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.

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.

Your Tax Dollars at Play

One of the many hilarious Republican talking points is that the private sector spends money more effectively than the government. Every corporation on the New York Stock Exchange disproves that argument on a minutely basis. [If you want a dramatic example, read William Cohen’s Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon.] If you can find a single CEO whose salary makes a lick of sense, you’re probably trying to bullshit yourself and me. No government office is arrogant enough to pay anyone millions of dollars for squatting in a corner office making foolish decisions. In fact, the biggest abuses of government funds are consistently when the government farms out work to the private sector. Private business can’t seem to do anything without doing it badly, other than cobbling together harmless or harmful and unnecessary widgets and toys; like assault weapons.

Idle billionaire playboy Jeff Bezos just launched his latest toy, a roughly half-billion-dollar megayacht that pretty much flaunts how much excess cash the boy has to flaunt. It is a “sailing yacht,” which means he has the time to let the wind blow him to his luxury destinations. At 417 feet/127m, Bezos’ “Koru” is the world’s largest sailing yacht equipped with three masts, an on-deck pool and a mermaid on the bow that looks like his girlfriend, Lauren Sánchez.

Bezos isn’t risking his precious time to the winds of fate, though. He also has a $75M Damen Yachting “butler boat,” the Abeona, a 246-foot support vessel toting the “toys” — the ATVs, supercars, seaplanes, motorcycles, smaller boats, scuba gear, personal submarines, and a helicopter hangar—and a 45 person crew to make sure Jeffy and his bimbo don’t have to lift a finger or sully their presence sleeping in the vicinity of minions. The $75M Abeona is a motorized yacht and has the range to go anywhere Bezos might want to travel on a single “tank” of gas.       

At the moment, the world seems to be gorging on mindless and useless billionaires. As of April, Forbes Magazine says there are 2,640 billionaires in the world and they have hoarded at least $12.2 trillion and the USA has spewed 735 of those useless, money-grubbing, corporate-welfare morons across the planet.

Check out the comments on the NYT link above. Nitwits and asskissers said servile things like “Amazon is akin to the automobile. He deserves it. The fact that it drives the less accomplished to deep green envy is just an added bonus.” What could a person do to “earn” $125 billion dollars? What did Bezos do to “deserve” even a few million, let alone billions? What kind of work could possibly be worth that hourly wage? People who save lives for a living aren’t even in that economic territory. The President of the United States receives a $400,000 annual salary. Bezos, like every other rich asshole on the planet, was simply lucky, took advantage of the national infrastructure (transportation, digital and physical communications systems, business regulations, Republican income tax protection, and other semi-legal systems) that he in no way paid for, and put his money to work with Trump to reduce his tax obligations to near-zero. You might call that “smart” (Trump does.), but I’d call it treasonous and good reason to nationalize Amazon and put Bezos on that damn boat for life as an international criminal.

Yeah, lucky. Like Musk, Gates, and 99% of the billionaire élite, Bezos was a rich kid, spoiled and sent to the best schools anyone could afford, and had his success handed to him on a platter that even fool couldn’t miss picking up. Reagan trashing “unearned income” made it so that goobers like Bezos could hide his income through stock that he bestowed on himself as CEO and Chairman of the Amazon board of directors. If you don’t think Bezos’ parents were rich, explain how they were able to loan him US$245,000 in 1995 (equivalent to $477,134.28 in 2023) for an on-line bookstore? Who had a family that could cough up that kind of money in 1995, especially after putting him through a pair of degrees at Princeton? While he can make a bullshit claim to growing up with a single parent, his maternal grandparents had money and they generously handed it down to his step-father and mother. He couldn’t even find an original name for his company and stole “Amazon” from a Minneapolis lesbian-owned bookstore.

The Nixon/Reagan/Bush I & II/Trump “elections” (two of which were anointments, not elections, since Bush II and Trump lost the popular vote) proved that you can fool almost half of the voters all of the time. None of the “tax cuts” enacted by any Republican have made a nickel’s difference to working people, but they keep hoping it might. Dribble-down has been all negative for us, though. Political economists David Hope and Julian Limberg studied the effects of “tax cuts for the rich” and summarized their study with “We find that major tax cuts for the rich push up income inequality, as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The size of the effect is substantial: on average, each major tax cut results in a rise of over 0.7 percentage points in top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect holds in both the short and medium term. Turning our attention to economic performance, we find no significant effects of major tax cuts for the rich. More specifically, the trajectories of real GDP per capita and the unemployment rate are unaffected by significant reductions in taxes on the rich in both the short- and medium-term.” Since the rich get that way from extracting value and resources from labor and national treasure (including natural resources), worrying about their luxury and opulence makes no sense from the perspective of the 99%. But that is exactly what Republicans are selling to The Marching Morons.

Trump’s acting budget director (talk about ultimate oxymorons) Russ Vought, said “It’s not that Americans are taxed too little, it’s that Washington spends too much.”  The world is awash in billionaires buying half-billion dollar yachts, building mansions all over the planet, and hoarding more money than most national budgets and these goobers think they need more? Heather Cox Richards, who provides a consistently brilliant analysis of the current political nonsense, wrote, “A 2020 study by Carter C. Price and Kathryn A. Edwards of the RAND Corporation showed that the changing economic distribution systems of the past forty years have moved a staggering $50 trillion upward, out of the hands of the bottom 90% of Americans. (The national debt is currently about $31.5 trillion.)” So much for rational spending from the “private sector.”

If you suspect that I harbor nothing but ill-will toward Jeffy and billionaires and multi-millionaires in general, you are not particularly perceptive. I am a firm believer in the thought behind Aerosmith’s “Eat the Rich” and one of my favorite dreams is driving to work one morning seeing assholes in custom tailored suits hanging from every telephone pole the whole way to downtown St. Paul. The first thing I thought of when I read about Bezos’ boat was hoping for a spontaneous hurricane to sink him and everyone he knows in the deepest part of the ocean and the second was wondering if we could take up a collection to pay China to torpedo the damn thing. Maybe he could invite his butt-buddies Musk and DeSantis to do their interview on the boat during hurricane season?

