Freedom of Choice? We’re Being Invaded!

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

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

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

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

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

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

STP–The Canaries in the Coal Mine

Back in 2014, when we first moved to Red Wing, we joined the local YMCA. It’s a fairly nice facility for a small town and it seemed to be welcoming. That was typical of my experience with Minnesota Twin Cities (YMCA of the North) organizations. I had been a downtown St. Paul YMCA member, transferred to the Roseville facility, since we moved to Minnesota in 1996 and, as of 2013, my Medicare health insurance Silver Sneakers benefit began to pay for my membership. So, it seemed logical to transfer my membership to my new residence. The paperwork went smoothly and in late November we began to enjoy our new facility . . . for about a month. In late December, the Red Wing YMCA quietly announced (louder for those of us who were effected) that it would no longer accept Silver Sneakers payments and even acknowledged that it was the only YMCA in the state to make that move.

At least in our situation, the only real benefit to the Red Wing YMCA was the swimming pool. We have a small gym in our basement, complete with an excellent treadmill, stationary bicycle, weights, and resistance bands. We have no reason to leave our home for those things, which I discovered by transferring my Silver Sneakers membership to the local Anytime Fitness where I used it a couple of times and let it lapse.

For a bit, I attempted to carry on a dialog with the Y’s management (Tom Burke, Martha Harris, and Mike Melstad) and a member of the board (Barb Haley) who all claimed to have a solid, demonstrable financial reason for the Silver Sneakers decision, but were all completely unable or unwilling to produce any of it. I suspect when they learned I have a background in manufacturing accounting, ROI justification, and quality management they decided to keep their “secret calculations” secret. I was supposed to believe they’d done a thorough financial analysis which had provided justification for their decision. I am rarely inclined to trust any kind of management decision logic, based on my long history with incompetent, lazy, uninformed, overpaid, and mostly-useless management types.

This past December, the Red Wing YMCA management decided to re-evaluate and reverse their Silver Sneakers decision. They were pretty quiet about it, but I lucked into the inspiration to ask on January 1, 2023 and discovered they’d be allowing Silver Sneakers compensation starting the next day. While I was either getting registered, watching my wife get re-enrolled, or watching a half-dozen other old farts get signed up under the new policy, I heard the same pool-schedule spiel fed to each of us: the best time to swim and to avoid crowds was between 2PM and 4PM. So, I’ve been taking advantage of my new membership fairly regularly for the last 3 weeks. Yesterday, I showed for for my routine and discovered, thanks to a tiny sign printed on the door to the pool (after changing and showering) that the pool hours would be limited 4:15 to 8:30PM. I wasn’t the only surprised bait-and-switch victim, as there were two other new members in the dressing room who were at least as pissed as me.

I thought about bitching about yet another snow-job experience from the Red Wing YMCA, but I decided it is no longer worth it to me. Mrs. Day and I have been discussing the pros and cons of staying in Red Wing and Minnesota for the last couple of winters and I’m just going to put the local YMCA in the “cons” category and let someone else worry about it. “Fixing” systems, organizations, and processes was my career for 50+ years. I’m retired and don’t care enough to fix much of anything now.

This all reminded me of a conversation I had with the Washburn quality manager in 1991, during my 30-day moment of unhappy employment with that company. I wrote about this in a 2015 essay titled “Quality in A Disposable World” after a similar conversation with a Red Wing Southeast Technical College instructor. In that essay, I wrote, “Like a lot of small business people, my instructor was under the delusion that customers will naturally complain if they are disappointed with service or product quality. Many larger companies are equally happy to pretend that they are getting 100% ‘compliance’ from dissatisfied customers. The fact is that most customers simply log their dissatisfaction and tell themselves they will remember to never buy that particular company’s product or service again. Most company executives are perfectly happy with that outcome.”

The Washburn service manager explained to me that the company’s complaints system dealt with customers fairly ruthlessly (efficiently?). He said, “the company shipped product with a known 50% defect rate, based off of the internal random inspection data from a few years back (Since they quit inspections after a few months, product quality had probably gotten worse.). From a suspected 50% defect rate, about 1% of the company’s customers complained, expecting some sort of warranty response. If they stonewalled that first complaint, about 1% of the first 1% would come back for more abuse. No special inspection was done for warranty replacement instruments, so at least 50% of the replacements were also defective out-of-the-box. According to the manager, that 1%-of-1% routine applied to warranty replacement complaints.” So, with a known 50% defect rate, Washburn only provided some kind of warranty service (the first time) on 0.5% of shipped product.

In a similar vein, someone who was once involved in Red Wing’s city management explained how the city’s civil service bureaucracy blew off citizen comments and complaints with an acronym, "STP = same three people.”  The arrogant, simple-minded idea was that the few members of the public who contested or complained about the top-down city management decisions could be dismissed with this delusion. Red Wing is a very small town, 16,000 people and steadily shrinking (especially in average incomes), with a huge budget and a voracious appetite for insane growth through mindless annexation (41.41 square miles, so far). Minneapolis, with 425,000 residents, is contained in 57.51 square miles. Red Wing city management also has an outsized view of the “value” of city employees, based solely on what the city employees can get away with (often by ignoring the STP). Xcel’s Prairie Island Power Plants are the city’s main property tax contributor and those plants are likely to be phased out in the next decade. Eventually, that unrestrained spending will result in exorbitant local taxes and a rapid Atlantic City-style evacuation of the area by everyone who can afford to take a loss to find a more secure place to live. (Remember the rule, the first rats to leave the ship are the ones who can swim.)

Like the Washburn quality manager and the Red Wing YMCA management, the Red Wing city bureaucrats labor under the delusion that the 3 or 4 citizens who regularly comment and/or complain about the city’s services, expenses, or decisions only represent themselves. In fact, that small group is very likely representative of at least half of the local residents. They are consistently the “canaries in the coal mine.” The poor treatment they receive from the bureaucrats likely keeps the rest of the locals from voicing their opinions, until they vote with their feet and give up on the city. Red Wing’s growth has been anemic, at best, for the entire 163 year life of the city, falling far behind the national population growth and that of the state’s major cities. That failure isn’t for lack of natural resources,opportunity, or even representation in state and federal government.

