was on that one conversation. (ROBAT – Really Odd But Amazingly True)

The next morning I went to work (city of about a million people) and mentioned to two of them that I thought the DJ was neat. Oh, the DJ was a girl. One of the two friends replied: “I know her, she’s not dating anyone. I’ll set you two up for St. Patrick’s Day.” And she did. (ROBAT)

On St. Patrick’s Day we were to meet at 10 or so. I got to the bar about 9:30. The place was packed, and my friend was spinning mad tunes (is that even a phrase?) and she mentioned that the DJ would be there soon, soon being 10:30 or so. I had some friends there as wingmen, and soon enough I was introduced to the DJ, or, The Mrs. To Be.

I immediately called her by the name she used on the radio.

The Mrs. To Be: “No, it’s really REDACTED.”

John Wilder: “Why don’t you use your real name?”

The Mrs. To Be: “You know . . . stalkers.”

John Wilder: “Oh. (long pause) My friends told me not to bring up stalking on the first date.” (Yes, I really said that.)

We danced. We both realized that neither of us were dancers. We picked out a booth in another room where the music wasn’t so loud.

I got beers for us. We sat down, and the interview started. Yes, I did this (LINK) and interviewed her.

But a really good interviewer (and I was in top form back then) can make an interview seem like a pleasant conversation by a person that’s interested in you. And it was pleasant. And I was interested in her. But I needed to weed out the kinds of crazy that would conflict with my kinds of crazy. And also make sure that the person shared the same core values I did. (ROBAT)

I was pleasantly surprised that The Mrs. To Be was much less neurotic (in the ways that mattered to me) than most of the crazy moonbat girls from my previous relationships. And she wasn’t married.

Yet.

We stayed until they kicked us out of the bar. Why did they kick us out of the bar? Because everyone else had already left and we had been talking for three hours, and it seemed like 15 minutes. (ROBAT)

We walked out of the bar. There had been hundreds of cars there when I’d gotten there I’d been lucky to find a good spot. The Mrs. To Be had showed up nearly an hour later. Yet, there were only two cars left in the lot. And they were parked side by side, with matching dents on the driver-side door. (ROBAT)

Apparently, God does have a sense of humor, and thankfully for me He’s not subtle when He kicks a message out. I walked her to the door, and leaned in for the kiss. (ROBAT)

Which she wasn’t expecting, but, you know, when you’ve got the sign from the Big Coach to run like hell for first base, you run like hell for first base. She kissed me right back. (ROBAT)

139 days later, The Mrs. and I were married in a mall in Bally’s® Casino in Vegas on a Sunday morning. (ROBAT)

Bob Segar, who brought together two people who were utterly tired of his music. Thanks, Bob for bringing us together in mutual hatred! (Image by Adam Freese, CC BY 2.0, Attribution)

Your Business Passion Sucks.

“I can’t afford to sell a west side home for that! But what a fantastical year for pizza by the slice!” – The Simpsons

It’s always a good idea to start a business to take money from people who say, “milady” because they often cannot defend themselves in hand-to-hand combat. Take their money and buy yourself something nice.

The Mrs. and I have had a bunch of business ideas – our Internet pizza by the slice company (we don’t deliver, you have to come pick it up) wasn’t exactly a great hit, but we sold it for $50,000,000 in Alta Vista™ stock that we couldn’t sell for three years. Easy come, easy go.

I kid. This didn’t happen to me, but it did happen to a friend of mine. Don’t worry – he’s been the CEO of multiple companies and has vacation houses in three states.

But one time The Mrs. and I actually came up with a real business plan. We’d read an article on a website back in the day (I actually don’t remember which one – it was a site I used to go to back when Google® was new) about a PC Bang in San Francisco. The concept was that the business rented computers by the hour and sold snacks to gamers who were all connected by LAN (local area networks) to play against each other or as an organized team against other gamers. The name may sound dirty, but it really was a South Korean name that just never wore off. (South Koreans are big gamers.)

The Mrs. liked to play games, and she and I reckoned that a great way to make money would be to take it from chain-smoking gamers – we had e-mailed the author of the article and he told us the concept worked well in San Francisco, but the gamers were amazing at smoking – even teenagers. Since even back then smoking was a thing only demons without souls did inside, the smokers would take a break from killing virtual people to smoke outside.

Thinking this would be a good idea (the PC stuff, not the smoking), The Mrs. and I priced local strip mall rents. We had a place in mind that we wouldn’t even need to retrofit. We put together a business plan. We got quotes on computers, counters, and computer furniture. We got pricing on cash registers and contacted candy, snack and frozen foods retailers. We put together a business plan. Front to back, thirty pages. Included demographics. Everything. The place in the strip mall was awesome – it was right next to a movie theater. Catch the nerds after the Star Wars, right?

I had to work the day of our appointment, but The Mrs. took our business plan and went to her bank (Bank of America) and asked for a small business loan. Hey, the government guarantees that stuff, right? They give them to everybody, right?

No.

They didn’t throw her out because she was a lady. They threw her out because our idea was stupid.

She fumed when she got home.

“I’m going to close my checking account there.”

I’m sure they were upset, because she had exactly $17.43 in her account, plus a box of lint. They even paid extra lint each month on her lint deposit. “Oh, Mrs. Wilder, we would have to shut our doors if you took your $17.43 elsewhere. And here’s your lint.”

I mean, we had cash reserves of $5,000 at that time. Why wouldn’t they loan us a measly $55,000 for an unproven idea?

Well, when I put it that way . . . it sounds stupid. And it was stupid.

See, our problem was that we talked about businesses we thought we would like (I’m not a gamer, but I like candy).

Occasionally, we see some fool with passion and money start a business we had talked about. And then the business would close within about six months.

After careful observation, every business we could be passionate about closed. The successful businesses were ones we wondered “how is that place still in business”?