It’s Not My Problem/Business

A friend on Facebook recently asked about the relevance of Yelp (and other user-style volunteer) reviews. He said, “To me the content feels like collated, anonymous hearsay.” Of course, the alternative would be the paid professional/political-announcement style reviews we should all be taking with a block of salt in magazines, blogs, television, the internet, and newspapers. Having read and written product and performance reviews since I was 13, when I submitted a whiny little-kid letter to Downbeat Magazine that the editor mistook for a “review” and published it as such, I usually apply more weight to end-user reviews than to “professional” opinions, unless there is technical content involved.

Opinions are, as everyone knows, like assholes. On a weirdly-weighted site like Amazon, I look at the negative reviews first to get the “bad news” over with, then the middle-weighted reviews for the whole picture, and, rarely, scan the paid 5-star reviews to see what the company line might be. I still get misled occasionally, but not as often as I would if I just looked at the overall star-count or read the pointless 5-star reviews.

Lots of people and businesses don’t like the end-user review system, from academics to small business and services to giant monopolies like Amazon. That, of course, doesn’t mean that these reviews are wrong or even particularly effective in affecting business behavioral change. The thinner the skin and the more aggrieved the business response, most likely, the more accurate a negative review probably is.

For example, an acquaintance of my friend wrote, "As a restaurant/bar owner I believe there really isn't a reason for these type of sites. If you are a decent, strong human being, if there is a problem you will always speak in person, in private, to the manager or owner, because you care about the business and you care about its employees that need jobs and you want to see the business do well. If everything is great you can always give a good review on your own social media platforms. . .”

This reminds me of a similar experience I had in a vocational class a few years ago and I wrote about that in “How Quality Feedback Really Works” and I kept beating that horse with "Quality in the Disposable World." I summarized my take on customer feedback, “Small quantity (boutique) production and service businesses don’t have access to actual numbers and formal inspection procedures and if they rely on customer complaints for feedback they are committing business suicide. In fact, the only way a small business can get any kind of information about customer satisfaction is to hunt for it. When someone cares enough about the product or its performance to complain, a conscious customer service tech should take that complaint seriously and to heart. The 1% of your customer base who care enough about your product or their expectations to complain are rare and valuable. If you choose to ignore them, don’t complain when your customer base makes its buying decisions solely on price and delivery. You have informed them through your actions that you don’t give a shit about their expectations and the result is that they won’t care about you or your company’s survival.” But that requires the owner of the business to actually care about something other than convenience and income and that is rare as hens’ retirement plans.

After working for a half-dozen small companies during the first 20 years of my career, I decided to actively pursue Intel CEO Andy Grove’s advice, "Each individual must build the kind of career strength that makes him or her marketable. No matter where you work, you are not an employee. You are in a business with one employer - yourself, in competition with millions of similar businesses worldwide. . . Nobody owes you a career - you own it as a sole proprietor. And the key to survival is to learn to add more value everyday.“ An addition I tacked to that advice was a tactic I ended up needing to pay attention to way too often, “I have no reason to care more about this business that the people who have the most to gain from its survival.” I augmented that rule with “I am not going to make another nitwit into a millionaire.” (In those first 20 years, I rescued three circling-the-toilet companies from their owners’ worst instincts and two of them were sold for a substantial profit soon after I left and one went back to old habits and soon vanished from corporate history.

A slight, but very helpful (to me) variation on that 2nd rule is “I will not be a manager in a dysfunctional business.” My 30-day stint as manufacturing and engineering manager for a trainwreck of a company in Indiana put the nail into that rule that has stuck since. Not volunteering for a “promotion” into middle management freed my energy and time so that, eventually, I was able to put my whole self into three one-man service businesses that I ran between 2000 and 2015 (when I retired the last of those companies) and my paid hobby as a Minnesota State Motorcycle Safety Instructor (from which I retired in 2018).

So, not only do I believe there is some value in end-user goods and services reviews, I think they are a business’ best (and sometimes only) chance to know what your customers really think of you. Ignore them at your own risk. Many have and many have died as a result.

Work vs Jobs vs Mission

A lot of young people in tech jobs have recently discovered how little loyalty their previous employers held for their employees. As usual, a lot of millennials think they are the first group to experience this horror. Kiddies, you aren’t. I doubt there has ever been a generation who was happily surprised to discover their masters were willing to make sacrifices to keep the minions fed. Modern government jobs are probably the closest thing to that kind of situation, but that is only because in a socialist system everyone in the system shares in the funding of the system. In a public education system pension, for example, if the retired teachers don’t get paid the retired bureaucrats don’t get paid. In business, except the CEO and a few other C’s who will always get their golden parachutes, there is no such thing as “us” or “them”; it’s just “me” and everyone else. When you work for a corporation, it is a gross mistake to imagine “we’re all in this together.” Corporations, by design, are everyman and woman for themselves.

I do have sympathy for all of the young people recently dumped from their “dream jobs.” Been there, done that, and worse. The “worse” was being middle-management and being told to layoff my employees. The firs time in my life I was drunk was when I was in my early 30s, in the late 1970s, and I had just finished the slow painful dissolution of my test engineering department at Valmont Industries. For three months, the company mismanagement kept telling us “this will be the last layoff” and, a week later, we were handed another list of employees to get rid of. For me, this was the first of a fairly long list of engineering jobs but for several of my friends and coworkers it was the end of the brief rise in their career paths. A couple of weeks later, my boss laid me off and, later that day, he was handed his notice.

