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Take Two

October 9, 2012 12 Comments

[Editor’s Note: After reading the comments appended to yesterday’s essay, I’ve decided to rewrite it. After all, it’s not the readers’ fault it reads like Henry James transcribing Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man into Sanskrit. The fault, dear Sippican, lies not in the Intertunnel, but in your pixels]

I want you to click on the triangular button on the YouTube player and watch the video that is enabled and put into motion by clicking on the triangular symbol on the video I want you to play. That is because I want you  to watch the video. This is what I am wanting.

Please look at the video. Are you looking at it? Look some more, ensuring that you look the hell out of it. Do not unlook at any time. I am telling you this, after embedding this video on a blog I keep where I tell people that I would like them to look at things. I hereby affirm and exclaim that the thing I’m bringing attention to is what I would like for you to pay attention to. Please do. Pay attention to it, I mean.

As you may have gathered, I have also watched the video. I wish to take this opportunity to aver that the man in the video is commendable in every way, and the apparatus he has constructed is useful and interesting. It is good. By “good,” I mean that it is not bad. It is not not good. I like it and it is good. I like the good things about it, and do not dislike the bad things about it because there are no bad things about it.

I would further like to take this opportunity to say that I am refraining utterly from litote, simile, metonymy, analogy, synecdoche, metaphor, paradox, and any other method of amusing juxtaposition of words, concepts, or images that might give off even the aroma of not goodness to these proceedings.

The man did a good thing with his thing there that was good, and I liked the good thing and you should like the good thing too. Because it’s good, and not bad.

Also, any use of the appended video, which I believe you should watch again to see that it’s good once more, will be entirely restricted to proclaiming the essential and uncontrovertible goodness of the good thing made by the good person. I will not intimate that the good thing has any lessons to offer us on the state of the nation and the differing views on the correct allocation of time and resources in the private economy. That would simply detract from saying I like it a lot, in every way a man can like a oblong wooden boxlike structure that he’s not currently occupying below ground.

Of course, I would like to point out that by mentioning, just this once, that the thing in the video is a good thing, made by a good person, no doubt in a state filled with good people, federated with other states filled with good people into a national entity of outstanding probity, industriousness, and benignancy, that I’m not saying I’m entitled to any sort of opinion about it at all. In the past, I have had profit and loss, hire and fire responsibility for 59 million dollars of construction activity in a single calendar year, but of course that doesn’t mean I would have any idea about “carpentry, production, or business.”

But by god, I know good. That thing there is good. I wish I was a better writer, too, so I could think of another word for good.

Please Remember: Carpenters Are Really Dumb, And Harvard Grads Are Wicked Smart

October 8, 2012 7 Comments

Harrumph. I doubt this guy could even make out the paperwork to get a Humanities grant.

The two modules that make up the working surface of his very nifty work table are called “torsion boxes.” They are immensely strong for their light weight –but strong things are often bendy; these are able to avoid deflection under very substantial loads. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the fellow had never heard the term torsion box. It could very well be he’s just smart and innovative on his own.

Since he’s still in business in this homebuilding climate, I’ll guess he’s a very good businessman indeed. It’s counterintuitive to many people that work in small-shop industries, where there has to be visible, measurable work on display at the end of every day to show the customer, that they should stop what they’re doing for any reason to invest time and money in things that have long-term productivity benefits. If in the short run you’re dead, you have a tendency to simply hustle all the time. You can only think of the long run as a series of daily short runs.

Increases in productivity are a luxury to a business that has limited capital. That’s why you see poor countries emerging from communism using human labor to accomplish things we use machines for. If you’ve got lots of people and no money, you dig a canal with shovels. Luxuries come last. The fellow in the video probably knew he could improve his, and his workers’ productivity with a setup like that for a very long time before he accumulated enough time, energy and money to try his hand at it. If you confiscate his money, squander his time, and dissipate his energy before he gets a chance to use them, his business is less productive, and the work he does takes longer and costs more, or at the very least pays less, than if he invests in himself, his business, and his workers.

Paulk Homes

If SimCity Was Real

September 22, 2012 4 Comments


The Lion City from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

The tilt-shift photography gives everything the Matchbox car vibe, of course, but that’s not it. Singapore is SimCity for real people.

Singapore is a country; a sort-of city state, like Venice in the Middle Ages. It was a British protectorate for a good long while, and after that it used to be part of Malaysia, but that only lasted a couple of years. By any measure of anything,  it’s gone on a tear for its entire history.

My children like playing building games. They can be as ham-fisted as Minecraft, or as sophisticated as Age of Empires. They design mud huts and rollercoasters and everything in between, rendered in pixels. I liked that the programs have a heavy budgeting aspect to them. Even Doom is sort of a budgeting game. You can’t run out of shotgun shells before you run out of imps.

