Freedom of Choice? We’re Being Invaded!

I had a couple of sobering experiences yesterdays that reminded me of the complications involved in keeping the human species from killing itself and every other major lifeform on the planet. As usual, if life wasn’t so funny it would be terrifying and depressing.

First, I had a doctor’s appointment to review the analysis of my failing right knee. I particularly like my physician because he has a very international view of medicine, life, and the world around him. As we went thorough my options regarding the beat-to-shit knee, we carried on our usual conversations about the world outside of my old, rotting body. Someone close to me once told me that all of the doctors in the world had conspired to treat Covid as if it were something much worse than the seasonal flu. He complained that he didn’t get “his check” for participating in that grand conspiracy to profit Big Pharma and whoever else supposedly benefitted from the pandemic. From there we had a laugh about the self-important goobers who imagined they were receiving Microsoft tracking chips with their vaccines. Again, no payment for that work to my doctor and I suggested he at least ask for a lifetime subscription for Microsoft Office and not that bullshit 365 crap, but the real thing on a DVD. And that was the funny part of the conversation.

The less funny part, from his perspective, is that when humans are confronted with evidence that their delusions are nothing more than bullshit they double-down on their bullshit. Cognitive dissonance seems to be exclusively a human mental defect, but it is a big one. When I asked if there was a way to get past that, in his experience, his response was, “No, we’re doomed.” I desperately wish I disagreed with him, but I don’t. Since I was a kid. in the 1950s, and first read C.M. Kornbluth’s novelette “The Marching Morons” I have had zero faith in the future of human beings as a species and my own best-case-scenario is that we find a clever way to kill ourselves off without taking every other form of life with us. Any reading of US history that isn’t pure conservative newspeak is full of the dullest, most violent, and the dumbest rolling over anything resembling logic and decency as easily as Trump cons his nitwits into sending him their spare change. “We’re doomed,” for sure. At best the 1% of humanity’s best and brightest will be doomed to babysitting the marching morons until the planet is uninhabitable.

Later that day, I limped to the local YMCA to try and reinstate my swimming routine after a couple of months of avoiding the pool until I knew if it was doing good or harm to my knee. When you are 75, a couple of months of low to moderate exercise does a lot of damage to your physical conditioning. My usual lame 1/4 mile routine too much for me and I was pretty discouraged when I gave up on the swim and headed to the sauna before braving this year’s mild December evening. There was one guy in the sauna and I picked the opposite end of the room to stew in my frustration. Within a few minutes, the sauna was almost full of middle-aged men showing off their flabby naked bodies and I should have passed on the experience. Their conversation was as depressing as my swimming failure and I sunk into a steaming funk as I listened to a pair of nitwits babbling about the “border crisis” and other equally obscure-to-Minnesota subjects they know nothing about.

The big takeaway I got from their conversation was that they are major breeders of stupid. I wasn’t interested enough to keep an accurate track of their family mobs, but I am fairly certain that everyone in the sauna had at least 5 offspring. All of whom were somewhat-to-seriously involved in mindless school sports. For sure, with all of the preening and bragging not one of those obvious-Trumpers had a kid who was competing in the USA Mathematical Olympiad, the Scripps National (or even the city or state) Spelling Bee, the National Speech and Debate Tournament, or any of the 30 national high school academic competitions. (I linked those competitions, just in case you don’t believe there is anything other than sports for your kid to excel in, you fuckin’ idiot shoulda-been-sterilized-at-birth goober.)

In this country, practically throughout the nation’s history, we have celebrated the luckiest 1%, not the smartest. The half-wits who stumbled into wealth through inheritance or good fortune or both end up being the idols of millions and those who work hard, take almost every step of accomplishment our species has managed, and make the rest of us look like the the extinct human species we came from are mostly ignored. As I have said more than once, “I’m not worried about AI, but LI is gonna kill us all.” The fourth of the “The 5 basic laws of human stupidity” is “Non-stupid people always underestimate the destructive power of stupid individuals” and the fifth is “A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.” They are everywhere and their population is growing exponentially, even as world population growth slows. In fact, for the most part the only humans who are currently breeding are fools,. So, “we are doomed.”

Freedom of Choice? How to Make A Cult

You can’t get very far into this subject without an argument about what a “cult” is. So I’m going to stuck with Webster’s for a definition, because I usually do.

1. as in audience: a group of people showing intense devotion to a cause, person, or work (as a film)
2. as in religion: a body of beliefs and practices regarding the supernatural and the worship of one or more deities

Mrs. Day and I were talking about the odd devotion people we know have toward a variety of pop stars: from the Beatles to Taylor Swift or John Wayne to Keano Reeves. We know old-ass men who worship the Beatles with at least as much fervor as teenage girls texting about Taylor Swift. To be honest, we weren’t just academically interested. Mrs. Day and I really wanted to know “What is that about and how do I get my own cult?” Because if you can attract enough members to your cult, you never have to worry about money. Donald Trump sold 2,024 scraps from a cheesy tarp-sized blue suit he wore for his mugshot for $4,654 a scrap. That is more than $4.7M dollars for a suit J.C. Penney’s would have discounted or put in a seconds bin! So, “how do I get my own cult?” is a serious question. Now the two of us have a goal, a definition of what that goal looks like, and a purpose for reaching that goal.

First, we need that devoted “audience.” If you are really serious about this objective, math is on your side. There are about 320M people in the USA alone and 8.1B in the world, but let’s concentrate on the US and let the ROW cash flow come as it will. If I can get myself or my product (for example: a popular song) in front of a lot of people, say 10% of the bodies in the USA, I will have am uncommitted audience of 3.2M people. If I mostly suck, I might end up with 1% of that group who hear my song and pay attention to the name of the song, they might want to know who the artist is, look up when I might be performing nearby, buy some of that artist’s (my) music, and, if I really get lucky, they “follow” me throughout their lives like Beatles, Rolling Stones, Clapton, Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Springfield, and those really obscure British Invasion band fans. Those followers become members of the “cult of me.”

If I’m even a little bit special, 1% of that first group of 10% leaves me with a a fan/cult-base, a “cult group,” of 360,000. And that’s if I suck and/or didn’t get enough exposure to really be a hit. Casinos all over the world are well-stocked with performers who suck, but still collected enough attention to have a modestly lucrative cult following. (I’m talking about you, Teddy “Captain Poopypants” Nugent.) Taylor Swift has at least a 93% saturation rate (256M), supposedly 44% of US adults consider themselves Taylor Swift “fans” (258M over 18) and about 40M more between 10 and 18 (~275M total). Supposedly, 16% of that huge first group consider themselves to be “avid” fans and are almost certain to be the minimum size group for the Swiftie cult. That is a cult with 44M members. She’s the either the first or the second largest church/cult in the USA and she has fans worldwide.

