Amway Without the Soap

If you’ve been hiding under a rock lo these many years, everything depicted in this video might be news to you. If so, I’d like the address of your rock, and want to sublet part of the shadow from you. Even if you are clued in, the refresher course they put under all these videos on RubeTube with a link to Wikipedia won’t do you any harm:

Sovereign citizen movement
Wikipedia • The sovereign citizen movement is a loose group of anti-government activists, conspiracy theorists, vexatious litigants, tax protesters and financial scammers found mainly in English-speaking common law countries—the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand.

If you’re wondering what Mexicans like to watch on TV, wonder no further. Most everyone here likes to watch Americans getting arrested. There are about a zillion YouTube channels that mimic the hoary original TV show, Cops, and I swear my friends in Yucatan watch all of them. In the first AirBnB we rented a couple of years ago, if you turned on the TV without subscription logins in hand, all you got was Cops dubbed in Spanish as the single default channel. As far as Mexico goes, there are no home grown versions of these arrest videos, because people don’t act like that here, and are mystified and modestly entertained by watching Americans fling their poo at the popo.

All the entertainment and commentary in these videos are the downstream effect of demanding that police wear body cameras all the time. It didn’t work out like they planned. Everyone still tries the I can’t breathe dindu nuthin’ dodge. No one’s buying it anymore, because there’s an almost unlimited supply of bodycam depictions of diddo everythin’. They show that American police are generally polite and professional, to the point of being overly deferential to raging a-holes, if you ask me. The cops seem mostly resigned to the “catch and release” program of the judiciary, and plod along, wearily asking, over and over, if any driver has a valid driver’s license, a current registration, and paid up insurance. They’re all hoping to someday find that single, elusive driver, every traffic cop’s white whale, someone who can answer, “Yes.”

So my Mexican friends are quite well versed in the art of PIT maneuvers, window breakage, generous applications of pepper spray, wobbly straight line walking, jerking eye motions, and fighting with the cops while declaiming, “I’m not resisting.” But they were all mystified by Sovereign Citizens. The Spanish subtitles are of no use to a Spanish speaker, because the English being spouted is of no use to an English speaker. The people are plain nuts, but they don’t appear to be like the usual meth-addled impromptu Grand Theft Auto contestants that the Arkansas state troopers are currently ramming at 120 MPH. So they ask me, “¿Qué onda?” What gives?

After some cogitation, I realized I had seen this sort of behavior before, but not where you might have expected to find it. Sovereign Citizenry is just Amway without the soap. I’ll explain.

Both sets of people construct an alternate reality, live in it, and expect the world to conform to them. IYKYK is the INRI nailed to the top of the cross they’ve fashioned for themselves. Amway people, and their MLM ilk, reject the fundamental laws of economics, entrepreneurship, success, and social relationships. SovCits reject the fundamental laws of, well, laws, along with all sorts of government authority, contracts, jurisdiction, and identity.

Common sense isn’t common, as they say, but it’s much, much less common in both sets of cults than among the genpop. For instance, common sense tells you that when two burly uniformed men carrying handcuffs, mace, pistols, tasers, batons, and a paystub from the local police station say, “You’re under arrest,” the appropriate response is not, “No I’m not.”

Both groups trump common sense with their indomitable adherence to Hidden Knowledge. They believe that ordinary people are trapped by their slavish idolatry of obvious rules, and the only way out is to learn The Secret Rules. Back in the Pleistocene Era before the internet, when people learned about things like this only by word of mouth, everyone eventually had a “friend” at work who invited you to a gathering at their house that was totally social, trust me, but somehow instantly devolved into a guy scribbling on a whiteboard telling you how much money you could make by signing up everyone you know by telling them how much money they could make, by signing up everyone they knew…. Then you all sold soap to each other to get rich. Or Tupperware. Or timeshares. Or whatever.