I decided to observe businesses. Which ones were successful? Which ones lasted five years or more?

The biggest place to occupy was the middle. Stuff everyone needed. Milk. Eggs. Bacon. Quality footwear. Panty hose. PEZ®.

But the competition has scale here. Wal-Mart®, Target©, and the large regional/national grocery stores occupy this niche. And competing against them on price will destroy you. Everyone needs what they sell, but they have relentlessly focused on cost reduction for decades, optimizing supply chains. The result? Cheese has never been cheaper. I can get sushi at midnight in any small Midwestern town. Not great sushi, but Wal-Mart® sushi. And it doesn’t cost all that much. And I can get decent wild salmon anytime of the year.

What about the rest? I know that people sell all sorts of niche products – how do they manage to do that?

Mainly by not making much money. Do people make millions on their YouTube© channel? Yes. If their name is Pewdepie. But if you are in the top 3% of YouTube® channels? You make less than $16,000 a year. Again, not bad posting goofy videos to the Internet, but it shows that the vast majority of people make no money on YouTube™.

And it’s the same thing with the people that sold me a T-Shirt that vaguely references a movie from 1983. (No, you shouldn’t send your kids to Camp Crystal Lake.) They would never make money off of just that one t-shirt. They have to find lots of different shirts like that to sell.

I have no idea where this came from – I found it floating on the Internet. This is a t-shirt I need.

Another example was a local business near where we live. They sold bicycle stuff from 9am to 5pm to the locals (I bought three bikes from them), but their real business for the last 20 years was selling stuff online. They would import cases of, say, bicycling jackets manufactured in China. Then they’d sell them online. Ironically? I talked to the owner and they sold lots of products back to China – the stuff they sent to the United States apparently was only available in the United States, and they had to have it shipped back to them.

But now the bigger bike shops on the Internet have taken most of the market share – the local bike shop is closed. The long thin part of the market they operated on disappeared.

So where do you aim?

With a business you need a broad base of consumers.

You need a lot of people interested in your product. Our PC Bang obviously didn’t meet that.
The product should be a low cost product. Ours would have been low cost, but still would have needed hundreds of dollars in business a night.
The market (ideally) should be an unserved need or a cheap fun thing.

Good examples of this? Fidget spinners. Somebody made a zillion dollars off of those.

When the Japanese first sent cars to the United States? They didn’t send Acuras®. They sent cheap sheet metal things that had great gas mileage because the engines were nearly wind up. And they sold like fidget spinners.

What ideas suck?

I was in a business dinner with a really rich guy – it was our company and his. We were at the nicest restaurant I’ve ever been to – before or since. It makes sense, because the contract we were signing was $270 million. And that was $270 million American dollars, not that wrapping paper they use in Canada. The owner of the firm talked about how the food was wonderful in Houston – and he had tried to create a world-class restaurant in the (smaller) Midwestern city where he lived. He said he had lost a million dollars trying to create an awesome restaurant. So, super high quality is probably not the best way to go when starting out. Think cheap hamburgers. But for a million dollars he had great food for a year!

Who can get away with ludicrously high prices? Apple™. Celebrities.

Think:

Beats® headphones. $45 worth of components for $34,500 a pair (I couldn’t tell you – I buy $12 ear buds).
Whatever stupid crap the Kardashians are selling this week.

So if I were opening a business? I’ve learned a lot. I’d avoid borrowing money early on. I’d avoid everything that I love –passion clouds judgement. I’d look for good deals. My passion would be focused on creating great values for other people – and I’d maybe figure out that Internet pizza by the slice . . . . Maybe I just need an app for that? People buy anything off their cellphones, right?

Dinosaurs, Radioactivity, Time Reversed Sensing, Remote Viewing and The Ultimate Warrior

“Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.” – Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

In 1843 Sir Richard Owen came up with the term “dinosaur” to describe the fossilized remains that were being discovered and studied. Of course, before this point they were considered “dragon bones” or bones from giants because only truly massive beasts could have created bones so big. But we all know it was your momma.

Every once in a while, I like to take a large turn to the weird on Wisdom Monday – primarily because it’s fun. I think that following those that study the paranormal is similar to watching The Ultimate Warrior® take on Hulk Hogan™ for the WWF© title. It’s harmless, amusing, and if you watch it close enough, you just might stumble upon some truth. Ohhh, yeah!

I think that science describes what’s true – and as such, is the very enemy of post-modernist thought – “nothing is certain, nothing is true.” And I am certain that there are many things we don’t yet understand, and many places where the basic fundamental understanding of nature and reality eludes us. This is different than post-modernism. There is Truth. We just need to understand it. And we really don’t.

Like radioactive decay.

Radioactive decay is where an essentially unstable atomic nucleus decides that it’s done with being unstable and dumps a proton like a psycho ex-girlfriend. Or it splits into two nuclei like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck not being in the same movie together. This decay is important, because it likely is the source of heat for the core of the earth that keeps our magnetic dynamo going that keeps the planet habitable. Matt and Ben must be in separate movies so that we can all live.

But the rate of radioactive decay should be constant, right? I mean, if I jumped up and down on a trampoline with a lot of plutonium the plutonium wouldn’t decay any faster. I’d be fried like a pizza roll from the radiation from the plutonium, but the rate at which the plutonium decayed wouldn’t change.

The radioactive decay should be constant.

But it isn’t. It appears to be (in some experiments) a variable. It varies with the time of the day, and the season of the year. Not by a lot, but by about 4% in one experiment. Here’s a graph of the experiment by Sturrock, P.A.; Steinitz, G.; Fischbach, E.; Javorsek, D.; Jenkins, J.H. (2012):

Pretty colors, right? But it also is pretty plain that something is going on here that impacts the radioactive decay of Radon 222 seems to be changed . . . by how close we are to the Sun. Maybe.

This bothers physicists. A lot.

