Evidently Stephen DeStefano is one of the cartoonists working on Venture Brothers Season 3 — and he helped put together these teaser images of Brock Samson in the 80s.
Brock Samson in the 80s
Friday, September 7th, 2007Leatherman Skeletool
Friday, September 7th, 2007
Erik Sofge of Popular Mechanics raves about the new Leatherman Skeletool:
First things first: Leatherman’s new multi-tool has an incredible name — Skeletool. And, yes, it looks skeletal. The bare, stripped-down aluminum frame is gleaming and cruel, and when you show it off to friends, you won’t say, “Hey, look at my Leatherman.” You’ll invoke the title of Skeletool, because you’d be a fool not to.The Skeletool also happens to be a great idea come to life. It’s the multi-tool you might actually carry around with you, with a few essential functions — a knife, screwdriver, pliers and a bottle opener — but surprisingly little weight. At 5 ounces, Leatherman claims this is the lightest full-size multi-tool ever (less than full-size being those tiny keychain models). The stainless steel blade and bottle opener are accessible when the tool is closed. We can’t stress enough how handy that is. And we’re not talking about the easy-access knife, which is now standard on many multi-tools. It’s the bottle opener that you need to get to, repeatedly, and in various states of mind. When it comes to multi-tool design, Leatherman simply gets it.
Which might explain why, for something that looks so rigid and unyielding, the Skeletool feels almost cushy to hold. The design is asymmetrical, sloping slightly when it’s closed, and curving to fit the shape of your hand when the handles are open. There are tiny design updates crammed into every millimeter of its design, like the fact that the screwdriver isn’t hinged and tucked away, but in a fixed position, ready to be used as soon as you open the tool. And the extra double-sided bit fits into the handle, giving you a total of four bit sizes (two flathead and two Phillips).
The bad news is? Skeletool won’t be available until November. And it’s not exactly cheap, at $72 for the standard version and $96 for the Skeletool CX, which has carbon-fiber handles. Then again, unlike many multi-tools, this one is compact and light enough to carry around practically all the time. Worst-case scenario, the only thing you’ll use it for is cracking open bottles—and look extremely impressive while doing so.
Hurrah for labour shortages
Friday, September 7th, 2007The Economist says, Hurrah for labour shortages:
“Labour shortage” is one of the most nonsensical phrases ever coined. Real shortages happen outside the market economy: armies run short of ammunition; sailing ships may lack wind. But with six billion people on the planet, labour is not in short supply. What “labour shortage” means is that employers can’t find workers with the right skills at a price they like. Similar shortages are reported of Rembrandts, lobsters and nice houses in London.Nonetheless, the news that British farmers are complaining of a “labour shortage” is excellent news. For the past five years, eastern European workers have been pouring into Britain — perhaps as many as a million Poles, and hundreds of thousands of other nationalities, legal and illegal. The result has been a triumph of European integration. The diligent new arrivals have boosted economic growth in Britain, and many have gained money and know-how to help rebuild home countries ruined by communism.
That supply seemed inexhaustible. But it wasn’t. Most economies of eastern Europe are now booming, so pay and conditions at home are improving. The “discount” on staying put and the premium on going abroad have both shrunk.
Secondly, the new Europeans are realising that tedious and monotonous agricultural work is not the only way into life in Britain. Waitressing at a country pub is a better job than picking strawberries in the surrounding fields: you improve your English, don’t get dirty, and meet nicer people. Figures published last month showed 41% of registered workers from the eight eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004 applying to work in administration, business or management, compared with 25% three years ago. The hospitality industry accounted for 19% and agriculture only 11%.
It’s Not Luck
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007
When I got to It’s Not Luck, his second novel, it reminded me why I liked The Goal so much: a narrative is a surprisingly good way to explore ideas and convey technical information. Science fiction authors have known this for years, but it also works for more down-to-earth ideas.
In The Goal, our hero desperately tries to save his factory by following the cryptic advice of his Yoda-like mentor, Jonah — who bears a striking resemblance to the author, Eli Goldratt.
