The High-Risk, High-Reward Milieu

This video might be interesting to any number of people from most any walk of like. It’s like catnip to anyone who ever constructed a commercial building. I think it’s the greatest example of construction, ever. You can build things taller, or wider, or goofier (I’m looking at you, Gehry), or more expensive, or more elaborate, but you can’t ever surpass what was accomplished by so few men in so short a time, resulting in a more iconic building. The Empire State Building in New York City is the greatest office building in the world, and has been since the day it opened.

The lady out in the harbor with the lantern jaw, wearing a bathrobe, holding an ice cream cone, and beckoning every country on Earth to use America as their recycling bin has nothing on the Empire State Building. I wouldn’t be surprised if half the population think the Empire State is named after the building, not the other way around. The only structure as iconic as the Empire State Building might be the Eiffel Tower, and that’s nothing but a radio antenna, when you really look at it. Big deal.

The Empire State was completed during the Depression. They didn’t have trouble finding people willing to take risks to earn a living just then. So you’d be forgiven if you assumed that they’d look at workers as kind of expendable. You assumed wrong, however. Up to 3,500 people worked on the building at any one time. Four people died during construction. That’s 3,500 people working two shifts, day and night, to complete the tallest building in the world in one year and 45 days. Four deaths.

Let’s compare that to the World Trade Center Project in 2001. One World Trade Center, which is as ugly as a home-made suit, took 8 years to build. It had somewhere between 4,000 to 5,000 workers, and depending on who you ask, had 5 worker deaths. If you do the math, the fatality rate per worker is essentially identical to the Empire State Building. Other big buildings like the Burj Khalifa and the Shanghai tower claim lower fatality rates, but I don’t trust stats about worker safety from closed societies, thank you very much.

So you can see the guys in the video working on the Empire, hanging all over it like King Kong would a few years later. They didn’t fall off much. They didn’t have OSHA, or any number of other safety foofaraws that are in place today. So how did they manage to stay in one piece while working four times as hard as people would in the future?

It’s simple, really. They were smarter than people are now. Not the kind of smarter that’s in vogue nowadays. None of them was plucked from any Ivy League admission offices. They were predominately Irish and Italian immigrants, at least from what I’ve read. They had nerve. They had skills. Mad skills, by the look of it. They had experience building things like railroads, mining ore, or erecting steelwork, even if it was a little closer to mother earth. Many were craftsmen, with prodigious hand skills developed by long experience. They were used to working around heavy machinery and keeping their fingers out of the gears.

By comparison, modern workers are skilled at avoiding risk, instead of managing it. They’re more conversant with technology-driven tasks. They crave automation, standardized working conditions, and lunchtime. They’re not really skilled in navigating dangerous situations in the way their predecessors were. But they died at the same rate, because building great big things is inherently dangerous, and having little experience with true danger make them vulnerable to brain farts, as we used to call them.

The Empire State Building was constructed in a truly high-risk, high-reward milieu. Men with a high tolerance for risk, or whose desperation for work overrode their tolerances, needed mental toughness, and relied on their experience in risky environments to stay safe. Modern workers rely on a rulebook that only the shop steward has read. The investors, who didn’t stick one spud into a rivet hole, were also working in a high-risk, high-reward mode. The building didn’t start to turn a profit until the 1950s.

We could use a few guys like the men who financed and built the Empire State Building just now. God knows where we’re going to find them.

The Second Great Male Renunciation

Towards the end of the 1700s, men wised up a little. Driven by style leaders like Beau Brummell, they stopped dressing like Mardi Gras floats and snuff-guzzling fops, and started dressing like they might be good for something other than playing cards with Louis XIV. They didn’t want to look beautiful anymore. They wanted to look masculine. It was the adumbration of what we call The Suit. It was a major milepost in the history of clothing, and other things. It was called the Great Male Renunciation.

Suits are of course tumbling out of favor. Hardly anyone wears one properly, if they wear one at all anymore. People, important people even, wear remnants of one, even to important gatherings. A business suit worn without a tie is an incongruity. A business suit jacket worn over jeans is an abomination.

