Category: Uncategorized

Whew!

I sure am glad President [Johnson] was re-elected instead of that scary [Goldwater] guy. Now that [Medicare] is in full swing, the [War on Poverty] can’t fail!

I’m worried about the situation in [Vietnam] but you know, someone with this kind of social commitment isn’t going to escalate the situation over there. Maybe with an increase in troop levels we can get the [Vietnamese] government back on its feet and not be there much longer!

Jesus H. Christ, we’re playing MadLibs with 1965.

A new and disturbing phenomenon

Angry internet commenters have grown not only more numerous and angrier, but increasingly incoherent. YouTube comments in particular are so garbled that only an impressionistic haze of rage and sociopolitical obsession can be abstracted from the text.

I theorize that these comments are no longer mostly produced by humans. The mass of anonymous anger has in the last decade grown so heavy and compact that its own heat and pressure has begun to generate new comments in a kind of Chomskyan parthenogenesis, a volcanic language organ that spews semi-understandable confrontation. These almost unparseable chunks of language share key phrases and subject matter, and are uniformly infused with rage. However, they refer only to their own content and don’t appear to require any communication from the outside to fuel their growth.

We are dealing with a new and troubling Internet worm; a self-replicating mechanism that attacks ideas incoherently and grows at an increasing rate.

The legendary Jerkov Chain is finally here.

Who is my neighbor? A lesson from the Fire Department.

Today I’d like to talk about the fire department.

Let’s get something out of the way first. I’m not going to talk about firefighters. Firefighters define heroism in the popular imagination. Especially after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the fireman is a condensed symbol of personal sacrifice, courage, expertise, tenacity, and total devotion to a cause. And because there were no front line soldiers to celebrate after that disaster, anyone wrapping himself in the bloody flag made sure to pop on the FDNY hat as well.

Professional firefighters are neither the most endangered nor the most selfless of people in America. They are well-equipped, well-trained, and well-paid. “Firefighter” is not in the top ten most dangerous jobs. It’s way worse to be a farmer, a cab driver, or a fisherman. Firefighters do dangerous things every day for excellent pay in the best possible circumstances.

So what distinguishes firefighters from other people who are paid well to take risks? The difference lies in the character of their employer, the fire department.

No city or town can exist without a fire department. As industrial cities grew, city-consuming fires became a threat to public order and commerce. If you can barely see your neighbor’s stove smoke, your house fire is your problem. If you’re in a cluttered row of shops in London, a fire three doors down grabs your interest right away. Private fire departments on a subscription basis didn’t quite do the trick, for obvious reasons. If half the town burned but your store didn’t, there wasn’t much to celebrate.

So, inevitably, firefighting services were expanded to include more and more places. If the whole city’s resources could be thrown at one nasty fire, it wouldn’t consume everything else. Stopping the destruction was far better than insuring against it. Like public health, the fire department was accepted as necessary, compulsory, and authoritative. Nobody could opt out of paying for the fire department, or object to their regulations, because it would endanger everyone else.

Fire departments themselves looked beyond municipal boundaries. When big disasters happen, sometimes they overwhelm one city’s resources. Other nearby departments have agreed to mutual aid, so that any fire department will help any other fire department in these circumstances. Today these arrangements are large and sophisticated enough that departments will send their resources a thousand miles away if a serious incident requires it.

The fire departments also took on the job of medical rescue. It made sense that the first to respond to fires and other disasters knew how to care for the injured, and this progressed to the point that fire departments had medics as well as people who just put out fires. Today every town has medics in their fire department, who work with private ambulances and hospitals. If someone is ill or injured, those medics will respond right away and help, and then figure out what can be done further.

I’m sorry to bore you with all of that detail, but there’s a point to this. The universal presence of these fire departments represents a commitment by the people in each town. The commitment is this:

If there is any fire, natural disaster, or other physical threat to life and property in this city, we are willing to pay a large sum of money to make sure that the problem is fixed as quickly as possible, without regard for who owns the property involved or why it happened. If any of our neighboring cities is overwhelmed by such an incident, we are willing to send as much of our own as we can to help. We will never go back on this, because the city and its neighbors are interdependent and we’ll all go up in flames if we don’t keep our promises.

Furthermore, if anyone is injured or becomes ill in our city, whether it’s a resident or not, we are willing to pay a large sum of money to see that this person receives the best in immediate treatment and transportation to a hospital. We’ll never go back on this, because we are committed to the health and safety of our own residents, and without the good hospitality of offering this to everyone, we can’t offer it to anyone. We trust that other cities will treat our residents likewise.

This is quite a statement. This means that if anything catches fire or falls over or floods anywhere in town, it’s our problem, we got it. And if anyone falls on the sidewalk or overdoses or gets food poisoning or tries to commit suicide here, that’s our problem too, we’ll take care of it. Always. And we know you’ll do it for us.

Here’s a good example, from the blog of the Los Angeles Fire Department:

On Tuesday, August 15, 2006 at 1:53 PM, eleven Companies of Los Angeles Firefighters, three LAFD Rescue Ambulances, two LAFD Helicopters, one LAFD Swift Water Rescue Team, two LAFD Dive Teams, one LAFD Rehab Unit, one LAFD Hazardous Materials Squad, one EMS Battalion Captain, one Battalion Chief Officer Command Team, one Division Chief Officer Command Team and Los Angeles Police Department resources, including the LAPD Underwater Dive Unit, under the Unified Command of Los Angeles Police and Fire Department Command Officers, responded to a Water Rescue and Recovery Effort near 1555 North San Fernando Road in the Los Angeles community of Glassell Park.

