Category: Old Curmudgeon

Posted on

Five-Five

Jake, Dorothy, Mary, Barb

If there is significance in numbers, this birthday is significant. I am double nickels now and it was double nickels the year I was born. You notice birthdays that end in zero or five. They seem like milestones. This one really isn’t, beyond the numbers. Nevertheless, it is an occasion to pause and think about past, present and future. But I don’t have any profound thoughts today.

Life has been good so far and most things worked out better than I planned, although I can’t say that I ever really had a smart plan. Maybe that’s why things worked out. You don’t have to be smart if you are lucky and I have been lucky.

Posted on

Seven Ages of Man and Modern Retirement

Shakespeare didn’t invent the concept, but he made it famous. I am at number five of the seven ages of man and considering whether or not the concept still makes as much sense in the modern age, when machines and medicines may change the way the whole game is played.

We still think today of the traditional career track, where we settle on a life-work when we are in our early twenties and stick to it until we are in our early sixties. After that we live off a pension or savings and  whether we move to a retirement center in Arizona or Florida or whether we age in place,  the remainder of our lives are just post scripts from the working/productive point of view. This really doesn’t work anymore.

For one thing, there is a crisis in Social Security and pensions. Franklin Roosevelt was very clever when he sold the country Social Security. It really is a type of Ponzi scheme, but he sold it as insurance and we have had that concept of it ever since. In fairness to Franklin, it was also a sort of insurance, since many workers did not live long enough to collect SS and nobody was supposed to depend only on it. Life expectancy was only 63 when Roosevelt proposed making the retirement age 65. Things have changed.

The last generation that will be able to depend on pensions and Social Security will retire within the next five years. There will not be enough young people to support the old people in the style to which they have become accustomed. “Young people” like me and younger, should expect to work longer and pay for more of our expenses through savings and continued work income and society will have to adjust to accommodate these needs. 

As we live longer and healthier lives, as the physical demands of most paid-labor become less onerous and as our retirement funds run out of money, it just makes a lot more sense to keep working. 

Staying on the job will mean getting rid of the old career paradigm we have today, as well as blurring the distinction between work and retirement. Most of us won’t be able to keep our current jobs and just tack on a decade or two.

For one thing, we have to move aside and give others a chance. This is especially true of managers and leaders. In the Civil Service, where longevity is rewarded, you often have the sad case a couple of workers growing old together. I say sad because one may have got the job only a year or two after the other, yet he could remain the junior guy for thirty years. We saw a similar higher profile case, BTW, with former Senator Ernest Hollings, who was the junior senator from South Carolina for nearly forty years, serving with Strom Thurmond, who hung around for almost fifty years and turned 100 while still in office. 

Another problem is that we just get bored and/or our skills are overtaken by events or technologies.   It is hard to keep up with changing requirements.  Most of us tend to slow down in our search for improvement after we think we have enough. This makes perfect sense. It is like the old joke that you always find your lost keys in the last place you look … because who keeps on looking after that. Calvin Coolidge said that you should always leave when they still want you to stay and it is very sad if you don’t take that advice.

So if most people probably shouldn’t just keep on doing their current job, what should they do? I met a guy who has one of the most perfect retirement jobs. He is the gunsmith/tinsmith at Old Salem, where he crafts guns and tools by hand.  He told me that he wanted to be an artist, but discovered that there were more talented people than there were places for them to work, so he went into business. After retirement, he got to indulge his creative side again doing a job and developing skills that keep him both useful and busy. His picture is up top.

Not everybody can get this exact sort of job, but there are lots of jobs that are functionally equivalent. I want to spend some of my productive golden years doing forestry and working on real estate development. My currently amorphous & slow moving dream is to work some cluster development into working forest and agricultural land, allowing them to exist in a symbiotic way. I think too many people are living too far from natural systems and I include in this group many who live in ostensibly “natural communities” that separate the work of man from nature. When Thoreau tramped though the nature around Walden Pond, he and his neighbors were aware of where their food came from and where the wood that would heat their houses next winter was growing. I think we should strive to strike a balance with nature – local nature – not separate ourselves and/or treat nature like part fragile flower in a museum that will be profaned by our touch and human actions.  I hope to make that the work of my sixth age. It will be useful and I hope profitable work. I would like to make the kids and (eventually I hope) grandchildren part of that before I shuffle off this mortal coil.

