Coyote Blog

Back when he was blogging, TJIC had a nice little animated gif with people running around yelling “Oh Noz.”  I wish I had it for this chart and the accompanying text  (via Kevin Drum)

Many young adults have felt the impact of the recession and sluggish recovery in tangible ways. Fully half (49%) of those ages 18 to 34 say that because of economic conditions over the past few years, they have taken a job they didn’t really want just to pay the bills. More than a third (35%) say they have gone back to school because of the bad economy. And one-in-four (24%) say they have taken an unpaid job to gain work experience.

First, this study is great evidence of my “what is normal” fail.  There is no baseline.  OK, 24% moved back in with their parents.  How many did this in good times?  How much worse is this?

But the real eye-catcher to me is that somehow I am supposed to be shocked that people have to find a job to pay the bills.  Even a job that, gasp, they really didn’t want.  I have a clue for you.  A lot of jobs 22-year-olds have to take are not that compelling.  Mine were not.  Despite what colleges seem to be telling them, the world does not offer up a lot of really cool jobs to inexperienced young adults.  Long before you are closing deals with CEO’s, you are probably writing sales literature in some cubicle.

And by the way, I am struck by how wealthy our society is when I look at this chart.  Look at answers two and three.   In both cases, people are saying that in tough times, they chose to forego income and build their skills, even perhaps paying for the privilege.  What other time in history would people have this luxury?  How many countries today would have so many people with this luxury in hard times?  Even in the Great Depression in this country I don’t think we saw the same phenomenon.  Obviously the economy sucks and it would be great for everyone for it to improve, but in most other times and even in many other countries in the world today, a significant bar in bad times would have been “I starved to death.”

(update: link is fixed)  My new Forbes column is up, and it attempts to strip away the window dressing around the Keystone pipeline decision to get at the core issue — “a quasi-irrational (‘I’m blogging against the modern economy from my iPhone’), almost aesthetic distaste for energy production, the modern industrial economy, and capitalism itself. ”  Read it all here.

PS-  the contrast between the Administrations support of the egregious HSR project in CA and its rejection of the takes-no-tax-dollars Keystone XL infrastructure project reminds me of my earlier piece on the Timeless Appeal of Triumphalism.   Politicians love to shift capital from private, boring, productive things like pipelines to sexy taxpayer-funded things that they can put their names on.

Done with a large bid (pictured below, 42 notebooks!).  Now I can stop pursuing trivial tasks like putting food on the table and get back to blogging.

My column in Forbes is up.  Here is how it starts.  Hit the link to see it all.

We Americans are all being held hostage.  The ransom demand:  Trillions of dollars in new taxes.  The threat:  the shut down of any number of economic activities, from retirement payments to mortgage lending.

Megan McArdle, blogging at the Atlantic Monthly, posted a hypothetical list of what government activities would have to cease if we bumped up against the debt ceiling and 40% of government activity (ie the amount currently funded by deficit spending) had to cease immediately. Here are two examples from her article:

The market for guaranteed student loans plunges into chaos. Hope your kid wasn’t going to college this year!

The mortgage market evaporates. Hope you didn’t need to buy or sell a house!

Terrorists have tried for years to find some way to threaten the whole of America and have, with the exception of 9/11, never really succeeded.  Who knew that all they really needed was not to buy guns and bombs, but to get elected to Congress.   How did we ever get in this position, where a handful of men and women in Washington had the power to hold the entire economy hostage?

 

This is a crass request but could two of you hit the facebook like button on the right side of my home page so I can get a better URL (it takes 25). Thanks.

Blogging from the road with my ipad2, which is perhaps the greatest piece of gear ever, especially now with my portable Bluetooth keyboard. And I don’t really even like apple OS that much, but this is one awesome device. As a better kindle replacement alone it Is worth the price.

Google is doing some sort of consolidation of Google apps accounts with other Google accounts.  Apparently, in the process I lost almost all of my Google accounts.  This means I lost all my feeds in Google Reader and I somehow have to rebuild the list, which likely will delay blogging for a while.

