Defining idealism, Henry Ford on,
edit"An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous." — Henry Ford (as quoted at Wikiquote). This resonates lately. Of course, I can just see people asking, "Why are you quoting an anti-Semite?" Like all humans, Henry Ford had piercing faculties in some respects and dangerous blind spots in others. But because he was so smart and so driven, his pros and cons, and their effects on the world, were of greater amplitude than those of most humans. We all have the waves, but the wave forms and amplitudes vary. Charles Sorensen (1956:301-334) said that Henry Ford's greatest failure in life was that he was not a good father. I disagree, because that was about one person's life (his son's). To me, the most tragic thing about Henry Ford is that which affected many lives. He had the typical human cognitive weaknesses—e.g., irrational outgroup-hating and flawed extrapolation from instances—that all humans have to varying degrees, but he lived his life and made his mark on the world during the perfect-storm instant of human history: after industrialization had reached critical mass, giving individual humans and groups of humans the ability to impose their wills on the world with higher amplitude, but before the Holocaust and nuclear weapons had provided humans with some lessons, which include (1) that being racist/ethnocentric/otherwise intolerant is no longer viable, that is, the era of history in which venomous intolerance and "being a good guy" could be defined as compatible is now over; and (relatedly) that (2) human cognitive defects are deadly to the entire species, not just the outgroup. Whether sufficient percentages of human individuals learn these lessons sufficiently before any big shit goes down is yet to be seen. [2010-02-26; 2010-09-30]
False economies in hustle avoidance, an operator with a brain on,
edit"LUBRICATION IN THE AUTOMATIC. We have been for a considerable time intimately connected with the automatic type of machine, and from careful observation are convinced that a deal of expense both in time and tools can be saved by more attention to the oil feed. As a rule the machine comes into the shop from the makers fitted up with an ordinary spreader, and this has to do duty upon all jobs alike if left to the average operator. Result, when drilling, counterboring, etc., in deep holes, tools get dulled rapidly or burned, and the machine is standing idle for far too great a proportion of its time. As another illustration of how this expense may be avoided with a little ingenuity and forethought, we show a sketch of an arrangement for oil feed rigged up on a screw machine by an operator who had his heart in the work. The spreader was taken off and a piece of pipe A, Fig. 26, put into its place, thereby insuring a good supply of oil to the forming and cut-off tools. Screwed into A was a short length B, bent to throw the oil right into the drilled hole. Another piece C was branched from the main oil pipe and given an upward bend to throw into the work from the bottom. The job required a 1⅜-inch hole 1½ inches deep in 1⅞ inches stock, and, despite a copious flood of lubricant on the outside of the work, the drill, a fluted one, required grinding much too frequently to be either agreeable or economical. So the above arrangement was made at small cost, and we could then run the machine for more than a week on end without grinding. In most cases some little scheming may be found necessary to clear the turret tools, especially when using box tools, but when once this difficulty is overcome the operator has time to loaf where before he was hustled to death to keep things going." —A reader-correspondent of the American Machinist, circa 1900 to 1908. (As quoted in a compilation by F.H. Colvin and F.A. Stanley.) The operator who understands that the right kind of hustle up front saves even more hustle later is an operator who has his heart in the work—and a brain in his head. [2010-07-03]
Limitations of the real-world value of patents, Joseph Roe on,
edit"A patent for an invention which meets a widespread and pressing need, and for which there is a tremendous demand, is difficult to defend. [...] it is worth pondering whether superior methods and business judgment are not still the best industrial protection." —Joseph W. Roe, 1916. (Roe 1916:145-146) [2010-07-11]
- "Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers." —Elon Musk, 2014. (http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you ) [2014-06-12]
Historiographic insight that history-assembling is iterative, Disston authors on,
