I bumped into this chart via the writings of Jordan Peterson, he of Canada and the book Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. What struck me about this chart (authored by Mark J. Perry, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan) is the near-total relationship of rising costs to government “protection.”
Many of us have been arguing for years that government should get out of the protection rackets: as examples, the college business and the ways in which health care is protected by a government that refuses to pass tort reform law.
In the case of the former, college costs, I am stunned at how expense has risen even as the perceived value has decreased. Who among us really thinks that a college education is worth 200% more than it was 20 years ago. Free money (well, at least as it is perceived by those taking student loans) has driven up the cost of college. Period. Full stop.
If students were forced to pay for college using their own money (no loans), I assure you college costs would drop. The universities couldn’t stay in business otherwise.
As to the latter – health care – the increases in cost have more to do with hospitals and doctors protecting themselves against lawyers as it does almost any other aspect of providing care. Yes, technology is costly and our health care system is heavily invested in things like hybrid operating rooms and PET-scans, among many other things. Indeed, health care economists estimate that 40–50% of annual cost increases can be traced to new technologies or the intensified use of old ones. But the other half? In my view it can be laid at the feet of personal injury lawyers. We need tort reform in this country and with it I can almost guarantee that heath care costs will start to decline.
Meanwhile, the costs of things none of us really need – cell phones, TVs, more clothing choices (seriously, how many shirts do you really need?) – have come tumbling down. I suspect that this is due more to the free market system and the advent of global trading. Cheap Chinese-made cellphones, including even Apple’s, have flooded the market and the demand has risen accordingly. Computer software is cheaper because of the incredible number of substitute products available. And so on. Not one word or whiff of government protection.
Housing costs have risen, again, because of 20 years of insane lending practices, wherein virtually anyone can get a mortgage and chase a somewhat constant supply of new housing (thereby increasing the price). Government restricts the building of new homes and viola! housing prices creep up.
College textbook costs have risen because publishers wanted in on the “free money” being thrown around by student loans. Two years ago I mistakenly required a textbook in one of my classes that carried a price tag of $180. Yet, within that text was nothing new, nothing that could not be covered, and was not covered, by a book six years old and about a tenth of that cost. You can guess what I did in the next semester. That’s right: I dropped the expensive book and required one that covered the material at a far better cost to my students.
“I
wish I could go to more meetings,” said no one, ever.
Meetings consume
and waste a massive, rising amount of individual and organizational time. In a survey last year by Salary.com, “too many
meetings” was the top time-waster at the office, cited by 47% of 3,164 workers.
The scheduling platform Doodle estimates
that 700 million hours will be lost in U.S. workplaces this year to unnecessary
or wasteful meetings.
But meetings
themselves are not the problem. They are
essential to teams and organizations, supporting inclusion, communication, and
coordination. Abolishing meetings is a
false solution.
Research shows that only one person usually leaves a meeting feeling good about it: the leader.
Sadly, most
companies and most leaders view poor meetings as inevitable, like living with
rain in London. But, unlike the weather,
meetings can be improved. Researchers have
been working on these issues for 15 years, including interviews and surveys of
some 10,000 employees across many organizations. Improving just one meeting a day yields
tremendous benefits not only for the organization but for the person
responsible.
Here are some ways
to counteract the most common ways that meetings fail.
Recognize that you may be the
problem.
We are poor judges of our own meeting leadership skills. Research, published in 2011 in the journal Group Dynamics, shows that only one
person usually leaves a meeting feeling good about it: the leader. In a 1998 Verizon survey of more than 1,300
company managers, 79% of them reported that the meetings they initiated were
extremely or very productive, but only 56% said the same about meetings
initiated by others. Clearly those
running meetings and attending them are not aligned.
Though it’s rare,
some companies seeking better meetings have surveyed employees to find out how
much they felt all members contributed and whether meetings went beyond
reiterating routine information. At RSC
Bio Solutions, a small firm in Charlotte, N.C., the CEO polled employees in
2016 and decided to rotate the leadership of daily short meetings to make them
more productive.
Keep it small.
Amazon’s Jeff
Bezos is known for instituting a “two-pizza rule”—if you need more than two
pizzas to feed everyone, the meeting is too large. A 2010 study conducted by consultants Bain
& Company found that for each additional person over seven members in a
decision-making group, decision effectiveness is reduced by approximately 10%. A 2011 study of 97 work teams by three
Canadian researchers found more counterproductive behavior and interpersonal
aggression in larger groups.
Leaders should limit attendance to just the
essential stakeholders.
And to widen the scope, they can ask those outside the meeting for their
input beforehand and can provide minutes afterward—a technique that keeps
non-attendees in the loop while letting them do their work.
Don’t take an hour.
The Yerkes–Dodson
law, which maps the inverted-U-shaped relationship between stress and
performance, is well established in psychological research and holds that
performance is optimal with some moderate level of pressure. To achieve that in meetings, carefully
consider how long you need—and then dial it back a bit.
Try a 48-minute
rule in place of an hour, for example, to create focused, efficient discussion.
A regular fast “huddle” or a stand-up
meeting (used by companies such as Apple, Zappos and Capital One) has similar
effects. A 1999 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that
sit-down meetings last 35% longer than those held standing up, with no gains in
effectiveness.
A 2009 survey of
meeting-goers noted the importance of ending on time to avoid frustration and a
domino effect on schedules. To avoid
running over, some companies use a countdown clock. At the vacation website Tripping.com, the
leader must contribute to a team beer jar if a meeting ends late.
Do a meeting “pre-mortem.”
Studies show that
having an agenda is a poor predictor of attendees’ perceptions of meeting
effectiveness. And it’s no wonder: A
2003 survey of 187 companies detailed in the Harvard Business Review found that, in about half of them, agendas
were typically standard boilerplate, repeated at every meeting, or made up on
the spot.
An effective
agenda works like a plan for an event: It has clear goals or key questions to
answer. To get there, consider a pre-mortem—that is, envision how the
meeting could go wrong and devise a strategy to prevent it. Ask attendees for agenda items and assign
ownership.
