The Price of Being A Nation of Assholes

One of the few terrific management books of the last 100 years is Robert Sutton’s 2007 The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. In case you are a typical American and don't have the mental capacity to read a book, Sutton offered two tests for identifying assholes:

1. After encountering the person, do people feel oppressed, humiliated or otherwise worse about themselves?
2. Does the person target people who are less powerful than him/her?

Sound familiar?
To provide guidance to the generally clueless sort who make corporate decisions, Sutton also gave us a dozen identifying asshole behaviors, he called them The Dirty Dozen:

1. Insults
2. Violation of personal space
3. Unsolicited touching
4. Threats
5. Sarcasm
6. Flames
7. Humiliation
8. Shaming
9. Interruption
10. Backbiting
11. Glaring
12. Snubbing

Thanks to the Electoral College and the ultimate American asshole, Alexander Hamilton, we are about to experience a federal government totally staffed by assholes. Outside of the 61,900,651 confirmed assholes who voted for Trump (as of November 8, 2016) any normal person would recognize all 12 of those behaviors as Donald Trump’s prime personality markers.  From my own personal experience in this past election, those characteristics are core pseudo-conservative principles, too.

What does it mean for the future of the country when half of our voters idolize assholes? Keep in mind that, on average, the least educated portion of the country voted overwhelmingly for Trump, demonstrating why Trump and Republicans “love the uneducated.” For one, it means our media will continue to become more mean spirited, less fact-oriented, more focused on profit and less on public service, and society in general and public service will be less inviting to decent, intelligent people. I’m a firm believer in the FACT that incentives are everything. When society rewards politicians’ bad behavior far more consistently than decency, manners, intelligence, and competence, people with those qualities will find other places to commit their time. Eventually (as in January 20, 2017) our federal government will be almost fully-staffed by the worst, most selfish, least capable people in the country. The country is about to experience at least two years governed by all assholes. I don’t think this is going to work out the way these voters expected or hoped.

Red Wing Is Bad for My Health

My wife and I moved to Red Wing, Minnesota at the end of 2014, after almost 20 years in Little Canada, Minnesota. Little Canada is a bedroom suburb of St. Paul and while it is a an independent city with its own government, Little Canada is really just a collection of home developments with a few bars and a couple of Dollar Stores. Red Wing had been one of my favorite Minnesota destinations since I moved to the state in 1996. Since I moved to Minnesota, I’ve taken my out-of-state friends here to show them why I love Minnesota. The scenery is as good as the Lake States and Midwest gets. The Mississippi River is a national treasure. Red Wing has a lot of history to be proud of and some of it is still standing. There are proponents of the city (55% of the residents would call them “liberals”) who would like to see Red Wing survive and thrive into this century and beyond. The 21st Century infrastructure is here: from high speed, reliable fiber optic internet service to power generation to food production to traditional transportation (including a functioning railroad station and city buses). Unfortunately, there are more people who want to turn back the clock to when white people ruled and everyone else obeyed than there are people who recognize the critical value of diversity and progress.

Most of Minnesota is socially inbred and new residents often complain that, unless you are 3rd or 4th generation, you’ll always be viewed as an outsider and close friendships will be unlikely. Red Wing is no different in that aspect. The first thing I realized about moving to Red Wing was that we were leaving some precious relationships and while Red Wing is “only” 50 miles from the Twin Cities that distance is enough to terminate anything resembling regular association. Relationships are critical to mental and physical health and we’ve replaced deep friendships with casual acquaintances.

The Twin Cities are famous (in the US) for being one of the best places in the country for fitness and recreation. With its bicycle trails, water resources, and easy access to outdoor resources, you’d think Red Wing would have been a good place to be as a retiree looking to stay active. First, we left a pair of cities with a large collection of fitness centers, all actively competing for residents’ dollars and moved to a city with one option, the Red Wing Family YMCA. The Red Wing YMCA is one of two YMCA facilities (Rochester is the other) in the state that does not accept Medicare fitness plans and membership is expensive: nearly $1,000/year for two seniors (or a family of 17). That is twice what we paid for both YMCA and for-profit gym memberships in the Cities. There are a couple of much smaller gyms that do accept Medicare fitness plans, but they only offer weights and machines.

Red Wing is a tourist town and, as such, there is no shortage of restaurants and they are pretty good. Not good for you, but good as in well-designed to encourage over-eating and poor diet habits. Healthy eating is far harder than in the Cities where farmers’ markets and co-ops abound. Red Wing has a seasonal farmers’ market, but the local grocery options are very Midwestern traditional and not particularly healthy; including Wal-Mart and EconoFoods, two national chains that make no effort to stock local products.