Don’t Blame Me

A local shanty in one of our old, more run-down neighborhoods proudly displays a buttload of ignorance and lack of responsibility in his (I assume) front yard: “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for TRUMP.” He also has a cute piece of “art” depicting President Biden as the Wizard of Oz Scarecrow. I guess that’s what passes for humor among the humor-deprived fascists these days. Not enough people falling down stairs, being shot by cops, or suffocating in a pandemic to keep them entertained?

1,000,000 Americans dead from Covid, thanks to this nitwit’s irresponsible politics, but he’s convinced it’s “not my fault” and “you can’t blame me.” They put our political system on the edge of collapse and chaos thanks to Der Orange Führer’s inciting an insurrection and civil unrest among the well-armed right wing crazies and their favorite fake news sources getting their marching orders from Vladimir Putin. Trump’s incompetent handling of the beginning of the pandemic put a spotlight on the supply chain problems, but dependent industries, like automotive and robotics,  began to see delays in semiconductor and chip deliveries a year before that. Trump’s uneducated and unintelligent and barely-employable white power extremists have been set loose to vent their frustrations and demand their entitlements. Police believed they were going to deal out racist violence and corruption, backed by a President who wanted the country to return “to the good old days” when cops had no more responsibility than street thugs. Trump voters blithely ignore their responsibility in creating this national disaster, but they are wrong. We can and we do blame them.

You can’t blame me, sure the killer was my son,
but I didn’t teach him to pull the trigger of the gun.
It’s the killing on his TV screen.
You can’t blame me, it’s those images he’s seen.

“Cookie Jar,” Jack Johnson

This small, semi-rural Minnesota town is like most of rural America, more than half-stupid. 50.3% of my county voted for Trump in 2020 and 54.6% voted for that moron in 2016. If you were a glass-half-full kind of person, you might take some solace from that slim margin and the tiny improvement between 2016 and 2020. I’m not. As my wife says, “Every other person here is a fascist.” 

When half of a population is proudly below average intelligence and education, I think the area is headed downhill with little-to-no chance of improvement. I have immense faith in the power of down-breeding. If, for example, the character proudly posting those two idiot statements in his yard reproduced, I’d bet the offspring are even dumber. It’s not like the odds are good that a substantially more intelligent person would breed with an idiot, even by accident.

From here, it’s hard to see a way back to sanity in the country. Trump and the white power idiots have started a fire that was had to be extinguished with a Civil War the last time something similar happened in North America. We’ve jumped well past “the tipping point of stupid” and, for many, it appears that they can not risk having to admit defeat, incompetence, or anything resembling a personal intellectual failure. They would rather die or live in a authoritarian shit hole than be wrong and drag the rest of us into it with them. As Mark Leibovich described them, “the former president has mainstreamed an authentic collection of cranks, bozos, and racists.” As part of the fatally flawed 2020 census, my area fell out of District 2, which included a bit of the Twin Cities, and was swept into one of the dumbest US congresscritter districts, a solid-red District 1 where all of our Republican candidates are election-results-denying, pro welfare-for-rich-farmers and screw everyone else, under-achieving, uneducated half-wits who are no more capable of contributing anything useful to the state or nation than is their timid Maralardo “fearless leader.” If it weren’t for the Rochester bright spot, District 1 would be a train wreck of dropouts, Proud Boys still living with Mom, single moms on welfare, and “farmers” completely dependent on their federal support checks growing crops no one needs or wants.

We had barely been in our retirement home for a year when most of our neighbors were overwhelmingly and foolishly lead by their noses to vote for Trump in 2016. We’d left an area of St. Paul where 85% of our neighbors were not complete fools. Mrs. Day immediately wanted to pull up stakes and move back to civilization. The fact that almost half of our neighbors were not fascists and fools was not a convincing argument. Outside of Rochester, Minnesota’s District 1 is home to many of the state’s dumbest cities, which is pretty amazing since most of the “cities” in our district are vanishing into ghost towns (under 5,000 population).  Worthington is proudly the state’s undisputed dumbest state for a collection of reasons including the fact that 3 out of 10 residents couldn’t manage to finish high school. As a friend said before the 2016 election, “Half of every population is below average intelligence and half have below average education. They are not the same group and they amount to more than 50% of the population. They are all voting for Trump.” (If they manage to vote at all, that is.)

Like many of the people in Minnesota’s District 2, we’re old. We retired and moved here, which mostly means we moved here to die. Lots of young people are here dying, too. The most common story I hear from people who grew up here is “I moved to the Cities when I graduated and failed miserably there. I moved back in with my parents (usually to “take care of my Mom”) and haven’t left.” 10% of the district live below the poverty line. The district’s average income is about 90% of the state’s average. 80% of the district drives 20 minutes to get to work, mostly in the Cities or Rochester. The district’s property values are about 3/4 of the state average. College graduates are about 80% of the state’s average. The district’s veteran population (poverty draft) is about 10% above the state’s average. If Rochester weren’t in the district and the Twin Cities weren’t in moderate commuting distance, none of those numbers would be anything but dramatically more dismal. In almost every way, Minnesota’s District 2 resembles Lauren Bobert’s Colorado District 3, except they are less educated, poorer, older, and more likely to be veterans and US native-born.

The odds are good that we’ll end up being misrepresented by Brad Finstad (who won the interim election earlier this year against a far more qualified Democratic candidate). In his short time in the House, Finstad has voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, opposed the president’s student loan debt forgiveness plans, . blamed Democrats for inflation and for the spike in crime that began in the middle of Trump’s term. Like most of the current Republican herd, Finstad was anti-Trump until the wind blew in another direction. Other than being a “famous local (small town) baseball player” and a mediocre state Representative and a Trump appointee to the Department of Education, Finstad is what you’d expect from a rural Republican candidate, exceptionally unqualified, uneducated, and uninspiring. Weirdly, Finstad is so uninteresting that even the wingnuts don’t know what to think of him. Of course, they think Tim Pawlenty is “radical left,” so “think” is probably not the right word for describing their garbage spewing.