In It’s Not Luck, our hero has moved up in the organization — after saving the plant, of course — and he now struggles to internalize the greater lessons of his mentor and to use his methodologies to solve problems in logistics, marketing, and strategy, not just production. In fact, he has to come up with miracles to save three different divisions in the conglomerate before they’re sold off to Wall Street sharks.
It’s Not Luck is not great literature, but it has its strengths. First, the solutions our hero and his team come up with are solid, interesting solutions, and reading about them might inspire a manager to come up with similar ideas closer to home.
Second, Goldratt has worked as a consultant long enough to write convincingly about resistance and apathy from within an organization — like Scott Adams (Dilbert), but not funny. His characters don’t ring particularly true in other ways — they are quite wooden — but the “change management” portions of the story feel grounded in reality.
What does not work is the constant advertising for Goldratt’s jargon-laden Thinking Processes. Our hero routinely explains the great importance of drawing a Cloud, or spelling out a Current Reality Tree, when it’s not at all clear that these formal tools are what allowed someone to come up with the intriguing business solutions Goldratt put in the book.
One last point: Perhaps I’ve spent too much time thinking like a Finance Guy, but when our hero and his colleagues realize that they can save their companies by making them vastly more profitable, but accepted accounting practices will make them look less profitable in the short term, I couldn’t help but think, Why aren’t they arranging a management buyout? The real reason: Goldratt isn’t a finance guy.
Haystack Syndrome 3
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007In The Haystack Syndrome, which I was just discussing, Goldratt expands his original example by supposing that the marketing director visits Japan — the book was published in 1990, remember — where demand for Products P and Q is almost the same as in the states — but at a price 20 percent lower.
We previously calculated that each P sold was worth $3 per minute on Resource B, the bottleneck, and each Q was worth $2. Now, each P sold to Japan is worth less than $3 per minute. In fact, each P sold to Japan is worth just $27 — costs didn’t decrease by 20 percent, just the selling price — which is less than $2 per minute. So we don’t want to sell any product to Japan.
What happens if we increase our capacity? Let’s assume that we can buy another B machine for $100,000, and we can pay another B worker for $400 per week. (These numbers obviously aren’t real, even for 1990.)
Now we can sell 100 of Product P and 50 of Product Q in the states for a total contribution (or throughput) of $7,500. Even after we subtract out our now-higher fixed costs of $6,400, our net profit is $1,100, or $800 higher than the $300 we were making before. That machine will pay for itself in 125 weeks.
Right?
Oh, wait, maybe we can sell to Japan now. We’ve lifted the constraint on Resource B, but now Resource A has become the bottleneck. By selling 100 of Product P, we’re using 1,500 minutes of Resource A. By selling 50 of Product Q, we’re using 500 more minutes of Resource A. We only have 400 minutes left to throw at Japan. With 400 minutes at Resource A, we can produce about 26 more units of Product P, for another $700 in contribution (or throughput). That almost doubles our previous improvement.
It’s a good thing we didn’t stop our analysis too soon; it almost cost us a lot of money.
Wait a minute, our constraint shifted from Resource B to Resource A, and we didn’t recalculate everything, even though changing our constraint changes everything. If Resource A is our constraint, then Product P has a throughput of $3/minute, and Product Q has a throughput of $6/minute! Product P sold to Japan now has a throughput of less than $2/minute, and Product Q sold to Japan now has a throughput of $4/minute.
With our 2,400 minutes of Resource A, we should be making Product Q for the states (500 minutes), then Product Q for Japan (500 minutes), then Product P for the states (1,400 minutes). We should produce no Product P for Japan. Then we can bring in $3,000 + $2,000 + $4,200 = $9,200 in contribution (throughput), for a net profit of $2,800, which dramatically improves our profit again!
Inertia can cost you a lot of money.
How To Hide An Airplane Factory
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007
How To Hide An Airplane Factory:
During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting and trompe l’oeil to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.
I’d say they succeeded. Take a look at all the pictures.