SimCity was always the king of all the planning games. It was a pretty good representation of life, too; you couldn’t force people move to the city you were laying out, you had to coax them there by setting up a situation that made the place attractive in the first place. They’d bug out without hesitation over taxes or droughts or whatever, too, just like real people. The buildings in the game had a nice visual vibe to them as well — coherent but variegated. Real cities can only achieve that vibe by having all the buildings burn to the ground at the same time, and then being rebuilt by Victorians. And SimCity had a pleasant sense of humor about itself, which is more than one can say about Detroit.

There is an element of real life that most building and budgeting games can’t, or won’t simulate: people are very unpredictable. People act crazy. Sometimes people are entirely put-upon by their surroundings, and stick with it and flourish anyway; others live in a cossetted wonderland and pee in the corners. People are strange. They’re sometimes strange and wonderful, it’s true; but the wonderful part doesn’t keep regular hours, and the strange part works overtime.

So you look at Singapore, and it certainly looks strange and wonderful. If you read about who lives there, and how they behave, and how they’re housed, and how they are governed, and what they do for a living, and how they manage it with nothing but an equatorial mudhole for ground zero, you realize that every nostrum for the behavior of humans you’ve been told is essential for a successful civilization is contradicted there — probably because there are competing visions of how the world works, and neither one works on its own while the other vision hangs off the back of the applecart and drags its heels. Singapore looks like you can just move the sliders back and forth and the humans and the buildings shift like numbers in a ledger. It’s wonderful and a little unnerving. It doesn’t seem real.

By the way, I have a nine-year-old son, and if I ever find the person that invented Minecraft, he better have major medical.

 

The Gas Tank Of Damocles

August 21, 2012 10 Comments

Let me wax philosophical about my wife’s gas tank.

We drive old vehicles. I don’t like driving old vehicles. The reliability of your transportation is paramount. Old cars break down. Buying a new car is a form of insurance against risk. But real insurance against risk is unavailable, or illegal, for such as us, with one exception — personal avoidance of risk at all costs.

My wife saw a piece of metal hanging below the car that looked as out of place as an honest man in Congress. One of the two straps that held the gas tank from dragging on the road had rusted clean through and broken. The other strap looked as reliable as cell phone service in a tunnel. Something must be done, and immediately.

My family never goes anywhere much now. We cannot hope to weather much bad luck with our own meager resources, and we cannot rely on others, so we keep our heads down. We were lucky that we discovered the problem in our driveway, instead of on the highway. You might think us daft for being grateful for a broken gas tank strap in our driveway, but we were. We were doubly grateful that it wasn’t February, as well. So we offered our hosannahs. Now what to do?

In a fiscal landscape that made any sense, I’d pay a mechanic to repair the car. There’s a fellow down the street –walking distance, what a luxury for us —and he’s honest and could use the money. He’s my neighbor. But I poked around and found out that the repair would cost maybe $750 at a dealer. The mechanic down the street might only command half that, but it’s still too much. I’d have to fix it myself.

I do not enjoy fixing my car. I’ve done it, back when I was young and Gerry Ford and Jimmy Carter were desolating the landscape, but I have no natural ability or affinity for it. But I went to Amazon, and found the correct parts, and ordered them, and crawled under the car and fixed it. My older son is old enough to help now, thank goodness. I am somewhat infirm in certain ways, and to lay vaguely upside-down under a car yanking on rusty bolts nearly overcame me. But after two days of effort interspersed with trips to the fainting couch, we had replaced the parts. The repair will outlast the car.

I did not earn money by fixing my own car, of course –just the opposite. The mechanic did not earn money. The people who rely on the mechanic to earn money will not earn money, and so forth. Ultimately, through a process which must be deduced, because it cannot be observed, this lack of commerce will ultimately filter its way through the entire economy to the point where someone will not buy what I make because I didn’t hire the mechanic. It’s the circle of life, except it’s the circle of the death of commerce.

I am barraged daily with references to Helicopter Ben running the Treasury printing presses day and night, and thereby causing inflation. It’s an insane idea. When the velocity of money sniffs zero, there is no inflation. The Fed makes money and gives it to the government, who lends it to itself, and none of it ever makes it into the wild where a car mechanic and his downstream brethren might get ahold of it. For productive people in today’s American economy, the money might as well not exist. The bill for it will exist plenty in the future, of course. But when the velocity of money is zero, the future must be entirely discounted. It’s a meaningless concept, like watching an unplugged clock.