Most people have something like this that they can do and want to do, something that will give them meaningful work until they can work no longer. I want to die with my boots on and I think most people want to keep working if they think about it. Years of leisure sound great until you have to live through them.   

The Bible tells us that the lifespan of a man is three-score and ten. That’s seventy years and roughly ten years for each of the seven ages of man. We do better than that today.

If we tweak Social Security rules to make it easier and more lucrative for retired folks to work, I think more of them will.  And if we made work rules more flexible to allow more part-time, flexible and intermittent work schedules, we can keep people working for decades past official retirement. New studies indicate that many of us will live to be 100 or 110. We really don’t want to work for forty-five years and then retire for another forty-five years and just wait listening for the steps of the grim reaper. Old people can be assets or burdens to the earth. Increasingly it is a choice get to make ourselves.

Above is the single men’s workshop at Old Salem. Below is the shoe maker’s room in Old Salem. There is a story about a man who was in a terrible accident. When he woke up in hospital the doctor said, “I have some good news and bad news for you.” The guy asked for the bad news first. The doctor told him, “we had to amputate both your legs.” The guy shouted back, “what could possibly be good news to make up for that?” “The guy in the next bed wants to buy your shoes.”

Posted on

Computer Revolution #4 (and counting)

I am doing my FSI talk again on Monday.   It is very similar to the one I did in February, but there are some additions and changes.   The new PowerPoint is below.  I was thinking through the slides and about the impact of new media this time.  Below are a few ideas.  I don’t know if I will use them in the very short presentation, but maybe if somebody asks.

Social_Media_FSI_April_5Download

This is the forth computer revolution that I have personally experienced

The first was when I was still too young to have much of an understanding.   This was the one where computers were going to take over the world.  Science fiction movies had computers just usurping the thinking of humans.   There were “evil” computers like Hal on “2001: a Space Odyssey” (funny, 2001 came and went w/o that Jupiter mission) but mostly they were just better than we mere humans.  The irony is that the actual computing power was so low in those days that we just laugh at the perceived threat.

I was part of the next revolution, proud and excited.  This was when young people (like me at the time) were going to use computers to change the world and displace all the accumulated wisdom of the ages with our raw young intelligence bolstered by computer power. The problem was that we really didn’t know how to do anything.  The computers just helped us do nothing much faster than before and leveraged our mistakes.  I recall a saying on the wall the University of Minnesota, where I got my MBA. It said,

“to err is human, but if you really want to mess up you need computer support.”

The other MBA epitaph was, “Often wrong but never in doubt.” Harness that to the power of computers and see what you come up with.   The third revolution was the dot.com boom of the late 1990s.  This is the one we have to pay close attention to because it has lessons for today.  The idea of the dot.com is that you didn’t really need any content or products. The race was for attention – eye balls.  People set up web sites supposedly selling all sorts of things, but all they really cared about was exposure.  Money poured in to investments in dot.com. It wasn’t until around March of 2000 that people noticed that the emperor had no clothes. The demise of the dot.com pulled the market down with it and also much of the economy.  The NASDAQ still hasn’t fully recovered. Some firms like Amazon.com came out winners. The difference was their organizational skills and the fact that they delivered real products.

We have our own special dot.com cautionary tale. We (the USG, State, USIA) messed up big-time in the 1990s in relation to public affairs, or at least the concept did.  Many were taken in by the promise of the Internet and there were those who thought we didn’t need a real presence on the ground in other countries. We could do it all from Washington.  During the 1990s, we closed posts, shut down most of our libraries (made them into Information Resource Centers), eliminated many of our centers overseas and generally let our public affairs capacity atrophy. A simple but telling statistic is that there were only about half as many public diplomacy officers in 2000 as there had been in 1990.  After the attacks of 9/11, we really didn’t have the people on the ground or the experience needed to communicate with world publics. The website “air war” was a bust. You can reach millions of people, but you are just wasting your time if they aren’t paying attention or your message doesn’t appeal.