People claim, loudly, that it was comfort, simplicity, individualism, and egalitarianism that killed the suit for daily men’s wear, and good riddance. They’re full of merde. One of the original names for a suit of clothes was a lounge suit. A well-made suit is comfortable to wear, and motility isn’t constricted much. You’re protected from the elements in your wool carapace, and you can take the jacket on and off in private settings to regulate your temperature, too. There’s a great deal of variation in suits as well. A workman could wear a durable tweed suit jacket with a flat hat and be comfortable while doing even heavy labor.

As far as simplicity goes, modern suits have always lent simplicity to dressing yourself for brain work. You could choose your shirt from very few in the closet, your tie for a splash of color, with more subdued hues for more staid occasions. Just make sure your socks match, and you’d be done.

People think their current regimen of a dishevelish mishmash of clothes is simpler than a suit, but they’re lying to themselves, and everyone else that has to lay eyes on them. A while back, I  worked in an office that required “business casual” clothes. That’s a collared, long-sleeve shirt, a tie, slacks, and shoes. Customers occasionally visited our cubicle empire, and we didn’t want to look like mendicants if they did. The management eventually bowed to Lumbergh trends in the zeitgeist, and instituted the completely misnamed casual Fridays.

Once the memo went out, everyone (else) dressed like ragamuffins on Fridays. The men dressed garden variety badly, and the women dressed like Marseilles taproom wenches. I wore the same thing I wore the other four days of the week. This elicited complaints from my peers. They wanted me to be forced to dress badly along with them. They never understood that they were spending an inordinate amount of time wondering what to wear on casual Friday. I was spending zero. And a shirt, tie, and slacks is a perfectly comfortable way to dress. And I don’t know how to break it to you, but jeans are not even supposed to be comfortable. They were made from coarse, durable cloth that could stand up to much heavier work than the friction from an Aeron chair. Eventually I was put in charge of everybody, and I made sure casual Friday went the way of powdered wigs.

The egalitarianism I mentioned is strictly of the Animal Farm variety. The modern tech CEO wanders out on to the TED Talk stage wearing moon boot sneakers, expensive ripped jeans, a T-shirt with an incongruous slogan on it, all topped off with a suit jacket. He’s got Argentine president hair, or his head is shaved like a death row inmate. All this is supposed to make him look as casual and accessible as any clerk in his javascript empire. It’s a sad joke. He might as well be sporting a justacorps and a Restoration wig. He’ll disdainfully refer to everyone who his company owes money to as “the suits,” but that’s because he wants to act like Elaine with Mr. Peterman’s gold card, but they won’t let him. And the entire audience is dressed the same way as the CEO. So much for individualism.

The force driving the Great Male Renunciation was the desire to leave irrational, emotional, and frivolous modes of dress, comportment, and social interactions to women. Toughen up, Van Buren. Lord knows who first said, “Clothes make the man,” but he may have been standing next to a guillotine, shoving some ancien regime dude in silk hose and high heels into the Jacobin Cuisinart hole. Perhaps the quote has been truncated from, “Clothes might make the man, but we can make him shorter.”

Suits aren’t fussy garments. Cary Grant, who might have worn the most famous suit, ever, didn’t really worry much about his clothes. Suits simplify things, and project the right image for a put-together man. And they work pretty well, too, whether you’re thinking about stuff at the Plaza Hotel or running away from a cropduster.

Here’s Cary on how to dress well:

No, it isn’t only money that determines how well a man dresses—it’s personal taste. Because of the demands of my work, I’ve purchased dozens of suits over the years and they all have one attribute in common: they are in the middle of fashion. By that I mean they’re not self-consciously fashionable or far out, nor are they overly conservative or dated. In other words, the lapels are neither too wide nor too narrow, the trousers neither too tight nor too loose, the coats neither too short nor too long. I’ve worn clothes of extreme style, but only in order to dress appropriately for the type of character I played in particular films. Otherwise, simplicity, to me, has always been the essence of good taste.

Suits communicate more than seriousness to people you encounter. They’re a form of good manners. In a business suit, you are what you is, to mangle a saying while getting the meaning right. Dressing like you’re sleeping behind a dumpster while pulling in seven figures is pretty close to Marie Antoinette, Hameau de la Reine mendacity.

