When Do You Fold?

1/21/2/14
As much to tweak the VW assholes in Albuquerque as anything, I’ve been running an ad to sell the damn RV for the last four weeks. I’ve had a couple of calls, but nobody serious. More than one Craig’s Lister took it on himself to berate me for calling my pile-of-crap Winnebago a “good deal” as a “handyman’s special” at $20,000. I understand the sentiment, but it’s worth what someone will pay for it and, somehow, Winnebago Rialta prices are pretty outrageous. There is a company cynically named “Rialta Heaven” that regularly asks insane prices, $30,00-40,000, for exactly our RV model. According to their website, they get it.

Sunday night, someone called my bluff. A guy from Phoenix called and offered me $17,000 cash for the RV and said he’d be in New Mexico tomorrow if I was ready to sell. Unfortunately, I’m not. First, we’re living in the damn thing and I have to find alternative housing if we’re going to give this pile of crap away. Second, it’s our primary transportation and the one thing I have not seen in New Mexico is a half-decent vehicle for a reasonable price. Reasonable prices are pretty common, but New Mexico drivers are astoundingly bad and pretty much everything older than an edible sandwich has been dinged up pretty good. Third, the title is still in Minnesota.

If you followed this idiot’s retirement journey since spring, you know I wasted a whole summer working on this vehicle. We’re into it for about $25,000 in actual investment, but dozens, maybe hundreds, of hours in sweat equity. I know, I know, all of that was about as brainless as buying ENRON stock on the penny market, but it happened. I did it because I fell for the bullshit I was getting about folks claiming to have enjoyed 100,000-150,000 miles of trouble-free travel in these damn things. I did it because I really liked the concept and wanted to believe VW was an actual car manufacturer. Pretty early in the refurb process, it became obvious that Winnebago was not a real anything. Their welds suck. Their choice of steel is pretty much the formula for “instant rust.” Their assembly process is based on the belief that hot glue is the ultimate fastener. Winnebago’s engineering is laughable. The company’s “customer service” is a nasty joke. Everything you would think a company based in Iowa would be, Winnebago is. Once I get going, though, I don’t stop to think about anything. I ride that way, too.

I’m not going any longer. While we have come to a stasis point in the repair process, the only “go” I would consider doing in this RV would be the shortest line back to Minnesota where I would park the damn thing, clean it up, and sell it to the first person with cash. It’s my wife’s money, but if it were up to me I’d take any amount of cash to remove this thing from my property. It is simply painful to look at. It reminds me of too many stupid decisions, too many stressful nights, too many hours on the cell phone trying to find a competent mechanic or an unobtainable part, and pretty much no good moments remain. So, it’s up for sale and I’m taking all bidders. I got one last night and two today. I suspect we’re going to be free of all things VW before the end of January.

Officially, the Rialta belongs to Robbye. The majority of the purchase was something she wanted to do with money she inherited. Since she’s not involved in repairing the thing, she doesn’t have all of those negative moments to dwell on. She rarely drives it, so the hours I’ve spent behind the wheel wondering what will fall off of the damn thing next are mine only. She’s pretty much an uninvolved passenger on this trip, so she gets up every morning expecting to be able to do something fun; regardless of what I’m going to be doing to make that happen. We are clearly on two completely different trips here. I’d trade in a heartbeat, but that’s not an option.

Whatever we buy next will be a different kind of decision.

#74 The Biology of A City (2003)

All Rights Reserved © 2003 Thomas W. Day

Imagine that you are a terrorist.  Your boss, an elitist ruling class millionaire, ex-playboy, hands-off style manager, tells you to go to America and bomb "the" World Trade Center.  You've never been . . .  anywhere.  You don't know New York from New Mexico.  Or New York City's World Trade Center from any of the two dozen other World Trade Centers scattered around the country.  Doing a web search, somehow you stumble upon St. Paul, Minnesota's World Trade Center and you aim for that facility.  Knowing even less about American habits, you pick a Saturday for your grand attack on "the Imperialist State." 

Since a couple of the September 11th terrorists found St. Paul to be a good place to learn to fly passenger jets, it's unlikely that the above scenario could ever happen.  Unless the terrorists were looking for a secret place to make a practice run.  Nobody would ever mistake downtown St. Paul for a major hub of any kind of economic or social activity.  The city is a tomb, especially on weekends.

If St. Paul's World Trade Center were bombed on Saturday, the news would hit the presses no sooner than 9:00AM on Monday.  The loss of downtown St. Paul would not become an inconvenience until . . . sometime.  Probably.  Maybe.

Like at least 50 cities in the United States, St. Paul is cursed with the worst of all municipal handicaps; St. Paul is the Minnesota's state capitol.  In my personal experience, I've noticed that becoming a gathering place for politicians and civil service drones is practically a municipal poison pill.  From Sacramento, CA to Albany, NY the evidence is consistent and conclusive; to kill a community's vitality you only have to stuff the core with a state capitol building. 

That is just one of St. Paul's terminal illnesses, though.  Sometime near the turn of the last century, St. Paul decided to become a union town.  Coupling labor unions with politicians and civil serpents is the kind of thing that gives South American cult cloning a bad name.  It's the kind of social experiment that has driven intelligence from most rural communities.  Put the town idiots in charge of the town and everyone with a lick of sense gets out of Dodge on the first bus.

On the basis of his non-performance as St. Paul's mayor, Minnesota shipped Norm Coleman to the U.S. Senate.  Coleman sunk tons of taxpayer money into a variety of Simpsons-inspired debacles, from the public funding of a pro sports arena (the Xcel Center) to a variety of badly conceived and even more incompetently accomplished business and government buildings.  In the end, downtown St. Paul is even more empty and lifeless and St. Paul taxpayers are even further in debt.  That's the kind of performance that warrants a Republican political promotion in America today. 

Like pretty much every overstuffed city in the country, St. Paul is reeling from the current Republican recession.  Whatever income sources the city may have had are dried up and blowing in the winds of winter.  So the clever Powers That Be are forced to find creative new sources of income.  So far their creativity has been limited to increasing the fines on parking violations on downtown streets.  These social engineering wizards most likely live and shop in the suburbs, where parking is always free, so they shouldn't be blamed for missing the obvious result of their actions: screw anyone silly enough to venture downtown and no one goes downtown.

Since there is absolutely no human activity visible in the downtown area, the city cops have nothing to do but to stake out parking meters and issue citations with floating-decimal precision.  I recently received a citation that was issued precisely on the minute of the meter's expiration.  An observer watched the cop stand by the meter for five minutes waiting for the flag to pop.  The citation was written and torn from the cop's book and heading for my windshield before the meter expired.  Now that's government efficiency in . . .  action?

Obviously, reducing the government overstaffing in light of the city's lack of need is not an option.  Governments always grow, otherwise how could self-important government  management justify their inflated salaries?  But if the city is reducing how long can it be before the city government has to start shrinking?  In fact, the city is increasing the free parking spaces for government employees, at the expense of available parking for real human beings.  Currently, a solid three blocks of one street is dedicated to free city employee parking.  That's not enough, so the city has purchased a privately owned lot and is converting it to a parking structure for the ever-growing cast of under-skilled, over-paid, over-staffed city employees.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, I volunteered to chase coffee during a work break.  Since we were smack in the middle of downtown St. Paul, I figured it would be a two block walk, tops.  After forty minutes of searching, I found an open, but empty, Marshall Fields store with a Starbucks.  On my trip I past no less than four downtown coffee shops and not one of those stores had Saturday hours.  In fact, the Marshall Fields was the only live downtown business that afternoon.  Drug stores, convenience stores, shoe stores, restaurants, banks, gift shops, and every other business struggling to survive in downtown St. Paul were all closed on Saturday. 

One of my associates joked that if the studio were in Minneapolis we'd probably have a coffee shop next door.  It's worse than that.  Little Canada, my dinky hometown, has a couple of coffee shops that are open seven days a week.  St. Paul, Minnesota's state capital, home to a zillion civil serpents, and not much else, has nothing going on at any given moment. 

Still, on a Saturday when the streets were largely abandoned and businesses were closed or as empty as a Kansas pasture, the St. Paul meter maids were lurking the streets, tagging the rare parked vehicle, and doing their part to keep the city streets empty and the businesses unprofitable.  My tax dollars at work. 

June, 2003

Predicting 2015

The 2014 election is about on us. In less than two months the nation will decide if it wants to survive and thrive or shrivel into a neo-fascist feudal state. I have never been able to read the minds of my fellow citizens and this year is no different. There is no shortage of Teatards in every state and they are voters, if nothing else. Teabaggers will wander to their local poll places and vote their emotions as if they were actual thoughts. That probably accounts for about 25-30% of all Americans. The rest of us? Maybe, maybe not.

 

On average, Americans do not vote. We pretend its because we are too proud or brilliant to pick the "lessor of two evils," but in fact those non-voters are just lazy; mentally and physically. If the usual suspects show up for this mid-term election, we'll end up with a Republican/Teabag House and, possibily, an even dumber Senate. If that happens, put your money anywhere but in the US.