Research shows
that such preparation increases engagement and a sense of purpose. And if the agenda isn’t coming together, that
points to an obvious solution: Cancel the meeting.
[Dr. Rogelberg is Chancellor’s
Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the author of “The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You
Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance,” published last month by Oxford
University Press. The foregoing article
appeared in the February 16, 2019, print edition as ‘The Science of Better Meetings.’]
The following essay was authored by a “Dr. Hall” and ran on the Wall Street Journal’s website on February 1, 2019. The WSJ did not provide Dr. Hall’s complete name. I am capturing it here for my own reference and for those of my readers who might enjoy it. It is Dr. Hall’s work.
Happiness seems to be in short supply today, with acrimony,
incivility and bad, boorish behavior permeating society and the media from the
highest echelons of government on down. Yet
happiness has always been something distinctively coveted by Americans. The inalienable right to pursue it, along with
life and liberty, was enshrined by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of
Independence.
If we are to pursue it, however, we need to define it. And to understand what Jefferson really meant
by happiness, we must turn to a thinker who influenced him: the Greek
philosopher Aristotle, who lived in the 4th century B.C.
Aristotle’s ethical system—as described in his major
treatises, the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics—revolves around the
idea that the goal of human life is happiness, which he called eudaimonia. (In
Greek, the root eu means “well” or
“good,” and daimonian suggests a guardian spirit or one’s lot in life.)
Aristotle didn’t equate happiness with wealth, pleasure or fame. For him, happiness was an internal state of mind—a felicity or contentment that we can acquire only by living life in the best way possible.
Aristotle was born in a small, independent Greek city-state,
but he spent years at close quarters with the Macedonian royal family. He was
an eyewitness to the court of Philip II, Alexander the Great’s despotic father,
who was ruthless, acquisitive and addicted to conspicuous consumption. Philip
pitted his rivalrous lieutenants, wives, concubines and children against each
other, and they responded by endlessly plotting bouts of reciprocal murder.
Aristotle saw that these seemingly fortunate members of the
elite were actually miserable. Such people spend their lives acquiring material
possessions or seeking sensory gratification, but on some level, they know that
these pursuits aren’t conducive to true happiness. They may even recognize the
right thing to do, but they are too weak or lazy to act on it.
Real happiness, Aristotle believed, comes from a continuous
effort to become the best possible version of yourself. Like his teacher Plato
and Plato’s own teacher Socrates, he subscribed to the ancient proverb engraved
over the oracle at Delphi: Know thyself.
Aristotle’s common-sense prescriptions for happiness also offer hope for the wider community.
In his treatises, Aristotle analyzed a wide range of traits
of character—in Greek, ethos, from which we derive the word “ethics.” These
included libido, courage, anger, how we treat other people and how we regard
money. All of us possess these properties, and happiness comes from cultivating
each one in the correct amount, so that it is a virtue (arete) rather than a
vice. It is better to seek the average
of the various traits in other words, the “mean” amount of each of the
properties.
It is in this notion of the “mean” that Aristotelian ethics
differs from other ancient moral systems. Aristotle does not teach, for
instance, that anger is a vice and patience a virtue. Rather, he believes that
when we feel anger in the right amount, at the right time and toward the right
people, it is virtuous. Without it, we wouldn’t stand up for ourselves or for
important principles. Failing to feel anger when we are wronged is a vice, but
then so is excessive, misplaced or gratuitous anger.
And the same goes for every other quality. Fiscal
responsibility, to take another example, is the virtue lying between the vices
of parsimony—which Aristotle despised, especially in the rich—and reckless
spending.
[Editor’s’ Note: If the present-day socialists have their way (and it looks increasingly likely that they will), we will embark on another of those wondrous “soak the rich” adventures that result only in the flight of capital out of our country. It won’t work to “soak the rich” inasmuch as the sum total of ALL their wealth would run the government for maybe six months.
Nevertheless, I can understand the sentiment. The rich in our country have lost their moral compasses. Where one home is enough, they have 3 and 4 and more. Where one car per person in their households is enough, they have entire fleets. Dare I mention the jets? Today came the news that a condo (!) in New York City has sold for $250 million. Seriously, a condo? I could go on. The point is that they have too much and the poor people, well in sight from that condo, are watching, getting angrier.]
Good Aristotelians acknowledge both their best and their
worst moral characteristics and work continuously at self-improvement. They try
to develop habits of generosity, honesty, responsibility, integrity, fairness,
kindness and good humor. The result is a comforting moral self-sufficiency that
even bereavement, bankruptcy or sheer bad luck can’t take away.
Aristotle’s common-sense prescriptions for happiness also
offer hope for the wider community. When he said that we are political animals,
he meant that we flourish by cultivating the virtues in relation not just to
ourselves and our families but also to our friends, neighbors and fellow
citizens. He offers us a way to pursue our happiness as individuals, but his
principles can help us to make the public arena a better place as well.
The rich in our midst have an “optics” problem. They are seen as having way more than they can ever possibly use (which, of course, they do) and they are flaunting it. Better that they figure a way to give away as much as they can as fast as they can and help others to realize the dream. The optics are terrible. Pitchfork producers are gearing up.
Several years ago, I quit Facebook and never
looked back. There hasn’t been a time
when I regretted the decision or somehow looked with envy upon those well-connected
friends of mine who get all they need to know from Social Media. I even began questioning what the definition
of “need to know” was (or is), and, by and large, haven’t gotten a clear answer
in the years since. I am happy not knowing about Jane’s new puppy or kitten, or
Buffy’s new car. I don’t, as it turns
out, “need to know.”
American and other international companies seized upon Facebook as an advertising medium almost unparalleled in the history of the world. This was, of course, Mark Zuckerberg’s secret sauce all along. The service is free to users (“and always will be,” he says), but it reminds me of the old adage, “when a product is free, YOU are the product.” Everything you do on the Net is somehow shoveled into Facebook’s engines and helps advertisers target you incessantly. You are indeed the product.