I had no “mission” at Valmont. It was just a reasonably well-paying job near a reasonable tolerable Nebraska small city where my wife had picked our next house. The economy in Nebraska and all of the country’s agricultural areas was in rapid decline and our small city, Fremont, was especially hard-hit when Valmont laid off 1,600 employees, Campbell Soup closed their canning facility, two packing plants shutdown and moved to non-union states, and the city practically closed down for the duration of the recession (well into the 90s). There was no Reagan “economic miracle” or any other kind of miracle to save us. We managed to “sell” our house for a substantial loss, including giving the “buyers” $5,000 under-the-table for their down-payment. I took another awful tech job in Omaha, which lasted until my new employer asked me to layoff my best employees because the were “overqualified.” I quit, instead, and wrote this song the night I decided to leave that job, “I’m Gonna Quit.”

Over the next 40 years, I went through 11 employers and discovered whatever “mission” my life was going to have in the process. Like soldiers in battle, there is no such thing as patriotism or fealty to king and country, there is only loyalty among peers and “the unit” within the organization. Having any kind of emotional attachment to any larger entity is foolish and in most organizations (using that term loosely) you have to watch your back even around your peers. Functioning teams are a rarity. Most departments are organized around defending management from responsibility and unnecessary (anytime the buck can be passed) effort.

I think mostly by accident, I have been blessed to be part of a half-dozen teams, probably amounting to a total of 15 years out of my 50-year career. The other 35 years were spent earning a living in a “job.” In many ways, I learned more useful lessons in the jobs than in the functioning work situations: sometimes seeing how not to do a job is more valuable than examples of excellence. I believe the key to that whole “mission” thing is to have one for yourself, totally separate and even isolated from your job. I have always advocated “The best time to start looking for a new job is when you start a new job.” Your “career” and your “mission” are to constantly be updating, improving, and fine-tuning your skills and taking care of yourself. Your employer almost certainly holds no loyalty to you other than the expectation that assigned work will be completed as expected. You should also expect fair and reasonable treatment, but you should not be surprised if that ends suddenly, unsentimentally, and without notice. Corporations, contrary to foolish assertions by our Extreme Court, are not people although they may be psychopathic and sociopathic.

Banned by Amazon’s Robocops

April 10, 2023 This past Friday I received an email from Amazon titled “Unusual Reviewing Behavior.” The message inside was, “We apologize but Amazon has noticed some unusual reviewing activity on this account. As a result, all reviews submitted by this account have been removed and this account will no longer be able to contribute reviews and other content on Amazon.  If you would like to learn more, please see our community guidelines. To contact us about this decision, please email community-help@amazon.com.” If you’re bored enough to follow that “community guidelines” link you’ll discover it is almost as helpful as FEMA under a Republican administration. That description applies to all of the communications I’ve ever seen from Amazon, too. The company is so big that it no longer feels any need to communicate with its customers.

In the past twelve months, I’d received two notices from Amazon’s “bot algorithm” claiming that “You  have repeatedly posted content that violates our Community Guidelines (available at http://www.amazon.com/review-guidelines) or Conditions of Use ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=508088).” There was no indication of where I had “repeatedly” violated anything and since I used to regularly review music, books, and occasional products I was in the dark. I responded to their “community-help” robot with “If you don’t have a system to help identify what you call a violation for users, how do you expect anyone to self-correct?” And that has been the end of our “communications.” Of course, in the lazy-robo-programmer tradition, there was no way for me to identify what review Amazon’s robot was objecting to, so examining what it was that the bot objected to was impossible. . However, as an obvious “libtard” I suspect the actual objection came when some wingnut “reported” one of my book or movie reviews and inappropriate or some other typical snowflake objection.

For a fact, I know that Amazon’s ‘bot wasn’t activated by an excessive number of positive reviews. I almost never give anything a 5-star review and I almost never think anything, product-person-or-organization rates an “excellent” rating. Likewise, I rarely give 1-star ratings. Again, not many things are outright awful. I do review a fair number of books that I’ve checked out of my local libraries through Kindle. So my “verified buyer” numbers do not correlate to my book reviews. But after the first Amazon threat of banning, I have contained my book and movie reviews to the Minneapolis Public Library system.

Amazon is obviously overwhelmed by the outcome of their AI review “analysis” and banishing pogrom. It seems that there should be a substantial backlash to the company’s actions and I suspect there has been. There has been a sudden rash of complaints about this robocop-crap and you’ll find an almost unlimited number of people wondering what is going on at Amazon on diverse sites from the  amazonforum.com to forums.macrumors.com to quora.com to reddit.com to businessinsider.com to Amazon’s own vendors who complain about informative reviews disappearing.

For me, this forced a self-admission that I have been lazy and this has been a wake-up call. A little on-line searching and I found all sorts of substitutes for Amazon’s dismal service including Rakuten.com, Walmart.com, AliExpress.com, and for a few extra pennies I started going direct to some of the vendors I’d bought from through Amazon in the past, especially my subscription services. This wake-up call comes at a pretty interesting time for me, too. Looking back at my last year of Amazon purchases I discovered that I’ve returned about 1/4 of the semi-major purchases I’ve made with the monolith due to defects, obviously previous use, and gross mislabeling either by Amazon or the vendor. Electronics from Amazon is almost consistently a bad bet.I have had far better results with electronics from NewEgg.com. NewEgg's customer service is terrific and the people who do customer reviews on NewEgg are technically competent.

This is an example of damaged or
used stuff Amazon's Chinese vendors
ship to US customers. I had to cancel
payment through my bank to get
Amazon to refund this purchase.

I’d suspect that a lot of Asian vendors are dumping their junk inventory on Amazon under the safe assumption that Americans who are lazy enough to buy online are also too lazy to complain when their purchases are defective or damaged or even “previously owned.” 25% defects is a terrible batting average and a friend who gave up on Amazon a few years ago swears that the stuff he gets from AliExpress is consistently better quality and far cheaper than any similar products coming from Amazon. It makes sense, since almost everything Amazon sells is made in China and the things that aren’t made in China are available directly from those companies. 

