A Miscellany

First, something fun that caught my eye, so typical of Japan. You undoubtedly have heard of their high-speed rail service over there. Sleek, aerodynamic trains rocket down the tracks at upwards of 200 miles per hour. At the tip of each train is a sculpted aerodynamic nose made of thin aluminum plate. The odd thing is that it is literally sculpted. Elderly Japanese craftsmen hand hammer each nose cone individually. A 73-year-old metalworker named Kiyoto Yamashita hammered out the first one as a rush job for the train serving the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Now his company makes them for all of Japan’s high speed trains. Nobody has come up with a cheaper or better method. As a former professional blacksmith I find it satisfying to know that my craft still surpasses high tech solutions somewhere in the modern world.

Continuing on the old vs. new theme, I’d like to recommend the Park-McCullough House in Bennington, Vermont, as an interesting place to visit. A lawyer and southern Vermont native, Trenor Park, made his fortune as a lawyer and land speculator in California during the gold rush. He returned home a millionaire and in 1865 he built a 42 room summer home in the grand French style. The Parks and McCulloughs lived there for the next 100 years. After the last family resident died it was turned into a museum. Trenor Park was deeply involved in the design, and his daughter renovated it for a presidential visit in 1891. The result is grand, yet human scaled, with rich detailing. Every room has custom carved woodwork and a marble fireplace. Apparently the occupants never threw anything away, because the place is stocked with furniture, paintings, carpets, clothing, and housewares, all beautiful. It’s a time capsule of Gilded Age life in the upper class. It has a carriage house that I’d be happy to live in, pleasant grounds, and even a children’s playhouse that is an exact miniature replica of the main house, complete with cupola and slate mansard roof.

On a more topical note, I have an idea for compensation for the BP/Deepwater Horizon spill. It’s called, “You blow it, we own it.” If an offshore well blows out and spills oil for more than a day, the U.S. government takes possession of the well and contracts its operation to another oil services company. In the case of the Deepwater Horizon we could be looking at a gross of about $500 million a year (at 10,000 barrels a day), with the development costs left on BP’s tab. That would tighten up deep water operations and oil executive sphincters.

There’s a trend on National Public Radio that is annoying me. Part of it is those Story Corps segments where family members interview each other. Part of it is disaster and tragedy coverage where they interview the family member about the victim. They refer to this kind of stuff as “driveway moments.” Supposedly we are listening to these stories on the drive home and, unable to tear ourselves away, we sit in the car listening after we are in our respective driveways. I call it lachrymography, the exploitation of tears.

I have to give them credit for knowing their medium. Radio is intimate. Scott Simon’s soft voice is right there in your ear as he sympathetically probes the wounds of some surviving spouse. I also credit them for being good at it. My breakfast has stuck in my throat more than once as some poor soul has shared a loss with millions of strangers. Afterwards, I feel manipulated. NPR is playing me for my dopamine and my donations. There is some kind of relationship between NPR and its faithful listeners that suspends cynicism, gets far enough into the listener’s ear that these exercises in controlled pathos strike home. I’m not saying that there is some evil genius at NPR headquarters cackling, “That should have them sobbing on their steering wheels!” It is something that has evolved, survived, and become more sophisticated, as editors drift towards stories that contain that donation-laden, quavering voice.

Here’s a note from the flash collapse and rebound of the New York Stock Exchange on May 6. As you may remember, the Dow Jones Average lost and regained a thousand points in the space of an hour and a half. There is an international consulting firm called Accenture that was trading for about $44 a share just before the plunge. It briefly reached a low of 4 cents before rebounding to $41. If someone had been able to jump in at the right moment and buy $5,000 worth of Accenture at the bottom, they would have walked away with $5 million an hour later. Of course, only some major firm with computer programs in place could have pulled off anything like this. These big traders with computerized high speed trading are generally considered the culprits behind the plunge. This thousand to one opportunity is another piece of evidence that the stock market has transformed from a place for investment to the world’s most complex casino.

Some startup drug company is selling for $12 a share. I buy a thousand shares. The next day they announce a successful trial of their new (insert name of common affliction) drug. Their stock jumps to $20. I sell, and pocket $8,000. A week later someone questions their study and the stock drops to $10. The people who bought at $20 grieve. What has been accomplished here? What net social benefit has come out of these transactions? I’m trying to see a substantive difference between this and pari-mutuel gambling on horse races. Yes, the drug company needs investors, but what benefit is there from this volatility?