If she was an asshole, I’d be worried. Pop history tells us mostly “what you see is what you get.” Ted Nugent was an asshole as a young man and is still one. Bruce Springsteen was a pretty cool guy as a young man and is a bit cooler today. Willy Nelson was cool out of the womb. Donny Trump was born a turd and just got smellier with age. So, I’m not worried about Swift and the Swifties. She (and her fans) got a pretty serious boost to her cred when Teddy Nugent publicly whined about her. Anything Teddy is afraid of (more likely, jealous of) is good enough for me.

While Swift certainly sets the high and enviable bar for creating a successful cult, she doesn’t make getting up there seem any easier. She is an incredibly hard working artist and performer. I don’t want to be a hard working anything and it it worked for Trump that means there is a pretty easy-to-achieve low bar for creating a cult, too. That’s the one I want to aim at, even without the advantage of being handed somewhere around $800M just for being born into the right, cutthroat family. Of course, if I started out with $800M I wouldn’t be wasting my time messing with goobers like the nitwits who belong to Trump’s cult. I don’t want those imbeciles in my country, let alone anywhere near me. I am even nervous about getting anywhere near their money.

That is a problem with creating a cult, too. It’s not like cult members are anyone’s idea of the “best and brightest.” From Joseph Smith’s original Mormons to the Beatles and their nitwit Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Transcendental Meditation entourage, true believers are kind of gross in a simple-minded, hyper-gullible, sticky-clingy, lay-down-with-dogs-and-get-up-with-fleas way that makes me want to take a shower after looking at them. That is a show-stopping problem for a wannabe cult leader. You have be someone like Trump who can loudly and proudly stand in front of people he despises and tell them what they want to hear. Man, if I’d have thought this out earlier I might have passed on the whole idea. Talk about being surrounded by people you don’t want to be near, this is getting totally out of hand. Still, the idea of collecting a few hundred thousand followers who will happily and stupidly empty their pockets and bank accounts for my benefit is tempting. I’m going to have to think about this more.

I’ll get back to you.

The Death Cult that Wants to Kill Us All

There was a phase in the early period of Christianity where the clear objective was to die and go to Never-never Land as fast as possible. One of the first Christian sects, the Donatists, inspired a nutty group of fanatics called the Circumcellions who would initiate spontaneous acts of violence on strangers in the hopes of getting their asses killed and obtaining martyrdom status (sound familiar?). As one author put it, “The logic of Christianity leads to the disturbing conclusion that if heaven is better than this life, then death is a good and desirable outcome.” The nutjob Federalist Society even published an article titled “For Christians, Dying From COVID (Or Anything Else) Is A Good Thing” where the author wrote, “For one thing, Christians believe that life and death belong entirely to God. There is nothing we can do to make our days on earth one second longer or shorter.” Joy Pullman goes on to pile one nutty superstitious claim on top of many others, but the main point is “For another thing, for Christians, death is good.” Add taking as many non-believers and believers with you as possible to this philosphy is “the Christian thing to do.”

The early leaders of the Catholic Church saw that this interpretation of the Bible would lead to an quick disappearance of their source of resources and followers. In the fifth century, Augustine wrote The City of God, which was Christianity’s first condemnation of suicide. In an effort to get some kind of renumeration even from the dead, as described in Wikipedia, “In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas denounced suicide as an act against God and as a sin for which one could not repent. Civil and criminal laws were enacted to discourage suicide, and as well as degrading the body rather than permitting a normal burial, the property and possessions of both the person who died by suicide and of their family were confiscated.” [And today’s faux-conservatives bitch about inheritance taxes?]

Today’s breed of radical Christian “Crack Suicide Squads” are only slightly more subtle. They have no interest in caring for other humans, but they’ve snagged themselves on the crazy idea that their only path to heaven is to commit to having as many humans born as possible. Obviously, once a baby is born, they have no obligation to it in any way because . . . that would cost the idle rich who profit from superstition and foolishness some of their unearned money and . . . money.

As the author of one analysis of the Christian suicide cult wrote, “In fact, belief in heaven makes this life actively undesirable. The longer we live, the more chances we have to encounter temptation, fall into sin, and lose our salvation—the worst catastrophe imaginable. If heaven is the goal, then the younger we die, the better.This idea is taken to an extreme by Christian apologists who say that fetuses which die before birth go straight to heaven, bypassing human existence entirely. In this belief system, that’s the best possible outcome. The second best outcome is children who die before the age of accountability. They may suffer, but they never have a chance to lose their salvation.”

Knowing that is their belief certainly diminishes any hope one might have that Christians actually care about anyone but their own imaginary souls and their place at the right hand of an all-powerful vengeful Jehovah who will smite their enemies and grade school bullies and high school cool kids with plagues and lightening bolts. Actually, that sounds kinda Marvel Comics cool.

Now we have a buttload of Christian suicide culters in charge of at least one branch of the federal government, the grossly mis-named House of Representatives:

• Current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson who in his earlier employment was a lawyer for the wall-to-wall Christian crazies Alliance Defense Fund, a group of radical nutbags who have dedicated themselves to imagining that not being able to discriminate against LGBTQ rights will send the country to Hell. In an earlier moment in his career of failures and corruption, Johnson was the founding dean of the private Louisiana College Southern Baptist law school, established in 2010, where Johnson claimed would “acknowledge the Judeo-Christian foundation of the legal system.” Gullible sponsors flushed $5 million into Johnson’s mythical university, but it never opened its doors. Johnson slithered away after two years as an idle, but well-paid, dean.
• Marjorie Taylor Greene whose insanity, treason, insurrection, and stupidity  needs no further introduction.
• Matt Gaetz, yet another whack job who would be happier as a private rural girls’ school Principal in an uneducated conservative southern state.
• House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan who should have stuck with overseeing pervert Ohio coaches and team doctors.
• Rep. Bob Good (R-VA): “We should not fear a government shutdown. Most of what we do up here is bad anyway. Most of what we do up here hurts the American people, when we do stuff to the American people while promising to do things for the American people. Essential operations continue. 85% continues. Most of the American people won’t even miss if the government is shutdown temporarily.”
• Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) “I love Andy Biggs. I know some people think he’s crazy, but that’s just because they don’t know him,” Krysten Sinema
• Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) a classical fact-free-zone of Republican insanity.
• Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) is one of two Representatives from a state that doesn’t have a large enough population to warrant any representation, Rosendale is a special case for reforming the structure of the US Constitution. “Rosendale touts his background as a real estate investor from Maryland who pretends he’s a rancher out on the range from almost all the way across the country, but all public records show, though, that Rosendale is a ‘rancher’ by way of just renting real estate out to others who actually do the ranching on that land.” In other words, Rosendale is just another Eastern millionaire taking advantage of gullible Montana rubes.
• Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) is just like his Montana welfare state cohort, Rosendale, in his disrespect for the fools who vote for him. After running away from his Trump cabinet position in the wake of a collection of ethics violations, Zinke pretended to be an outsider looking out for his fellow Montana rubes in his House campaign. Wearing his ponyboy cowboy hat, he claims that “Despite the deep state's attempts to repeatedly stop me I stand before you as a duly elected member of the congress and tell you that a deep state exists… They want to wipe out the American cowboy.” Little fella, the cowboy barely existed for 20 years after the Civil War and that job is long gone and couldn’t even pretend to exist today without buttloads of federal farm assistance.
• There are at least a half-dozen more Republican nutjobs in the House and as many equally suicidal characters in the Senate, but their names are hardly worth mentioning and their stories are too miserably despicable to research.

As another Christian critic wrote, “For the religious right, every war is a sign of the return of Jesus Christ, and the chance they’ll get to say, “I told you so. I was right. I was right all along.” Even if they have to burn down the world to prove it.” Sadly, “even” is the wrong word to chose in regard to the American Christian Taliban. They desperately want to take the whole world with them to prove they are right, but what they will prove to nobody (when no one is here to see it) is that we all get one life to live and that’s it.

Or This Guy (these guys?)

The previous essay, “ID’ing A Trumper” needed this additional character stereotype. The headline below his picture was:

Princeton, MN (KROC-AM News) - Five Minnesota law officers are recovering today from gunshot wounds suffered in an apparent exchange of gunfire with a 64-year-old man at a rural residence in central Minnesota this morning.

You know this doofus is a Trumper.

 

Or all of these guys: 

 

 

 

ID’ing A Trumper

After 7 years of this nonsense, Trumpers have become a “group” of their own. Like Republicans, they are a minority but also like Republicans they are grossly and powerfully overrepresented in society. As Wikipedia notes, “The label Trumpism has been applied to national-conservative and national-populist movements in other democracies, and many politicians outside of the United States have been labeled as staunch allies of Trump or Trumpism, or even as their country's equivalent to Trump, by various news agencies; among them are Jair Bolsonaro, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, Jacob Zuma, Shinzo Abe, Javier Milei, and Yoon Suk-yeol.” So, Trump’s brand of racist fascism has spread (or was already there and Trump allowed them to crawl out of their rat holes) to assholes around the world. Trumpism has become sort of a culture with some pretty obvious trademarks. As one source explained, “MAGA idealism which includes white supremacy, xenophobia, control over women’s bodies, capitalistic values and a lack of morality.”

Characters like this guy don’t need the hat or the disrespectful shirt to be identified. You know by the expression on his face and the rest of his body language that he is uneducated, entitled, racist, ignorant, and proud of all of that. Likewise, this bunch of shouting, inbred, arrogant fools are easily identified as Trumpers. If they weren’t Trumpers they’d be Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Hell’s Angels or Outlaw biker gangbangers, Blood & Honour America Division neofascists, Aryan Nation skinheads, Jewish Defense League terrorists, and nothing keeps these characters from belonging to all of the above clans of nutjobs and the many more “organizations” where white people join in mutual hatred of anyone who isn’t “like us.” The fact that there are so many young Trumpers proves that Kornbluth was on the money with “The Marching Morons” and the saying “stupidity kills, just not fast enough” is sadly true.

However, my inspiration for this essay came at my local YMCA. An old white guy (surprise!) is often wrapping up whatever routine he has when I arrive at the gym. He shaves at the Y and while there is nothing special about his face it takes him about 10 minutes to get the job done. All the while, he has the water running full force as he scrapes the dead skin and scraggly hair from his face. That kind of arrogant, entitled, wasteful, anti-environmental attitude just screams “Trumper!” and it got me thinking about the other identifying behaviors of Trumpers.

Arrogance and entitlement are the primary hallmarks. Mostly, we’re talking about middle-aged to old white people, sadly not just men. Even more sadly, not just old men. When you see some one blasting down the freeway at 20+mph over the speed limit, weaving between cars like a video game, you likely automatically think “asshole” and “Trumper.” When someone tries to push their grocery cart in front of a long line of socially distanced shoppers, you know this is another Trumper. When someone is yelling at a cashier for some imagined slight or, back in the masking days of COVID, for asking the customer to either back off or wear the required mask, we think “Trumper.” An illegally loud vehicle--motorcycle, pickup, car, or semi--90% certainly a Trumper. Obviously, swastika or Confederate flag tats and patches and hats are Trumper ID marks. When someone takes an assault rifle into a business, school, church, or concert crowd and kills the usual mass murder quantity of innocent people, you think “Trumper.” When someone is commenting on science, technology, medicine, religion (especially Christianity), or economics and it is beyond obvious that they know nothing about that subject, you should probably think “Trumper” and 99% of the time you’ll be right.

You can always find an exception and, especially in this case, “the exception proves the rule.” You will be wrong in assuming any form of assholery to be Trumpism so rarely it will be of no consequence. That is one hell of a hallmark for a political/social movement: always wrong, never learns from mistakes, and so deep into the wingnut echo chamber that no new information ever seeps in.

AI and LI, or HI? That Is the Question

This month’s (September 2023) Wired Magazine is sub-titled “Dear AI Overlord’s, Don’t Fuck This Up.” Obviously, the bulk of the magazine is devoted to opinions of how bad or good Artificial Intelligence is going to be for near and long-term humanity. Mostly, as usual, the Wired opinions are from liberal arts majors who have no idea what they are talking about as far as AI’s technology.