Again, why wouldn’t Chinese companies dump their junk through Amazon and sell their good stuff directly through their own outlets? That is how the long, sad history of vanishing American manufacturing has gone since the 70s and, now, we may be seeing the same thing happen to American retail. If I were in their shoes, that’s what I’d be doing. I makes no sense to be building a brand for another country or business. Remember Superscope from the 1960s? I didn't think so. 

Living without Amazon is a lot easier than I suspected. I gave up on Prime a couple of years ago because their video selection was pitiful and I almost never got anything in less than 3-4 days, regardless of their 2-day shipping promise. There are all sorts of articles about ditching Prime: "How to Officially Break Up with Amazon" is a terrific primer on how to wean yourself from Amazon's clickbait. Buying from Amazon is bad for your local economy and the company treats its employees like crap, so everything about Amazon is bad karma. Like dumping Twitter and Facebook, the longer I stay away from Amazon the better I feel about that decision. I think this is going to be a beautiful non-relationship.

CEO Salaries vs Value and Competence

A few weeks ago, I stumbled into a bizarre discussion about Apple CEO Tim Cook’s 2023 salary “cut” (from $83 million in stock awards, $12 million in incentives and $3 million in salary to $49 million in total compensation for 2023). I argued that it would be impossible for one person to be worth anything near Cook’s 2023 income, let alone the insane compensation he received in 2022. A couple of “CEOs” (“Chief Extortion Officers”) argued that Cook should be compensated based on Apple’s performance (Since “Cook took over as CEO in 2011, Apple stock has returned 1,212% versus 290% for the S&P 500”). One self-described CEO wrote, “When you look at how much his salary is compared to the worth of the company, he's being paid a small % of the worth of the company he's leading and his guidance and decisions are what drives the company and shares.”  Hilarious.  Anyone stupid enough to believe a CEO has ANYTHING at all to do with a company's performance deserves to be beaten to death with a handful of wadded-up preferred stock.  

Cook has been compensated with well over a billion dollars since 2011. I would argue that, mostly, the company’s performance represents how repressed the engineers and designers had been under Jobs’ deranged “leadership” and general megalomania. As for stock value, Apple stock is valued at 10X it’s 2011 price which is impressive but not anything close to exceptional for tech companies during that period. I’ve known and “worked with” (in quotes, because none of the CEOs I know ever did a moment of productive work) a solid dozen CEOs from $20-50M/year to $500,000,000/year corporations and I have yet to see any of them do anything that would positively effect the company’s bottom line.

I am entertained by the idea a CEO’s compensation should be based on the company’s performance or value. It’s pretty obvious that the flotsam and jetsam that bobs to the top in the sewers of corporate politics never make that argument when their companies’ stock tanks. This is just more of the Harvard MBA “pull credit up and push blame down” tactic. If there were a financial connection between CEO performance and income, there would be a bunch of ex-CEOs littering the nation’s homeless camps.

John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lines in a Silicon Valley Startup tells a different kind of story about the kind of halfwit who floats to the top of corporate toilet bowls. Assuming you don’t believe that Elizabeth Holmes exerted some kind of magical witchcraft on the susceptible minds of executives from Safeway, Walgreens, the US Army’s General James Mattis, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Jim Mattis, Rupert Murdoch, the Walton family, the DeVos family including Betsy DeVos, the Cox family of Cox Enterprises, Carlos Slim Helú, Larry Ellison and several dozen tech-venture capitalists, a passel of idle rich wannabes, and way too many technical employees who should have known better, it’s pretty obvious that most rich people got that way through luck. Holmes only “qualification” as a biotech entrepreneur was her physical attractiveness and some pretty shaky presentation skills.

50 years ago, I was a young, gullible electronics tech who fell for the promises of an employer who eventually ripped me off for several tens of thousands of dollars. For a couple of years I worked closely with this character, following him to trade shows, county and state fairs, and on-site watching him con all sorts of customers (all rich farmers and ranchers) into equipment they didn’t need and would never figure out how to use. Often, at the fairs, my boss would wander around the other vendor booths and he’d buy the dumbest shit. In the end, I realized that (like most salespeople) he believed his own bullshit and when he heard the same lines from someone else he’d fall for it every time. His main “skill” was being in the right place at the right time with a big pile of cash his father had handed him in hopes that he’d find his idle way in the world.

As I read Bad Blood, I saw my small town boss over and over again. Except now he was wearing handmade Italian suits, driving overpriced Eurotrash cars, and taking meetings where he’d hear presentations from other rich people who didn’t know what they were talking about.  But that wasn’t a problem for him because he never knew what he was talking about, either. Hundreds of millions of dollars flowed out of the hands of these rich farmboys (and girls) into the hands of a couple of con artists pretending to be sophisticated biotech engineers. Worse, they weren’t even doing a good job of pretending to be engineers or biologists.

George Santos is another example of how easily the so-called “sophisticated” crowd can be fooled. It wasn’t just the usual bimbo Republicans who fell for that bumbling con artist. The so-called, self-styled sophisticates of New York’s Long Island were easily duped by a dude who couldn’t sell watches in a Midwestern shopping mall. So if you are intelligent enough to realize that you were conned by Ronnie Reagan, G.W. Bush & Co, or Maralardo, don’t feel bad. You’re in the “good” company of the nation’s oldest, richest, and most educated “talent.”

An un-surprising postscript about the Theranos scam is that neither Holmes or her chubby Indian co-conspirator, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, have spent a day in jail, as yet. Supposedly, Holmes will surrender to prison authorities sometime in April for an 11 year sentence. In the meantime, she’s puking out her 2nd baby and living the high life at her $135 million Silicon Valley estate. She supposedly married William "Billy" Evans, an idle rich heir to the Evans Hotel Group, and they’ve spawned two pups. She used her 2nd spawning to put off her trip to prison after she and Evans failed to pull off a one-way trip to Mexico before sentencing.

“You can fix it.”