I have a hunch that while America is perhaps at its most polarized,
politically and otherwise, there is a developing sense that Facebook and its
ilk (Instagram, Snapchat, et al) are not as good for us as we might have
otherwise believed. I hope so.
The mob reaction to the Covington High School event is ample evidence. It took a Facebook-nano-second for the boys of Covington to get their almighty due in the court of public opinion. Reputations were ruined and lives turned all but upside down. Sad to see in what is supposed to be the most civilized nation on earth (it isn’t, not by a long shot).
Dr. Calvin Newport, a Georgetown University professor, was
interviewed this week in the Wall Street
Journal and had plenty to say about that event and the whole of social
media. He teaches computer science at the renown D.C. campus.
“Because I don’t have any social-media accounts,” he said, “my encounter with the Covington Catholic controversy was much different than most people’s. I read about the event days later in an old-fashioned newspaper column and learned that the social-media reaction had been incendiary and basically everyone was now upset at each other, at themselves, at technology itself. It sounded exhausting.”
One of the seminal pieces I came across when researching my own doctoral dissertation was Newport’s 2010 piece entitled, An Argument for Quitting Facebook. It was a blog post that came with instructions on how to deactivate your account. I followed his instructions and left Facebook about a year later.
“Technologies are great,” he wrote, “but if you want to keep control of your time and attention,” you should “insist that they earn their keep before you make them a regular part of your life.”
Newport has never had a social-media account and jokes that such a public turning-inward, as it were, is lawful and not the least bit anti-social. More to the point, he noticed that social media was impairing our ability to concentrate; yes, concentrate, which, as grandma often told you, is an “essential skill for professional and personal success.”
Right
around the transition to mobile [from desktop computers], Newport observed that
for many people a passing interest in social media was morphing into
“compulsive use.” It tapped what is probably a human tendency to seize upon the
so-called gambler’s fallacy (“I gotta keep playing this slot machine; it’ll pay
off on the next hit I’m sure!”).
The transition to mobile meant that checking social media became
a hand-held event. And phones were
everywhere, including the grocery store line. Still, it was a slower-moving
medium. You might update your “wall” (as it was known then) only occasionally,
and if you went on to check what your friends were up to in the morning, there
would be no reason to check in the afternoon. Nothing had changed.
But then it did change. The smartphone, via Apple’s App Store and its agreement with Facebook to load software on every iPhone sold, made the practice far easier and thereby rendered social media as ubiquitous, which suited the commercial interests of social-media companies just fine, thank you. User-engagement numbers tripled, then quadrupled.
Then came the “Like” button, along with Google’s “Plus” and Twitter’s “Follow Me,” the modern-era equivalent of three cherries on a slot-machine. Cal Newport refers to them as “small indicators of approval.”
Well, not so small. These Likes, Follows, and Plusses provided “a much richer stream of information coming back to the user,” which proved even more seductive. The reinforcement is all the more insidious for being intermittent. Sometimes you’re rewarded for checking in, sometimes you’re frustrated. It short-circuits the dopamine system and feeds the compulsion. It’s like having a slot machine at your desk.
Facebook added to the compulsion by introducing facial recognition, yet another “small indicator of approval.” And one more reason to keep playing the social-media-slot-machine.
All of this, with Cal Newport’s help, led me to end my slot-machine habit. Seriously, have I missed anything by not being on Facebook? Anything important? My answer is an unequivocal “no.” And contrary to Mark Zuckerberg’s assurances, and because I am not on the porous Facebook, my privacy has therefore remained intact. Notwithstanding Zuck’s commitment to “everyone having a voice and being able to connect,” I seem to be fine connecting in far more personal and immediate ways.
All the “connecting” and “voicing” on social media, to me, adds
up to nothing more than an annoying static, the modern-day equivalent of so
much cosmic noise. Witness the Covington
Catholic fracas. “Is anyone better off for having wasted hours and hours of
time this past week exhaustively engaging half-formed back-and-forth yelling on
social media?” Dr. Newport asks.
“On reflection, the answer is yes for one group in particular: the executives at the giant social-media conglomerates, who sucked up all those extra ‘user engagement’ minutes like an oil tycoon who just hit a gusher.”
Only Zuckerberg got rich, just like the tycoons of the
1800s. The user reaped nothing, except
for agitation and negativity.
“When I talk to people now who are very distressed about their
digital life,” he says, “it’s not political things that they care about.” Instead, he says, people are beginning to say,
“I’m on this more than is useful, more than is healthy. It’s keeping me from my
kids. It’s keeping me from my friends.
It’s keeping me from things I used to enjoy. I think it’s hurting the quality
of my life.”
You cannot un-ring a bell, to be sure, and social media is here
to stay, Still, he says, “we should have been warier about this idea of taking
human sociality —incredibly powerful and shaped by a million years of evolution
—and allowing 22-year-olds in California to reinvent it.”
Newport laments that everyone “writes the same article with tips for turning off notifications or some such. This is not working. What people need is a full-fledged philosophy of how to use technology.”
I have
come to participate in Newport’s experiment he calls a “digital declutter,” or
what I call a “digital cleanse.” I even went so far as to invest in old
typewriters.
Instead, I’d rather spend my days figuring out what I’d like to
do with my time, including … nothing at all. In the end, you see, human beings crave “high-quality
leisure.” Facebook and its ilk are, to
my mind, low-quality.
And, so,
like Cal Newport, I am glad I don’t own Facebook stock. In business parlance, Facebook has what is
known as a very weak connection to
their user base, a user-base that is much fickler than they probably want to
admit, simply because people like me are fine walking away from it.
And walk
away I did.
In part
two we will take a closer look at Newport’s ideas around our declining ability
to focus, to concentrate, and how social media has played a role.
Wanting this to be preserved for my own reference, I am
posting this Wall Street Journal article (from January 22, 2019) to my Blog. I
am especially proud of Mr. Rocca’s reporting of the John Jay conclusions; to
wit:
“Researchers said they had found no evidence that homosexual orientation was a risk factor for abuse and suggested that the high proportion of male victims was at least in part a function of their greater availability, especially in the period before girls were allowed to be altar servers.”