In the month’s “Dear Cloud Support” essay, the opening question is “’I failed two captcha tests this week. Am I still human Bot or not?’” The second I read that statement I realized the question missed the real problem. It is not a yes-no problem, it is a 1-out-of-three problem, at the least. It isn’t just AIBots who are the threat, it is equally or more stupid humans (Low Intelligence) and badly designed AI systems that are the threat. The battle for survival is between the LI&AIBots vs High Intelligence (HI). In the short term, the stupid people will cause the most harm. Long term? Who knows?

There are a couple of articles that delude to the idea that engineers and computer programmers aren’t up to the job of keeping AI reasonably moral. They, clearly a pack of liberal arts dweebs, imagine that, finally, the world will need the kinds of “skills” that a liberal arts degree supposedly promotes. No evidence of that appears to exist in the modern world and lots of contradicting data would argue to the contrary. For example, Steve Jobs, a liberal arts scumbag who learned from his philosophy classes which kinds of decisions are moral and which are not. So, he focused his life on always picking the amoral “what will profit Steve the most” options. There is no shortage of executives, politicians, and entertainers who disprove the idea that anything about a liberal arts education creates any sort of “better” citizen.

Not that a STEM education produces any sort of predictable outcome, either. The amoral academic environment is probably the culprit. Between the cut-throat publish-or-perish competition, the corporate shills who crank out drugs, processes, and products for companies at the expense of the taxpayers who support marginal “education” facilities, and the low bar academia sets for educator standards and skills it doesn’t matter much what a kid majors in, exposure to this environment is probably doing to do at least as much damage as it provides useful education.

As Law 2 in the “Five Laws of Stupidity” clearly explains, “The probability that a person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.” And that includes education credentials or professional standing and accomplishment. Law 1 states “Everyone always and inevitably underestimates the number of stupid people in circulation” and Law 4 explains “Non-stupid people always underestimate the destructive power of stupid individuals.” At the least, 50% of every population is “below average” and that is assuming the distribution is “normal,” not heavily skewed-right with a really long tail as I suspect. The existence, abundance, and persistence of the Trump Cult is serious evidence that, at least in the USA, some serious down-breeding is causing our average IQ to drop dramatically. So, assuming that “average IQ of 100” might be optimistic.

If I had to put my fate in the hands of an AI system that was Open Sourced and monitored by the smartest people in the world or the random-number-generator that is, optimistically, what the Low Intelligence crowd represents at best, I’ll take AIBots and HI over anything the LI crowd can produce.

Going Amazon-free

About eight months ago, I received a notice from the Amazon cop-bot that, somehow, I’d “repeatedly posted content that violates our Community Guidelines” (“repeatedly” means twice in Amazon-bot-speak) and “You received an initial warning and because of your repeated violation of our Community Guidelines we've removed your ability to participate in Community features” (the “initial warning” was a bot-email with no reference to what the warning referred to). However, when I send emails to a variety of Amazon’s automated “customer service” locations including one to a Jeff Bezo’s email I found from searching other confused and pissed-off banned Amazon customers, I got a snarky note from “Ayesha of Amazon.com's Communities Escalation Team” finally telling me where I’d violated their weird, poorly-explained, and inconsistent “guidelines.” Here are the condemned reviews, so you can be the judge.

#1 Storm Watch: Joe Pickett, Book 23
Review Title: Deep State goober nonsense
Text: Probably the worst edited novel from a major publisher in years. If it weren't a library book, I'd have probably red-lined at least 50 pages out of the book in an editing fit.
Box has, apparently, joined a majority of westerners in the belief that letting oil and mining companies rape and pillage the mountains at will has no consequences. And, even more cluelessly, imagines that selling those resources does not require the cooperation and financial assistance of the taxpaying states. I couldn't read this silly fantasy novel without remember the first time I drove through Montana in the 60s and was stunned at the filthy, mining-tailing contaminated rivers and streams and the pollution billowing uncontrolled from processing plants in practically every small town I passed through. It actually made Kansas, my home state, look responsible.
Pickett is still, mostly, a sympathetic "hero," but almost every other person in the novel approaches the cowardice and foolishness of the Proud Boys. Even after Trump, these goofy, entitled goobers imagine that anyone with a college education working for the government is "Deep State" and out to repress white "working men," the same men you always see leaning on shovels at construction sites.

#2 Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media's Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption
Review Title: Paranoid and laughable
Text: If this were written by Andy Borowitz it would have been spectacularly funny. I had to re-calibrate often while I read "Breaking the News" to remind myself this nutjob is serious. Which kind of makes it even funnier.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that some wingnut objected to my disrespecting the Faux News worldview and hit the “Report” button at the bottom of my reviews. Since Amazon doesn’t post reviews immediately, under the false claim that they check reviews for those mythical “community standards” before putting a review online, it’s tough to know what happened, but both reviews were up for several months before causing my entire 15 year history of reviews to be discarded.

I have, honestly, hated almost everything about Amazon since Bezos and his gang of lawyers steamrolled the original Amazon books in Minneapolis in 2008. I have been buying stuff from Amazon since 2008 to the tune of well over $9,000 up until early this year. I figured if they don’t like my business, I shouldn’t give it to them. So, after getting the first notice, I started looking for alternatives to the demon Amazon. Turns out, laziness is primarily what fueled my buying decisions because Amazon is a long ways from either a primary or a quality supplier. For years, local and national retailers have complained that Amazon shoppers browse their inventory and order the products from Amazon. The reverse is also possible and downright handy. Assuming you know how misleadingly-weighted Amazon’s rating system is you can learn almost as much from a product’s Amazon page as you can from seeing the thing in person. If you’re really devious, you could even order the thing from Amazon, play with it, return it, and buy it again from a decent vendor. Just as Amazon makes it clear to you that it does not owe you a microsecond of loyalty, you don’t owe Amazon anything either.

Currently, the only “business” I do with Amazon is via my Kindle and my local library. I haven’t bought anything from Amazon since January and the credit card information Amazon has for me expired in March. I’m currently doing the research to see how I can get away from even that bit of business.

This past few months, I researched, priced, and ordered several products that are listed on Amazon.com. I just didn’t buy them from Amazon. I bought some expensive bicycle handlebars from the manufacturer in Idaho, some bike repair parts and a flat kit from my local bicycle shop, and some bike accessories for my new electric mountain bike on eBay. I looked them all up, initially, with Amazon’s search engine, then tracked down the actual vendors and bought from them unless I could source the stuff locally. As for the cheap Chinese-made stuff, the best sources I know of are Temu.com and AliExpress.com and, of course, eBay. I bought a pair of 3-bearing, all metal mountain bike pedals for $23 shipped, after finding the company and product description on Amazon for $88-140. 