 

In my 66 years, there has been no fiscal conservative Republican in office, regardless of how they label themselves. They are the party of "borrow and spend" and when it comes to oil companies, wars, corporate welfare, and giving away the future to the lazy, unproductive, anti-democratic idle rich Republicans will spend the future to party today. Without exception. So, when 2016 turns into a "mandate" for the Teatards and other Republicans, the country is going back into the dumpster where Bush and Cheney left it and the dollar is going to become worthless. If you have any ideas on where an old American with no language skills and only a few years left to live his retirement can hide cash and his physical self, I'd like to hear about it.

What We Get from Our Monopoly

A while back, I decided to try to upgrade my godawful Comcast service to something that might approach the 35MPS communications speeds I’m supposed to be getting for my $58/month. Since I dumped my telephone provider and went to an Internet-only service with the only option in Little Canada (and Ramsey County), Comcast, I’ve paid for 9-35MPS service and received something more along the lines of 2MPS download/500kPS upload. (Yes, I check it regularly.) I had better internet service in Missouri, Texas, and New Mexico state park campgrounds than what I get hard-wired into my home. After looking at the “rental options” and the screwing I’d get from Comcast if I decided to try to get that monopoly to provide something resembling service, I did some research, talked to a Comcast tech I caught at my local coffee shop, and bought a 3.0 modem on eBay.

Wednesday, I tried to install the new modem. I called ahead to get a “direct number” for Comcast’s “modem initialization” procedure, charged up the cell phone, and unhooked the old RCA modem and installed the new one. When I called the new number, I immediately discovered I was making an international transaction. My best bet is that I was talking to someone in India. The phone connection was at least 80% THD and the “technician” was a woman who couldn’t understand me any better than I could understand her. 45 minutes later, still no connection. I gave up and we decided to reinstall the old modem. She couldn’t get that to work, either. She sent me to a “supervisor” who was unable to make a service reservation. The supervisor sent me to someone else who, at least, spoke recognizable English. Three hours of phone tag, “please hold for . . . ,” trying the same things with the same lack of success, and non-stop incompetence and I’m exactly where I was three hours earlier, except older, more pissed off, and even more disgusted with Comcast.

The end result of all of this was that I had an appointment for 10AM on Thursday for a tech visit who would come and “fix” the damage done by the phone “customer service.” Supposedly, a supervisor will “credit” my account for the first four attempts to initialize the new modem and inability to return my account to the original modem. I’m sure that’s about as likely as Comcast’s ability to provide service anywhere near the premium they ask for their mediocre technology.

An hour later, my internet service automatically rejuvenates itself. When I tried to call what passes for Comcast “service” to cancel the tech visit, I’m back on hold for a half hour while the non-US-based “customer service” person tries to find evidence of the service call so she can cancel it. My cell phone battery died before she managed to accomplish that task. I decided to make a trip to the Comcast office in Roseville to see if a local number was available. There were at least 30 people waiting in line for a variety of services from paying late bills to turning in equipment to picking up equipment to, like me, hoping for a live person to solve Comcast-related problems. An hour and a half later, I am at the counter and the guy has no idea who I should call and I just turn in the old modem for credit. At this point, I’m ready to try retirement without an ISP or home phone. I can always go back to catching up on my email at the local coffee shop.

After giving up on the local solution, I decided to give the new modem one more try. This time, I luck into an English-speaking customer service representative. She looks up my account, sees that I have a field tech appointment for Thursday, notices that my area’s service has been disabled for most of the day due to a neighborhood-wide problem, tells me there is nothing she can do to initialize the new modem, and wishes me luck with Thursday’s tech appointment.

I decided to use what energy I had left examining Comcast’s competition, CenturyLink. Big surprise, another half hour on hold waiting for the customer service representative who “appreciates your business.” I am a little surprised that the lady who finally answers my call appears to be English-speaking. She gives me the long winded sales pitch, offering all sorts of crap I don’t need, want, or want to hear about. I just want to know if CenturyLink can provide service to my house (Yes, at 12MPS max.) and when (No sooner than September 17, almost two weeks away.). It’s almost impossible to stop this lady from signing me up and I escape with a promise that I’ll think about it and call back.

I have thought about it. What I’ve decided is that we’ll get buy with Comcast until we sell the house. There is no chance that I’ll consider buying another home in Ramsey County or any other location “served” by Comcast. In fact, I might be disinclined to buy a home again, since it’s obvious that this country has decided to give itself over to the TBTF corporations, which means that even a smart place with local service providers will eventually be overwhelmed (Like Minneapolis was.) by AT&T, Comcast, or Qwest. Then, I’ll want to move again.

For a state that is so arrogantly proud of its “blue” and high-tech status, we are amazingly complacent about the awful service we receive from our communications monopolies. I think the only thing we’ve proved about “bigger is better” corporate acquisitions is that bigger is always incompetent, expensive, and corrupt. At this point, it’s pretty tough to remember that it wasn’t that long ago that Bell Telephone was broken up to provide better and cheaper service. It worked, for a bit, but the assholes who mismanage technology, who own the mythical “liberal media,” and wholly own one entire political party desperately dislike competition and the “miracle of the market” bullshit only exists in Libertarian fairy tales. Capitalists do not like capitalism and once they have the spare cash available to start corrupting the system to prevent competition, they do. History trumps economic philosophy every time.

It is disgusting that, due to Google’s experiment, Kansas City is kicking the Cities’ asses in the communications department. If we can’t do better than Kansas City, we’re aren’t even a “cold Omaha.” We’re just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies who’ve inbred so often we can’t read the handwriting on the wall.

#73 A Change Had to Come (2003)

All Rights Reserved © 2003 Thomas W. Day

Six years ago, when I first decided that I needed to understand enough HTML to put together the Rat's Eye View so that I could blow off some political, social, business, and sports talk steam, I didn't have a goal in mind for this website.  It's purpose was exactly what I advertised it as, a place for me to rant.  No financial objectives, no hopeful political revolution, no magic bullet for the billions of flaws in American business or the god-awful excuse that passes for business education, and no idea how to remove professional sports from the center focus of our failed Fifth Estate.  I just wanted to be able to speak my mind and see it somewhere other than on my a piece of paper puking from my own printer.  With a lofty goal like that in mind, how could I fail?

During the days when most of the Rat Rants were written, I was confined in an eight-by-six cubicle, employed, sequentially, by two of the most cold blooded organizations that I'd ever imagined could exist.  Both jobs involved supporting medical devices, no less.  After a lifetime of aiming myself at a misshapen career building music equipment, recording music, playing music, riding and writing about motorcycles, and contemplating my growing stomach, I was making more money than I'd ever expected doing practically nothing.  Especially, doing nothing worthwhile, honorable, memorable, or respectable.  Hence, the Rat was born. 

One of those two miserable companies was pretty much ripped apart from within.  Apparently, it was doing so much patient damage that even the employees had enough and the company began to sprout whistle blowing leaks as quickly as a new Republican administration.  For the same reasons, too.  The FDA closed the doors and I, being slow on the uptake and particularly ignorant, made the awful decision to try yet another medical company in the inane hope that it wasn't medicine that contaminated companies but the usual crappy executives. 

Wrong again.  The second company was such a carbon copy of the first that I couldn't tell one SNAFU-system from the other without prescriptions lenses.  A little examination of the industry finally taught me that the corruption starts at the core of the business -- with overpaid, arrogant, not particularly skilled doctors -- and extends all the way through the industry's suppliers to the money source, insurance companies and Medicare.  For a decade, medicine made a run at replacing the Military-Industrial Complex as the nation's worst national security threat, but our current Commander-in-Thief has sacrificed the economy so they can both coexist profitably. 

The Rat became my sole line of personal ethics defense and you, my tiny group of readers, were my support group.  To be honest and fair, Old age and avarice had a grip on me, too.  For the first time, I began to worry about retirement, security, and a collection of concepts that I have damn little control of in the best of times.  Trapped in a flawed logic loop, the only time I allowed myself to peek out of the closet was in the Rat Rants. 

But I turned out not to be dead yet and I got better.  But not before getting a whole lot worse in early 2001. 

Since then, either the cubicle quit me or I quit it.  I make a living, barely, as a freelance recording engineer and maintenance tech, a part-time music school instructor, and a motorcycle safety instructor for the State of Minnesota.  Like about 40% of the country, I'm "under-employed," uninsured, and bouncing around slightly above the poverty line.  Unlike 90-some-percent of working Americans, I love my work and look forward to every day.  Every moment of every day. 

I set my own schedule.  When I get pissed at "management," I tell them to screw off and don't work for that particular organization again.  I'm putting in more hours than I ever did as an employee, making a small fraction of my old "hourly wage," and haven't taken off more than a day in a row in almost two years.  I feel younger, stronger, faster, leaner, and more adaptable than I have since . . . ever.  I might be broke tomorrow, but today I'm alive.

