The international bastion of greed known as finance is getting covered in volcanic ash.
Remember how Iceland’s economy was destroyed by derivatives? High stakes casino gambling disguised as investment instruments were used to funnel the hard earned money of the citizens of Iceland into the coffers of the already wealthy.
Perhaps there is some sort of justice after all.
When I was in 8th grade my mother – at my great uncle’s behest – gave me one of the positive thinking books. I believe it was called The Secret of Success. It’s entire gimmick was to use “I am” as the statement in your head when envisioning what you want to achieve. It was a play on the English translation of the Name of God (“I Am Who Am”). Even then it struck me as both blasphemous and, well, silly.
Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
One thing that bothered me was how she did not go back far enough to address the origins of the magical thinking. Instead, she decided to lay blame on the Calvinists. The thing is, Calvinism was a reversion to an older idea that gods and goddesses punished and rewarded their followers according to how “good” that person was. This is an ancient idea that Job was written to debunk. It saddened me to see that she did not recognize how old magical thinking is.
Ehrenreich also went into how the magical thinking of positive thinking has damaged the business environment for workers and investors. Companies spend billions on positive thinking seminars to brainwash workers into believing if they just work harder and think positively they will not join their former colleagues among the unemployed. This is also used to make people not understand that collective bargaining is the only way to fix the problems that are endemic to the United States’ employment situation.
Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
This book is worth reading as long long as it is remembered that it is only a beginning point to understanding how bad the positive thinking movement is to the very fabric of society.
Update: All the noise made by everyone has caused this idjit law to be delayed for a year. Hopefully, someone with sense will fix it. Honestly, I’m not holding my breath.
Now, there are many ways in which Congress Critters are idjits. (And, yes, I know the proper spelling is idiot, but idjit has such a nice sound.) Today, I want to talk to you about the wonders of good intentions gone bad – very bad.
No one will argue that product safety is a waste of time – especially when it comes to children’s products. But, and here is the kicker, Congress has made it impossible for libraries to provide books, small crafters to sell handmade toys – even if the individual materials are “safe”, and makes it impossible to allow the Salvation Army and others to receive children’s items that have not been tested.
We are in a depression. (I don’t really hold with anyone who calls this a “recession.” It has all the markers of a depression on a world-wide scale. So what does Congress do? They make sure those who can’t afford new stuff have to go into debt to get baby and children’s goods and clothes.
Now, one thing I have learned by working in the real world is that any law Congress passes is going to benefit large companies and their interests – especially if they are donors to the critter’s campaign fund. Let’s look at who really benefits from the law.
If a company can mass produce something, they can benefit from economies of scale and will already have a percentage of loss assigned to their production lots. Sending a single item of each size or type to a testing facility will not impact their bottom line in any real way.
If a company is one which has handmade items, the idea of testing each finished product is ridiculous since testing destroys the item. Looks like an attack on handmade producers to me. And, no, it is not conspiracy theory, it is a time honored tradition in predatory business practices.
The most insidious effects are to libraries. If children cannot develop a love of reading at a young age, they will never develop such a love if parents can’t afford to buy books. This will further stratify our society.
Speaking of stratification. Let’s make the poor who can barely survive financially even more dependent on rent-to-own and high interest debt by not allowing them to buy clothes, baby equipment, and toys from secondhand and charity stores. This looks like a war on the poor to me.
If you want to read the mess that is this law, you can find the text of the CPSIA here.
I would like to thank The Common Room for inspiring this post.
Yep. I said it. I mean it. Of course, since she is a politician, that is a given.
After pushing the Democrats to pass the banker bailout giving Hank Paulson a blank check to hand out to his buddies on Wall Street – she is demanding a detailed plan from the Autos?!?!
My response? The auto companies should hand her and her fellow hypocritical colleagues Paulson’s plan for the banks.
Oh, that’s right, they didn’t have a plan.
I am sick and tired of hearing Coasters – both East and West Coasters spout lies and myths about the auto companies. The Detroit Free Press wrote a piece explaining the myths being spouted. I suggest you click over there and read it if you believe the US auto companies make junk. They don’t.