Here are some of the resources I’ve found to substitute for my default Amazon buying habit:

• eBay.com, of course, is and always has been a go-to location for all things. Like several other online vendors listed below, the “convenience” of Amazon (plus my dislike of Paypal, plus Musk and his fascist cofounding buddy Theil) had put eBay on the backburner of my online shopping options. After dumping Amazon, I was “forced” to look to eBay for some odd car bits that my local auto parts house couldn’t supply. I found them on eBay and they arrived in two days. Since I last dealt with eBay vendors, at least a decade ago, they have really upped their shipping and customer service game.
• Newegg.com I’ve been buying electronics from Newegg for years, far longer than Amazon, and Newegg’s electronic selection, quality, buyers’ review usefulness, and customer service blows Amazon out of the water.
• Nashbar.com Another online vendor that I’ve dealt with almost since the beginning of the WWW. My accounting history records a set of mountain bike wheels purchased from Nashbar in 1999. Again, great service, terrific products, incredible sales (hence those sealed bearing wheels in 1999), and knowledgeable customer service.
• PetSmart is the hands-down best online place to go for all things pet-related. I’d forgotten how customer-friendly this company was until my Amazon spat. As I was cancelling some of my Amazon subscriptions, I discovered a couple of them were with Petsmart. I easily moved those subscriptions to Petsmart’s website and saved a little money as a result. When our amazing little cat, Diva, died unexpectedly this fall, Petsmart refunded my money for a shipment in process and sent a beautiful sympathy letter. Not only was that beyond comprehension from Amazon, it was more than our local vet offered.
• Temu.com Is a Chinese-owned digital marketplace that is the number one shopping megastore worldwide, regularly whipping Amazon’s butt in price, selection, and quality (at least with Chinese-made products, which is 70% of Amazon’s selection). I’ve tried some of Temu’s dirt-cheap ($3 for 512GB) MicroSD cards and while they are often defective, Temu gives me instant credit for those defective cards without requiring a return. Otherwise, I’ve bought electronics, bicycle parts and accessories, motorcycle accessories, gifts for my wife and family, shoes and clothing, tools, and assorted weird stuff. Shipping is kinda slow, usually a week to two, but Temu provides tracking information and, unlike Amazon or AliExpress, that information is accurate.
• AliExpress is another Chinese-owned outlet, owned by AliBaba, that under-sells Amazon by a good bit and, usually, with better quality. Delivery is even longer and a lot less reliable than Temu and often untrackable. However, after getting two used induction-compatible high end frying pans from Amazon (returned at Amazon’s expense), I bought the exact same pans from AliBaba and they came new, for 1/4 of Amazon’s price, and included “gifts” from the vendor (a smaller pan and some non-stick friendly utensils). As best I can tell, AliExpress has little-to-no customer protection for lost shipping and you are absolutely gambling buying expensive stuff from AliExpress. I ordered a $120 microphone from AliExpress that never arrived and AliExpress kept insisting that I provide “shipping information” to claim a refund. Since I did not receive any shipping information, tracking links, or any evidence the package had ever been shipped, I was out of luck.
• Walmart.com and Target.com have really stepped up their online games. Plus, I can get stuff delivered to my local store for free and pickup along with groceries. I started using Walmart’s store pickup service early in the COVID pandemic and have used it often since. Now that COVID is making a comeback, I’ll be back in the parking lot waiting for a Walmart associate to load my groceries into the back of the Honda. Our local Target just increased the size of their grocery department and is building a parking area for pickup only. I am looking forward to trying it out.
• My local library, especially for book reviews. The same reviews that got me banned from Amazon are still standing on the Hennepin County Library webpage. When I retired, I sold several bookshelves full of books as part of my downsizing routine and I bought an Amazon Kindle where I restored some of my old book collection. I also found a ton of ePUBs of my older stuff, which lives on my computers and Android tablets. I am about to replace the Kindle, though, since everything my library has in eBook and Audiobook format is also available via Libby (Adobe) plus a few that aren’t on Kindle. And I can access the library’s whole catalog via Libby. Supposedly, Epubor Ultimate is capable of converting Kindle books from the Amazon format to ePUBs which eliminates any reason why I can’t move from Kindle to Kobo, where I could directly check out books from my libraries. I haven’t bought a Kobo, yet, but I am shopping for one everywhere but Amazon.com.
• Speaking of local, when I first dropped out of Amazon, I began to look, first, for local sources for the stuff I buy. For example, my local bike shop is grossly high priced for some stuff, but for many things they are as reasonable as online retail and you can’t beat the delivery time. That goes for hardware, office supplies, groceries, music equipment and repairs, and at least 75% of the stuff for which might have once defaulted to Amazon.

After 3/4 of a year of avoiding Amazon, I literally have no regrets or reason to return to that evil monopoly. I am solidly disgusted with our bought-and-paid-for-congresscritters for not only allowing Amazon to abuse the USPS but for giving them piles of taxpayer money for services the federal government should be managing itself. I do like using Amazon’s website like the old Sears’ catalog, pawing through the options for a purchase, reading the 1, 2, and 3-star reviews (the 4 and 5 stars are rarely honest buyers), noting the sellers so I can go to their websites for better prices and service, and, for now, checking out my library books.

“You need to have an open mind!”

I bumped into a local acquaintance at the Farmer’s Market this weekend. His latest frenzy (he’s gone through several dozen in the 8 years I’ve known him) is AI terror. Technophobia is not as new thing. Old people and uneducated people and unskilled people have been afraid of “progress” almost as long as we’ve been banging the rocks together. After he failed to create any sort of panic in his audience (me), he quickly walked away, shouting over his shoulder, “Tom, you need to have an open mind.”

There are “open minds” and there are open minds. Being open to emotional content is the path to becoming a mindless cult member. At this point in my life, I may not be able to take much of any even slightly emotional argument seriously. That “lack of charisma” problem that many Democratic candidates are curse with is nothing more than a refusal to resort to appealing to their listeners’ amygdala and aiming, instead, for their frontal cortex. One of Richard Nixon’s media advisors, Roger Ailes, wrote “Voters are basically lazy. Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we…seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.” Ailes described exactly the tactics he’d use in running Fox News a couple of decades later. Screw reason, poke ‘em in the emotions and they’ll never even think about thinking for themselves. Or, as Rick Santorum once blatantly honestly said, "We will never have the elite, smart people on our side." Nope, but they can count on most of the characters on the below-average side of the IQ curve and that will consistently be half of any population.