Whatever happens, I suspect Mrs. Day will become more adamant in her desire to move someplace less stupid and nuts. As a life-long Midwesterner who wishes he wasn’t, it will be a one-sided debate.

“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.

Woe Is Rural America (and it’s well-deserved)

“Greater Minnesota” is just a politically correct phrase for “rural Minnesota,” which is everywhere in the state except Minneapolis, St. Paul, Rochester, and . . . that’s about it. Duluth is a wannabe city, but that northern industrial area is just a black hole for development tax dollars with little-to-no possible return. St. Cloud is even less likely to stage any sort of economic comeback. Rural everywhere has suffered a brain and skills drain since the turn of the last century. “How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm” was a popular song in 1919 and popular music has never been great at spotting trends early. Back in the 60s, Larry McMurtry explained what had happened to rural Texas with “The kids who stayed in the country tended to be dull, lazy, cautious, or all three; those with brains, zip, and daring were soon off to Dallas or Houston.”

Red Wing and Goodhue County, for example, has suffered a steadily declining population since 2000 and regular property tax increases that make the area less and less attractive to anyone with the math skills to know what will happen to residential property taxes when Xcel closes the nuclear plans in the next decade. $15/hour or about $30,000/year is not a living wage in a town where even a serious fixer-upper costs more than $150,000. Area property values have increased by 37% in the last decade and wages by less than 3%. The city’s “average commute time” is 19.8 minutes, which means a substantial number of the area’s workforce is working a good distance from the city (mostly in the Twin Cities). Almost 14% of the city’s residents live in poverty, with women between 55 and 64 the largest demographic in that group. One quarter of the people employed in the area are over-65. The average resident’s age is 42.7 years, 6 years older than Minnesota’s average, and 41% of the City’s residents are past retirement age.

So, filling those local jobs means competing with employers from outside of the area with wages, benefits, decent management, and advancement opportunities. And that is for a rural city only 50 miles from the serious competition. Cities and businesses further from the state’s economic hub have to be shedding young talent like my sheepdog loses her winter undercoat when spring hits. Red Wing is pretending/attempting to shift to a more tourist-friendly destination, but noise and air pollution and a lack of recreational resources (other than the river) and a serious lack of city development talent has turned that effort into pointless and ineffective construction and economic flailing and rapidly growing property taxes. A short look at the rural area’s economic and demographic situation would make any reasonable person suspect it is not sustainable. The city has at least a half-dozen massive development failures in its recent history, a downtown that is being rapidly abandoned by businesses and customers, an excess of empty commercial buildings and, even, more than a few empty housing units, a decent infrastructure but large and expensive municipal and county services, and an aging population that is less able to finance the “if you build it they will come” city government’s delusional attitude.

An unrealistic attitude is a rural problem, too. Much of rural American believes it is full of strong, independent individuals who are more able to take care of themselves than “city folks.” That couldn’t be much further from the truth. Rural areas and states receive an outsized investment relative to their contributions to the GNP and tax base. Rural areas need cities, but cities are steadily less dependent on the goods and services produced by rural areas; to the point that this has become a loud “taxation without representation” issue for cities that have had their education systems, infrastructure, and services scavenged for the benefit of declining rural areas. Rural areas, mostly, imagine themselves to be indispensable and their anger and outrage in the face of facts drives them to the Fox and Republican propaganda machines, which isolates them even more.

There is a lot of data supporting the argument that the keys to economic success are tightly linked to diversity, inclusion, and openness. It is incredibly rare to find any small town that exemplifies any of those attributes. 50 years ago, Mr. McMurtry also had a pretty strong and accurate opinion of the kind of people who live in outstate “cities” and rural areas, “Lubbock, Amarillo, and Wichita Falls are the three principal cities of the Texas plain—cities that I find uniformly graceless and unattractive. In summer they are dry and hot, in winter cold, dusty, and windswept; the population is rigidly conformist on the surface and seethes underneath with imperfectly suppressed malice." The vaccine paranoia, anger and resentment, and self-destructive “rebellion” against science is a great example of that “imperfectly suppressed malice.” And an obvious result is the mass exodus from those areas by healthcare professionals. “Toxic individualism” is the media’s phrase for people who grossly over-estimate their own intelligence, knowledge and capabilities, and distrust anyone smarter than themselves; which is often practically everyone outside of their narrow and sheltered society. Attracting talented young people, or retaining them, into that environment is an impossible task.

If You Build It . . . You’re A Fool

Like a lot of small rural villages, Red Wing, MN has visions of grandeur that may be reflections of the town’s past or, more likely, are evidence that down-breeding has consequences. The current city bureaucracy and mismanagement have been hustling growth bullshit since the momentary burst in the area’s economy in the 70’s when Xcel’s Prairie Island Nuclear plant generated a substantial increase in the city and county population and tax base.Since the 70s, Red Wing has clearly suffered from a Field of Dreams syndrome, believing that if the city builds enough expensive crap people will finally be attracted to moving here and creating jobs and businesses that will make the dreamers look like actual planners. So far, if anyone is coming they must be the ghosts that populated that corn field baseball game in Costner's movie. They are very much invisible.

The city “planners” have been hacking away at a weird idea to convert the only significant riverside area of the city into some sort of “shopping district" and a misbegotten concert venue. The project name is the "Old West Main & Upper Harbor Renewal Project." The picture above is what the area looks like now and it is obvious that this is a grossly underused and somewhat unsightly waste of a prime Mississippi River location. The two videos below are concept renderings of the anticipated outcome of this multi-million dollar project in an economically disadvantaged area that has a mostly-abandoned downtown and a rapidly vanishing retail economic segment (like almost every small town in the country).