BTW – Rebuilding American diplomatic capacity began soon after 9/11. Colin Powell spearheaded a diplomatic readiness initiative to help compensate for the damage done during the 1990s Results are starting to show but rebuilding networks will take a while longer. U.S. diplomacy has a very peculiar age structure because of the nineties neglect. There are many new employees (>10 years experience) and many old employees (20 > years experience), but not many in the middle.  This will be a challenge in the next five years, as much of the experience will go out the door through retirements. (Career diplomats can retire after 20 years.) It will be a good time to look for a job in the Foreign Service, but our government will be paying for mistakes of the 1990s for the next ten years. You cannot turn these things on and off like a light bulb. Think of public affairs like a forest. Things take time.  The trees you plant today determine the forest years from now and you cannot expect to walk in the shade of your trees that you didn’t plant 15 years ago. Some things just take time.

Now here we are in revolution #4. I don’t know how this story will end.   My earnest hope is that we will remember that we are always and everywhere talking to people.   People are funny.  They don’t always do what you think they will.   You still have to understand them before you can expect them to understand you.   In this latest age of new media, reaching out with the newest tools is necessary, but not sufficient to achieve our goals

Posted on

Equality v FAirness

The concepts of fairness and equality significantly overlap, but they are not the same. A recent study showed how people’s perception of fairness of equal outcomes varied depending on what rewards were being offered. It seems that most people think equality is fair up to a certain level; after that treating unequal contributions equally is unfair. Modern philosopher John Rawls in his theory of a “hypothetical contract” argued we could imagine a fair society if we imagined a situation where all of our individual identities were temporarily unknown. What rules would we all set up if we didn’t know what role we were going to get to play? This kind of analysis is bound to produce equality and you can see this kind of thinking at work for SOME things.

The sun also shines on the wicked

People tend to believe in equal distribution when they believe rewards are random or unearned. That makes sense to me too. If you cannot make reasonable distinctions, your best course of action is to treat everybody equally. People are even more generous with things they don’t feel they earned. The best time to ask for a loan is after someone has come into an unexpected windfall. Do the thought experiment yourself. How different would be your response to a friend asking for ten of dollars if (1) you just found $100 on the ground or (2) you just spent 12 hours washing dishes to earn $100 (maybe $60 after taxes and fees)?

And think of how much more generous you could be if it wasn’t even yours. I remember as a child, friends would sometimes let friends skip in line … but almost always in BACK of them. No cost generosity can be appealing.

So people believe that fairness is pretty much the same as equality when rewards are random. They also tend to believe in minimums. Few people think it is morally wrong for a starving man to steal bread from someone who has more than enough. It is interesting to consider how the evaluation changes when one starving man steals bread from another starving man. Most of us believe in basic equality, i.e. some minimum level.

Outside games of chance, the world offers few examples of complete randomness.

After that, fairness and equality diverge and their fairness requires unequal treatment of unequal inputs. It is a very imperfect calculation. There is a lot of random chance involved and that makes judgment more difficult. And it was difficult already, since the amount contribution might be hard to see. The contribution of someone who thinks for a couple of minutes and then makes the effective move might be worth more than someone who struggles all day doing the wrong things.

We also come against the problem of previous expertise. There is the story about the man who locks himself out of his house. He calls the locksmith, who wisely quotes a price of $50 BEFORE solving the problem. After they agree, the locksmith takes out a little hammer, whacks the lock and it opens.

“Fifty dollars,” the man complains. “All you did was hit it once. I want an itemized bill.” The locksmith hands him a bill – “$.05 for whacking the lock; $49.95 for knowing how to whack the lock.”

Those least able to make meaningful distinctions tend to favor equality of outcomes

It is no coincidence that the love of equality is most ardent among the young. They have not yet had much of a chance either to earn anything or see anybody else earn it. With experience comes a greater appreciation for fairness. Interestingly, the young tend to believe in economic equality, but can be ferociously unequal in other ways. The degree of social stratification among teenagers is something most adults never see. You can see what they think more about and what they know more about.

A modern society makes it harder to judge fairness too. In an agricultural society, everybody’s efforts were literally on view. Laziness or ineptitude would show up in a farmer’s crops. If there was bad luck, such as weather or unexpected bugs, everybody would be aware of that too. A man who worked hard only to have his crops destroyed by a hail storm clearly deserved help, the drunk that never bothered to plant at all, not so much.

Did the ants marginalize the grasshopper?

The old fable of the ants and the grasshopper appeals to an agricultural society. Retelling in our contemporary context often has the grasshopper saved by the generosity of strangers. I am sure there is a version that taxes the ants to pay for the grasshopper’s welfare and criticizes the narrow-minded, if hard working ants, for their insensitivity to grasshopper culture.

