Is Kickstarter part of the problem?

I recently listened to an interview with one of the head’s of Pimco. Pimco is one of the largest financial institutions in the world, with over two trillion dollars that it manages, and is the world’s largest bond investment manager. They know a thing or two about global trends and markets

One of the questions asked was what caused the financial crisis. The answer given, which is admittedly controversial, is that consumers took on too much debt. This is something that’s been said before, but consumers are supposed to take on debt, that’s part of how the economy grows. The clarification is that the debt they took on was predominantly consumption based, not investment based. People were spending money on nice things, fun experiences, trying to improve their overall happiness, but not investing in methods of improving productivity, or increasing domestic output.

This makes sense to me. One takes on debt with the presumption that it will generate a return greater than the cost of the debt with interest. A college education will generate a higher salary, a car will permit greater choice of living options and careers, etc.

If true, this is both compelling and frightening. Just because people have less money to spend does not mean that their appetite for new things and experience has gone away. If anything, they desire more because they can only afford less.

When the financial crisis really came to bear near the end of 2008, a lot of banks shut down their loan programs to small businesses, much to dismay of many economists. Without loans, these businesses cannot expand or grow their businesses. But something else did show up: Kickstarter.

Kickstarter launched in late April 2009, and it allowed people to ask for money from the public at large to produce things for the purposes of consumption: games, videos, movies, albums, etc. Looking at kickstarter, everyone and their grandmother has an idea for a 3D printer that they want to sell.

Pros: This effectively democratizes the creative process. You don’t have to know somebody in the publishing business to get your new album financed. So long as you have a means of demonstrating your talent and people are excited about your project, you have a decent chance of getting the funding you need.

Cons: This does not address our need to invest in small business capital expenditures that are important for growing the economy. The public at large has been trained by advertising agencies to view opportunities on a more selfish level. A sheet metal fabrication company is not going to have success on kickstarter trying to raise funds for a new stamping machine. It’s not very sexy compared to a new videogame by the creator of Mega Man.

There’s also no accountability. Donating to kickstarter does not guarantee that you will receive anything for your money. If a company fails to produce the good for whatever reason, you’re out of luck. Part of the vetting process for getting a small business loan was demonstrating one’s ability to handle funds appropriately, or at least be accountable if the company failed in it’s mission to generate profitability for those providing the loan. That vetting process has been thrown out the window. Say what you will about rich institutions, they can afford to take risks. The public is now bearing those risks, with less information, nickel and diming away our savings on neat things we may never even receive.

I hope I’m wrong. I’ve donated to a kickstarter campaign, helped a friend setup his own, and have several projects that might be good to bring to kickstarter to help get them off the ground. But is that the right thing we should be doing with our money?

Education vs. infrastructure

Hypothetical: You come stumble into a developing nation just hit with a disaster. The plight of the people moves you to act. You have millions of dollars and time at your disposal. What do you do?

A particular planet money podcast, referenced once already in a previous post, has had me thinking a lot about this sort of scenario. “Education is key to bringing these people to a greater level of independence and prosperity.” I would argue that is not sufficient enough to be true.

What good is calculus to a girl who hauls water for six hours a day for her family?

The education, one might argue, would allow her to leave and move on to bigger and better things, but would she be able to leave as long as the family depends on her for getting the water?

The Planet Money episode I refer to centers around one man’s attempt to build a school for a town in Haiti devastated by the earthquake. Originally, listeners raised about $3000 for the town to build it’s own school, but that money was used up before a foundation was fully laid. A volunteer with a long career in construction and planning then tried his hand. Ultimately, the school was built, but it took longer, cost more, and was tremendously scaled back from the original, but still modest beginnings.

People developed the use of roads and trade long before literacy became commonplace. Is it foolish to prioritize education over infrastructure? One of the main reasons the school took so long and had to have it’s scope of work reduced is that there was not sufficient industry to supply them with raw materials, nor roads to transport those materials to them.

There is the obvious trap that this is a guy living in a developed nation discussing solutions for developing nations, generalizing over a complex set of situations unique to each country. But, even industrial revolutions tend to happen before education becomes a priority.

There is also a need for balance, you can’t  focus solely on education or infrastructure, which is really what I worry is going on now. I also don’t think this contradicts my previous views on mission trips (though I had to stop and work on that for a bit). The best kind of trip involves education of the people going, while they help rebuild.

What is the cost of being right?

We’ve all been there. The argument with the person who refuses to be convinced. Even with all of the evidence, data, logic, emotion that you throw at them, they stand their ground and remain true to their belief. It’s frustrating, because you know you’re right.

The problem is that whether you’re actually right or not is not what matters anymore. What matters is that you know it, and it is important for the other person to acknowledge it. Or, at least know that you were right.

I’ve been reading case studies about companies that fall apart because the leadership team got into an argument like this. The same thing has destroyed personal relationships as well.

There is a whole body of evidence surrounding what is known as the backfire effect. The premise is that, contrary to what logic dictates, instead of changing one’s personal opinion when presented with facts that contradict that opinion, we tend to believe more strongly in our opinion, and instead devalue the facts that run against us. By extension, we devalue the source of the facts, the methods by which they were gathered, etc, etc, etc.

So now you’ve got someone who needs the other side to understand how wrong they are, the other side refusing to concede, and actually becoming more and more certain that they are actually right. They will respond with arguments of their own, resulting in a backfire effect on the first person.

Two people who both now have to prove themselves right, and the other person wrong, both only becoming more and more convinced by how right they are.

Rock, meet hard place.

This isn’t something everyone does all the time, but I do think it is something any of us can fall victim to if we aren’t careful. I was tempted to use the word petty several times when writing this, but that suggests immaturity in a situation where their brain is actually taking them down a road without them realizing it. It’s okay to believe that you’re right, but be careful where that takes you.