It’s a dream, obviously, and one based on a gross over-estimate of the city’s planning and development skills that could only be sustained if one were to ignore the long, expensive, and sad history of the city’s weird attempts to encourage growth, population-wise and economically. Currently, what businesses exist in the area are a couple of biker bars, some tiny and insignificant consumer retail businesses, a fair amount of small manufacturing, and some of the city’s scabbier housing units. Odds are, when the $3.5-5M are spent, if the city is lucky a few of those businesses will survive the customer and access problems caused by the grossly optimistic time schedule for the project. My bet is that there will be no more than one more restaurant in the area and several of the small manufacturing companies will either be forced out or will leave, probably Red Wing altogether, “willingly.” And the local citizens will be stuck with another large cost overrun bill, higher taxes, an enlarged and even more inefficient Public Works department that will do at least as poor a job of maintaining both the “pedestrian bridge” and the additional sidewalks as they do with the existing paths, sidewalks, and city parking areas. All of this as Xcel is likely to continue to decommission the property tax cash cow that has, in the past, funded every City Council pipedream and city planner's vanity “legacy” project since 1970.

In case you think I’m overstating Red Wing’s development past, here are a few examples of the city’s development track record. #1 the most recent (2017 through 2019) Spring Creek Road Project was promoted as being a business “starter” that would free up anticipated commercial real estate and increase business to existing businesses and to “to reduce traffic deaths along Highway 61.” That last bit was a pretty tough sell, since the next major intersection, which has all of the “features” the Spring Creek Road Project would bring to the Spring Creek/HW61 intersection is one of the city’s highest “impact points” for crashes and traffic deaths. 

This foolish project was, unbelievably, “20 years in the making.” Instead of accomplishing any useful goals, the city removed 3 supposedly desperately needed lower income duplexes and created two large, toxic-material-leaking and highly illegal junk yards and there have been some spectacular crashes at the new traffic light intersection.I’ve witnessed two of of those crashes while sitting on my bicycle at the intersection waiting for the “walk” light. Not to mention driving one of the city's grocery stores (Econofoods) out of business during the long project delays and due to the difficult access to the

 

This isn't the first time Red Wing has tried to "develop" Spring Creek Road along Highway 61. More than a decade ago, the city removed three houses from the southwest side of the street in a strange attempt to create a commercial section where there had been homes on a street that has about as much commercial appeal as a back alley in an abandoned mining town. Obviously, this was another waste of local taxpayer money and one from which the city learned nothing.

This might be my favorite Red Wing "development" failure. Anderson Park was obviously someone's pipedream of a recreational attraction to the city and for the half-dozen people who use the lower park it really can be a special place to hide out, walk the dog, experience a little mildly natural Minnesota flora and fauna, or start a ride on the Cannon River bicycle trail. Clearly, someone thought that would be a big draw because a buttload of money was spent on this park. 

Just as clearly, that someone had no idea that regular maintenance would be an issue in an area and facilities that would see the kind of use the design implied. Maintenance is not a Red Wing city skill. City sidewalks go the entire winter without seeing a single attempt at snow removal. Water faucets in the few areas where there is some tourist and local traffic almost always remain "out of order" all summer. And this bathroom was massively outside of the city Public Works' capabilities. The city can't even manage placing and maintaining trash cans at the more obvious tourist attractions. A public bathroom on a bicycle trail? What a pipedream. This building has been closed and a public reminder of city incompetence for more than a decade.

The Old Main Street and Harbor area where all of the upcoming and ongoing development disaster is just beginning is a reminder of the city's maintenance lethargy, too. Believe it or not, there is a sidewalk buried under the snow in this picture and that sidewalk remained buried from January to April in 2021, while the city was convincing taxpayers to add even more maintenance to ignore with the newest development disaster. There is almost a mile of this expensive sidewalk that gets ignored by the city all winter, every winter.

Even the newest addition to the upcoming project, the traffic circle and harbor trail, that hasn't been in place for five years and, as you can see by the footprints in the snow, gets used in spite of the city's inability to make even the slightest effort to keep the sidewalks safe to use. You know that giant footbridge is going to be everything from an accidental deathtrap to a suicide launching pad and I'm sure the city will act surprised when the first city budget-crushing liability lawsuit is filed.

And my all-time favorite Red Wing boondoggle happened long before I arrived in Red Wing and, maybe, before we moved to Minnesota in '96. This retaining wall must have cost the city a half-million dollars or more and if it had a development purpose, it failed miserably. My picture doesn't convey how massive this retaining wall is. There are thousands of large retaining wall blocks in this thing and the lot it "protects" is idiotically small and impractical for any serious development. It is for sale, if you are interested, though. Beyond that, there is about 1/2 mile of marginal "condos" and apartments along this frontage road. The development cost to local taxpayers will take a couple centuries to recover. The city owns acres of undeveloped land and various abandoned "business" and industrial properties repossessed over the years due to unpaid taxes. In the right light, Red Wing could become the next great place for apocalypse or zombie movies: just add dead people and/or zombies.

In another burst of irrational optimism, in 2019 the city spontaneously decided to blow $3,655,200 (estimated cost and probably a fraction of the final bill) on a 2nd fire station on the sparsely populated west end of the village. The idea was that adding a dozen fire fighters and a multi-million dollar fire station would shorten the response time by about 5 minutes, at best. Curiously, there was a west end fire station that closed in the 1970s. That must have been a brief burst of actual conservative financial planning for the city that has since been solidly squashed by the "if you build it" nonsense. In a few years, this building will be one more monument to unrestrained municipal spending,
"irrational exuberance," and apathetic and uneducated taxpayers. Whoopee!

If this story and series of pictures does not make you want to hire Red Wing's City Council and the City "Engineer" for your next development project . . . good for you. Personally, with my money I wouldn't employ anyone associated with Red Wing's city government to run a kids' lemonade stand. 