People are much more willing to tolerate suffering in themselves or others when choice is involved. Physically hard work is less common than it used to be, but people are willing to put themselves through grueling physical suffering in pursuit of sports. Nobody feels sorry for the Olympic Marathon runner, but imagine if someone was forced to go through that much agony to earn a daily living. The difference is choice

I liked (and still like) to drink beer and on some occasions have consumed enough to suffer severe “flu-like” symptoms the next day. Chrissy makes no attempt to mitigate my suffering and in fact boldly opens drapes and stomps around the house in the early morning (i.e. before 10 am) hours. Her behavior is very different if my flu-like symptoms are caused by actual flu. What causes the difference? Choice.

It is just plain cruel to punish someone if he has no choice and cannot change his behavior. On the other hand, if someone can choose, it makes sense not to protect him from the consequences of those choices. In fact, allowing someone to persist in error when he has the capacity to change is a morally questionable and cruel thing to do. Should you let a child walk into a fire because he is fascinated by the flame?

This is the moral hazard of insurance. Insurance is great to the extent that it spreads the risk of random events so that no individual is destroyed by bad luck. However, if individuals start to engage in riskier behaviors BECAUSE they can take advantage of others through insurance, you have a moral hazard as well as higher system-wide costs.

Free will or determinism

I think that current debates between liberals and conservatives often come down to the age-old debate about freedom and determinism. You can see it in the way they use language. Consider the case of the drunken farmer reference above. When asked why the fields went untended, a conservative might say something like, “He just wouldn’t stop drinking long enough to do the work,” while a liberal might say, “He was unable to stop drinking …” or even “He didn’t get the help he needed to stop drinking ….”

There has never been a definitive answer in the free will debate. The most nuanced approaches talk about free will exercised within the limits of constraints, but this just moves the discussion argue about the height of the walls of the constraints.

Somewhere between stimulus and response is a choice

A poor man might have fewer opportunities than a rich one, but how much is his behavior DETERMINED by his poverty and how much exercise of free will does he have? Nobody has complete freedom and nobody accomplishes anything completely on his own. But we are not animals. Somewhere between the stimulus and our response is a region of choice.

It is not always bad to start off or be economically less well off. For example, I am happy that I grew up in modest means. It has made my life easier in the respect that I didn’t have to “live up” to a high standard of the previous generation. Some of my richer friends have never escaped the shadow of their parents’ wealth, and it seems to fill them with anxiety and guilt. They might have really nice baggage, but maybe it is better not to have to carry it all.

The bottom line for me is that it is not unfair that some people are rich and others are poor. My own prejudice would be for some limits, so that we could relieve existential poverty and I believe that great wealth is morally corrupting, especially great unearned wealth. But that is just my prejudice.

I think there is a moral hazard in wealth redistribution. The test for me would be sustainability. If “society” can “invest” in you and there is a reasonable chance that this will help you become a productive and independent citizen who will someday make contributions (not only economic, also social, artistic etc.) in excess of the investment, it is the right thing to do. You have the choice not to play in this game, but others should have the reciprocal choice not to give to you. In other words, nobody should have the right to make demands w/o offering something in return.

Reciprocity is one of the basics of civilization

Most of us do not expect perfect reciprocity in every transaction, but you expect something. If you are generous to me today, you might never expect something back from me specifically to you, but you do expect that I will at least be grateful and/or be generous to someone else in the future.  Remember that movie “Pay it Forward”?

Freedom is more than another word for nothin’ left to lose

We have choices. We often call the sum of our choices “freedom”. Sometimes people ask what freedom is good for and we might try to answer that it helps create wealth or that we can help the poor more etc. It does these things. Free countries tend to be richer, cleaner and generally more pleasant. But freedom is not the means to a goal. Freedom is the goal for which we are willing to sacrifice other things. If we created a perfectly “fair,” “just” or “equal” society at the cost of freedom, which includes the freedom to succeed and the freedom to fail, we have accomplished nothing.

Posted on

Listlessness & Going to the Dogs

I have not had much to write about.  The snow has held me down/in.    I have been reading a couple of good books.  The most interesting is called “Sonic Boom” by Gregg Easterbrook.  It has given me something to think about, but I have not thought it through yet.  