Now we have the internet, and hooboy, it’s the equivalent of a bosh cropduster. Not only can someone in Arkansas convince someone in Arizona that Black’s Law Dictionary is the new Holy Bible, they can sell them stuff directly and make money off it. Fictitious license plates. Weird ID cards. Books and reams of mimeographed law-talking-guy drivel to clutch while you explain to a judge why you’re not a person, you’re a Moorish National, even though you’ve lived in Oklahoma since the doctor slapped you, apparently much too vigorously.

It’s the ritualized documentation that both groups adore that makes their Venn diagrams completely overlap. Sovereign Citizens produce blizzards of pseudo-legal filings, affidavits, notices, stamps, and citations. You’ll often see their latest victims literally reading off a script while the cops roll their eyes and call for backup. MLMs are about the same, and produce plans, scripts, motivational systems, charts, seminars, books, and endless “training materials” that are little more than business plans for bothering your friends, neighbors, and co-workers. The worst of these people, which is generally a 100% tie for first place, drag their children into it, too, like the woman in the video. And when it fails (it always does), they’ll tell you that you didn’t do it hard enough, or maybe it’s just proof that the system is totally corrupt, man, and by the way, would you like to buy my book that exposes the totally corrupt system?

Both worlds generally operate best when they catch people who are having some sort of personal crisis. The SovCits quote every crazy pseudo-legalism they can dream up, but eventually the cops find out they simply have four DUIs, or fourteen speeding tickets they forgot to pay, or some other impetus to declare to cops, like Obi-Wan Kenobi in a trucker’s cap, that these are not the laws you’re looking for.

The MLMs appeal mostly to people who’ve run aground on the shores of regular commerce. Financial stress and loneliness is a powerful motivator to listen to someone who says they have the cheat code to that Sandals Vacation you’ve been dreaming of since you got laid off with no severance.

So it’s kinda fun to see a SovCit tell a policeman that he’s allowed to drive 90 mph in a school zone because he’s not driving in a car, he’s traveling in his vessel under maritime law. It’s less fun to try to explain it to Mexicans.

And for some reason, they never want to drive anywhere with me.

Feed The Monkey Redux

About a dozen years ago, a joke I wrote on my blog was copied and pasted into every major news outlet in the United Kingdom, without attribution. A soccer coach (yeah, I know) had told the joke to his team, and the usual people who like to take offense took offense. The lazy, incurious newspaper writers just looked it up online, where I was essentially the only reference for it, and purloined it. It’s not an offensive joke, really, and not all that funny, truth be told:

NASA decided they’d finally send a man up in a capsule after sending
only monkeys in the earlier missions. They fire the man and the monkey
into space. The intercom crackled, “Monkey, fire the retros.” A little
later, “Monkey, check the solid fuel supply.” Later still, “Monkey,
check the life support systems for the man.” The astronaut took umbrage
and radioed NASA, ” When do I get to do something?” NASA replies, ” In
fifteen minutes, feed the monkey.”

I was only trying to illustrate a point. I’m going to dust it off and use it again to illustrate something more recent. We’re at a big, Feed the Monkey inflection point again. It’s about time that I get plagiarized for noticing it first.

In yesterday’s news roundup, there was an obscure article from the Harvard Business Review. It was written by Yukun Liu, Suqing Wu, Mengqi Ruan, Siyu Chen and Xiao-Yun Xie. Since I’m originally Boston Irish, and have staggered through Hahvahd Yahd plenty of times, it was gratifying to see so many fine, Irish names in the HBR byline like that. Anyway, the headline read: Research: Gen AI Makes People More Productive—and Less Motivated, and the gist of the story was this:

Generative AI (gen AI) has revolutionized workplaces, allowing professionals to produce high-quality work in less time. Whether it’s drafting a performance review, brainstorming ideas, or crafting a marketing email, humans collaborating with gen AI achieve results that are both more efficient and often superior in quality. However, our research reveals a hidden trade-off: While gen AI collaboration boosts immediate task performance, it can undermine workers’ intrinsic motivation and increase feelings of boredom when they turn to tasks in which they don’t have this technological assistance.

Hmm. Let’s examine the research, shall we?