So, here is the article, copyright belonging to the WSJ:
By Francis X. Rocca
Since last summer, the Catholic Church has been roiled by
accusations that retired Archbishop Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C.,
molested male minors and sexually harassed adult seminarians and priests over
more than two decades. The case has reignited a long and tense debate among
Catholics over the question of homosexuality in the all-male priesthood. Some
bishops, other clergy and laypeople have cited Archbishop McCarrick’s rise to
power, despite widespread rumors of sexual misconduct, as evidence of a
“homosexual subculture” in the hierarchy that they blame for allowing sex abuse
and covering it up.
“These homosexual networks, which are now widespread in many
dioceses, seminaries, religious orders, etc., act under concealment of secrecy
and lies with the power of octopus tentacles, and strangle innocent victims and
priestly vocations, and are strangling the entire church,” wrote Archbishop
Carlo Maria Viganò, a former Vatican envoy to the U.S., in a manifesto
published last August.
At a November meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic
Bishops (USCCB), Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco cited a study
by the Rev. D. Paul Sullins, a sociologist at the Catholic University of
America, positing a correlation among the incidence of allegations of sexual
abuse, the proportion of Catholic priests describing themselves as homosexual
and the reported existence of a “homosexual subculture” in some U.S.
seminaries. The archbishop ruled out a “direct causal connection” between
homosexuality and abuse but called for further study to explain the
correlation.
Others in the church have denounced such statements as the
scapegoating of gay priests. Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, one of the
organizers of a summit on sex abuse that Pope Francis has called for next month
at the Vatican, has dismissed any link between homosexuality and sexual abuse,
which he says is rooted instead in “privilege, power and protection of a
clerical culture.”
A study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice,
commissioned by the USCCB and published in 2004, found that 81% of the reported
victims of sex abuse by priests were male. In a follow-up study in 2011, John
Jay researchers said they had found no evidence that homosexual orientation was
a risk factor for abuse and suggested that the high proportion of male victims
was at least in part a function of their greater availability, especially in
the period before girls were allowed to be altar servers.
Those alleging a connection between sex abuse and a
homosexual subculture in the priesthood often cite the work of the late A.W.
Richard Sipe, a psychotherapist and pioneer in the study of clerical sex abuse.
In an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI in 2008, Mr. Sipe wrote that he had
heard “from many priests about their seduction by highly placed clerics and the
dire consequences in their lives that does not end in their victimization
alone… This abuse paves the way for them to pass the tradition on—to have sex
with each other and even with minors.”
Mr. Sipe also wrote that “sexual abuse of minor boys by
priests must not be confused with a homosexual orientation…This is patently
clear when a 35-year-old man abuses a 13-year-old girl. Heterosexual
orientation is not blamed.”
The Rev. James Martin, author of “Building a Bridge,” a book
about the church’s relationship with gay Catholics, dismisses talk of a “gay
subculture” in the priesthood as malicious mythology. “There’s as much a gay
subculture as there is an Irish subculture or a sports subculture. In a sense,
it’s natural that gay priests and religious would congregate,” he said. But he
denies that gay priests somehow control the hierarchy: “The notion that someone
would be shut out of being a bishop or religious superior because he is
straight is ridiculous.”
One point that all sides in the debate seem to agree on is
that the priesthood today is a disproportionately gay vocation. Of the 37,000
priests in the U.S., Father Martin estimates that gay men make up anywhere
between 25% and 40%. Janet Smith, a professor of moral theology at a seminary
in Detroit who has called for “eradicating…homosexual networks” in the clergy,
believes the proportion of “active homosexuals” varies widely but constitutes
as much as 50% of the priests in some U.S. dioceses.
Why are so many priests gay? An oft-cited reason is that,
before the growing social acceptance of homosexuality in recent decades,
clerical celibacy was the respectable alternative for Catholic men who had no
desire to marry. “Coming out as a gay man in a religiously engaged and
conservative environment was just not an option, so entering the priesthood
made perfect sense,” said Thomas Plante, a professor of psychology at Santa
Clara University. “You could live in a community of men in seminary and after.
It was a perfect scenario, perfect cover.”
Another factor seems to have been the tumultuous change in
the church in the decades following the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), when
some 20,000 men left the priesthood in the U.S., most of them to marry. “Their
absence, it can be argued, has dramatically changed the gay/straight ratio,”
wrote the Rev. Donald Cozzens in “The Changing Face of the Priesthood” (2000).
The Catholic Church teaches that “homosexual tendencies,”
while not sinful in themselves, are “objectively disordered” as an inclination
to sinful acts. In 2005, a Vatican document said that the church “cannot admit
to the seminary or to holy orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated
homosexual tendencies or support the so-called ‘gay culture.’”
Pope Francis has shown greater openness to homosexuality
than his predecessors, and the most famous statement of his pontificate was a
reference to gay priests: “If someone is gay and is searching for the Lord and
has good will, then who am I to judge him?” Yet he approved a 2016 document
reaffirming the 2005 ban, which he restated in his own words in an interview
published last month. “In the consecrated life and the priestly life, that type
of affection has no place,” the pope said. “For that reason, the church
recommends that people with that ingrained tendency not be accepted for the
ministry or the consecrated life. The ministry or the consecrated life is not
their place.”
The pope didn’t call for the expulsion of gay men already in
the priesthood but said that they must be “exquisitely responsible, taking care
never to scandalize either their communities or the holy faithful people of God
by living a double life.”
Some argue that the clerical life poses an unreasonable
challenge for gay men. “It’s just not a good place for people with same-sex
attraction to be in a same-sex environment,” said Msgr. Charles Pope, a pastor
in Washington, D.C., who has written on the subject for the National Catholic
Register. “If an alcoholic came to me and said, ‘I’m sober and I’m going to get
a job working in a bar,’ I’d say, ‘That’s not a good match for you.’”