Update:  I got it transferred, but it was a Kluge and all my starred posts I was saving to blog on are gone.  I will try to see if those are recoverable, but my sense is that they are not.

Update #2: OK, I was wrong.  I got all my starred items.  What I did was go into the old Google Reader account (it exists with a special temp ID) and set up the sharing to make my starred items public.  I then sent myself a link to those items, which I could then add as a feed to my new feed reader account.  So now my old starred items show up as a feed in my new reader.  I am sure the temp account will go away at some point, but I figure a way to preserve them or else at least blog on them before they are lost.

From Overlawyered today:

“A new study in the Financial Analysts Journal casts serious doubt on the premise [of litigation social efficiency], at least when it comes to shareholder class actions. In most cases, the authors found, the litigation mainly serves to punish shareholders who have already suffered from a downturn in their stock. Only suits targeting illegal insider trading, and to a lesser extent, accounting fraud were associated with subsequent higher long-term returns.”

Way back in early 2006 (have I been blogging so long?) I was guest blogging at Overlawyered and I wrote this:

But from a philosophical standpoint, shareholder suits have never made much sense to me. While I can understand the shareholders of the company suing a minority shareholder who might be enriching themselves disproportionately (e.g. Rigas family at Adelphia), suits by shareholders against the company they own seem… crazy.

Any successful verdict for shareholders against the company would effectively come out of the pockets of the company’s owners who are.. the shareholders. So in effect, shareholders are suing themselves, and, win or lose, they as a group end up with less than if the suit had never been started, since a good chunk of the payout goes to the lawyers. The only way these suits make financial sense (except to the lawyers, like Bill Lerach) is if only a small subset of the shareholders participate, and then these are just vehicles for transferring money from half the shareholders to the other half, or in other words from one wronged party that does not engage in litigation to another wronged party who is aggressively litigious. Is there really justice here?

OK, you could argue that many of these shareholders are not suing themselves, because they are past shareholders that dumped their stock at a loss. But given these facts, these suits are even less fair. If these suits are made by past shareholders who held stock (ie, were the owners) at the time certain wrongs were committed, they are in fact paid by current and future shareholders who may well have not even owned the company at the time of the abuses, and who may in fact be participating in cleaning the company up. So these litigants are in effect making the argument that because the company was run unethically when they owned it, they are going to sue the people who bought it from them and cleaned it up? Shouldn’t the payment be the other way around, with past owners paying current owners for the mess they left?

I understand that theoretically they might have an incentive improvement from the threat of these suits that improves corporate governance.  But this is mitigated by the fact that most corporations consider these suits to be random landmines without merit, to be avoided if possible, to be settled if necessary, but that have little bearing on the underlying governance of the company.

I had the opportunity to go to the Oscars once, along with the Governor’s Ball afterward (the year Eastwood won for Unforgiven).  When asked what certain folks looked like (e.g. Sharon Stone at the next table), my answer was inevitably “not as good as in their pictures.”  Claudia Schiffer sat right in front of me in the theater and all I can remember is her huge bony anorexic spine sticking out like some kind of lizard.

The exception was Cindy Crawford.  This may be unbelievable, but she looked even better than in pictures.  I kid you not.  Here is a sample of why she is the greatest, via Tom Kirkendall (he claims to just be blogging on the quality of the commercial – yeah right).

Just when I was climbing on top of any number of issues at work, and was ready to start blogging again in earnest, Civ 5 was released yesterday.  Yes, it has all the time destruction potential of its older versions.  Some quick thoughts from a few hours of play

• Beautiful interface.
• The things that were removed (ie religions) are not missed
• The only thing I don’t like about the interface is that the new way of showing armies makes it harder to distinguish what type of troops they are.
• Love the new combat system and the elimination of absurd stacks.  The new city defense system is a nice add as well.
• More barbarians on the loose in the early game, but if they attack you no combat units (workers, settlers) they drag them back to their encampment and you can go and free the hostages
• Early game very different — not a headlong race to settle open space.  Early game city states change the early dynamics, for the better I think.
• I like not having to build transports to send armies overseas.  This certainly will make oceans a less formidable barrier to conquest, which I think is good.
• Can’t comment yet about balance or unbalanced strategies, not far enough along, but am very happy so far.