This morning in a conversation with an old friend, he brought up a question, “How many people do you think affected through your life?” L.A. “Arnold” Stevenson¹ was my first real employer and, probably, a mentor of sorts. He would have hated that label and I’m not particularly fond of it. Before Arnold, I had held several jobs from age 13 to 23, but my employers and bosses made no more of a mark on me than would have assorted drunks I might have met in a bar. Most of the people I worked for, before Arnold, knew no more about the organizations (loosely using that word) they led (laughably using that word) than anyone on the street at any given moment. Not only would I have not considered them mentors, they were mostly just obstacles to be gotten around in the process of doing my various jobs.

After about 5 months in a mediocre Dodge City Community College technology program, I realized that the instructor was out of things to teach me and, supposedly, there were 1 1/2 more years of classes that I needed to take for my associates degree. About the time I came to that realization, my wife announced that she was unexpectedly (to me) pregnant. She’d been listening to an unholy collection of Kansas idiot-relatives, both on her side and mine, and decided that having a baby would solve the problem of having to make adult decisions about what to do with her life. Of course, since someone had to take up that slack my own adult decision process went into overdrive.

I’d been working as a part-time electronics technician for a small manufacturing company in Dodge while I went to school and as soon as that employer discovered that I was sending resumes to competitors they offered me a slight salary bump and a large increase in responsibility and increase in hours. While I’d only been at that job for a few months, I was already the department’s “expert,” which was scary on multiple levels. The first level would be that I didn’t know squat about much of anything. I ignored that offer as long as possible and, eventually, my resume landed on the desk of the manager at Oswalt Industries in Hereford, Texas. He passed it on to Arnold, who was running the division’s electronic scales department and who was looking for a technician to handle the office and shop duties while he performed the field service responsibilities. After a brief interview, I was hired and we spent a day locating a place to live and went back home to gather our meager belongings, quit my job, say “goodbye” to our relatives and friends, rent a small U-Haul van, and move ourselves to Texas. I was barely 23 years old and had been on my own for 8 years and the sole support of our family-of-two for 4 years. And life was about to become incredibly complicated.

For starters, while my new employer had made a big deal out of their benefits, including health insurance, they didn’t bother to point out the fact that my wife’s pregnancy was “a pre-existing condition” that wouldn’t be covered. That would be a several-thousand dollar debt which I’d be paying off with my $2.35/hour salary; which meant a short work-week would be at least 60 hours and more often 80 to 90. Secondly, while I was a “star” with my previous employer I was a rank beginner with Arnold. About a week into my new job, he told me, “If I’d have known how little you knew when I hired you, I’d have never hired you.” I really didn’t know much, either. My previous employer had no service information for the products I’d been repairing and installing. I’d made one attempt to convince our prime supplier that I needed schematics and calibration information which had gotten me a reprimand from both my employer and the supplier’s CEOs. Arnold, on the other hand, had everything I’d asked for and a lot more for every electronic device we serviced. I’d hand-traced schematics for most of the circuit boards and while my drawings were better than nothing, they weren’t absolutely correct and some of my troubleshooting assumptions were wrong as a result. After a rough start, during which I expected to be fired practically every time Arnold came near me, I began to be useful and even got a small raise.

Once he decided that I wouldn’t be a waste of his time, Arnold became a constant education. His mantra was something like “Anything any engineer can design, I can improve on.” `That applied to everything from the components we used in circuit repair work to the processes we used in rebuilding electro-mechanical devices to the cable and wire routing on the equipment we installed and repaired. Arnold got his electronics training in the 1950s Air Force, where state-of-the-art electronics met mission-critical applications and at least one technician, Arnold, who never wanted a pilot to die because of something Arnold could have prevented. My on-the-job training with Arnold ended after about a year, because our idiot division manager had made Arnold’s life miserable by scheduling him in several places at the same time, often hundreds of miles apart, and by cluelessly undermining his decisions and authority. Arnold quit and started his own business and after a short pause, hired me to do his in-house repairs in my spare time. Almost immediately, my “spare time” began to produce a lot more income than my day-job. I started to avoid the telephone on weekends, so I could concentrate on the work Arnold gave me instead of the low paid work from my “real job.”

On occasion, I’d even do a field job with Arnold, even taking fake “sick days” to free up the time. One of those occasions was when he got a call from one of his customers to look at a newly installed “automated elevator system.” The system came from one of our worst vendors, C-G Systems (Colton, CA), who had installed a complicated half-analog/half-digital system that was intended to monitor, weigh, and deliver premixed cattle feed to feed trucks. Literally, none of the system worked when the C-G engineers packed up and left in the night, abandoning the feedlot owner with a million dollar non-functional system. Arnold brought me along for a walk-through of the new, deader-than-a-doornail facility and he immediately started identifying sections that he thought could be brought to life fairly quickly. This was 1972, when the most advanced digital “technology” available was TTL in 14 and 16-pin DIP packages and A-to-D circuits came from a very few, very expensive manufacturers. Neither Arnold or I had ever worked on digital logic to that moment. So, we took a bunch of notes and went home to do research. We both bought Don Lancaster’s TTL Cookbook, The RTL Cookbook, and Walt Jung’s National Semiconductor Applications books. And we spent a couple of weeks reading and experimenting with these circuits. Then, we went back and, section-by-section, we brought most of that system to life. There were areas that wouldn’t be practical or possible for at least another decade, but the grain mill could at least move grain, measure it, and deliver it by conveyor to the trucks.

Hereford, Texas was a tornado magnet and when the city got clobbered by tornado just past midnight on April 19, 1971, Arnold decided his family needed a tornado shelter. (The edge of the tornado passed by the house I was renting by less than 150’ and we slept through it.) So, Arnold grabbed a shovel and dug the outline of the foundation and walls a couple of days later. He and I dug holes for the walls and he lined those holes with plywood frame work and poured the concrete himself. Then, he rented a backhoe and dug out the basement, poured the floor, reused the wall plywood as a frame for the ceiling which he braced massively, and poured the ceiling and buried the structure. Over the rest of the spring, he finished that new basement/storm shelter into a terrific family entertainment room with food and water storage. Throughout the construction, the city inspectors harassed him for not using “approved” contractors. Every time they tried to ding him for a code violation, he demonstrated that he’d exceeded code by a wife margin and they backed off, pouting all the way.