Selling a mission

I’m currently in the market for a mission trip. Do you have any suggestions? Our youth have gone to South Dakota to help the Lakota on the Pine Ridge reservation. They’ve helped renovate damaged homes in Katrina.

I heard on the radio recently that the number of volunteers in Oklahoma after the tornados hit are so plentiful that it’s getting hard for construction companies to get contracts.

When I was a teenager, I took several trips to Juarez, Mexico to build homes for the homeless there. It was one of those experiences that defines a person. Nothing makes you appreciate what you have like experiencing life without it. I strongly believe it’s the kind of thing everyone needs to do at least once. I used to argue it was because if you have the opportunity to do good, you have to seize it. Now, I’m not so sure. I think it may be much more self serving.

After the earthquake in Haiti, lots of groups went down to help rebuild. I know the exact sort of experience. A group comes in for a week, builds up a basic house, or perhaps a larger structure like a three room school or meeting house, working crazy hours and goes home feeling completely exhausted, but riding a high of having done tremendous good.

The truth is more complicated.

You can argue that giving a free home or school certainly doesn’t hurt the situation, but it begs the question: what does this group really need? Construction projects are popular because it’s hard work and you have something to show for your actions at the end of the week. In New Orleans, because a renovation takes more than one week, they stage the projects so that at least one home is getting finished each week, and cart the current teams to see a finished product, to visualize what the home they are working on will eventually be. It is important for people to feel like what they are doing is making a difference.

Every single one of these trips that I participate in, I toy with the idea of giving up what I have and making this particular mission my cause. I’ve got the skills and the will to throw myself at a cause until positive change occurs. But I don’t do it, and deep down I know that even if I offered, I would get turned away by the organizers. That’s not what they want, nor should it be.

The Susan G Komen foundation is arguably one of the most successful non-profits in recent history in terms of getting awareness of their brand and their cause into the public eye. Others have been around for longer, but it’s hard to turn around and not spot a pink ribbon somewhere, or see a commercial about one of their three day walks. For a long time I was puzzled by the walks. The Walk for Hunger, the Relay for Life, all have people walking for a cause. But walking doesn’t actually stride toward finding a cure for cancer. You can walk the entirety of your life, around the planet, and not a single step will advance the scientific pursuits behind the machinations of cancer. What they really need is your money.

But they can’t just ask for your money. That doesn’t work. What works is organizing the massive walks where volunteers ask their friends for money. It’s inefficient, because lots of the money donated ends up going into the cost of organizing the walk itself. T-shirts, drinks, zoning off an area with police protection for three straight days. But, because people finish the walk feeling exhausted and having a t shirt for having walked so far and so hard.

This is not a knock against the methods employed by these non-profits. They are simply employing methods that are effective. The knock is against our need to be sold an artificial involvement to better engage us, and make us open our wallets wider. They sell an opportunity for someone to exert themselves really hard, and feel good doing it because, their efforts are furthering a cause that, for at least that day, or three days, or week, is really important to them. A lot of the money goes to the cause you are supporting, but not as much as it could because you need to get something back for your efforts. You need a memory, a t-shirt, maybe a photo with a celebrity.

Admittedly, the alternate approach has its own pitfalls. There are plenty of examples of an individual or community receiving a cash windfall in response to a particular disaster, and that money is poorly managed and ultimately wasted. Planet Money had interesting coverage of the efforts to build a school for a small town that had lost theirs in the Haitian Earthquake. Both approaches were tried, and in the end it is questionable if either one really made a positive difference for the community.

I am still an advocate of mission trips. I think they’re very important learning experiences. Ignorance breeds over-simplification at its least and apathy at its worst. There’s no such thing as a big problem that’s simple. I believe in working hard to find your own limits can help you grow as an individual as well as a team. I believe it will change your decision making process, as well as improve your problem solving skills by making learn to do more with less.

I still believe in building something, but I want to find trips that have as much education as they do hard labor. That’s the only way we can fix the real problems.

Perception of value

I have direct deposit. It’s great. Twice a month my salary gets deposited into my account automatically. I don’t have to to go the bank, I don’t have to wait for the funds to clear. It just works.

A lot of my bills are taken care of in the same way. The mortgage gets paid automatically. The credit cards are nearly automatic. I keep that manual in case there are ever charges that I need to dispute, same with the phone bill. But, in the end, finances are controlled by logging in to an online service and shifting funds from one entity to another.

I sometimes wonder if this is a bad thing.

Money has become an abstraction in my life. I do not carry cash anymore. Too often, when I did carry it, I’d end up giving it away to people begging for change in the subways or on the streets in Boston. I’m not opposed to helping people in need, but think that supporting institutions designed to get people off the street is a much better use of my funds rather than giving someone $5 because they tell me they need money for a bus ticket to get home. What little reading I’ve done into the subject gives me little encouragement that the $5 is actually going to a bus ticket .

So, life is easier with a credit or debit card, handling the finances in computerized transactions that are automatically recorded, removing humans and human errors largely from the equation, streamlining the system of payment to give me what I want exactly when I want it, without having to worry about the availability of funds.

It’s easy to see why this appeals to so many people. The simplicity and speed of gratification is a sign of modernity. Companies like it too. One would think it heretical that both sides like the exact same thing. After all, aren’t they both competing to hang on to the money? Except we don’t. Or, at least I don’t.

What is a dollar worth? For value propositions, we are often presented the worth of something in dollars, but without a baseline perception of the metric, how can we have any meaningful comparisons?

Example 1: An unlocked (purchased off contract, without a subsidy) smart phone for $200 is perceived to be a good deal, but why? The reason is that, compared to other unlocked cell phones, $200 falls on the low end of the spectrum. Higher end Android and iPhones unlocked easily broach $600. But what is the value of $200? For that, you could buy 200 loaves of bread, or 100 half-gallons of milk. Or split the difference and eat like a medieval peasant for a third of a year (and probably die by the end, that’s not the healthiest diet).