No, Americans are busy blaming the US auto companies for their focus on larger, gas consuming vehicles when what did the American public buy? Trucks and SUVs. So it isn’t just Pelosi and her congressional colleagues that are hypocrites. It is every single one of you who bought a truck, SUV, Lincoln, Cadillac, etc. and now are bitching about how the US companies didn’t build more gas efficient vehicles.
Oh, wait, you say that those vehicles are safer because they are bigger? Well, only the people in those vehicles, everyone around them was less safe. Most of the people driving SUVs don’t realize they are driving a truck and it is not a car.
You also had to have your gadgets including video players, onboard navigation, and a variety of unnecessary amenities before considering gas mileage.
Next, I hear the moaning about the death of the electric car. The electric car is not green. It costs more in pollution and energy to run an electric car than it does a gas guzzler. Don’t believe me? Go take a look at DOE data on where the energy from the grid comes from!
**Graph from http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/epm_sum.html
As you can plainly see from the DOE’s own data, coal, the most polluting energy source is the biggest source of energy in the USA. But, all those electric car worshippers seem to think they are green. They aren’t. Technically, even diesel fuel is cleaner.
But, of course, it is the auto companies who are the big bad villains when they want to do the right thing and not renege on their pension obligations.
Much of the opposition I have read online has talked about how the unions demanded good wages and a safety net. The hatefulness of these posts cannot be underestimated. The guys who founded unions in coal mining, the railroads, and the auto companies did not get there by being nice guys. Just because you have been too cowardly to stand up to the greedy oligarchs that have taken over every other industry to ensure slave wages for the masses and massive rewards for the leeches at the top you shouldn’t blame those who stood up for themselves – you should, instead, be inspired.
The focus on the auto execs showing up in private jets is another red herring. Here is the thing, I honestly don’t think any of them are very good executives. They have their issues. But, by far, their usage of executive perks pales in comparison to anything done by any executive in New York or California. If you want to talk about hedonism talk about banking – and I’m not talking of the local bank manager!
The autos have continuously cut and cut in every possible area.
It takes 4 years – minimum – to develop a new vehicle and bring it to the line. That’s from design to testing to tooling to getting it on the lot.
They have outsourced much of their engineering – not just support staff.
Manufacturing a car is a big, complex process, especially with regulatory obligations.
Japanese, Korean, and German car companies are underwritten by their own governments through a variety of public policies ranging from publicly funded medical care to low interest – and even no interest – business giveaways. Let’s not forget requirements that a percentage of any company manufacturing in those countries must be owned by their own nationals. For that matter, look at what percentage of Daimler is owned by the German government.
No, the autos are victims of the bankers, so-called free trade, and government meddling.
So, yep, Nancy Pelosi and Congress, the American Public, and all the interests bitching about the autos are just hypocritical little bitches.
I have taken a lot of time to think about this since former First Lady, now Senator, Hillary Clinton tried to pass a health care bill. I was actually an intern in Washington D.C. when some Congress Critters were trying to figure this out. This was during George H.W. Bush’s term. As someone with chronic health problems, I have a vested interested in this, particular issue.
There is only one type of solution that would work in the USA and neither candidate presented it. Barack Obama’s solution is not a solution. He doesn’t have the courage for the real solution – like most politicians. What is the solution? A two-tiered solution.
What do I mean by a two-tiered solution? One where some things are covered by a National pool through taxes collected while anything else is through private insurance or out-of-pocket.
I know, most people are thinking, “How do you decide that?” Simple in philosophy, difficult in practicality. The first thing that must occur is a commitment to the Common Good as the Founders of this nation meant it. This means an acceptance that it does not serve the nation to have communicable diseases spread through our society.
Let’s look at a real historical event – the 1918 Influenza Pandemic that may have killed up to 1/3 of the world’s population. No one really knows the numbers. There were many factors involved in that pandemic which I can cover elsewhere, but the big one is the feeling that people had that no matter what they had to continue to go to work rather than go to the doctor because they could not afford to either go to the doctor or miss work. Missing work, at the time, would have meant job loss for the majority of workers. This facilitated the even faster spread of this disease through the population.