Texas was never going to be a place where I’d be happy and even less so for my wife. Before our 2nd daughter was born, I’d started looking for a way out of that armpit, only a few miles from Dalhart, Texas where the “Willie and Joe” cartoonist Bill Mauldin once told a Rolling Stone reporter “If they ever give the world an enema — Dalhart is where they’ll put the tube.” Bill was wrong, Dalhart was much nicer than Hereford and Dalhart had a tiny fraction of the multiple sorts of pollution that Hereford generated. Arnold went above and beyond to help me relocate. First, he strongly recommended that I start my own business, like his, in Guymon, OK. We wanted to go further from Texas than that, so he put in several good words for me with a large equipment dealer in Central City, NE and that was the job I took. As part of that research we did for the grain mill, I had started working on a small mobile electronic scale of my own design and Arnold connected me to a friend of his in Garden City, KS who was running a larger scales servicing business and a small manufacturing operation. It took me a few more years to finish the design and when I did I handed it off to Arnold’s connection who produced it for a few years. A few years later, that resulted in a life-saving large royalty check at a critical time in my unemployed life and career.

I learned countless things from working with Arnold Stevenson. I owe him my career and, likely, the best parts of my life. From early on in my experience with Arnold, I started looking at every piece of electronic equipment as something that was probably designed by half-hearted, mediocre engineers and that could be improved along with being repaired. I learned that doing a job as well as possible was its own reward. I learned that just having a job isn’t enough; financially, personally, and security-wise. I learned that as soon as I got a job, I should be looking for the next one and getting myself ready to be able to do that next job. I learned that management is more often than not, useless and incompetent. I learned to depend on myself for education, training, security, and to always be looking to be ready for what comes next. I learned to collect educational resources from any place I find them and to assume that any education I get that is worthwhile is going to come from my own effort; often without any school’s assistances and totally from my own research and study.

Arnold died in 2006, back in Hereford after some time in his hometown of Garden City. When I passed through Hereford on my way to California, Arnold was in Garden City and I missed seeing him. The next time I was in Hereford was 2014 and too late. It is possible that I had talked to Arnold once or twice since we left Hereford. I know I certainly thought of him thousands of times between 1973 and . . . now and beyond. Anyone who has gone through a massive change in perspective, ability, experience, and insight has to owe several people for all of that. In many important ways, I think Arnold had more effect on my life than did my father. As a result of working with Arnold, I rewrote practically every life-lesson I’d absorbed between birth and age 26 when I left Texas. I had a lot more lessons to learn, but all of them were built on the 3 years I worked with L.A. Stevenson.

¹ L.A. "Arnold' Stevenson Garden City Telegram, The (KS) January 20, 2006

“Where Did They All Go?”

In a discussion that turned weirdly (hysterically similar to the stuff that used to go on in my parents’ home whenever they suffered any kind of cognitive dissonance sneaking inside their very conservative western Kansas news-blinders) an acquaintance shrieked “Where did they all go, then?” and “nobody wants to work anymore.” This was at the end of an interminable last-of-its-kind (I hope) dinner where pretty much everything finally went off of the rails with little hope of reconciliation. That had been a long time coming, but when it arrived it was a little startling. Still, the conversation (screaming match?) inspired some investigation into a topic I’ve wondered about.

A lot of “where did they all go” question is old news for me. Friends working in a dozen different industries have kept me sort-of-in-touch with manufacturing tech, and support work after I retired in 2013. All of them, by the way, are making more money in today’s dollar than I ever did at my peak income. Pandemic and supply lines stuff aside, people with skills are in huge demand and everyone else can, at least, find a job if they want one.

Tech and other sorts of parts in the supply lines were coming unglued in lots of manufacturing in early 2018 as Trump’s “trade” fuckups scared some of our economic partners, like Canada’s forestry production, into finding more predictable/rational trade partners. At least one guitar manufacturer in California started using “urban forestry” to supplement their diminishing access to “tone woods” like red and yellow Canadian cedar. Lots of the raw materials we used to get from South America is now going, first, to China, Japan, and the EU. Those infamous ”chip shortages” that suddenly appeared in the media as “lost in the supply chain” during 2020 and 2021, were actually vanishing about mid-2019, again thanks to Trump’s trade off-again/on-again weirdness with China, Taiwan, and India where almost all of that stuff has been made since Reagan purged the US of manufacturing investment in the 80s with his bizarre and foolish Dribble-Down Voodoo Economics. If we didn’t want it, lots of other buyers did. Now, we’re nobody’s preferred customer. When you’re building (or working in) a service economy, many of these problems appear insignificant. In manufacturing and engineering, they are show-stoppers.

As far back as mid-2018 a friend who was working for a company that supplied most of the automotive industry with design and production of high-tech headlights complained about the fact that Chinese suppliers no longer felt obligated to stick to their price quotes for manufactured parts for which they knew the US (and EU) could no longer provide alternatives. Not long after that, the company began shutting down the parts of their production that relied on semiconductor manufacturing and my friend was prewarned that he’d need to get out while the getting was good. It took him less than a week to find a better paying job in medical tech and he left Detroit in early-2019 for Minneapolis.