I am heading for Italy for two weeks.  No blogging planned except perhaps some photo-blogging.  I expect you guys to have this country straightened out by the time I get back.

I am back from the family reunion (my wife’s family) which was held on a cruise last week.  The cruise was a really good venue for a family reunion — small enough that you run into people, but large enough to escape them too.  Every night we had 4 large tables to ourselves in the restaurant.

The cruise itself was a little disappointing, but it was chosen more for being low cost and accesible to the entire group, so I can live with that.   There were way too many people in my space for my personal taste.  Someday I want to take a much smaller boat, maybe in the Greek Isles.

A couple of things amazed me.  One, the port of call in Mexico was really a dump.  And this is from someone who has spent time in Mexico, good places and bad, and has some fondness for the country.  I figured out the reason when I was laying on the deck and saw the Panamanian flag flying form the back of the boat.  By US law, for a non-US flagged ship to leave and return to a port (in this case Long Beach), it must stop in between in another country.  I am sure the cruise line would love to run four day cruises say between San Diego and Santa Barbara or San Francisco, but that would be illegal unless they took on the prohibitive cost of operating a US-flagged ship.  So we stopped in a little industrial town just over the border to make it all legal.

The other thing that amazed me was the decor of the ship.  I would have bet money that the ship was designed in the 1970′s.  Our room, which had a balcony, was nice, but the common areas were right out of bad 1970′s casino ambiance.  Amazingly, though, the nameplate said it was built in 1998.  Not sure what these guys were thinking.  I called it the great floating leisure suit.

Internet service was $24 per hour, so I did not do any blogging, but the good news is I got a ton of writing done on my new novel.

I am testing blogging from my droid. My parent’s ranch is actually out of signal range, so I hopped in a atv to drive down the dirt road until I got a signal.

Like most who have read Asimovs Nightfall, I read the part about everyone being so afraid of the dark with some smugness. But most of us city-bred folks don’t know what real darkness is. I went outside last night, after the moon went down, at a ranch 30 miles by dirt road from a town of 2000, and it was dark-dark. So dark that the darkness seemed to have material substance. Dark enough to not be able to see my hand in front of my face. I kindof understood how those guys in the novel felt.

The upside was that the stars wered amazing — not quite 30,000 suns but the milky way was amazing. Watched a number of satellites come by using a web site that give time and where to look.

As y’all know, I am not a member of either the Coke or Pepsi party, so I find all the partisan mudslinging on the political blogs to be just kind of funny.  Particularly when both sides are piously accusing the other of exactly the same behavior, while maintaining that they are immune from said behavior  (or only engaging in it because the other guy started it).

I really don’t understand political strategy.  I admit this.  Take global warming.  I really thought the CRU email thing was a minor distraction.  After all, the there were so many fundamental flaws in the science and scientific process that a lot of the CRU stuff was old news to those who have paid attention.  But I was wrong.  There was something about the scandal that was more compact and easy to tell, it fit into a box or storyline familiar to both the media that had to report it and the public that had to consume it.  I understood the whole scandal and its impact so poorly that I have done little blogging at my climate site lately, as I still can’t get excited blogging about commissions and investigations into the scandal that seem to obsess the skeptic community currently.

So I won’t say that this strategy by Kevin Drum is wrong, I will just say I don’t understand it:

On Twitter, here was my insta-reaction to Obama’s oil spill address from the Oval Office:

What a terrible speech.