The point is, why has $200 for a smartphone been deemed an acceptable value? One could argue that the  market demand determines the price. Higher prices reduce adoption, lower prices eliminate profitability margin, and you’re sort of right. We don’t usually know how much things cost to make, in every sense.

Example 2: Health insurance. The Affordable Care Act, if nothing else, is forcing people to face the quagmire of health insurance. Lots of articles and news reports have shed light on the completely bizarre value propostion presented by health insurance. Money loses are sense of value when it comes to health insurance. Doctors and hospitals bill amounts mandated by the hospitals, get reimbursed a certain amount, patients get charged another amount, and then there’s other amounts that just sort of vanish. It’s called “funny money” It’s charged, but never collected, and never expected.

Say you go to the doctor because you don’t feel good. She takes your temperature, concludes you have a cold that needs to run its course, and send you home with some aspirin. It was worth going because now you know what you have and you aren’t worried you’re about to die of some horrible, obscure disease. (Hypochondriacs unite! But don’t hold hands.) Let’s say the doctor’s time is worth $100, plus the cost of the aspirin at $3. Rather than pay the doctor directly, you pay a co-pay of 7.5 half-gallons of milk. The doctor then bills the insurance company for 300 loaves of bread. The insurance company pays out a quarter of an unlocked iphone ($150 for those keeping score) to the doctor and take the copay, along with the monthly premiums that the person and their employer pays them. But the doctor billed for half an unlocked iphone. What happened to the other 150 loaves of bread? The doctor bills that much because she is contractually obligated to charge a certain amount to the insurance company for certain kinds of service, but the value in it is never clear.

Example 3: Dinner out at a nice restaurant plus a show plus a babysitter easily runs north of $200. Plane tickets for the family to travel to Texas for a week: $800. A brand new videogame $60. According to steam, the most time I’ve ever spent on a single videogame is about 200 hours (that was before I had kids), but people online have bragged about spending over 2000 hours on some Call of Duty games. Not a a statistic I would brag about, but to each his own. For one of those people, a video game breaks down to $.03/hr. A dinner breaks down to $67/hr. A week in Texas breaks down to $4.76/hr (not including food, lodging, etc.) Am I spending too much on dinner, or not enough on the videogame?

Market forces are supposed to determine the value people have for a good or service, but has the abstraction of money clouded our perception of value, rendering a market that is free to chose a price that it wants, and then simply has to convince us that we want it at the price it has set? Are we numb to the market?

Either way, I think I need to find a babysitter I can pay in loaves of bread.

Frustration with the publishing process

It’s not easy to get a book published if you want to go the traditional route.

1. First you have to write a book.
2. Then you have to throw it away and write a different, better book.
3. Then you have to get that book ripped apart, critiqued, and properly edited.
4. Then you have to find a literary agent.
5. Then you have to get it published.

I’m currently on step 4, and have been working on a good query letter for some time, ready heavily through a site called QueryShark. It’s run by a literary agent who has gotten fed up with how bad query letters can be, especially compared to how good the books can be.

Writing, I think for a lot of people, starts out as something for the ego. It feels good to write. I suspect this because the process of publishing is designed largely to separate the good books from those that are written purely for the sake of the author. Each of the above steps, aside from the first one, cause a lot of anguish and frustration. Who wants to throw away their first book, after all the time they put into it? Who wants to listen to a bunch of people who just don’t get your story? Why can’t the agent and publishing company just read the book, and know that it is as good as you believe it to be?

But, you suck it up, you throw away that book, you remove some of your proudest writing because it takes away from the story for the reader, you do your homework, you deal with rejection, and acknowledge that there is a very real probability that no publisher will greenlight your book.

And then, one day, while walking through the DVD section at Target, you’ll spot this.

Assuming that getting a movie made and into distribution is at least as hard as getting a book published, you’ll think to yourself, “I’ve gotta be doing something wrong.”

For those who can’t be bothered to click the link. The movie is about a bunch of people trapped in a flooded grocery store with a great white shark. No, I’m not making that up.

Check the temperatures! Something is starting to freeze!

My opinion of Apple is softening.

I still don’t like them, and believe they are a bad company, but I have to admit that reality is starting to return to the view of most people.

Some of the recent good moves that Apple has made:

1. Dividends. Apple has done a tremendous job of separating people from their money, jacking up a stock price to astronomical levels, arguable becoming the most valuable company in the world. To what end? Well, at last, there is an end.

2. Charitable donations: This also falls under the category of giving back, but bears notable mention here. A few years ago Apple famously refused to donate to any causes, but is now offering to match donations its employees make to some causes.

3. Apologies: Remember the terrible antenna in the iPhone 4? Remember how it came out that it always had terrible antennas, and that the software was reporting stronger signal than it actually had? Remember the independent studies showing that it was not the network, but in fact the design architecture of the iPhones that resulted in so many dropped calls on the AT&T network? Remember the press conference with the non-apology, accusing the press of picking on Apple? But recently they did apologize for forcing maps, which so many have complained about.

It used to be that when Apple did something bad, it was okay because they were Apple, and I always hated that. Now, they don’t have a free pass anymore. Now they are under the same scrutiny as all of the other techs, more so than many now, and are no longer the perfect company that they never were.

They still do things I don’t like, such as denying customers features that they can roll out, but choose not to in order to improve the attractiveness of the next version. The original iPhone shipped with a 2G antenna, even thought many phones were already 3G. Their slow speeds were blamed on the network, but Apple really needed a good selling point for the next year.

One thing that I must credit them is creating a platform with a very accessible interface that has generated a vast swath of apps to help those with autism.