Cary’s style of dress made it well into the 1960s without any challengers. Until about the Beatle arrivals, men’s clothing and hairstyles were heavily influenced by the military. Makes sense. A whole generation had recently been in the military. In order to attract a mate, men wanted to look overtly masculine. A suit was just a civilian version of an officer’s uniform. Men kept their hair close cropped and neat. They were clean-shaven, and shined their shoes. If you wanted to look healthy, you’d get a suntan, a hat tip to people who did robust things outdoors.

Then came the Peacock Revolution. Men started dressing like dandies again. The British Invasion told men that they could look shaggy and still pull chicks. They started dressing like rock stars, and rock stars started dressing like women. Or more to the point, like homosexual men:

Mostly based around men incorporating feminine fashion elements such as floral prints, bright colours and complex patterns, the movement also saw the embracing of elements of fashions from Africa, Asia, the late 18th century and the queer community. The movement began around the late 1950s when John Stephen began opening boutiques on Carnaby Street, London, which advertised flamboyant and queer fashions to the mod subculture.

The denouement of this movement crashed and burned into a late seventies heap of leisure suits, fondue pots, shag carpeting, and harvest gold appliances. Luckily, in the following decade, Gordon Gekko instructed everyone to buy a decent suit, and we had an interregnum of half-decent clothing for men.

Women still dressed like clowns, wearing dresses with the hanger still in the shoulders and too much rouge, but woman basically always dress like clowns. Men should leave them to it, and worry about their own appearance.

Once the last preppie was hunted to extinction, Grunge pretty much drove a stake through the twitching corpse of men’s fashion. It’s been a long, slow degradation since then. Women are driving the bus now, because they’ve totally taken over the internet. Even though they’re still sleeping with same bad boys from down the block on the sly, they’re demanding that their significant others display the most feminine version of anything that has to do with masculinity. I’m not sure how they’re managing it, but guys have feminine beards these days. Their manbuns make them look like a tween girl at a makeup mirror. Their clothes are too tight, and instead of accentuating their physique with the cut, it makes them look like oversized toddlers. Their outfits are Slovenly Chic™. Football jerseys with the names of the men who are sleeping with their girlfriends on the back, shower shoes, sweatpants too tight to sweat in, wispy beards, tattoos that make them look like a walking Go Fish deck of cards — it’s all a disaster.

So I require… Check that! I demand a Second Great Male Renunciation! Refuse to set foot in an Abercrombie and Fitch until they’re selling shotguns, canoes, and tents again, and start equipping safaris and antarctic expeditions. Start dressing like Ernest Hemingway instead of Mariel. Wear sweatclothes to hit a heavy bag, instead of on dates. And I know this last one is going to be difficult for you to understand, but you can stop shading your eyes with the palm of your hand, and turn your baseball cap around with the bill in the front.

Do it for your self-respect. Do it for your country. Do it for the children. You know, the ones you’ll never have — if you don’t.

It’s the End of the World as We Know It

Man, apocalypse sells. I’d say that dystopia was all the rage in movies, teevee, and books, but that would be underselling it. There is no other topic. I’m an old hand at it. Long before R.E.M., we had this sort of thing:

Of course everyone tries their hand at the Nostradamus thing, and misses by a mile. It’s comical to watch things like Blade Runner and see how rainy Los Angeles was going to get. Everyone will have umbrellas with lights in the handles, and flying cars, but no one seems to have a cell phone in  the future, do they? Deckard’s putting coins in a payphone between flying car rides. In general, the bigger the budget for a movie, the farther off they get from the way things actually turned out. Smarter fictionistas place their space operas a thousand years in the future, so they can keep on with their silly versions of dystopia.

Eric Blair and Aldous Huxley pretty much covered all the ground required. We’d be amused or stomped into submission, one way or the other. Maybe both. They’re old hat, now. The new imaginary dystopias have women being forced to have babies, or men forced to sleep for a hundred years to reach the next interstellar gas station, because there’s no gas on Earth, natch. That’s a hardy perennial.

