Sippican Cottage
Donate

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin

August 21, 2013 13 Comments

People do get good at things.

It’s more than interesting to get a peek at someone at the top of their game — no matter what their game is — it’s fun. We watch men in pajamas fight over a leather bag with a bladder in it on a striped lawn. Enjoying watching a man fillet some fish isn’t that strange.

The best kind of reality shows simply point a camera at the unseen parts of quotidian life. How It’s Made isn’t the best show on television. It’s the best show that’s ever been on television. Whenever I hear a politician or pundit talk about a modern economy like they understand it well enough to run it, I want to burst out laughing, or cry, or both. If you can’t even keep pictures of your dick off the Intertunnel during an election cycle, I imagine being Emperor of the Economic and Social Universe is probably well above your abilities. Politicians have to take tours of factories because to them, everything and everybody in a factory might as well be alchemy performed by men from Jupiter.

There’s a disconnect between love of work and the workplace right now. Most employees don’t like where they work, or what they do all day, or where they live, but the enormous weight of regulatory, legal and financial inertia that employment and daily life is freighted with keeps them in settings they detest, working with and for people they resent. Most of even the best drag their feet to get a feeling of control over their situation. Many actively sabotage their workplace to achieve a feeling of self-possession.

The employers react to the ambivalence or malice of the workers by attempting to micromanage their activities, and by occasionally changing out the workforce like a dirty diaper instead of a group of fellow humans. One set of politicians says that management is evil; the other set says the employees are lazy and stupid, and each makes their appeals to one tribe by promising to hurt the other. Every once in a while they both decide that the American population would be more useful to them if they were all foreigners, who will do what they’re told and say thank you for a slap in the face for at least one generation before they get uppity.

The dirty secret is that there is no difference between labor and management. People are people. The general tenor of life is not dictated by the eloi or the morlocks. The general view of other humans by individuals is expressed by everyone, and the manifestation of that general view winnows people into recognizable roles that can be demagogued, but we’re all fish from the same fry, and swim in the same tepid, dirty water. Most humans just don’t have a high regard for their fellow humans any more, and they don’t really care what they’re doing at work, and don’t take much pride in themselves. And people in management have the same attitude about their employees, not because they’re unlike them, but because they’re exactly like them. Everyone thinks everyone else can go to hell, and tries to get away with everything they can that won’t result in prison or the cable TV being shut off. It’s not a recipe for workplace harmony, or excellence.

When I was young I was taught by a dead society that dignity was internal; that a man that filleted salmon for a living could be noble by dint of his effort, comportment, and his value to his fellow man; that all men were created equal, but that their worth could (and should) be judged by how they behaved in this world, especially when they thought no one was looking. I was not taught that goldbricking and featherbedding and tossing a sabot in the gears was a road to dignity. I was not taught that lording over disposable underlings was a path to greatness.

But I’m talking to a wall. And there’s nothing but writing on it.

There Is Too Much Butter… On… Those… Trays

April 24, 2013 2 Comments

I’ve often remarked that the most productive use of a blogger’s time would be to simply to point a camera out the window wherever they were.

I don’t think newscasts should have hosts. They should have a camera and point it toward things. I don’t think newspapers should quote anyone. They should print the text of proposed legislation, not talk about it.

I found the video fascinating, and well-done. I didn’t know much about Barcelona, at least not up-to-date knowledge of it. I recognized lots of buildings in it because I’m not illiterate, but I’ve never been there. It’s vanishingly unlikely I’ll ever go there. Still, it’s useful to know what it’s like there, even superficially. You can find out all sorts of things by paying attention. There was a street sign pointing out the way to Karl Marx Place, for instance. That was interesting to me, and told me things. I didn’t notice a sign for Hitler Circle, or the Stalin Memorial Abattoir, or the Mengele Park Towers, or Vlad the Impaler Children’s Hospital, or the Idi Amin Culinary Academy, but they might have been there, and I missed it. I’ll have to watch it again.

Marvelous Mockba

April 7, 2013 3 Comments

Russia is a gangster state.

In the 1920s and 30s, lots of countries descended into gangsterism. Enormous forces, seen and unseen, pushed and pulled at people like taffy. Like horses in a burning barn, they thrashed around looking for an alternative to the rude discomforts all around them. The world is descending into gangsterism again.

Of course there’s never a shortage of Savonarolas abroad in the land. Rasputins. Caudillos and ministers and seers and strongmen. When people are suitably tenderized with the hammer of bipartisan rage followed by ennui, the gangsters take over, and add “Democratic” to the country’s name, usually, while extracting democracy like a molar with a rusty pliers. One tug, once, and it’s gone.

So Mockba sends shady people trained in the arts of war without governors to administer polonium enemas to anyone that gets in the way of looting the treasury, and the country settles down into a low boil of avoiding the wrong people with the right connections, and getting on with your life. And to someone like me that remembers the ultimate gangster state that preceded it, it’s wonderful to see.