I also recall reading a paper by a Dr. Dean Radin some time ago (LINK – to a .pdf). He performed an experiment with 31 different subjects where they viewed a total of 1060 images. He measured their physiological responses during the testing. They’d see a blank slide. Then, five seconds after they pressed the mouse button, they’d see a slide. Kittens. A mountain. A hot naked person. A seaside. A dismembered body.

What???

Yeah. Some of the pictures were set up to produce an emotional response, but most, not.

About four seconds before the emotional picture, the subject displayed a physiological response. But for those boring pictures? No response.

Read that again.

About four seconds before something emotional happened, the subject knew something emotional was going to happen. Which is not how reality has been defined to us – we’re not supposed to know that something bad is going to happen. But this experiment said . . . we do.

And then there was Project Stargate, started at Stanford Research Institute and eventually folded into an Army project. The movie The Men Who Stare at Goats is a fictionalized version of what went on during the Army project, and it’s not a bad movie.

Yeah. This was a government funded (to the tune of $20,000,000) project in what’s called Remote Viewing. What’s Remote Viewing? It’s fairly simple – a target was assigned to a “viewer” who was asked to describe it. In one trial, the US government was looking for a downed Soviet Tu-22 bomber in Africa – it was converted to a surveillance plane and had all of the latest Soviet goodies (I assume that they had diesel-powered calculators weighing in at only 350 kilograms). The report says the remote view assigned to find it wrote down a latitude and a longitude. And the plane was there.

The government reportedly got information they could take action on for years, in some cases entirely verified by satellite photos and other James Bond-type stuff. In my own personal admission – at one point I got online and did a remote viewing test. I concentrated very hard, wrote down a sketch and my observations, and the following photo was nearly spot on.

Coincidence? Sure.

Science? No way. I couldn’t replicate it. But it happened. And these coincidences have happened to me throughout my life.

We’ve talked before (LINK) about the biggest advantage humanity has – the ability to see into the future. We do it regularly. I can predict that during the month of December, it’s probably not going to be an awesome time to catch a bunch of sun in Fairbanks. I can predict that if I plant grass seed, fertilize it, and water it, at some point I’m going to need a mower. Through our thought processes we can see the future.

But would it have been to our advantage to know four seconds before a saber-toothed tiger attacked? Would it have been subject to natural selection? Would the people who couldn’t see slightly into the future die at a slightly higher rate? Sure.

How could that even work?

There is precedence in quantum mechanics for particles to become entangled that doesn’t even involve alcohol and a frat party – Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance” wherein the state of one entangled particle changed the state of the other particle even though they were far apart. Something about information seems to tie distant particles together – even though there’s no way that they could be tied together, just like Hulk Hogan® and The Ultimate Warrior©.

Is there a coincidence that Hulk Hogan® teamed up with The Ultimate Warrior™ right when the Global Warming© thing began?

And the whole “spooky action at a distance” is difficult to believe, but it is generally accepted, and based on actual scientific observation, but we have problems with thinking that we might in some way be tied into events slightly into the future, or thousands of miles away.

Science can tell us a lot. But we have to wait until Summer Slam ’18 for the results . . .

DNA Testing, Cousin Lovin’, and Khannnnn!

“My father has warned people about the dangers of experimenting with DNA viruses for years. You processed that information through your addled, paranoid infrastructure.” – 12 Monkeys

I come from the land of the ice and snow . . . but this is Denali. My ice and snow is probably closer to Denmark?

So, my mother-in-law gave me a DNA testing kit for Christmas. I’m pretty sure she wanted to verify that I was human. It turns out I am at least 94% human. There’s 2% “Other” (I’m thinking bear) and 4% “Filler” – whatever that is.

The kit that she got for me was from Ancestry.com. It’s a fairly simple kit – there’s a tube that you spit into. It takes about ¼ teaspoon of saliva to fill it up to the line. Since Ancestry sold over 1.5 million of these kits over the Thanksgiving weekend, that’s 375,000 teaspoons of spit headed to Lehi, Utah in a four day period. That’s 488.281092 gallons (150,000 liters) of spit in just 4 days! I guess they need the water in Utah.

How long does it take to test all that spit? In my case, not very long. I put the spit in the mail the first week of January, and it arrived there in five days. They started processing it two weeks later, and about 10 days after that my DNA test results were in. They sure do know how to handle spit in Lehi.

The results are:

Europe West 40%
Great Britain 24%
Ireland/Scotland/Wales 17%
Scandinavia 17%

Low Confidence Regions

Finland/Northwest Russia 1%
Iberian Peninsula < 1%

None of these were a surprise to me. Based on family history and stories, I’d expected just a bit more Danish than 17%, but if you look at the “Europe West” it overlaps Denmark quite a bit. Additionally, the stories that I’ve been told about the McWilder side seem about right. I wasn’t surprised about the Finland or Iberian (Spanish/Portuguese), but those numbers are pretty small.

What is 1%? It’s roughly one direct ancestor back in ~1790 (for me – if you were younger, it would be later, if you were older, it would be sooner, and if your great great great great grandparents had kids young or late, that would skew it as well). But 1790 seems about right.

The DNA data is put into a computer simulator that pulls genetic information into a model and computes how yours matches up against various populations. Are there margins for error? Sure. And are there different models? Absolutely. Once you’ve taken the test, you can upload your data to GEDMATCH.com for free and run it against a huge batch of models. An overwhelming number of models. Really, an overwhelming number of models without guidance. So, I went to look on the Internet, and they suggested I use the Eurogenes K12 model – it models against twelve European populations and produced an output (for me) that looks like:

Population
South Asian	–
Caucasus	4.89
Southwest Asian	1.56
North Amerindian + Arctic	0.57
Siberian	–
Mediterranean	9.72
East Asian	–
West African	–
Volga-Ural	7.66
South Baltic	13.09
Western European	26.41
North Sea	36.10

Looking at this in a pie chart, it looks like this:

For Southwest Asian, think the area around the Caucuses and the Middle East. A different version of the test suggested that this might be Ashkenazi Jewish, to the tune of 1.9%. Mazel Tov!