edit"There has been no guide for the compilation of the material in this book. Information has been obtained from every available source. It is possible, therefore, that the wide circulation of the book will bring to light some omissions, which, we hope, will be passed with tolerance in view of the difficulties attending the compilation of the facts." —The authors from the Disston company in the foreword of The File: Its History, Making, and Uses, Philadelphia, PA, USA, Henry Disston & Sons, Inc, 1920. They're totally right, and furthermore, their historiographic insight applies wonderfully here in the Web era, too. In improving Wikipedia's industrial history info, one can find numerous cases where a previous historian (quite forgivably) was missing a piece or two of the story. In the Web era it is getting orders of magnitude easier to synthesize the whole story from disparate sources. If the Disston authors could have seen millions of library books scanned, OCRd, and available with full text search capability right on their desktops, they would have been amazed at the strides that have been made toward overcoming "the difficulties attending the compilation of the facts". Of course, that doesn't mean that the work of the historian is now easy, or trivial, or fully automated; it simply means that it's less labor-intensive to climb up onto shoulders than it used to be. Furthermore, I would refactor the historiographic insight above as follows: history-assembling is iterative, and those running the later iterations have no basis for looking upon the earlier iterators as inferior just because their build was more primitive. The development has to be bootstrapped. [2010-07-14]
Everything should have a history button, James Bridle on,
edit"Everything should have a history button." —James Bridle, as quoted here. Amen. [2010-09-13]
What might logically follow if machines could do anything that a human can do, Martin Ford on,
edit"I am not committing the Lump of Labor Fallacy. I don’t believe that the amount of “work” that needs to be done is in any way limited. It may well be infinite. I just think that machines will be able to do the work." —Martin Ford, 2010-06-09. I hope I just heard a few heads explode. A commenter accused Ford of committing the fallacy anew in the final sentence. I honestly think that person doesn't get it. Oh, no doubt, I can see exactly what the commenter means, and his comment makes perfect sense when you view it through those lenses, but he's missing the point. The lump fallacy idea relies on new service work always being created. Sure. True. There always will be; that's correct. And what's also correct is that for every 30 new positions for humans that are created that require greater skill and talent, there will be 30 old ones lost that required less. Not everyone will be able to do those new ones. Mismatch ensues between what employers demand and what most people can supply. Job growth for humans will not be sufficient. It will exist, but it will be inadequate. Do you refuse to consider that we may already be at the tipping point, because the corollaries are too painful to think about? How much do you know about the world, and about industrial technology, today? Not 10 years ago. Is it possible that the people who can see what's coming are just less ignorant than others, or maybe more honest with themselves? The thing that gets me is the strong-AI-vs-narrow-AI point. It's so frickin obvious. Long before strong AI brings you a nice lunch next Tuesday, narrow AI will have eaten tomorrow's lunch out from in front of you. Someone points out that C3PO is incredibly far off. A century or two maybe. Yes. You're correct. So what? You think that's stopping tens of millions of jobs from going bye-bye within the next 20 years? Shelf-stocking? Logistics chain staffing? Cashiers? Perhaps my problem is that I'm less capable of lying to myself than most people are. I've always been ready to admit when someone or something, including myself, is only half correct, or is obviously fucked. I'm already moving on to pondering possible solutions while others are still coddling their own denial. [2010-09-30; 2010-10-03; 2015-07-19]
The relationship between experts and amateurs, Moni3 on,
edit"I'm mystified that discussions have taken place to say that experts are unnecessary on Wikipedia. Clearly they are very necessary because we cite them all the time. Wikipedia forces a give-and-take. Experts need to be willing to explain how they formed their knowledge[,] and we amateurs need to bootstrap up and be able to speak intelligently with experts." —Moni3, here. I came across this quote at the user page of GrahamColm. There have been many iterations of wisdom on this topic, but this one struck me as an especially quotable one. [2010-12-04]
The 3 legs of productivity benefit distribution, Alfred Sloan on,
edit"And so I conclude that the benefits of productivity increases should be apportioned among the consumer (lower prices or better product), labor (higher wages), and the shareholders (return on investment)." —Alfred P. Sloan, 1964, My Years With General Motors, p. 400.
