Society

It\’s finally out!

Dave Farquhar Society

OK, do I really need to tell you why you need The Complete Calvin and Hobbes?

I didn’t think so.My favorite one of all time, unfortunately, isn’t available on the Web anymore. It’s from March 31, 1986. Calvin has to go to the doctor. And the doctor approaches him with all the standard gear–tongue depressor, stethoscope–and a terrified Calvin keeps asking, “WHAT’S THAT!? WILL IT HURT?” And the doctor calmly tells him what it is and assures him that it won’t hurt at all.

Except for the last thing. Calvin asks his standard question, and then the doctor calmly says, “It’s a cattle prod. It hurts a little less than a branding iron.”

Calvin faints, and the doctor laments that kids have no sense of humor.

If I drop off the face of the earth for a month, it’ll be because I got my copy.

Insourcing time

Dave Farquhar Society , ,

Here’s a recycled idea: outsource to small towns instead of overseas.

It made sense in the 1930s and it makes sense now.The reason salaries are high in large cities is partly because the monthly rent on an apartment is higher than the mortgage payment on a modest 3-bedroom home in a smaller metropolitan area. I remember being at a financial seminar where the speaker counseled somebody who hated living in Chicago. He didn’t want to move because he’d make less money. They talked about why he needed the salary he was making, and he realized the only reason was so he could continue living in Chicago.

Needless to say, he found a lower-paying job in a city with a lower cost of living, and ended up much happier.

Since high cost of living makes for high salaries, high cost of living is expensive for corporations too.

Manufacturing jobs–back when anything was actually made in the USA–tended to herd in cities. But some companies put their factories in rural areas, where the labor was cheaper, in order to undercut their competitors’ prices.

In the so-called Information Age, nothing keeps companies from locating call centers and other facilities in small towns. It may or may not be cheaper than India–but the cost of doing business in India is increasing–but, let’s face it, there are issues with going overseas.

When I was in college, even the most liberal students I knew complained about foreign teachers’ assistants, who were graduate-level students put in charge of teaching the weedout classes freshmen have to take. Besides the thick accents, cultural differences–ranging from figures of speech to simple expectations–could get in the way of understanding.

Add a VOIP line to the mix and you have a recipe for disaster. Not that shareholders know anything about any of this. (Most of the shareholders who make the biggest racket probably didn’t go to a public university.)

The company I work for (no, I won’t give its name) does it right. Not only are the call centers in the United States, there are several of them. A customer from the South is going to talk to a representative from the South. Accent and all. Customers from the North are going to get the Minnesota call center more often than not. Westerners will speak to a Californian.

That’s important. I’ve been called a Southerner exactly one in my life–by someone from Detroit–but my in-laws definitely consider themselves Southern. When I told them that my Dad was saying 15 years ago that biscuits and gravy causes colon cancer, their response was, “That’s just a Yankee doctor talking. No Southerner would ever say that.”

Suffice it to say they don’t consider me a Southerner.

So I like this idea. Outsourcing closer to home will neatly solve the cost problems of the big city and the cultural problems of offshoring. Some people prefer living in a small (or at least smaller) town anyway.

The article I linked says this could be the renaissance of small town USA. It might be too early to say that, but I don’t see how that could be a bad thing.

Why small business is better than big business

Dave Farquhar Society , , ,

Technophilosopher Paul Graham (whose essay on Bayesian filtering spurred the development of one of the more popular methods for blocking spam) has some thoughts on what companies ought to learn from open source and blogging.

I really liked this quote: [Those who] run Windows on servers ought to be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google and Yahoo don’t know. I know Google and Yahoo are a whole lot smarter than anyone I’ve worked for who runs on Windows.

But the most poignant bit for me was this: People work a lot harder on things they like.

I believe this is why successful small businesses are successful. Millionaire owners of small businesses often work very long hours–possibly 10 or even 14 hours a day. But many of them probably don’t realize they’re working those long hours because they enjoy it.

I’ve noticed this with my wife when I work with her. She doesn’t keep track of the hours she works because she doesn’t care. And at the end of my workday when I come home, we might spend most of the evening working, but at the end of the evening, we’re no more tired than we would have been if we’d spent the evening sitting on the couch watching TV.