I feel a little responsible for the new “dog twitter” because it is made by Mattel, almost my name.  It seems that Mattel is going to sell a collar for your dog that allows the animal to twitter you. Read about it here.  

I miss the kids.   It is not that I see that that much when they are home, but I like them around.  Espen came home for the weekend last weekend; the now kept him at home for the rest of the week.  We were supposed to pick up Alex that weekend too.  The snow on last Friday stopped us, but we were able to pick him up for this weekend.  So we had both of the boys.   Too bad we didn’t have Mariza too.

As I said, we don’t really see much of the boys when they are home.  They tend to stay up late, go out with their friends and sleep much of the day. But we had a good lunch with them yesterday at Fuddruckers.  When I think back, I cannot think of anything specific, but I think that describes many good times.   It is just nice being together.

I drove Alex back to James Madison in Harrisonburg today. We dropped off Espen at George Mason on the way.  The trip back from Harrisonburg was lonely.  

I was in a bit of a hurry.  I wanted to get home before the new snow they were predicting and I had to get back by 3:50 to go to the dentist.   The good news I got today is that they can fix the problem.  The bad news is that toothache I mentioned requires a root canal, which I will get tomorrow.  It is not very painful any more, but it costs a lot.

I read a couple of interesting articles today about trees.   One talked about how trees are growing faster as a result of climate change.   Of course it is not all good.  Evidently less fog in California may do long term harm to the redwood forests.

Posted on

Toothaches

I had a terrible toothache yesterday. I tried to get in to see the dentist, but the blizzard closed her down too.  So I used a lot of “Orajel” and took some pain-killer pills left over from when Alex had his wisdom teeth pulled. This sort of worked, but only if I hung my head over the back of my chair and left my mouth open. I have no idea why that worked, but it relieved the acute pain.

Today the pain is gone – mostly. I couldn’t explain why it started and I cannot explain why it went away. Misery is a mystery to me. I still plan to go to the dentist on Monday to preempt any recurrence. My teeth are rotten. I treated them poorly when I was young and now they are getting their revenge. It is not hereditary. The kids have excellent teeth and have never had even one cavity among them. Modern toothpaste and fluoride in the water has banished cavities. 

Life does get better, but you just don’t think about it. There was a TV commercial when I a kid.  It featured a kid who came back from the dentist bragging, “Look mom, no cavities.”  That kind of claim sold toothpaste in those days because not having cavities was so rare. Today it is different.  You don’t think about cavities when you don’t have any. It becomes normal.  

You don’t think of too much else when you have a bad toothache, but you forget about it as soon as it goes away. It is a blessing to forget pain but also an invitation to complacency. I was tempted to just let it go after the pain dissipated and that seems to be the pattern for life in general. We ignore what is not bothering us.

The picture above is the truck among the snow banks, snowing how high the snow has gotten. 

Posted on

Crooked Lawyers

I have been a plaintiff in at least three class-action lawsuits.  I got nothing from any of them and never really understood what the cases were about. The one I understood best involved a leather coat I bought from Joseph A Banks. “My” lawyers said that I had been deceived by online advertising.  I didn’t feel aggrieved but they make it very hard to get out of the “class.” My lawyers won a pile of money, but their fees took it all, leaving nothing for us victims. 

These kinds of class action cases are shakedown. 

Unscrupulous lawyers cruise around looking for people they can call victims and corral into a class. Sometimes they even create victims if they cannot find any on the free range. The key is to tie the victims to a firm that has money.  The target firms know that they may have done nothing particularly wrong, but they also understand they really cannot win. It might cost more to fight to a righteous victory than to pay the extortion money requested by the pirate leaders … sorry lawyers and there is always the chance with the crap shoot that can come from going before a jury made up mostly of people who had nothing else to do and/or couldn’t think of a good excuse to avoid being there.

BTW – I have not served on a jury and have never even been called up. Where you live makes the difference. Where we live in Fairfax County, they have lots of voters and not too many perps.  Some places the balance is different and voters there get lots more jury opportunities.

Toyota in the shakedown zone

What brought this subject to mind was a program I saw today with a lawyer talking about his plans to shakedown (he didn’t use that word) Toyota. This just makes me sad. We owned a couple of Toyotas.  They were good cars and the company was a good company.  I think they still are.  Nothing is perfect and the demand for perfection usually gets you in big trouble. Toyota may be able to pass through this purgatory but the lawyers will make it that much harder.