News from the Front
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007Paul Graham’s News from the Front explains his heretical idea that “It may not matter all that much where you go to college”:
Practically everyone thinks that someone who went to MIT or Harvard or Stanford must be smart. Even people who hate you for it believe it.But when you think about what it means to have gone to an elite college, how could this be true? We’re talking about a decision made by admissions officers — basically, HR people — based on a cursory examination of a huge pile of depressingly similar applications submitted by seventeen year olds. And what do they have to go on? An easily gamed standardized test; a short essay telling you what the kid thinks you want to hear; an interview with a random alum; a high school record that’s largely an index of obedience. Who would rely on such a test?
And yet a lot of companies do. A lot of companies are very much influenced by where applicants went to college. How could they be? I think I know the answer to that.
There used to be a saying in the corporate world: “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” You no longer hear this about IBM specifically, but the idea is very much alive; there is a whole category of “enterprise” software companies that exist to take advantage of it. People buying technology for large organizations don’t care if they pay a fortune for mediocre software. It’s not their money. They just want to buy from a supplier who seems safe — a company with an established name, confident salesmen, impressive offices, and software that conforms to all the current fashions. Not necessarily a company that will deliver so much as one that, if they do let you down, will still seem to have been a prudent choice. So companies have evolved to fill that niche.
A recruiter at a big company is in much the same position as someone buying technology for one. If someone went to Stanford and is not obviously insane, they’re probably a safe bet. And a safe bet is enough. No one ever measures recruiters by the later performance of people they turn down.
Cho No More: We Can Stop Mass Killings
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007In Cho No More: We Can Stop Mass Killings, Eugene Methvin asserts that “Today, we have the knowledge to do a far better job of identifying potential mass killers like Seung Hui Cho, protect the public by institutionalizing them, and study their pathologies to improve the science of treating them. All we lack is the will.”
He applauds Maryland’s old Patuxent Institution, a real-life Arkham Asylum:
A young lawyer named Jerome Robinson was in the courtroom the day Duker was sentenced. A few years later Robinson was in the Maryland legislature. He headed a “blue ribbon” study commission embracing the best legal and psychiatric minds of the time. They produced the 1951 “defective delinquent” law creating a hybrid prison and mental hospital, the Patuxent Institution, which opened its doors in 1955. It was a sound solution to the terrible problem posed by explosive criminals like Duker and James. The nation’s best psychiatric authorities agreed such psychopaths comprise an unusual category of compulsive criminals who, while knowing the difference between right and wrong and hence legally “sane,” nevertheless lack the normal moral restraints on rage impulses.The law’s authors made their priorities clear: 1. Protect the public. 2. Provide treatment within the limits of current psychiatric knowledge. 3. Research to advance the science. They wanted it made difficult to get into Patuxent, and then difficult to get out. Fourteen elaborate safeguards surrounded a convicted criminal before he could be committed to Patuxent — many more than in other state civil proceedings permitting potentially lifetime civil commitment for insanity that federal courts had frequently upheld against constitutional attacks. Only convicted criminals were candidates for admission. A candidate was entitled to have psychiatrists of his own choice examine him and testify in his behalf, at state expense. And the ultimate question was left not to psychiatrists but to a citizen-jury: did this convicted criminal, “by the demonstration of persistent, aggravated antisocial or criminal behavior… evidence a propensity toward criminal activity… so as to clearly demonstrate an actual danger to society?”
For some, regardless of the sentence for the original offense, their prison term spent at Patuxent was for life.
The legislators who wrote the law knew it and meant it to be so. In the first ten years, 46 percent of inmates served beyond their expired sentences, a proportion that by 1972 dropped to 20 percent. One inmate, William L. McDonough, got a one-year sentence for an assault conviction in 1962 and spent ten years in Patuxent before being paroled. Roosevelt Murray was committed in 1958 after conviction for unlawful use of an automobile, for which he could have received a four-year sentence. He stayed for 16 years, until in February 1974 a jury decided he was safe to release.
