Bruce’s Thoughts

Just a quick note today, to remind you that it’s not about the turkey, or the football games.

It’s about remembering that we’ve all been blessed in one way or another, and taking time to notice and praise the things we’ve been given.

Reader, I’m grateful to you, and I wish you all the good will in the world.

I’m in a particularly grumpy mood today, so I’m brooding about the unfairness of the universe in general, and about one particular form of the unfairness.

My son, Ben, is teaching High School English in Saint Louis to a bunch of students who, for the most part, have been short changed all their lives in the education department. The are (for the most part) good kids, but lead rough lives out of school and have had to struggle for their education, so he has a doubly tough job ahead of him.

From all I can tell, he seems to be handling it with determination, imagination, and a certain amount of grace, and I’m terribly proud of him. (At this point I can’t resist a little vanity and a little smugness. Well, okay, more than a little.)

But here’s the thing - if salary were awarded fairly, according to how much each person contributes to the benefit of us all, he should be making what I do, and vice versa, because he is certainly making a bigger contribution to the world by educating our next generation than I am by tweaking lines of code in an obscure product feature.

You could argue that education levels differentiate us, but he’s got as much training in his field as I do in mine, and maybe more. You could argue that supply and demand sets the price, but right now there aren’t a ton of people stepping up to his job, and the market is littered with out-of-work programmers.

The only reason I can see for the difference is that society (that’s a polite name for you and me) has arbitrarily decided that the profession of teaching is less valuable than the profession of software development, and I say “Pfui” on that. Even the best work that I do is obsolete within five years, but the work that Ben is doing will be with us for the next fifty, so he should be ten times more valuable, right?

Like I say, I’m in a grumpy mood today, but I don’t think that invalidates what I’ve said: the world is upside down.

If you go to the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, take a stroll down the hallway to the Asian exhibit. On your left, in a long display case, you will find a small Chinese cup of the mid seventeenth century. It’s not very big - perhaps 8cm across and 3cm tall,  and it would be easy to miss. But oh, how beautiful it is!

17th century Chinese porcelain cup with plum tree design

It is in a classic form of a footed bowl, and the foot is exactly the right size and shape to lift it off its platform and display its shadows. It’s very hard to get just the right proportion in a footed shape: being off by a millimeter can make the bowl look awkward or dumpy, or just stick it to the floor.

The walls of the cup form an ogee pattern, with the lip folding out like a flower opening to the sun. I know from experience how hard it is to get the lip right in this shape. The curve of the lip has to match the bottom curve of the bowl, but they are not the same curve, and each has to flow seamlessly into the wall itself. Here is a picture of the lip.

The perfect form of the lip, wall, and base of the cup.

The walls are perhaps a half millimeter in thickness, and you can indeed see the light through them. They are perfectly, uniformly white. The shape of the interior pulls your eye from the delicate lip down the smooth, sensual curve of the wall to the perfect floor of the bowl, all in a perfect, unbroken curve.

And if you let your eye linger for a few minutes, you will see the ghostly image of a plum tree emerge, white on white and so delicate that you might be dreaming it. Other cups are decorated with pictures of trees, but this one has captured its soul in the porcelain.

If I could have a wish, I would ask for a time machine to take me back to meet the man who made this wholly remarkable thing. I just want to watch him at work, chat with him a little, and see what sort of man it takes to produce something this perfect.

I’m a wood turner, and I know how agonizingly difficult it is to get the lines of this sort of vessel right, when there is no decoration and all of the beauty lies in the unbroken curve. To think that he achieved this from a lump of clay, then had to glaze it and risk firing it to red heat, then know the exact moment to take it from the kiln. For a man who can do this, the appellation of “genius” is entirely deserved.

You may think that I’m exaggerating my praise, but I tell you in all earnestness that this is the most beautiful object in the world. If you doubt me, take the trip to the Museum of Fine Art and find yourself paralyzed with astonishment, as I was.

