Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

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.

Kipling, Gods of The Copybook Headings, and It’s Different This Time

“I prefer Kipling. ‘The female of the species is more deadly than the male.’” – Clue

So, yeah, I drove by this one time. Didn’t stop.

Ahhhh, Kipling.

Kipling won the Nobel™ Prize© in literature back when it meant something, i.e., before the Nobel® committee discovered the internet, started spending time on Facebook®, stopped reading entirely and, remembering on a Thursday they were still supposed to give some award away related to something called “literature”, awarded one to Bob Dylan thinking he might bring some primo weed to Stockholm if he won. Instead? Bobby didn’t show up at all, and sent them a crappy recording describing a book report that a teacher would flunk a freshman for (really) instead of a lecture.

And no weed for the committee.

Can a Nobel® Physics™ Prize© be too far out for the guy who did the special effects for Star Wars™? At least that guy ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm, no more, either.

Seriously. Bob Dylan? For literature?

Anyhow, back to Kipling. He wrote poems that were amazing in the rhythm, word choice, and thoughts behind the poem. I’ve previously mentioned “If” – which has for decades been one of my favorites – that post is here (LINK).

Another favorite of mine is the following one, The Gods of The Copybook Headings. It was written in the aftermath of World War One, which was particularly devastating for both England, generally, and Kipling, personally. The title refers to books that school children used to practice penmanship by copying the same sentences again. And again. And again. The phrases that they used were typically based on Bible verses or other generally accepted moral aphorisms.

The Gods of The Copybook Headings

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Kipling was weary. He’d seen that when people varied from accepted wisdom and morality, the results were . . . horrifying. The idea was simple: the experiences and accumulated wisdom of thousands of years of civilized human experience might (just maybe!) have something to say to us, here, now and today. Well, his today was 1919, which isn’t really our today. Everything is different now, right?

Peterson refers to Christian morality (and the Bible in general) as an emergent phenomenon. It is worth far more than the sum of its parts – it has been distilled and the relatively simple parts produce an amazingly complex outcome – here’s a link to my post that included that (LINK). With Christianity, it’s a measure of its complexity that it eventually produced the conditions required for the birth of science and the freedoms that eventually sprang from the Reformation. It’s an irony that Christianity gave birth to the very society that could look at Christianity critically – and it could ask the hard questions about itself – because of itself.

Kipling gives an innate understanding of what Glubb would later begin to quantify (LINK). Kipling also seems prescient in exactly the places our moral failings would begin to falter – from the general populace disarmament that led to the biggest slaughters in all of history to our greed that led to multiple stock market bubbles . . . and the associated collapses.

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Rudyard spoke of the dangers of collectivism, even before the full horrors of the Soviet Union and communism appeared, costing at least seventy million lives. Yet even now, after the complete and demonstrated failure of collectivism, we’re pretty sure Venezuela will be paradise. Did I say Venezuela? I meant California. What, California now leads the United States in poverty? Hmmm. Hang on, I’ll get back to you. Just must be the wrong people putting it in practice. It certainly can’t be that greed for the wealth of others produces nothing but pain and sorrow. Covet not . . . hmmm.

Kipling even nailed that in failed collectivist states that beyond the moral and economic destruction of the country, even money itself would be degraded to the point of uselessness. To double it up? Kipling knew that we would delude ourselves to believe that collectivism was worth trying again. And again.

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

I think that Sin must test pretty poorly in market research – “Seems like it’s pretty judgmental, Alex?” But I think Sin is there for a reason. Sinning is bad. It can be seen that the morality of a dual parent household is unmistakable in its superiority statistically. It’s really not even close when it comes to outcomes for children.

And marriage is hard. Very hard. It’s much easier just . . . having random sex. And not having marriage. And not having kids. And the very end of a civilization, since without the morality that gave birth to it, it can no longer produce the intellectual capital, the wealth, and the free society that allows people to make moral choices.

It doesn’t produce enough strong men.

Thankfully, the chaos that emerges produces strong men that make hard choices. But it’s a pretty rough ride. Well it has been.

I’m reliably informed by the Gods of The Market . . . that it’s different this time.

Sick. Will post on Monday, even if still Sick.

Facebook, Why People Quit, and Why You’re Not Important

BRETT: What’s the matter?

LAMBERT: I can’t see a goddamn thing.

KANE: Quit griping.

LAMBERT: I Iike griping.

– Alien

The Cub Scouts had a lousy record of shooting down incoming enemy plains, even though they designed their jobs.

This month on Google news, I saw a link for an article called, “Why People Really Quit Their Jobs,” at the Harvard® Business Review™ (HBR). I clicked on it. I don’t suggest that you do, but if you want to it’s here (LINK). Since it was before I had enough coffee to engage the higher reasoning centers of my brain, I nodded, zombie-like, as I read it. I probably drooled a bit, too. I wrote down on a sticky note that this might be a good topic to blog about. See, I think about you, dear reader, all of the time-even in my sub-human decaffeinated state.