Here's the point of all this, though.  For several years, I poured my heart into writing the Rat Rants, trying to link and publicize the website, and hoping to put some light on the cesspool that our country and culture appears to be circling. Obviously, from the lack of hits the site has taken in its history, I couldn't hit a barn with a baseball bat.   I've enjoyed the notes I've received from you, my friends, but pretending that this is a regular, occasionally noticed "opinion column" is a fantasy I can't maintain.  Wanting to be a writer and a critic and actually being one are not the same thing. 

I write because if I don't, I implode.  But I don't appear to have a real author's drive to be read.  It's the same for my  music, I do it for myself and if someone else enjoys it I'm amazed and suspect that person's musical taste may be somewhat deranged. 

On my dinky NEC laptop, alone, I've piled up almost 60 unpublished Rats and I hack at them every week to see if I can turn them into something that makes sense.  Usually, I can't.  I find myself less and less able to make sense of our culture.  The ones that make the most sense are, to be honest, more profane than I'd like.  When I write my best stuff, I'm unrestrained from calling a turd a "turd."  The goal and intent of the Rat Rants was to entertain and inform, not to offend. 

That, my friends, is not getting the job done.  Business and politics in 2003 are so entwined that there is no inoffensive way to describe their relationship.  If I want to keep writing about them, I have to tell it the way I see it.

Fortunately for me, I don't have to deal with it nearly as much as some of you.  I can hang out with musicians and motorcyclists and pretend that we are still a democracy and that I'm not living in the world's all time "have and have-not" disaster zone.  Like most Americans, I can close my eyes and let my preoccupations wash away the pain. 

Because of all this stuff, I'm going to close the Yahoo Rat's Eye group, let my website name expire this next year, and get on with the other bits of life.  I expect keep my AT&T Rat's Eye page alive and I hope all of you will stay in contact.  Check in, occasionally, if you have some time to waste, and see what I've been holding back.  The Rat isn't gone altogether, I'm just not paying InsaneDomains.com to be here. 

Take care of yourselves and try not to take the world as seriously as it warrants.  If there is a god out there, she has a seriously warped sense of humor.  We might as well laugh along with the joke.  It's mostly on us. 

May 2003

#72 Turning a Page (2003)

All Rights Reserved © 2003 Thomas W. Day

In the summer of 2001, my excuse for randomly producing Rat Rants went cold.  At the end of August, I quit my Fortune 1000 job and wandered into the world of unemployment and, hopefully, self-employment.  A year later, self-employment is a reality, although an intermittently paying reality, and my exposure to management is minimal.  Hence, my inspiration for Rants has been stunted.

At the moment, I'm actually relishing being out of the Rat race.  Of course, at 54, it's possible I may be further out of the race and so far off of the road that I've become irrelevant.  In some ways, it was the fear of obsolescence that drove me to the decision to leave my cube life.  In my 54 long and disillusioned years on this planet, I've found that confronting fear is not enough.  I usually have to dive into the pit with whatever I'm afraid of and see how sharp its teeth really are.  And so I am in the pit with uncertain income and it's a lot less scary than I'd imagined.  But it pays about as well as I'd expected.

Last night, I had a dream that actually stuck with me through my morning coffee.  I'm likely to misinterpret it in this Rant, but it's my dream and my column, so you'll have to suffer with your Jungian or Freudian disagreement.  I dreamed that I was in the military, but still working for a manager from my last job who I actually liked and respected (imagine that!). 

The two of us were all trudging up a staircase, not knowing where we were going or what we'd be doing at the top, when he reminded me that "it is inappropriate for an enlisted man, to be walking ahead of an officer."

I asked him, "If we were walking on to a battlefield, would you still want to be in front?"  He replied, "That is an inappropriate question."  This guy actually uses that kind of language in normal conversation, which is why I remembered the dream so clearly.

Believe it or not, that must have been my version of a nightmare because I woke up at that point.  I, clearly, lead a sheltered life.  After realizing that I wasn't going to fall back to sleep, I was stuck trying to figure out what the damn dream meant, or what it meant to me.  My personal irritation with the dream's concept was that his officer's "credential," not his skill, courage, or knowledge, was what gave him a position at the head of the staircase.  And, of course, I was pissed because I knew he'd be climbing the stairs too slowly.  I don't usually follow people up stairs, because I take them two at a time.  I get bored easily.

After exercising his leadership, away he went, in front of me and just as cluelessly as I'd been when I was in front.  In the dream, there were only two of us in this military column, which simplifies the symbolism.  Even my subconscious knows that I need simple and direct instruction.

Much of my Rat Ranting MBA-directed ire is based on the kind of academic aristocracy that I'd experienced from my last two employers.  Many of our large and stodgy employers have taken the position that college degrees are evidence of competence, not inheritance and lack of necessity or stunted adolescent inspiration.  Now that the bloom has fallen off of the last ten years of economic "irrational exuberance," I wonder if this mistaken belief will be revisited.  If we want to jump-start the economy, again, the way it was cranked up in the early 1990s, talent will have to be more important than pedigree. 

A visit to any major state or private university will make it obvious, even to HR drudges, that the majority of the kids in school past age eighteen are rich, idle, privileged and clueless.  With an average cost of $50,000 per year, it's pretty obvious that average folks aren't sending their kids to college, unless there's a scholarship involved. 

At the University of Minnesota, school officials are campaigning local apartment complexes to encourage them to cater to college students.  Because there are more kids in school than the college can provide for?  Nope.  Because the kids whose parents can afford university life have grown up with their own bedrooms (and telephones, entertainment systems, Jacuzzis, and Porches) and they're not willing to share a dorm room at this self-important point in their lives.  So, working-class folks are being forced out of their hard-to-find apartments to accommodate housing for multinational children of the ruling class. 

It's happening all over the country.  An invasion of snobby apartment snatchers.

I've said this before and will most likely repeat myself at a later date, anyone can do well in college if college is the only thing that person has to do.  Between the dumbing-down of the education system and the high-tech availability of everything from test questions to Masters thesis, it's not that hard to survive four through eight years in our university system.  If you have money and time. 

All of this tells us that the real justification for using a college education as selection criteria is to keep the good jobs in the hands of the rich and privileged.  In really good times, we can probably survive that kind of foolishness.  In bad times, ability and aptitude ought to become more important than breeding.  Bad times might be on the way and it remains to be seen that business is agile enough to rearrange its poor habits and irrational priorities.

Universities, on the other hand, react as slowly as glacier ice.  Their budgets get bigger while their service to the culture shrivels into approaching zero.  In a frenzy of public spending, they collect sports coliseums, performance amphitheaters, art galleries, and other monuments to uselessness.  Their administrators throw tantrums when state governments consider withholding funds for these arrogant extravagances. 

The only way to reign in these folks is to ignore their existence.  Since most Americans can't even afford to send their kids to a college sports event, let alone to college, at least half of that job is already accomplished.  Outside of television athletics, the majority of us only think about universities when we're bitching about management and the people who spawned that ilk.  Hopefully, "out of mind" will soon turn into "out of funding."  Not long after that, universities will pare down to necessary survival functions and, possibly, return to providing education and useful research. 

Right.  I'm living in a dream world where everyone breakfasts on lobster and Johnny Walker Blue.  Dream on drunken Rat.

Contrary to popular fantasy, Americans love royalty.  We appear to crave a return to King George's reign.  I once read that less than 1% of the population participated in the Revolutionary War.  I suspect that it's probably safe to say that the other 99% were perfectly happy with serving an aristocracy.  Some things never change.  Our soap opera crowd practically slashed their arms and tore hunks of hair in mourning after the death of spoiled Princess Diana.  A good portion of the voting public flushed their vote toward George II because there was a George I and good money and breeding ought to follow bad.  Or some weird logic that escapes me.  We still turn out good crowds to bow before popes, kings, and rock stars.  And so on.

Nuts.  After 200 years, the American Revolution may have come to an end.  We're a royalty-loving, aristocracy-sustaining, ruling class mismanaged socialism for the rich and while that might be a luxury we can afford when we're rolling in success, it's not something we can afford now that the rats have invaded the corn crib. 

April, 2003

When Home Becomes A Police State

The recent flurry of examples of how abusive our local “police” have become seems to be surprising to too many of us. The tiny-brained conservative crowd have, of course, blamed this on Obama and “the liberals.” It’s hard to be more clueless than the folks who watch and believe Fox News and the rest of our corporate media, but they work hard at pretending to be informed and I’m sure they will be even more idiotic next year. The sad and terrifying thing about what’s going on in the country is that Washington isn’t as responsible for this as we are, locally. The real abuse is happening at the lowest levels possible. It’s true that the horsepower used in some cases comes from the “donations” of military equipment to untrained, poorly managed, horribly staffed local police and sheriff’s departments. Those small town bullies were already over-equipped with weapons before they began to collect tanks, machine guns, and other weapons intended for full-out warfare. Put them in assault uniforms, identity-hiding armor, and elect city officials who imagine themselves to be untouchable royalty and we have a police state growing from the bottom up. Ironically, the police state in cities like Ferguson, Missouri are being restrained by the big, scary federal government. If they weren’t worried about the Justice Department and the FBI, those places would be full-on dictatorships. Many cities are approaching that level of police abuse and we, locally, are at fault.