I’m in favor of what is sometimes called a Tobin tax. It is a tenth of one percent levy on all stock exchange transactions. The NYSE, AMEX, and NASDAQ together are churning about $90 billion a day. A 0.1% Tobin tax would put $90 million per trading day into our coffers, or roughly $22 billion a year. It would also discourage high speed trading, reducing market volatility. There would be howls of outrage on Wall Street, but that is soft and gentle music to my ears.



The Important Bill

Occasionally I get the sense that someone in Washington D.C. is actually paying attention. For years I have been pounding a single note on the political keyboard, namely campaign finance reform. There is a bill in play right now that actually addresses the problem.

I have written about how people focus on political personalities while ignoring the system that promoted those personalities. Imagine you have a machine that makes coffee cups. You pull a lever and out comes a cup. You pour coffee in it and find that there is a hole in the bottom. Coffee leaks out on your lap. You discard that cup, pull the lever again, get another cup, pour more coffee, and get another cup in your lap. Repeat, repeat, repeat. You can discard cups forever, but until you fix the machine you are going to keep getting burned.

The most significant two numbers in U.S. politics are 2,400 and 30,400. These are the numbers of dollars that an individual can give to a federal candidate or a national party. The problem with these numbers is that very few people in this country can afford them. Perhaps one out of a thousand Americans can donate anything close to these amounts on a regular basis.

The Public Interest Research Group did an analysis of campaign finance over a number of election cycles and found that, on average:

• Whichever candidate in a congressional primary spent the most money won, 9 times out of 10.
• The high spender outspent the number two spender 3:1 – it generally wasn’t close.
• 75% of the money that these high spending winners raised came in big chunks - $500 up to the $2,400 limit.

 I like to say that the difference between elections in Iran and elections in the U.S. is that in Iran a small group of mullahs decides who gets to run for office and in the U.S. a small group of millionaires makes that decision.

The bill in question is the Fair Elections Now Act. It would beef up the public campaign funding available to candidates who are either unwilling or unable to schmooze millionaires. The vital number here is $100, the limit for contributions to candidates taking advantage of the public funding. Each candidate would have to raise thousands of sub-$100 donations in order to qualify for funding.

Qualified House candidates would get $900,000, split 40/60 between the primary and general elections. Senate candidates would get $1.25 million plus $250,000 per district in their state, again, split 40/60. This is real money for contesting an election.

Even better, if a publicly funded candidate faces a high spender, he or she can raise more $100 donations and have them matched 4:1. This provides the monetary parity that swings elections.

The cherry on top is mandated discounts on media buys and media vouchers of $100,000 per congressional district.

The question must pop into your mind: Where will all this money come from? Oh, it gets better. Government contractors (Halliburton, anyone?) will pay a percentage of their contracts into the campaign finance fund. The fund will also get the proceeds of sales of portions of the broadcast spectrum.

You can read about the legislation in detail at Public Campaign and Fix Congress First!. The Senate bill is S.752 and the House version is H.1826.

This is a complete game changer. Finally, candidates with opinions that might offend the mighty will have funding equal to their less discriminating opponents. This is the fix that the machine has been needing.

Thankfully, all my elected representatives are on board. Senators Leahy and Sanders will cosponsor, as will Representative Welch. There are over a hundred cosponsors in the house right now, but there are many yet unconverted.

I don’t ask for action from my readers very often, but I do now. Forward the news of this legislation to everyone you know. It isn’t a liberal/conservative issue, it’s a 99.9% of Americans who can’t fling $2,400 checks around issue. Ask people to contact their Senators and Representatives and firmly demand their support for this bill. Those legislators that are already supporters should get praise and thanks. Here’s a list of who’s who in terms of demands or thanks.

Examine any government policy that angers or mystifies you and you can almost always trace it back to the undue influence of big money in our electoral system. The big money rewards the spineless, the hacks, the flunkies, the ethically challenged, the shortsighted, and the just plain evil. The Fair Elections Now Act is the most important piece of legislation I have seen since I started paying attention to politics. Let’s get it passed.