Which is why, on Black, er, Thursday, I will be standing in line at Target to get my son an iPad. Don’t tell him, it’s his Christmas present.

Hindsight is not 20/20

Memories are an imperfect thing. Eye witnesses to crimes are not reliable testimony. It is not hard to implant a false memory. A bad outcome does not always mean you made the wrong choice. Conversely, a good outcome does not always mean you made the right choice.

Memories are tainted with the context of where we are, right now. There have been experiments with mice showing that when they remember something, they are actually recreating the synapses of that memory. The irony is that the purest memory possible is a forgotten one, lost in an amnesiac’s brain. That’s assuming it’s not overwritten by newer memories.

If we take this to be true in people’s brains, which some people are starting to believe, that means that thinking back on an event, your impressions are clouded by the ultimate outcome. All of the telltale signs you can’t believe you didn’t see? Maybe they were never there. The risk is that by dwelling on a particular memory, continuously re-contextualizing it based on your perception of the outcome actually leeches out lessons that may not actually be relevant, and deaden the lessons one should take away.

Ultimately, one truly does not know what would have happened if they made a different choice, simply because they did not make that choice. Aggregate the experience, learn from it, and make better choices in the future.

On the importance of food

I don’t enjoy thinking about food.

It feels like a confession, to say that. Coworkers sometimes show off their elaborate lunches, or describe some fantastic meal they enjoyed at a wedding celebration or high end restaurant, and while those things are nice, I honestly do not care.

There is nothing on the Food Network that I want to watch. I’ve never taken a picture of a meal that I am going to eat.

This is not to say that I don’t enjoy eating food. My wife is a fabulous chef and has made some amazing stuff. She is the polar opposite of me in this regard. She plans around meals, and a lot of strategizing is spent figuring out how to prepare a given meal. One of the more unpleasant things to happen in her day is for something to come up that prevents her from making the dinner she’d planned to make. This is not too uncommon right now, what with two young children at home right now.

This is a problem, largely because food apathy inhibits food creativity. My wife can open the fridge, take stock of what’s in there, and plan out a meal. I can open the fridge, take stock of what’s in there, and go and make a PB&J. They’re simple, tasty, and fill be up, at least at first. Human systems thrive on variety, it seems. The first day, a PB&J will last until lunch. The next day, it lasts until 10. The day after, until 8. By then end of the week, I’ll finish the PB&J and still be starving. The same experience has happened with eggs, and any number of breakfast items. I could mix things up a bit, but that takes a lot of planning and effort, as well as prep time, and I’d much rather use that time for sleeping.

I learned in college that when choosing between eating and sleeping, sleeping wins. I also learned that after using the technique of drinking lots of water to stave off hunger for two straight days, it never works again.

I’m hungry.

Economies of Scale

Why do smart phones cost so much?

Seriously, why do they cost so much?

They have tiny displays, low power processors, batteries that often prove to be inadequate. My netbook has a more powerful processor, a bigger screen, more of pretty much everything, and yet it cost $300 new, whereas your average unlocked smart phone runs about $600. A few years ago, a device like the HTC Tilt would cost you over $800 unlocked, if memory serves.

It’s easy to nitpick that the processor style for a cellphone vs. a netbook is very different. The software is very different. The smart phone has a touch screen. So let’s take an example that’s a bit harder to argue.

iPhone 4S vs. the “new” iPad.

iPhone 4S 16GB unlocked price? $649.

new iPad 16GB wth 4G? $629.

They’ve got the same processor, same screen pixel density, the same internal storage. The iPad has a faster cellular modem than the 4S. The screen is immensely bigger, as is the battery to power it. The iPad intrinsically costs more to build than an iPhone from a materials standpoint. So what is the justification for the cost of the iPhone? The camera? Siri? (hah!)

This is not a hate on Apple post (picking on Siri notwithstanding), I’m pretty certain every other cell phone maker does the same thing. Apple’s iPad affords a cleaner comparison than is usually available. The question is, why are they able to get away with it? If there is such a massive profit to be had making cellphones, why aren’t more companies doing it, driving down the prices?

Designing for consequences

I don’t design cars. By the time you’re done reading this, you’ll be glad I don’t design cars. At the moment, I’m of the opinion that cars should take out seatbelts, airbags, stability control, anti-lock brakes, crumple zones, and all of those safety features they’ve added over the last fifty years.

Instead, they should put a big spike on the steering wheel where the horn is.

Do this for all cars, and suddenly people will become much more cautious and courteous drivers.

I sometimes wonder if the push and drive to increase driver safety comes at a cost. Specifically, it insulates people from the consequences of their actions.

A drunk driver plows into a crowd of pedestrians. Thanks to all of the great safety equipment inside of the car, the driver is fine, and can walk away, but the people he hit were not so well protected. Sure, he might go to prison, but prison hardly heals the injured.

There is an obvious market incentive to increase the level of protection for the buyer. After all, someone who walks away from a wreck that could’ve killed them goes a long way to brand loyalty. But, there’s no incentive to protect things not in the vehicle. The design of cars is largely to absorb as much energy as possible, and transmit the rest away from the passengers.

There is also no market incentive to punish obviously bad drivers. At best, consequences are realized through tickets and a rise in insurance premiums, but it seems that the brain has a hard time internalizing the cause and effect due to time delays between getting caught in your insurance going up, or the the number of times you get away with something vs. the number of times you are caught.

So, how to bring the consequences of your actions into a more real time, present form?

I realize there are a lot of practical issues with the spike, but once something goes from harmless to potentially deadly, it does make one redefine their priorities, as you suddenly face the same potential consequences as those around you.

This American Life–Retraction

I’ve become something of a podcast junkie. I don’t listen to music much while at work. I prefer the telling of stories to music when I’m doing CAD modeling. I makes it a lot easier to pause right in the middle and I’m less likely to hum along, which is distracting to the people around me.