So the planet will be too hot or too cold, or both, or filled with the undead, or the recently dead, or the ancient dead, doing undead-like things. Reverse vampires will fight lizard people for control over the precious soylent green reserve. Whatever. It’s all kinda tedious.

The reason authors get the future so wrong is because they’re laboring under massive misconceptions about the present. Fruit of the poison tree, as it were. If they truly understood the way the world worked today, and went from there, they might have a shot. But women “forced to have babies” must be an amusing topic for a landlord who accepts Section 8 for their apartments. And the weather never does seem to have the gumption to wipe us all out. There was a wall of ice a mile high not too long ago where I’m typing this from. Weather never does seem to cooperate, coming or going.

Nuclear problems are a fave, of course. We’re all going to glow in the dark anytime now. We were promised atomic cataclysms morning, noon and night since Oppenheimer finally got ahold of Von Neumann on the blower and invented the things, but we ended up with Russians and Ukes riding dirt bikes at each other and using shotguns to shoot drones with hand grenades zip-tied to them. Oh well.

So I’ll put on my thinking cap, and stick my neck out. What’s dystopia going to look like? That’s easy. I don’t need a crystal ball, or even an imagination. I just need to visit a nursing home to ask the last people who can remember the 1950s in the Estados Unidos what life was like back in the day, and go from there:

Then I’ll ask them what a dystopia is gonna look like. I’m sure they’ll answer, unanimously: Dude, you’re living in it:

Nothing New Under the Sun. Or In the Cellar Hole

That’s pretty impressive. No, I’m not referring to building a house with a giant toothpaste tube full of mortar. You know, right after building a space village starship dock around the building site, and a giant factory to pre-fab anything that sticks out of the walls. When I said it was impressive, I was referring to anyone willing to move in and try to dust a concrete house with corrugated walls. Or hang a picture or something.

All the problems of construction that involve actual construction were solved decades, if not centuries ago. It’s vanishingly straightforward to build a lot of inexpensive houses quickly.

I’ve had a hand in building everything from a birdhouse to a football stadium. I’ve never had anything in my way but the government, and the occasional boulder in the cellar hole.

A monolithic pour, all concrete house is nothing new, either.

Florida’s full of concrete houses, I gather, built from CMUs (concrete blocks), which the guys in the second video no doubt could also handle just as nimbly. It’s pretty easy and fast for a few guys to build a single story house’s walls out of concrete block, and they don’t need a crane and a Cray computer to do it. I’ve done it for a wood frame house in a day or two, working along with only two other guys. And I could barely pull my weight back then.

You can always spot the “Tell” in these “new method to build a house in a day” schemes. They manage four walls in a day, or maybe two, after twenty weeks of preparation, using enough equipment to build the Hoover Dam. Then they call it “a house.” Four walls is not a house, guys. Well, I guess it’s a house, you know, except for the foundation it sits on and the utilities and the floors and the roof and the finishes and electricals and the plumbing and the HVAC, spangled with 24 building inspections, plus the occasional required bribe or gangster threat if you’re working in a city.

You can’t order a house from Amazon, built by Apple, no matter how hard you wish for it, kids. I suggest that you learn how to bang a few nails, and get busy.

Somebody’s Gotta Go Back and Get a Sh*tload of Dimes

Well, now that you know how to run a Roman army, let’s figure out how you’re going to get that army where it’s going. Luckily, someone named Sasha Trubetskoy has made a subway-style map of all the major Roman roads, circa 125 anno domini. And it’s very, very cool:

You can click on it to embiggen it. I would. I did. It’s fascinating. It took a whole lot of work to assemble this. There’s lots of info about how he did it at the link. He makes some interesting deductions about the road network, too:

How long would it actually take to travel this network? That depends a lot on what method of transport you are using, which depends on how much money you have. Another big factor is the season – each time of year poses its own challenges. In the summer, it would take you about two months to walk on foot from Rome to Byzantium. If you had a horse, it would only take you a month.

Roman roads were no joke. Some of them are still in use. This is a very serious transportation network that indicates the the Roman Empire was worthy of its name. The Mediterranean was a Roman lake, and most of Europe was a Roman parking lot. And if you add in a recipe for pizza, they ended up conquering the world.