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.

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.

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.

“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?

“I Want to See What Happens Next”

August 30, 2022

A friend died two weeks ago, Keith Beseke was, I believe, 75. Usually, when someone is said to have “fought” cancer, I try to nod politely. It is hard to think of a way for a patient to actually actively participate in the fight against his own cancer. But Keith did fight his cancer with every ounce of his being. He stayed incredibly active for almost all of the 3 years he fought that battle. The general life expectancy estimate for "stage 4 pancreatic cancer patients [is] about three to five months, depending on the condition of the patient." When Keith was diagnosed, in July of 2019, he was in pretty amazing condition, a long distance runner, an avid bicyclist, and an active outdoorsman (hunting and fishing). Keith jumped through every hoop to stay alive. For most of the past 3 years, his attitude was considerably better than mine. He often told me he wanted to live as long as possible because “I want to see what happens next.” He was actually excited about the future. He did manage to outlive Donny Trump’s reign of corruption, incompetence, stupidity, and banality, which I’m sure was satisfying. Many of his friends and relatives were mindless Trump cult followers, which seriously confused and disappointed him. He and his wife, Sue, were strong supporters of Joe Biden in 2020 when I was certain Trump’s fascist handlers would steamroll Biden if Joe made it past the primaries. I was wrong, they were right and I’m glad.

As Sue wrote the morning she told friends Keith had died, “Pancreatic cancer won.” But cancer didn’t win easily and it was an unexpectedly (except to Keith and Sue) long fight.

I am very different from Keith. He was, mostly, an optimist; a grouchy optimist but he had some kind of powerful faith in the possibility of good outcomes. He spent almost all of his life in Minnesota and loved the state and the area as only an outdoorsman can. He was a project engineer for the Department of the Interior and most of his working life was spent creating bird habitat on the upper Mississippi River. I suspect you have to be an optimist to imagine positive outcome for a river so abused as the Mississippi has been for as long as white people have been pissing and shitting in the river. While those hard-won outposts of waterfowl rest and rehab are under constant threat and blatant damage from industry, farming, and the small and large towns that drain their sewers into the river, the valuable remnants of Keith’s projects still provide birds, fish, and other wildlife a place to stay on their seasonal trips north and south. I learned a lot from his example, although I suspect my basic nature is fixed to a negative pole.

When we first met, I think in early 2016 or late 2015, Keith was the only adult student at the local music “school.” All of the other students were 16-and-under, many of them way under. Keith told me when he retired, at 55 from the Interior Department, he was either going to go back to school and study mathematics or learn to play lead guitar. Keith was never much of a lead guitarist, which always made me wonder how well he’d have done as a math student. He had a strong, rich voice and wrote interesting songs and was always generous and fun to play with at jam sessions and open mics. In the last couple of years, he and Sue had a fair number of jam sessions at their beautiful home in Welch and I got to meet some wonderful people there.

Unlike Keith, I’m not excited to see what comes next. I fully expect the US and too much of the rest of the world fall into the mindless fascist easy chair of compliance and obedience. I don’t feel any need or desire to see any of that. Keith, however, would have tried to look through the smoke and mirrors and bullshit to see what the people who are always trying to do the right thing for the right reasons are doing now. He would have found them, pointed them out to me, and reminded me that things that are broken can be fixed.

When Does Marketing Trump Products?

As usual, I stepped into a discussion about the “importance” of marketing when I should have just ignored it all and let people believe the whackadoodle crap they want to believe, uninterrupted by reality. As usual, the marketing dweebs out-jabbered me and I’m happy to let them wander off into the woods as they usually do. At this point in my life, it no longer matters to me what happens to anyone’s business and I’m less inclined to be interested in anyone’s mission than at any other time in my life.

However, I get to have the last word (if I want to) on my own blog and here it comes.

The question from marketing is always, “How do people hear about the product you are selling if not marketing?" The answer is simple and complicated. The simple part is that word-of-mouth spreads far faster and more effectively than any advertising campaign. The complicated part is that word-of-mouth spreads bad news far faster and more effectively than any advertising campaign can ever hope to repair. From my years in quality management training, I remember a restaurant rule that went something like “It will take $50 in advertising to convince a customer to try your business, 5 seconds of lousy service to drive that customer out the door, and $5,000 in more advertising to get them to try you again.” Something like that.