Father Martin agrees that “people who cannot live celibacy
should not be clergy” but says that there is no reason to think gay people are
less equipped to do so. “The catechism says that celibacy is what all gay
people should do, so gay priests are following the catechism to the letter,” he
said. “If you’re saying that gay men can’t be celibate, you’re saying that the
catechism can’t be lived.”
This article cites “model train layouts” as the prototype, if you will, of the future vision for driver-less trains. From the Wall Street Journal on January 19, 2019, I am copying it here for reference.
My own model train layout is driven by me (the embedded video is the latest update on progress), using a remote controller and, at least insofar as I can tell, results in far fewer accidents than occur on the nation’s “real” layout of some 140,000 miles of track. I am being only somewhat facetious. Automation has certainly resulted in fewer accidents in any number of industries and every-day, pedestrian type applications.
I am somewhat conflicted, however. Our country hasn’t thought
through what it will do with all the unemployed engineers and others displaced
by robotic automation. We certainly have experience with what expanded leisure time can result in – to
wit, the opioid epidemic amidst the thousands of laid-off mine workers here in
Wyoming suffering from the “war on coal.” Men with nothing to do and no future
tend to self-medicate.
Oh well. Time marches on. We cannot stop progress, such as it is
…
Here’s the article:
SYDNEY—Mining giant Rio Tinto calls it the world’s largest robot: mile-long driverless trains traversing the sparsely populated Australian Outback on roughly 1,000 miles of track. American railroad companies, seeking to boost network efficiencies, call it the future.
U.S. rail-freight operators say greater automation will make their networks safer and more productive. They point to railroads owned by Anglo-Australian miner Rio Tinto as a blueprint for the 140,000-mile private U.S. network that moves vast quantities of everything from cars to corn.
A decade in the making, Rio Tinto’s driverless train system, called Auto Haul™, now manages roughly 200 locomotives that move iron ore from inland mines to coastal ports in Western Australia. The trains are operated hundreds of miles away, in an office block in Perth.
Rio Tinto’s network, which began formally operating in driverless mode late last month, is the first fully autonomous, long-haul freight railroad. Rail-company executives from countries including the U.S. and Canada have visited to see the technology in action, said Ivan Vella, Rio Tinto’s head of iron-ore rail services.
American companies say automating tasks once handled by crew will create fluid networks more akin to a model train set. Around 5 million tons of goods are moved daily on the U.S. network, which freight operators share with passenger trains, generating more than $70 billion in revenue annually.
Drivers have variable skills, so a generous distance is kept between trains. In doing so, companies sacrifice valuable rail capacity. Also, the different ways that drivers run locomotives lead to inconsistent wear-and-tear and fuel use, while human error accounts for more than one-third of accidents, according to the Association of American Railroads, an industry trade group.
Last November, miner BHP Group Ltd. was forced to derail a 268-wagon runaway train in Australia’s Pilbara region, the origin of half the world’s iron-ore exports. The train rolled away after its driver disembarked to inspect a wagon and failed to secure the brake.
Labor unions and some lawmakers worry about risks to public safety, cyber threats and job cuts from increased automation. Rail-freight companies have typically offered some of the nation’s best-paid jobs, with an average annual salary of more than $125,000, said the AAR, which represents most major railroads. The country’s biggest Class I railroads employed roughly 147,000 people in 2017.
“Americans want a rail network and a transportation system that serves the people, not one that simply makes money for stockholders by eliminating good jobs and quality rail service,” Railroad Workers United, a coalition of unions, said in a statement submitted last year to the Federal Railroad Administration, which was seeking comments on the future of automation in the industry. RWU opposes crews of fewer than two people.
Reaching a consensus among companies, unions and regulators on how many drivers, if any, should remain on board will likely take a long time, said CSX Corp. Chief Executive James Foote.
U.S. rail-freight operators, whose trains are typically staffed by a conductor and engineer, say the goal isn’t to do away with drivers immediately. They contend there are many steps to reach the sort of driverless network Rio Tinto has created, although a shift toward more one-person crews is anticipated as new technologies are implemented.
“The lack of certainty makes investments in technology and innovation cautious endeavors that result in small gains, not leaps forward,” the AAR said in a filing to the Federal Railroad Administration last month.
Today, efforts to advance automation are being held back by regulations that haven’t kept pace with technological change, executives say. They fear falling behind as vehicle makers develop self-driving cars and autonomous trucks.
The Transportation Department released guidelines on autonomous vehicles in October but didn’t address autonomous trains in detail.
Existing regulations typically dictate that tasks such as track inspections be conducted by people. Operators say this could be done better using an automated system.
The AAR has urged transport officials to grant waivers on what it says are outdated rules and allow railroads and manufacturers to create voluntary standards for safety technology, where possible. The Federal Railroad Administration was unable to comment because of the continuing government shutdown.
The 200-year-old industry has spent most of the past decade developing positive train control technology, designed to automatically stop a train to prevent collisions. That system, which uses GPS information and track data, has created a platform to operate trains more independently.
“The Rio Tinto example clearly shows the technology is here,” said John Scheib, chief legal officer at Norfolk Southern Corp. “It shows that our regulator needs to move more quickly to open the doors to such technologies,” he said.
Rio Tinto’s trains complete an average return journey of 500 miles in 40 hours. Previously, the miner had to shuttle nearly 100 drivers around these scrubby outlands to switch train drivers three times for each journey. That totaled almost a million miles a year and the changeovers added more than an hour to each return train trip.
Today, a train controller at its Perth operations center sets the route, then computers both at the center and on-board take over to make decisions. Before the system was set up, the miner faced repeated setbacks. The project ran three years late and to almost double the original budget.
“What Auto Haul does,” though, “is drive it better than the best driver, every time,” Mr. Vella said.
Of course, there are many people in Australia “who love driving trains [and] they are disappointed they don’t get to drive trains anymore,” he said. “We are trying to give them alternatives.”