So, with all of this insanity, why would anyone consider living in Red Wing, let alone moving there. There is one gigantic, overwhelming, massively impressive feature of Red Wing, Minnesota: the Red Wing branch of the Mayo Clinic. The majority of Red Wing's incoming citizens (and out-going, for that matter) are healthcare workers and the senior citizens and retirees they are here to serve. We come to Red Wing because of the incredibly high quality healthcare the Mayo Clinic provides to an otherwise very isolated and under-served area. Lose the Mayo and I'd bet half of us would have our houses and condos up for sale by the end of the first year. There are at least 100 places my wife and I would rather live, but none of them have anything near the quality of healthcare services of the Mayo Clinic. I know of at least another dozen couples, our age, in town who are here for exactly the same reason. Yeah, the Mississippi River valley is picturesque, but the weather sucks 10 months out of every year, and the working-age population are unskilled and uneducated and as racist and foolish as the January 6th Goober Rioters. A substantial portion, the overwhelming majority, of the new construction in town are apartments near the Mayo Clinic.  If that isn't a scary fact for the future of the village, you are either a fool (and highly qualified to serve on Red Wing's City Council) or someone who doesn't care what happens to the town in a decade or two when that big rat passing through the bull snake economy (aka "Boomers") dies off and the places is left with hundreds of expensive and empty condos and apartments and dozens of over-priced/over-sized housing units. It's going to be scary for someone, but not us. We'll be dead. I've been in the situation that the two or three generations behind us will be in before. In the 1970s, I bought a large, older home in Fremont, Nebraska in 1976. By 1978, the Nebraska farm economy had been crushed by Vietnam War-caused inflation and the town's major employers, ag-based manufacturing (like my employer), died like they had been shot in the heart. When we moved to Fremont, there were no more than a total of a half-dozen houses for sale in a 20,000 population town. When we were forced to sell after I was laid-off, there were hundreds of houses desperately up for sale. Not having any real attachment to the area was a big advantage for us. I sold the house for a substantial (for us, at the time) loss, but I got out without having to declare bankruptcy, suffer foreclosure, or being stuck with a house payment without employment for an extended period. So many people we knew went the other route, because Fremont was "home" to them and they didn't feel they had the luxury to abandon the place while the ship-jumping was good; or as good as it would get for the next 20 years or more. I have a strong sense of déjà vu these days in Red Wing. This time, however, I don't have my life savings tied up in a house. I don't have a young career and a young family to manage, but for those who do these should be very nervous times.

Post Mortem: I Just Wanted a “Family Day”

Monday 2/26/2018

My wife, Robbye, and I are having one of those classic “quiet days” after her day-long plan to drag me into the Cities for a day of being ignored by the kids, buying stuff, and waiting around for her visit to end stalled when she learned I had no interest in going. She tried the guilt trip, the anger trip, and the "I’m not talking to you” trip and we’re still in the last phase. She decided, yesterday, that she wanted to go into the Cities for a political meeting. Later, she decided she wanted to visit our daughter and her family before the meeting. Sometime after that, she started saying “we” when she described her plans and, this morning, I had to remind her that I had other plans for the day and had no interest in the 100 mile trip just so I could sit around being tolerated until she got back from the meeting. 

I’m just not into all of the family hassle any more. I’ve been everyone’s daddy for 60-some years and it hasn’t been particularly rewarding. I was a pretty terrible parent and only slightly worse as a grandparent. I tried, but I don’t have the necessary skills. I disappoint people on a constant basis, mostly because I do not understand them . . . ever. I don’t know what people want from me and I don’t know what I’m supposed to get out of most relationships. 

About the only line I’ve managed to draw in my life has been on funerals. Even that one gets crossed far too often. Once someone is dead, I’m convinced they no longer need anything from me and I would rather not attend funerals as a rule. I went to my step-mother and father’s funerals and those events were as baffling as being hit on the head from behind by a stranger. I don’t know why I was there or if anyone cared that I was. If my goal in life is to bring comfort to others, I’d just as soon they kill me and eat me for that purpose. 

Robbye and I are at the point in life where we are considering what we’d do if we were suddenly alone. She likes to think she’d do something independent, for the first time in her life. She imagines herself driving places towing a camper, a dog, a cat, and a house full of stuff. Or she might put all of the crap in a storage bin, where it will rot and be infested with mice, rats, and insects. The exploring part is the dream, though. I suspect she will muddle along in our Red Wing house for a year or so, get tangled up in some sort of home repair scam and lose a bucket of money, panic, and sell the house, camper, furniture, and the rest of our stuff for a huge loss and move into an assisted living facility. I like to think that I’d observe a reasonable period of mourning and hit the road. I’d probably sell the house to be sure I have nothing to come back to and simply disappear from my past life. 

The obvious directions are west or south: west coast or South America, that is. The past three years in Red Wing have made it pretty obvious that the “home” we thought we’d discovered and built is a myth. We’re about as established here as we were when we moved from Colorado to a rental house in Roseville in 1996. The “communities” that we imagined we were part of are all illusions. People say you aren’t a Minnesota resident until you are at least 3rd generation and, apparently, that is true. Likewise, once your kids no longer depend on you for support and sustainence, your relevance to their lives vanishes. That’s normal, if unexpected, and healthy for them. Sticking around to see if they might still need you is, however, insane. 

So, my wife’s dream of a “family day” is something she and we are going to have to get used to not having from here out. The kids don’t need us, probably don’t like us much, and get bored quickly when we are around. We always feel like we’re imposing when we visit them, their busy lives go on hold while they put up with us, and that’s about as satisfying as a pizza that has everything you don’t like sprinkled on top of the things you can just tolerate.

Facing Red Wing’s Reality

What is often called “optimism” is often delusion. In the case of the city of Red Wing, Minnesota the city’s historic planning for spontaneous, prosperous and strong growth has been a city delusion almost since the city’s founding. The Prairie Island Nuclear Plant went online in 1973. As you can see by the city’s population history, the city’s population jumped by about 30% between 1970 and 1980; mostly fueled by the power plant employees’ inflated salaries. The two reactors are slated to go off-line in 2033 and 2034, since Xcel has no plans to renew the 60 year licenses. The Treasure Island Resort and Casino opened in 1983, which provided another smaller spurt in the city’s population. Since 2000, the town’s population has been, essentially, flat at about 16,000 people and the city only added about 1,000 people between 1990 and 2000.