This would indicate that around 1765 that the Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother Grandpa McWilder talked about is real. And I saw another chart from a Norwegian dude (online) that look nearly identical to mine as far as proportions go. So, yeah, pretty Scandinavian.

But that takes it back to about 256 ancestors. Seems like as you go back in time, the number of ancestors that you have is manageable. So, let’s go back to, say, 400AD, about the time the Roman Empire fell. What, would we need a school auditorium? An NFL® stadium to hold them all?

No. There are 4.6 quintillion ancestors needed. By comparison, there are only 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on Earth (an estimate I saw online).

Huh?

Well, we certainly know that that many people weren’t around, so what happened? Well, have you ever been to a village in upstate New York where all of the residents looked . . . similar? All around the world, there are little isolated villages that have villagers that look the same. Or similar enough that you can see they’re all related.

If you haven’t watched Game of Thrones . . . his parents are brother and sister. Spoiler!

Because they are. There weren’t 4.6 quintillion ancestors, because many of them were duplicated. While there have been a lot of marriages between second cousins, (Professor Robin Fox of Rutgers thinks that 80% or more of marriages in history were between second cousins or closer) after about 1860 you saw the practice come under (in the United States) a rather wide degree of disapproval. In Europe it had been discouraged since the days of Rome, but the 24 of the 50 United States have laws against first cousins marrying. To my surprise. I would have expected the number to be 100% since it is so very icky.

Around the world, first cousin marriage is tolerated in lots of places, but actively encouraged in the Middle East (especially Pakistan).

But that gets us out of needing 4.6 quintillion people (each) to produce you and I.

And those villages produce populations where genes are sampled from. The best I can figure is that it gives a good idea of where people came from in the last 500 years – it won’t tell you in great detail that you were related to Julius Caesar (because you aren’t).

Ancestry.com indicated that I have Mormon pioneer ancestors.

Five years ago, this would have surprised me. But at a family funeral, a relative I’d never met filled me in on the family story.

“Sit down, John.”

Turns out that one of my ancestors had been sent down to Mexico by Brigham Young (an early Mormon leader) to set up a polygamist Mormon colony.

Yeah. Back only five or so generations my great-great-great-great grandfather was zooming across international borders so that he could have multiple wives.

I had no idea, as I’m not Mormon, and NO one in my family had ever talked to me about that. But it’s certainly written in the DNA and confirmed through my Mormon Aunt.

Now I have to go see this.

But it makes sense that Ancestry.com has that data, because Ancestry.com is largely a Mormon venture, just like familysearch.org, which is a free genealogical website. The familysearch.org database might just be a bit suspect as you go thousands of years into the past, as you can go back to find Adam and Eve on it. And Julius Caesar (who had no kids). But it did show I was related to Charles Martel (Martel means “The Hammer”) who was so tough that he thought the title of “King” wasn’t enough for him. And I believe that, because men of status had lots and lots and lots of babies.

Genghis Kahn, who died in 1227, is the ancestor of 0.5% of the men alive on Earth today. Which was probably due to this (disputed) quote:

“The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms.”

And, as the grandfather of 0.5% of all the men on Earth . . . he apparently held a lot of wives. Maybe he was a Mormon, too?

Employee Retention

“A job’s come up and I thought about you, Clarice. Not a job, really. More of an interesting errand. Sit down.” – Silence of the Lambs

The Boy and friend enjoy cocoa in the break room before heading back to conduct a PowerPoint® presentation on marketing to five year olds. Sadly, The Boy would soon be let go due to age discrimination.

After you’ve been at a job for a while, you begin to count people in the room. Not just on who you could push out of the way to get to the door for a quick escape if you needed to, or who to blame when you took the last cup of coffee in the breakroom without making more. No, after a while, you begin to feel like a survivor, mainly because the faces around you keep changing.

How many people in the room were there five years ago? How many were there 10 years ago? I mean, not that they’ve been in the room the whole time, but that worked for the same company? (I’m assuming your company is like mine, and they have kinda strict rules about not wanting you to living in the conference rooms – it’s horrible when you find that out the hard way.)

I looked at my emails from February 19 five years ago and counted the number of people who emailed me. Then I counted those that were still with the company. There were 10 out of 25 still with the company. I did the math, and that calculated to a greater than 20% attrition, each year. A better survival rate than a doughnut in Oprah’s dining room? Sure. But still pretty grim.

So, five years go by? The company’s changed out most of the employees in my random-ish sample. But what did the attrition look like for mid-level managers? When I did the math, it was greater than 45%. I was surprised – it was a huge number. These were the people who were responsible for company results – and, generally, the employees had been pretty good, and the company had been really profitable during that time period. Almost half of them would leave yearly.

But that 45% attrition wasn’t the highest number I have run into – I looked at another company that I used to work at. Over a five year period, they’d had an 80% attrition rate. 80%! There was only one guy out of sixteen left. It probably won’t surprise you when I tell you that company closed down two years after I visited.

And some positions are even worse. One particularly key leadership position that I’ve observed (since I have worked closely with this position on and off) has seen seven people in ten years. If I add in interim leaders? That number goes up to NINE people in TEN years. For one job. One key job.

I did some research online – what’s a decent attrition rate? Some HR personnel said that less than 15% was a good, healthy number. But the smarter HR people said . . . hey, 15% is high. We want zero attrition in our high performers.

But can you keep the good ones, like the key leeader revolving door listed above?

No.

The world is changing at a pretty rapid pace:

Professor Richard Foster (which sounds like a made-up name) from some so-called college called “Yale” was reported by BBC to have done a study that looked at company lifespans. Turns out the average life of a company on the S&P 500 in the 1920’s was 67 years. In 2011-ish when he did his study? 15 years.