One upside is the Mayo Clinic both in Red Wing and in nearby Rochester. After a couple of years of ignoring our healthcare, my wife and I have both found decent doctors at the Red Wing facility and we were fortunate to be here when one of us was found to have cancer. I can not fault the Mayo’s performance in any way. There is, however, no alternative to the Mayo Clinic in Red Wing: no independent physicians or clinics and no other hospital outside of 50 miles north in the Cities. While our experience with Mayo was good, we know several residents who have nothing positive to say about the local clinic and who travel long distances for healthcare.

Educational opportunities in Red Wing are sparse and disappointing. Part of my motivation for moving her was the Guitar Construction and Repair program at Southeast Community Technical College. I attended the program for one full school year, 2015-2016. The instructors are excellent and the program is a state treasure, but it is being down-scaled in favor of a two year liberal arts direction. The school recently renamed itself “Minnesota State College Southeast” in an attempt to move away from the technical school label. The school’s management is mostly absent, based in Winona and barely supervised in Red Wing. The facilities are excellent and you’d think there would be great demand for classes in both the technical programs and in 4-year school prep, but the school is a ghost town most of the day. There are no night classes and much of the program appears to be designed for right-out-of-high-school students rather than the more typical customer for community colleges: working adults. Part of this is the state’s fault, since there is a wrong-headed move to “standardize” the community colleges across the state, which will kill off most of these schools with mediocrity. There is no “community education” program like those found all over the Cities.

Possibly worst of all, in 2016 Trump got 55% of the Goodhue County vote (37% Clinton and 3 other right wing “parties” split the rest of the county). Jason Lewis—a self-declared misogynist, racist (to the point of advocating the return of slavery), homophobic, xenophobic, anti-public education, anti-science regressive—defeated another clearly superior-in-every-way Democratic candidate, Angie Craig, without a platform, without an agenda (other than being against everything), and without a clue. by an overall slim 2% margin but a considerably larger margin in Goodhue County. Lewis advocates tax policies designed to expand economic inequality, eliminating national healthcare, and a variety of failed 1980’s pro-1% policies that even the dumbest economist would stay away from.
So, the end result of retiring from the Cities to Red Wing has been boredom, loneliness, about 30 pounds of weight gain, and a dramatic loss in social, educational, and recreational opportunities. More than half of my neighbors are regressive, racist, uneducated, and proud of their white entitlements. In all, I’d call this a failed experiment. I suspect Red Wing doesn’t want me and I’m not sure I’ll be able to look at this place the same ever again.

They Took Ur Jobs!

Trump promised to bring the jobs he shopped out to China back to the USA. What do you think the chances are that Trump’s hats, shirts, ties, and other cheap shit will come back to US clothing manufacturers? How about zero, unless he can get US wages down to China’s.

The Trumpets wailed about how badly they were being treated, most of whom are living on Social Security and Unemployment and Welfare. These are the same people who elected Reagan and started the transfer of wealth from the US to Indochina and from the working class to the 1%. But they don’t get that, because they are the “uneducated” that Trump loves so much. When Reagan took his dribble-down axe to the federal tax code and made “unearned income” (interest and investment income, rent, income received from the ownership of natural resources, inheritance: aka “passive income”) more profitable than active income, any chance of US jobs expanding died and has almost no chance of ever returning. Trump is a prime beneficiary of this tax/social engineering plan and if you think Donald Trump has ever done one thing that didn’t benefit himself over every other person on the planet, you are one of his beloved “uneducated.”

For example, the unemployed (probably for decades) steel workers who campaigned and voted for Trump are great examples of uneducated voters without a clue. What could Trump do to bring steel production back to the US? He doesn’t even us US steel in his own casinos. The problem is on multiple levels: 1) the US tax system does not reward capital investment, 2) even if someone were insane enough take on creating a modern steel production facility, it wouldn’t employ uneducated, unskilled labor and would be highly automated, and 3) the US hasn’t invested in manufacturing and engineering education for so long that the country doesn’t have the talent to build a competitive steel production facility. Financial services has siphoned off at least two generations of the nation’s most talented people to the point that 45% of US STEM undergrads are foreign students who intend to return home with their US-subsidized education and skills. Our manufacturing economy is so weak that 74% of US STEM grads work in non-STEM related jobs. And why not? Engineering is complicated, competitive, and constantly demanding new skills. Finance is barely any different today than it was in the early 1980’s, when the Reagan Administration decided to blow-off enforcing Glass-Steagall. To become a finance millionaire, all you need is ruthlessness, a total lack of morality, and a little luck. You actually have to have talent, education, and perseverance to be Elon Musk.