As I watch the rise and fall of companies in the computer industry, I see this same pattern. Why can’t Microsoft sustain the growth of its early years? There are lots of reasons, but in the very early days when Bill Gates and Paul Allen actually spent time writing code alongside their employees, everyone worked excruciatingly long hours, but they did it out of choice. Microsoft is notorious for trying to force those kinds of hours out of its workers today (the book Microserfs details this in general). Could the reason every Microsoft operating system released in the last 15 years has been delayed be because they’re just a labor, rather than a labor of love?

I think that has a lot to do with it.

And I think this is the reason why I’m not a fan of big business and never have been. Don’t get me wrong; I’m no fan of big government or big labor either. Big anything is out of touch and can’t help but focus more on self-preservation than on the things it’s doing and why those things are interesting and important. I can’t necessarily tell you why any given thing is interesting or important but I can tell you without even seeing it that it isn’t because of the amount of money it can make.

Not enough IT workers?

Dave Farquhar Society

His Billness claims he can’t find enough IT workers. I think this is more posturing so he can get more visas–it’s cheaper to import labor from the Far East than to outsource, I guess.

I don’t see this shortage he’s talking about. Billy needs to read what I’m reading: unemployment is up and salaries are down in the IT field.

If he can’t find the workers he needs among the 2005 graduates, it seems to me he needs to be looking at the people who have a bit more seasoning.

And when the unemployment rate among IT workers is higher than the national average and salaries are decreasing in the face of increasing cost of living, do you think that might have something to do with why the dean of engineering and applied science at Princeton sees fewer people going into that field?

I just came off the job market. Trust me, it’s not like your phone rings every hour with a job offer or even an interview.

Either the situation is extremely different on the programming side than it is on the sysadmin side, or Gates isn’t seeing (or refuses to see) the whole picture.

Whatever happened to risk-takers?

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I love Disney like I love the Soviet Union. Mainly it’s because the company clawed its way to the top by taking advantage of obscure aspects of copyright law, and then the company bought enough Congressmen to close up the doors they used to get where they are today.

But I read something today about Disney that I found interesting.Ward Kimball was a high-up at Disney. He was one of Disney’s primary animators and had almost a son-father relationship with Disney himself. He wrote a memoir some years back (the link takes you to some excerpts), and it gives me some idea what’s wrong with Disney and, frankly, what’s wrong with us.

Some poignant sections:

Walter Lantz, who made Woody Woodpecker, never gave a damn about quality a day in his life. He always wanted the quick buck.

If you want to know the real secret of Walt’s success, it’s that he never tried to make money. He was always trying to make something that he could have fun with or be proud of.

It goes against our instincts to do anything like that today. Today, everything’s about the bottom line. If you can save half a cent, you do it. If it comes at the expense of quality, so be it.

He felt that if you put your heart into a project and if you were a perfectionist, people would automatically like it. They would appreciate the quality.

I was going to say I don’t think that’s true anymore, but maybe that’s just because I thought only of the computer industry when I read that. In the automotive industry, part of the reason Toyota is now the second largest carmaker in the world is because of its quality. Twenty years ago Toyota and Honda were two of the least imaginative companies in the industry (and frequently the butt of jokes) but the quality was there almost from the start. So maybe this does still work, provided you manage to not run out of money.

Artists are pretty touchy individuals; they aren’t brick layers. It takes very little to hurt their feelings. Walt was never quite aware of that.

Neither are most people. I guess that gives me more insight into myself than it does into the world, but I found it interesting.

Walt was a rugged individualist. He admired Henry Ford… Maybe Ford and Walt were the last of the great ones, the last of the great rugged individuals. Maybe that was why they were impatient with people of lesser talent and impatient with themselves when they made mistakes.

Nah, there are plenty of rugged individualists. The problem is they don’t do well when they’re stuck under people with less talent than them. Billy Mitchell is a notorious example. Rugged individualists often aren’t appreciated until they’re gone. I don’t know if I have all of the attributes of one, but “impatient with people of lesser talent and impatient with themselves when they made mistakes” fits me to a tee. I wish I had some insight in how to deal with that attribute.