Graceful Degradation

I have long been a fan of wooden boats. There is something alive about them that a fiberglass or steel boat lacks. Modern materials are an improvement in terms of strength to weight and ease of maintenance, but there is a grace to wood.

Part of that grace is that wood speaks to us about its condition. It shows its wear, its cracks, or its incipient rot. A spruce mast will creak and bend before giving up and breaking, allowing a sailor time to loosen a line or change course prior to a disaster. Although it is many times stronger, pound for pound, a carbon fiber mast offers no warnings. If there is a hidden flaw in it, or if you exceed its strength, the first you will hear of it is a sound like a gunshot. Your mast will go over the side and you will be in a very sudden predicament.

What the wooden mast has that the carbon fiber mast lacks is the property of graceful degradation. This is one of my favorite engineering terms. It calls up the image of genteel debauchery, but it refers to a system that has a gradual mode of failure with perceptible warnings inherent to the process.

This concept came to mind as I visited eastern Massachusetts this last Sunday. A ten-foot diameter water main, no, THE ten foot diameter water main from the primary reservoir had broken, putting two million people instantly on a boil water order.

The water main was just a trigger, though. The concept has been percolating in the back of my mind for some time, possibly since the recent tritium leak at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. The present financial crisis swirls into the mix along with the ash cloud from that volcano in Iceland, as do the 5,000 barrels of oil that spew into the Gulf of Mexico every day.

I’ll jump to the conclusion and then backtrack: Efficiency isn’t resilient. Concentrated, streamlined, just-in-time, lean systems aren’t resilient.

We rely on many complex systems that have virtually no room for error, yet threaten us with disaster in the event of an error. We have the single big water main and the few large power plants transmitting over the few large transmission lines. The power plant in question runs on an inherently dangerous fuel in an inherently dangerous reaction that has to be carefully balanced and isolated from the environment by layers of so-called failsafe protection. A dozen huge banks handle 60% of our economy. Our air transportation system is structurally overbooked, with planes taking off and landing every 30 seconds at major airports. A delay at one airport cascades to dozens of others, clogging the entire system .There is no room for error, breakdown, bad weather, or, let’s say, a volcanic eruption. There are hundreds of offshore platforms managing holes drilled into the seabed in the Gulf of Mexico, each required to contain a high pressure stream of toxic material. It’s surprising that more spills haven’t happened. As the various pipes, actual and metaphorical, crack and spew, we witness the inevitable force of chance multiplied by decades of cost savings through deregulation and deferred maintenance.

We could take a lesson from nature. The natural world has evolved to be spectacularly inefficient. It is inefficient because only the inefficient survive. Most organisms over-reproduce so that some small number of offspring will survive. Living systems exhibit massive redundancy.

I am reminded of the State of Vermont installing a “living system” wastewater treatment facility for one of its welcome centers along Interstate 91. A living system wastewater treatment plant uses tanks with hydroponically grown plants to absorb waste products and purify the water. The problem with wastewater treatment at a tourist welcome center is that business spikes on the weekends and then goes to nearly zero during weekdays. A conventional septic system has a hard time handling the surge or starve pattern, but a plant ecosystem is well adapted to it. The huge surface area of the root systems captures the surge and the plants store the nutrients till the next time of plenty.

I am also reminded of a presentation I attended at the Northern Grain Growers conference back in March. The presenter was talking about side by side tests of organic and chemically grown grains. In good years the chemical crops outperformed the organic crops. However, in mediocre or bad years, when the weather didn’t cooperate, the organic crops outperformed the chemical ones. The reason is that organic farming concentrates on nourishing the soil, not the plant. (See my essay on obliquity) It takes more effort and care to build up the soil, but then the soil holds moisture and nutrients better than the dead sponge of a chemically treated field. The organic farmer is trading short term gain for long term reliability.

The British Petroleum (BP) offshore well that is now leaking 5,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico is a classic example of the failure of short term bean counting. It would have cost BP roughly $500,000 per well to install a remotely operated emergency shutoff valve, a backup requirement that BP had lobbied against. BP has about 200 subsea wells worldwide, so that would have cost BP $100 million. The company is now facing civil liabilities approaching $10 billion, and its stock has lost $25 billion in market value. That’s just the financial cost of lean operation. The cost to society in general will be many times that.