I have read You Are Not So Smart and listened to the audiobook and Podcast so often that I bought both versions of the book, along with You Are Now Less Dumb. I usually read a book once a decade and my library resources are more than adequate for my purposes, but not when it comes to how badly our brains work, especially under emotional impulse. When I was a young man, I fell victim to practically every sucker-the-rube scam known to humans, but I’ve tried to make a personal policy out of “Screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice, shame on me.” I’ve been burned more than a few times failing to heed that advice, but I’ve avoided disaster for most of my life believing that when it comes to con artists “forgiveness is for suckers.” I didn’t call my motorcycle column and blog “Geezer with A Grudge” for nothing.

An “open mind” is the kind of mindset that allowed Hitler to con all of the British politicians who met him into believing he was benign, in fact the ONLY important British leader who distrusted Hitler was Winston Churchill, who was also the only one who didn’t speak face-to-face with the Nazi bastard. Likewise, I prefer to obtain my own information on important subjects through READING about and studying those topics. I don’t know a lot of stuff, but the stuff I do know is regularly and largely misrepresented in the media, YouTube (especially), advertising, and in most person-to-person “communications.” That means I don’t listen to sales routines over the phone or in person; “Just give me the literature and I’ll get back to you if I’m interested” is usually enough to kill a sales pitch in the bud. I’m not real bright and it takes me time to absorb the information that usually has to be extracted from sales literature with as much effort as taking a college physics or chemistry exam. They don’t make information easy or even available, more often than not.

I’m a big believer and observe in track records, too. If you’ve been wrong almost always (Talkin’ to you Republicans.) and don’t show any evidence that you realize you were regularly on the wrong side of reality, history, morality, and decent behavior (Still talkin’ to you Republicans.) I have no interest in your opinions and doubt your ability to acquire and assemble facts that are coherent or even honest.

American Lawlessness

I can't run no more,
With that lawless crowd.
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
A thundercloud.
They're going to hear from me. Leonard Cohen – Anthem

But they likely won’t hear from enough of us, will they? Usually, in American history, the “thunderclouds” that get summoned are in service of the 1%, the planet killers, the real “baby killers” who do their work in quantity not quality, and outright criminals who belong either behind bars or standing in front of a firing squad convicted of treason. But the United States are no longer united and at least half of the voting public (those allowed to vote) are “that lawless crowd.”

You see their distain for law and order, peace and quiet, the public spaces, and decency practically everywhere you go. You hear them flaunt laws and polite behavior all night long in practically every town in the nation. They do it for both fun and profit and they do it knowing the police are, mostly, on their side. The country is rapidly becoming half-“that lawless crowd.” And they are clearly proud of their ability to repeatedly commit crimes against the “public good” and national security without consequences. How will this play out on both the world stage and locally? Probably, badly.

I’m going to work from the bottom up in describing the symptoms of an empire in rapid decline. At the dead bottom—where local, state, and federal laws are broken and flaunted on a moment-by-moment basis—are vehicle noise laws. Here is one of many places where you can see that rural areas are in a state of far more deterioration than their urban cousins. On mild spring-thru-fall days, you can hear the sounds of blatantly illegal vehicle exhaust systems coming from every direction. While it is clearly and obviously illegal to alter any EPA/DOT-approved vehicle’s intake and exhaust system, local and state cops ignore those criminals because of . . . money. Irrationally powerful special interest groups like the IAPO (International Association of Professional Bar Owners) spent buttloads of cash putting up obstacles to prevent the weak attempts of “law enforcement” from patrolling the obvious sources of a substantial number of vehicle deaths and serious injuries: bar “closing time.” That same pack of gangsters and the amazingly powerful (and totally lame) MIC (Motorcycle Industry Council) put up all sorts of political noise when the noise their customers make destroys the peace and quiet and citizens begin to demand actual law enforcement (instead of minority harassment.).  And cops?  They are both terrified of biker gangs reprisals and too often the gang members. The same goes for the characters with illegal exhaust systems on their pickups, Honda Civics, and other assorted law-breaking vehicles.

That’s one of many examples of lawlessness at the lowest levels of society. At the national level, we had a violent insurrection that attempted to cancel the votes of tens of millions of Americans in an effort to install a egotistic, foolish reality show actor and his 3^rd-tier élite handlers as a permanent dictatorship. Everything works top-down and our culture is infested with lawless 1%ers who imagine themselves to be above the law and, worse, the law itself. When those at the top of society or business consider themselves to be ungoverned by law and order, that attitude showers across the nation with all of the worst people imagining themselves to be “special.” No only are they not special, but they are capable of destroying anything that is special within their reach.

The Incredible Power of Luck and Finding Suckers

I recently read two automotive industry books, first was Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, and the second was Driving Honda, Inside the World’s Most Innovative Car Company. Those two companies could not be more unlike wile still being in the same industry. One company (Tesla, if you’re clueless)  is driven by a narcistic megalomaniac and the other is driven by a company philosophy. The cars produced by the two companies are equally different: Teslas are all about status and “belonging” to a cult and Hondas are primarily reliable, flexible transportation. One company exists to promote the fame and fortune of its owner, man-boy Elon Musk, and Honda exists “to provide products and services that expand people's dreams and potential.” The difference is apparent, even obvious, in the products, the employees, and the customers.

I committed a fair portion of my working career to manufacturing and, even, a substantial portion of my early audio engineering experience to producing products of my own design . In fact, from my perspective it was hard to beat the best moments I experienced in manufacturing products I cared about. Likewise, I would have rather died in a motorcycle crash at 30 than having gone through my worst half-dozen moments in manufacturing (which all occurred during my 10 years in medical devices). Manufacturing anything is a team effort and that includes designing the equipment necessary for manufacturing. Anyone who claims to have designed a product that was mass produced is a lying sack of crap. From the original concept to the finished product, there are dozens if not hundreds of hands and minds that shape and finish a product into something that is useful, safe, and cost-effective.