“Our police” are completely self-serving. They have no interest in protecting anyone other than their power and access to any form of corruption or criminal behavior they see fit to commit (no poetry intended). There is, literally, no reason to believe anything from members of the police forces who should be solely supported by our tax money, but who are not because they have turned to theft and barely-concealed taxation of the poor and middle class for fun and profit.

The reason they get away with this is because we are the world’s most passive pseudo-democracy. We’re all wrapped up in Brad and whatshername or NFL/NBA or whatever pro gladiator sport you prefer. Our country is going to hell and douchebags around the nation are packing guns in grocery stores pretending to be defenders of liberty while our uniformed gangbangers are destroying liberty everywhere they set foot. In what seems more like an Onion satire than a serious statement, sheriffs and police chiefs around the country are accusing President Obama of creating a police state, while they are actually mismanaging real police cities and states. All I can figure is that they watched Clevon Little in Blazing Saddles and decided we really are that stupid. So far, all evidence seems to support their conclusion.

#71 A Democratic Experiment (2003)

All Rights Reserved © 2003 Thomas W. Day

Minnesota's experiment in participatory democracy ended in early January. Once again, the rats are winning the rat race. The lesson the state and the nation should have learned from our experience was distorted, or simply ignored. Mostly ignored. A lot of vested interests went well out of their way to pretend the last four years were either insignificant or a terrible mistake. I guess you could call that active ignore-ance?

As of January, our citizen governor’s, Jesse "The Body/Mind" Ventura, four years was up. He chose not to run again, most likely because he needs some time to wash the bitter taste of public service from his palate. The Independence Party fielded a strong candidate against a pitiful Democratic candidate and a downright repulsive Republican corporate mouthpiece. Minnesotans stood up on their hind feet and split the overwhelming majority of votes between Tweedly Dee and Tweedly Dumb. Dumb won.
Like most of the country, Minnesota's voting public was bought for a song (the rarely credible "no new taxes" refrain) and we're off on another four years of pointless politics, underhanded spending, and smoky room decision making. The politicians and the media call this "politics have returned to normal." This month, we learn that part of returning politics to "normal" includes the information that an insurance company that had agreed to a $3.5 million settlement decided to back out of that agreement because they discovered that a $10,000 "contribution" to the state Republican Party would reduce that penalty to $200,000 and a promise to stay out of the state for 5 years. Personally, I think missing out on a few decades of "normal politics" would be a relief.

In the aftermath of the last couple of elections, one of my favorite events is getting a call from one of the local news rags asking if I'd like to subscribe. I know this is sort of like picking on a fat kid, but if you're lazy enough to work for a newspaper you ought to expect a little abuse. We have two anti-newspapers in the Twin Cities and they regularly offer free bird cage protection in the hopes that I might decide to actually pay for my media drivel.

"No, not interested." I say. I always give them a chance to exit gracefully.

"How else are you going to keep up on what's happening in your neighborhood, your state, and your country or the world?" The solicitor always replies. It must be on their script.

Since the solicitor passed on a graceful exit, I can degenerate into attack mode without feeling unfairly malicious. "I talk to my neighbors, I read the free news websites (including AP) on Yahoo!, and that's about all the interest I have in what's going on in 'the world.' But newspapers are at the bottom of the list of information sources. You guys are the folks who couldn't uncover, then wouldn't report, the fact that a Presidential candidate had a long DWI record. Something, that any high school journalist student would know how to find. You guys spent eight years harping about Clinton's "I didn't inhale" comment but completely avoided Gee Wiz's spoon draining coke habits. You guys still insist on characterizing Gee Wiz as a 'jock' when the closest he ever got to being athletic was when he was a Yale cheerleader.

So where's the news?

"You folks have as much vested interest in dragging the country down into a two party system, because those two parties have all the advertising money. Anyone who's not pre-owned doesn't have enough cash to interest the media, so where's the news going to come from? It's not news if everyone already knows what you're going to say. I trust my local free radical rag and random internet news sites far more than the major media and that isn't saying much." I'm usually just getting started when the phone solicitor loses interest and asks to be excused.

My local Public Radio/TV contributor-hunters used to get polite conversation and moderate contributions. I've even volunteered to do time taking contributions on the phone for them, but no more.
In the last days of our state's congressional election the incumbent candidate, Paul Wellstone, died in a plane crash. The Demoplicans dredged the Mississippi until something, Walter Mondale, got caught in the nets. They propped him against a lectern and offered him as a memorial substitute for Wellstone. In a last minute attempt to focus the congressional campaign, someone decided that there ought to be a debate so that under-100 year old voters would know who Mondale was. Mondale threw an old fart's tantrum and refused to debate unless he only had one opponent on the stage. His attention span had, apparently, shrunk even further than it had been when he was Carter's vice-pres. So, even though the Green Party and the Independence Party candidates met the threshold for public financing, they didn't meet Mondale's standards for debate participation.

Remember, this is all taking place in a state where the "experts" claimed that, in 1998, Ventura wouldn't get 5% of the vote until the polls started to close and Jesse ended up being governor. Sometimes, the public actually gets to vote before the media proclaims the new king. But not this year.

Minnesota Public TV broadcast the two-party debates. Mondale proved himself to be a crabby old used-to-be-a-liberal, currently-a-corporate-shill fool. Coleman managed to keep his feet spread far enough that he didn't trip over them. And the two best candidates spent the evening watching the election being thrown by "public broadcasting."

That piece of history will save me a good bit of time and money in the future. Having controlled an election and actively worked to exclude substantial third-party options, Public Broadcasting threw its hat in with the rest of paid media. I think this is a sad moment for Americans, who have put time and contributions into trying to hang on to a small spot of media control, but the past is the past and we have to move on. Something Ventura's moment in politics provided for Minnesotans. A moment in the sun for Democracy. The last Presidential election, also an embarrassment for democracy and our electoral system, trashed the credibility of national elections. Our local election finished off hope for the Minnesota Fifth Estate. Good thing we have the Internet.

However, Minnesotans learned quite a few things about government during The Body's reign. We learned that anyone with reasonable intelligence can manage a state at least as well as professional politicians (a world class oxymoron). That should have been obvious, but testing the theory with a professional wrestler was a pretty dramatic example. Jesse made up for his own lack of experience and training by packing his administration with a diverse and skilled group of people that even the media and Republicrats were impressed. I think this demonstrated that the best people for the job of managing the country try very hard to avoid politicians, not politics.

There's an old adage about management and politics that says "anyone who wants the job shouldn't be allowed to do it." Jesse's candidacy was founded on testing that theory. When he started his campaign, he was trying to make a political point. He had next-to-no expectations of winning the election. His campaign was half entertainment, half protest movement, and zero political ambition. Of the three candidates for governor, Jesse was obviously the best choice. For once, that mattered. Four years later, the least capable candidate of that same trio, Norm Coleman, has been elected to the U.S. Senate, Jesse is retiring from politics, and our new governor is a conservative corporate hack. It's comforting to see that humans are still predictable and gullible.

Jesse got a lot of heat from characterizing the media as "jackals." The heat all came from the media. Anyone who's watched a press conference would have a hard time disputing the jackal label. On average, the media is lazy, elitist, vicious, disinterested in the truth or issue complexity, and observes pack mentality etiquette more closely than traffic on the San Diego Freeway. I think calling the media hacks jackals is slandering a perfectly reliable animal.

I didn't vote for Jesse. I was so worried that the Republican idiot, Coleman, would win that I flushed my vote on the Demolican candidate, who I disliked slightly less. It's the first time in thirty-some years of voting that I chickened out and the first time that a candidate I really wanted to see elected ended up in office. Go figure.

Jesse was thin-skinned, tended to whine when he felt abused, he could be a bully, he was often overly-dramatic and a little paranoid, and he would rather settle serious issues in the parking lot. He was also quick to admit when he needed to study a subject before commenting on it. He took advice and could tell good advice from vested interest advice. He cared more about taxpaying citizens than he did the tax-avoiding rich. He's not a coward. He has principles and tried to live by them, even when they were politically incorrect. He came into the office with the same standards he took when he returned to life as a civilian.

My only serious disagreement with Jesse came when he was hanging out with a New York talk show. He said that St. Paul was much more poorly designed than Minneapolis. He joked that the place had been laid out by "drunken Irishmen." Having just experienced far too much of Minneapolis' organization, I couldn't agree less. I think Minneapolis was designed by a pack of drunken professional wrestlers. The city, obviously, couldn't decide if it wanted to use the compass, the winding and merging rivers, or the random escape route of a scared rabbit as a street planning device. So, a little of each was applied. Getting from point A to point B involves passing through Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Russian alphabet.