In this case, some teenagers were messing around fishing in a flood control channel and one of them fell in. The city sent what must be tens of millions of dollars in equipment and more than a hundred people, all moving as fast as possible including by air and water, to save one person who screwed up. No one asked if he was from Los Angeles, or even if he was from the United States. No one asked if he’d paid up his fire and rescue subscription. The city, in the form of a huge commitment of resources, said “No problem. We got that.”

There’s a big fight in America right now about health care. It’s actually a fight about money, of course. Currently the economics of health are hilariously broken, and there’s a war of ideas on what to do about it. Some want very much for the public to provide care for those otherwise without, and other people resist the idea of paying with their own tax money for people they disapprove of, or dislike, or fear.

For those of you who don’t want to pay tax to support the medical bills of others: I invite you to consider the fire department. It’s terribly expensive. There’s a lot of waste. There’s corruption. And worst of all, they take our tax dollars and spend it on any idiot or loser who falls asleep smoking or does a y’all-watch-this stunt or texts while driving. They even spend our money saving whorehouses, dive bars, criminals, illegal immigrants, and people who’ve taken a vow to kill us all. .

And you wouldn’t have it any other way, because if the fire department isn’t for all of us, it just won’t work. There’s no time to check green cards or get out the big book of moral ideas and decide whether this conflagration or severed artery meets our local standard. There is only time to help, or not.

So whether this influences your view on the current health care debate or not, I hope you will take the time to ask yourself: which town do you want to live in? The one who says “Yeah, we got that, no problem”? Or one that can’t figure out whether you’re worth their trouble in time to save you?

or how I learned to stop worrying and love the corporation

I enjoy my new job.

I thought I wouldn’t. The past few years were spent at dot coms, which present themselves as an employee paradise. Casual dress, flexible hours, innovation, a fun atmosphere, perks, and the lure of possible big money cashouts: everyone wants it! The software tools are sexy and easy open source projects. It’s all very cool. And if you screw up, everyone understands and it’s all play money anyhow.

Now I’m at a large company. I work a fixed schedule and I wear Office Casual Clothing. There are policies and procedures for everything. Rank is important. Everyone is in a cube, some of us two to a cube. The software we manage is almost all proprietary and runs on proprietary operating systems. The work itself is locked into very specific tasks with step by step instructions. And if I blow it, I’m fired. Large sums of money rest on the competence of the staff.

It’s way better.

The dot coms I have known were all doomed. Almost all of them were the classic two-founder startups going after a niche in the market. All of them needed outside money to achieve their goals, and in every case the outside money wrecked the company. Uncontrolled hiring wiped out the competence and the culture of these places within months. Executives who came in with the outside money were out of their depth and resorted to arbitrary decision-making and tyranny, and sometimes deliberately failed at their fiduciary responsibilities.

Here are some examples of things I saw at dot coms: People hired to do nothing to make a company look bigger; openly racist senior executives allowed to carry out their prejudices; nonexistent products fraudulently sold by salesmen who then left with their money; stolen patents; illegal or impossible business plans designed to fail just after an executive had left for a better job; and indecision actually written into the procedures of the company to resolve differences between founders.

These things happen at bigger and better-organized companies, but it’s possible for all of them to occur at once at a startup dot com without any consequences for anyone involved. Too many of those places were all the boys playing the treehouse, complete with NO GIRLS sign, with the difference that being pushed out meant real broken bones down below.

In particular, the “two cofounders” startups were disasters. I’ll make an exception for the last one I worked at, where both of them were smart nice guys who knew what they were doing and cooperated. Everywhere else it was a disaster: Beavis & Butthead meet Leopold & Loeb. They were all white college grad males. Almost always one was technical and the other was business. They were inevitably rivals and often boyhood friends. Neither one could be completely in charge, and neither one could be seen defeated. I’ve seen situations where the two actually alternated between winning and losing the argument, so that the company sailed along zig zag for months.

I won’t ever work for a two cofounders startup again, unless it’s the last two. The rest is just the whole company as fifth wheel in the meltdown of a friendship.

So why do I love my current corporate job? Because it’s just plain old capitalism. Real money is being made and lost, and if enough is lost bad things will happen. Policies and procedures are in place that have been tested, and if they fail they are revised. Quality assurance is done by professionals with reliable tests. Software doesn’t go into production unless several groups agree that it works. Pay arrives on time each time. Insanity in the office is punished. A real HR department deals with out of control coworkers, even executives.

There’s nobody handing out beanie hats or taking us all to Dave & Busters, we have to wear normal clothing and show up on time, working from home is discouraged, the software and tools are totally uncool and often annoying, and there’s absolutely no chance of the company being bought or taken public to make us all millionaires. I love it. It’s just plain old employment at a regular profit-making company, making rich guys richer and slogging along. And the punchline? I’m making more money now.

With great respect to personal friends who are running their own startups well, the rest of you can keep your dot-coms. I’ll stick with the totally uncool skyscraper job working for the Man. He treats us all way better.