I spent the first couple of decades of my life in Canada. I then sought out the more contentious but somewhat greener pastures of "Mankind's Last Best Hope", the "Shining City On A Hill", a superpower and World's self-appointed Policeman, the "Leader of the Free World", the "Empire of Liberty", the "Indispensable Nation", with "American Exceptionalism" coursing through its veins, that country South of the 49th parallel. I did this partly because I wanted to observe what made the US different from the "True North Strong and Free" (aka "The Great White North"), and other former members of the British Empire. What was the source of this clear dynamism and entrepreneurial spirit? It has been a complicated and chaotic learning experience. My father, a serial entrepreneur, was somewhat crestfallen that I had decided to stay in what he called "The United Snakes". And from some perspective, Trump's derogatory comments about "s-hole countries" left one out; the US itself (which I sometimes refer to as "The Real Evil Empire"). I now can compare what I see going on in Canada with what I observe going on all around me, particularly in the entrepreneurial sphere. Canada for some reason does not quite understand the value of entrepreneurship, and how to harness it. Canada has exported a lot of its talent for many decades to the US or Europe. Alexander Graham Bell's family and Thomas Edison's family have some Canadian roots, as do many others. I noticed a "business incubator" set up by my alma mater back in Canada. But when I investigated, I discovered that it was just a building that was mostly full of University bureaucracy, and few startups or entrepreneurs to speak of. And not only that, but the University was charging fees which were considerably higher than what one would pay for commercial office space in the city. They really had no idea what an "incubator" was, except someone had read somewhere that in the US, there was lots of money involved, and these idiots wanted to grab some of it for themselves. And of course, it was failing miserably. My mentor returned back to Canada to take a "Canada Chair". The Canada Chairs were meant to offer world class salaries and benefits to entice Canadian academics to return to Canada. However, my mentor had only been there for a couple of years when the reality started to sink in. The government seized all the Canada Chairs to dole them out to those from various intersectionality and social justice categories. So my mentor was promptly booted from his position since he was a white male. A couple of years ago, I went to listen to a lecture by an occupant of a Canada Chair sponsored by the American Institute of Physics. The topic of the lecture was more or less about how to remove white males from academia so these positions could be filled with "more worthy" victims of White Supremacy and the patriarchy, such as women and BIPOC people. As I have previously mentioned, I am BIPOC but I reject any preferences this identification might accord me. One of the stated goals of this lecture was to discuss how to get more black males into physics faculty positions. I made several private suggestions to the person moderating this lecture, a completely illiterate incompetent that the AIP had hired to manage their DEI program. I suggested that we look back a century or more ago when Black Physicists from this geographic area were far more successful in academia, government and corporate R&D than they are presently. I was promptly expelled from the lecture, with no explanation. I sent my summary of my suggestions to numerous fellow professional physicists, and not a single one could see how I had caused offense. So much for trying to actually make serious progress on this question. No, it did not suit the narrative of just pushing unprepared candidates with no discernible merit into positions by force and fiat. My mentor has a long list of patents to his credit; dozens and dozens. Some of these cover technology in which tens of billions have been invested, and some cover technology in which tens of trillions have been invested. So he knows a thing or two about technology and patents and their commercial value. While at his new position as a chaired professor at a prominent Canadian university, my mentor had another insight. And so, since he knows something about the value of these things, he visited the intellectual property office on campus to see about getting a patent issued. He astounded at the reception he received. The person running this intellectual property office was nominally a patent attorney. And since filing for a patent entails a lot of effort, the attorney was not particularly interested in assisting in the writing and filing of a patent. What the attorney did instead was to chew out my mentor up one side and down the other for being an idiot. He told him that every idea he had ever had, including this new one, were completely worthless horse-pucky. And he knew better, since he was an attorney who had actually never done anything whatsoever in his supposed field of expertise. I have had some interactions with my alma mater over the last few years. One of the things I have noticed is that the bureaucracy and administrative staff have ballooned considerably over the last few years, and particularly since I graduated decades ago. I also noticed what their "secret plans" were for the future of the university. These administrative nincompoops thought that their jobs would be permanently secured if they made a massive marketing effort in China. They thought they could entice thousands of Chinese students to a sort of middling university up on the tundra, and charge them immense fees. And the Chinese would gladly pay these obscene costs. And these administrators would therefore all be rich and comfortable forever. There