Companies don’t last as long now – your career may last longer than the life span of many S&P 500 companies. High performers? Those that want to make a large contribution will be quitting and going to those companies that are growing – that’s where the opportunity is. You can’t stop them from doing this, unless you have incriminating photos, or are paying them more than you really should. The second isn’t something that a company that’s not growing can (generally) do, so, they leave.

For good or bad, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that workers under forty today will hold 12 to 15 jobs in their lifetime. In a forty five year career? That’s a new job every three years.

So, low retention rates, short lifespan companies, and a job market that is driven by high employee turnover – it doesn’t really sound fun.

Good news! There is a way to stay longer at a company you love: I hear one way to stay at a company longer is to hide in the air ducts and only come out after the security guard makes the 10pm walk through. Might even be some leftover doughnuts in the breakroom.

Nope. Oprah was here. Sigh. Guess it’s ketchup and mustard packets for dinner again . . . .

Malthus, S-Curves, Rabbits, Construction, and Software Design

“One of the most widely used chemical compounds is zinc oxide. This policeman, this farmer, and this housewife don’t realize it, but they all depend on zinc oxide in their daily lives.” – Kentucky Fried Movie

The Alaska range at dawn. Not pictured: sexy farmers.

Thomas Malthus was a very, very gloomy guy – so much so that the term after his name, “Malthusian” has come to describe dismal, teeming masses of poor hungry people. He did the math and saw that food production produced arithmetically, and there were limits of how much food a single acre could produce, and a limit to how much food could be produced overall. People reproduced geometrically, and could reproduce much faster than the food supply. Probably because farming was and is much less fun than sex.

Looks like Pastor Malthus would be more of a party guy, and less of a “we’re all doomed” guy. Via Wikimedia

Pierre François Verhulst was modelling populations based on his reading of that gloomy Thomas Malthus, and (after a bit of tinkering in the math world by some other folks) they ended up with:

N(t)=K/1(+CKe^-rt)

Math sometimes solves multiple problems with the same solution. And one of those solutions is the S-Curve (or “Logistics Function”). Originally, Verhulst found it. What irritates me about Verhulst is that his middle name has that French curly-cue thingy hanging off the bottom of a perfectly useful “c”. So, we’ll just call him Pierre for the next sentence until we’re entirely done talking about him.

Here is Pierre – and he approved this picture, which kinda makes him look like offspring of a parrot and a serial killer. – Via Wikimedia

If you think back to an earlier (relatively popular) post (LINK) r is the rate of population growth, and K is the carrying capacity. If you maximum mating as your evolutionary strategy, you’re an r critter, like a rabbit. If you have a few offspring, and guard them like the crown jewels, you’re a K critter. If you go back to the post linked above, you’ll see how this equation determines the fate of nations . . . but this post is about more than that.

The equation above is (kinda sorta) what I graphed to make the following curve:

It’s called an S-curve (or sigmoid curve) because it looks like an “s” that’s been stretched out.

So, you can imagine that as a population of bunnies gets dropped on an unsuspecting continent with no natural bunny predators, the population will skyrocket, as happened when rabbits were introduced to Australia. In 1859, a dozen or so escaped from a hunting compound, and instead of forming the rabbit version of the A-Team they started reproducing, because rabbits like sex more than farming, too. That’s the beginning of the curve. Small growth, numbers wise, at first. A dozen rabbits, two dozen, a hundred, two hundred . . . .

As the numbers of rabbits increase, they reach a peak of maximum growth – they’re moving outward and taking over more and more territory. At the end? Growth slows as numbers peak.

In 1920, there were estimated to be 10,000,000,000 rabbits in Australia. Ten billion. In sixty years. Right now, it’s estimated that “only” 200,000,000 rabbits survive in Australia. The rabbit population growth followed the S-Curve until people figured out ways to, well, kill billions of rabbits. If they stopped killing rabbits, you’d see 10,000,000,000 in just a few years – the rabbits would shoot back up the curve.

Rabbit – it’s Australian for girlfriend, and these rabbits are drinking from the beer ponds of South Australia.

But it’s not just the population of Foster’s® drinking rabbits that this equation is used to predict.

Innovation

In many ways, the curve itself is a mathematical model of innovation or novelty. If you look at the adoption of a technology, for instance, it’s very well described by the curve. The adoption of the automobile, the Internet, (by population) television, radio, and even language elements are all explained by the S-curve.

My parents were, in many ways, really late stage adopters of stuff. Ma Wilder never had a microwave during when I lived at home – even though every one of my friends did. Video tape players? They got one when I was in college. They may have been the last “new” VCR purchasers.

Why? Don’t know. Pop Wilder had (generally) a really awesome income. It’s not like he was out of money – and he bought all the fancy stuff like VCRs and televisions with remote controls after he retired.

But this measure also applies to adoption of any new technology. And it shows that companies must continually innovate or their income streams will stagnate. Apple™ has made tons of money on the iPod© and the iPhone® and the iPad™ . . . but innovation has slowed, greatly. And nearly every phone is now an iPhone© or an Android™. When Jobs was a live, it really was the Steve-curve, rather than the S-curve. Now it’s the $-curve. Wonder how long that will last them? If they get in league with the forces of darkness and evil, maybe they can put together the NecrinomoPhone©, kinda like an iPhone™ but used to put you in league with Demons. Or Facebook®. But I repeat myself.

Construction

S-curves are tools used by construction companies to measure progress on construction jobs. When you think about it, construction starts slow. There isn’t a lot of work that can be done on a house until the foundation is in. And then framing can start, and then, once framing is complete and the building is sheathed? Lots of people can come and do their work at the same time – plumbers and electricians can do work with the drywall crew following closely behind. There is a great amount of work that takes place in a short time, provided there’s enough Copenhagen® and Bud Light™.