The term velocity referring to the passage of money through the alimentary canal of commerce is very descriptive, and apt to my circumstances. The economy is in exactly the same shape as my wife’s gas tank — filled with fuel which only makes it sag on its rusty underpinnings further,
making it more difficult to fix, and dangerous to be underneath, but you must bang around under there anyway because there’s no other choice.
Nervous Nellies endlessly warn me that if it was all released at once, it would explode, but that eventuality is remote compared to going hungry because we can’t drive to the supermarket until it’s fixed. And above all, the fuel isn’t taking you anywhere because the whole apparatus is busted, and the process to fix it is busted, and if you want it fixed you better do it yourself because nobody outside a building with a seal on it has any money.

It’s hard to work under the gas tank of Damocles.

Dynamism

July 24, 2012 9 Comments

What is dynamism? Off to the dictionary.

… great energy, force, or power; vigor: the dynamism of the new governor.

No, this won’t do. All the examples in the dictionary mention a politician.

Dynamism is what happens when politicians aren’t paying attention. 

There, that’s my definition. Take that, Sam Johnson.

I don’t know of an example of dynamism that sprung from political action. All politicians try to control everything, and in advance. They generally suck at seeing even ten minutes down the road with any accuracy. Then they glom onto whatever’s worth taking credit for.

Hewlett Packard. Apple. Google. Disney. Amazon. Mattel. Harley-Davison. What do these companies have in common? They were all started in a garage. In Harley’s case, it was really just a shed. Why do people start the most successful businesses in the world in a shed?

Because everything they’re doing is illegal. No, really. Everyone tries to spin it as frugality, or spontaneity, or whatever — but it’s just a way to dodge all the roadblocks the political class has put in the dynamic person’s way. There are no OSHA inspections of garages. No wheelchair ramps. Hell, there are no demands to hire a state senator’s brother-in-law in a garage.

Pretty much all the examples I gave you turned into raging fans of the government after they were well established. Apple was next to nothing until they did a dirty deal to make their computers the only thing ever used in public schools. Harley got bailed out. Google spends all day using the government as a proxy to keep out competition. They all know there are bright people and garages everywhere, and give campaign donations to politicians that promise garage inspections daily.

Remember that Netflix “internal” PowerPoint cultural statement that made the rounds of the Intertunnel a few years back? Lots of people, deep thinkers, said it sounded like how every business should be run. To me, it sounded like what you’d do if you had a business in your garage.

Well, you don’t have a business in your garage anymore, and garage strategies don’t cut a lot of ice at the SEC or the EEOC or the EIEIO or whatever bureau run by basilisks you’d care to mention. You can’t talk about only having people that have those wonderful x characteristics on your team. Someone from the government wants to know how many of them are brown or have ovaries or roll around in wheelchairs and lots of other things you may or may not care about. Strategies like a devil-may-care attitude towards a dress code sound great in theory, but the first time a presentable woman wears a unitard and gets a somewhat longer longing glance from the fellows in the mail room than she’d like, you’ll figure out why pasties or speedos aren’t allowed at IBM. It will be explained to you in some detail by her lawyer.  Hey, Woz, they don’t let you throw things away in the household trash that smell vaguely like Chernobyl once there’s a logo on the building. And promising people stock options instead of wages will only get you so far out in the exogarage sunshine when the government wonders aloud where their FICA money is.

So everyone wants dynamism, but no one wants to allow it as soon as they don’t need it any more. Politicians never need dynamism. Dynamism can build institutions they can’t control. Institutions that might oppose them. Dynamism gives regular people ideas.

In every case I can think of, dynamism is regular people unleashed. I don’t find the founders of most of those businesses I mentioned earlier to be that dynamic. They’re usually a certain kind of inspired drudge. They barely understand the forces they let loose. But by hook or by crook, they unleash things. Not just among their own employees. In most cases, it’s the customers that get unleashed, and love it. Google sounds like a cushioned gulag to work at. But its customers use it to find things, including finding me, thank goodness. Who cares why?

The industrial revolution in England happened because the landed gentry wasn’t paying attention. They scoffed at the importance of guys with grease under their fingernails right up until the greasy guys’ clout –political, monetary, cultural– eclipsed their own, and there was nothing they could do to put the genie back in the bottle. It was the same in America. When we just paved the roads and didn’t worry too much about what was going on in all the sheds, America ran wild economically. It wasn’t until we fixed everything in advance that it all got broken. You can’t micromanage dynamism. Look at the explosion of commerce that happened in China when they took the communist boot off the average person’s face, and improved it to an autocratic slipper on their neck. Russia may be a gangster state now, but a gangster is better than a commissar.

Until regular people are allowed to swing their elbows again in the US instead of listening to the national intercom’s continual funds for this worthy project are soon to be released message, nothing much is going to happen.

I run a business out of my house and we teach our children at desks in their bedrooms. We make music instead of buying it. We write books. Food comes from recipes, not reservations. We make our own heat and our own fun. You can kill us, but you can’t make us stop trying. Dare I call it dynamism?

Tag: business

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sippicancottage

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

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