Guys like L.B. Mayer, Jack Warner and Sam Goldwyn were despots. They were untouchables. You would have to speak to a guy who would speak to a guy who would speak to their secretaries in order to see them. Walt wasn’t like that. He mixed with everybody. You didn’t say Mr. Disney like you said Mr. Mayer or Mr. Warner. [I]f you called Jack Warner by his first name, he’d fire you. Walt didn’t want anybody to call him anything but Walt.

There are a lot more untouchables at the top today than there are approachables. I quickly tire of higher-ups who refuse to call me “Dave.” You’re not my mother! Why not just go all the way and make it “Mr. Farquhar” if that’s the way you’re going to be!

I read a story a while ago about Louis Marx. For much of the 20th century, Marx was the owner of the largest toy company in the world. Somehow he managed to figure out how to consistently produce cheap toys that didn’t break. And when they did break, he usually fixed them for free. Send the broken toy to the factory and they’d fix it for the price of postage, or bring it in person to the headquarters at 200 Fifth Avenue in New York City, and they’d fix it free if they could. Well, I read a story about someone who brought a toy in to be fixed. He had no idea where to go, but he saw a kind-looking old man, so he walked up to him and held up his broken toy. He smiled and asked the child to follow him. The child noticed that everyone treated this man with the utmost respect. He took him to an office where a repairman fixed toys. Well, a few years later this child saw a picture of Louis Marx and he believes the kind old man who helped him was Lou Marx himself.

[Walt Disney] was a man who loved nostalgia before it became fashionable. That’s why so many of his pictures were set in the harmless period of American history, the Gay Nineties or the early 1900’s – because that was when he was a kid.

Kurt Vonnegut once said that you’re the most honest and your work is the most appealing when it harkens back to your childhood. So I guess the money I spent back in 1998 learning how to un-grow up was a wise investment. Not that I needed Ward Kimball or Kurt Vonnegut to tell me that, of course…

He came from a pretty… poor family. He had four brothers and a sister. There wasn’t any extra money to spend… He loved having that soda fountain because as a kid, he couldn’t spend money for ice cream. His youth was scratching for pennies and nickels and tossing whatever he earned into the kitty at home.

I think you appreciate you have a lot more when you’ve had to struggle for a while. That definitely explains the difference between my Dad and his brother. I won’t elaborate on that any more other than to say I learned a little about how not to live by watching Dad, but I learned a lot more of what not to do by watching his sorry excuse for a brother.

Now the Disney operation is a corporation with many, many bosses and committees. The people who run the place don’t have any personal relationships with the creative people. The thing that made Walt great was that he was a creative himself and he recognized creativity in others.

Mega-success stories often begin with the person at the top being the prototype for the type of person the company needs to succeed. At the very least it makes the person at the top able to recognize the people who do the work.

Marx’s ultimate downfall was that he wouldn’t hire anyone too much like him, because he was afraid of someone usurping him. He didn’t get usurped, but without someone to replace him, his company died a very quick death. He was 76 when he finally retired, and he lived to see his company’s assets auctioned off at bankruptcy.

I suspect a second coming of Walt Disney probably wouldn’t last all that long at Disney now.

There’s no longer any innovation or excitement. The new regime just sits around trying to guess how Walt might have done it. That’s quicksand… So it’s boring. It’s a corporation where they play it safe. You copy yourself copying yourself. Walt would never stand for that. He never repeated himself.

If you have to guess how someone else would have done it, you’re much better off just walking up to someone else and asking, “How would you do it?” You’ll get better ideas that way.

He’d frighten everybody half to death by challenging them that way. But then you’d get with it, and new ideas would come. Walt kept everyone on pins and needles. Everybody getting [angry] at him was very healthy. See, you had a guy steering you all the time, and that made you work to capacity. It pulled the best out of you.