was no thought to improving the quality of instruction or the quality of research or the faculty. No, those things were all not important because the Chinese would supposedly be willing to pay huge amounts to attend a school surrounded by lots of "superior European types" with a few First Nations and black and East Indian immigrants thrown into the mix. These same characters of course sign on whole-heartedly to the DEI agenda to replace all those superior European types, because they view themselves as quite woke and sensitive and so on. It was all sort of a load of nonsense, from what I could tell. I am working on creating a startup doing R&D (that is, research and development). I was thinking about locating some of the facilities in Canada (and possibly in Australia as well). However, as I watch Canada and Australia fall all over themselves to make their countries as unappealing as possible, for entrepreneurship or anything else, I am having second thoughts.
Inflation And Deflation Posted on December 4, 2024 by john Dear Friends, It seems to me, when Trump takes command, even if the Fed were to cut interest rates, there will be deflation, not inflation… as long as he cuts government spending, taxes and regulation at the same time. Think of it like a car. Taxes and regulation are the brakes, while spending lowers the efficiency of the engine. So if you push down hard on the brakes, with taxes and regulation, while at the same time lower the efficiency of the engine, the car will slow and eventually stop. A Keynesian would claim spending is the accelerator, but empirical history proves it lowers efficiency, it doesn’t increase fuel intake. It’s “pushing on a string.” R&D, investment in plant, and innovation are the accelerators. So, to cut inflation, government only needs to cut spending and lift its foot off the brakes. Because government spending is like cocaine, it only feels good, it doesn’t make anything better. In fact it’s destructive. Why? Because government spending competes with private sector spending, creates inefficiencies, and fosters cronyism. All of which corrodes a nation’s wealth. Though it vastly increases the wealth of those directing the spending. By competing with private sector spending, government largess drives up costs. Monetizing the debt increase inflation. Government needs directs research, instead of consumer needs, making the economy less efficient. Meanwhile, Many firms become established they only rent seek. Becoming specialists in filling out the forms necessary to get free government money. Like coke, it feels good… until it runs out. Deflation is the normal state of affairs in a free enterprise economy. Wages and costs are directly derived from the efficiency of the operation. If a manufacturer buys a new tool that increases the efficiency of his workers by 20%. He can give them a raise, lower his costs to under cut his competition, and take extra profits for himself. All because of that increase in efficiency. To make it more clear. If a contractor had a carpenter, who can frame a 20 foot wall in 20 minutes with a hammer and nails. Then the contractor buys a nail gun that increases efficiency, so the same carpenter can frame the same wall in 5 minutes, that increase in efficiency translates in to profit, higher wages and a savings to the customer. Making deflation and rising wages the normal state of affairs in a capitalist economy. The way the government keeps inflation as close to 2% as possible is by printing 2% more money than the economy grows in a single year. Which is tricky because the actual growth is hard to measure,. Especially with flawed metrics. What the elite never want to happen, is to allow natural deflation. Because that leads to rapid increase in wages, the standard of living, and the station of us peons. The argument for keeping inflation above zero is based on flawed logic as well. They claim people will stop spending if they can expect lower prices next year. But if you need a refrigerator, you need it now, not next year. Few who are making gobs of money, are willing to store meat in a cooler for a year, to save a fiver. Making the argument against deflation spurious as it can be. So if the government can cut spending, regulation and taxes, The federal reserve will be reigned in. Because there will be no need to print money to keep up with the deficit. The debt would be whittled away while our standard of living would increase. Even as the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates to try to cut into the growth. To save the cronies. A wise government that serves the interests of the whole nation, would then cut spending, taxes and regulation to allow the free market the breath, to grow us out of the debt the elite have saddled us with. I suspect the Fed’s plan though is to collapse the currency the debt is denoted in and voila… the debt is inflated away and the elite don’t suffer. Just the economy, citizens and debt mules. Us for the most part. Sincerely, John Pepin