However, the city’s optimism has been fueled by drunken sailor optimism since the city’s inception in the 1850’s. In 1995, the city built a 222 acre high school complex capable of housing a lot more than the current 1,000 8th-12th grade students. Current demographics and population growth trends indicate that considerably less of the facility will be needed or used in the next few years. The city just finished “investing” $3M in the Sheldon Theater, a show place that has no more chance of providing taxpayers a return on their investment than Donald Trump has at competently reading a teleprompter. This past year (2017), the city council voted to add a 2^nd fire station to the west side of town, where it is desperately hoped the city’s growth might happen due to the minuscule commuter advantage to the Twin Cities. Over the past two decades, there have been several attempts to encourage some population growth on the west side of town with minimal results. You would think that a growth plan would assume and encourage some kind of mass transit to the Cities, like rail, but the city and Goodhue County both assume similar or increased car traffic in spite of obvious trends away from single-passenger vehicle commuting. When the Prairie Island power plant begins to shut down, it is reasonable to expect that a population roll-back similar to the 1970’s growth will occur and the city will be stuck with several expensive, oversized facilities and a drastically reduced tax base.

In an effort to reel-in as much property tax as possible, this tiny town has incorporated 41.19 square miles of the Mississippi River valley. As Google Maps aptly illustrates, very little of the City of Red Wing is “city.” About 6.6% of the city is water and at an average of 475 inhabitants per square mile practically a ghost town. If the city were as dense as the Twin Cities, one of the least dense cities in the nation, we’d be at around 1,800 people per square mile and would need only about 9 square miles of that 41.19 square mile city; which means at least 32 square miles is largely unoccupied but still requires the city services and resources.

All of that acquired territory was gathered when a small portion of that real estate (Prairie Island) brought large tax revenues. Fairly regularly, Xcel and the NRC do a little song and dance around the illegally stored spent fuel cask inventory and nuclear facility re-licensing. Some part of that dance routine occurs every seven years, with the latest one in 2015. Xcel does an ROI analysis at each approval, inspection, or maintenance interval with political, economic, and risk assessments at each turn. Renewables are becoming a large part of the company’s income with considerably less downside at risk. It shouldn’t be a surprise to hear that Xcel decides to begin to decommission Prairie Island rather than invest the millions necessary for the next refueling. The company has clearly stated that it “has no intention” of asking for another NRC license extension in 2033. Somewhere between now and 2033, 40-70% of Red Wing’s property tax base will vanish and with it a fair number of the highest paid residents in the area. Unless there is some miracle replacement for that revenue, property taxes will either skyrocket or Red Wing’s city services will take a huge hit along with the higher-than-typical city and county employee salaries.(Update: Looking at the 2020 Red Wing Salary Compliance Notice, you can choke on that evidence. ". . . effective January 1, 2020: City Council Administrator $148,616, Administrative Business Director $121,326.40, and Public Works Director $121,326.40." The Minnesota governor's salary is $127,000. It is more than safe to assume there are several >$100,000 salaries downstream for those top three.)

At the risk of being accused of being alarmist, I think Prairie Island’s closing is going to be an unrecoverable hit to the city of Red Wing. Based on the city’s sudden growth when the power plant was first installed, this chart is my estimate of what will happen to the population of Red Wing, Minnesota; depending on when Xcel decides to start shutting the plant down. This estimate only considers the effect on the city if just Prairie Island closes. (If you have Excel, you can play with my data on this spreadsheet.) Odds are, as the city’s tax base gets kicked in the ass by the largest property taxpayer the city will first try to shift the burden to other local industries. If that happens, more than just this one critical employer could vacate the premises. If that happens, those nasty looking downturns beginning around 2022, 2029, or 2033 will look a lot worse. If Xcel is followed out the door by BIC, Red Wing Shoes, or any of the other major employers the city could even be forced into bankruptcy.

Thanks in part to our current Bankruptcy King/President, we have a model of this kind of community catastrophe. In 1930, Atlantic City had a population of 66,000 citizens. In 1976, the voters legalized gambling. By 1990, the city had lost 28,000 citizens and after a brief faux-boom the city’s casinos (including Trump’s) began to close their doors, declare bankruptcy, and default on owed property taxes. Residents were left holding the bag and many of them were forced out of their homes by the city’s attempt to avoid defaulting on local government pensions, reducing costs, and downsizing the bureaucracy. If you don’t think this could happen to Red Wing and you are a local resident, you will keep your eyes tightly closed and wish for a miracle. If you are a realist, you have to be worried about the county and city’s extravagant spending habits and exorbitant civil service wages (and the resulting pension expenses).

What kind of “miracle” could prevent this small town exodus and economic downturn? I can’t think of an industry that could replace Xcel and Prairie Island, but it’s not hard to imagine a combination of Red Wing’s strong infrastructure, mass transportation, and internet entrepreneur-ship that could at least stem the tide. Red Wing has affordable 21st Century internet service, which is unusual for Minnesota and the upper Midwest. There is still a train station and AMTRAK service to Red Wing, although it is too unpredictable, slow, and infrequent to be considered much more than a placeholder until (and if) real infrastructure improvements happen.

The real miracle would be a sudden burst of realistic thinking by the City Council, school board, and local residents. The current thinking is “spend it while we have it,” but that’s not what’s happening. The city government is spending a whole lot of money it doesn’t have as most of that spending is financed with bonds and debt and there is little-to-no municipal or county savings for the rainy days that are sure to be coming. It’s easy to imagine that if Red Wing began to build up a reserve of cash for the future, current residents would whine that if the city can afford reserve funds it can afford to reduce taxes. Americans, especially faux-conservatives, are really lousy when it comes to acting fiscally conservative. We are the most timid nation on the planet when it comes to science, rational thinking, education, foreign relations, and pretty much anything that might take more than a sentence to explain, but we are fearless when it comes to long term debt. I can’t decide if its because many Americans either think their gods will save them or if they just don’t care about their offspring; or both. Whatever the cause, it’s not a good trait over the long haul.