One of the podcasts I enjoy, like a lot of people, is This American Life. They’ve been fairly popular in the news lately due to a show they produced recently about Apple and Chinese manufacturing. This week was their first ever retraction, and they dedicated the entire show to it. In that sense, it’s the best retraction I’ve ever seen or heard. Retractions are often simple apologies or corrections run at the bottom of an online article, or published the next day at the back of the newspaper that you have to track down, which few people will see or care.

One of the ironies is that I’ve been working my way through the archives of This American Life and had just finished up an episode in 2000 out people who convince themselves of their own lies before listening to the retraction episode, where the man telling about his experiences in China made up things that did not really happen to enhance his story.

That being said, I have a couple of issues of my own.

First of all, contrary to what the reporter from marketplace or the translator said, there are factories guarded by men with guns. It’s true that only military men are allowed to carry weapons, but sometimes these men are hired to guard factories. They are displayed very prominently at the entrances and are scary as hell. I only visited one factory where this was the case, and I remember wondering why they needed to have military guards at the entrance, as they predominantly make toys, but nonetheless they do exist.

The other big emphasis on the narrator’s character teardown was that he reported things that did not actually happen to him, but have actually happened. They talk in detail about N-Hexane and the damage it does to people. While I do not condone his lying about the experience, I understand his desire to increase people’s awareness of bad things that are happening.

At the same time, I’d like to share a couple of stories and observations. When working with a factory in China, I witnessed several instances of the management taking steps to ensure employee morale and safety. They have festivals to clear away bad spirits that are effectively one giant party. There was an instance where my company wanted to use a UV curing process on some electronics and the factory agreed with a contingency that we purchase sufficiently rated eye protection equipment. It was an instance where we should have thought of it, but did not, and the management stepped in to protect its workers.

One of the greatest dangers to workers is their lack of knowledge about how some things might be harmful to them. There is another operation involving ultrasonic welding that is occasionally performed. It involves pushing to pieces of plastic together with a thin rib between them. A horn comes down and shakes the top pieces at an ultrasonic frequency that melts the rib of plastic and bonds the two together. The problem is that the horn has to ramp up from no noise to an ultrasonic frequency, which passes through the audible range, including those that can be bad for the ear at close range. As such, we hand out earplugs to all of the workers nearby. The catch? They don’t wear them. They don’t like them. The person using the tool will wear them, but the person right next to the tool doesn’t see the need. You explain it to them, they put in the earplugs, then pull them out again as you walk away.

The last observation I want to make is that of wages and living expenses. My last trip to China was around 2006 or 2007, so things may have changed, but I had a conversation regarding cost of living with some of the factory managers. They explained that workers at the particular factory I was at paid 800 RMB a month for people working a 40 hour work week. That’s about $100 a month in US wages. Not much, but at the same time their cost for room and board is 100 RMB per month. Their living expenses are 1/8th of their earnings.

Assume that the average person in Boston makes $60K. It’s actually less than that, but that’s what a toll taker makes. That’s a lot more than 800 RMB a month. It’s 40000 RMB a month, or $5000. Of course, there are taxes and insurance that comes out of your paycheck, possibly union dues. That stuff account for about 25% of gross pay give or take, leaving you with a check for $3750. Assume rent for an average Boston apartment is about $1200 per month. That does not include utilities like heat, water and electricity. Take off another $250 or so for that. There are also grocery bills, which with current food prices can easily run to $100 per week, or $400 per month. Take that stuff out and you’re left with $1900. A fair chunk of change, but .38 of your original take home salary. Our living expenses are 3/5 of our earnings. In a lot of situations, the expenses are higher and the wages are less, pushing that disparity further.

I once believed that we enjoy a higher standard of living because of the higher wages and availability of cash. That’s a part of it, but given that things are so much less expensive in China, a lot of that advantage is in the noise. Our higher standard of living comes from the amount of money we have to put into it, and I worry about its sustainability.

The last point I want to make is that it’s wrong to assume that people working in these factories are planning to work there doing these dull and dangerous jobs for the next forty to fifty years. Again, from my experience, the workers are predominantly women, they come to the industrialized areas for two to three years, earn enough for a dowry, then go back home and get married. When designing assembly lines, you have to have stations that you can pluck someone off the street and sit them down and have them doing work within minutes. This is a problem right after Chinese New Year, as a lot of the workers go home, and just don’t come back. There’s no such thing at two week’s notice. Because these jobs are not enjoyable, it’s understandable that workers want to put this part of their life behind them as quickly as possible. The more hours you work, the sooner its over. In that sense, it’s sort of like college. You work incredibly hard for several years doing work that isn’t always enjoyable, but helps ensure a prosperous future.

I have a great deal of respect for the workers in China, and would not want to trade places with them at all. At the same time, I wonder what I could give up to move my own earnings to expenses ratio closer to theirs.

The plight of the tragic hero

I have a problem with the idea of the tragic hero. From the perspective of writing, the tragic hero provides incredible opportunity for deep drama, moving moments, and a compelling story. The opportunity is so great, that I sometimes wonder if writers rely on it as a sort of crutch.

I’m an optimist, and I like happy endings. That doesn’t mean I like for things to be sappy, but I do like the entire concept of sometime getting an opportunity to relish the end results of their turmoil. I can admit, in real life this does not always happen. But the practice of the tragic hero in stories is  too commonplace.

I think it is harder to write a story with the level of drama and turmoil one gets with a tragic hero and not have a tragic hero. This is where I tip my hat to J.K. Rowling. (*Alert, spoiler if you’ve not read the last book or seen the last movie and have somehow avoided discussion of it) Opinions can vary regarding the originality of the universe, the movies, but the woman can craft a story. Before the last book came out, a lot of people believed that the only way the story could be brought to an end was to kill Harry Potter. I, myself, believed that she probably would not do that, but at least one of the three main characters would die. But she managed to create a compelling story that did not kill any of them, which gave it a very satisfying conclusion for me.