So, Jesse, you were a good governor. Some of us learned a lot about politics and the state's activities while you were in office. I'm proud to have been a Minnesotan during your term. I'll miss you and your honesty and, maybe more than you, the members of your administration. You "shocked the world" and this brain-dead place is better for it. I hope, someday, we Americans find the courage and creativity to test the American Experiment again.

March, 2003

#70 Enough is Enough (2003)

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

A few years back, I was traveling in a smoke filled pickup with my brother and one of his friends.  The conversation, somehow, had drifted to the reintroduction of timber wolves on public lands in the northwest.  These two hobby cattlemen were irritated that perfectly good grazing land was being wasted on a wild animal; even worse, a predator.  Obviously, the conversation degenerated into one of the many the ever-popular anti-tree-hugging diatribe.  Winding down, it all ended on a statement that tree-huggers ought to be concerned that cattlemen were going extinct. 

Until that moment, I hadn't realized that cattlemen were a species.  Having known a fair number of real cattlemen in my ag-tech-support past, I'd always thought of them as members of the more common homo sapiens sup-species and as nothing more specific than industrialists in a rectally-emitting smokestack industry.  Once I considered this new knowledge, I began to feel real concern for other, long extinct, occupational species.  Buggy whip weavers, for example.  Stovepipe hat blockers were especially cruelly extinguished, in the prime of their abilities and stylishness. 

Picking on my brother's hobbies is a great pastime, but it's not the real purpose in this rant.  Humans have developed a species-centric perspective that is becoming downright vicious.  All of the religions we've created, including science, are based on the idiotic idea that humans are the end product of evolution.  That species-centric outlook would be good comedy if we weren't so prone to take it to globally destructive extremes.

Here in Minnesota, for instance, the Department of Natural Resources has become concerned because the deer population is approaching one million, "far too many for the habitat to support."  In the Twin Cities, alone, there are nearly four million humans, but the entire state is incapable of supporting one million deer?   In Arizona, the FLM experts have decided that the desert is incapable of supporting more than 40,000 wild horses.  So, they roundup and redistribute the "excess" animals on a regular basis.  Redistribution often means selling the animals to dog and people food processors.  In the 1930s, there were more than two hundred thousand wild horses in Arizona and the desert appeared to support those animals considerably better than it supports the five million people who live there now.  Which animal uses and misuses the most resources, deer, wild horses, wolves, or humans?  Which animal is more likely to exceed the carrying capacity of a given piece of real estate? 

The idea that wild and free animals are encroaching on human habitat has become the usual human perspective on real estate.  Even to urbanites, it ought to be obvious that the animals were here first.  It's humans who are doing the encroaching.  Rapidly approaching five billion on earth, soon the only species that will outnumber us will be house flies and cockroaches.  Without the food we supply to those species, they would be in trouble too. 

Since it's so obvious and easy to determine how many of each wild animal species belong in a given territory, I'd like to ask why that same calculation hasn't been made for humans?  Biologists make precise statements about how many acres per animal are required in a given habitat, based on the animals' nature, diet, and the available resources.  Predators always require a lot more space than herbivores.  Humans, being the ultimate predator, would seem to require the most space but that's a calculation I've never been able to find.

Personally, I've always considered most human abnormalities to be "population diseases."  Many of these behavioral oddities are so "normal" in our current overpopulated world that it has become politically incorrect to describe them as unnatural or aberrations.  Most non-reproductive sexual preferences, for example, are obviously nature's attempt to prevent humans from procreating.  Homosexuality and variations on that theme take a significant portion of the population out of the breeding pool.  Mental illness, especially those illnesses that shorten life expectancy, reduce average longevity and population growth.  And, of course, good 'ole and ever-popular wars and other crimes of violence are effective population reducers.  These are the tactics, and the only tactics, humans use to prevent overpopulation. 

If we were truly a rational animal, we'd be more proactive about managing human population.  War, for example, is a typically human response to population control.  In other words, it's stupid.  War is similar to organized hunting as a population control tactic.  Hunters actively seek out and destroy the most healthy and attractive animals, leaving the sick, weak, and weird looking to reproduce and continue the species.  Wars do the same thing to human populations.  The easiest way to avoid being killed in a foreign war is to have a serious defect, to be 4F.  Fit males get shipped off to be killed and the defective stay home and breed.  Yet another brilliant innovation from the folks who brought you communism, dictatorships, feudalism, monarchies, and international corporations.

Humans have ruled the planet for less than 5,000 years and have been a significant evolutionary force for less than 50,000 years.  In geologic time, we've been here for less than an instant.  In biological time, we've barely been here for much longer.  At our current rate of stupidity, it's hard to imagine we'll be around to meet the next dominant species.  Unless we destroy the planet, we're likely to be leaving it to that unlucky species in the not all that distant future. 

However, an awful lot of humans appear to be determined to take out the planet when we go.  The Reagan Administration was stuffed full of people who could expound on Manifest Destiny and other comedic standards.  Bush I & II rehired many of those same simpletons and they are charging ahead, ignorantly and theocratic-ly, into the overpopulation void.  The race seems to be between finding a way to use up the world's natural resources in a single generation and breeding so effectively that we reach standing-room-only.  As Mark Twain said, "humans descended from the higher animals."  Was he talking about rabbits?

February, 2003

#69 Conservative Courage? (2002)

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

Webster's defines "conservatism" and "conservative" as "a disposition in politics to conserve what is established . . . a political philosophy based on tradition and social stability, stressing established institutions and preferring gradual development to abrupt change  . . . the tendency to prefer an existing or traditional situation to change . . . tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions. . . "  Pretty depressing outlook, don't you think?  Two hundred years ago, this sort of person would be labeled a "Tory," an English-monarchy-loving, King George IX sympathizer.  If you believe that the majority of Americans are conservative, it follows that the majority of Americans are, apparently, ready to rejoin the United Kingdom. 

Most like, it's safe to assume that the majority of humans on this planet are conservative.  Personally, I can't tell conservative Republicans from conservative communist Chinese.  If you swing far enough to either political pole, you end up at the same spot.  Communism fails because government is a flawed concept.  Everybody's-business-is-my-business rightwing conservatism follows the same flaws.  In the end, the government ends up serving itself and the interests of those who provide power to the government.  When that happens, you can't tell the right from the left unless, as Pete Townsend theorized, "their beards have all grown longer overnight."  Pete was hoping for the impossible when he imagined there would be a time when we "won't get fooled again," though.  Since most of us are conservatives, we're easy to fool.

Supposedly, the opposite of a conservative in today's political jargon is a "liberal." Webster's defines that philosophy as one who is "not bound by authoritarianism. . .  [and who is] associated with ideals of individual expression, economic freedom, greater individual participation in government, and constitutional, political and administrative reforms designed to secure these objectives . . . one who is open-minded or not strict in the observance of orthodox, traditional or established forms or ways."  I'm sure these sound like terrible characteristics to most of us.  Damn revolutionaries!  Since I've always had a dictionary within reach, I've never had any problem considering myself a liberal.  Even adding "tree hugging" to the description has no effect on my identification with liberalism.  I like trees and I'm a liberal. 

Words are funny things.  In modern media-speak, words end up meaning what we are told they mean, not what they are intended to mean.  Like the marketing folks say, "image is everything."  If the media, politicos, and the rest of the conservative Powers That Be tell us being a "liberal" is a bad thing, we believe it.  It's obvious, from reading the liberal definition, why that crowd would like us to think conservative.  It's in their best interests to convince the rest of us that a conservative philosophy is good for everyone.  Because it's particularly good for the minority who are in the driver's seat.   Conservatives live to "conserve what is established," resisting change even when change is past necessary and well into damn-near-too-late-to-save-the-world.  Why the majority of us care what the ruling minority wants is something I've never understood.

Here's one theory, though.  Many Americans pretend to be conservatives, not because they want things to stay the way they are but because they don't want them getting any worse.  Now that's a courageous, but understandable, position.  Too gutless to look out the window because there might be something scary there?  The problem with this tactic is that if you're not getting better, you're always going to be getting worse.  In sports, the phrase is "the best defense is a good offense."  In politics, if the ruled class isn't trying to kick the ruling class' butt, we're all spiraling the toilet bowl.

In times of political hopelessness it's comforting, to me, to remember that less than 1% of the early American population deserves to be called members of our "founding fathers."  That's the small percentage who participated in the American Revolution.  The rest, the overwhelming 99%+ rest, were too occupied with survival, collecting wealth, or drinking homemade beer to bother themselves with independence.  The rest were conservatives.