Unfair? Maybe! I mean, compared to Sarah Palin’s (literally) incomprehensible burbling on Bill O’Reilly’s show afterward it was a model of straight talk and reassurance. But that’s a pretty low bar.

What’s the deal with Sarah Palin?  I swear she gets more pub from her enemies than her supporters.  How does it somehow help a sitting President — who was supposedly elected because he was the most competent person of all time — to be compared, however favorably, to a woman with limited political experience who holds no office?  Granted the Republicans really have no one of distinction leading them right now, and Palin is about the only Republican in years with any modicum of charisma.  But since when have losing VP candidates been the standard against which Presidents are measured?

I have been encouraging my son to take up blogging on… well, anything.   I hope it will be a way for him to practice his writing, learn a few computer skills, and exercise some critical thinking.   So he has finally gotten started, and of course the teenage male mind turns to … ranking baseball players.  Check his post out, and be sure to give him grief in the comments for being a Yankee homer.

I have written a lot about the Cash for Clunkers law, and the fact that it was a hit with its beneficiaries because it bought cars that blue-booked for just under $1500 for two or three times that amount.  Other studies have shown that the program did abate some CO2, but at ridiculously high prices per ton.

But I have found a reason to love the Cash for Clunkers program:  it is a fabulous demonstration project for just how utterly pointless government stimulus programs can be.  Stimulus programs tend to be hard to evaluate in our complex economy — sort of like trying to calculate the effect of a butterfly flapping its wings on world climate.  But since cash for clunkers only lasted a few weeks and hit only one industry, we can learn a lot about the effectiveness of government stimulus.

Here is the US Census data for auto dealer sales (source).  Thanks to my friend Scott who first pointed me to the analysis:

The dotted line simply averages the sales for the month of the clunkers program and the month after.  I think it is pretty clear that we spent a few billion dollars making some used car owners happy (by overpaying for their vehicles) but did absolutely nothing to move the trend line in auto sales, as the program appears to have just pulled forward purchases rather than stimulated new ones.

Update: Welcome Instapundit readers.  This is all in the family blogging day, as my son just started up his own blog with a post ranking baseball players.  Feel free to give him grief for being a Yankees homer.

I have started a new blog because, you know, I don’t have enough to do already.  To some extent this is a reaction to a lot of interest I am getting on the topic of recreation privatization, and in part because the nature of climate blogging has changed of late to requiring one to keep up with a fast flow of stories, and I just don’t have the time.  Anyway, the new blog is called Park Privatization.  I hope those who are interested in the topic find it compelling.  If nothing else, at least with this post Google will now find it.  I will still post here regularly and on the climate blog as often as I can.

One of the reasons for substantial variation in the cost of health insurance between the states is the variations in state “must-cover” health insurance mandates.  New York and Massachusetts, both known to have among the most extensive requirements, not coincidentally have the highest average premium costs.

I found this study the other day - it was put together by a health insurance group and is certainly self-serving;  but since it is just a summary of existing law, I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be mostly accurate.

Here is one example table from the report — it is the type of specialist care that must be covered in each state.  They also have much longer tables on the individual procedures that must be covered:

Gotta make sure that “naturopaths” are covered, don’t we?  You can picture the process of specialists marching into state capitals and making their pitch that their profession needs to be covered.

You can get a feeling for what goes on with one example.  One procedure, “Port Wine Stain Elimination,” caught my eye.  I assumed this was removal of some type of birthmark, but I was curious and looked it up.  I got this study near the top of the Google search, and in this link you can see the political process of mandates in a nutshell.  Here is the abstract (emphasis added)

background. Port-wine stains are congenital vascular malformations that can be disfiguring and may lead to psychosocial as well as medical complications. The 585-nm pulsed dye laser is very effective in treating port-wine stains. Laser treatment is often viewed by insurance companies as a “cosmetic procedure” and not “medically necessary.” Consequently many patients are denied coverage for treatment of their disfiguring birthmarks.