As for “nobody wants to work,” justifying that claim with our current 3.1% unemployment takes some hard work or simple denial. Our acquaintance chose denial, which made for an entertaining song-and-dance and an amazing display of ignorance when it comes to how employment works. It helped that neither of these folks were ever skilled labor (Unless you call being a junior college adjunct anthro “skilled?”) and neither have any sort of employment record worth talking about. If you haven’t been involved in chasing this country’s economy from one area crash to the next during the past 50 years, it’s hard to explain job hunting. I, on the other hand, have never experienced the kind of job opportunities available to today’s employment-age workers. I’m getting hit up at least a dozen times a month, through my LinkedIn page, for jobs I’m qualified for and some that aren’t even in the vicinity of my experiences.

Oddly, this Chamber of Commerce article, ”Understanding America’s Labor Shortage,” is surprisingly informative (for a group sadly known for its corporate propaganda output and disconnect from much of reality). Thanks to a variety of issues—from early retirements to Covid deaths and long-term Covid effects, to the long-standing child care problems—“in 2021, employers ended up adding an unprecedented 3.8 million jobs. But at the same time, millions of Americans have left the labor force since before the pandemic. In fact, we have more than three million fewer Americans participating in the labor force today compared to February of 2020.” That isn’t including what anyone who has followed numbers in national disasters knows will be a much larger than the reported 1,2M US citizens dead from Covid.

Speaking of killing us with Covid, thanks to the MAGAt nitwits and their “fearless leader,” almost 20% of the US healthcare workforce quit during the pandemic and another 12% were laid off, about 1.7 million professionals gone from hospitals and clinics, The people left in that overstressed, underpaid industry are considering quitting, too: 31% of them, in fact. They are not having any problems finding alternative work, either.

The Chamber’s survey found that of the many people who have yet to return to the workforce, “Twenty-seven percent indicated that the need to be home and care for children or other family members has made the return to work difficult or impossible. More than a quarter (28%) indicated that they have been ill and their health has taken priority over looking for work.” That survey found that many of those folks are not returning to the workforce because they are “concerned about COVID-19 at work, indicate that pay is too low, or are more focused on acquiring new skills and education before re-entering the job market." Some of that last group are taking advantage of the fact that many skilled labor unions are providing free and paid education for highly paid skilled in-demand jobs such as electrician and plumbers.

Retirements are kicking the workforce’s ass, too. That same article stated, “As of October 2021, the pandemic drove more than 3 million adults into early retirement.” At the other end of “ where they went,”Over the last two years, nearly 10 million new business applications were filed and in 2020 alone more than 4 million new business were started.“ This is exactly the kind of economy, except for the booming job market, where I started my Wirebender Audio Systems business after a layoff in 1980 and various good and bad times kept that going until a few months before I retired. So, good for them.

And that is where they all went. Any questions?

The Rat’s Rules: #6 If You’re Not Growing You’re Dying

““If You’re Not Growing You’re Dying” is probably one of the most misunderstood business rules in a long, long list of misunderstood business rules. Too many mismanagers mistake that phrase to mean the growth is the agent that keeps the business alive. That is not what the phrase means, or should mean.

It’s more important to stay alive than to grow, ask any number of short people or many exceptionally long people. Concentrating on growth allows lazy mismanagers to pretend to have their eye on the target while looking at easy stuff that could be handled by an intern: a stupid, unmotivated intern. Growth mismanagers worry about advertising/marketing, paying the sales force more to develop more sales, reducing costs (like R&D, manufacturing, or employee development), and juggling the books to provide the appearance of growth. None of those things are likely to create long term growth and most of them waste resources that will likely kill the business.

If that kind of mismanager were inclined to take advice from an honest consultant (both, a rare breed), that consultant would tell the growth mismanager  “Don’t worry about growing, dumbass. You are dying. Try to concentrate on staying alive.” Not growing is a symptom of dying, not the core problem. As any old person who has lived long enough to begin to lose height. It isn’t the lost inch or two that is the problem, the problem is being old and close to dying.

“Staying alive” activities are (in order): superior customer service, staying close to customers to determine their needs and desires, creating reliable and innovative products, employee development, and (dead last by several lengths) marketing and sales. When you ask an ex-customer of a company that was once considered excellent why they now dislike or distrust that company, 99% of the time I’d bet the answer will be “they treated me like crap.” Poor customer service will flip a loyal customer to a hater in a few seconds. That kind of hater will spread poisonous word-of-mouth stories that no marketing plan could ever keep up with. There is an old restaurant management rule that says something like “It takes $50 in advertising to get a new customer to try your business, 5 seconds of poor service to lose them, and $5,000 in advertising to get them to try you again.” The cost of poor service is under-rated, often ignored, and when it has gone on too long there is no road back for the company. No one can afford to spend $5,000 to attract a customer for a $20 meal.

22 years ago, I started my RatsEyeView.com (a domain I gave up a few years ago) business page and this blog to attract customers to the business consulting companies I worked for. I was a sub-contractor, most often, for D&H Consulting out of Rancho Santa Fe, CA working with an old friend from California on improving quality management and inventory control. I didn’t last long, 3 or 4 projects I think. It was soon apparent to me that in the early 2000s the corporate rewards were going to mismanagers who could downsize operations to little more than marketing and sales, passing off manufacturing and service to overseas manufacturers and contract companies. What these CEOs and other corner-office creeps wanted to hear was “How much do you like my poetry?” The only "improvement" they had in mind was in their own salary and perks. Almost universally, these mismanagers were all proud holders of the most worthless degree in academia, the MBA. Someone once said that you could sum up the entirety of a Harvard MBA with “Push blame down and pull credit up.” If any of the corporate “leaders” I consulted with had other skills, they did not display them around me. Every one of the companies we worked with has since been absorbed by another entity now, most at bargain basement prices. The CEOs, though, made out like the bandits they are.The businesses and employees were trashed like they were the disposable private property of the executives and, usually, the stockholders got the shaft too.

Why people like that keep getting hired is impossible to explain. Killing a business ought to be a scarlet letter on an executive’s resume, but it doesn’t work that way. Corporate American seems to protect and reward the really major failures. Which is why our companies keep dying while they focus on growth and keep over-paying executives who don’t produce revenue or customer satisfaction.

