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Quick One
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Walmart and Gay Marriage
I had the thought today about Walmart and Gay Marriage – that true political hatred is reserved for opponents who do your job better than you do. To Wit:
- Walmart is a fairly right wing company, in a right wing industry. So they seem from their marketing anyway. They provide many, many thousands of jobs for low skilled workers and have gained their gargantuan size by first and foremost serving the needs of the bottom half of the income distribution. They do it far, far better than any government program. Their critics have to reach as far down as being unfair to suppliers for criticism.
- Gay marriage is a full on embrace of marriage, while it does in involve an irritating (to me) changing of the definition marriage, there really is no downside to conservatism by changing the law to allow for gay marriage. Opponents have to claim a “sanctity” argument, which the more I think about it is bizarre. Mandating polygamy (it has happened believe it or not) would be degrading sanctity but degradation by extension? I have changed my mind on this over the years. It must be infuriating having the other side be more gung ho about a cornerstone of the whole conservative platform.
This post is a bit of a ramble, sorry, it’s late…
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Review of Average is Over by Tyler Cowen
Last night I finished Tyler Cowen’s Average is Over – and much like his earlier work, The Great Stagnation – it has changed my thinking a good bit.
The root theory is that most (all?) of the coming economic advancement in the future will come from the pairing of people and smart machines, and that the future will be consumed by either making and enhancing those machines, working with the machines in new ways, or managing/motivating/services the previous two groups. One corollary of this is that our current troubles (income inequality/political polarization, etc) are side effects of the technological shift, not of culture and not of politics (though demographics does play a role).
I either agree with, or was convinced by almost all of the arguments in the book, save the few below.
- Cowen has the theory that the bottom end of the income distribution (which will grow more fixed over time) will compensate for loss of income by moving to lower cost states and areas. I.E. a marginally employable person (i.e. high school dropout with minor criminal record say) will realize that it’s easier to move to Oklahoma or North Dakota and be marginally employed than to stay in New York and be marginally employed. That part I agree with, but there is another force in play – namely that as income drops the social network, family, friends, etc become much more important, prompting more trade and barter. Basically there is a trade off between the measurable wealth/income (paid in dollars) and the non-measurable income/wealth (personal and family connections, favors, barter, etc) See the fascinating Gang Leader For a Day for more info. A drop in measurable income might prompt a surge in investment in personal/social networks, which I imagine are more location dependent; freezing people in place (it’s hard to move everyone you know to the same state).
- Cowen defines technological advancement mostly in terms of machine learning, and seems to underweigh recent hardware developments. The internet of things conceivably gets rid of many more manual labor jobs than I think Cowen might think (go SkyNet!) – see the Adafruit blog for more examples.
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I just caught myself thinking…
I don’t drink or smoke, and I eat right and exercise – I can disregard power tool safety instructions and still be okay.
And it worked! It turns out you really can wear flailing brush cutters down to the nub. Take that common sense!
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Friday links
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Quotes of the day….
From Utah
I want to live in a world where it’s easier to be good
and
If you want nothing before your dead
Shake hands with your boss and look wiseand
He had the everlasting No
and
You find our if you’re really a pacifist while you’re on the way to the floor
I’ve discovered him on Spotify – the more more different the worldview, the more interesting the person. He is a relentlessly categorical thinker.
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Bumper sticker of the day
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Weekly goals in review 2013-08-25
This is week two – for week one see here.
The goals were
- Finish FM Mobile – DONE
- Write new client site diagnosis/audit – DONE
- SEO audit modifications – NOT DONE
- Send Makeup company stuff off to contractors – DONE
- Directory Site – get ready to send off – I wound up doing this myself for logistical reasons – DONE
- Finish CE Site – NOT DONE
- Aquanauts Mods – DONE
- Set up two meetings – DONE
- Set up 2 on CC billing – DONE
- Roadmap Site migration – conceptual work done, not written though – NOT DONE
- Golf Site Fixes – DONE
- Accounting – DONE
- Look for proposals on Docracy.com – didn’t find anything good – DONE
So, I’m 10 for 13, or .76%. That should probably be the target percentage.
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A new goals scheme
So – in imitation/emulation of Sebastian Marshall I am doing weekly goals for my company life.
Last week was Week (8-11-2013) – here they are (somewhat anonymized for client privacy)
- Refine FM site – DONE
- Finalize current draft of CE site – NOT DONE
- Record CE Site Tutorials – NOT DONE
- Fix Lingering Radio site problems – DONE
- Review R’s site and contract – DONE
- Fix annoying login mysql/php communication problem on DTF blog – NOT DONE (actually I did try this and have learned more about the problem, all to no avail)
- Implement accounting changes with two clients – NOT DONE
- Create proposals and followup for three clients – DONE
- Modify files to MC and send to subcontractor – BLOCKED (by circumstance beyond my control.
So, in the first week I’m batting about .500 – with one block. There was one surprise project that happened during the week (actually a future project that got moved up) that I successfully pulled off that would have been on next weeks list and all of my actual deadlines got met.
So – what thoughts does this spark in reviewing the tasks?
- 20% of the goals were on basic infrastructure (accounting and the login problem) – both of which were prioritized down and not done. 20% seems like the right percentage of infrastructure/capital investment goals
- I spent far too much time writing the proposals – that seems like an excellent area for improvements – I need to develop more stock components and simplify delivery. You would think I would do more of that with my current provider, BidSketch, but I do not seem to be using it for that purpose – I’m going to explore something more bare bones and integrated with my accounting system. I think that is my best opportunity for a 10X return on time.
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Spying on terrorists is hard so the NSA spies on Americans instead
One thing I don’t think anyone has mentioned yet about the current NSA scandals is how easy it must be for the NSA to spy on Americans compared to our enemies. I imagine that’s why the they does it.
Terrorist groups are secretive, private and rarely speak English. Americans are culturally extroverted, have both burning (and boring) secrets equally matched with a fervent desire to express them without being judged negatively, and speak passable English in most cases.
If you were being judged on the number of “Possible” catastrophes averted, who would you rather spy on?