Weirdly, there has never been a shortage of people who are willing to do the hard work that is necessary to make and improve a product or service. Usually, those people go unnoticed not just by the public but by the people who have the most to gain from their hard work. Every rich asshole from Henry Ford to Elon Musk has lucked into a few hundred dedicated, talented, hard-working people who foolishly bought into the rich guys’ bullshit and made the lucky idiot rich in spite of himself. I’ve had a ringside seat for a half-dozen of those rags-to-riches lucky business histories. In only one of the lot was the “founder” a critical (or even useful) component in the companies’ success. In most, the founder/founders was/were an impediment that employees had to work around to keep the business alive. In none of the second group of mismanagers were the people who had the most to gain even mildly aware of their good fortune. In that one instance where the founder was a critical component, he was also very aware of his own shortcomings and consistently grateful for the contributions of the people who carried his ass from rags to riches (although he started out pretty rich).

Luck usually has more to do with success than does brilliance, talent, strategy, or even hard work. But yiou’d never get that story from the lucky few who are successful, or at least rarely is that kind of self-critical honesty present. Most “founders” do everything they can to purge their institutions of evidence of their mindless luck as quickly as possible. Some do it ruthlessly and fairly successfully, like Musk and Tesla or Jobs and Apple, and many more do it ham-handedly often killing the golden goose before it is fully hatched. But they all depend nearly totally on being lucky enough to con the right people into committing to what is presented as a “mission” early in the business’ history and doing all of the hard, boring, detail work that is necessary to actual success. Some, like Trump, not only misunderstand how little he contributed to the success of his one-and-only public corporate meltdown but blame the people who did the work for dying on him. Most are like Henry Ford who carefully scraped away all of the evidence of his own good fortune so ruthlessly that he “destroyed” his only son, Edsel, to keep his own competence myth alive. Without the fatal consequences, the same went for Musk and Jobs.

The next time you hear some half-wit babble about his self-made zillionaire status, try to imagine what it would be like to have built something spectacular,—believing your hard work and contributions would result in some kind of recognition and reward—having to listen to a non-contributor brag who ended up on top of the corporate turd-pile purely out of luck and conniving viciousness. It happens more often than not, but the public perception is one more example that “history is written (and advertised) by the winners.”

What to Do, Where to Live?

In 1971, around the time my daughter Holly was born, I was working in Hereford, Texas for a small company mismanaged by a total nitwit as a division of a larger company that was headed for corporate oblivion. However, the upside was that I worked for one of the best supervisors would ever experience, although it was an industry for which I had absolutely no interest at all, and all of that was at the very beginning of what would become my career. One of the people I worked closely with was a WWII-generation machinist born and raised in west Texas, but who had spent a bit of his life sampling other parts of the country; especially during WWII. His name was Carl [forgot his last name] and he was a source of a lot of wisdom at a time when that was a rare commodity in my life. Late in my time in that job, he and I were talking about the difficulty of figuring out life’s big questions: like where do I want to live and what should I be doing to make a living? His simple-sounding advice was “If you want to live a happy life, figure out where you want to live and live there. Figure out what you want to do and do that.”

It might sound easy and it was for Carl. He’d grown up in a small farmhouse between Hereford and Amarillo in the early 20th Century. His brothers and he rode Indian motorcycles between the two towns when there were no roads, paved or otherwise. They fixed what they rode and anything else that needed fixing. Carl told me that when he was a kid there were no flies or many other flying insects in West Texas and they would hang a butchered steer from their windmill and carve off what they needed, leaving the sun to “cure” the open wound till the next time they needed some beef. When the WWII draft came along, Carl was told to apply his mechanical skills to the military-industrial complex and he moved to San Diego to do just that. He built machine and airplane parts for Consolidated Aircraft Corporation and when the war ended, he modified his Ford to be able to run on naphtha, since gas was in short supply and rationed, filled up the tank and put a 55 gallon barrel of the stuff in his trunk, and drove back to Texas. He got married, worked at a few different manufacturing companies in the area, and ended up in the ag industry company where I worked for a few years before he retired. That was what he wanted to do and where he wanted to do it.

For most of us, those two questions are not so simple, but it’s mostly because we overcomplicate our expectations. We’re either looking for the impossibly perfect place or a totally-fulfilling forever job, neither of which is likely to ever occur. A good rule for most everything is “pretty good is good enough.” Perfect, on the other hand, is highly unlikely.

Carl was pretty clear in his instructions, though. The first step is “where.” Finding a great job in a rotten place will never be satisfying. In fact, a mediocre job in a great place (assuming it pays enough to enjoy the place) isn’t a terrible situation. Most of us have some idea about what kind of place we’d like to live. Some of us know exactly where we’d like to live because we’ve spent our lives in that place, our friends and family are there, and we are comfortable with the climate, culture, and opportunities. Some folks are so set on the place that they are willing to sacrifice everything else about their lives to live there. No matter how you picked the place, what to do comes next. If you never settle on a place, I think the odds are good that you’ll never be happy with what you’re doing with your life.

One thing many of us neglect or outright screw-up in our early lives is not taking some kind of career planning seriously early enough. All of the smart people I have ever known came up with career goals fairly early in life, at least by high school, and they let those goals drive their first 4-10 years of adulthood. They usually changed those targets several times over their lives, but when they did they set new goals and aimed for them. Some of us take half of our lives to figure that out, some never figure it out and just wander through their lives wondering “why nothing wonderful ever happens to me?” The only thing that is likely to ever happen to you is life, which will happen whether you make plans or don’t but making the attempt to obtain some kind of control and to maintain self-direction is pretty much the same as driving a car vs letting go of the wheel on a mountain road to see what will happen. You might get lucky, but you probably won’t.

You can catch up, if you don’t get started sensibly, but it’s a lot harder. Mark Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut's son, is my overwhelming favorite role model for late starters. He started off his adult life as a hippy commune holdout, after being diagnosed with severe schizophrenia and having been committed to Vancouver mental hospital for a time. After providing on his own cure (for what he later decided was bipolar disorder), he graduated from Harvard Medical School at 32 years old and started his pediatric Internship and Residency. That was a lot of territory to cover after being a non-starter in his prime learning years. Your mileage will most definitely vary from Mark Vonnegut’s. Still, my own experience might demonstrate that if you keep at it you might end up doing work you care about with people you love and respect, even if the business is run by self-destructive, selfish and narcissistic idiots.

The trick, as I see it, is to get started on deciding where you want to live, including the kind of home/apartment/tent/cabin it will be. That might include who you want to live with, but that is not critical. While you’re sorting that out, find some kind of mission for yourself because if you don’t someone will find one for you and you probably won’t like it.