I’ll lay our present crises at the figurative feet of corporate power and corporate mythology. Our culture has been sold a story about the efficiency of business and the wisdom of market forces. Corporate interference in our government has made that mythology law. What we find is that efficiency works (at least for the shareholders) only as long as everything is going well, and that markets are no wiser than the yeast in a beer vat.

We need to have a conversation as a society about the ongoing price of building in resilience. In some cases it won’t be a cost, but a savings. My local credit union gives me better service and interest rates than the commercial bank I used to use. Widely distributed renewable energy systems will pay for themselves during their service life and dampen price volatility. We have to start adding into our calculations the periodic, yet inevitable price of lacking a Plan B. If we are smart, we will enforce some rational amount of redundancy. When things go wrong, as they so often do, we will have the ability to degrade gracefully.



The Language of Suits

Your Minor Heretic has never been a clothes horse. Jeans and work shirts are the norm for me, with the occasional display of a tweed jacket and khakis when I want a little professorial cred. Every man has a turning point, though.

In my role as a renewable energy consultant I have to make a presentation at a prestigious country club to the board of a well funded organization. When I thought about the venue and the audience I realized that tweed and khakis wouldn’t cut it. Time to buy a suit. Being ignorant, but realizing both my ignorance and that there are subtleties to the selection of suits, I turned to my friend The Broker.

He is a successful manager at a brokerage firm with a name you would recognize. He knows the game, plays the game well, and enjoys the game, but realizes that it is a game and stays somewhat aloof and amused by it all. I owe him much of my understanding of the financial markets (such as it is) and appreciate his window into that world. I have lunch with him regularly and on a recent outing I pumped him for information on the language of suits. He gave me a raft of information, which he then helpfully summarized in the email below. Oh brave new world.

Here's what I'd look for in a suit:

2 button jacket, not three, which was a bit of a trendy fad that is fortunately (in my view) going out.

Plain front pants, versus pleated. Pleated are a perfectly acceptable classic look but your build wants plain front and it is a slightly cleaner, more contemporary look without being trendy or affected. Affected being the sartorial offense only slightly eclipsed by tacky. And, yeah, you want cuffs on the pants.

Materials: a light to mid-weight wool worsted will work in all but the hottest days. You may want a spring-summer suit and a fall-winter suit. I love the three-piece suit, despite my nasty comment.* I think it is a perfect expression of Minor H. Just know that it is a more academic look and statement which, I suspect, may be spot on for much of your work. But if you find yourself doing a Power Lunch with some mogul you may want to think about whether or not the vest communicates what you want.

For Wall Street or a more formal look I go for black, navy, charcoal, pinstripe, neither of which sound appropriate to me for your Sunday afternoon at the Country Club. For that I suggest a mid-tone gray, a nice glen plaid or even a nice tan with an interesting texture or pattern ( a la the Land's End example I attached). The suit says "serious, professional, committed." The friendly color and material say "Sunday afternoon at the Country Club" and "I'm not some schmuck trying too hard to sell you something." If you get the cut and fit right, then it winks and nods to the assembled Prepoisie that you know the game.

The other cues in that game are Brooks Brothers shirts which are immediately recognizable to the initiated by their rounded barrel cuff edges and the rounded pockets. Again, a shirt with some stripes or color or a nice pattern will also be more Sunday afternoon and less Monday boardroom. That will play well in Brookline.

(* Nasty comment: Three piece suits are only seen in a five mile radius around Cambridge Massachusetts.)

There’s a lot of information packed in there, but no more than is packed into a well-made glen plaid two-button suit with a Brooks Brothers cuff peeking out. The exercise of choosing a suit has brought to the forefront of my attention how much we signal each other with our clothes. There are some people who deliberately work with their clothing style to communicate, but most of us just have some basic idea of what’s appropriate for various situations and choose clothing by some mixture of work requirements, brand loyalty, and color preference. Our broadcast of our identities is unconscious. My friend The Broker knows the language and employs it consciously. The only other person I know who employs the language of clothing so consciously is a costume designer. And now I do.

This plunge into business clothing has made me think about that most impractical piece of men’s clothing, the tie. A man’s tie is a decoration, but mostly it is a sign. I’ve been trying out a number of messages to attach to the tie, and I have distilled it down to “I care.” A man wears a tie for professional situations to signify a serious attitude. He wears a tie to social functions to express his opinion that said function is special in some way, elevated above the norm. The color and pattern of the tie can signal an allegiance to a university, a club, or an arm of the military. It can also signal an ironic counter-message to the formality of the form.