Do you think this did not affect the productivity of the world? So many people died it was akin to the Bubonic Plague in the Middle Ages in the despair felt. Yes, it did spur the medical profession’s professionalism. That, unfortunately, has turned into a mixed blessing which I will address later.
So, what would be the basic criteria of what is automatically “just covered” in the initial inception of this plan?
Management of many diseases is vital to the well-being of our society and economy. We need an army of nurses, doctors, actuaries, private citizens, and public health experts to go through and decide what meets the definition of the Common Good. Many people will not be happy that their particular disease or treatment is not automatically covered – at least not immediately. It will still be available on the private market.
To those who say that there cannot be a private market for medical procedures need to look at two medical economies that are run primarily as markets – plastic surgery and reproductive endocrinology. In real dollars, the procedures are continually lowering overall costs to patients while increasing both success and safety. Are there issues? Yes. But these are two areas that prove that a “free,” but lightly regulated, market can work to the benefit of both physicians and patients.
I haven’t spoken of what is in the private market yet. That is something that the group I mentioned above would need to determine. And, please, leave religion out of it! This is a time for practicality, not ideology.
I think next I will tackle medical monopolies and why they must be broken in order for costs to decrease – including the FDA’s monopoly control of the pharmaceutical market.
The rest of the country is very ignorant of how important the automotive industry is to the very base of every other business in the USA. For every 1 job at an actual auto company, there are 6 jobs that support that job – from secondary vendors to waitresses to construction workers. No industry has invested more in the USA than the auto industry. None.
Silly Valley (aka Silicon Valley), can thank the advances in industrial robots that occurred in the 1970s for much of the basic research that has enabled portable computing and networking. Oh yes, as bizarre as it sounds, both Ford and GM have what are known as SciLabs that do some of the most cutting edge research anywhere. Much of that has been incorporated in other industries – from pharmaceuticals to computers to manufacturing. Lasers? Much of the most advanced work was to do tooling and die in the auto plants!
It is very easy for the rest of America to blame the auto industry for pollution, high prices, etc. without wondering why this is – or even the American public’s culpability in this. For every safety feature demanded, you get to lose fuel efficiency and affordability. Yep, you can’t have both in the environment that has been created by the regulations and laws imposed upon the auto industry.
Despite all the belly aching of the American public, they still buy foreign cars. They have bought foreign cars until there are, in reality, no American-made cars. There are American assembled cars. But, the parts are made from all over the world – some in the USA, most elsewhere.
What about the unwillingness of Americans to pay for health care as a society? The automotive companies pay for more people’s health care than any group other than Medicare (government). Yet, you expect they should be able to sell at the same price as the Japanese and Germans who have no need to cover this for the vast majority of their employees? This is the single biggest expense the auto companies have! Prices would be reduced on most of their product if this expense was not there.
I am highly annoyed with Congress and the American public. They are balking at helping GM in acquiring the dying Chrysler Automotive Group. Chrysler is not going to survive without a real auto manager taking over. Cerberus Group showed complete incompetence in their first 6 months when they endangered the supply line for all 3 manufacturers (and some domestic Japanese manufacturing) by withholding from a major Tier 1 supplier without warning the others they were going to do that. To cut costs, the supply line in manufacturing is razor thin. The auto company execs, unlike Wall Street execs, are not outrageously paid. (They don’t have that kind of money!)
The auto industry, unlike the banking industry, has a history of actually paying back loans from the government. Wow!
By the way, the only parts of GM and Ford that are in trouble are the North American companies. The international divisions – which are kept separate – are in very good health and are actually hiring in some sectors. So, the only parts that are hurting are the ones in the strangle hold of ridiculous levels of obligation and regulation. There are always scuttlings of how Ford or GM is going under. Maybe the North American divisions, but there will be a Ford and a GM, but it may no longer be anywhere in the USA. Hell, it would behoove them to move to Windsor, Ontario, Canada with the way the US government and people have been treating them since Reagan!