In four studies involving more than 3,500 participants, we explored what happens when humans and gen AI collaborate on common work tasks. Participants completed real-world professional tasks, such as writing Facebook posts, brainstorming ideas, and drafting emails, with or without gen AI. We then assessed both task performance and participants’ psychological experiences, including their sense of control, intrinsic motivation, and levels of boredom.

I need you to picture the look on my face after being informed that “real-world professional tasks” consist of “writing Facebook posts, brainstorming ideas, and drafting emails.” To anyone that performs real work in the real world, this smacks of doing nothing all day, or maybe if you squint hard enough, doing the lowest form of clerical work. So what happens when your intrepid employees use generative AI to perform their “work”?

Immediate Performance Boost: Gen AI enhanced the quality and efficiency of tasks. For instance, performance reviews written with gen AI were significantly longer, more analytical, and demonstrated a more helpful tone compared to reviews written without assistance. Similarly, emails drafted with gen AI tended to use warmer, more personable language, containing more expressions of encouragement, empathy, and social connection, compared to those written without AI assistance.

What’s the downside, according to my new Harvardian amigos?

Psychological Costs: Despite the performance benefits, participants who collaborated with gen AI on one task and then transitioned to a different, unaided task consistently reported a decline in intrinsic motivation and an increase in boredom. Across our studies, intrinsic motivation dropped by an average of 11% and boredom increased by an average of 20%. In contrast, those who worked without AI maintained a relatively steady psychological state.

These Cambridge papershufflin’ boffins go on to blame Gen AI for the problem of demotivation when the subject isn’t using it. Because it’s so easy to do their work with a robot, they’re bummed out, and can’t perform their menial duties when their Magic Conch is turned off:

If employees consistently rely on AI for creative or cognitively challenging tasks, they risk losing the very aspects of work that drive engagement, growth, and satisfaction.

On the totem pole of balderdash-speak, “driving engagement” has got to be right up there. Baumol’s Cost Disease has marched through the Tertiary Sector of the economy that consists mostly of shoe-shopping online at your desk. It’s gone straight into the Quaternary Sector of the economy. Doing nothing for long stretches at great expense to the general public who didn’t ask for it to be done is an art form at this point.

Reactions to Generative AI have apparently made it through four of the five stages of Kubler-Ross grief:

• Denial: Shock and disbelief are common. Denial helps soften the initial blow.
• Anger: Pain may be redirected as anger toward people, institutions, or even the deceased.
• Bargaining: Often includes thoughts of negotiating with fate or a higher power to reverse or lessen the loss.
• Depression: Sadness, regret, and loneliness can set in as the reality of the loss sinks in.
• Acceptance: Not about being “okay” with the loss, but reaching a place of peace or resolution.

I’m not an expert or anything, but I’ve tested out various brands of generative AI for all sort of things (Not for any real writing. It’s not creative), including coding. I can testify that it can’t pass the Turing Test yet. I can spot AI writing at a hundred yards. I know it’s not written by the humans described in the article who get bummed out when they’re asked to do any work at all, instead of simply pressing a button on their browser. I can spot AI writing because all the words are spelled correctly, the whole thing isn’t in passive voice, the verbs are conjugated properly, and it’s otherwise grammatically correct. AI writing is going to have to get a lot worse to pass the Turing Test with me, not better.

So let’s rewrite Number Four, Depression, to read: “A decline in intrinsic motivation and an increase in boredom.” The Harvard Business Review nailed that one.

And Number Five needs to be updated, bigtime. Since generative AI writes everything for you, better than you can manage it, and faster, while still  “driving engagement” and any other newspeak bosh for your job, one that probably shouldn’t even exist, you should probably radio back to base, tell them you’re bored and depressed and ask them, “When do I get to do something?”

Their answer? Acceptance: Feed the AI monkey, honey.

Noticing. It’s a Bitch

I’ll add something right up front here: It’s not my fault I notice things. In a way, it’s my job, if I’m going to blog. I guess this form of interwriting is a very loose form of journalism. Er, maybe not journalism. Epistles? I dunno. I’ve been accused of birthing more screeds than Savonarola, but I don’t see it like that. Like I said, it’s not my fault I notice things.