objective. To determine variability of insurance coverage for laser treatment of port-wine stains from state to state. Natural history, progression, and potential complications of port-wine stains arc reviewed and rationale for consistent insurance coverage for laser treatment of port-wine stains is given.

methods. A questionnaire was mailed to 40 dermatologic surgeons in 22 states and the District of Columbia. We reviewed the literature regarding port-wine stains and their potential complications, and health care policy guidelines regarding “medical necessity” and “cosmetic procedures.”

results. Insurance coverage for laser treatment of port-wine stains varies from state to state.

conclusion. Based on current health care policy guidelines, laser treatment of port-wine stains should be regarded, and covered, as a medical necessity by all insurance providers.

In other words, the study surveyed a bunch of cosmetic surgeons.  They were asked “should an expensive procedure you provide be covered by insurance.”  They all answered “Hell YES!”  Anyone want to bet whether the funding for the study came from the company that makes the laser equipment?

But today, they now have to run to 50 state houses (well, 48 since they have been successful in 2).  In the future, they will just run to Congress.  And we know how good Congress is at saying no to special interests.

Postscript: I would normally assume this is obvious, but after years of blogging I know that I must add that I have nothing against those with port wine stains, I am thrilled that a technology exists today to remove them, but I don’t want to pay for it in my policy.

Postscript #2: I am willing to bet that the Venn diagram of the 4 states offering “naturopath” coverage and the 3 states offering “Pastoral Counselors” don’t overlap.

Postscript #3: What does a naturopath (whose tools include homeopathy) charge an insurance company for a remedy consisting of at most one molecule of active ingredient in a glass of pure but well shaken water?  Speaking of homeopathy, this is classically funny.

I am considering making a climate presentation in Phoenix based on my book, videos, and blogging on how catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory tends to grossly overestimate man’s negative impact on climate.

I need an honest answer – is there any interest out there in the Phoenix area in that you might attend such a presentation in North Phoenix followed by a Q&A?  Email me or leave notes in the comments.  If you are associated with a group that might like to attend such a presentation, please email me.

I generally don’t do horserace style political blogging on strategy between the Coke and Pepsi parties, and I am not going to start now.   However, I did find it funny that it was Mike Huckabee threatening Sarah Palin that she should not leave the GOP.  It’s funny to me because of all the things the GOP could do to potentially attract me to the party, having Mike Huckabee leave the party would be close to first on the list.

As of this evening, the site migration from the Typepad service to self-hosted WordPress is mostly complete.  I have gotten a few emails about broken links and such, but I am fairly certain most are chased down now (though you are welcome to email me if you have problems).  The RSS feed is the last thing I need to test — which I will do with this post.  For those of you who have been accessing this site via the feeds.feedburner.com/CoyoteBlog feed, I am hoping nothing has changed — that should still be the primary feed in the future  (though you may experience about 10 duplicate posts from this weekend).  Folks who have been using other feed locations will have to migrate — all those other feeds are now off (well, almost, I will put a few more messages on the old feeds to remind people to switch).  If you are seeing this post in your feed reader, you are good to go.

I have really tried to make the site more attractive, and I rejoiced in the much greater flexibility I had on WordPress.   Since several people have asked, I did all the design myself, though I paid a whopping $7 each for two stock images I used in creating the banner image.  Most folks read this blog via text feeds, but do me one favor and check out the new design just to make me feel better for all the work that went into it.

Actually, the vast majority of work went into migrating the site from Typepad without breaking hundreds of inbound links.  It is not impossible to maintain the permalink structure of the old Typepad blog, just hard, and I will post on how I did it soon.  On thing I will say now, though — the new Typepad platform implemented for my site in October made it MUCH harder to migrate.  The last 50 days of posts took more time to migrate than the previous 4+ years.  That is one reason I have dropped a lot of my posting and really pushed up the priority of moving the site — Every day I waited created a lot more work.