Go figure.

Living in A One-Sided World

The people who make the rules, the rich and powerful, are beginning to experience the world as the rest of us have to live it and they aren’t happy about it. And let’s face, it’s a pretty miserable world. The rules that most of us are forced to live by, out of necessity, are only suggestions for the rich and powerful. If you didn’t get that out of the 4 years of being mismanaged, ignored, abused, and ripped-off by the Trump 3rd Tier Elites, you will never get it. But a lot of people got it. And now that we are in our 3rd year of a pandemic that has cost this country at least 1,010,599 lives (as of June 25, 2022) and at least 6,300,000 worldwide, some people are discovering that they can use the same rules that have always applied to the idle rich and abusively powerful.

For example, if you are a skilled healthcare worker, like a registered nurse, you are in big demand today. Typically, an RN makes about $29/hour as a hospital employee. Hospital employees are historically abused and misused by their grossly overpaid and under-skilled and cynically misnamed “administration” executives. During the early days of Covid, that abuse went ballistic as hospitals’ staff were decimated by the killer virus and administrators did as little as possible to protect their employees from the disease and hostile, delusional patients. People died, people quit, and as of this writing about 20% of US healthcare workers have left the workforce and 47% of those remaining in that workforce plan to leave their “current role” or the occupation entirely in the next 3 years. One of the ways to leave the role as a hospital employee, for nurses, is to become a “travel nurse.” This article, “Why Do Travel Nurses Get Paid More | Travel Nursing,” does a nice job of explaining why a freelance nurse gets better pay, has more job opportunities and control, and is less stressed than a clinic or hospital employee. The bottom line, though, is more money and less hassle. If a hospital administrator is a pain in the ass, leave and work somewhere else in a heartbeat. Want more money? Travel nurses can make more than twice the salary of a permanent employee. Don’t like the work assignments, don’t do them and the employer’s leverage is practically zilch. Most likely, they won’t fire you because they are already way short on people to do the actual work and everyone knows the administrators don’t do anything resembling work. No patient ever picked a clinic because of the administrators.

Some friends who are retired nurse were recently marveling at the fact that people would apply for a job with Mayo Clinic, be offered the job, and not show up. The assumption was “people don’t want to work anymore,” but the fact is that in that business the odds are good that the applicant received several offers and just took a different one. Employers have been in that position for decades and when they pick an employee for a job most employers don’t bother telling the other candidates that they didn’t get the job and they sure don’t bother to tell them why they didn’t get the job. But for the last 100 years, employers have expected prospective employees to be massively more considerate than employers. No longer that world, is it?

Doctors are in a completely different and much better situation, thanks to mismanagement and Covid and the two combined. For example, pathologists are in hyper-short supply: Industry Voices—The shortage of invisible doctors | Fierce Healthcare. Where there were typically about 100 annual open positions in the country for pathologists there are well over 1,000 today and there are expected to be almost 6,000 open positions by the end of the decade. We can thank scumbags like Ronald Reagan for the current situation, since he made “work” a dirty word and single-handedly flipped a tax system that penalized idle “unearned income” into the spectacularly profitable but culturally worthless “financial services” investment income scam that has destroyed our manufacturing sector, diverted talent from all sorts of necessary functions (like medicine) to money shuffling, and set the country’s education system back at least 50 unrecoverable years. Doctors are retiring, many far earlier than they had originally planned or expected, and doctors are leaving the healthcare system. Even the moderately representative and grossly conservative AMA admits that one in three doctors are planning on cutting back their hours and commitment or leaving their practice entirely in the next three years. Doctors can pretty much go where they want to go, from research positions in the medical device or drug industries to teaching or administration jobs in completely different fields. You might think you are special with your cute little MBA party animal degree, but with an MD behind your name you are special.

And those thousands of open positions with a fraction of the necessary and critical applicants are just the tip of the “Great Resignation” iceberg. One of the longest lasting aftereffects of the Black Plague was an idea that is still growing; the rich and powerful are not as important as they imagine themselves to be. Like today’s Bezos, Musk, and the rest of that dependent, unskilled, over-valued ilk, the idle rich of the 12th Century might have been able to isolate themselves from the plague, but they couldn’t support themselves with their meager talents and when serfs realized that the penalties for walking away from the manor and the 3rd tier royalty were unenforceable, they walked. They kept walking until they created what we now consider “the middle class.” Royals have been trying to beat back that movement for at least 1,000 years, but the more education and talent is required to support a society the more people there are who can do the simple math that illustrates the inconsequential quality of idle elites. One of the key purposes of religion is to convince workers that God has chosen the idle rich for their special qualities and to question that is to question God. If you ever wanted to know why atheists' like Trump, the Kochs, Musk, and the rest toss money and acknowledgement at evangelical preachers, this is why. The priests have the same marching orders they’ve always had, “Baffle ‘em with bullshit, keep ‘em in line, don’t let them think for themselves or you’ll have to get a real job.”

As the author of “How the Black Death made life better” wrote, “With many state governments reducing unemployment benefits to push workers to fill open jobs, the aim, like England after the Black Death, is to reinstate and reinforce previous social and labor hierarchies, regardless of whose work has actually been ‘essential’ over the past 16 months.” As every competent employee in the world knows, if every CEO, CFO, COO, or any other C-word executive on the planet died tomorrow, the day after tomorrow would be no different than any day that came before it except that companies would be more profitable, more efficient, more flexible, and the stockholders would be richer. With Trump, we discovered that an incompetent and corrupt President is much worse than no President at all. And for 8 years of the worst recession in 75 years, the Republican Congress demonstrated that most of the design of the US government is so flawed that congresscritters can say out loud that their whole goal is to prevent the President from restoring the economy, rebuilding the infrastructure, and preparing the country for the future without any penalty.

For the moment, many employees are in the driver’s seat. Because humans are gullible and easily distracted, most likely this won’t last long. So, enjoy it while you can.