That is because they will demonize Toyota in order to make more money. What has the average Toyota owner actually lost? Most have lost nothing. But if clever lawyers can figure out ways to corral enough of people into a class, they can figure out how to shakedown the company. The lawyer on TV was running the gambit that Toyota owners may have lost resale value, since the demand may have declined as Toyota’s reputation has declined and that Toyota should pay them off. The TV host scoffed a little and pointed out that this sum would be nearly impossible to figure out and would not be much money per person. 

Not to worry. If lawyers put all these people into a class, it will be possible to get enough money out of Toyota to pay their legal fees. Of course, the average owner will get less than nothing. Why less than nothing?  Because all these lawyers will distract a good company from making better cars.  Instead of innovation, they will start playing defense.

A few very simple things that can be done to reform this system

First is to force the class-action lawyers get individuals to take the affirmative step of opting into the class. In the three class actions I was part of, they never asked me if I wanted to be in. In fact, they make it very hard to get out once they have herded you into the corral. I would never have opted in. Lawyers know that, which is why they don’t want to give us the choice. The second thing is to make the loser pay the reasonable costs of the winner in any lawsuit. Some people say that we should also get rid of contingency fees (where lawyers get a piece of the action only if they win), but I think the loser-pays system would change the incentives and take care of this too. 

Loser-pays would embolden the victims to take on the lawyer shakedowns. As I mentioned above, sometimes individuals and firms settle because they know that the cost of a successful defense would still be more expensive than just paying off. This would remove that as an obstacle.  

Innovation is great in science and technology, bad in law

It is good to be innovative and entrepreneurial in most things. That is because innovations can create wealth for everybody involved. It is a positive sum proposition, a win-win. When two or more people make a trade, they all get more of what they want.  The law is an exception because it is zero or even negative sum. Law settles disputes.  For every winner, there is a loser and when you count in all the other costs less comes out of a legal case than goes in. And once the lawyers get involved, the warring parties will harden their positions because of the adversarial nature of our law and it is unlikely that they will come up with synergy that makes them both better off. 

Law is also not voluntary. If I buy something you are selling, presumably we both think we got a good deal, since neither could force the other to participate in the transition. Law is all about coercion. One of us would prefer not to take part in the transaction and we both hope to use the coercion of the state to force the other to do something he/she would not do under coercion-free conditions.

Law should be plodding, boring and predictable

Law should be predictable, even if it is plodding, because people have to be able count on it.  It should not change to radically or rapidly that most people cannot keep up with it. In a just society, everybody is reasonably sure when they are acting within the law and when they are not.   Justice suffers when laws are ambiguous. In fact, there is a rough way to recognize a good society by answering a couple of questions.  (1) You have done something you think is wrong.  How afraid are you of suffering proportional consequences?  If the answer is “a lot,” the society is reasonably just.  (2) You have been accused of a doing something you do not believe is a crime.  How afraid are you that you will suffer disproportional consequences?  If you are very afraid, the society is unjust.   To the extent that lawyers blur the lines, they create injustice.

Innovation and entrepreneurial behavior among lawyers tends to dampen those things in other parts of society. A law fare assault on one frightens dozens and makes them less likely to try anything new. 

The coat was a good deal

BTW – the coat was really nice. You can see what it looks like now in the picture above.  I bought it online for $149 in 2003.  It is very comfortable.  Given our local weather, I wear it much of the year and it looks like it will last many more years to come. It was not possible that I could have been significantly harmed by anything Joseph A Banks did, ergo the lawyers who did this to them and used people like me as an offensive weapon, were crooks. I pity the people at Toyota. They will be lawyered for years to come.

Posted on

Telecommuting and Snow Days

I gave my staff the option to telework today, anticipating the dreadful white monster said to be slouching toward us and expected to blanket Washington with 16-24 inches of wet snow by tomorrow morning. (The record snowfall in Washington is 28 inches, set in 1922.  If you want to follow the storm’s progress the hashtag is #snowpocalypse.) I did that yesterday morning. Soon after, we got a notice telling us that telecommuting should be encouraged.  Good.  Now we got a further notice telling us that the government employees will get four hours early dismissal and this goes for teleworkers too. Not good. I know this is done in the spirit of fairness and of course we will comply with the directive.  I know that I will sound like a scrooge, but it really doesn’t make sense.