Noticing things can get you into big trouble these days. Or more to the point, noticing the wrong things. But I can’t help myself. No matter how many times you do it, I’ll always notice when allegedly educated persons no longer know the difference between vice and vise, or mislead and misled, or ken the similarity between a tattoo and a port wine stain. Oh well.

So let’s watch a video, shall we, and I’ll ruin it for you properly by noticing things afterward. What it’s like to manufacture stuff in China:

It sure is interesting to me, and I’m grateful to Maneesh for filling me in about something I don’t know much about. I’ve worked in a factory or two, so that’s not what I find informative. I’ve made quite hi-tech stuff in those factories, too, much more so than the plastic trifles made in the video. But it was a while ago, and while it was mechanized, it wasn’t robotized like that.

Some things I noticed: Maneesh, who is intelligent and informative, appears slightly unhinged. Most everyone does these days. His clothing and general demeanor is childlike, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. He’s shopping around for a factory to make a product he’s going to sell in the US. That’s a serious business, or used to be, or should be, anyway. Those people sitting there making the stuff, and people everywhere just like them, depend on management to act rationally, in order to keep sitting on those chairs and getting paid. Please note that the workers aren’t dressed like half a clown, and mugging for the camera. I know when management got rapacious, but when did management get silly?  I’m not sure, exactly, but Maneesh and his cohort are just mimicking the slide-deck, rah-rah, go fast and break things, ruthlessly dogfooding, key learnings, boil the ocean zeitgeist adumbrated by techbro jerks like Steve Jobs.

I found the first ten seconds of the video as interesting as the rest of it. Bombing along the Chinese highway, looking out the window. Not enough people simply point a camera at their surroundings so you can see what’s going on in a faraway place. Well, not enough people who know enough to turn their cellphones sideways, anyway. The official media never points their cameras at anything anymore. They’re 100 percent into the not-noticing phase of information delivery. They point cameras at themselves, and tell you what they fantasize is happening instead.

So I got curious about what Maneesh was going to make in the factory he’s trying to find in China. I got to poking around, and noticed this:

Speaking of noticing things, I can’t be the only person who notices how profoundly weird everyone wants to look in this video. The women look like they go to a funeral parlor to get made up, and the only person wearing a tie to talk about a half-a-mil calls himself “Mr. Wonderful” to dispel any seriousness he might be saddled with.

Maneesh is nervous, and they pull at him like pitbull/poodle hybrids at a toddler. He gets a slap for his troubles, but he toddled off somewhere else, and makes and sells the thing anyway.

If you click on the image, you can visit the website and see what’s on offer, but I’ll save you some time. It’s an obedience shock collar you wear on your wrist instead of your pencil neck so that people only get a slightly disturbed vibe from you, not the full dose of your emotional delirium tremens. It’s an invisible fence for you instead of your pitbull/poodle mix. It’s a Timex wearable Skinner Box. It gives you an electric jolt every time you start to badthink. The punchline of the joke is that it doesn’t know anything, so if you’re trying to quit smoking or something, you have to remember to give yourself a shock when you want a coffin nail. So I gather that you don’t have enough willpower to close the refrigerator door, even though you weigh two bills already, but you’re expected to have enough willpower to shock yourself when you reach for the fourth Klondike bar you had today. I can’t help noticing a personality disconnect there.

However, I quibble. I’m glad to support this product in any way I can. Although there will be some ground rules, people. You’ll all wear these things, but I’ll press the buttons for you. And fair warning: I notice a lot more of your bad habits than you do.

Noticing. It’s a Bitch.

Shop Like a Billionaire

What is a game?

There are lots of definitions abroad in the land. People like to argue about the difference between a sport and a game, for instance. You could stir up some trouble differentiating between a toy and a game, too, I guess. Here’s as good an explanation of a game as I’ve seen:

A game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

That’s a pretty good high-level view of it. The unnecessary obstacle in your way might be anything from a 320-pound offensive tackle to Boardwalk and Park Place with hotels on them. Games is games.