I’m not going to point out lots of books that emphasize the use of the tragic hero, because ultimately that’s not where the problem lies. I worry that the  mentality of the tragic hero has been overly embraced in our culture. It’s a simple and successful storytelling crutch because readers/viewers too readily identify with the protagonist.

A few years ago I went hiking with a guy who had not packed enough water, yet refused offers of water from others who had extra, preferring instead to soldier on without it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a strong advocate of self sacrifice. I think one gains a tremendous amount from the experience self sacrifice. It can make us quite strong, but to  deny gifts of grace denies you a taste of love and compassion that is unique and cannot be gained through self sacrifice. Do not turn something down for the sake of turning something down. Do not create, in your own head, a narrative of the tragic hero. Remember, at the end of the story, the hero usually dies.

The worst part about such a narrative is that the protagonist will often make choices that could have spared them the fate they suffered, and still succeeded. At that point, they stop being a tragic hero and just become a really bad decision maker.  Those are the stories you read about in the papers and see on the news. We see them as bad decision makers, but they saw themselves as tragic heroes. I use past-tense, because they’re usually dead by the time we hear about the story.

Do not romanticize the tragic hero. Celebrate those who sacrificed themselves for the greater good by enjoying the goodness they enabled us to enjoy. Anyone who aspires to martyrdom sells short what they can hope to accomplish by living.

*I’m adding this bit a few weeks after drafting this originally. After feedback from Julie and thinking about it for a few weeks, it’s probably worth qualifying that I am in no way immune to the issues I describe above. Julie caught me doing the tragic hero bit just the other day at lunch. The things we hate most about others are often the things we dislike most about ourselves, no?"*

Method of improving adoption of public transportation

Public transportation is, for a great many people, a low cost method of getting from one place to another. In the US, there is a mentality of the importance of having one’s own car for the freedom to go from one place to another when needed. Many people are will to front the cost of driving, parking, mostly (I think) because of the justification that public transportation would take too long, and the time is too important to waste waiting for the bus.

This ignores the fact that you can get a lot more done sitting on a bus than you can driving a car, because driving requires your attention. In fact, I’m typing this while riding on a bus (when else would I have time to write?). But I digress….

Proposed solution:

Give public buses the same right of way that one gives to ambulances and police cars. When the bus comes, you have to pull over. You have to stop for the bus, it does not have to stop for you.

With that, buses become not only cost effective, but more efficient than driving one’s self. Rush hour need only apply to people who insist on the freedom of sitting in traffic with everyone else who insists on the freedom of sitting in traffic.

Buses could also use more comfortable seats.

And schedules that  don’t require a decoder ring to comprehend.

Tradition vs. optimization

9 to 5. That’s the concept of normalcy. People work 7 hours, from 9am to 5pm, with an hour break for lunch at noon. Bankers hours.

A lot of jobs don’t fall into this mold, and I contend that this is a good thing. Imagine if everyone, every business, was only open from 9am to 5pm. Business that rely on commerce would be limited strictly to those that do not work (admittedly, a bigger demographic right now than anyone wants it to be). People that have errands to run outside of work would be out of luck. They’d have to use their vacation days exclusively for things like grocery shopping because nothing is ever open.

Why is it that this does not make sense, and yet so many companies cling to the perception of the 9-5 job?

Proposal: you can break a 24 hour period into 3 distinct 8 hour blocks of time. Take the companies, and split them into 3 different shifts. Not just manufacturing jobs, but everything. Banks, insurance, lawyers, clinics, you name it.

Suddenly, you have one third as many cars on the road during the morning commute. Suddenly, you have three times as many parking spaces available to you. Suddenly, the lunch rush isn’t as crammed. Eateries would have to stay open more, but the revenue might actually be made up for the fact that there is a more even flow of people, with fewer ones giving up to eat someplace else because a given place is always mobbed during the lunch rush.

Utilities would like it. There would no longer be as much of a surge during the day when all of those office buildings fire up their HVAC systems and computer networks.

Real estate moguls might not like it. One location could house three business instead of one, which may mean three times as much rent, but it would also mean you would only need one third as much office space. A sudden surge of available real estate would cause prices to plummet. Then again, that would lower business expenses, expenses that those businesses could pass along to the consumer.

There’s my pitch for the evening.

You don’t have to limit it hours of being open

Smart part numbering rant

Disclaimer: This topic is not interesting, not even to me. It’s an engineering process rant.

The problem centers around the fact that first principles, while a good place to start, are not good at resolving problems to which first principles have  been applied and repeatedly failed.

In a modern approach to design, you have a team of mechanical engineers working to design parts. You’ve also got electrical engineers incorporating electronics, industrial designers managing the form, marketing guys designing the packaging, manufacturing engineers making sure it can all be produced and assembled in a cost effective manner, and managers to try and keep things on schedule.

There are also software engineers, but this argument doesn’t entirely apply to them, for I’ll leave them out of the example for the moment.

Very early on in a process like this, it becomes evident that every part that is designed needs to have a unique identifier. Otherwise, how do you know what all you need to order and build?

The problem arises when people try to utilize that part number to describe the part itself. Lets go through the exercise of developing a smart part numbering system.

1st design consideration: At least in the US. studies have shown that when the number of digits surpass 10, the probability of a transcription error is greater than 50%. We have an average brain buffer of 10 digits. So, any part number methodology you assign, you’ll want to keep to no more than 10 numbers.