By destroying the auto industry through systemic bad regulation and an ever-increasingly onerous health care burden, you have destroyed the manufacturing base that is what makes real wealth in a country.
Real wealth is not from interest compounding on the backs of those who create real goods and services. Real wealth comes from making things people need and want.
Are the auto companies perfect? Hell no! But, they are a damn sight more moral than any banker will ever be.
I have worked in banking, telecommunications, automotive, IT, academia, government, and retail. Each have strengths and weaknesses. The smartest people are in telecommunications and IT, with telecommunications edging that out because, well, if you can play with at telephony switch, that beats a simple server. The most conniving, in banking. (Conniving isn’t necessarily evil.) The most imaginative in academia – though, there was rarely any bearing on reality. The most patient were in retail. The most resourceful and practical? Automotive.
If I had something I needed done in no time whatsoever and someone told me it was impossible? I would call anyone who had run an automotive plant or had to get anything done in automotive. Would it be perfect? No. But, the amazing thing is that these folks don’t just walk away. They will continue to fix the problems.
I have traveled over most of the USA. The auto worker of the American Great Lakes Region and Midwest is the real salt of the earth. This is the person who takes off the first day of deer season. This is the guy who helps his neighbor who is now out of work. They may call one another all kinds of names – even swearing at one another – but they leave it back on the plant floor at the end of the day.
Perhaps it is the very saltiness of the auto worker that alienates so much of the East and West Coast. This saltiness filters all the way through to the Congress Critters we send from Michigan. Even our top executives are not all that refined. They come through the ranks – every successful one, at least.
As much as you may detest the auto industry, it is only a reflection of your dislike of what America is. America is made up of the auto worker and his compatriots more than it is made up of any other group – more than banker stereotype (I am not including day-to-day workers like tellers as “bankers”); more than entertainment stereotype; more than the Silicon Valley stereotype; more than the Washington, D.C. stereotype; because, the majority of people in any industry are just like the guy on the line. Just trying to make it to the end of the day. And, unlike the other industries, the auto companies are trying to keep their promises to their older workers – even if they did eat their young.
One last thing, Michigan, the home of the auto industry, was a leader in environmentalism throughout the 1960s and 1970s. We still have a majority of family farms because of some of these initiatives, does your state?
It is often stated that what people say on the Internet will last forever. This statement always makes me laugh. It is incorrect. First, nothing lasts forever – well, except God if you believe, but that is not what I’m talking about here. All things are transient in nature.
Librarians have been wrestling with issues around ephemera for generations. In library school, you can take courses focused just on ephemera. How is it defined? How do you catalog it? Do you even acquire such things for your collection? If you do, how do you decide what is worth saving and what is not? These questions have been around since the first librarian started building his or her collection. Not everything can be saved – and not everything is worth saving.
Let’s face it, most of what is written – in newspapers and magazines, let alone blogs – is not going to be kept for future generations to peruse. It just is not going to happen. Let’s look at the paper based world first.
There are many books written every year. There are too many to count accurately due to the numerous independently published books. Most don’t even break even. The authors never receive any residuals (if they contracted for them) because the book never leaves the bookstore shelf. Will this book be remembered in 20 or 30 years? With the nature of copyright laws, it is highly doubtful, and more likely that it will disappear from this earth forever. If a book is picked up by a few people it has a slightly better chance of surviving, but it still will probably disappear. Books are the most permanent of media in today’s world. (I will get to why electronic media is not very permanent later.)
Next, we have newspapers and magazines. Most of the news-centric ones like to claim that they are highly accurate. Well, I did my undergraduate degree in history (and Experimental Psychology) and let me tell you, there are more retractions and misrepresentation of facts in the average newspaper than you can shake a stick at. It isn’t necessarily because the reporters and editors are bad. Sometimes it is. More times it is because they just got something wrong and there has to be a correction. Depending on how "popular" that first story is, well, it can get hard to get the public to accept the corrections because corrections are hidden in the back pages of the paper. But, even these tend to be forgotten and lost over time.