The Patuxent Institution compiled a remarkable record of success. In 1971 Dr. Emory F. Hodges, a Virginia psychiatrist and member of a presidential task force on prison reform, estimated in the American Journal of Psychiatry that Patuxent had saved 391 former inmates, the hardest of hardcore compulsive criminals, from repeating criminal acts as they would likely have done if they had gone through their normal prison sentences. He estimated these Patuxent alumni would have been arrested for 1500 new crimes in their three or more years of liberty, and have committed many thousands more for which they would have escaped arrest. Hodges heavily credited the indefinite sentence, and concluded the institution was preventing a larger volume of crime with each passing year.
Patuxent was costly. In 1970 the institution had about 485 inmates and 12 psychiatrists, about a fifth of the total working in prisons in the entire nation. Maryland prisons held about 5000 other criminal convicts, with no fulltime psychiatrists and only four part-time, while Patuxent had ten, plus five psychologists and 13 social workers for 485 patients. The state spent about five times as much on Patuxent inmates as on ordinary state prisoners.
America’s Toe-Tapping Menace
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007Laura MacDonald comments on America’s Toe-Tapping Menace:
What is shocking about Senator Larry Craig’s bathroom arrest is not what he may have been doing tapping his shoe in that stall, but that Minnesotans are still paying policemen to tap back. For almost 40 years most police departments have been aware of something that still escapes the general public: men who troll for sex in public places, gay or “not gay,” are, for the most part, upstanding citizens. Arresting them costs a lot and accomplishes little.In 1970, Laud Humphreys published the groundbreaking dissertation he wrote as a doctoral candidate at Washington University called “Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places.” Because of his unorthodox methods — he did not get his subjects’ consent, he tracked down names and addresses through license plate numbers, he interviewed the men in their homes in disguise and under false pretenses — “Tearoom Trade” is now taught as a primary example of unethical social research.
That said, what results! In minute, choreographic detail, Mr. Humphreys (who died in 1988) illustrated that various signals — the foot tapping, the hand waving and the body positioning — are all parts of a delicate ritual of call and answer, an elaborate series of codes that require the proper response for the initiator to continue. Put simply, a straight man would be left alone after that first tap or cough or look went unanswered.
Haystack Syndrome 2
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007In The Haystack Syndrome, which I was just discussing, Goldratt jokes about an enthusiastic process engineer who races to his boss to explain that he has a new way — for just a few thousand dollars — to produce a part not in 20 minutes, but in 21.
This “disprovement” certainly won’t earn him accolades; by the measurements used at the plant, he has reduced efficiency by five percent.
But what he has really done is “elevate the constraint” on the system. He has found a way to offload some of the work on the bottleneck, Resource B, to the “less efficient” Resource C, which has excess capacity, because it’s not the bottleneck:
Under the new system, a part that used to take 15 minutes at Resource B and 5 minutes at Resource C now takes 14 minutes at Resource B and 7 minutes at Resource C — one more minute, but one less minute where it counts.
A plant that has been producing 100 of Product P and 30 of Product Q can now produce the same 100 of Product P — that’s all the market demands — and 55 of Product Q.
Not bad for reducing effiency.
The Next Killer App
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007Cringely thinks The Next Killer App is telepresence:
Imagine one of the new aluminum and glass iMacs only instead of a 24-inch screen make it 42 inches. The familiar iSight camera will be there in the bezel. but this time the camera will have HD resolution. This hang-it-on-the-wall iMac would establish yet another category of computers, which is what Apple loves to do. They’ll sell a million units to the faithful and all it will take is putting an active telepresence system in every Apple store connected to every other Apple store for prospective users to play with. This gets Apple into the big screen TV business with a system that has higher margins simply because it isn’t just a TV but is also a Mac. Look for all this after Christmas along with refreshed Macs featuring the H.264 encoder chip I pre-announced a number of months ago. Look for Apple to also facilitate telepresence by turning it into a service as it has more and more wanted to do. Then imagine that system connected to a 3G iPhone.