I guess I’m just really reflective right now. I don’t ever want to be out of work again, so I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I’m looking for. I know there has to be a better way to say it, but I think what I’m looking for is someone who takes risks and is usually right.

I don’t believe in rule by committees. I don’t think anything can be done well through group action. This is another thing that made Walt great, because all the decisions on a picture were checked by him, down to the last detail.

Agreed. What else do I need to say?

How to make a national sales tax work–fairly

Dave Farquhar Society

So the idea of a national sales tax to replace the income tax comes up again, and this time it gets some consideration, or at least some air time.

The usual people are howling about it: Sales taxes are regressive, and regressive taxes are unfair.

Here’s a fair way to fix that.If you haven’t guessed, I’m in favor of this. The yearly paperwork is a major pain, and getting it right is even harder. Without professional help, I never can. How many hundreds of thousands of hours are wasted preparing taxes, just so we can have a tax system that seems fair?

And it’s not really fair. It’s impossible to close all of the loopholes, and those who have reason to find the loopholes also have sufficient money to find and take advantage of them.

I like the sales tax idea because it’s based on the money we spend. Want to pay less in taxes? Save more money. So it encourages saving, which is something we desperately need to do. It’s also next to impossible to evade, since two people are going to get in trouble for it, and it’s not worth a merchant’s while not to pay it, so the merchant will collect it.

So, let’s hit the regression problem.

Sales tax is regressive because both rich and poor alike have to buy food. And since rich and poor alike pay the same price for the same loaf of bread at the same store, the sales tax takes a larger percentage of a poor person’s income. That extra dime hurts the person who makes $250 a month a lot more than it hurts the person who makes $250 an hour.

So why do we tax food in the first place? That eliminates the problem. That way the guy who makes $250 a month and can’t afford to buy anything but groceries can still live, and he pays no taxes. The guy who makes $250 an hour pays no taxes on his food, but he does pay taxes on luxury items, which, in theory at least, he will be buying in much larger quantities than someone with a sub-subsistence income.

One could even choose not to tax subsistence-type foods like bread, eggs and milk, but tax luxury foods such as chocolate. Alcohol absolutely should be taxed. Defining luxury foods could be a dicey affair, but could it possibly be more complicated than the current tax code?

Other necessities like personal hygiene products, medicine, and clothing could be handled much the same way. Perhaps some sort of a baseline price could be established on clothes, so that a generic $10 pair of blue jeans isn’t taxed, but a $90 pair of designer jeans is.

And I have a question: How much money does the government spend every year enforcing the current tax code? This change does away with the processing centers, the need to print lots of forms, the auditors, the help lines, and the expenses that go with them. Or is the creation and maintenance of all of these cushy jobs a prime motivating factor behind the current tax code?

While this solution doesn’t solve all of the problems or potential problems with such an extensive overhaul, I do hope it helps prevent the idea from being dismissed just on the basis of it being regressive. It doesn’t have to be. And I hope it encourages those in favor of such a code to make it fair.

The government exists to protect and serve its citizens, not the other way around

Dave Farquhar Society , ,

“If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.” — Thomas Jefferson

Today, half of U.S. high school students surveyed believe newspaper stories should require government approval. Pravda, anyone?We shouldn’t be surprised. Freedom of the press died in the U.S. schoolroom on January 13, 1988 when the Supreme Court ruled that high schools can censor student newspapers.

As an outspoken high school newspaper editor in the early 1990s, I argued that in the 1950s the biggest problems were kids running in the halls and chewing gum in class. By the 1990s, teen pregnancy wasn’t even in the top two. Drugs and guns had pushed it out.

I argued that high school journalists should be permited to pursue tough issues. Their chances of solving any of those issues approaches zero, but their chances of helping their readers to feel less alone were pretty good. And I wouldn’t have minded if the newspapers made the administration a bit more accountable too–this was only a year or two after Pump up the Volume came out, after all.

I also argued that school’s job was to teach kids how to operate in the real world, and if they spent their late teens in a totalitarian regime, then they wouldn’t know what to do with their freedom when they turned 18.

Does this new study prove I was right?