Okay, this is going to be another of those “Why do they have to rush Christmas so much?” rants, so if that sort of thing has lost its appeal for you, you can skip the rest of this post.

Christmas decorations started going up before Halloween this year - at least in my little corner of New England. That seems excessive to me - I mean, think of the confusion of the little kid going to buy a trick-or-treat costume, and being confronted with Santa Claus. That would take the fun out of both holidays.

Also, I hate all the secular Christmas music, and a lot of the religious songs - including carols. I mean, I’ve heard “White Christmas” and “Silent Night” in every conceivable forms for fifty-seven years, and I’m sick to death of them. And Handel’s “Messiah” is just about to tip into that category, but not quite yet. It’s bad enough when I have to endure them from November 25 through Decemberr 25, but to stretch the torture into October seems to be cruel and unusual punishment.

This year, it all seems to be driven by a spirit of panic among the retailers. Now, I understand that, and even sympathize with them because, in our consumer society, the heaviest consumption takes place in this time of the year. With the economy in the trash can, people are scaling back, and retailers are worried about coming out of Christmas with full shelves, empty tills, and a very scary New Year. They have my sympathies, but do they really believe that doing the same sort of advertising harder, louder and longer will really produce different results? Not this year, I think.

Everyone says that I’m difficult to buy for, and I suppose that they’re right. There’s not much that I really need, besides clothes (and Paula buys those for me) and food and shelter; and those things that I really want but don’t need, I tend to purchasein a fit of impulse buying. So there’s not much left to buy for me at Christmas, unless you know me well and are very imaginative.

Well, this year I’m making it easy for everyone: what I really want is for everyone who would have bought a present to donate the money to any of the following in my name:

• American Civil Liberties Union
• Doctors Without Borders
• Amnesty International

Don’t tell me how much you gave, and you can keep the tax deduction yourself, but a gift like this would really make me smile and restore a lot of the comfort and joy of Christmas for me.

I might even hum a carol or two - softly.

I had hoped to keep this blog politics-free, but this is on my mind today and it’s my blog, so here goes:

I wish I could make up my mind about the wisdom of trying to tide Detroit through their immediate crisis with yet another loan/bailout/whatever. I seem to have different ideas on alternate days, but here are some thoughts:

• The management of these companies have shown themselves to be avaricious morons for the last three decades, and I don’t see any signs of change. Whatever we do, every executive above the level of Director should be summarily fired and frog-marched out of the building, and his golden parachute thrown out after him.
• We could well be throwing good money after bad - just delaying the inevitable collapse by three or six months, and we can’t afford to waste that kind of money.
• On the other hand, that would give workers another three or six months to try to retool, or get another job, or move somewhere else more congenial to workers.
• We don’t make very good cars, really - not compared to the Toyotas, Hondas, and BMW’s of the world; so would the driving public be any worse off if the bad cars disappeared from the market?
• But I think we could build great cars again, if Detroit could be blasted out of the rut they’ve been in since 1945, and maybe this would do it.
• If our domestic car manufacturers failed, all of upper Michigan would become a wasteland, and it’s been a heavy manufacturing center for so long that no other industry is going to move there.
• But we need a heavy manufacturing sector to balance our service-heavy economy, and Michigan would be the best place to re-invent it, even if it weren’t cars.
• We still don’t have a plan to deal with the other half of the problem the UAW, who have used their considerable power not just to get a fair shake for their workers, but to hold the auto industry hostage and extort outrageous benefits - far greater than any large workforce in the world. You know that they’re not going to go along with an austerity plan without a lot of heavy-handed persuasion.
• What could the auto executives say, or contract to, that would convince us that they wouldn’t simply screw it up again and waste our money? Would you believe them?
• But even worse would be for the US government to get directly into the management of the auto industry. I mean, it is a specialized sort of job, and it’s not like we have a great track record of running large enterprises at the federal level.