But finishing is hard – the last 5% often takes 20% of the project’s schedule. That’s because the available places for work drop off. And the last bits of work have to be done sequentially – you can’t put the carpet in until you’ve textured the ceiling, unless you like crunchy carpet. The S-curve is awesome at predicting the average construction time of a project.

Software Projects

Software projects are similar to building a house, except half of the houses completed would immediately burst in to explosive flame as soon as you tried to lock the front door. Oh, and you’d be locked inside. Inexplicably, every month your bedroom would mysteriously appear on the outside of the house, but in a different place each time. Sometimes you would flush the toilet and the light would turn off. Unless the switch for the fan was on, and then it would flush, but be refilled with goat’s blood.

We should be glad that contractors don’t hire software engineers. But the S-curve still defines the progress to the exploding houses that software engineers create.

Crop Response

If you don’t water a plant, it won’t grow. If a plant doesn’t have a vital nutrient, it won’t grow. If the farmer is having sex for reproductive purposes, well, the plant might grow if he remembered to water it and fertilize it.

But the responses to water and these vital nutrients is . . . an S-curve. Too little of that stuff? Low growth rates. Just right? High growth rates – but maybe you want to avoid maximum growth rates if the incremental fertilizer is expensive. Sometimes maximum isn’t optimum. Just ask Gary Busey.

But crops respond with that same S-curve response to the addition of a vital nutrient, or, if you gradually add in an inhibiting factor like salt, it forms an inverse S-curve – a little salt won’t hurt the wheat, but eventually it kills it and no production is possible.

There are other physical things that S-curves apply to – such as learning a foreign language (interesting), machine learning (complex) and tumor growth rates (ugh).

S-Curves also show up in seemingly unrelated things . . . like names and Chicken Pox. Source – XKCD.com

But Malthus has (at least for the last 225 years) been wrong. Food production increases have been amazing – we’ve gone from famines caused by crop failures to the only famines that currently exist are entirely political in nature. Food production has been increased through farming mechanization, nitrogen fertilizer production, food genetics, pesticide application, and better irrigation.

The continued S-curve of food innovation has saved billions of lives. And birthrates in most of the world are falling – leading to a real possibility that Malthus will be forever wrong, except about the “farmers like sex” thing.

12 Rules For Life: Return of the Jordan (Final Part of the Review Trilogy), Charles Atlas, The Simpsons . . . and Being a Man, The Definitive Review

“No. Not yet. One thing remains. Vader. You must confront Vader. Then, only then, a Jedi will you be. And confront him you will.” – Star Wars: Return of the Jedi

The Boy in full Vader get up. He looked at me and said, “You are my Father, John Wilder. Can I have more cake?” and then force-choked me when I said no, three pieces was enough. So I cut off his hand. That’s good parenting where I come from . . .

As promised, this is the final part of my book review for Dr. Jordan Peterson’s new bestseller, “12 Rules for Life.” You can find the first part here (LINK) and the second part here (LINK). Quotes, if not otherwise noted, are Peterson from the book. Sorry for the delay – the flu was busy attempting to eat my lungs. I’m better now.

I strongly recommend this book – and get no money if you buy it at this time – in the future, who knows?

Rule 9: Assume That The Person You’re Listening To Knows Something You Don’t

If you listen, most people are really not boring. Okay, some are. But they are mainly parents of children who haven’t graduated from high school and anyone from Iowa. Everybody else is interesting. Dr. Peterson talks about how he sat down with a woman, and within minutes she was telling him she was a witch. And not only that, a witch whose coven regularly got together and prayed for global peace – a world peace witch. By day? She was a minor bureaucrat; I imagined a driver’s license lady. Not who you’d size up to be a witch. Oh, wait. EXACTLY who you’d size up to be a witch.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve interviewed lots and lots of people for my job. I was never bored once. But I had people blurt out amazing things in the interview. “I got fired for stealing.” I was hiring for a position that had lots of financial responsibility, and maybe kinda lax oversight. No job there. “I hated my co-workers.” Yup. Big points for working well with others. Again, people will tell you amazing things if you just shut up and listen. Dates were interesting, too. Had one date where the girl’s plan was to go off and find herself in the Peace Corps after she’d just gotten out of a relationship with her husband who had buried a bus so he could grow illegal weed. Yeah, that night was an early exit.

But few enough actually listen (I’ve been guilty of that myself, lots of times) without responding – i.e., defining the problem for the speaker. Even worse is defining the situation for the speaker – Peterson discussed a woman who was unsure if she had been raped after continually getting drunk and going home with guys. He could have defined it as “yes” or “no” for her but that would have prevented her from sorting it out herself, which was crucial to helping her. He used this example to point out that being too intrusive in a conversation often warps it in a manner that changes the framework for the other person . . . and prevents them from getting better.

Peterson listens, because his theory is that people talk to simulate their reality. Humans are the only critters that do that – simulate entire worlds with our words and model the results of present actions into the future. When we run these simulations, we often simulate the words and behavior of others – I know I have a pretty accurate simulation of The Mrs. running. It’s over 98% accurate. The Mrs. likewise has one of me, too. We have tons of conversations with each other without even speaking to each other, because the other just our simulation.

Honest listening – turning off the simulator – is required for real conversation. Our filters and feedback contaminate the discussion. Once we get to that honest listening stage, we can have Real Conversations – Conversations where we truly hear each other and can create new knowledge, and sometimes solve our own problem.

Rule 10: Be Precise In Your Speech

Dr. Peterson begins with a discussion of the coming obsolescence of laptops. Most of our laptop experience is located outside of the laptop – it’s only a “single leaf, on a tree, in a forest . . .” Our laptops feed from all of the other computers out there – from the Facebook© servers to the wonderful servers that bring you Wilder, Wealthy and Wise and that Japanese cooking site you don’t want your wife to see that you’ve been to visit after she goes to bed so you can dream about sushi. Those exist outside of your laptop – and your laptop only pulls information from them.