The media has decided to blame Trump on liberals who, supposedly, ignored the “plight” of the poor white man. The reality is that the poor white man has always had the tools he needed to crawl out of poverty and step into the middle class: public education and white entitlement. The problem is these are the same poor white men who were easily distracted by the 1% aiming them at poor blacks, Hispanics, and every other ethic immigrant with a work ethic. The one skill poor whites will always have is an innate capacity for hate and violence. Otherwise, their claim of “white supremacy” is disproven by their existence.

There is, as best I can see, no fix for massive unemployment in the unskilled labor demographic. The best this lot can hope for is decent healthcare, available education for the small percentage with the values to work for it, tolerable housing, and the usual distractions of sports, religion, and guns. Preying on this crowd with easy credit and heartless bankruptcy laws is the Republican tactic and, so far, telling these nitwits that Democrats and liberals and immigrants are to blame has worked. It doesn’t make their lives any better, but it does keep their capacity for hate and violence in play.

Red Wing, MN Real Estate Market 11/25/2016

I check the real estate market fairly regularly, mostly to see what the rental business tells me about my hometown’s economy. I was more than a little surprised to see how much of Red Wing is up for sale this Thanksgiving weekend (154 total homes for sale, with 2 forclosures and 11 for sale by owner properties). When we started looking for a home in Red Wing (population 16,000) in 2014, there were only a couple dozen homes for sale and practically none in the $200k-and-above territory. Today, there are 59 $200k-and-up homes for sale with a surprising number (13) of $500k-and-above homes available. Two-thirds of the Red Wing homes for sale are $100k-and-up, which is middle class and upwards in a city this small. More than one-third of the homse for sale are $200k-and-up. If that doesn’t make the city council and government very, VERY nervous, they are braindead.

Are the rats leaving the ship? Post-2016 election, I am certainly thinking about bailing out of Trumpland. The only thing to think about a city and county that votes overwhelmingly for a bankrupt, mobbed-up, Russian-financed con man is that there is a whole lot of stupid here and that is not a good sign for the future of the area. This palace belongs to one of my rich neighbors and they are asking “$699k” for the property. If I owned a $700,000 home in a place that was suicidal enough to elect Trump and Jason Lewis, I’d be panicked. (Maybe, if I could afford a $700k castle that wouldn’t be true, so that could be beyond my imagination.)

However, I can easily afford the home I’m living in and the self-destructive citizens of this county and city are making me nervous. I’ve lived in a town this size when industry and the people who make things happen fled. In the early 1980’s, right after Reagan was elected, Nebraska’s farm economy crashed and I lost all of the equity I had in a home in Fremont. When we moved to Fremont, there were a half-dozen houses for sale. When we crashed and burned, there were several hundred and prices were rock bottom. A smarter person would have bankrupted and walked away from the property, but I paid the downpayment for my buyers, took a $5,000 loss on an $18,000 loan, and left town broke and in debt. Today’s situation in Red Wing feels suspiciously familiar.

The south end of the Twin Cities appears to be in a similar economic situation. While Ramsey and Hennepin County properties are still pretty strong, Dakota and Washington Counties are well-decorated with bank owned homes and auctions. There are too many nice looking properties selling for under $100k in areas where the non-foreclosed properties are selling for $200k-and-up. This is some kind of economic indicator, but I don’t know what kind. Could be a good time for rental propertyinvestment or it could be time to cut and run from the stupid parts of the state.

Making the Vote Count

Ever since the inbred crowd started voting in mass and gave us Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, McCain, Romney, and Bush II, I’ve argued that passing the US Citizenship Test ought to be a prerequisite for voting. Face it, if you are too stupid and uninformed to pass a test designed for people who have barely dried off their feet after getting off of the boat or crossing one of our boarder rivers or lakes, you shouldn’t be making decisions about who is running the country, your state or hometown. There are lots of on-line examples of the US Citizenship Test, try and see if you belong in a voting booth.

After Trump’s election, I’ve doubled-down on this idea. I absolutely believe a few sample questions from the Citizenship Test should be administered (automatically with randomly selected questions) before anyone casts a vote. However, after Trump I have decided that simply failing the test isn’t embarrassment enough for those morons who don’t bother to know how the country works but who think their opinions matter. Like nit-picking hanging-chads and racially–coded “purged registration lists,” I think we should do something with the idiot vote. Rather than helplessly wringing our hands after one more fraudulent Red State election count, let’s get some entertainment out of our rapidly growing idiot population.