This one resonated when I read it today. Earlier in the paragraph, Sloan mentions what happens when people with insufficient circumspection mistakenly push for one of the 3 legs of the stool to be omitted. In his time it was [some] labor leaders trying to push for labor to become the only leg of the stool. In the half century since Sloan wrote that sentence, we have gradually been traveling toward the era when labor would be entirely removed, leaving only 2 legs on the stool. This has been happening not intentionally but as a natural unintended consequence of corporations' path to growth (of revenue, profit margin percentage, or both) having a large component of removing labor from production (i.e., reducing its intensity per unit of output), which is called productivity growth. Productivity is a good thing, of course. Always has been, and will continue to be. But growing productivity indefinitely, across all industries, as much and as quickly as engineering and technology can allow, decade after decade till kingdom come, does produce an externality, and it begins to interfere with its own apportionment mechanism. For it's conceivable to starve the overall economy (not to run it out of fuel all at once, but rather to progressively starve it via ever-leaner mixtures through pathological sputtering toward possible stalling), because one of the inputs (consumer spending) of each value-recirculation-plus-addition cycle is directly driven by one of the outputs of the previous cycle (wages). In other words, productivity growth in isolation (without other additives to the system) treats macroeconomic value recirculation as an externality. Individual corporations, acting as they are expected to act, treat employment as an externality. The employment of the populace, save for a few choice members at this particular corporation, is someone else's problem. Which is fine, as long as there are other corporations at which the slack is picked up. A large bunch of someone elses, who as a group solve the whole problem, via many little chip-ins.
Now, on the previous page (399), Sloan translates a GM–UAW contract clause as "In other words, the real source of income is productivity." And that statement was correct, and is correct, and will still continue to be correct. (BTW, compare also this.) But the apportionment of the gains is the system function that will need revising as contextual parameter values shift. Once there is no longer sufficient need for labor in production, value recirculation cannot continue to rely solely on the wages-feeding-spending loop, unless the definition of wages is grown. That growth happens via the polarity shift when wages can be paid not only for doing production but also for avoiding hurting production from outside, or supporting the environment in which it can happen, which includes enriching the culture medium from which scarce talented participants (do-ers) can arise. That whole paragraph in which Sloan mentions the 3 legs of the stool (the stool image itself being my analogy added for clarity), and explains that labor alone can't stand up as a stool on its own, is interestingly echoed 45 years later, when Martin Ford in 2009 says that the wage recapturing mechanism cannot take all of the gains (of productivity growth) from the other 2 legs and give them all to the third (i.e., "labor", whether old-wages or basic-income or new-wages type), because the stool doesn't stay standing if you do that. Innovators and their customers must also benefit. The "stool" is the feeding of one cycle by the next. In other words, it is not the engine, it is the running of the engine. It is the state of being running. The alternative to which is being stalled.
Pondering these thoughts brings me around to developing the analogy to the internal combustion cycle more thoroughly. What keeps an IC engine running once it's started? It is the motion of one cycle providing the conditions for the next cycle to be set up and executed. OK, now consider the thermal efficiency of heat engines such as IC engines. IC engines typically have 10% to 30% efficiency (cars and trucks), some around 50% max (large marine diesels). Engineers are always looking to squeeze a few more percentage points (or at least basis points) out of any given engine design. Why? Because more value (work (physics)/work (thermodynamics)) is gotten out of each unit of fuel. But what happens when the fuel system (pump, filters, injectors) is gradually refined such that it is only allowed to supply that fraction of the fuel charge that actually contributes to the engine's work output? Which is to say, that the goal is "deliver-only-work-fuel", and the reality is "continually approaching more closely to that goal"? Such that any bit of fuel that was only "along for the ride" as waste is somehow successfully filtered from reaching the injector tip? The engine runs leaner and leaner until it starts to sputter on its way to possibly stalling.