This was penned by Michael Barone and appeared in the Wall Street Journal on December 19, 2018. Consistent with words of warning contained in Hans Rosling’s book Factfulness and in another wonderful book entitled, What We Should Be Worried About, this article is one of many we are sure to see in the coming months and years. I am posting it here for the benefit of my MBA students
Numbers., numbers, numbers …
In 1957, 4.3 million babies were born in the United States — 4,316,233, to be exact. In 2017, 60 years later, the number was 3,853,472. That’s an 11 percent decline, in a nation whose population has nearly doubled over those six decades. And although there are a few days left in 2018, the number for this year is sure to be lower still.
That’s the dominant finding from a thorough and alarming
American Enterprise Institute report on Declining
Fertility in America by Lyman Stone of the Institute for Family Studies.
In recent years, demographics journalists have focused on
slivers of the population — the increasing percentages of Hispanics and Asians,
the decline in births to teenage mothers, low birth rates in high-cost coastal
metropolitan areas. Stone looks at the
larger picture, that of total population, and finds that “the specter of low
fertility, and ultimately of declining populations, has come to America.”
That’s a different picture from that of a decade ago, when
American birth rates hovered around, and sometimes just above, replacement level. That was a vivid contrast with substantially
below-replacement-level birth rates in most of Europe and Japan, especially
Japan where things are completely upside-down age-wise.
Those birth rates were buoyed upward by immigrant mothers,
after a quarter-century of mass migration from Latin America, especially
Mexico. But Mexican migration fell
toward zero in the 2007-09 recession, and births to immigrants in the U.S.
sharply declined, too.
Some Americans might see that as good news. It suggests that
a lower percentage of babies are born to mothers in disadvantaged households.
And just about everyone, as Stone notes, takes the
continuing sharp decline in births to teenage mothers as good news too,
considering that such children have tended to suffer negative outcomes.
But the negative
outcomes of increasing infertility – and eventual
population decline – have even greater implications. To put it bluntly:
Who is going to pay for Social Security and Medicare when there are fewer working-age adults paying taxes for every oldster receiving benefits?
Welfare states assume
expanding populations, and America’s potential parents don’t seem to be
providing one any more. Why?
Stone rules out one cause. Surveys show that women want more children
than they’re having. That was probably
not the case, or less so, when American’s fertility rate dropped in the
mid-1970s.
The culprit this time is something that scarcely existed then: student loans for college. Yep, student loans. The top three items on Stone’s list of five causes are:
“increased young adult debt service costs due to student loans.”
Number two is:
“decreasing young adult homeownership” due to higher prices and — here it is again — “student loans.”
Number three is:
“increasing years spent actively enrolled in educational institutions, which tends to reduce birth rates dramatically.”
Government efforts to encourage higher education have, for
many intended beneficiaries, backfired. Nongraduates
still have debt. Graduates with
politically correct degrees can’t find jobs. College costs have been inflated by
administrative bloat and country club campuses.
“The entire educational complex is presently structured in such a way as to discourage family formation for young adults.”
The result is “delayed marriage,” which “explains the vast
majority of changes in American fertility over the past 10 or 20 years,” Stone
writes. And though he doesn’t mention
it, the increasing number of noncollege whites who never marry surely explains
some of the rest.
What are policymakers doing to respond to this abrupt
demographic challenge? Approximately…
nothing.
Stone notes that the Congressional Budget Office, the Social
Security Administration and Medicare’s actuaries have not “even published
stress-test scenarios of long-term fertility at 1.5 or 1.6” — just below the
current 1.7 — “an incredible collective failure of foresight by almost all the
economic bodies whose job it is to anticipate this kind of problem.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan, the one politician who gets it and
who has worked strenuously to address such problems, and at one point got all
his Republican colleagues to go along with entitlement reform, has just
delivered his farewell speech. Therefore, he’s gone, and no one is talking
about the issue in his wake. House
Republicans will be in the minority next month, and they have no appetite for
taking up the issue again. Especially
since President Trump has promised to leave entitlements entirely in place.
And no significant number of Democratic officeholders is
seeking to give up what they consider one of their party’s chief political
advantages.
It’s quite a contrast with the late 1990s, when American
fertility was higher, and Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich were working on
entitlement reform until the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke.
One answer, of course, is to let in as many young – very young – immigrants as we can. They ought to come with skills, but as long
as they come with a desire to procreate, well, then, we might have hope.
As my readers know, several years ago I walked away from Facebook and have never looked back. The decision was simple: I came to dislike Mark Zuckerberg and his company, his privacy practices, his politics, and his history. After all, especially in this era of #MeToo, we ought to stop and remember that Facebook was originally designed to rate girl’s looks and, well, you know, their … shall we say … bed’ability. It surprises me that more women aren’t quitting Facebook on that basis alone, but Mark does a good job throwing his money at causes.
In my doctoral dissertation I wrote about the many ways Facebook and other social media platforms could be vehicles for harm and how they might not face the test of time. I hate to say “I told you so,” but I did. Facebook is losing traction among the key demographics on whose backs Zuckerberg’s stock priced is based. Google recently announced that they are ending Google+ and we all know that Twitter has all but stopped growing.
Anyway, this news appeared in last week’s New York Times:
Walt Mossberg, of whom I’ve been a fan for going on 25 years, has summarily quit Facebook.
Remember, this is a man who has spent decades chronicling the impact of Silicon Valley’s policies; ergo, his exit from the social network speaks louder than most.
Mr. Mossberg, a veteran of The Wall Street Journal, said on Monday he would be deactivating his Facebook account, along with the Facebook-owned Messenger and Instagram apps. Stunning news, albeit something he felt compelled to post on … that’s right … Facebook.
“I am doing this — after being on Facebook for nearly 12 years — because my own values and the policies and actions of Facebook have diverged to the point where I’m no longer comfortable here,” he wrote on Facebook.
While Mr. Mossberg didn’t list any specific complaints on Monday, his history of public writing left little doubt that his ire was aimed largely at the company’s policies and actions on user privacy.