Today's liberals have decided that too many negative connotations apply to the liberal label, so they are taking to calling themselves "progressives."  I don't think that tactic will work.  If a word, "liberal," filled with as many positive attributes as that word owns, can end up being an insult, "progressive" doesn't stand a chance.  Although I do like the truthful insinuation that the progressive opposition would be, by default, "regressive."    Regressive is a much more honest term to describe the majority of card-carrying Republican conservatives.  Often, these younger-than-me folks refer to a mythical time from their youth when citizens "took responsibility for their actions" or when the government was less intrusive in our lives. 

It's hard to imagine a more intrusive government than the mind police who forced loyalty pledges out of intellectuals and Hollywood actors, the McCarthy-Eisenhower 1950's Republicans.  But these kids aren't old enough to remember, or to have experienced, that group of terrorists.  Fortunately, either am I, but at least I was alive during that period and read about it.  Finding a positive difference in attitude or social responsibility between the Jay-Ed "I look pretty in hoop skirts" Hoover FBI and the Soviet Union's Secret Police, any time between 1948 and 1975, would be an experiment in fine detail discrimination.  I would like to believe that most Americans would be unimpressed with the responsibility accepted by the radical racists, found from coast-to-coast and board-to-boarder, who ran the country, business, and most neighborhoods all through the 20th Century.  Having experienced half of that century, I wouldn't have great difficulty in continuing this list of vicious and irresponsible conservative activities from the "good old days" for several dozen pages.  It's old and depressing news and you'd be bored.

I think you know, or ought to know, that those Good Old Days were only good for a select group of people; mostly privileged, white, and well-connected males.  In the 1950s, that group could make a kind claim to being some sort of working majority.  Today, that isn't the case.  Tomorrow, it will be even less true.  Still, conservatism marches on.

The key conservative characteristic I see that makes me want to avoid becoming one is an omnipresent fear.  Especially the fear of change.  Everyone who reads, thinks, or works knows that the only constant in this world is change.  Nothing is constant.  Change proves that nothing about the way the world works fits the conservative definition.  It's a radical fantasy.  "Existing or traditional" situations are destined to become history.  "Established institutions" become bone yards.  No matter how much we may "prefer gradual development to abrupt change," the longer human culture exists the faster changes happen.  In the first 50 years of the 20th Century, it was estimated that human knowledge doubled.  That pace was about the same as the previous 50 years.  Today, global knowledge doubles every 5 years.  By 2020, it is estimated that our knowledge base will be doubling every 72 days.  At the current rate of computer development, by 2020 we may have computers that equal human capacity.  In fact, you could reasonably expect computers to equal all human capacities in that near future.  In the face of that, does any aspect of conservative philosophy fit a practical application?

Fear of the inevitable seems to me to be the ultimate cowardice.  A political or personal philosophy based on extreme cowardice is about as doomed as any social meme yet constructed.  It's also a common thread in the history of failed cultures.  All the way back to the earliest recorded Chinese governments, history is littered with the remains of cultures who tried to stop, or reverse, progress, knowledge, and change.  I think you could draw an accurate line between the rise of conservative thinking and the fall of any particular culture in history.  It's possible that there is a social critical mass that occurs when a significant majority of a culture's members spend a significant portion of their time trying to stop the clock, instead of doing what they can to go where progress is going.  When that critical mass is breached, the culture crashes and gets replaced by the target culture that change was trying to obtain. 

Monarchies, dictatorships, communism, and other conservative politics are all attempts to put an anchor on progress.  These philosophical dead ends all try to maintain the status quo in the face of overwhelming momentum.  To do their damage, these systems have to convince a significant portion of the general population that what's good for the ruling class is good for the ruled class.  This task is a lot easier if the victims are less than brilliant.  Education is the arch enemy of conservatism, which explains why progressive universities often house so many "liberals."  Science and conservatism are at opposite poles of human activity. 

The more technically astute the general population, the less likely that culture is to be conservative.  You can see dramatic examples of that in micro-cultures within our own macro-culture.  Places where fast moving technology is originating are always more liberal than where the technology is barely used and hardly understood.  Compare the lower Midwest and the old South to central California (Silicon Valley, Santa Clara, San Francisco),  Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Washington state, for example.  The more current the technology, the more liberal the politics.  The more stagnant the culture, the more primitive the technology.  The best way to open up regressive, oppressive cultures may be to export technology to the work force.  It seems to be working for China, as god-awfully conservative as that government is, technology and change are collecting momentum faster than the conservatives can build speed bumps. 

None of this proves that some apparently technical individuals won't be conservative.  Individuals may feel that change is moving so quickly that it weakens their position in society.  Putting the brakes on change may buy a few extra moments, which is all an individual's career lasts in cultural time, of power and influence.   A conservative technologist ought to be viewed as one of the most distrusted, interest-conflicted individuals in any culture.    Never trust a man who wants to sell you a horse-drawn wagon when someone else is selling hydrogen powered rocket ships.

January, 2003

Customer Service in the 21st Century

I recently experienced some terrible customer service from my local credit union. At first, I decided to blow it off and start looking for a new credit union or bank. Since I’d come to that credit union because of awful and incompetent service from Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Charles Schwab, I decided to put a few moments of effort into registering a complaint with the credit union. Their response was encouraging, so I put a little more effort into them and they responded respectably. After resolving many of my complaints and restarting our relationship, I wrote this note to the branch manager.

Kari,

Thanks for your email, patience, and interest in my complaint. It may not sound like it, but I appreciate the attitude Affinity Plus employees take with complaints. I actually care a lot about the idea of a community credit union and have more than just money invested in Affinity.

I'm discovering that my background in manufacturing engineering, quality control and reliability assurance, and technical writing makes me an odd customer. One of the rules US companies used to know when they actually made products is that customers base their loyalty on their experience with the products and customer service. Screw up either and you are lost. In the late 80's, when we quit making our own stuff and farmed that work out to other countries, management lost sight of anything more complicated than exorbitant salaries and bonuses and buck-passing. A good rule of thumb for customer complaints is that rarely more than 1% of customers will bother to complain about poor service. Ignore that 1% and you can pretend you are shipping nearly perfect product or performing to your customer’s expectations.

I actually worked, for a very short time, for a company in Chicago whose quality “policy” was to ignore the first customer complaint under the assumption that no more than 10% of the 1% would complain twice. With that set of procedures, they could claim a product failure/return rate of less than 0.05% with a 50% known defect manufacturing process. The company I’d recently left worked for years to drive our actual product failure rates below 1% during warranty (which was 3 years instead of 90 days for the Chicago company) while my new employer believed they were doing more than twice as well by ignoring customer complaints.

The difference between the two companies in other areas was substantial, too. However, my old employer relied on return customers and consistently produced a 20+% profit margin for the ten years I worked there. My new employer was, not surprisingly, happy to turn any sort of profit and usually broke even on the rare occasion the bottom line was considered. Obviously, the Chicago company had next-to-no return business and no customer loyalty. I lasted slightly less than 30 days in Chicago. They had no need for my experience and I had no interest in participating in their business “plan.”

I’ve found that the worst thing any organization can do is to ignore the few complaints they receive and create obstacles for customer feedback. I can not explain why Americans are so disinclined to complain when it might do some good, while we’re more dissatisfied with our quality of life than most 1st world nations. Regardless, any company that wants to perform at a level above its competition has to keep this psychology in mind.

Thanks for your interest and for pursuing solutions to my complaint.

Regards,

Tom Day

#68 Management by Hiding (2002)

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

Back in the decade of constantly changing management techniques, David Packard, of Hewlett-Packard, wrote a book called "The HP Way."  In this business biography, he took a bit of credit for "inventing" the "management by walking around" style.  Sam Walton gets a lot of credit for popularizing the technique, too.  If these managers actually walked around some, that's a good thing.  As for their having invented a style of management, that's bull.

In fact, this is ancient, common sense stuff.  Walking around management is the basic tactic of nearly every successful from-scratch start-up manager.  Mostly because the manager is the managee and he has to do the walking around, and do the work, to keep things moving.  Good managers keep walking around until they sell the company to someone who has a burning desire to kill or stagnate a successful business. 

Walking around management is still a popular topic of conversation, even if it doesn't get applied all that often outside of small businesses.  I found about 1,400 hits on the subject in a recent Yahoo search.  The phrase is live and well, regardless of the condition of the actual practice.  Lots of execs like to think of themselves as being a hands-on manager because even the lamest of the breed knows that anyone who isn't hands-on is useless.

However, most managers claim to be walking around when they're mostly hiding.  MBA-style managers in large companies are too busy keeping their backs to walls to do a lot of walking around. When you step onto the production floor, or anywhere where work gets accomplished, you bump into people who could use a little management assistance.  That distracts the MBAs from their primary task of promoting themselves to their equally clueless (and even more immobile) superiors, which derails the all-important promotion schedule.  The last thing a modern manager wants to do is to be useful to the people he manages.  In the never ending quest for stock bonuses and outrageously huge salaries, messing with people who do work is an unrewarding enterprise.