Since the reddest states are all going to computerized voting machines my voting test system could be tacked on with almost no extra costs (Sorry Diebold and the rest of the Republican vote repressors. You’ll have to game the election system some other way.) I definitely want everyone to vote, so we’re not going to toss out anyone’s vote until we’ve had fun with it. We’re just not going to count the idiot votes for making any important decisions.

However, after the informed voters have made their selection and candidates have been chosen we’re going to do something with the idiot vote.

For every office in every election, every city, county, state, and federal final tally will include who the morons voted for. That will give us two important post-election things to consider: 1) We’ll all get to laugh at the nitwits in our midst and their pitiful attempts to participate in an informed election and 2) the so-called knowledgeable voters who made similar choices to the idiots will have an opportunity for self-reflection and, hopefully, take that moment to remove themselves from the gene pool.

Dropping the Bar Further than Ever

Minnesota’s second congressional district, my new home town, elected a character right out of America’s worst nightmares and history: Jason Lewis. Our old representative, John Kline, wasn’t much better, but he at least pretended to be a local representative rather than the corporate shill he has been since 2003. Kline mouthed the Republican code words for racism, economic inequality, corporate rights over human rights, and the usual litany of bullshit Republicans have spewed since Nixon. Lewis doesn’t bother.

Jason Lewis thought the US was mistaken in actively deciding to banish slavery. In his steaming pile of gibbering monkey drivel, Power Divided is Power Checked: The Argument for States' Rights, Lewis wrote “In fact, if you really want to be quite frank about it, how does somebody else owning a slave affect me? It doesn’t. If I don’t think it is right, I won’t own one, and people always say ‘well if you don’t want to marry somebody of the same sex, you don’t have to, but why tell somebody else they can’t. Uh, you know if you don’t want to own a slave, don’t. But don’t tell other people they can’t.” So, Minnesota’s proud Union heritage has been blasted into history by electing a quasi-modern pro-slavery half-wit. Yeah, he’s anti-civil rights, too, but that’s just a given for what passes for “modern” Republicans.

Not surprisingly, Lewis has an elevated opinion of his own sex. Lewis called women “simply ignorant of the important issues in life” and “non-thinking” during one of many mentally-deficient moments on his hate-jock radio show. Of course, if you can tolerate his bullshit book for even a few pages, you’d discover that Lewis is the poster boy for historical delusion and technological incompetence. You might even be tempted to call him “non-thinking.”

Most hilariously, he has referred to himself as John Galt-like, which is pretty amazing. This child of the idle upper-class a couple of party animal degrees: a master's degree in political science (University of Colorado at Denver) and a BA in education/business (University of Northern Iowa). With that background, he’s barely equipped to manage a Dollar Store. Galt was, at least, a fictional character who had some ability to create and utilize technology. Lewis needs help identifying his microphone in a radio studio. Like most of the pseudo-conservative nut jobs in the Republican Party, Lewis will demonstrate his job killing skills in Washington, but his nitwit voters will blame his incompetence and laziness on Democrats.

Minnesota foisted one idiot, Michelle Bachmann, on the US political scene, which made the state a world-wide laughing stock. Here we go again.

Open Letter to Econofoods (and all of Walmart’s competition)

I think you are missing bet in the competition for grocery business in southeastern Minnesota. My local store doesn't appear to either know there are local farm suppliers for apples, eggs, meat, and other staples, but seems to be dumping the few local food sources they recognized; like Sturdiwheat. I live on the west end of town and my closest grocery is the Tyler Road Econo Foods, but right up the hill is Walmart with most of the same groceries slightly to substantially cheaper. 

Since an actual local grocery, Buchanan Grocery, stocks local products, including Wisconsin and Minnesota cheese, Sturdiwheat products, Pepin Heights apples and cider, and other locally grown products, I am starting my grocery runs there. The way back first takes me past Walmart then our Econo Foods store.

There is no convenience advantage to spending more money at Econofoods and without a local food motivation you've made it difficult for me to follow my natural opposition to shopping at Walmarts. I think someone in marketing needs to get fired and whoever is making the distribution decisions should be next.

In the battle for grocery customers, it’s pretty amazing to see that a small, sort-of-locally-owned chain would be so clueless about locally produced food. The Econo Foods' website makes the claim, "We offer a full service grocery store and take pride in carefully selecting the best meats and hand picked produce from local farmers." The reality is that most of the products that could be sourced locally come from Michigan and the Kroger Company distributors: including apples and other seasonally available fruits and vegetables, apple cider, cheese, milk, eggs, meat, grains and flour, and, as I mentioned in my letter, Sturdiwheat products. I am willing to pay a reasonable premium for locally grown foods and a smaller price to avoid shopping at Walmart, but if the so-called local store is no more willing to buy locally produced foods than Walmart, why would I care which one gets my money? I’m just sayin’.