Ethnic Cleansing or “Amnesty”
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007In Ethnic Cleansing or “Amnesty”, Orson Scott Card imagines a talk-show debate between a “fuzzy-headed liberal” and a conservative Republican after all the illegal immigrants have been kicked out of the country:
“So the higher prices we’re all paying, the reduced services, the loss of American jobs, the contempt the whole world feels for American ethnic cleansing — you think it was all worth it?” says the talk-show host.The Republican spokesman nods wisely. “They broke the law even coming into this country.”
“What if it was a stupid law?” asks the liberal.
“It was the law, and they broke it.”
“And so they no longer deserved to live in America?” says the liberal.
“They never deserved to live here.”
“So lawbreakers don’t deserve to live here. Have you ever had a speeding ticket?”
“I’m an American. And I pay my traffic fines.”
“But you broke the law.”
“I was born here.”
“But your ancestors weren’t,” says the liberal. “Your ancestors, somewhere along the line, were born somewhere else.”
“But they came here legally.”
“No sir, they did not,” says the liberal. “I knew we’d get to this point, so I had your genealogy researched. Here’s a list of your German ancestors who broke the law of their German-speaking state by emigrating.”
“Those weren’t American laws, so they weren’t criminals here.”
“And here are your Puritan New England ancestors, who came here as criminals because of their defiance of the laws concerning religion in England.”
“They wanted freedom of religion.”
“But they broke the law. And look — here are your Scotch-Irish and German ancestors who settled in Pennsylvania and North Carolina without getting legal title to their lands. They were all law-breaking squatters, and they kept getting caught farming on other people’s land and had to move on.”
“It was wide-open country then, and the laws were different —”
“And look — here are your ancestors who crossed over the Appalachian Mountains like Daniel Boone, into areas that the federal government absolutely declared off-limits to white settlers. Then when the Indians attacked them for illegally trespassing, they demanded that the US Army come and kill Indians so your ancestors could keep their illegally occupied land.”
“I know the Indians were badly treated, but —”
“In fact, through most of the territory of the US, the first settlers were illegal immigrants, weren’t they? US treaties supersede all other laws except the Constitution. So what about it? Do you favor the expulsion of all these white illegal immigrants to restore the land to the legal titleholders by US treaty?”
“That was a long time ago.”
Card paints his hypothetical free-market economists with a peculiar brush:
The reporters talk to the free market economists who swore that when the illegal immigrants left, all those great jobs would return to Americans. “They just have to raise the wages higher to attract the workers they want,” say the economists.
[...]
The people who starved to death in Mexico aren’t here to enjoy the growing prosperity in their country, with so many American jobs now available to them – but free market economists never mind a few thousand deaths here and there. The free market always recovers. “Let them die,” the free market economists said, “and reduce the surplus population.”
That’s not even a good caricature of a free-market economist.
Tour de France cyclists have big hearts
Monday, September 3rd, 2007Tour de France cyclists have big hearts — literally:
Researchers who examined the hearts of former Tour bikers found that the athletes’ hearts were from 20 to 40 percent larger than average, said Dr. Francois Carre of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Rennes, France, speaking at a meeting of the European Society of Cardiology.
[...]
Carre found that the athletes’ hearts shrank nearly a quarter in size after they finished riding professionally. Still, the cyclists remained in excellent physical condition.
This still leaves some questions: How big were the cyclists hearts before they started training? Did they start with larger hearts, or did they possess hearts that adapted more to training than others’? Or did their hearts grow as a result of performance-enhancing drugs?
Haystack Syndrome
Monday, September 3rd, 2007When I recently read Kevin Fox‘s Blue Light anecdote, it spurred me to go back and read the stack of old Goldratt books I’d inherited. I loved The Goal, but, frankly, I wasn’t impressed with his Theory of Constraints (the book, not the idea), or The Race (which is little more than a proto-PowerPoint), or The Haystack Syndrome.