This immobile and distorted perspective isn't something that MBA factories have changed or created. (I'm probably not going to live long enough to see an original idea spawned in the MBA academia.)  They're not to blame for something that has been around for as long mismanagement.  In my 40-year working life, the most common work-related complaints I've heard (or produced) have been about lazy and incompetent management.  A good manager is hard to find.  Sounds like a country-western tune, doesn't it? 

It's a courage thing.  Walking around involves being seen, becoming expected to accomplish something useful, and having to take an occasional position regarding actual work and working conditions.   This would amount to an endless pile of issues and activities that are better left untouched by an ambitious exec.  Any manager, even a CEO, who does those things has courage and is about as rare as an honest politician.  Being accessible means you have to make and explain decisions, provide (or withhold) resources, and you have to manage. 

And you thought becoming a manager put an end to all the hard stuff?  Don't worry; nobody expects anything significant from management.  We're used to gutless, brainless, pointless, clueless edicts from the void.  We'd just get confused (and productive) of you did anything beyond the norm.  Sleep little exec, sleep.  Mamma will wake you when the bankruptcy court convenes. 

November 2002

#67 Science and Academia (2002)

[Yet another misread of history, government, and science. At the time I wrote this, it seemed logical to conclude that if nations with socialized medicine were devoid of creativity that the socialized medicine was the problem. How that I possess an Australian fake hip and a German heart stent, I realize that those nations are simply more conservative than the U.S. and didn’t jump into the business until their products were sorted out, unlike our medical system that leaps first and thinks later.]

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

Recently, I stumbled upon an article, by a person who I respect greatly, Dr. Richard O'Connor, calling for a different way for drugs to be developed and tested.  His motivation was, in part, due to the disclosure of the close, financial link between drug companies and a physician, Dr. Martin Keller of  Brown University, who is a recognized "expert" and is a clinician whose research is most commonly cited as the justification for an entire group of medications.

The Boston Globe found that Dr. Keller received more than a half-million dollars in "consulting fees" from the companies whose products he's "tested."  The Boston Globe reported that the doctor didn't bother to report "his relationships to these companies" to the medical journals that published the results of his clinical trials.  Personally, I'm not convinced that medical journals are more ethically bound than physicians, but I could be wrong.  This kind of conflict of interest is as common in medical research as misspelled words in a personal letter from G.W. Bush. 

Dr. O'Connor's conclusion from this un-shocking discovery is that taxpayers and patients should consider changing the way medical products are developed.  He states that he's "willing to pay a lower price and a higher tax, and let the government fund research.  Profits and healthcare are a dangerous combination."   That's probably a logical conclusion, based on a belief in government funded research and the hope that medical research is done, primarily, to benefit humanity. 

Unfortunately, that hopeful vision is probably unfounded.  If government funded medicine were capable of producing worthwhile research, Europe's various socialized medicine systems would be the source of an occasional breakthrough in medicine or technology.  If not-for-profit research were a functional idea, our own university systems would be hotbeds of creativity. 

For the last thirty years, the only purpose served by European "research" has been to provide a source of human lab rats for American biotech experiments.  Every US company does its initial product testing in Europe.  And if it weren't for US-subsidized clinical trials, European physicians would be completely deprived of evidence that they do any science at all.  Since most physicians are fond of imagining themselves to be scientists, so that would be a serious blow to the ego. 

We Americans are always being told, by our intelligenza, that European-everything is better than the mess we've made out of capitalism.  If "better" means classically, traditional, functionally unproductive, and unchanged by reality or necessity there is no question that European values rock and rule.  If anyone could beat a dead horse on the right spots (with a precision-made buggy whip) to make it do work, Europe has the experience to get the job done. 

But the fact is, government managed medicine stifles creativity and initiative.  For that matter, government managed anything can always be counted on to crush the life out of whatever is being managed.  So our only government sponsored hope might be with those shining faces and hopeful dreamers in higher education.  Well, now we're sunk for sure. 

Our own academics, secure and comfortable with tenure, pensions, and graduate students to do their grunt work, don't seem to be able to produce anything interesting without corporate sponsorship and initiative provided by royalties.  Even with those initiatives, many academics want more.  Our universities are well stocked with researchers who not only earn six-figure salaries but who also own the patent rights and corporate sponsorships to their research.  In other words, these state and private institutions are doing nothing more sophisticated than providing state funded facilities and cheap, highly educated manpower to corporations.  I think this is called "corporate welfare," but I might be minimizing the welfare aspect of the situation.

If a sociologist ever wanted to examine the effects of greed on society, our medical and university research systems would be a fine place to start.  The ineffective sugar pill control model would be Europe.  So far, the statement that democracy is an inefficient, perverted form or government, but it's the best we have so far, also applies most accurately to capitalism and research.  Which means we're not going to see any amazing breakthroughs until somebody comes up with a better system.

I hope you're not holding your breath while you wait.

Footnote: http://www.undoingdepression.com/news05.html

November 2002

#66 A Voice of Courage (2002)

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

The country lost a voice of courage this year.  Paul Wellstone, my own US Senator, died along with his wife, a daughter, and several staff members in a plan crash in northern Minnesota.  In the midst of a heated political battle for his Senate seat, Wellstone was, characteristically, attempting to attend a friend's father's funeral when his private plane went down attempting to land on a small, rural airport in heavy fog.  Minnesotans are still in mourning, some are so grief stricken you'd think they'd lost a member of their own family.

It's possible that Paul's politics seemed so radical that you might not understand how a state could elect and love such a man.  Wellstone was often called "the most liberal member of the senate."  Maybe he was.  He thought of himself as the voice of the voiceless.  A representative for the rest of us, to put Apple's unused motto to good use.  Wellstone treated his office as a calling, a sacred obligation to the people who voted for him, not just the people who donated money.  He took a lot of heat from conservatives for being "anti-business."  Looking at his voting record, it's hard to see how anyone could find that in his actions, but reality never gets between a conservative and his dogma.  Wellstone felt that corporate interests and the ruling-rich have all the representation their money can buy and that at least one elected official should represent the  other 99.99% of the population.  Out of only 100 Senators, I guess, statistically, we should have felt specially lucky to have even one guy on our side.

Paul's most recent outrage was, after considerable soul searching and research, voting against granting unilateral unprovoked war powers to the G.W. Bush gang.  He was pissing into the wind, since the majority of the senate did their flag-waving best to bring prosperity back to the military-industrial complex and a recession for the rest of us.  You are more likely to be remembered for being right than for joining the crowd, though.  Eugene McCarthy, another Minnesota Senator, was the only vote against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that gave us ten years of the pointless, vicious Vietnam War.  McCarthy's courage, Nixon's impeachment and resignation, and Johnson's appendix scar may be the only remnant of those years that history bothers to record.

History is papered with the few men who took courageous, against-the-grain stands against warlords and the mindless masses.  Wellstone will be remembered as one of the few in the Senate who had a conscious to listen to, when this vote was taken.  As usual, the mob carried the motion, but truth and morality rarely enter into mob action.  (In fact, I can't think of a single moment in history when any majority was on the right side of an issue.  It's always a calibration point  to remember that less than 1% of Americans participated in the Revolutionary War.  99% of our "founding fathers" were Tories.  Most modern "conservatives" would have been proud to be called Tories.) 

History, though, appears to have a nose for the truth and an attraction to courage.  Twenty years from now, Congress' conservative cowards will be forgotten and the few who placed their position on the line to vote against this foolish war for oil will be remembered.  Paul Wellstone was one of the most courageous men in politics. 

It took him a while to admit to his conscience, since he was in a nasty campaign race for reelection, but he did the right thing in the end.  I guess those who knew Paul never had any doubt how he'd vote.  He had me guessing, though.  It's hard to know who's going to be caught up in a political stampede.  I guess I haven't been involved in Minnesota politics long enough to know how difficult it would be to panic Paul Wellstone.

It's hard to imagine Minnesota politics without Paul's presence.  For at least the last few decades, Minnesota has been a hot and cold place, Wellstone and Rod Gramms, the progressive and the ultimate regressive.  Mark Dayton put up enough of his own money to offset Gramm's corporate and right-wing attachments and Dayton's election left Minnesota with a slight tilt toward a progressive Senate position.  If Wellstone's opponent, ex-St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman, wins this election, a lot of state and national balances will be altered.  Dayton is enough of a non -entity that his position is barely able to muster neutrality.  Coleman is the ultimate Republican yes-man.   Any butt that will further his political ambition is a butt worth kissing. 

Wellstone will be missed well beyond the next few years.

November 2002

State of Software Amateurism

During the winter months, I was wrapped up in more than a couple discussions with kids who consider themselves to be computer experts (by profession, at the least) who believe that if you aren’t using the latest OS, you are a hillbilly. As of March 2014, the above chart reflects US computer OS use, per a pretty large sample survey.