Trump’s Election Upside

Buying local is expensive and a hassle. Most conservatives don’t bother with spending their welfare and social security money on local produce or on local products or services. Without progressives, liberals, and moderates there wouldn’t be any local businesses outside of second hand stores.

In 2016, 1,322,891 Minnesotans voted for Trump and 55% of Goodhue County residents voted for everything Minnesota Nice was supposed to oppose. There were worse places in the state, some voting as high as 74% for Trump (Morrison County, where 32,000 barely-educated, 97%-white, timid Fox News-misinformed souls live in rural isolation) and many of the non-urban counties citizens voted Trump in 60% or greater numbers. Morrison County is typical of those outstate Minnesota ungrateful wretches, where unemployment fell from 12% in 2009 to about 4% in 2016. “Thanks, Obama,” said no one while they voted for a guy who relished their displacement and economic destruction in 2009.

So, when I go to buy groceries, household products, building materials, appliances, furniture, services, or anything locally, I have to think, “I have a 60%-or-better chance of subsidizing a Trump nutjob with my money.” Obviously, if I buy from Target or Wal-Mart there is a 100% chance that I’m handing my money to a corporate fascist but I’m spending considerably less money (For example, $0.89 for eggs vs. $4+ for locally grown eggs). The premium I am paying might be for the expectation that I’m buying chemical-free produce, but I wouldn’t trust a Trump supporter to be half-honest as an organic food supplier. I wouldn’t trust a Trump supporter not to be a slave owner, for that matter.

This puts local suppliers in a tough position. They advertise they are not Republicans or Trumpeters and alienate 60% of their neighbors but self-identify with 90% of their customers? They don’t advertise their political positions and people like me assume they are part of the 60% and we pass on gambling that they might be sentient humans? Not my problem. My job is to avoid the Trumpeters as much as possible and that means I either go with known quantities or avoid local producers because they are expensive.

Stupidity Kills

I’ve had this tag on my keychain for about 25 years. It sustained me through the Bush 43 years and 13 years of teaching the addled children of the characters who voted for Reagan, Bush I & II, and, now, it’s going to apply for at least 4 more years of Trump. It’s not comforting, it’s just reality.

Striking A Blow for Corporate Personhood

About 90% of action movies are stories about one guy overcoming The Powers That Be. Sometimes it’s a rich asshole his gangster employees, sometimes it’s a corporation doing everything from selling contaminated food or medicine to peddling weapons to terrorists or other gangsters, sometimes it’s even just gangsters with power and money. It’s always the same kind of people, though: the people the American public just put into the highest offices in the nation.

When I’ve watched those movies, I have always wondered who is rooting for the bad guys? Somebody has to be, right? The bad guys always have numbers on their side; both in the movies and in real life. The army and the cops are almost always working for the Boss; or are the Boss themselves. Along with the people who are supposed to be the wall between evil and chaos,, it’s usually true that the majority of people are well-intentioned, good-hearted, but cowardly. But when 60,637,350 Americans voted for Trump (vs. 61,422,098 for Clinton as of November 15, 2016) it's hard to prop up the illusion that the average citizen is just a timid good guy. I can’t help you with that delusion at all, in fact.

So, who did those 60,637,350 supporters of the bad guys put in power?

• Reince Priebus as White House Chief of Staff
• Steve Bannon (Breitbart News) Senior Counselor to the President

and these were the leading actors for the rest of Trump's collection of super villains:

• Secretary of State: TBD [Newt Gingrich, Bob Corker, John Bolton]
• Treasury Secretary: TBD [Steven Mnuchin, Jamie Dimon]
• Attorney General: TBD [Rudy Giuliani, Pam Bondi, Chris Christie]
• Defense Secretary: TBD [Kelly Ayotte, Jeff Sessions, Michael Flynn]
• Health and Human Services Secretary: TBD [Ben Carson, Rick Scott]
• Interior Secretary: TBD [Lucas Oil, Sarah Palin, Robert Grady, Jan Brewer]
• Agriculture Secretary: TBD [Sid Miller, Sam Brownback, Dave Heineman]
• Labor Secretary: TBD [Victoria Lipnic]
• Commerce Secretary: TBD [Wilbur Ross, Chris Christie, Dan DiMicco]
• Education Secretary: TBD [Ben Carson, William Evers]
• Energy Secretary: TBD [Harold Hamm, Robert Grady]
• Homeland Security Secretary: TBD [David Clarke, Michael McCaul]
• Veterans Affairs Secretary: TBD [Jeff Miller]
• Environmental Protection Agency Administrator: TBD [Myron Ebell, Jeffrey Holmstead, Joe Aiello]