Looking over the above, I guess I’m talking myself into giving Detroit the short-term help it needs to implement some sort of recovery plan. But I would want to see a detailed plan of how they will recover, produce cars worthy of the 21st century, and repay the loan with interest. And I’d want the new management to forgo any golden parachutes (though they can take perfomance based incentive bonuses) and give us their first-born as collateral that they will carry out the plan and not be distracted by the latest consumer whims.

But I’m still not happy about it - not happy at all.

I can’t pretend any more that it’s just late fall in New England.

Nights are getting long - I go to work and return in the dark - and it’s cold all day with no respite in the afternoon. The wind is from the north, bringing its memories of polar glaciers and snowfields, and the ground has hardened up.

Yep, it’s winter.

For hardy Yankees, winter is just another part of the year, but I was raised where winter was a short interlude between a nice fall and a glorious spring, and after thirty years here I still haven’t adjusted. I’ve just about made my peace with the snow and the cold, and I can almost cope with the long dark night, but I can’t believe that it’s so bloody long! In North Carolina, winter starts in December and is pretty much done by March.

I figure that God intended winter to be three months long - the rest is the Devil’s work.

I have a few rules of thumb that help me make sense of the world, and one of them is “Sturgeon’s Law.”

The late, much missed author Theodore Sturgeon was one of the giants from the frontier days of science fiction. He, Isaac Asimov, Stanislaw Lem, and Poul Andersen lifted the genre from a public perception of pulp fiction “ray guns and rocket ships” to a literary form recognized as a branch of “speculative fiction,” worthy of reading and study.

Usually.

Sturgeon was addressing a writer’s conference and started taking questions after his talk. Someone (probably an English Professor or a literary critic) asked him,

“Dr Sturgeon, isn’t it true that 95% of science fiction is just crap?”

Sturgeon looked down at him from his two-meter height and said in imperial tones,

“Young man, in my experience, 95% of everything is just crap.”

Game, set, and match to Sturgeon.

When I’m discouraged with a program that I’m trying to debug, or a particularly obnoxious newsman, or a television show that should never have made it beyond its pilot, I’ll think of Sturgeon’s law: “95% of everything is just crap.” Somehow it always cheers me up.

Thanks, Dr Sturgeon, and I wish you the best - in whatever universe you’re visiting.

I’m used to slowdowns and recessions - we seem to go through them about once very seven or eight years. Things get tough for a while, unemployment goes up, but pretty soon the economy rebalances itself and we’re back in business. Sort of like getting a cold.

I don’t think it’s going to be like that this time - I think it’s more like double pneumonia.

I discount a lot of the hysteria that I hear in the media - it’s there job to make things appear more dramatic than they really are. But when I hear people like Paul Volker and George Soros talking in apocalyptic terms I start to think that this time we’re really in for it. Things are going to get a lot worse, and last a lot longer. And the scariest thing is that no one seems to have any clue how bad it will get, or how long it will last, so it’s just impossible to make any plans.

Now, I happen to be paying off a home loan that I used to start my business (http://managingprogrammers.com, now, alas, defunct). I’m paying it off as fast as I can, to make the house safe and to get out from under the interest payments. But would I be better off paying the minimum and tucking the rest of my payment in a cash account somewhere, so I have a rainy day fund? The choice depends on how secure I feel, and that depends on how severe this crash will be, so how do I make a decision?

I really can’t afford to be out of a job right now, so what’s the right approach. Should I stay with my current job, in a company that’s heavily leveraged with debt and could be forced to lay off staff, or do I find a little startup with a bankroll of venture capital, or do I find a job with a big, stodgy firm that isn’t very exciting but is more solid? Damned if I know - there’s no telling which choice is the least risky.

I suspect that I’m not alone in feeling that the helplessness of this is the worst part: feeling like you’re just waiting for the sky to fall - or not - and that you can’t do anything to prevent it, or even to plan for it. If I knew what the risks were, I would feel much better, even if they were substantial; but not knowing is keeping me awake at night.