Now, I’ve visited this topic before (LINK) in a definitive post about one of the most definitive books on the subject ever written – First Break All the Rules. I heartily recommend this book, and get no money if you buy it at this link (as of this writing). Read my post first – it’s the Wilder’s® Notes (Cliff’s Notes™ was taken, and neither of us wanted to be sued by Cliff Bars®).

If you don’t read the HBR article (again, I don’t recommend it, it rambles and is as poorly edited for flow as a copier fixed by a Chihuahua – and that comes from a one-man-show blogger who does these posts start to finish in three to six hours, admittedly in a flash/flourish of brilliance) the TL;DR version is:

OMG, I totally cannot believe that people quit Facebook®!!!
OMG, why???
Stock options are awesome!!
OMG here’s why:
- “They left when their job wasn’t enjoyable,”
- “their strengths weren’t being used,”
- “and they weren’t growing in their careers.”
OMG, fix that by:
- Designing meaningful jobs (for stars) that people enjoy. Let them design their own!
- Use their strengths, silly!
- Allow people flexibility when they don’t like travel or want to make babies.
- Babies? So 1990. So toxic!

Yeah. It’s that shallow. Here’s an example sentence embedded in the squalid mess of pretentiousness if you don’t believe me:

“At Facebook, our head of diversity is a former lawyer, journalist, and talk show host; one of our communications leaders used to sing in a rock band; and one of our product managers is a former teacher.”

Yeah. I’m pretty sure that they have no idea how stupid that sounds. And I’m also pretty sure that the head of diversity . . . does absolutely nothing of value for Facebook®. Nothing. A communications leader? Not sure what that is, but I’d bet they’re just another leach on the profits the company produces. And a product manager sounds good. At least it involves capitalism in some fashion, maybe?

Whenever you think of a position and its value – ask yourself this: does the NFL® have that position?

No. There is no VP of Football Diversity at New England. Belichick would give birth to living kittens if they hired one, and I would pay $1,000,000 for the rights to broadcast that on YouTube®, and an extra $1500 per Belichick-cat hybrid. Football teams have a mission – winning (except you, Cleveland). And a business should have a mission – creating mutual value for customers, but also creating profit for shareholders. You know, because they own the place.

What they’re missing is that it’s not just these jobs that don’t produce value, it’s that most of the things they do at Facebook® produce little to no value. Price’s Law (discussed in my Jordan Peterson post here (LINK)) shows that of the 20,000 employees at Facebook™, 141 (the square root of 20,000) produce half of the value. It is a certainty that the “head of diversity” is not one of those 141. Nor anyone in HR. Or probably anyone who wrote this article.

I assure you, those 141 people are enjoying work, using their strengths, and get whatever they want from the boss if there’s an issue. They’re probably getting paid a king’s ransom, too, if the culture allows it. And they deserve it. Those 141 people account for $20 billion in revenue.

I had a chance to manage an amazing performer – Willie. I’ve mentioned him before (LINK). Although the company wouldn’t allow me to pay him more even though he’d routinely save them a million a year, in a bad year, and would have saved them from a billion dollar investment based on bad physics (really) if they would have listened to him. But what’s physics when you’re trying to do a business deal, right? Oh, yeah.

A billion dollars (and I’m not making this number up).

Me? I have Willie the maximum amount of flexibility that I could. I couldn’t give him a raise, but I could let him buy almost unlimited computer goodies. It seemed like he had a new laptop every month. Plus the cutting edge in peripherals. As his boss, I generally got the best of his cast-off equipment.

Another employee (not a high revenue employee, but still nice and pleasant) decided to order a new computer.

John Wilder: “Send it back.”

Other Employee: “But you let Willie have one.”

John Wilder: “You’re not Willie.” And they knew that, too. I didn’t treat everyone in the group the same, but I did try to treat them fairly. I think they knew that, too. At least they all nodded when I asked them that during employee review time.

The 141 are the most important people at Facebook™. Honestly, most of the remaining 19,850 or so people at Facebook® are interchangeable and simply lucky to be working at Facebook© rather than being a barista or hauling garbage or working at a cement kiln. And that’s not bad. You need people who just go to work, put in their time, get their job done, enjoy it, and go home. Not every part in the engine is a spark plug. I’ve been a spark plug, and I’ve been a broken wiper switch, sometimes at the same company (though rarely in the same year). The company needs both.

And that’s not to say that you don’t have the ability to make everyone feel awesome, too. I’m willing to bet that Facebook® probably has baristas and jesters and blacksmiths working for them. You can allow and encourage everyone to have fun – there’s no reason not to. And I firmly believe that managers should support their employees – and not be dictators.

I’ve always viewed the position of manager as having a moral dimension – it was important that every employee that ever reported to me was touched positively by the experience – they may not have liked me, but they were a better employee, more productive, more moral person because of the experience. I figured if I could do that, the company had to win, too, even if the employee wasn’t a spark plug.

Remember, those 19850 remaining employees still produce half the revenue – though the formula is recursive – 140 of those 19850 make $10 billion for the company. Oops. But, really, if everyone designed their own job, nobody would do the dishes and the toilet would never be clean. And that would describe my basement . . . sigh.