2nd design consideration: The methodology must be simple, and relatively intuitive. When new employees are brought on board, you don’t want to spend hours/days/weeks teaching them how your proprietary method works. For one that’s time that they could be doing work that will make you money. For another, given the transient nature of so many jobs, contractors and new employees are not always enthusiastic to learn a skill that will not make them more marketable to another company. If you have to write a manual on your part numbering system, you’re on the wrong track.

“Now wait a second!” you might ask. “Why not use one of the established part numbering systems already in use for a given industry?” Great idea. Go find one. I’ll wait….

Actually, I won’t. I’ve already written this by the time you’re reading it, and this isn’t a rant to go into the ramifications of reading something that’s not yet been written. What is telling is that companies with massive inventories that have to index millions of unique products have opted to use a system that does not rely in intelligent part numbering systems. Examples: Amazon.com, and McMaster-Carr. Alternately, Stockdrive parts/Sterling Instruments has what appears to be an intelligent numbering system. The numbers are twice as long, and good luck figuring out their methodology. To say nothing of the fact that the part often has multiple numbers, none of which are ever in stock (no I’m not bitter (well, okay, maybe a little bit)).

3rd design consideration: Think about all of the things different departments that I listed previously. Here’s a short list.

If you’re a mechanical engineer: weight, color, material, dimensions, general tolerances, is it an assembly?, is it a part?, is it an assembly but you buy it as a single module that you can treat as a part?, what project does it fall under?, etc.

If you’re an electrical engineer: what is the resistance?, what is the capacitance?, is it a microprocessor?, how much I/O does it have?, how does it mount to a PCB?, what is it’s thermal profile?

If you’re a manufacturing engineer: fabrication method, number of post processes, is it heat treated?, is it toxic to handle?, what is the shelf life?, is it reactive?

If you’re an industrial designer: what is the acceptance of marring, I can probably think of others, but I don’t feel like it.

Okay, lets say you’ve managed to accomplish all of the above. The system is simple, it’s running, people can use it, and learn it quickly. You’ve got 4 screws sized 1, 2, 3, and 4.

But the inevitable happens, someone comes out with a size 1.5, and your designers need to use it. 1’s not strong enough, 2 is too expensive. Prudence demands that you append a digit and create sizes 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0. Hopefully you designed that system to have just 9 numbers this kind of contingency. Sadly, that means you have update every number of every part, which is time consuming and expensive. You also have to pray that it won’t happen again, which it will.

Alternately, you create an exception and make size 1.5 just call it 5. You’ve broken the scheme, though, which means you have to update the documentation explaining how the rules work, with an appendix of exceptions to the rule. This can grow pretty fast, which violates the design goal of simple to learn and intuitive.

A third option, of course, is to not allow the engineers to use a 1.5 size screw because the costs associated with updating the part numbering scheme make it prohibitively expensive. Congratulations! Your numbering scheme has just reduced the profitability of your product. I’m sure that will look good on the performance review.

Smart part numbering systems are traps. They designed like wikis, where people start with a simple setup that is allowed to grow organically over time. It’s another database that’s easy to add data in. You can add more rules and complexity to maintain the original methodology, but the simplicity is lost within just a few generations of the numbering scheme, which can happen in less than a year for fast growing companies. I say it’s a trap because people believe that it’s easy to get the information back out. There’s a method to the scheme, so people can figure out the part number based upon their needs, right?

The more you add intelligence to a part numbering scheme, the more you reduce its flexibility, in terms of part reuse and cost out opportunities. The original purpose of the part number is to give each part a unique identifier. We’ve not even covered the possibility of multiple parts accidentally deriving the same number under an intelligent scheme.

This is a problem no one has ever been able to solve. First principles have been abused repeatedly in this respect. Moreover, the market has moved away from intelligent numbering systems. Consider Google and the internet. Websites are assigned a unique IP address by which to reach them. There is no intelligence related to the IP address and the content within the site. Once you have an IP address, you can put anything there you want. Rather than assigning an intelligent numbering scheme to IP addresses, it’s better to allow for random assignments, and then services like Google will trawl the content and index them for fast and easy searching.

So, when thinking about smart part numbering schemes, remember the words of Admiral Ackbar

When the brain gets tired

Does anyone at the CIA have the problem of someone coming into the company kitchen and stealing their lunch from the fridge? Is it a common problem? Do people for whom intelligence that keeps out nation safe their very job puzzle over who would be so rude?

Does it spur them to innovation?

Have tiny cameras and poisons one can hide inside common lunch foods been created primarily to prevent corporate kitchen lunch theft, and only later reworked for more covert tasks? Does the CIA actually hire somebody to steal lunches in an effort to keep an arms race internally going to better enhance and advance the knowledge gathering required to unmask the lunch thief? Are they hiring? Do lunch bringers at the CIA regularly bring in tasty lunches?

Have CEO’s learned from this practice, and regularly make a habit of stealing the lunches of their engineers when they’re struggling to solve a difficult problem in the hopes of spurring inspiration from the rage driven hunger of finding their lunch gone? What then, do they do to those that perpetually eat out? Do those that consistently dine out find their wages not keeping up with their peers and the market in general because their bosses secretly want them to start bringing in lunch so that same bosses may steal in hopes of increasing breakthroughs and productivity?

For all the books that are written about creating workplaces and environments that inspire and create inspiration, does it really just come down to stealing people’s lunches?

That which remains

When computers first started, they were massive mainframe machines with terminal stations that people logged into to get their work done. Over time, the personal computer appeared, and people were able setup an individual PC that operated in isolation from all of the others to do one’s own work.

But then Darpanet had to go all viral and now everything is talking to everything else on this internet thingy. What’s more, a lot of the services that were developed for personal computers have migrated onto the web and the PC’s themselves are slimming down into mere terminals to access said online services.

We’ve gone back to mainframes. Only now we call it a cloud.