Presumably we are giving people four hours off so that they can flee the confines of Washington before they are frozen in place by the fierce winter storm. This is smart, especially around here where we are dependent on transportation systems that seem especially sensitive to weather.  But our telecommuting decision has already addressed that problem for those working from home.  They are already safely hunkered down in their warm cocoons and don’t need those four hours to come safely home.  If it were up to me, I would just let them work the full day.

I have long been a supporter of telecommuting and encourage it to the greatest extent possible. I fought to protect and extend telecommuting when I ran the IIP-Speaker office and have written in support. It is good for morale, the environment and productivity where appropriately employed. But telecommuting is one of those things precariously balanced on a slippery steep slope and it starts the downward slide to perdition when it transitions from being a mutually beneficial working arrangement to a type of defined right for an employee.

Social pressures weaken when employees are away from their bosses and colleagues. Working alone requires a lot more self-discipline than working where everybody can see you. There is significant temptation to use telecommuting as a type of semi-vacation day. That is why telecommuting is not for everybody and why it can never become a right.  A few people will abuse it and – sorry for the cliché – ruin it for everybody. Managers have to maintain an arbitrary power over telecommuting, i.e. we have to have the authority to call telecommuters at a moment’s notice and change or assign different work.  It is also important to specify that if telecommuters cannot do the work from home, they must make other arrangements.  In other words, you cannot claim equipment failure as an excuse. The telecommuter has MORE responsibility at home than he/she has at work.  Responsibility is a price of the freedom and flexibility of telework. 

I have a simple kind of karma rule for life. If things are not too big a difference, I call them equal.  My analogy is the vending machine. If I put my money in and the machine rips me off, I don’t complain.  On the other hand, if it gives me too much change, I don’t try to give it back.   It is just too much effort to care very much and if you care only in one direction, you are being dishonest.

Work and trust are similar two-way propositions. I don’t complain when co-workers take a little extra time at lunch and don’t expect complaints when people have to stay a little longer to finish work.  As a worker, I am actually in favor of leaving a little more on the table, i.e. I try to put a little more effort in than I think I “need” to. Since I assume that I overestimate my contribution (as we all do) this probably makes it objectively about fair. Most people are okay with that, but there are always a few bad apples who try to take as much as they can and give back little or nothing.

I learned these things from hard experience, BTW.  I will give one example. A few years ago, I couldn’t get in touch with one of my telecommuters for a couple of days. When I finally found him, he told me that his phone and computer had gone down and thought that was a good excuse.   When I asked him what he had done during those two days, he just repeated that he had been unable to work.   I think he was lying about the phone and computer, but that didn’t matter as much as the demonstrable result that he didn’t work for two days.  I made him take those two days as annual leave and took away his telecommuting privileges until he could guarantee that his equipment would work. There was much gnashing of teeth and some people thought that I was unfair and arbitrary. I would say it was indeed arbitrary, but it was very fair. I further believe that if managers ever lose the power to be arbitrary in this manner, that telecommuting is doomed to become something like those jobs in the old Chicago political machine, where people showed up for their city jobs only to collect their paychecks.

Returning to my original thought, there is no reason to give telecommuters four hours off. This would be an excellent opportunity to demonstrate why telecommuting is such a good thing. As I wrote in the original linked posting  telecommuting makes our organization more robust and less susceptible to the caprices of nature. We should revel in that, savor the success, not throw it away in a misguided show of magnanimity. It violates the social contract and just doesn’t make sense.   

Posted on

Snowy Cracks in the Façade of Civilization

This year has been especially cold and there has been more snow than usual. The snow in December filled and exceeded last year’s whole year averages. It looks like we are going to fill this year’s quota by the end of next week.

Northern Virginia does a good job of keeping the streets clear – too good, IMO.  The snow is supposed to start tomorrow morning, but the crews are out already “pre-treating” the roads with salt so that the initial snow falls will melt and there won’t be that crust when the plows go through.

Of course, Virginia has a kinder climate. The temperatures might drop below zero after a snowfall in Wisconsin or Minnesota.  This literally freezes in ice and snow. In Virginia you can be pretty sure that it will get fairly warm soon enough after even a heavy snowfall the warm sun will hit the road surface and melt off whatever the salt and plow missed.  