So I guess I’ll muddle along like the rest of us, looking at the flood of data in front of me and trying to sift the nuggets of real data from the gravel of misinformation. I’ll try to make the best decisions I can with the data I’ve got, though I’m not at all confident that I’ll get it right, and I’ll hope that we come out of the valley of the shadow of death sooner rather than later.

Best of luck to you, reader, and wish me luck too.

I’m reading on Yahoo today that the Feds have turned down a request from banks and consumer credit advocates to forgive portions of the credit card debt of consumers who wouldn’t have qualified for the card, or who clearly can’t pay the debt. Evidently, the object to the fact that the banks want to realize the loss over several years, instead of the year of forgiveness.

Come on people, get with the program!

In case you haven’t noticed, people around the country are being savaged by debt that they can’t pay without beggaring themselves and going into bankruptcy. That approach benefits no one: not the consumers, not the banks, not even the government. So any alternative approach appears to be an improvement, and this one sounds fair: everyone gives up something and everyone gains something.

Except that the feds want the tax money now, not in inflated dollars. Greedy bastards.

I know the familiar refrain: “They shouldn’t have got into this mess in the first place - they shouldn’t have taken those cards if they couldn’t pay them back.” That sounds nice and moral, but consider:

• Financial situations can change in a heartbeat, and what looked like a reasonable debt load yesterday can become a mountain today.
• Banks have been literally forcing credit into our hands for years, with ever more ingenious enticements to go beyond our means at little or no consequence for the first two years.
• The Feds have done nothing about these predatory practices but wring their hands and listen to the bank lobbyists.

So I’m content to give the consumers a lecture on responsibilty and some credit counseling, but I’ve got real anger for the consumer credit industry and their enablers in the FTC and other Washington agencies. For decades, banks have been strip mining middle and lower income families of the money they need to get out of debt by taking it in late fees, service charges, and annual fees; and the FTC has tamely signed off on this outrageous behavior in the name of the “free market.” If there’s any evil in this scenario, that’s where it lives.

So if the banks and the consumers are collectively trying to dig themselves out of the hole they have dug together, why would anyone block their way, especially on the strength of an accounting rule?

Smug, self-cogratulatory, bastards - turn the bums out of office and put in someone with a soul.

It’s been about a week since Barak Obama clinched the election to the US presidency. Now that the wild celebration has begun to settle down, I’ve started to thinkabout things more deeply, and here are some of my thoughts.

I grew up in the segregated South of the 1950’s and 1960’s, when you could buy “Whites Only” signs off the rack in hardware stores, and Black parents taught their children (particularly their sons) not to look White people (particularly women) in the eye, and to step off the street to let a White person past. In that not-so-long-ago time, Mr Obama would have been invisible at best, and more likely an “uppity nigra” (Apologies for the language, if I were being true to history it would have been worse.)

I remember that my parents worked to promote civil rights. They didn’t go to Birmingham, but they did march in local protests. I wish I had been allowed to go, but it was too dangerous - the Klan was still active.

But here we are, a generation and a half later, with an African American just about to enter the white house (and expel that Texas SOB, but that’s another rant.) It occurred to me that, when we were looking at racial progress day by day, we saw little or no progress and it was disheartening in the extreme. But if I compare today’s triumph with memories of my youth I feel a little shiver of pride for all of us - first for the Blacks who kept fighting against long odds for what they knew should be theirs by right, and then for the rest of us who (often grudgingly) opened society to them.

I’m not naive enough to think that this marks the end of racism - we’re still a racist nation and will be for several more generations - but I really like that little moment of satisfaction and pride that I feel whenever I think of his win and all it means. As a Friend said in Meeting, “I look to the struggles of the future, and I am sustained by the successes of the past.”

Amen, Brother.