It’s hard to imagine a nastier looking bunch of rich, corrupt bad guys than this list. We’ve been here before. Nixon’s gang was no better or worse than Trump’s collection of deplorables. Reagan’s gangsters were so corrupt that a bunch of them (138) went to jail. If you are an X-gen youngster, you might imagine that Bush 43 was a disaster of a president and . . . you wouldn’t be wrong. In terms of bankrupting the nation, G.W. was record-setting. He was the kind of doubling-down on borrowing to go to war. But most Republicans are big talkers when it comes to the evils of the national debt and big spenders when it comes to handing taxpayer money over to the military-industrial gangsters.

Trump’s love for the oil companies ought to scare the shit out of anyone who believes we have some obligation to leave resources for future generations. Those oil pipelines that were “stopped” during the Obama administration will be making a big, uninterruped, unregulated comeback.

Nobody with adult reading skills should be surprised who Trump is taking with him to Washington. Trump, himself, is the poster child for the classic evil rich guy who is even more evil behind closed doors than he is in public. About 60,637,350 Americans voted for exactly the guy that you’d hope most people would hope gets killed at the end of the movie. 60,637,350 Americans voted for the people who brought us corporate personhood, Citizens United and worse, and the massive spread between the haves and have-nots. Think about that. When you look at your neighbor, your local store owner, your local politicians, and your friends and when you realize there is a 50% chance that they’d be cheering for the bad guy in the next Batman movie, you can’t help but think about how low humanity has sunk in this country.

What’s in the Glass?

The wrong question is, “Is the glass half-full or half-empty?” The right question is, “What’s in the glass and if it is something good why they hell isn’t it full?” In other words, “Who the hell syphoned off my glass of beer and how did they do that without me knowing about it?”

My 10 years in medical devices taught me a lot, probably too much, about who is sucking the glass empty in our misnamed “healthcare system.” Today, my wife is having her second radiology exam after her doctor discovered she had a rare form of cancer that was, probably, caused by her mother’s receiving a steroid/synthetic form of estrogen (DES, diethylstilbestrol) that was wrongly assumed had some miscarriage preventative effects. In the end, DES was worthless for that purpose and was repurposed without much FDA examination for increasing weight gain in cattle (“improved feed utilization”). When you attempt to buy “steroid-free” beef, pork, chicken, or other meat you are hoping to buy meat that was not fed DES.

Sitting in the Mayo Clinic’s Radiology waiting room, watching the parade of sales reps waltz in and out of doctors’ offices and departments, I’m reminded of who we can blame for our country having the most expensive, least effective system in the industrialized world: follow the fuckin’ money assholes. Everyone from the drug companies to the medical device companies to the insurance companies to doctors who game the system to the politicians these corporate criminals bribe to keep our system dysfunctional, inefficient, and incompetent are to blame. In fact, a rational nation would hold them criminally to blame and we’d empty our for-profit prisons of victimless “criminals” and pack them full of suits, CEOs, sales people, and insurance executives. Instead, the dumbest states in the country elect the worst of these characters to political office: Rick Scott (Florida Govenor), is probably the worst but he’s far from the only criminal in office. Obama’s Justice Department has been more aggressive in pursuing these criminals than any President in my lifetime, but Congress has worked hard to protect its benefactors. At least one of this season’s Republican candidates, Ben Carson, was rewarded by G.W. Bush for his creative accounting with the Medal of Freedom for pretending to be a physician while raking off more than his fair share of corporate welfare. Some people couldn’t identify a hero in a stack of actual heroes.

A few friends have been medical sales reps and they actually put their patients so far toward the front of their priorities that my fellow medical device employees hated talking to them. They were the exception, however. Most of the sales reps were so clueless that they’d call Technical Services to ask what products they had in their on-call bag. A few called to warn us that a doctor might actually be inclined to do his/her job and could be calling to ask about product failures (which in my 10 year experience never happened). Mostly, every interaction with anyone in the medical field was dissapointing. Docs didn’t worry abouts how their patients coped with the drugs they prescribed, the devices they implanted, or the incredible, bankrupting costs of having their lives saved (or not). Since the docs didn’t care, neither did anyone else in the system. The most callous group in the lineup of people with their hands out and their hearts closed were the industry executives: the multimillionares.