Eventually a point might be reached where it stalls. What did that point represent? Did it represent the move to zero fuel-injector output? No. Only the move from inordinately lean to inadequate-for-continued-firing. It had not reached zero yet. It was at most only halfway to zero when the engine stalled. Remember, even the most efficient IC engine needs half of its fuel just to keep running, not to put out useful work. This is the 50% thermal efficiency level showing itself. It takes at least half the fuel just to produce a combustion chamber explosion and push the piston, providing the next bit of motion that allows future cycles to be set up and thus to possibly occur. Now come back to labor and wages as they are still defined today (old-style). What do they represent in the IC analogy? They represent a fuel system (pump, filters, injectors) which has traditionally been delivering both "non-work-fraction" fuel and "work-fraction" fuel to the combustion chamber. But this fuel system has been being continually refined to reduce the "non-work-fraction". This refinement is called productivity growth, and it is a Good Thing, because it reduces waste. But it is approaching the goal where it cannot allow for any fuel to be delivered except that fraction that does work (produces work output). What happens? Because you could not reach 100% thermal efficiency in the engine (not physically possible), you must pass through lean mixtures on your way to surely stalling eventually. Now get out your tuning wrenches and tune the system such that it allows some "non-work-fraction" fuel to accompany the "work-fraction" fuel. What happens? The engine can stay running.
Now consider the non-work fuel fraction in particular. It is "waste", is it not? And what is waste?
You reply: Waste is horrible. Waste is disgusting. Waste is freeloading. Waste is evil. Waste cannot be tolerated. All waste must be eliminated. If all waste cannot be eliminated, then maximum waste-prevention must constantly push to come as close as it ever can. To say that one might consider allowing some waste, to suffer its existence for a larger reason, is pernicious, isn't it? What an evil notion. Waste is evil, remember? How could you intentionally allow any of it? Are you a bad person? You must be a bad person—or at least one who's wrong, and who's perhaps stupider than I am, because I know better. Those who consider allowing some waste are clearly idiots at best and criminals at worst. Thus you say to me.
And to all this, I reply: Your car or truck—be it Chevrolet Silverado or even Toyota Prius—wastes over *half* of its fuel on *nothing* but radiated heat and uselessness! Oh my God! You should scrap it right away, shouldn't you? Such evil waste. In the dichotomy of purity, good and evil, only good can be accepted. But how will you drive to work, or the grocery store? Now consider another heat engine in your household. Your kid eats 2000 kilocalories a day and then burns at least 130 of them just running his brain *while it's asleep*! (2000 kcal/d × 0.2 brain consumption/total body consumption × 0.33 asleep time/day) My God! Have you ever stopped to think how wasteful that is? What are you going to do about it, O ideological purist? Scrap your car, kill your kid? What about the energy that your own body wastes? Maybe in the name of ideological purity you should cease to live!
I hope you've realized by now that I'm only making a rhetorical modest proposal here in order to teach the slow learners that laissez-faire economics with only old-style wages and labor (devoid of the polarity shift that defines new-style wages) is only an engine that ran great for many decades but will begin to lean out and run like crap and eventually stall unless it's retuned.
Now, I'm almost done exploring for today, but I have one more aspect of the analogy to examine. What is the cycle? It is a cycle of value recirculation plus addition. Some of the value is newly created in each cycle (that's the value-addition part), while another component of it is existing value that has been recycled. Thus when employee A stamps widget B, the new existence of widget B injects new value into the economy (a value-add), but the production line is only up and running at all because capital was previously invested in building it, and employee A had a heated building to sleep in last night while the outdoor temp was below freezing, and he had money to buy his breakfast this morning that is fueling him now (or, if he skipped today's breakfast, then last night's dinner—his previous meal, at any rate). Those inputs were existing value, created in earlier "IC cycles" (as it were), being recirculated and partially burned. The production line conveyor and the residential building continue existing for another day; the heat and food were consumed. Value recirculates and burns in various fractions. Would the engine be running if the only value that was available was the value-add of widget B, in and of itself? No, it would have stalled, and no widgets would be being stamped today.