Democrats and Republicans both agree that the government’s job is to protect its citizens from thugs. Where they disagree is on the definition of the word “thugs,” and, to a lesser degree, on how to go about doing the protecting.

But that’s irrelevant. The government’s job is to protect its citizens from thugs is turning into Citizens’ job is to protect the government from thugs. That’s backwards.

Maybe we need to worry less about test scores and start making sure we teach the basics. I knew what libel was when I was in the seventh grade. We re-enacted the Trial of John Peter Zenger. I don’t know how many of my classmates remember it, but we were presented with the concept and we all knew, if only for a moment, why it was important. Chances are even if the names and dates and other details are forgotten, one who studied the case in school will at least be left with the gut feeling that government censorship of newspapers is wrong.

I don’t know what history and civics teachers are being told to teach today, but obviously the constitution is lacking in the curriculum.

And that’s a problem, because once the First Amendment falls, most of the others will fall right with it, and the few that manage to remain won’t be worth having anymore anyway. I suspect that’s why Jefferson, who couldn’t open a newspaper without reading someone blasting something he’d done or not done, still considered newspapers more important than government.

So we\’re complaining about our economy…

Dave Farquhar Society , , ,

OK, so this is a bit late coming, and I haven’t really been able to think this through as well as I should, so I hope some other people will think through it with me. The problem: Our trade deficit is up.

The solution is to devalue the dollar. Supposedly.Americans crave cheap, foreign-made products. Multinational corporations crave cheaply made products from third-world countries that they can mark up astronomically because of the brand recognition and achieve monstrous profits that they can report to their shareholders every quarter.

To that end, the United States has encouraged outsourcing and granted most-favored nation trading status to totalitarian regimes such as China who are willing to create favorable conditions for this way of doing business.

And now the United States is complaining about continually breaking its own records for trade deficits.

The current administration is responding by devaluing the dollar. That’s a classic idea. By devaluing your currency, you make your own goods less expensive abroad and you make foreign goods more expensive inside your own borders.

But I see at least two problems with that policy. The ruthless Chinese tie the value of their currency to the U.S. Dollar. So devaluing the dollar does absolutely nothing to help our trade deficit with China. Chinese goods continue to cost the same amount of money here, and the price of U.S. goods in China remains the same.

The price of a BMW or Mercedes automobile goes up, but the people who are willing to spend $60,000 on a car are probably also willing to spend $65,000. It only increases the monthly payment by about $80. It might make the price of a Cadillac look a little bit better, but there are plenty of people who believe the BMW is the better car and will pay the extra money. Meanwhile, Europeans will continue to not buy U.S. cars, because Europeans just aren’t very fond of them.

The second problem is that the United States just doesn’t produce all that much anymore. Consumer electronics are almost exclusively made in China, with the main exception being some high-end consumer electronics still produced in South Korea or Taiwan. Toys are almost exclusively made in China. Some large items such as appliances are made here because they are too expensive to ship overseas, but that cuts both ways.

Buying American helps. But we didn’t do that 20 years ago when we still made stuff here. Now it just might be too late.

Part of me also thinks that we need to quit complaining. Look at these plans for a bungalow house from 1912. This house cost $900 to build–assuming one paid someone else to do it. You provided the land. Adjusted for inflation, that would be about $17,000 today. Our grandparents were raised in houses like this. By comparison, my house is a mansion.

Today, without blinking, we’ll pay that much for a car.

Just two or three miles away from me, houses fitting the modern idea of a proper size for raising a family are being built. They’re about twice the size of mine and they sell for about $400,000. Houses like those from 1912, no longer suitable for storing our lawnmowers, are claimed under eminent domain and razed to make room for big-box stores to sell more foreign-made goods. I’m not sure what becomes of the people who by their own choice were still living in them.

Republicans like to blame high taxes for what they call the decline of the traditional American family, where only one parent had to work. Democrats ask what was so great about that, and blame the modern struggle to make ends meet on low wages or discrimination.

But if we lived within our means, we’d be able to afford to buy U.S.-made goods from stores owned by our neighbors, who are far less likely to abuse eminent domain and deprive people of their property rights.