During my career, I have observed very bad behavior by managers, over and over and over. I have seen many instances of massive theft and fraud and lying and actual physical assaults. I have witnessed astounding unparalleled verbal abuse and many physical threats. I know of plenty of sexual assaults as well. Yet none of the people behaving like this was ever held accountable for any of it. As a junior person, I was constantly mocked and insulted and threatened. I did not dare point out anything improper or illegal. I knew my career would be over instantly if I did so. Now as a more "seasoned" professional, I am hoping that I can chart a superior course for any organization I am involved with. I am trying to think of "antibodies" for this kind of behavior that can be created to try to prevent these negative activities or minimize or reduce them. And I will consider situations where there might be some retribution called for. Way more than half of all American employees report that they dislike their workplace, and most of them say it is because of their direct managers. Substantially more than 50% of all those who leave a job report that it is because they could no longer stand the abuse from their managers. I had a job where I was directed to attempt to improve the morale at a large technical government agency. In numerous surveys, going back decades, this agency had always had the absolutely worst morale of any US government agency. Of course, the main cause of the morale problems were the managers themselves, but no one can tell the managers this. The managers were infinitely powerful and were judged to be blameless for everything and anything that happened in their domains, by definition. This sort of stuff makes for a very bad environment. I was basically just putting bandaids on severe problems. I have observed this situation numerous times, at universities and corporations and government organizations and nonprofits. A couple of examples stand out in my mind, and are somewhat illustrative. (1) At a grocery store near me, I met a young man in his 30s. Let's call him "Peter O'Really" (not his actual name). Peter had worked for this private chain of high end grocery stores for over a dozen years, ever since he graduated from college. He had possibly even worked for them before he finished college. Peter was well-known to be a hard worker, and a dedicated worker. When anyone needed assistance, Peter jumped in to help. Peter did not care about departmental boundaries. Peter would lend a hand wherever he was needed. Peter probably had over a decade of good performance reviews. Everyone who worked with Peter loved him. So Peter was promoted, up the ranks, and when I met him he had just taken a new position, managing over 400 people. At this point, something "clicked" inside Peter. He effectively "lost his mind". Within a couple of weeks, Peter went from a helpful, reasonable sort of guy, to a raging tyrant. I had never seen anything like this transformation before, up close. It was as though Peter became the embodiment of that famous statement of Lord Acton, "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely." Peter set down new rules for those he was managing. No employee was allowed to greet any customers that they knew. No employee was allowed to speak to any customers on their breaks, or even during their days off away from the store. No employee was allowed to help any customers. This was all strictly forbidden. This behavior would be met with severe criticism and chastisement and threats and even termination. The departments under Peter were now effectively warring camps. Everyone hated everyone else and no one cooperated with each other any more. Nonpaying customers were accorded all kinds of privileges, but paying customers were treated with hostility. So this high end store had homeless people sleeping in it, 12 hours a day, as they vomited and defecated on themselves. No, according to the management, this was perfectly reasonable. This went on for at least 10 months. Any customer who noticed this was attacked and treated as a threat. Customers who commented about this were even served with a notice of tresspass and threatened with arrest or worse. Nonpaying customers would hold "rallies" inside the cafeteria section of the store, screaming at the top of their lungs about the necessity to kill as many whites as possible, as soon as possible. This happened regularly, at least a couple of times a week, for months. This was not a problem, according to the management. Employees would stand outside the doors spitting on the exiting customers and blowing cigarette smoke in their faces. This was fine with the management. Employees and others could hang out in the private parking lot for hours, smoking "skunk weed". This created an offensive noxious cloud of smoke that customers had to walk through. Managers were dismissive of complaints. One of Peter's "thugs" called me at home to threaten me with physical attack and prison. This character told me numerous times that since this store was part of a privately owned corporation, no laws applied to them and they could do whatever they pleased. I just could not believe what I was hearing. This was a grocery store, after all, not the Mafia. Eventually, Peter was fired. I have paid attention to Peter's "Linked-in" page since then. He has not been able to find any employment now in several years. Potential employers examine his track record, and are repulsed. Peter is basically unemployable now, even for a minimum wage job. (2) I worked for a few years for a failed STEM researcher who had been promoted to the manager position at a think tank. Let's call this think tank manager "Frank Soupspoon" (not his real name). Dr. Soupspoon was sort of a holy terror at the think tank; yelling, screaming, cursing, threatening, throwing heavy objects at people's heads, and worse. There were about 4 people who quit before I did. I called them all up, and the overall comment was something like, "I could not continue to work for someone mentally ill." Dr. Soupspoon was irrational and unpredictable. None of his opinions or pronouncements made the least bit of sense. And Soupspoon was vindictive and angry about 99% of the time. Later, as I tried to make sense of what was behind Soupspoon's "reign of terror" and obscene and even illegal harassment of all and sundry, I realized something. The staff had wondered if Soupspoon was suffering from early onset dementia, since he could not seem to remember stuff he had been told, even in writing, and would often fly into a rage about it. However out from under his thumb, as I contemplated