I'd like to end this with one abstracted theme. Being alive at all requires energy to be consumed, and some of it to be "wasted". The body is not a 100%-efficient heat engine. Running any machines at all, IC or electrical, similarly requires energy to be consumed, and some of it to be "wasted". Machines are not 100%-efficient heat engines. Consider: having a functioning economy perhaps requires energy to be consumed, and some of it to be "wasted". But notice the quote marks on "wasted". What is your definition of waste? Your kid burns calories just lying there sleeping; but do you consider it a "waste" of food? Of course not. It's not being wasted just because it's not being converted to useful work in the moving-his-legs-and-climbing-the-steps-and-carrying-a-sack-of-stuff-to-the-top sense. Being alive at all is "useful", too. It has usefulness of a different sort, stair-climbing or no.
Death is the only perfect efficiency. Inanimate objects are the only objects that don't "waste" any resources by their continued existing.
Those two statements I would make with certainty. They then make we wonder if you can also say this by way of corollary: Perfect efficiency approaches entropy. Is that right? Is entropy the limit (mathematics) that the curve of efficiency_gains approaches but never reaches?
Regardless of that last daydream, the following confident suggestion: If you want to be alive, and to earn a living, and for food and products and services to be produced and traded, then perhaps you must accept the 2 forms of energy that coexist in your system: the fraction converted to useful work, and the fraction wasted, such as waste heat radiated off by the radiator. Perhaps a perfect-efficiency engine, in other words a perpetual-motion machine, is a dream conceived in *incomplete* theory, not a real thing to be expected. (Complete theory is theory that accurately describes all reality, not just some of it, or the main moving parts of it.) Perhaps as the fuel system gets gradually "perfected" toward delivering solely work-fraction fuel—even as it approaches merely 30% or 50% of that goal; it need not be closer than that to see the effects—old-style wages must become viewed as now being only the useful energy, and new-style wages are the "wasted" energy that allows the engine to run at all, or the body to stay alive at all. But that's not a waste at all, if you value having any machinery be running at all, or having any organisms be alive at all.
[2011-05-29]
- Random connection, 2014-03-02: I was reading last night when a couple of sentences grabbed my attention. They made me think to look back again at the above. Having done so, I think the entropy daydream above was only half-cooked—on the trail of something, but not far enough along the trail. I think the best I would do with it at this moment is to observe that superconductivity, one example of efficiency pushed to its max, shares an attribute with death/inanimateness in that energy is not being "wasted"; but then, what of it? Why is that connection either interesting/useful or uninteresting/not useful? I'm not sure at the moment. I think the daydream above may have been mistaking something in the mirror for something in the room, though; if a parabola starts on the floor, running toward a mirror on the wall, and shoots upward, treating the mirror as the x-axis limit that is never reached, then you will see the parabola's reflection in the mirror, and you will see that both parabolas, the one in the room and the one in the mirror, are approaching the self-same limit, which is the mirror surface itself. (I'm talking about panel B (not A) in the nearby image; the mirror surface is the Y-axis in panel B.) But a thermodynamic subsystem in which superconducting is occurring is (it seems to me at the moment) far from being "the same as" a thermodynamic subsystem in which total stillness and entropy reigns (that is, a place where nothing is happening). Therefore one is not approaching the other, within the same room. However, they are approaching each other as they reach for the mirror surface. Just as reflections of each other.
- Anyway, the sentences that grabbed my attention as I was reading last night were the following (emphasis mine; wikilinks mine):
- "[…] The second law declared that the transformation of heat and work was subject to limitations, because heat does not flow naturally from cold to hot bodies. To express this basic characteristic of thermodynamic change, the German physicist Rudolph Clausius, who formulated the second law, introduced the concept of "entropy," after the Greek for "transformation." Mathematically defined as the ratio of heat exchanged to the temperature at which the process occurs, entropy expressed in a sense the degree to which the energy in a thermodynamic system was unavailable for use. It was ultimately recognized to be as fundamental a property of thermodynamic systems as energy itself." —Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America, 1995 Harvard edition, pp. 31-32.