Wanna stay in contact with your loved ones around the globe? How about pen-on-paper with a stamp affixed? The Post Office needs the work. Or, even the good old telephone? Reaching out and touching someone in a personal way is far more memorable than a Facebook post, folks.
Besides, all Zuckerberg cares about is how to make money.
Remember, when a product is free, YOU are the product.
As the nation grapples with the putative messages contained within “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” I thought it would be nice to pause for just a moment.
The #MeToo Movement is out of control, and has now succeeded in banning an otherwise innocent and, for its time, a quaint and reassuring winter song (it isn’t a Christmas song, by the way). They want the song banned because its lyrics suggest that consent is not forthcoming and the “wolf” continues his assault. An alternative interpretation would be that the man is being a gentleman and offering a safe harbor from the ravages of a bad storm. And, lest we forget, no less than the Academy Awards folk thought so much of the composition, that they awarded it the 1949 Oscar for Best Original Song.
Books, of course, will be next. Hitler (wherever he is) is sure to be smiling. Banning books was, after all, his specialty.
But I digress.
So, here are some words about the best selling songs of all time. I begin with this:
The best-selling single of all time is the 1942 Christmas classic, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” Although the song was sung by Bing Crosby for the movie Holiday Inn, the tune was penned by composer Irving Berlin.
Now, get this: Knowing what he’d just written, and perhaps foreshadowing the success of the song, Berlin is said to have told his secretary, “Grab your pen and take down this song. I just wrote the best song I’ve ever written—heck, I just wrote the best song that anybody’s ever written!” The MeToo idiots will surely take umbrage at a man barking orders to his, we assume, female secretary. But so it goes.
Anyway, that’s a pretty bold proclamation. But, if you’d like to argue with Mr. Berlin, you might want to take a look at the sales records first.
The Bing Crosby version of “White Christmas” has sold over 50 million singles. If you factor in other artists covering the song, it has sold over 100 million singles worldwide since it was first released in 1942.
By comparison, the next most popular single of any genre is Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind″ tribute to Princess Diana, with 33 million sales.
There’s clearly something magical about Christmas songs when it comes to sweeping the singles charts. Looking through the top 25 singles of all time yields five Christmas songs:
the aforementioned “White Christmas” with 31 million in sales;
Bing Crosby’s “Silent Night” (30 million sales);
Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” (16 million sales);
Gene Autry’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (12.5 million sales); and,
Band Aid’s (whoever/whatever that is) “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (11.7 million sales).
Between you and me, I am offended (offended! I say) that Mariah would have the gall to “want me” and not get hauled into court. Oh well.
In my youth, and really as a reflection of my father’s youth in Hoboken, New Jersey and his later work in Hollywood, I had two passions: the artistry of Frank Sinatra and … toy trains. Even now, I continue to marvel at the life of Francis Albert Sinatra who, from incredibly humble beginnings in New Jersey (his mother baby-sat my father and occasionally my grand-mother would babysit Frank), rose to become inarguably the greatest entertainer of the 20th Century (the Beatles were a group and Elvis or Michael Jackson never quite eclipsed Frank).
I continue to marvel at his voice and his tremendous contribution to the body of American music.
As for toy trains, I inherited this love from my dad as well. I called him my “Ambassador to an Earlier Age,” an earlier age when trains roamed the American continent and whose whistle and chuff were the hymns of daily life.
Turns out that Frank Sinatra loved toy trains too. In fact, he amassed a multi-million-dollar-collection of trains that was recently auctioned off by the Sinatra Family for something excess of $20 million. By the way, Neil Young recently sold off his collection and raised in excess of $5m (if memory serves).
Anyway, the point of this post is to relate the story of Frank Sinatra’s piano tuner, who, as it turned out, also shared an interest in toy trains. What follows are the remembrances of John Aaron, Frank’s piano tuner and technician. He blogs wonderful stories at http://johnaaronstories.blogspot.com.
SINATRA THE ENIGMA. Frank Sinatra was vast, complex and controversial. Since his death in 1998 at age 82, it seems like a new book comes out every year outlining his remarkable career and promising that the author has gotten to the root of what Sinatra was really like. No one gets it entirely right because Frank was a many-faceted person,and people became familiar only with those aspects of his personality he chose to show them.
Over the years, I interacted with him as a musician, piano technician and fellow toy train enthusiast. I might just as well have been dealing with three different people. Add to this the legends and rumors that surrounded him—most of which he neither confirmed nor denied—and it’s no wonder he was a hard character to nail down. I eventually decided not to attempt to do what so many others failed to accomplish. Therefore, I will confine my narrative to our mutual hobby of collecting and operating toy trains.
SINATRA THE COLLECTOR. Frank collected and operated toy trains, a hobby that should not be confused with model railroading. Toy trains are the big, heavy, colorful, noisy electric trains that were most popular from the 1920s to 1960s and were a fixture under most families’ Christmas trees. Almost every major department store had an operating layout on display during the holiday season. As a youngster growing up in Hoboken, N.J., Frank made the pilgrimage to Manhattan whenever possible to view the department store holiday layouts and the year-round showroom layouts at the Lionel and American Flyer headquarters.
Most of us who collect toy trains got hooked on them as kids. Operating them on our home layouts now takes us back to our childhood times. The hobby has wide appeal to people in high stress professions. For example, of the nearly 30,000 active toy train enthusiasts in the United States, the largest single professional group is that of family physicians. But this is followed by corporate CEOs and CFOs, lawyers, business owners and clergymen.
People in show business, although the smallest professional group,are naturally the most visible. Besides Mr. Sinatra, there is Neil Young,Rod Stewart, Mandy Patinkin and Joe Regalbuto (“Frank” on the Murphy Brown TV series). Now deceased, there was also Jackie Gleason, Tom Snyder, Ward Kimball, Dudley Moore, Arthur Godfrey, Tommy Dorsey and Gary Coleman. In my more than 50 years in the hobby, I have had the pleasure of visiting the home layouts of many of these famous collectors. Many celebrity train layouts can be viewed via the Internet.