what I had observed, I realized that the real issue was probably that Dr. Soupspoon was intoxicated with alcohol at least 50% of the time at work. Soupspoon has managed to wrangle himself an "emeritus position" at the think tank, which is highly unwarranted. He never contributed anything as near as I could tell, but he impeded a lot of progress, offended more than his share of our customers and drove away a lot of his best staff. Also, Soupspoon always walked around with a chip on his shoulder due to his crappy education and inadequate background and failed research career. Soupspoon just did not have what it took, and never produced anything of any value, in decades. This is not the person one wants deciding the fate of people's careers and making choices about research programs. He was basically a fraud, and he knew it. He was jealous of people who could produce and did his best to destroy them, if at all possible. But in his position, he was completely unassailable and immune to criticism, or so it seemed. I have seen this phenomenon at numerous highbrow and elite institutions over my career. And my friends have observed the same thing at other illustrious institutions. So of course, one starts to wonder why this is. One explanation that strikes me is that active innovators are loathe to walk away from a career in R and D to manage others. If someone has spent a decade or two or more reaching the forefront of some area, at tremendous personal cost, they are loathe to suddenly quit and stop doing anything productive or useful. The people who are willing to do this are frequently those with nominally the "right" credentials, at least on paper, but who are adrift when it comes to actually contributing. So they are lured by the power and attention and the extra salary, and they accept positions in R&D management. This of course is a very bad arrangement. It might be even worse than a nontechnical person managing a group of technical people. I posed this question to a close friend, one of the most brilliant pure mathematicians I have ever met. We were working in the mathematics department at a very prominent R&D institution, at the time (at least by some measures) the best in the world. I asked John, "why do I observe so many middle managers doing things that are bad for the customers, bad for the organization, bad for the owners, bad for the employees, and even bad for their own careers?" John said he had noticed the same thing. He had pondered it for a couple of years, and had decided that the concept of "power" is so appealing, so attractive, so enticing and so seductive to certain people (like the grocery store manager Peter that I described above) that they seem to more or less go insane. These people are effectively "drunk with power". They want to demonstrate to everyone that they are endowed with sufficient authority and might and clout and omnipotence that they can do whatever strikes them, at the moment, and that no one can stop them. And if that involves a self-destructive action, well that is even more compelling to them, it would seem. They are seized by the illusion of "control" and want to exercise it. So, they do, often with predictably disastrous results. I was reminded of this when I came across a couple of recent essays online. The first is a recent letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal: UC Riverside’s DEI Guardians Came After Me https://www.wsj.com/opinion/uc-riversides-dei-guardians-came-after-me-39d8e26e https://www.wsj.com/opinion/uc-riversides-dei-guardians-came-after-me-39d8e26e?st=YsrbWY&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink The university censured me after I spoke out against race taking over the faculty hiring process. -Very shady handling by Kim Wilcox and Prof Phillip Brisk: From the article, Prof. Link was found not guilty of all charges by a peer group of UCR professors, but Wilcox and Brisk still went after him. As one reads this letter, it is striking how unfairly this senior professor was treated at a branch of the University of California. He was threatened and harassed, for seemingly no good reason. Eventually he just had had enough, and quit. The people attacking him felt that DEI and the "woke ideology" had endowed them with an invincible weapon to wield. And so, they did. I have heard of similar nonsense going on in other institutions. This new social justice nonsense is sort of vague, but it gives bullies all kinds of new weaponry to hassle, torment and persecute others. I know of a couple of R&D institutions where all work has now ceased, so everyone can fight using these new woke weapons to destroy each other. And it has now been going on for several years, at this point. Here is another interesting thread, this time from X (formerly Twitter). Google (now Alphabet) spent quite a few years and many millions of dollars trying to figure out why some of their work teams were productive and some were not: Google spent $80M studying effective teams. https://x.com/mtdemangeeos/status/1867230440844902560 Their shocking discovery? Perks & ping pong tables don't matter. -team members had to feel psychologically safe. And then they performed better. The managers were stunned to realize the answer. It was nothing like what they expected. Of course, most managers think that if they kick the snot out of their employees and make them hate their jobs, they will produce more. Any working stiff knows that this will not work, and this long study by Google showed it. If people felt "psychologically safe" at work, they performed better and contributed more and were happier. This should be obvious, but to Dark Triad and Dark Tetrad personalities drawn to managerial slots, it is not. We have some of the worst possible people managing others in many of our organizations. And it shows.