But we don’t inhabit that forest. We inhabit a simplification of that world. In our world where we give objects purpose and meaning – we don’t let them simply exist – we give a car purpose – it must take us from one place to another. A light switch ceases to just exist – it gives us light, and in a blackout part of us is shocked (pun intended) when the switch doesn’t bring us light. Peterson feels that precision is required so we down drown in the vast amount of detail that surrounds us.

Our model gums up when violated. I used a light switch – Peterson uses a cheating spouse – inviting Chaos in. Peterson then pops some Yeats in the CD player for good measure:

The Second Coming, by W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Speech is required to sort this chaos out, to make sense of it, to dispel it. A night light might also be nice to scare the rough beast away?

“Say what you mean so you can find out what you mean. Act out what you say so you can find out what happens.”

Rule 11: Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding

Skateboarders are pretty talented, and Peterson spends some time discussing their skill, and the methods by which they optimize risks, which is crucial, Peterson felt, to growing as a man. Unfortunately (in Peterson’s opinion) there are adults who what to spoil all the fun by putting in features that make skateboarding impossible while also looking ugly at the same time.

Those adults are then (at least by proximity in the chapter) compared to a friend that Peterson had. Peterson’s friend (also discussed in earlier chapters) had a problem: he hated mankind. He came to no good, making himself a victim at every turn, and learning to hate beautiful, successful people. They seemed to make him even madder. Dr. Peterson then followed up with a description of a TEDx talk by a professor . . . who also hated the human race. These self-appointed judges spoil the fun . . . and the risk.

And the result? Boys are being pushed out. 25% of college degrees granted are in the fields of healthcare, psychology, education, and public administration. 80% of these degrees go to women. Peterson feels that this is Not Good. If projections hold, there will be very few men in non-STEM fields in the next few years. And this is bad for women.

Huh?

How many college-educated women consider, say, a plumber a great catch? Some, to be sure, but not many. When it comes to marriage, women tend to marry someone either at the same social/economic status or of a higher status. As those guys disappear?

Marriage becomes something for the rich. The rest of the girls get hookups in their twenties, and a basket of cats when they hit 33. If they have kids, the results are similarly grim – because single parent families are statistically inferior in every way to dual parent families. So those rich kids? Yeah, life will be better for them. Because they have two parents.

Maybe patriarchy isn’t so bad? Feminism is a creation of Marxism (per Jordan), and between that and post-modernist thought – we’re trying to fundamentally remake civilization in ways that may not be as stable as civilization created over the last 11,000 years or so. And Marxism led to Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. And that idea became the most deadly idea of the entire 20^th century – killing more people, primarily their own citizens than any other idea.

Peterson REALLY doesn’t like Post Modernism, either, since it’s a philosophy that says there’s no truth and makes the claim “that logic itself is a merely a part of the oppressive patriarchal system.”

Boys are boys, but society is trying to force them to be girls, per Peterson. Which is really, really wrong. Biology is a huge part of what makes a boy act like a boy, and a girl act like a girl. Then, a large amount of (enjoyable) discussion about ancient gods and Disney© animated movies.

Then we get back to Peterson, talking about when he worked on a railway crew. Peterson uses these (amusing) stories about men and how they want particular behavior from other men: Do your job. Don’t whine. Don’t be a suck up. What to men want and value from other men? “Be tough, entertaining, competent and reliable.”

The above ad is from comic books, literally all comics books, of the 1950’s and 1960’s. I sent away for as similar set of books. You, too can learn Karate for only $19.95. If you can learn karate by yourself from a book. With a poor work ethic.

Peterson (really) feels that the Charles Atlas ad captures a lot of human sexuality in seven panels. Women want tough men. It’s here that he combines The Simpsons and Fifty Shades of Grey in the same hilarious paragraph. Lisa Simpson doesn’t want Milhouse, dude, she wants a kinky billionaire. Or that bad kid from Springfield Elementary. Or a dude that will keep you safe on the beach.

Because women want men. Tough men. And you get men through risk. Through . . . skateboarding.

Rule 12: Pet A Cat When You Encounter One On The Street

Peterson baits and switches here – starting with a discussion on dogs. But he brings back to cats, and also to the theme of the chapter – human suffering. It will literally suck to be a human. People die. People suffer, sometimes horribly and inexplicably. But, somehow, Superman™ needs Kryptonite© – this suffering makes life, well, not interesting, but certainly not fake.

It’s a worthy chapter, and my summary is short because I’m not one to use Peterson’s tough times, and I rarely write about my own. I’ll give you my bullet point summary:

Dogs are Happy
Cats have Terms and Conditions for Love
Enjoy Both Dogs and Cats – They Have Purity of Being
Because Life Sucks

CODA: Not The Led Zeppelin Album

Peterson caps it off – again, buy the book. I’ll just ask you – what do you want for yourself tomorrow? What about next year? Who could you be if you really tried?

So, that’s it. It’s a pretty long review, and I’m glad you stuck it out this far.

Pluses of the book? Amazing philosophical content. Easy read. Original thoughts.

Downside? Chapters could be more evenly edited to tie the content together, and follow the old rule – tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, tell ‘em, tell ‘em what you told ‘em. There are several chapters that I read a second time after about a week to write this review, and being prepped with the previous read and knowing what to look for, I enjoyed the chapters much more. Maybe this review will act as a guide you can use when you go through it to look for more content that sparks your interest.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Peterson also dictated this book – many of the passages sound like speech turned into text, though I might be wrong since I’ve heard a LOT of Peterson speaking but very little of his written stuff.

Overall verdict: totally recommend it. Best way ever to confront Vader. And then the Ewoks burned my copy – because they stopped making Star Wars® in 1983. Wonder what would have happened if they had made a sequel or two? I’m glad they never did.