How Do You Resolve This?

Almost all of my life, Republican presidents have made incredible messes that they left for Democrats to clean up. The worst were Nixon, Reagan, Bush I & II, and, now, Trump. Nixon took a failing war and doubled-down on it along with making the USA a debtor nation for the first time in the country’s history. Nixon left the country divided, distrustful, more racist and more unjust than it was before he took office, and broke. Reagan was a knee-jerk reaction to a dose of reality President Carter administered to the nation and he set the country back at least two generations on so many levels it would take a book (The book I recommend is The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America by William Kleinknecht.) to detail all of his betrayals, corruption, and incompetence. Reagan tossed so many trillions into the military-industrial toilet that he made the national debt an international affair in 1983. Bush I just continued the stupid policies of his predecessor, including the amazing cast of nitwits who surrounded Reagan. There was a reason Clinton’s “it’s about the economy, stupid” resonated so soundly. Unfortunately, stupid has been breeding like rats since 1992 and they can’t even spell “economy” let alone comprehend any aspect of economics.

The only saving grace regarding that trio of idiots and traitors was that my generation was not responsible for their existence and power. Bush II changed all of that. He was the worst of my generation. Every step of his life was a train wreak: personally, ethically, and intellectually. He brought Reagan’s pack of vicious idiots back to Washington, bumbled the Katrina response, fumbled the country into two endless, multi-trillion dollar wars, and deregulated the banksters until they crashed the world’s economy. Now Trump, another of the worst from my generation, is dragging the country closer to fascism every day. He has made the country a laughing stock, which could be a good thing, and alerted our allies to how divided, incompetent, and alienated the American public has become. Trump is a waving flag telling the world, “Americans are fools, we are arrogant and incompetent, we are self-absorbed, and we are unstable and dangerous.”

In 2016, I ran for local political office; for city council. There were several excellent people running for those offices (and a couple of not-so-excellent faux-conservative wannabes), including two young Red Wing citizens with big ideas about how to move Red Wing into the 21st Century. At the national level, the election seemed surreal, with neither candidate attracting much positive attention. Our US Representative race was between a nitwit hate radio Republican, Jason Lewis, and a Democrat, a woman, who had a long history of public service and competence. While Minnesota voted for Clinton, the outstate idiots in the state went Republican for practically every office. My country and hometown voted for Trump and Jason Lewis. To that point, I had no idea where I had moved, or who my neighbors were.

I lost my election, but because I spent the last two months of the campaign being far more involved in my wife’s cancer treatment than the election results I had almost no emotional connection to that “loss.” As the years have moved us further into Trump’s world of fools and traitors, I am even less attached to or interested in what happens in Red Wing and Goodhue County or even Minnesota. That is not natural for me. I have been politically active and interested since the 1960’s. Some part of me still wants to care, if just out of habit, but I mostly don’t. For the 18 years we lived in Little Canada, Ramsey County, Minnesota were considered our house and home to be the same entity. In fact, my wife and I are very fond of our house, but we’re ambiguous about our Red Wing, Goodhue County, Minnesota home. We are constantly considering flipping the place and heading west toward civilization; if we could identify an actual civilization in this declining empire.

One of my fellow failed 2016 candidates packed up his family, his businesses, and himself and left town a year after the election. He might not publically admit that the reason he left was that he felt his Red Wing neighbors were dangerously ignorant and vicious people, but that is essentially what he admitted to me. If I were in his position, I would do the same thing. If I had young children, I would not want them anywhere near neo-Nazi Trump voters. Our old home country and city overwhelmingly voted for Democrat candidates, including Clinton. We felt like we had jumped away from the table and into the stove. The majority of our old neighbors saw through Trump and Lewis as easily as though those two con artists were fine crystal. Our new neighbors fell for the con and carefully took aim and shot off their own feet and the feet of their children.

A candidate is supposed to represent all of the people in his district and the country. Republicans don’t believe this and, like Jason Lewis, they only speak to and for “their kind,” but Democrats and any elected official of good conscience have always given voice to the concept of trying to work for everyone; even if they failed or were disingenuous. To this point in my life, that would have been my intention also, but no more. Now, after Trump and Lewis, I am clinging to the barest capacity to care what happens to Trump voters. Because of that, I don’t have the slightest inclination to submit myself to either a political campaign or the misery of weekly city council meetings if I were to “win” an election in this community. This is the time in my life where I could apply what’s left of my energy and talents to working for my country and community. I just wish I had one of those that I believed in enough to make that effort seem worthwhile.

The Rat’s Rules: #5 "The first rats to leave the ship are the ones who can swim."

The Rat's Eye Business Rule #5: Stuff ends. Eventually, everything and everyone dies. Anyone who uses the words “forever,” “in perpetuity,” “to the end of time,” or any phrase or word similar to those in relation to anything human is clueless about time, death, decay, and entropy. Businesses, and in particular corporations, are designed to be easy to kill and for the killers to get away punishment-free.

Businesses often get shutdown to protect the people with the most money and power. The bigger the business, the more protection provided to the perpetrators. The people who did the work, created the products and services, produced the products and services, and who believed in whatever "mission" the business pretended to have get sacrificed. It's the way life in this country has worked for 200+ years, with only a few moments of interruption. Corporations whine that "employees aren't loyal these days." Interpret that to mean, "You people are too smart to buy into my bullshit."

Somewhere out there in the web is a reprint of a great speech Andy Grove (one of Intel’s founders) gave to a collection of business assholes where he explained why employees did not owe those rich and powerful men one ounce of loyalty. His recommendation to employees was to consider their employers as one of many possible customers and to treat their own careers as independent businesses. One absolute rule for the self-employed is to never limit your business to a single customer. Likewise, an employee who commits all of his output to an employer is destined to be disappointed and, probably, unemployment or worse. An employer deserves exactly the same loyalty as that employer gives to employees; nor more and probably slightly less.