I have posted on my dissatisfaction with the new Typepad platform several times.  Suffice it to say that while the WordPress platform is a much better one, I would not have moved had it not been for three issues:

• Typepad eliminated the blockquote option from the editor.  Yeah, I know, this seems a trivial concern.  But it is telling that a blog software provider could be so clueless about their customers as to think blockquotes to be unnecessary to bloggers
• Typepad really screwed up the image functionality.  I have been on and off to customer service for weeks on images that simply would not post or would not post correctly.  Further, perhaps in an effort to make it impossible in the future for anyone to leave, Typepad implemented a new image storage system where it is impossible to actually access your image file.  What this meant for me was that, in blogging, the same images had to be uploaded over and over again, for every post in which they were used.  Further, it meant that my program that I used to scrape the old blog site and put all the images on my new site could not copy these images.  I had to painstakingly go into every post, right click and download the image, and then re-post it.  And I use a lot of images.
• OK, so Typepad would have been fine if I did not ever quote any other sites and used no images (lol).  But it had one more problem– when switching to the new platform, they built a new spell check program which is awful.  Folks who read my blog a lot know I DESPERATELY need a good spell checker.  But the new Typepad spell checker did not have an “add to dictionary” or even a “slip all occurrences” option, and somehow it disabled the built-in Firefox checker.   Image spell-checking a 3000 word piece on global warming and having to hit skip 150 times for each occurrence of “CO2″ in the piece.

So, one blog down and one to go.    The second should be a lot easier with what I have learned.  My one screw-up on this one is I imported some old posts with Carriage Returns on each line so they don’t wrap right, but I will just have to live with that — I know how to avoid it with the next migration.  Expect blogging to be light, as I need to get my other site off Typepad before I post too many more items that I have to port manually.  I also still need to get the caching system up and tuned, so the site may be a tad slow for a few days.

Thanks to all those who complained about my site being the visual equivilent of nails on a chalkboard — you gave me the final push to get this done.  In retrospect, an intervention was clearly necesary and I appreciate those who were forthright enough to provide it.

My company has over 20 URL's for various recreation facilities we manage.  I do all the design and maintenance of these myself, generally using a shared core design with some color and content changes.  Since this is just a side job for me, I often put it off and unfortunately things get dated fast.

For a while now I have been wanting to experiment with a content management system to ease the maintenance of multiple web sites.  So over the past couple of weeks, I have played around with various CMS's.  I was intrigued for a while by ExpressionEngine, but the fact it was not public domain (ie it charges per site licenses that would be prohibitive for me) finally killed the deal.  I also looked at Joomla and Drupal. 

Eventually, I settled on what many will consider an odd choice:  WordPress.  Yeah, I know, its a blogging engine.  I know quite well, because I am in the process of converting both my blogs from Typepad to WordPress.  I chose WordPress for a few reasons:

• I understand the blogging paradigm, and so I have a good sense for how the content will be handled, and the limitations.
• I am, having messed around with my blogs, comfortable with the WordPress templating system.  Though certainly more limited than ExpressionEngine, it does what I need to do. I am moderately facile in CSS and PHP, the two real requirements to make a good template.
• Most of my sites are simple.  The only two API's I really need to plug in to are Google Maps and Flickr, and I have tested and am comfortable with the available WordPress plugins for these.
• I want to begin, carefully, to let some of my employees be able to add and edit some content (e.g. changing store hours).  I think the wordpress interface is pretty accessible to some folks who may be new to online content and gives me the amount of control I need as an editor.  For a noob content contributor, WordPress is far more accessible than other CMS's.
• With a static site, I have an advantage over a blog in that I can turn on full site caching to speed up the site (via WP-super-cache).  I also added an SEO plugin to make my permalinks and pages more SEO friendly, something I don't care that much about on my blog.

I think that the first site came out pretty well, and I don't think its obvious that it is built on a blogging engine (site here, for our Arizona snow play area).  The biggest internal debate I had was whether to go with fixed or variable widths.  I actually went the opposite way of most modern programmers, moving from variable to fixed rather than vice versa.  Most of my customers, as shown by my server logs, have slow and dated computers and monitors, so I think fixed width makes sense. 