The Economics of Love, Lee Iacocca, Hamburgers, and Statistics

Horace Tabor: “Wait a minute, you can’t buy a woman for money!”
Mad Jack Duncan: “You just try and get one without it.”

– Paint Your Wagon

Flowers for Mother’s Day. 2006 or so. See, I’m a romantic.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

It’s Wealthy Wednesday here at Wilder, Wealthy and Wise, so let’s look at Money. And Love.

Are money and love connected? Intimately connected, though they don’t text each other as much as FBI agents do. (Seriously – 50,000 texts to a mistress using the company phone? They’d burn you or I alive as a lesson to the surviving employees before they fired us.)

But money is related to love – married couples are four times (4!) wealthier than their unmarried compatriots. Actually, each of the married partners has twice what they would have had if they were single, but there are two of them, so, four times. Why?

Stable – If you’re married, you have an emotional backstop and cheerleader. If you’re single, you have a starter cat on your way to becoming a cat lady.
Multiple Income Streams – Although both of you might not be working – both of you can work if necessary. That makes working through a family economic crisis easier.
Economy of Scale – Two can’t live as cheaply as one. But it doesn’t cost twice as much for a married couple.
Accountability – You’ve got someone to help you make better choices – like not going to the bar on Tuesday night. And Wednesday night. And Thursday night . . . .
Healthier, and Happier (but Fatter) – Married couples are consistently healthier and happier than their unmarried counterparts. This translates into better wages and greater productivity at work – and more money.
Responsibility – You’re working not only for yourself, but others depend on you. You’d better do your best.

So, yes, being married matters. But you have to choose wisely: divorced folks are actually worse off than never-married folks from a financial perspective. Wilder Love Advice #1: If you get married, stay married.

How did I learn that wonderful advice? I broke it. I got a divorce, way long into the distant past. Why? I assure you the reasons were pretty good.

As Henny Youngman asked: “Why are divorces so expensive?”

“They’re worth it.”

But divorces are expensive:

Lawyers are expensive. They have to buy BMWs and pay for their mistresses and their own divorces.
Alimony, which is a medical procedure where the wallet is extracted through the nose.
Cost of splitting stuff – like household goods. Now you need two irons. And two coffee makers. And two Holy Grails.
Child care goes up. You’re both working now, so someone has to watch the children.
Child support costs bunches. And, ironically, is often not even spent on the child . . . .

If my calculations are right, (they were done some time ago) my divorce cost me over $250,000 in 2017 dollars. Not all of that money went to my ex-wife – a lot of it was interest on money I had to borrow to pay her off. If I had put that money into the stock market instead? It would be worth about $650,000 right now. So, yeah, divorce is pricey.

But worth it.

Besides not getting married, how do you avoid divorce? I think the best answer involves retired automotive executive Lee Iacocca. Iacocca was famous for being the brains behind the original Mustang® from Ford™. When Chrysler Motor Company© was nearly bankrupt, they hired Iacocca to come run the place as CEO.

This is Lee Iacocca – who never had tapioca in Topeka (at least as far as I know). But the man sure knew his burgers . . . and his love of burgers can teach you about . . . love. (photo Public Domain)

Back then, being the CEO of a major company came with perks – Chrysler had a chef hired just to cook for the CEO. Like lunch. A guy whose job it was to cook for one person. So on his first day, Iacocca’s assistant asked him what he wanted for lunch – Iacocca replied, whatever, get me a hamburger.

Iacocca was at his desk, looking over some numbers when the burger came back. He absently took a bite of the burger and then stopped. The burger was amazing.

The burger was the best burger he had ever had. Ever.

He dropped everything. “I need to talk to the chef.”

They introduced Lee to the chef – “Chef, this is the best burger I’ve ever had. What did you do?”

The chef got a thick, marbled ribeye out of the refrigerator, and ground it up.

Chef: “First you start with the right meat.” And that’s the secret with marriage – marry a ribeye. Start with the right meat.

After my first marriage I knew what I didn’t want. And if you don’t know exactly what you want, at least knowing what you don’t want gives a direction. The night I met The Mrs. (at that time she was The Miss), I actually interviewed her (LINK) to verify that none of the things that had plagued my previous relationship would surface in her particular bag of insanity. She passed. And yes, I really did use evil interviewing techniques the night we met.

Let’s say you suck at interviewing. How do you avoid a divorce?

Start with a ribeye of a partner.
If you’re looking for a girl – she shouldn’t have had many sexual partners. More than a few and divorce is in the air on day one. There is, however, no correlation with large numbers of sexual partners and guys being a divorce risk. Who says it’s bad to be a guy? We even get to die first!
If they’ve lived with a bunch of people, or even one or two?
If their parents are divorced?
If their values are significantly different?
Ideal age for a bride?
Used to be: Piercings, tattoos, and strangely colored hair? Now in 2018? Still risky.
Liberals get divorces much more frequently than conservatives.
If you smoke and they don’t?
If they smoke and you don’t?
The smoking thing? Replace it with drinking. If you drink, she should drink.
Be Catholic. Very low divorce rate, also wine on Sunday.
Be a college graduate. Marry a college graduate. Low divorce rates and better insults during arguments.
Make more than $50,000. Money problems tear up a relationship. Actually “Lack of money problems” is a better description.
Don’t be knocked up. Easier if you’re a dude.
Don’t have a daughter as child number one. Dunno why – higher divorce rate.

On this St. Valentine’s Day you can even follow my routine: I’ll get home, ask what’s for dinner, complain that it has onions in it, and then grab The Mrs. and look deeply into her eyes. I’d give her chocolates, flowers and a card. Except I’m not 12. I’ll lean my lips in, brushing her ear with them as I tell her, barely above a husky whisper,

“You have produced an adequate wealth effect in my life.”

I’m all romantic like that.