In my 50+ years of employment, the majority of my past employers are gone. Now that McNally Smith College of Music has joined those ranks, seven of the twelve employers on my resume have vanished. One, ex-Fortune 100 Guidant is on record as Forbe's #2 "Worst Mergers in History." Another Fortune 500 train-wreak, Telectronics, would have resulted in criminal FDA prosecution if Clinton had been a fraction of the Democrat some mis-remember him being. Two of the small corporations on my resume were absorbed by larger firms; one for a profit and one sold for patents and equipment. The rest just disappeared without a trace. Not a one of those failed companies were well managed, but the mismanagers were all grossly overpaid for their incompetence. Most of them were grossly over-compensated for blowing up the companies they mismanaged. The fortunes created by some of those golden parachutes could have solved Greece’s economic problems.

Here's what I learned from my first experience, back in 1972, with one of those companies. My tech-mentor, L.A. (Arnold) Stevenson, a high school dropout/genius Air Farce-trained electronics tech who is still the hands-down best educator I have ever met, "The first rats to leave the ship are the ones who can swim." That lesson taught me that the day to start looking for work was the day I got hired to a new job. That habit really came in handy when I started my own businesses. 

There is an obvious reason for that, too. The people who stick it out to the bloody end either feel they have no other good option or are so limited or incompetent that they don't have a better option. The ones who bail at the first sign of self-destruction are those who know they can find as good or better employment elsewhere. As Andy Grove infamously told us all, "Your career is your business, and you are its CEO." You are also your business' most important customer and everything you do in your career/business should be designed to first serve that obligation. In the last 20 years of my own career, I finally learned that it was time to leave when I stopped improving myself at work. That means when the resources to make yourself more marketable dry up, you should jump ship.

I didn’t stick around for the bloody end of any of the companies I worked for, but I got damn close in my first engineering job. The first time that company crashed, I stayed until I’d been asked to layoff every one of my techs and mechanics; then they laid me off just before Xmas (sound familiar?). Six months later, that company rehired me as a contractor which, eventually, turned into a management job. The next time their market collapsed, I was the first out the door; leaving my employees and friends with a little more job security and a big warning notice that “the end is near.” One of my best friends tried to stick it out to the bloody end and when he was laid off the Reagan economy was in full recession and there were NO tech jobs to be had in Nebraska. He died of a massive heart attack at 35 an unemployed year later. That was also a life lesson for me.

A lesson I learned the hard way from two of my defunct small company employers was “Never invest more of yourself in a business than the owners (or the people who profit the most) are investing.” For the last 15 years of my career, I regularly turned down management positions because I know enough about myself to know that my loyalty to the people who work for me will override my common sense and I will violate this rule. I will try to drag a dead horse over a mountain, even if I see the executives sitting on the damn horse while I try to move it. The simple solution to that problem is to avoid horses/management altogether. I can’t “fix” me, but I can sure as hell put some fences around my options.

Another thing I learned from Arnold was that I never wanted to be an employer. Everyone who has ever worked for me did so as an independent contractor. I don’t need the responsibility, the people who have worked for me didn’t need to be trained to be dependent on me, and I have always been too interested in too many things to want to be tied down to one business model or customer base.

I worked, weekends and nights, as an independent contractor for Arnold and he paid me about 10x what I made on an hourly rate with my day job. He constantly reminded me that he was my sole customer and that was a bad thing. That spurred me into doing a lot of electronic design work which led to my first product “invention” and a royalty check that saved my family a few years later when I was laid-off and near broke. 

Postscript November 2022: One of the big quarter-flipping winners of the past two decades has been Elon Musk. Purely by luck, his first dotcom was one of those 90's train wrecks, Zip2, that was foolishly acquired for a buttload of cash by the late-not-so-great Compaq. From there a sketchy online bank. X.com, which was merged with Musks' fascist buddy, Peter Theil, and turned into  Paypal, which was bought for a hilarious amount of money by eBay, making two of the most dangerous, most idiotic lucky fumblers into billionaires right when Republicans were eliminating the hyper rich from tax burdens/responsibilities. About the time those two were lucking into their fortunes, the people who were tossing money mindlessly into anything with a dotcom tail started damming up the waterfall of stupid cash, leaving the lucky ones who skated under the wire to take advantage of that timid moment in investment. 

Luck and management skill rarely go together and Musk, in late 2022 is demonstrating that fact. Immediately after buying Twitter, little Elon laid off 7500 Twitter employees with the finesse of a rural northern Minnesota lumberjack set loose in a national forest. Now, of course, he's trying to lure some of them back, but the exodus he began with his incompetent mismanagement "style" is resulting in more rats jumping ship; that includes a bunch of Twitter's most critical management people who are getting out while the getting is good. What do you want to bet many of those people will be recruiting ex-Twitter talent to create Twitter's next round of competition? Having voided their contracts, Musk will have a tough time enforcing anything resembling a non-compete.

Red Wing Is Bad for My Health

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

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

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

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

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

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

Possibly worst of all, in 2016 Trump got 55% of the Goodhue County vote (37% Clinton and 3 other right wing “parties” split the rest of the county). Jason Lewis—a self-declared misogynist, racist (to the point of advocating the return of slavery), homophobic, xenophobic, anti-public education, anti-science regressive—defeated another clearly superior-in-every-way Democratic candidate, Angie Craig, without a platform, without an agenda (other than being against everything), and without a clue. by an overall slim 2% margin but a considerably larger margin in Goodhue County. Lewis advocates tax policies designed to expand economic inequality, eliminating national healthcare, and a variety of failed 1980’s pro-1% policies that even the dumbest economist would stay away from. 

So, the end result of retiring from the Cities to Red Wing has been boredom, loneliness, about 30 pounds of weight gain, and a dramatic loss in social, educational, and recreational opportunities. More than half of my neighbors are regressive, racist, uneducated, and proud of their white entitlements. In all, I’d call this a failed experiment. I suspect Red Wing doesn’t want me and I’m not sure I’ll be able to look at this place the same ever again.