Yeah, I know that no one will ever consider me a l33t h4x0r for using WordPress, or even for using a CMS at all, but I was absolutely thrilled how fast the second site is going up now that I have built all the templates and functions I need.  More reports to come  (and hopefully this site will soon be on WordPress, but I am not holding my breath.  Still having trouble with brinking over the permalinks so they all work right).

I am getting used to the new Typepad editor, but two issues still really cause me to question the sanity of the developers, particularly since this roll out has been going on since June:

• I cannot believe that a blogging engine — not a generic text editor or HTML editor, but a purpose built blogging engine — would eliminate the blockquote functionality from the editor.  Have these guys ever, you know, actually read a blog or two?  We bloggers live off block quotes.
• How long has the computing spelling checking been around?  A couple of decades?  About 10 minutes into that 20 year span, developers learned from users that in addition to a "skip" button, they probably needed a "skip all" button.  Because if you write a 5000 word post on the banking crisis and use the "Bernanke" in that post 100 times, it is going to be real boring hitting "skip" 100 times in the spell check rather than "skip all" or even better "add to dictionary."  But, the rocket scientists at Typepad did indeed only put in a "skip" option, a bit like Ford building a car in which the windows won't roll down.

I am on vacation this week, so blogging will be light.  Just as well, as I have absolutely no idea where to begin with the Federal plan to semi-nationalize the banking industry.  I fear that the Bush administration has done it to us again.  Economists will be poking through this situation years from now, and may well find the bunkers empty of WMD’s.  Another trillion dollar commitment and unprecedented expansion of executive power ramrodded on the back of fear mongering and chicken-little crisis declaration.  Henry Paulson screams to the world that the sky is falling, and then wonders why he can’t stop the panicked stampede.  The Fed breaks the discount window wide open and promises to lend and recieve near infinite amounts of bank funds, and then wonders why banks have stopped lending to each other and only will do business with the Fed.

I am blogging from my mom’s MacIntosh.  Apple has done a lot of good things with its electronics of late, but their absolute refusal to adopt the two button mouse is just absurd.  Sorry, but cntl-click is just not the same. 

By the way, I think the iPod may be one of the best bits of industrial design in decades, but I am not about to join the Apple worship.  Microsoft gets dinged all the time for silly instances of proprietary over-control, but to my mind Apple is often worse.  However, I may not be entirely unbiased in this judgment, as I spent an hour the other day waiting in some zoo of an Apple store line just to buy a new video cable for my iPod Touch, since Apple added a chip in their latest iPods to cause third party cables to no longer function.

This is a reprise of a much older post, but since I have limited time for blogging, I thought it might be timely to reprise it:

I had a conversation the other day with a person I can best describe
as a well-meaning technocrat.  Though I am not sure he would put it
this baldly, he tends to support a government by smart people imposing
superior solutions on the sub-optimizing masses.  He was lamenting that
allowing a company like GM to die is dumb, and that a little bit of
intelligent management would save all those GM jobs and assets.  Though
we did not discuss specifics, I presume in his model the government
would have some role in this new intelligent design (I guess like it
had in Amtrak?)

There are lots of sophisticated academic models for the corporation.  I have even studied a few.  Here is my simple one:

A corporation has physical plant (like factories) and workers of
various skill levels who have productive potential.  These physical and
human assets are overlaid with what we generally shortcut as
"management" but which includes not just the actual humans currently
managing the company but the organization approach, the culture, the
management processes, its systems, the traditions, its contracts, its
unions, the intellectual property, etc. etc.  In fact, by calling all
this summed together "management", we falsely create the impression
that it can easily be changed out, by firing the overpaid bums and
getting new smarter guys.  This is not the case – Just ask Ross Perot.
You could fire the top 20 guys at GM and replace them all with the
consensus all-brilliant team and I still am not sure they could fix
it. 