Watching the pandemonium depicted on Mockba’s ubiquitous dashcams, and the wild melees in the street over rights of way, it’s easy to forget that none of that was necessary before, because the average person had nothing but fear or smugness in their interactions before. If you were a nobody, you’d have to immediately gauge if your tormenter was important in a pecking order hidden behind an unsmiling Berian mask. If you had a place in the ruling class, you’d only have to determine if your fender bender was caused by someone with a single-digit party card. You could treat anyone else any way you wanted. And there were no fender benders to fight over anyway, because no one had a car. You’d simply have to apologize to any driver that ran you over in a crosswalk because you knew they were important enough to have a vehicle.

So now the average person can fight with his fists in the street over slights with another average person, and a kind of rumble of vibrancy is demonstrated. It’s not a fair fight top to bottom, of course, but the crooks that run the place are more discerning gangsters than before, and don’t trifle themselves with the affairs of little people so much. And the little people make everything  go, if you will but let them. That’s why the lights are on, and the cars buzz here and there, and the boats full of people that don’t look like beaten dogs when the newspaper boy makes his delivery go to and fro.

Looks like life.

From 2009: The Angel Investors Have Horns

April 1, 2013 4 Comments

(First offered in 2009. I think I was cranky because I had been pawed over without effect by a bunch of VCs a year or so before that. Venture Capitalists, not Viet Cong. Hard to tell the difference sometimes) 

Interesting discussion about making money over at 37 signals.

People alternate between revulsion for and adoration of people who make money. There is currently an enormous reliance on style points in choosing between execration and exaltation. A large swath of the public believes that only money that you appear to get by accident, like gambling winnings; salaries for activities others do for free — like sports; passive income like many Internet websites provide without really doing anything; and the wages of idiot celebrity, including, of course, selling autobiographies even though you’ve never done anything, are the only approved methods of getting rich. No matter what, you have to seem like you’re not interested in making money. Persons think that Steve Jobs is less avaricious than Bill Gates, for instance. Sure he is.

The exploitation of quirks in a system in which you do not fully or willingly participate in is another fave. Enough illegality to seem exciting but not exactly criminal is considered THE piquant style point, of course. See Office Space or Trading Places for amusing examples of the genre.

Our weird ideas about whether or not you’re doing it in the approved hipster fashion mask an underlying problem. Making money as an entrepreneur is hard. But somewhat counterintuitively, the hardest way to make money might be to have it handed to you.

This is one of the reasons I encourage entrepreneurs to bootstrap instead of taking outside money. On day one, a bootstrapped company sets out to make money. They have no choice, really. On day one a funded company sets out to spend money. They hire, they buy, they invest, they spend. Making money isn’t important yet. They practice spending, not making.

Bootstrapping puts you in the right mindset as an entrepreneur. You think of money more as something you make than something you spend. That’s the right lesson, that’s the right habit, the right imprint on your business brain. You’re better off as an entrepreneur if you have more practice making money than spending money. Bootstrapping gives you a head start.

The world is rather a harsh place for true entrepreneurs just now, much more so than for people that are gaming some system for money, which has become the Holy Grail of angel investors. I’ve learned everything in this life the hard way, and the hardest lesson to learn is to only borrow money — which includes accepting capital for a piece of the action — to expand on something that already makes money.

Don’t get me wrong; if your business plan is to fleece investors, by all means, take the money. Billy Ray Valentine would.

Greenville 1969

March 10, 2013 5 Comments

Greenville, Maine 1969.

Treat yourself to the rest of the Flickr Photostream slideshow.  It’s a stone groove.

Greenville’s northeast of where I live now. It’s on the shore of Moosehead Lake. Never been. It’s Piscataquis. I’m an Oxford man. Next to no one lives in Greenville year-yound, but there’s resort getaways for bug bites or chill blains to taste.

I’m old enough to be one of the small children you can see in the pictures taken earlier in the evening, but the age is all we have in common. They watched a super 8 movie, projected on a bedsheet. Then they got put to bed, and mom and pop partied hearty. It’s New Year’s.

These are wealthy people. At least that’s what they seemed to people like us in 1969. Those are dentist’s sons and car dealership owner’s daughters. Things have changed and people on the dole own snowmobiles now, but it wasn’t always thus. Rich people skiied and we went sledding. They played tennis and we played hockey on the corduroy ice on a pond. They drove Citroens while we sat four across in the back seat of a Dodge Dart watching the road pass by through the rust holes in the floor. They let their hair down on New Year’s Eve, after the children were snug in their beds, at a modest lodge in the middle of nowhere Maine, while my parents watched Guy Lombardo on a black and white TV.

Maybe ten, fifteen years after that, the world opened up and everyone had nice cars and big houses and their kids wore what they liked instead of what was left over from a cousin’s closet from the previous decade. Regular people went to the hairdresser and bought their clothes instead of making them from patterns at the Newberry’s. Ordinary people ate strawberries out of season and vegetables that weren’t from a can. It became quotidian to fly on planes and go to movies. The dentist life was there for pipefitters. The pipefitter’s kids got braces and the dentist kids went Gekko.

And now, for reasons that can’t be explained, except to say for no good reason, regular people are plunged back into a dark age; back to pressing their snotty noses to the window for a peek at the dentists. Back to Greenville, 1969.

Tag: a boot stomping on a human face forever

Picture of sippicancottage

sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

Find Stuff:
Archives
Recent Comments
Recent Posts
Tags