Nevertheless, the thought of snow fills Washingtonians with dread and makes them question their very survival.  I went to Safeway today for routine shopping. The place was packed and people were stocking up on necessities. One old guy scooped up a dozen packages of baloney.   Bread was gone.  As you can see in the picture, we managed temporarily to produce Soviet style conditions.

It is silly. In the worst case scenario the snow will tie us down for two days. Even then, the paralysis will not be complete. Who in our modern and prosperous society has a cupboard so bare that he cannot go for a day or two w/o shopping. You can actually go longer than that w/o eating at all and I have not seen many people these days who couldn’t live off their fat for longer than that. 

The lines at the checkouts were long. I got into a line that was for the self-checkouts. I didn’t want to use them because I had a fair amount but I also didn’t want to get into another line, so I did my own.  It was a problem.  I use my own shopping bags. I got them ten years ago and they are still like new. They are much easier to pack and they are eco-friendly. As I recall they are made from recycled plastic from old bags. But they make life hard at the self checkout. The self checkout wants you to use their bags and gives you a hard time if you don’t.  It also evidently weighs your purchases and when I put a new bag of my own on the scale, it thinks I am stealing something.  I felt sorry for the people behind me, but people were cheerful despite my ineptitude and the dread of snow. The clerk had to reset my counter a couple of times, but I got through.

Posted on

Re-defining the Human Space

My colleague Bill May made a good point during our recent talk at FSI about Edward R. Murrow’s fabled last three feet when he explained that his kids have virtual friends that they have never met in person and may never meet in person.  But they are still friends.  They still influence each other.  They have entered Edward R. Murrow’s three feet range but they have done so electronically.   

Putting the human space in context

Let’s update Murrow and maybe put his statement in context.   Of course, the social media didn’t exist in his time as it does today, so he was talking only about broadcast media when he said electronic media.  He was right back then and he is right today – if we talk about broadcasting.   

The three feet idea refers not to physical presence but to human engagement.   Engagement w/o physical presence was nearly impossible in Edward R. Murrow’s time; it has become easy to do today.  So we should modify the three-foot-theorem, but not abandon it.   And Murrow’s admonition about overestimating the reach of electronic media still applies.

You can’t have a two-way relationship with a million friends …

The key is engagement and engagement still requires human interaction.   I have previously written about the Dunbar number, which postulates that individual human beings cannot maintain meaningful contact with more than something like 150-250 people.  There just is not enough time in the day and we don’t have the cognitive power to do more.   Even if you could keep millions of relationships straight, the recipients might object.   Most people like to think that their friends care about them.   How much can a guy with a million friends care about any one of them?   There has to be some kind of sorting.

… but maybe machines can

There is a qualification, however. People are increasingly comfortable interfacing with machines and artificial intelligence.  For example, I feel I have a relationship with something like Amazon.com, even though I am certain that no human at Amazon.com knows my name or cares about me as a person. Amazon.com has a very good algorithm which figures out what I like by comparing my previous purchases to those of others. Google does a similar thing with search.   

Kids love their teddy-bears

They are just making comparisons and projections based on the past behavior and revealed preferences, but it sure seems like human intelligence. And just like the kid who personifies his teddy-bear, I have to admit that I have personified Amazon.com, Charles Schwab, the Nature Conservancy and many of the other organizations that play these kinds of personalization games with me. I like to think that there are humans behind all this, but I don’t think there are.   Or more correctly, the humans are also part of this personalization machine.  If I call an actual person at Charles Schwab, they are very friendly and they know a lot about me – BECAUSE of the relationship we both have with the algorithm.  This is not real human contact.

Does human interaction have to be with humans?

The implications are both comforting and frightening and public affairs professionals have to pick up both ends of this stick.  Some “human” transactions can indeed be put on autopilot and the interactions may actually improve.   I prefer to do my banking, travel arrangements and much of my shopping online and would rather interact with a computer database than with a person.   But that goes only for things I already understand. I still trust humans more when I am making unfamiliar decisions.  We need both.

The test of artificial intelligence is how long it takes before you know that there is not another human on the other side of your conversation.  As technology improves, it takes us longer to know and we care less when we find out.  The machine has an advantage over us: it never forgets.  That means it can recognize long-term trends and patterns we might miss in ourselves and others. They say that a good friend is someone who sometimes knows you better than you know yourself. Welcome to the new world.