My favorite example of how effectively word-of-mouth works is In-N-Out Burger vs. McDonalds and Burger King.  When my family lived in California in the 80’s, there were probably a dozen fairly substantial fast food chains. Fast food was nothing more than a commodity to 90% of those businesses. None of them did anything particularly well, so the best marketing program probably “won.” Creative accounting probably helped those chains help convince suckers to both invest in their franchise and to buy their engineered addictive “fat, salt, and sugar” concoctions. You couldn’t drive a block on any busy street without seeing an ad for McDonalds, Burger King, Burger Chef, Wendy’s, Hardies, Carl’s Jr., and/or any of those commodity food producers.

The burger joint of choice for Californians remained In-N-Out Burger and before the internet the best way to find one was to ask for directions from someone wearing one of their t-shirts. There were two In-N-Out Burger stands in Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa and neither of them bothered to do much more than keep their signs lit, marketing-wise, and their lines flowing through their drive-thrus were always long. Like Aldi’s, those lines moved fast, so it was always worth the wait to get a hamburger made from actual beef, fresh tomatoes, onions, and lettuce and fries made from actual potatoes. When an In-N-Out Burger appeared near my daughter’s home in Plano, Texas, her junk-food addicted husband immediately changed his food allegiance to actual food. No advertising required.

Likewise, the pro audio company I worked for in California couldn’t afford an actual marketing department for the first 6 years I worked for the company. When the company started out, in 1973, the founder spent all of his inheritance and some of his siblings and parents’ money promoting a company that had yet to figure out product development and manufacturing. After a brief flash-in-the-pan period of media presence, the company downsized to a half-dozen employees in a cheap business district in Costa Mesa. For the next ten years, the founder worked at learning his engineering craft, the original employees learned how to manage money, purchase parts, and develop a sales rep network. By the time I started work there, “marketing” consisted of very information-strong ads in industry magazines and a couple of sales meetings each year.

That same year, the company released its first professional quality power amplifiers and by the end of 1983 our problems became “how can we make more of these products, service our customers, and maintain our product quality?” For the next six years, we doubled our gross sales every year, maintained a 24-26% profit margin, and led our industry in customer service and product quality.

The company’s CEO idolized Hartley Peavey and Steve Jobs and had a minor hard-on for Donald Trump. He saw himself as a similar marketing “genius” and desperately wanted to reform the company as an “ideas business” instead of a manufacturing and engineering company. In the next few years, manufacturing moved to China, product development became diffused and only somewhat focused on customer needs, marketing became a more powerful force and a larger empire in the company, and it took another decade for the gross sales to double between 1992 and 2002. It’s a privately-held company, so it’s hard to guess what the profit margins are now, but based on the gross sales, the size of the administrative staff (especially in marketing and sales), and the luxury of the new facilities and number of executive officers, I’d guess 5-8% max.

There was an upside for me. Having spent 8 years in an executive position near someone who saw himself as a marketing genius, I developed pretty thick charisma armor. When Donald Trump went public for his one-and-only time with the Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts (DJT) IPO, I remembered the giant space between reality and our CEO’s self-image and, for the first and only time in my investment career, I shorted about 1,000 shares of DJT. I know, not an impressive bet in the scale of things, but it was a big deal for me at the time. My incredibly clever and sophisticated investment philosophy was “anything that the CEO I knew so well believes is a ‘good idea’ is going to be a guaranteed disaster.” I missed the IPO peak by a few weeks, but I still got in when the stock was valued at about $29. I sold off half of my shorted option in 1998 and the rest in 2001 when DJT was pretty much a penny stock.

I have never had that much confidence in a stock’s value collapsing since. I was close with Apple in 1997, but Bill Gates stepped in to save Apple with a $150M investment and a dumbed-down version of Office for dumbed-down Mac users. Peavey is still a privately held company, so there has never been an “investment opportunity” for me to bet against that company. I would if I could, though.

My takeaway from all of this is that marketing is what you do when you can’t do anything useful, original, necessary, and/or well. When what you have to sell is fluff or a me-too commodity or crap, you probably need marketing to convince customers to part with their money and waste their time. There is a price to be paid for shifting resources from manufacturing, design, research, and customer service, too. Regardless of the delusions and propaganda saying otherwise, everything is a zero-sum game: you can’t spend money in one area without taking those resources from other areas. Moving resources to an unexamined, usually poorly-managed area like marketing (especially if the marketing is an external “organization”) too often means that manufacturing (the hardest job in any product-based company) gets shipped off-shore and important, mission-critical skills are lost forever. (And the off-shore vendor gets to refine those skills on someone else’s money, eventually becoming a competitor.)

From the inside, I have since witnessed the farce of marketing-driven mismanagement several times and every one of those attempts at an illusionary business model resulted in spectacular crashes; just like DJT. I don’t really know if marketing actually ever works, but I do know that if you think your business desperately needs marketing assistance you have a lot to worry about.