What about your pocket Pandora’s Box? You know, your smartphone, the most totally misnamed device ever. It’s not smart, and everyone uses it to avoid talking to anyone, so we really should call it something else. Pocket Pandora is as good a name as any. It’s basically only good for the intellectual version of slash and burn agriculture if you ask me. You’re reading this, so you asked me.

Most people try to convince themselves that their Pocket Pandora is a useful tool. It’s really not. For most people, it’s a toy to pass the time, and for the rest, a game device. In almost every case, an app on your Pocket Pandora represents a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. They don’t think it be like it is, but it do.

For example, some folks want to be able to turn the lights in their house on and off using their phone. They figure this is an improvement on a light switch, because it sounds less complicated than extracting their flabby ass from the couch cushions and shuffling across the room to do it, but in reality it adds all sorts of complexity to what should be a simple operation. You have to find your phone and call up an app and fiddle with it so your phone can talk to a cell tower and then to a mainframe somewhere to send signals back to who knows what to operate an electronic device to switch off the lights.

It’s a solution in search of a problem, of course. But the reason it caught on with so many people is that it has essentially been made into a game. Turning the lights on and off is necessary, but it’s hardly interesting. By making it into a game with your phone, they’ve convinced you that it’s a worthwhile waste of your time and money. What’s the harm in that, you might ask? Isn’t turning everything into a game an improvement?

When you want a toddler to do something they don’t want to do, you make it into a game. Open the tunnel, here comes the choo choo (filled with mush you just refused to eat). Please note who’s in charge in this scenario, and who’s getting duped. Worse still, if you’re duped into playing a game, you’re just the little tin car or boot being pushed onto Boardwalk or Park Place by someone else. You have no agency. You’re not actually playing. You’re being played.

Your Pocket Pandora is 99% designed to play you for a dupe, by fooling you into feeling like you have agency. Let’s test my supposition. I’ll go to the seventh circle of iPhone hell and ask it for the most popular app for an iPhone. Here it is:

I don’t know how many people are using this thing, because I’ve never heard of it, but please note the fine print: it has 860,000 people willing to give it a review on the Jobsstore.

On the front page for the app, I’ll grab excerpts from the first three reviews they have:

Where have you been ask my life???

I love this app so much. I cannot believe that all these sellers are on here and sellers such great products at great prices too. I know some cannot use the app but for those who can it is even easier in the app and you can do so much on here. It’s not some store app that is boring it is exciting and they seem to update it all the time…

… I also especially love the games I as of late have according to my husband become addicted to winning lol. I just have to spend a very small amount of time winning items and well I’ve gotten so many people in My family And friends circle on this app. They love it just as much.

Here’s the next one:

… I AM glad I gave it a try and hope I don’t blow all my expendable income on it because, while there are a few things I need, most of it is just stuff I want. They do honor the initial 90% off gift and if you have time to play their popularity/annoy your friends game, you can get some great deals. The coupons don’t last long enough at all. The other day I had a $16 off $40 coupon but it expired in 24 hours when I was still building my next cart, so I find myself waiting to make the purchase until I receive a good coupon. I have tried the referral thing to win free items and credits but I’m lame and antisocial so I don’t know enough people and I also don’t have the time to peruse reddit for hours looking for strangers to “click for click” with. It makes me a little frustrated (and obviously just jealous) when I see people who have received 100+ free gifts they’re going to resell just because they are kids with no jobs and spend their days being “influencers” on tik tok-In that regard it feels like a tween’s app, but again, I’m just lame so you may have better luck with the whole “Team Up Price Down” thing.

Here’s the next one:

…Again, I am overall satisfied with my shopping experience. Do not be scammed by the games- farmland and fish land seem like fun ways to win or earn free products or coupons but the closer you get to the goal, the harder they get to reach. Very time consuming and all the “free gift” boxes they tell are exclusive to you, are not. The prices never change. It’s just consumer manipulation and again, just a waste of time. Stuff is still super cheap and you get what’s advertised. Still worth using

Turn on your phone. Get likes. Get hits. Get coupons. Get discounts. Get followers. Get news updates. Open up, here comes the choo choo!