All these management factors, from the managers themselves to
process to history to culture could better be called the corporate
DNA*.  And DNA is very hard to change.  Walmart may be freaking
brilliant at what they do, but demand that they change tomorrow to an
upscale retailer marketing fashion products to teenage girls, and I
don’t think they would ever get there.  Its just too much change in the
DNA.  Yeah, you could hire some ex Merry-go-round** executives, but you
still have a culture aimed at big box low prices, a logistics system
and infrastructure aimed at doing same, absolutely no history or
knowledge of fashion, etc. etc.  I would bet you any amount of money I
could get to the GAP faster starting from scratch than starting from
Walmart.  For example, many folks (like me) greatly prefer Target over
Walmart because Target is a slightly nicer, more relaxing place to
shop.  And even this small difference may ultimately confound Walmart.
Even this very incremental need to add some aesthetics to their
experience may overtax their DNA.

Corporate DNA acts as a value multiplier.  The best corporate DNA
has a multiplier greater than one, meaning that it increases the value
of the people and physical assets in the corporation.  When I was at a
company called Emerson Electric (an industrial conglomerate, not the
consumer electronics guys) they were famous in the business world for
having a corporate DNA that added value to certain types of industrial
companies through cost reduction and intelligent investment.  Emerson’s
management, though, was always aware of the limits of their DNA, and
paid careful attention to where their DNA would have a multiplier
effect and where it would not.  Every company that has ever grown
rapidly has had a DNA that provided a multiplier greater than one…
for a while.

But things change.  Sometimes that change is slow, like a creeping
climate change, or sometimes it is rapid, like the dinosaur-killing
comet.  DNA that was robust no longer matches what the market needs, or
some other entity with better DNA comes along and out-competes you.
When this happens, when a corporation becomes senescent, when its DNA
is out of date, then its multiplier slips below one.  The corporation
is killing the value of its assets.  Smart people are made stupid by a
bad organization and systems and culture.  In the case of GM, hordes of
brilliant engineers teamed with highly-skilled production workers and
modern robotic manufacturing plants are turning out cars no one wants,
at prices no one wants to pay.

Changing your DNA is tough.  It is sometimes possible, with the
right managers and a crisis mentality, to evolve DNA over a period of
20-30 years.  One could argue that GE did this, avoiding becoming an
old-industry dinosaur.  GM has had a 30 year window (dating from the
mid-seventies oil price rise and influx of imported cars) to make a
change, and it has not been enough.  GM’s DNA was programmed to make
big, ugly (IMO) cars, and that is what it has continued to do.  If its
leaders were not able or willing to change its DNA over the last 30
years, no one, no matter how brilliant, is going to do it in the next
2-3.

So what if GM dies?  Letting the GM’s of the world die is one of the
best possible things we can do for our economy and the wealth of our
nation.  Assuming GM’s DNA has a less than one multiplier, then
releasing GM’s assets from GM’s control actually increases value.
Talented engineers, after some admittedly painful personal dislocation,
find jobs designing things people want and value.  Their output has
more value, which in the long run helps everyone, including themselves.

The alternative to not letting GM die is, well, Europe (and Japan).
A LOT of Europe’s productive assets are locked up in a few very large
corporations with close ties to the state which are not allowed to
fail, which are subsidized, protected from competition, etc.  In
conjunction with European laws that limit labor mobility, protecting
corporate dinosaurs has locked all of Europe’s most productive human
and physical assets into organizations with DNA multipliers less than
one. 

I don’t know if GM will fail (but a lot of other people have opinions) but if it does, I am confident that the end result will be positive for America.

* Those who accuse me of being more influenced by Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash than Harvard Business School may be correct.
**
Gratuitous reference aimed at forty-somethings who used to hang out at
the mall.  In my town, Merry-go-round was the place teenage girls went
if they wanted to dress like, uh, teenage girls.  I am pretty sure the
store went bust a while back.