SINATRA’S TRAIN LAYOUT. Hoboken is today one of New Jersey’s premier communities, but that was decidedly not the case in the Roaring Twenties when the youngster Frank Sinatra started to take an interest in toy trains. Hoboken was the low-rent district. In later life, Frank would quip, “I was born in Hoboken, but today, I couldn’t afford to live there.”
Most folks in his neighborhood could not buy electric trains which have always been costly, but as the story goes, Frank’s mother pawned an old fox fur piece she had acquired and bought him his first set of trains. Another often-heard tale has Frank and various friends jumping aboard a streetcar every now and then and traveling the dozen miles or so to the Lionel Train factory where they would rummage through the trash bins after hours in search of discarded train parts. From the parts, they would cobble together whole trains. Typical of the Sinatra mystique, Frank never confirmed or denied either story.
In his glory years, Sinatra would stroll the Lionel factory floors with Joshua Lionel Cowen himself as Frank picked out the latest Lionel offerings to add to his growing collection. Frank collected trains from almost all the major manufactures the world over. The value of his collection eventually exceeded several million dollars.
Of course, once the word got out that Sinatra loved toy trains, many came to him as gifts, including an antique locomotive courtesy of the Vatican. Tommy Dorsey, one of the first bandleaders Frank worked for, had a huge train layout in the basement of his Bernardsville, New Jersey, mansion which Frank enjoyed visiting and operating. Frank was also quite taken with the 1949 Macy’s holiday display layout in New York. Sinatra’s personal toy train layout not only surpassed both the Dorsey and Macy’s layouts, but it also gave the Lionel Corporation’s New York showroom layout a good run for the money!
The Sinatra collection and layout were not about owning the most toys. It was about fun. I never saw him more relaxed than when he was cleaning or oiling a locomotive or at the controls while four or five trains roared around his layout.
During the holidays, Frank often had neighborhood kids in to not only look at but to actually operate his layout. The fact that some trains were occasionally damaged by the overly enthusiastic kids did not upset him.Perhaps he remembered his childhood.
Frank’s fabulous layout and collection were housed in a special building at his Rancho Mirage estate in Palm Springs, Calif., known simply as “The Compound.” The two-plus acre, walled compound sat on the seventeenth fairway of the Tamarisk Country Club and as I recall, consisted of about eight buildings, tennis and handball courts, and a swimming pool. Some of the buildings were small houses for guests. One was Frank’s art studio(another hobby). One was a replica of a Santa Fe railroad caboose that was built up from an actual railroad flat car. I think it was used as a barber shop and exercise room.
The trains resided in a replica of an actual railroad station that was located in Ramsey, N.J. Lionel also made a reasonable model of this same station. Sinatra crammed his station from the floor to the rafters with wooden display cases and shelves brimming with trains of every type and manufacturer. The huge layout dominated the center of the room. Five trains could be operated simultaneously on the layout while others ran on separate loops or around the ceiling. A prominent area of the layout depicted Frank’s hometown of Hoboken. Another area of the station served as a library nook for Sinatra’s many train books and periodicals.
MR.”S” AND ME. In the early ‘60s, I worked in Hollywood as a studio musician and songwriter for several major record labels.On occasion, I would have reason to interact with Sinatra, and we developed a nodding acquaintance. When I opted for the more quiet lifestyle of a piano technician, Frank’s long-time pianist Bill Miller would call upon me for piano work, which eventually led me to occasionally service Frank’s personal pianos.
At some point, Sinatra saw my photo in one of the train magazines he regularly read and made the connection. He looked me up in the national directory of the Train Collectors Association, of which we were both members, and the next time he was performing in my area, he called me to ask if he could visit my layout. Since we were both night owls, we agreed that a late-night visit was best for security reasons. Frank arrived around midnight along with his driver and a bodyguard, and we wound up playing with trains till around dawn.
It is reasonable to ask why Sinatra would take an interest in me. Collecting toy trains has never been a hobby for the faint of wallet,and my income level was upper middle class at best. However, I could write, and so I did for almost all the major publications in the hobby. This led me to becoming a nationally recognized train “expert” and much in demand as a speaker and clinician at train conventions and shows. This brought many people,who wanted to sell the old trains they found in dad’s attic after he passed away, to my door. Manufactures also mailed me their latest new trains in hopes I would mention them in one of my articles. Technically, these trains were loaned to me for review and would be picked up by a representative of the company sometime in the future.
I’m still waiting.
I also had many of my own trains from my youth. Trains were the only birthday or Christmas presents I ever asked for. They made a great foundation to build my collection on. During the 1970s and ‘80s, the general public had no interest in old toy trains, and piano-tuning clients often gifted me with boxes of trains they were anxious to rid their homes of.
For Sinatra’s part, he had access to me, a knowledgeable train enthusiast with a first-class collection. More than that, however, we shared a lot of common interests. We both collected foreign trains from allover the world. Most collectors stick to American prototypes. Although most collectors prefer freight trains, both Frank and I favored passenger trains,and our collections were heavily weighted in their direction. Sinatra, of course, rode passenger trains frequently in the early years of his career.
Many enthusiasts have a lot of trains in their collections for display purposes only that do not work. Frank and I both agreed that every item in a collection should be operable, and we spent a lot of extra time and money restoring our trains to top-running condition.
Sinatra and I were also of the mind that no train was too rare or valuable to operate. We both owned the rare and highly coveted 1957 Lionel pink girl’s train sets. Although they were beyond valuable, we both frequently operated them on our layouts. Neither of us was much into the mint,never-opened, boxed train sets so many collectors strive to acquire. We both felt that toy trains were made to be toys and made to be played with.
Over the years, we met up at train conventions, shows, swap meets, auctions, etc. We also frequented many hobby shops, after regular hours,of course, and visited numerous layouts of fellow train collectors. Toy trains transported Sinatra light years away from concerts, movies and his legendary Las Vegas Rat Pack.