The Cemetery Is Full of Indispensable Men

Kids these days. They like to make up new names for old ideas and claim them for their own. It’s human nature to do so I guess. Kids these days also don’t think the world existed before the internet, so anything older doesn’t need renaming. If it never happened, you can’t re-name it, right?

So the recent generations are fascinated by software, and name situations that turn up in its adumbration and propagation as if they’re brand new problems. But they really aren’t. Just because captains of industry in the past used ledger books instead of Microsoft Excel, doesn’t mean they didn’t have sophisticated ideas about how the business world worked. Just the opposite, for the most part.

So we’re going to talk about the Bus Factor, and pretend it’s not just a javascript wrangler’s gloss on organizational memory, if you don’t mind. I’ve written several times about organizational memory here. I’d post links to it, but my organizational memory, and the regular kind, ain’t so good. Here’s the dictionary definition of the term:

Organizational memory (OM), sometimes called institutional memory or corporate memory, is the accumulated body of data, information, and knowledge created in the course of an organization’s existence. The concept of organizational memory includes the ideas of components knowledge acquisition, knowledge processing or maintenance, and knowledge usage like search and retrieval.

But the kids have coined their own term for it, and I like it better: the Bus Factor. It has a dictionary definition, too:

The “bus factor” is the minimum number of team members that have to suddenly disappear from a project before the project stalls due to lack of knowledgeable or competent personnel.

Of course that’s the least jocular version of what it means. The original meaning is, “What happens if so-and-so gets hit by a bus?”

This is an important consideration in the software world. Software development is filled with people who hate meetings. They hate telling anyone what they’re doing. They don’t like abstract standards of right and wrong. You know, like speling. They love talking about technical debt (I’ll do that later, unless I get hit by a bus), but not doing anything about it.

So the Wikiup suggest three ways to decrease the dangers of the Bus Factor:

Reduce complexity
Document all processes and keep that documentation up-to-date
Encourage cross-training

Since software development is a Aztec temple devoted to cutting out the end user’s hearts and sacrificing them to the gods of complexity, that first one is a non-starter. When was the last time any software was simplified?

Number two’s a doozy, too. For example, have you ever asked Google how to fix a Google problem? They have metric tonnes of “help” in the form of bulletin boards and other forms of “knowledge bases,” which are heavy on text and short on knowledge. All their suggestions refer to things that don’t exist anymore, or are called something different, or beside the point.

Number three’s a lark, too. Ask a code monkey to perform any other operation in the business and be prepared to see them throw themselves on the low-pile carpet and thrash around in a circle like Curley when he sees a tassel.

The kids are on to something here, though. IBM had a very long institutional memory, just to point out one malefactor among many. It didn’t help them survive the thorough Rometting they got. People who are working in new fields can’t always use old procedures to accomplish what they’re trying to accomplish.

But I’d like to commandeer the Bus Factor from the Zoomers and Millennials, and drive it to a destination that they don’t like to visit. They’re worrying about what happens if the guy who coded their statcounter has a suddenly and they don’t know how it works. Back in my day, we used to call that job security. But what they really should be worried about is how many seats are on that bus, and not who’s in front of it, but who’s sitting inside it when it goes off a cliff.

My generation is going to get on that bus en masse. We’re the generation that’s been climbing the phone poles at night on Christmas to get the lights back on. We built all the houses, and paved all the roads. We welded and painted and wired and plumbed and leveled and raised and moved and planted and sawed and every other damn thing that makes the difference between the twenty-first century and the tenth. We built all the missiles that the cocaine cowboy in Kiev is blasting all over the place.  Hell, we even built the internet you’re worrying about the Bus Factor on. In short, we did all the stuff you can’t be bothered to do anymore. Not with that sweet, sweet, javascript empire you’re going to make instead.

Napoleon once remarked that the cemetery was full of indispensable men. Good luck to you, when yours is.