Sometimes inaccurate stories were intentional. You do have the exceptional rapscallions of Samuel Clemens and Ambrose Bierce who would compete with each other for who could get the most ridiculous story accepted as fact by the editors back east – The Notorious Jumping Frog Of Calaveras County by Mark Twain was originally a news story about rocks that jumped on their own. There are people that to this day believe there are jumping stones in Calaveras County. But, again, the majority of things that were written are completely forgotten except by historians (and English Professors) who spend hours in often futile efforts trying to read yellowing and fading newspapers.
Some of you may start thinking that microfiche and microfilm have preserved newspapers and magazines. Well, first, the cost of moving ephemera is not unsubstantial, so there was only a selective group of newspapers and magazines that were conserved. Researchers in areas such as women studies, for instance, have run into this because women’s periodicals, in general, were not considered as important as the news centric newspaper – and most smaller periodicals are completely lost to time because there was not a large enough market to sell that microfiche / microfilm to.
Now, let’s talk about pamphlets and flyers. Believe it or not, libraries collect those – but conservation of those is something that is a full time job in archival institutions that want to keep them. The average library or collector is going to cull his or her collection so that only those perceived as most useful are going to be around for any amount of time. This is why you have comic books (once classed in this arena) that are so hard to find. They are ephemera.
Let’s move on to the recorded word. How many people have a crank turned record player? And records? I have them stored somewhere. I know the U.S. Library of Congress has a collection. The problem? They degrade over time. The same holds true for anything on a recorded medium – film, reel-to-reel, 8-tracks, cassette tapes, vhs tapes, cds, dvds – all of these degrade and if they are not transferred to a new medium they disappear. Part of what librarians and archivists do is cull collections so that the seemingly most valuable items are available for the future. There are limited funds, so not everything can be transferred to a new medium.
Electronic media is nothing new to the world of libraries. Do you remember punch cards? Scan-tron? Magnetic tape (still in use, and often degrades much faster than expected)? Floppy disks (All the different sizes)? Those are just the physical media. How on earth do you actually run and look at these items when you can’t get working hardware? The hardware needed for many of these are unavailable today. (I have run into this in the private sector as well!) Whatever was on those is gone forever as soon as the last piece of hardware that can read them is gone.
Ok, now we get to the Internet. Some of you are saying, whoa MLO, the Internet keeps everything. Well, no, it doesn’t. And, it isn’t just a matter of whether something is somewhere in the ethers of the Internet as to its permanence.
There are plenty of things that are gone forever from the early days of the Internet despite such projects as the Wayback Machine. Let’s start with email. Yes, AOL and Compuserve probably have tapes of everything anyone has ever typed on their services for advertising purposes – but, well, the computing power is such that most of it is on slowly degrading magnetic tape. Not too useful. Not all email lists are archived. Even those that are sometimes (many times) run out of money and that information is just gone – it can also be very easily altered. Even if the owner doesn’t actually run out of money, they may decide to purge the data. Trust me, as someone who has worked in IT for a long time, data is purged whenever legal to never be retrieved again without massive amounts of forensic computer work.
There are way too many black hats on the Internet to assume what you are reading is as it was when it was originally written. Of course, most people really don’t understand the actual costs of keeping a large web site – even a "locked" archive is not to be 100% trusted to last over time or be accurate.
Let’s talk about the precursor of the World Wide Web – GOPHER. Almost all of the information that was on GOPHER is gone. It is simply gone. There is no way to get it back without someone recreating the data. It is not stored anywhere. Some of Usenet News is like this as well. Depending on who was administering the group, there may or may not be archives that can be retrieved to look at how that particular group developed over time. I see no reason to think the current web and social networking sites won’t go the same route. Will there be exceptions? Of course! There are always exceptions, but probably about 90% of what is currently online is simply going to disappear over time due to anything from no money, censorship, technology fade, or other factors.