Our Timid New World

Today, I woke up to my youngest daughter calling to gloat about Trump’s victory. Since we hadn’t had the guts to check the news yet, I didn’t know that Donny had defeated Clinton but I suspected he has since her husband is a pseudo-conservative and she’s tagged along out of some sort of loyalty. We had bigger issues on a personal level to talk about, so we just avoided the subject and I’m sure she was disappointed.

Later today, I experienced a second opinion on our election process and the outcome. Amana/Maytag sent a guy to try and repair our twice-failed Amana dishwasher. The service call was supposed to be under warranty, but the guy and the customer service people decided it wasn’t. I got stuck with a $60 bill for nothing and, then, a demented lesson in politics and history from a guy at least my age driving a beat up van working for a small town appliance repair company.

“We just got rescued.”

“What?”

“We finally have a president with business experience.”

“If bankrupting six companies, stiffing your vendors, and losing stockholders millions is ‘business experience,’ that’s what we got." This is the same 'business man' label every mobster calls himself. The Sopranos are 'business men' by that definition.

“In 1980, I was running a mechanical contractor business. When Reagan got elected, it was like the whole country breathed a sigh of relief.”

“Not where I lived. In 1981, the market tanked, interest rates kept climbing, and you couldn’t get an engineering job anywhere in the Midwest unless it was with a military contractor. And what the fuck is a "mechanical contractor?”

He went on (and on) about how “the whole economy” turned around overnight after Reagan took office. Of course, reality has a liberal bias and as Forbes Magazine tell it, “Unable to borrow money at an interest rate they could afford, 17,000 businesses had failed by the fall of 1982 and unemployment reached record highs.” When I contested his weird take on 1980’s economics, he asked, “Have you ever run a business?”

Why yes, I have. Several, in fact. A couple for employers and a half-dozen of my own. I supported my family working several jobs and going to school nights. I never stiffed my vendors or declared bankruptcy, either. Turned out, he’d done both but he thought that was just “business.”

If a “business man” was what we needed in the presidency, Jimmy Carter was overwhelmingly more qualified than a demented talk radio jock who was a B-actor in his prime. Carter had turned a small family farm into a substantial farming and distribution business after a successful career as a Navy officer and nuclear engineer. His stint as Georgia governor provided that state with one of its few moments of respect and national prominence. But, according to this repair guy the whole economy suddenly turned around when Reagan took office. Of course, the facts contradicts the myth, so we print and worship the myth.

In 1983, I left Nebraska for California, since Reagan’s home state was the only functioning economy in the country. If I’d been willing to work for Northrop, Lockheed, or one of the dozens of military-industrial complex employers in southern California, I’d have been rolling in money. Instead, I clung to my values and worked for a consumer products manufacturer for ten years and came away from California poor but debt-free.

So, I met a Boomer generation Trump-voter and he turned out to be who I expected him to be: a barely-literate, failing student of history; including his own past. I don’t know how you fix any of this crap. A very few people are doing a lot of work to support the rest of the country and I think they are going to have to lay down that burden and let the country’s deadbeats know how precarious their position is. From my own family experience, it has become clear that people are very selective and creative in their memories and that seems to me to be an impossible educational hurdle. If most people are incapable of learning from history, we don’t have much hope of ever getting beyond our cave-dwelling habits and violent past.

They are All the Same?

I just spend an afternoon messing with our two year old Amana dishwasher. There are all sorts of things to learn from doing your own work on home appliances and since this particular device was dirt cheap when the bank installed it after repo'ing the house, I didn't have much to lose when it came to tearing the unit apart. So, I did.

Initially, Whirlpool (the company that owns Whirlpool, Maytag, KitchenAid, Jenn-Air, Amana, Gladiator GarageWorks, Inglis, Estate, Brastemp, Bauknecht, Indesit, and Consul brands), said this would be a warranty repair, since the dishwasher failed in exactly the same way a year after we bought the house. When the repair goofball showed up, all of that information seemed to vanish in the Whirlpool (pun intended).

After getting stuck with a $60 repair bill and a $300 estimate for a $250 dishwasher, I decided to do a little troubleshooting of my own. Pretty quickly, I discovered the pump that provides water to the spray jets was defective. After pulling the pump and applying power to the motor outside of the appliance, it was obvious that the noise we'd been living with as long as we've had this dishwasher had been coming from a poorly designed and assembled pump. The armature shaft was about 70% too small for the two end bushings, allowing the motor shaft to pound side-to-side as the motor spun. At first, I tried Whirlpool for the replacement pump, but they wanted $125 for a cheap Chinese-made plastic pump that probably cost less than $5 to build. Then, I checked all of the usual on-line suspects for a discount price and found the pump from as little as $36 to more than $100.