Health and longevity, Blacky on,
edit"We always had good appetites, never quite had them satisfied, had no smoking tobacco, no coffee, very little meat, and plenty of sleep—the hospital was always empty and there was not a death in the prison in my two years' time there." —Jack Black, describing the lifestyle in the provincial penitentiary at New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada, and clearly implying which lessons he thought should be drawn about personal habits that foster health and longevity. [2011-12-10]
Walking the plank with our eyes wide open, Gotye on,
edit
With our eyes wide open, we walk the plank
Well the signs were clear, they had no idea
You just get used to living in fear
Or give up when you can't even picture your future
We walk the plank with our eyes wide open
[...]
Some people offered up answers
We made out like we heard, they were only words
They didn't add up to a change in the way we were living
And the saddest thing is all of it could have been avoided
[...]
With our eyes wide open, we walk the plank, we walk the plank
With our eyes wide open, we walk the plank, we walk the plank, we walk the plank
With our eyes wide open, we walk the plank, we walk the plank
That was the end of the story.
—Gotye.
Some economic empirical observations and their (supposed) "explanations"
edit"High-school graduates now find themselves competing with college graduates for basic jobs in service businesses." —Kotkin, Joel (2012-07-16), "Generation Screwed: are millennials the Screwed Generation?", Newsweek, retrieved 2012-07-23.. Of course, the conventional "explanation" is just a really, really bad recession. Thus an idea that "it'll turn around soon." But I suspect that this is most likely to turn out like the general U.S. unemployment rate that, we were told in many news articles back in 2009, was going to bounce back from its 9% neighborhood within a year or two, or three. It's 2012, many individual U.S. states are still at 9%, and almost no one's talking anymore about when it will get back to a mere 6 or 7% (let alone the former normal of 5%). Instead, we hear about how, for this subpopulation or that subpopulation, it's way, way higher than 9%. And they don't offer any plausible foreseeable mechanism for its dropping in the next year or two, or three, or four. But with Google and DARPA having actually created trucks that can drive themselves, and all the other amazing IT that's now incubating and/or hatching, do we really believe that the unemployment rate among workers with the least education is going to heal itself, whether next year or 5 years from now? Especially when many college-educated people can't land white-collar jobs and are competing for basic jobs in service businesses? I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying that, in my gut, it doesn't feel likely anymore. I promise that if my words need to be eaten 1 or 2 or 4 years from today, I'll come back here and eat them. [2012-07-23]
- First update, 1.5 years later: Don't have time to ponder or write, but some themes: Stubborn persistence of elevated unemployment. Masking the problem by defining people as "not looking for work anyway", i.e., "You can't be considered unemployed if you've left the workforce." Readers wondering how high the bullshit quotient is on that one. Conspiracy nuts say it's so sky-high that you may as well not even bother reading the news (or taking off your tinfoil hat). Certainly it's not trivially low. Wonder where it is, exactly, between those two imaginative extremes. How many people *really* "aren't even trying anyway"? Smells fishy; a grain of truth isn't a whole bushel. On the other hand, glad the official numbers are as good as they are—glad we haven't fallen off any cliffs or anything. But can't exactly be thrilled, either. PBS Newshour Business Desk site gives some charts comparing the official rosiness with somebody's best guess of a realistic correction factor. Not possible to feel confident about guessing the ultimate meaning of it all. Still think the structural issues are durable. Now that average is over, that is, the old kind of average is over (the old ways to achieve average are gone), we need a new game to play. Although many people today may believe it impossible, there could emerge a new and different way for there to exist a semiprosperous/at-least-not-impoverished kind of "average" in the next longwave cycle. I still think this has the best chance of being that. Anyway, back to today's update. If you read various points from various dueling experts, you come away thinking that no one's theories actually explain the evidence, no one actually knows what's happening or not happening, and no one can predict what is going to happen. Not surprising; since when do humans understand the universe. Some links, all of which I skimmed, none of which I pored over (hope the link rot on these won't be too high at 5-yr OS):