The statistic that most interests me is “Other,” the 1.99% of users whose technology was, apparently, unimportant to the surveyors. On a recent trip to New Mexico, I met a surprising number of people who run their businesses on old versions of Windows: all the way back to a law office using Windows for Workgroups 3.11, a graphic artist using windows 98, a collection of small business owners who network and advertise their group on the web using tools from Windows 95, and several people still on Vista. While we were camped at Elephant Butte State Park, I met a 60’s rock star and I listened to his music recorded on a 1970’s TASCAM 80-8 1/2” reel-to-reel in a camper trailer. He gave me a copy of the soon-to-be-released CD bounced down to MP3 on a free version of studio editing software long-ago-absorbed by Adobe.

The OS-users’ pie chart chart sort of reflects my own experience, although a bit optimistically. Microsoft has been working overtime to convince WinXP users to evacuate the building since the company has ceased “support” of XP. Of course, real computer IT and user types know Microsoft is bullshitting us. Support for business XP users will continue for a while and you can tag on to that gravy train easily. Less obvious is the fact that hackers write hacks for the biggest bang for the buck. The real reason Apple’s OS X is fairly “safe” from identity thieves is that a scant 6-7% of computer users are Apple computer owners. If you really want to be hack-free, Windows for Workgroups 3.11 might be your best bet. Running MSDOS might be the closest thing to total security possible.

Soon, it won’t matter much what sort of PC computer OS you run because the majority of computer users will be tablet and phone nerds. The industry expects tablet sales to almost double desk and laptop PC sales by 2017. Mobile phones are already selling at 5X the PC rate and will approach 10X PC sales in 2017. The smart hacker is already up into your phones’ butt right now and heading for the digestive system.

The kids who run computer companies, especially the technologically inbred CEO/CFO/COO types, could care less about security, since they are in no way obligated by law for the incredible financial losses their companies are responsible for creating. While you have to marvel at the royal way these blessed-by-corruption organizations are treated, as a consumer we need to be more than a little bit suspicious of anything they tell us. The fact is, I believe, the only reason for owning any sort of computer is practical. These instruments are nearly useless as educational devices, incredibly limited as news distribution sources, and as inclined to continue the dumbing-down of our degraded and degenerating species as television. So, worrying about whether we are using the latest version of some half-baked, user-hostile bullshit software or hardware is self-destructive. If you can accomplish whatever work you need to be doing with whatever tool you have in your office, closet, classroom, or business, you are sufficiently up-to-date.

#64 A Lost Role Model (2002)

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

My grandmother died in the summer of 2002.  She was 85 years old and, if Women's Studies and MBA programs actually reflected serious scholarship of their subjects, she would be a recognized hero in both of those programs.  She and my grandfather were the two best business managers in the history of capitalism.  I know this for a collection of reasons and personal experiences.

When I last visited her, while she was sleeping and I stood on her back porch, remembering better times in that house and looking out over her large yard, I saw memories of a collection of young boys mowing that yard.  This may not seem like a big thing, but of the two dozen sons, grandsons (including me), great-grandsons, and our friends, none ever resented doing that work.  Some of us were paid for the work, some of us volunteered, and all of us did the job as well as we could.  Our motivation was that we knew we were appreciated and we were doing the job because we wanted to be doing it.  Working conditions that put teenage boys into that frame of mind is the kind of management talent that almost never exists.

My grandmother exercised that kind of skill in almost every area of her own small business.  She and my grandfather ran a flooring business, with a dozen or more employees.  Over the years, several of their employees took the experience and skills they obtained in my grandparents' employment and began their own businesses.  Many others spent the overwhelming bulk of their personal careers working for my grandparents.  The loyalty of their past and upwardly mobile employees remained in place for at least a decade after my grandparents retired from their businesses. 

They left a legacy of customer loyalty, also.  Their customers ranged from the most to the least wealthy and, if you watched my grandmother help a customer pick materials, you would not be able to tell which end of the financial spectrum the customer belonged.   She was the first class-blind person I'd known.  You could credit that attribute to her own early struggle to survive, but I think it was more than that.  She was also culture and color-blind.  Without a sign of patronizing, she treated everyone who came into her store with the same quiet, interested, helpful grace that, outside of her store, I’d only seen on English movies.  I think it was her nature rather than her conditioning that gave her this unique, ideal American quality.  Some people rise above their surroundings seemingly oblivious to the attitudes and standards of the time and place.  She was one of those people. 

As the years pass, my reasons to visit Kansas diminish.  Like much of the Midwest, the cream of my class long moved away to the coasts or the warm states.  Like electrons fleeing the Big Bang, the family is dispersed and continues to migrate away from the center.  The state is dingier, more depressed and more depressing each time I visit.  A bright spot was always my grandmother's house.  An afternoon with her, drinking coffee and watching sports and talking about her life, my life, and what we thought it all meant made the 1800 mile roundtrip a lot shorter, going both directions. 

Now, she's gone.  No one can take the place of the woman who gave me my first job, who gave me encouragement when I lost courage, who taught me the real values of education and independence, and the lady who told me to follow my heart regardless of her opinion of the direction. 

It has taken me a year to finish this piece.  I can't remember her without missing her.  My hometown is less, by more than half, my hometown without her there.  The depth of my family is reduced to a small fraction of its population without her in it.  Some people are so constant, so dependable, so make the world seem complete in their presence that in their absence the entire world is reduced.  They are irreplaceable.  My grandmother is irreplaceable.  Not just in my family, but in the world she touched.  I will never forget her and I will do what I can to make sure others know and remember what she taught me.

August 2002

#62 Surprise, Surprise! (2002)

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

I'm sure that my regular readers will be amazed to see that I'm not surprised that the press has suddenly discovered that a whole lot of executives are bottom-feeding, scum-sucking, back-stabbing, money-grubbing crooks.  The Washington Post published an article titled, "In Blossoming Scandal, Culprits Are Countless."  NewsMax.com titled their recent discovery, "How Corporate Crooks Cook the Books." 

"Well, duh," I might reply to one of the API's finest, interrupting an academic description of this amazing revelation.  But nobody's asking me, so I'll just keep Rat Ranting into the void (except for those of you who stand on the edge of the void tossing in pennies and making wishes). 

Enron, WorldCom, Xerox, Tyco, Global Crossing, Sunbeam, Informix, Summit Medical, Martha Stewart, and on goes the list until everything listed on the New York Stock Exchange will be duplicated in the criminal court system.    The funniest bits in all of the make-believe outrage, come from Prince Georgie's court jesters and the education system.  Jeffrey Garten, dean of Yale University's School of Management, admitted, "Even those of us at business schools are implicated. It's not like the educational establishment sounded any warning. We were cheerleaders, too." Cheerleaders?  Right, they were teaching the crooks how to be better crooks.  If the MBA programs were sounding any warnings it would have been to the crooks they were teaching to be better crooks. 

One of George II's first acts as president was to reduce the SEC's staff by 56 securities investigators.  Who would have guessed that the stock market would be the next target for Republican leash-holders?  Bush is just following Republican tradition.  Reagan did a similar hack job on the FDIC, the folks who monitored the savings and loan mafia, and provided middleclass taxpayers with a tidy $18-billion dollar debt. 

It looks like Prince George is going for the record, though.  A senator recently stated that the money scammed from American corporations could have funded national health insurance; twice.  Good thing the House beat back Hillary's health insurance program, how would Rolls Royce have survived without the trickle-down from all that hard stolen cash?  The bad news is that RR died anyway?  You'd think trickle-down would be more effective than that. 

My theory on stock crashes and depression/recessions is simple.  When middle America loses faith in the integrity and intelligence of the ruling class, the economic house of cards collapses.  (Yes, Virginia.  We do have a ruling class in this country.) 

Contrary to the fantasies imagined and promoted by the press, the education system, and politics, it doesn't matter what the rich and powerful think of themselves.  The rich and powerful are not critical to the function or success of the country.  Just as executives have no useful function to the companies they mismanage, that same ilk is equally useless to the nation in general.  Their best practice is to stay invisible, do as little as possible, and try not to hinder progress or daily business and social function. 

I've been saying, for decades, that an instant and fatal disease that struck the upper offices of 99% of the country's government and corporations would take weeks to detect.  It might even be months before anyone discovered those offices were full of reeking bodies.  Their participation is so self-serving that they have rendered themselves unnecessary.  Executive contribution is rarely anything more than a detriment. Most execs' capabilities are limited to back-stabbing and self-enrichment, which does nothing useful for the actual function of a business. What would most likely spur the discover of a floor full of exec fatalities would be an investigation of a sudden burst of productivity.  The press would have to put a stop to that kind of activity as soon as possible. 

It appears that the ruling class has gone too far and the middle class, who control about 10% of the nation's total wealth, are finding that 10% is what props up the 90%.  It will be interesting to see what it takes, and how long it takes, how much spin-doctoring it takes, to convince the working class that the idiots at the top aren't complete fools.  Now that is a real marketing job. 

August 2002