This is a mess of our own making. The government may have encouraged it somewhat, but the government didn’t make it and the government can’t fix it. That job belongs to us.

Assuming it isn’t too late, that is.

What\’s this deal with RFID chips in humans?

Dave Farquhar Society , ,

Arstechnica is reporting that RFID chips for humans have received FDA approval. The question for me is, what benefit do we get from this?RFID, for the uninitiated, is a computer chip used for tracking. Wal-Mart wants to use them to track merchandise, because they’ll know exactly where all of the merchandise is in the store. This makes good sense. No more scanning barcodes to keep track of the merchandise. And, in theory, when a telephone ends up in the socks section of the store–things like this happen–the store’s computer system is going to know about it, so lost merchandise can get put back where it belongs.

Presumably, it’ll also make it possible to track the movement of the product in the store. If something makes its way out of the store without passing through a checker’s hands, then, well, it’s stolen, right? So it could eliminate shoplifting.

If implemented properly, it could also stop people from buying a piece of merchandise, taking it home, replacing it with another piece of similar merchandise, and returning it.

It also ties in with Wal-Mart’s philosophy of knowing what items sell better in what stores, so it can adjust its warehousing.

It makes a lot of business sense. Any retailer that can implement this is going to have a huge advantage over any retailers who don’t. Kmart would stand a chance of making a huge comeback if it could manage to implement this first.

So now you know what RFID is. So now let’s think about RFID in humans.

The selling point of it is that medical records are instantly accessible. But I don’t want my medical records to be instantly accessible. I want my doctor to have them. I do not want my employer or insurance company to have them. What if some insurance adjuster sees the phrase “could benefit from ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction surgery” in my records? I can’t count on that flunky knowing what ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction is. Might I get denied coverage or employment because of that really serious-sounding condition?

A phone call to my doctor will tell you that phrase means you really don’t want me playing right field for the company softball team if you can avoid it, because I have a weak elbow in my throwing arm. But aside from that, I lead a pretty normal life.

Insurance companies and employers do enough practicing medicine without a license as it is. We don’t need to be giving them access to this kind of information.

Imagine the other possibilities. My employer can know exactly how many times I go to the bathroom. Or how much time I spend in my cubicle versus the server room or test lab. Do I really want vast herds of management dolts knowing that I spent 43 minutes longer in the server room this week than last week and then asking me why?

But that’s a minor annoyance. Imagine this scenario.

Any idiot driving around in a car can stop at a house and quickly know how many people are inside. This person might even know the identities of the people inside.

Parents, do you really want anyone who wants to know to be able to find out when your children are home alone?

It’ll also be possible to keep track of what kinds of seedy places politicians visit when they’re supposed to be in session, representing us. We might not want to know that information. There’s little chance of that, though. Once they read that, they’ll exclude themselves from this, of course.

Proponents of RFID for humans argue that you have to be within a few centimeters to read the chip. This has already been demonstrated not to be true, and as time goes on, the maximum distance of today will only increase. Early adopters of wireless networking quickly figured out that they could extend its usable distance to a mile or more by using Pringles cans.

Some people are speculating the Department of Homeland Security wants this so they can know where terrorists and suspected terrorists are.

But if knowing where the terrorists are all the time means anyone who wants to know can know where anyone else is, as well as their entire medical history and other details, the downside more than eliminates any possible upside.

Next time you want to forge some documents…

Dave Farquhar Society

Dan’s aging documents how-to really should have been required reading for CBS.

Found on Dvorak’s blog: Ebay listing for RARE IBM Selectric. Of course it’s rare. On Ebay, if it’s something no longer available at Target or Wal-Mart, it’s rare.And from looking at the typewriter, it looks like it’s in pretty good shape, especially considering its age. Since we Ebayers always grade on a curve, I suppose it therefore must be mint condition. Or maybe it’s MINT+++++++++++.

I suppose we should be glad that most people who have sufficient cranial matter to do a forgery right also have a few billion other things they really need to get done yesterday.

I do too. Excuse me while I go look for something really rare. Like secure software from Microsoft.

No Bob jokes, please.