- Darker roast:
- Lighter roast:
- Unemployment's Slow Drip: Top Economists on the 2013 Jobs Record
- First Take: Now, on to 6%
- At November's Pace, 5 Percent Unemployment by the End of Obama's Second Term
- [2014-01-10] — ¾-10 00:52, 11 January 2014 (UTC)
- Second update, 5 years later: Again I don't have time to do the topic full justice, but again I find a mix of light and dark roast. In a way the lighter side seems to be winning (best encapsulated in excellent recent pieces from Ezra Klein at Vox, "Why I’m skeptical that robots will take all our jobs", and James Surowiecki at Wired, "Robopocalypse not"), but yet the political turmoil shows the darker elements asserting their presence, and there is still this substantial outlook of risk and problems (interestingly explored in a recent piece from Vanessa Bates Ramirez at SingularityHub, "Civilization Is Breaking Down—Here’s What We Need to Do About It"). The US unemployment rate as of this writing, according to the Google knowledge/answer box citing the BLS and Eurostat, is 4.3%, with UK around 4.5% and DE at 3.9%. That's excellent (and it proves correct the 2013/2014 articles cited above, "First Take: Now, on to 6%" and "At November's Pace, 5 Percent Unemployment by the End of Obama's Second Term"); and yet we are still grappling with all the same questions that continue to qualify that rate with substantial asterisks: about underdisclosed flaws in the labor participation rate (that is, the employment-to-population ratio); about low-paying jobs having disproportionately displaced well-paying jobs (that is, it's great for new job creation to exist, but if too many of the new jobs are low-wage, that presents its own problems), chicken-and-egg barriers in the United States to funding of modern skilled-labor apprenticeships (companies can't pay if workers leave after training; workers can't train if companies don't pay for training), and how Germany does better in that regard; and so on. A quote that resonated with me just now was in Bates Ramirez's article, from Salim Ismail: "[civilization] is heading into a trough. I think it’s about a 20- or 30-year period. We need to get to abundance on the other side by creating new leaders, new projects, and new institutions." That really sums up my attitude on this topic at this time, and it really hasn't changed in the past 7 years since the emergence of the early versions that first brought the pieces together: there is no lump of labour, the classic kernel of the Luddite fallacy as either represented or misrepresented by generations of Econ101 is indeed false (just as Econ101 told us it was), and yet there's nonetheless a chasm that has to be bridged before we can get from the past to the abundant future. It has to do with the skills mismatch (no shortage of labor of new kinds but yet a shortage of skills for doing those kinds of labor), and it also has to do with how people feel when the old ways are slipping out of their grasp but they can't predict or even fathom the emerging new ways. It often expresses itself through lashing out, fear and loathing, trying to grab power for a recognizable ingroup before any outgroups ("them") can beat "us" to the punch, and so on. It's people refuting climate science not because they actually truly disbelieve in climate change (regardless of the fact that you will never get them to admit that) but in reality solely because they feel that "no matter how much or how fast the climate changes or not, I and my ingroup need to retain control of the levers of power, regardless; that's what's most important to me, and exchanging volleys of lies in a (bull)shit-throwing battle is the path I see toward doing that." We have to defuse these powder kegs of problems and show how people can have a place of dignity and at least a fair amount of power if we want them not to abandon worthwhile things at the ballot box: democracy, open/free trade, markets, the trend in the bend of the long arc. We need to show the fearful ones, the ones that Ismail identifies as the archetype that is "competitive, risk-taking, wants to take command and control" (and make no mistake, they are both male and female), how no one is imposing doom on them—how no one is forcing them to "lose" in a zero-sum win/lose confrontation. We have a ton of work cut out for us in that regard, because those hows have not been sufficiently figured out yet, let alone explained. That is a core part of the "architecting" that Ismail talked about. — ¾-10 19:57, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