I ended up going to a Brooks Brothers outlet with The Librarian. She was my unbiased set of fashion conscious eyeballs. The woman at the outlet was competent and not too pushy. I tried on some suits. The Librarian approved of a grayish-tan glen plaid and a dark gray pinstripe. I went out in the parking lot and got on my cellphone for some last minute coaching from The Broker. Then I dropped a few benjamins on the suits, plus one blue and one white narrow cut shirt. I passed over the shirts in light purple, teal, and I-ate-too-many-jalapeno-poppers-and-drank-too-many-strawberry-daquiris-and-puked. I also passed over the many ties that the saleswoman proffered. The patterns and colors were suitable for signaling high-altitude rescue aircraft, or perhaps luring amorous poison dart frogs. My explanation for the eyeball-spanking coloration is that while the form and mere presence of the tie signals formality, its color and pattern are the last outlet for personal expression in business attire. As with plumbing, the smaller the outlet, the harder the spray.

I’m ready for my presentation and some years of presentations after that. I’m also set up with a refreshed perception of clothing. Earlier today I found myself waiting at the bottom of a set of stairs for a group of men to pass by. Four out of five had dark suits, white shirts, and unexceptional ties. The fifth man was in jeans and a sweater. Given the building they came out of, I figured them for a mix a lawyers and lobbyists. The point is that I actually noticed that they had virtually duplicate dark suits and plain ties, and wondered about the contrast with the guy in jeans. New eyes for me.

I can’t end this without relating a story from my college days. I dressed raggedly and colorfully back then, a post-hippie, I guess. I was invited to a Halloween party and wanted a counterintuitive costume. I scrounged among my friends and assembled a full-on business suit, a good trench coat, and a briefcase. I parted my hair on one side and tucked my (now departed) ponytail down the back of my shirt collar. Wearing no mask or makeup, I presented myself at the front door of my friend’s house. The very woman who had invited me answered the door, looked me full in my uncovered face, and asked, “Um, can I help you?” She stared at me without recognition until I said my name. She was startled, laughed, and invited me in. The clothes make the man.



Spreading the Love

I’d like to direct your attention to two worthy blogs. One is about a blatant lie and another is about a long string of subtle lies.

The first is Government is Good , subtitled “An Unapologetic Defense of a Vital Institution” and “A web project of Douglas J. Amy, Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College.” Professor Amy, in clear, simple prose, explains why “governments are instituted among men” (See: Declaration of Independence) and why the knee-jerk critics of government qua government are wrong. It warms my heretical heart to read cogent, well supported articles with titles such as “The case FOR Bureaucracy” and “How Govt. is Good for Business.”

Bashing government is the national pastime, not baseball. And yet, as I have written before, what people really dislike about government is based on either the effect of corporate interference in government or our own misunderstanding of the rule of law.

Most of the regulatory absurdity, wasteful spending, and foreign policy blundering is the result of legislators being dependent upon corporate charity to run their reelection campaigns. On a personal level, we’d all like the law to let us do what we want to do, while preventing our neighbors from doing those annoying things that they want to do. There is a necessary symmetry to the law. You are supposed to be treated equally to the person you most despise. As Professor Amy points out, we are peeved when we deal with a bureaucrat who rigidly follows the rules, but we would be even more disturbed if that same bureaucrat had arbitrary power over us.

We are like fish in the sea, not noticing the water that sustains us. Professor Amy points out the water and its life-giving properties. It is refreshing.

The second site is BAGnews Notes, subtitled “How Politicians and the Media Spin Political Pictures.” This site chronicles and comments upon the use of images in the media, particularly political images. I find this fascinating and important because the most effective bias is the bias of background. Making a direct statement imperils the propagandist, because a direct statement can be fact-checked. The insinuation of a cleverly selected photograph is harder to confront.

The BAGnews home page presently has photos from recent Tea Party rallies, President Obama’s nuclear materials control summit, and the riots in Kyrgyzstan. All have something to say, more powerful for the absence of text. BAGnews provides the text, often an invitation to analysis as much as analysis itself.

I’m going to be frequenting these sites, and I hope you do as well.