An Age of Dying Expertise

Recently, a friend described an incredibly expensive series of visits to his Volvo dealership in which he had to explain the problem (surging at low speeds), leave his vehicle at the dealership for a day or two, pay around $1,000 per visit, take the car home and discover the same problem still existed. And he had to do this a half-dozen times before he finally “resolved” the problem by disabling the car’s oxygen sensors. He’d had several such problems with his two early 2000’s Volvos and at least one of those malfunctions was solved by a Boomer parts manager who had been a mechanic before being promoted to management who knew something about the history of Volvo’s many fuel system problems. Without that insight, his car might be in a salvage yard today.

I’ve had a couple similar experiences. In 2011, on a motorcycle trip with my grandson through the Rockies, my Suzuki blew a fork seal about 50 miles north of Laramie, WY. First, I assumed that there wouldn’t be a Suzuki dealer in that backwater and I was wrong. Frontier Cycles not only serviced and sold Suzuki bikes, but I lucked into a 60-something parts guy who knew that Suzuki only use 3 sizes of seals, regardless of their hundreds of part numbers for fork seals. Thanks to his long-term knowledge of Suzuki motorcycles, I was back on the road a day later. Left up to the young mechanic who did the work in a perfectly competent manner, I’d have been stuck in a motel for a week waiting for a part from Denver. I’ve documented my Volkswagen experience here long and loud, but along with discovering that two Albuquerque VW dealers and one VW specialty independent service station were totally incapable of doing anything their highly flawed computer analysis equipment didn’t describe for them, I lucked into one very clever and curious 50-60-something technician at German Motorwerke who discovered the Eurovan’s Transmission Control Unit (TCU) couldn’t make up its mind as to the source of the problem. Where the VW dealer “mechanics” read “replace the transmission,” Motorwerke’s tech tracked the faults though the analysis down to the point that every time he ran the analysis, the computer pointed to a different component of the transmission. That convinced him that the TCU was the problem, not the transmission that obviously managed to get the camper from eastern New Mexico to Albuquerque without frying itself, although a good bit of that trip was done in “limp home mode.” Later, I found another mechanic, Victor Cano-Linson at Big Victor’s Automotive in Elephant Butte, NM who patiently hacked his way through the mostly-erroneous mess of “service information” VW supplies for $400/month to independent shops and got us back on the road. Victor has a couple of grown kids, regardless of the fact that he looks about 30 max, so he’s going to be heading into retirement soon, too.

Currently, significantly more than 50% of America’s skilled-trade workers are retiring in the next 10 years, almost a third in the next five. That skilled labor shortage includes automotive and heavy equipment mechanics, plumbers, electricians, electronic technicians  construction workers, water system treatment technicians, building maintenance technicians, HVAC technicians, welders, masons, and heavy equipment operators. The same is true for high-skill, jobs like electrical and electronic engineers, mechanical engineers, doctors, and other hyper-skilled, education dependent jobs. There was a brief window when the important details of many of those skills would have been passed on, but that opportunity was missed during the multiple recessions, down-sizing, huge and incompetent conglomerate monopolies sucking up businesses and trashing them, and the massive transfer of wealth from the 99% to the 1% the country suffered between 1970 and 2020. While the owners of those skills are leaving the workforce, their replacements are having to fend for themselves in an unstable labor market with a shaky national  economic future. We often hear the shrill cry of “why don’t people want to work anymore,” but those asking don’t want to hear the complicated answer.

In a country that has fallen hook-line-and-sinker for the repeatedly-failed economic fallacy that dribble-down will save the economy and culture if we just cut taxes on the rich, working hard to earn a middle class living has lost its appeal. White people especially have been convinced if they just bow and scrape low enough they will be rewarded with the luxurious life they are entitled to be living. Mostly that proves that you can fool enough of the people all of the time.

From my own experience, a big reason the traditional generational skill-transfer didn’t and isn’t happening is that since the 70’s few of us had even considered staying with an employer long enough to be part of that. Most of us didn’t have the opportunity due to downsizing layoffs, recessionary layoffs, and local economic factors that put many of us in the technical migrant category. During the 70s through most of my career, the average engineer stayed at one company for an average of 3 years. Supposedly, that is up to 5.1 years today, but only one or two people (or at least a dozen) I know who are working in engineering would reflect that stat. Still, after 5.1 years an engineer has barely mastered the basics of a typical job in manufacturing, design, or customer support. Through most of the past 40 years, companies have devalued technical experience by laying off higher paid, experienced employees first often followed by employing those ex-employees at a much higher rate as contractors. There is literally no reason why a contractor would make the slightest effort to pass on valuable information to a company employee.

My last medical devices employer only hired degreed (mostly MS and PhD) engineers from well-regarded schools like MIT and CalTech. They were usually wonderful manipulators of computer-assisted software (CAD/CAM) and could wring solutions from auto-routing PCB layout software that totally baffled me. Their understanding of semiconductor electronics and reliability engineering was embarrassing at best and too often tragic for the end users. And every year there were fewer experienced engineers at that company to act as guardrails against the kind of mistakes young engineers make without knowing any history of the product, customers, or applications. Many of those experienced engineers were paid early-out bonuses to leave, because the company mismanagement had no idea how complicated the products had become.

Years ago, a young man who was trying to get started in the field I had introduced him to through the school where I worked and he had attended complained that “It’s not what you know but who you know in this business.” He was mostly complaining about the fact that service information on the products he most often was asked to repair was only available from other technicians. The companies who made the equipment were mostly dead-and-gone, but their equipment lived on and stayed in demand for at least another decade. The “who” he was complaining about were experienced technicians who had collected service manuals, schematics, and troubleshooting techniques over the previous 20-30 years. I offered to level the playing field for him by ignoring his calls when he needed help and he declined; understanding that it might take a while to become well-regarded enough to collect more useful resources.

Company and industry history are poorly-regarded today. “Experienced workers” are considered to be expensive workers and the first to go when mismanagement wants to give itself a giant pay increase or a huge golden parachute. Because they have no financial motivation to do anything to improve the life of the companies they mismanage, they see no downside in killing off company history resources. Like their heroes—Jack Welch, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and the rest of that ilk—they imagine that their media-manipulations are the important stuff in a company’s activities and the wreckage they leave behind will be for future generations to clean up . . . or not.