Balancing customization, and making the standard data model smart enough that it accommodates needs without being further customized, Larry Ellison on,
edit"You are better off, I submit to you, with an 80% solution installed and working in 6 months than fantasizing about a 100% solution that you might finish in 2 years after you write lots of custom code." —Larry Ellison, in Softwar, 2003. This principle alone is not a complete theory of life and business; but in the mid to late 1990s, Ellison saw that it was missing from too much of the enterprise computing landscape, and to bring a bit of it back in was basically tempering madness with a bit of wisdom. [2012-10-15]
Prospects, a dad on,
edit"I prefer to be honest with our son. I love him. He will never be happy, because he will understand too much. But at least he will not grow up like a stupid ass." —A dad on his son, Soviet Union, early 1970s. As quoted by Hedrick Smith. [2013-09-19]
Investing time in thinking, Bucky on,
edit"When in 1927 I began to consider what the little individual could do on behalf of his fellow man that governments and corporations could not do, it became evident that the individual was the only one that could find time to think in a cosmically adequate manner." —Buckminster Fuller (quoted in Zung 2002). [2015-07-18]
Hartness, Swasey on,
edit"You will hear from that young man again, and from this 'Lazy Susan' of his." —Ambrose Swasey on James Hartness, before others knew that Hartness was cool. This one resonated something like 7 years ago, but now it is time to duly honor it here. Granted that in the long term, it is the lazy Susans, not any particular persons in themselves, that are central, and many a Susan has been born whose various midwives are unknown—in fact, machine tools, for example, have now reached complete reimagining and reconfiguration by countless thinkers in their every machine element since Hartness's day; but vindication of thinkers lies therein nonetheless. [2017-12-09]
Writing the truth, Mark Albert and Peter Zelinski on,
edit"When in doubt, tell the truth."
—Mark Albert.
"The first time I met Mark Albert in person, he had this motto taped to the wall of his office. […]
"When in doubt, tell the truth. Here is what that sign means to me: […]
"To be a writer is to draw a circle. Everything in the world is interconnected, but the writer has to write a piece that stands alone. Maybe it will be 500 words or 3,000, but it will have a beginning and an end, and it will make one main point. The writer draws a circle to contain the story he or she wants to tell, and the circle can be drawn anywhere. It can be large or small. Yet however and wherever it’s drawn, the circle will contain some details and exclude others. What should be done about the tendrils of interconnection that cross the circle’s border? […]
"Confronted with complications such as these, the writer will always be tempted to overlook them, to make the lines of the circle more decisive than they actually are. Because the only other choice is to tell a messy story. […]
"The real writer tells the messy story. Indeed, the real writer is the one willing to invest effort and craft into seeing and accepting the messiness and giving it its fair place for the sake of the truth."
—Peter Zelinski.
https://www.mmsonline.com/blog/post/the-sign-on-the-wall-when-i-first-met-mark-albert-when-in-doubt-tell-the-truth [Resonated 2019-01-09]
Experiencing things without any clear realization of their existence or significance, the little fellow on,
edit"It was a hard but wholesome life, under which the people suffered many privations and enjoyed many advantages, without any clear realization of the existence of either one of them. […] This locality was known as The Notch, being situated at the head of a valley in an irregular bowl of hills. The scene was one of much natural beauty, of which I think the inhabitants had little realization, though they all loved it because it was their home and were always ready to contend that it surpassed all the surrounding communities and compared favorably with any other place on earth." —Calvin Coolidge on 19th-century Vermont life. Another facet of ontologic blindness's being a default state, which is a theme that pervades human existence. As the little fellow indicated in the second passage (that is, better qualifying what he expressed in the first), it is not that humans are insensible/insentient—rather just that, whereas pride and even arrogance come to them naturally (independently of the awareness-versus-ignorance distinction), the circumspection needed for insightful comparison does not. (To Colonel Starling and his crew, silent Cal was the little fellow—with affection, not irreverence.) [2019-02-02]