The analogy is very gross, and I realize that, but it’s my analogy and I like it! And the topic of this rant is not one the merits of the above analogy, but of data retention. More and more data resides almost exclusively on the cloud. But what is the retention policy? If 150 years, barring any strange medical breakthroughs, it is a safe bet that everyone currently using the internet and all of these cloud services will be dead. It’s hard to get a clear picture of how much data gets added to the cloud every day or year, but the term exabyte shows up the forecast. 1 exabyte is a million terabyte hard drives.

So hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of exabytes of data will be stored associated with accounts that are inactive. Pictures of birthdays, emails about travel plans, videos that are remixes of songs once popular that no one even remembers anymore. Technically, storage is growing at a rate sufficient to keep up with the exponential growth of data generated, but is it really worth it? Will companies like Google want to spend that kind of money to keep data that is private and can never be accessed again still available for immediate access? Will they schedule convenient ‘failures’ to purge the data? Will they announce a policy of erasing accounts that are inactive for 10+ years? 100+ years?

Perhaps instead, maybe all of those private accounts get made public 25 years after you die. Likely by then most of anything you’ve said to anyone will no longer be relevant. There’s a potential whole new industry for people to parse through the daily stuff we write about on a daily basis that ceases to be important within a week or a month, and find things more useful and important to generations many years later. Google Archives would have plenty of content to process. Maybe the emails could be used a hash tables for encryption algorithms. Then again, given how much we all talk about the same things, maybe not.

Why I don’t use Twitter

The library of congress has decided to store tweets. My knee-jerk reaction to hearing this was that it is a bad idea, but decided to let it settle in some and see if good may come of it.

Now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I still think it’s a bad idea.

I’ve heard the argument that tweets provide a snapshot of the collective psyche of people (at least those that use twitter) during a given time to be mined for information at some point in the future. I wonder, though, if there really is value there. Take, for example, the earthquake that happened in Japan. The people that actually experienced it were not (for the most part) twittering. And even if they were, the infrastructure that allowed for postings like that were falling down around them, so how many actually got through? As for the people that did not experience it, they were watching it on the news and twittering their impressions, which were based upon the impressions of the newscasters, so the tweets could be considered a bit redundant.

Tweeting has long bothered more because of where its origins lie than anything else. I’ve long contended that things like twitter arose because our society has made content consumption a priority. So much so that existing content is being consumed more rapidly than can be professionally produced. As such, new avenues to give voices to anyone with a keypad enables massive amounts of content generation to happen. I don’t see a problem with granting a voice to anyone and everyone who has something to say, but while brevity may be the soul of wit, there is more that need apply.

There must still be wit.

I’ll admit I can be a bit of a luddite when it comes to mobile communication. I did not appreciate the benefit of text messaging until reading an article about an inexperienced doctor in Africa needing to perform an amputation to save a man’s life getting the notes from a more experience doctor in London via text message. The information needed to be clear and concise, which is not easily conveyed over a bad voice connection stretching halfway across the world. In the same vein, it is very possible that Twitter has merit to it that I’ve not found. But as with any tool, there is the useful, practical purpose, and then there’s what everyone actually uses it for. Cell phones to call people in the next room. Facebook to keep up with people you see every day. These technologies have enormous benefit, but we use them to make our experiences more shallow, more brief, less meaningful.

And now the library of Congress is going to keep a record of it.

The merits of work you don’t want to do.

I don’t care for painting. And by don’t care of painting I mean that when faced with painting I revert to a state of maturity that my wife has trouble telling whether its me or my 22 month old son who is in distress. Painting with a roller isn’t so bad, but the edges, the preparation with moving furniture, laying down drop cloths (knowing full well that even if the cloths prevent paint from getting on the floor, the paint will still get on the underside of your shoe, and you’ll track it right off the drop cloth when you go to the bathroom), and the tape.

I really don’t like the tape. Putting it up or taking it down.

You might think, “Yeah! Let’s pull that tape down and admire our work!” Except that you have to be meticulously careful that the freshly dried and still not quite stuck to the wall paint does not have a better bond to the tape than it down the wall, and promptly come down as a sheet of messy, damp paint. Even when it works, it’s not perfect. Some paint drips past, or leaks around the edge, leaving you with marks that you then have to figure out how to get rid of.

And of all the painting jobs, I believe that ceilings are the worst. That incessant gravity ensures that whatever is below the roller; namely, you, is showered with paint. Mostly in small dots that occlude your glasses and make you think your going blind, but also in the occasional glob that lands in your hair and is still there three or four days later, prompting the question of, “How did you manage that?”

I have painted all of the ceilings in our house. A few years ago, our furnace had a little trouble resulting in a puff back. An innocuously sounding incident that means your entire house is coated in a film of soot. And I do mean everything. The ice cube trays in the freezer had soot in them.

We turned to our insurance company who kindly had the entire house cleaned. They did a magnificent job, and by the time they were done the house was cleaner than perhaps it had ever been since it was constructed (Perhaps cleaner than that, contractors tend to leave a mess). The only exception were the ceilings. They got mess off, but they were stained and needed to be painted. The insurance provided money to have it painted, but we opted to use those funds to replace our furnace with one that burned cleaner, more efficiently, and actually succeeded in the job of heating the house.

I said, “I can paint the ceilings. It’s easy enough to do.”

And it is pretty easy from a raw skills perspective. You’re not designing a V8 engine or performing heart bypass surgery, but painting ceilings is not a task I would be able to perform for a paycheck. It leaves me cranky.

That being said, the one thing it does do that’s positive is that it sharpens the mind on all of the things you could be doing instead. I had to take at least one break to stop and write down all of the other chores that, while not necessarily fun, were easily preferable to painting ceilings.

The ceilings look great, by the way. We’re quite pleased as it was the last major roadblock to putting our house on the market. And now, off to all of the other wonderful things that need to be done that aren’t painting.