However, even more interesting than the range of prices was the fact that this exact pump is used in Whirlpool/Amana/KitchenAid/Maytag dishwashers that ranged in list prices from $250 to more than $1,000. That was quite a revelation! If you think paying more for an appliance is going to get you better quality, this information ought to bust that bubble.

The repair goofball claimed the problem with modern dishwashers is "the computers," but I kept finding repair blogs and DIY sites that mostly found failures exactly like mine. Dishwasher, washing machine, dryers, and other appliances use most of their power driving motors and those motors and pumps are made more cheaply and poorly in every generation. Power generates heat, motion creates vibration and heat, torque stresses materials and connections, and those three things are the prime factors for part failure in any design.

The general lack of product warranty variation is a great indicator of just how poorly made and unreliable these appliances are: universally 1 year "limited warranty" is the industry standard. You can pre-buy repairs with the add-on warranty policies, but the reputation of those policies is terrible and the contract is not made between the customer and the manufacturer but an intermediate insurance company and miscellaneous repair companies. Warranties are not designed by accident. Reliability assurance weigh the part quality, design weak points, and other factors to make a very educated guess for the mean-time-between-failures the majority of a manufactured product and a fudge-factor cost is sometimes added to the wholesale price of a product to obtain a nice round number, like 12 months, for marketing purposes. Most products have a little safe margin built into the design, which explains why so many of us have experienced product failures 1-6 months after the warranty expires. Expecting a modern product with a 12 month warranty to last 3-5 years is irrational. The product has been designed to last 12 months with normal use. You are unlikely to see much more than that.

When it comes to "getting what you pay for" with the Whirlpool company and it's sub-brands, you are buying cosmetics and "features" like rarely-used wash cycles. Why would you spend money on a stainless steel interior/exterior if you know the fatal flaw in the product is a $5 pump? Your mileage may vary, but I am going to buy the cheapest replacement dishwasher I can find and play on throwing the whole thing away in a year or two.

11/17/2016 POSTSCRIPT: Yesterday, I received a call from a Whirlpool "customer service" person who left a wrong call-back number and a breathless "I really want to resolve this" message. So, I wasted my time trying to return the call and, after a really long time on hold, I was told that since the dishwasher was long out of warranty "I can't do anything to help you." Weird. Why would you bother to call, waste my time on hold for twenty minutes while you re-discovered your company wasn't going to do anything more than I was told the first time? 

Since the faux "service call," I've pulled the pump mechanism apart and did what I did for a living doing for 30+ years: analyzed the pump failure. It was an interesting experience. The actual pump design is pretty clever: two brass bushings, a highly magnetized armature, and a washer to seal moisture from the pump motor. Unfortunately, the armature shaft and the brass bushings are a poor fit, allowing the armature to flail about until the shaft and bushings were really distorted and, finally, the motor magnet intermittently positioned itself against the motor casing where it wouldn't start. Once the motor turned, however, it ran strongly but nosily: exactly the noise we've heard from this dishwasher from the day we started using it.

Placing My Bet Now

Regardless  of what you conservative fluffballs think, President Obama has done a fine job of keeping the country safe and restoring as much of our deficit economy as possible without a lick of work from our deadbeat Republican congress. If he’d have been given actual patriots to work with, we’d be in a whole different world today.


But you fuckwits decided to blow up the country and see if a random 1% mobbed-up Russian pimp asshole could fix what people with functioning brains could not make a dent in. That’s the beauty of being a moron; you not only don’t have to think before you act but when you fuck up the world you won’t be intelligent, decent, or courageous enough to admit the mess is all your fault.

Here’s my bet for 2017: Trump and his idiot vandals will be so busy looting the national treasury that, like Bush and Cheney and pals, they’ll take their eye off of the national security job and we’ll experience another national disaster like 9/11/2001. The beauty of being a pseudo-conservative is, as always, never having to admit responsibility or error. You morons stumble through life with both feet stuck in trashcans and your heads up your asses and you think your shit smells like roses.

So, let me say it before hand, “Thanks Donny and friends.”

This time, you’re going to discover that tactic is going to fail; big time or "bigly" (if you’re the usual Trump illiterate). You are going to crash the world economy, the plant’s eco system, and there won’t be any coming back from it. You may not admit that it was your fault, but it won’t matter because everyone is going to suffer. Climate change, massive national debt, near-universal unemployment, and a national reputation for stupidity that turns our allies into either a laugh track or enemies.