On the other hand, The Haystack Syndrome does have one good demonstration of Goldratt’s key point. Suppose we have a company that produces two products, P and Q, from three different raw materials and one purchased part:
How much money can our hypothetical company make in a week? Eyeballing the numbers, we see that it can sell 100 of Product P and 50 of Product Q.
Each P brings in $90 but costs $45 in materials, so it contributes $45 to covering overhead. Each Q contributes $60.
If we sell 100 of P, that’s $4,500. If we sell 50 of Q, that’s $3,000. If we then subtract out our $6,000 in overhead from salaries and the like, that leaves us $1,500 in profit.
Simple, but wrong — because we’ve ignored all our internal constraints. We can’t actually produce 100 of P and 50 of Q per week.
OK, so we produce some fraction of that. Naturally, we want to maximize the number of Product Q we produce; those are more profitable — $60 versus $45, 60-percent margins versus 50-percent margins.
Simple, but wrong again — because we’re still ignoring our constraints.
Well, how expensive are P and Q in terms of resources used? If we add it all up, each P requires 60 minutes of effort from various resources. Each Q requires just 50 minutes.
So Q requires less labor and less allocated overhead, too?
Sure, but none of that matters.
Our bottleneck is at Resource B. If we produce 100 of P, that uses 1,500 minutes of B’s time. If we produce 50 of Q, that uses another 1,500 minutes of B’s time. That adds up to 3,000 minutes per week, but we only have 2,400 minutes.
Our goal is to maximize the dollar throughput of our system, which means we need to maximize the dollar throughput of our bottleneck. In this case, our bottleneck is Resource B, so we need to look at the dollar throughput of producing Product P versus Product Q at that bottleneck.
Product P contributes $45 for 15 minutes at Resource B. Product Q contributes $60 for 30 minutes at Resource B. That’s $3/minute versus $2/minute.
There’s no comparison. Produce as much Product P as you can!
This may all be clear when you walk through a nice diagram, but imagine how a large organization tackles a problem like this. How is the sales team rewarded? Based on sales (revenue) over some threshold? Or revenue minus product cost (which includes labor and allocated overhead)? Or contribution margins?
How Not to Die
Sunday, September 2nd, 2007Paul Graham explains — to the startups he’s funded — How Not to Die:
A couple days ago I told a reporter that we expected about a third of the companies we funded to succeed. Actually I was being conservative. I’m hoping it might be as much as a half. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could achieve a 50% success rate?Another way of saying that is that half of you are going to die. Phrased that way, it doesn’t sound good at all. In fact, it’s kind of weird when you think about it, because our definition of success is that the founders get rich. If half the startups we fund succeed, then half of you are going to get rich and the other half are going to get nothing.
If you can just avoid dying, you get rich. That sounds like a joke, but it’s actually a pretty good description of what happens in a typical startup. It certainly describes what happened in Viaweb. We avoided dying till we got rich.
It was really close, too. When we were visiting Yahoo to talk about being acquired, we had to interrupt everything and borrow one of their conference rooms to talk down an investor who was about to back out of a new funding round we needed to stay alive. So even in the middle of getting rich we were fighting off the grim reaper.
You may have heard that quote about luck consisting of opportunity meeting preparation. You’ve now done the preparation. The work you’ve done so far has, in effect, put you in a position to get lucky: you can now get rich by not letting your company die. That’s more than most people have. So let’s talk about how not to die.
We’ve done this five times now, and we’ve seen a bunch of startups die. About 10 of them so far. We don’t know exactly what happens when they die, because they generally don’t die loudly and heroically. Mostly they crawl off somewhere and die.
For us the main indication of impending doom is when we don’t hear from you. When we haven’t heard from, or about, a startup for a couple months, that’s a bad sign. If we send them an email asking what’s up, and they don’t reply, that’s a really bad sign. So far that is a 100% accurate predictor of death.
Whereas if a startup regularly does new deals and releases and either sends us mail or shows up at YC events, they’re probably going to live.
I realize this will sound naive, but maybe the linkage works in both directions. Maybe if you can arrange that we keep hearing from you, you won’t die.