There is another issue that affects ephemera – and electronic media even more so. The noise issue. In information theory, there is an idea that the more information (signals) there is (are) the harder it is to find your specific information (specific signal). Without doing very specific things technologically a signal will be lost. Search engines (and their underlying algorithms) are the current method for finding information and filtering through the noise. As these change over time – and they are constantly being refined – much of what is currently considered "hot" or "important" to retrieve is going to be "unfindable" due to the noise around the item. It already happens in the print world. This is why librarians developed controlled vocabularies – a taxonomy is a very specific type of classification scheme that will soon be irrelevant to Internet information. Taxonomies are always hierarchical and the Internet is more like the Memex machine of Vannevar Bush.
Never heard of Vannevar Bush? Well, without his theories there would be no Internet. He proposed a machine that would allow a researcher to connect all the different realms of data together. It was a sort of word association. You know the experience where you start searching for one term and then end up searching for another term that really has nothing to do with what you were originally looking up? Well, that is what he hypothesized. Do you know what happens over time? Everything becomes connected to everything else. This makes the associations useless because you can no longer find the information. Because most social networking sites such as blogs and the like tend to be under the radar of the folks trying to preserve information over time, most of that is going to get lost in the noise.
In summary, technology changes, information storage costs money that can dry up, sites can be corrupted, sites/technologies can be abandoned, information is lost to the overall "noise", and it can even be censored (yes, I know about "rerouting information, it doesn’t always work.) So, after this long, somewhat (hopefully) coherent rant, I hope you understand why I laugh when I hear that whatever you write on the Internet is there forever. As the saying goes, "There is nothing new under the sun, " and the Internet is just publishing (including ephemera) under a new guise.
I picked up A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder–How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place
Professionally, I am trained as a librarian and have spent most of my career enforcing standards on folks who did not necessarily want to have anything to do with standards. Unlike some of my colleagues – and due to my training as a librarian – I also spent a considerable amount of time explaining to my higher-ups why everything should not be planned out to the nth degree. For a Business Process Analyst, this is akin to blasphemy – at least to management. In A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder–How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place
Abrahamson and Freedman start us at a meeting of professional organizers. Those intrepid folks who try to implement order on unsuspecting clients. Sometimes that order is sorely needed because people simply do not have the skills to put anything in order, but sometimes, it borders on the ridiculous. Just because I use something only once a year or every two years does not mean I should get rid of it! (Canning equipment comes to mind, as does the turkey sized Romertopf pot I own… but I digress.) And the authors agree with me, not the organizers.
Disorganization is not just about things, it is also about process and trying to create a one-size-fits-all environment. I see this constantly in my Information Technology work. This false belief that you will save money by making everyone do everything the same way with the same equipment. The problem is that not everything is the same. Some stuff is, well, highly specialized and will not fit on the standard platform. I know the arguments about security. (I live with a security guru, honest.) The thing people don’t remember is that the job still has to get done, and sometimes that means creating a mess.
How much creative work actually gets done when everything is put together in an exacting manner? Not much is what I would guess. And, the research the book cites confirms this. Oh, and science is a creative endeavor. How many breakthroughs came from lab accidents? Or by-products of other research? I think Nylon was one such invention. The process of vaccinations occurred due to a lab assistant’s error when working with chickens in one of Louis Pasteur’s early experiments with cholera. There are dozens of such discoveries. Even when you know what the goal is, research is messy. You may think you know your goal, but the data may point you elsewhere. If you could not take in the beauty of disorder, how would be able to deal with unexpected discoveries?
The perfect desk doesn’t seem so perfect when you need to show creative initiative.
Of course, there are the pathologically messy. Those people who have a complete inability to throw anything out. People really do die from piles of things collapsing atop them. There is usually a news report a month in most major cities about some fire hazard, the cat / animal person, etc. that some resident has complained about. Of course, since there seems to be a strong correlation with agoraphobia, it is often not discovered until it is too late to help the person and the junk has become part of the house’s or apartment’s infrastructure. In these cases, rather than a treasure trove a la Antiques’ Roadshow, you have a true junkyard.
There is a happy medium, and each person needs to find that for themselves – barring psychiatric disorders. You can be too neat as easily as too messy. Both are types of neurosis. In a way, what A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder–How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place
Find A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder–How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place