He also enlisted in a movement called Technocracy

October 16th, 2023

Elon Musk by Walter IsaacsonI can’t say I knew much about Canadian political movements before reading Walter Isaacson’s description of Elon Musk’s maternal grandfather’s background (in his biography of Elon):

The loss of his farm [in the Great Depression] instilled in him a populism, and he became active in a movement known as the Social Credit Party, which advocated giving citizens free credit notes they could use like currency. The movement had a conservative fundamentalist streak tinged with anti-Semitism. Its first leader in Canada decried a “perversion of cultural ideals” because “a disproportionate number of Jews occupy positions of control.” Haldeman rose to become chair of the party’s national council.

He also enlisted in a movement called Technocracy, which believed that government should be run by technocrats rather than politicians. It was temporarily outlawed in Canada because of its opposition to the country’s entry into World War II. Haldeman defied the ban by taking out a newspaper ad supporting the movement.

Incidentally, Canada’s banking system weathered the Great Depression rather well:

The McFadden Act of 1927 specifically prohibited interstate branch banking in the U.S., and only allowed banks to open branches within the single state in which it was chartered. Therefore, U.S. banks were forced to be small and local, with an undiversified loan portfolio tied to the local economy of a single state, or a specific region of a single state. The strict regulatory framework of the McFadden Act created a delicate and fragile banking system that could not easily withstand the shock of the Great Depression. Exhibit A: 9,000 banks failed in the U.S. in the early 1930s.

[…]

In Canada, where not a single bank failed, branching was the rule; in fact, Canada had only ten large banks during the 1930s. The Canadian economy fared much better than did the United States economy, in large part because of its better diversified and integrated banking system.

I didn’t know anyone moved to South Africa in the 1950s:

So in 1950, he decided to move to South Africa, which was still ruled by a white apartheid regime.

[…]

Haldeman decided he wanted to live inland, so they took off toward Johannesburg, where most of the white citizens spoke English rather than Afrikaans. But as they flew over nearby Pretoria, the lavender jacaranda flowers were in bloom, and Haldeman announced, “This is where we’ll stay.”

[…]

When Joshua and Winnifred were young, a charlatan named William Hunt, known (at least to himself) as “the Great Farini,” came to Moose Jaw and told tales of an ancient “lost city” he had seen when crossing the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. “This fabulist showed my grandfather pictures that were obviously fake, but he became a believer and decided it was his mission to rediscover it,” Musk says.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

There is no direct, urgent reason to do the best possible job

October 15th, 2023

The actual way delegation works, Byrne Hobart suggests, is to resist the entropic force that makes some problem look like a rounding error:

This shows up everywhere: Salesforce won’t miss its numbers this quarter because one particular salesperson is a little slow. McDonald’s won’t need to write down the value of its intangible assets because one bathroom isn’t cleaned thoroughly. Very few companies have died entirely because of excessive travel expenses (though it’s often an early sign of other failures to control spending).

Anyone making decisions at this level can be fairly confident that there is no direct, urgent reason to do the best possible job. And yet, if you indicate to a Salesforce salesperson, however subtly, that you might someday be a source of annual recurring revenue, you will hear from them a lot. And if you visit a McDonald’s it will generally have pristine, gleaming bathroom facilities (at least if you adjust for the foot traffic a typical location gets).

Delegation is, essentially, a relentless quest to make the individual decisions that are a rounding error for the company feel like weighty and important matters for whoever makes them. That can’t be done entirely by fiat; there’s some flexibility required because circumstances often change in a way that a) does change the optimal behavior for a given employee, but b) doesn’t reach the level of importance that would require attention from the CEO or board of directors.

What makes these organizations work is that they’re consistently breaking high-level incentives down into granular ones that actually affect people’s behavior without locking them into some approach that doesn’t make sense. It’s not a good idea for a company with a sales team of thousands to set a quota for firmwide cold calls, for example; the level at which that kind of quota should be set is the level at which someone can see whether their team is getting better results from cold calls, cold emails, events, requests for referrals, or any of the other tools in the salesperson’s kit. So the devolution is that highly specific key performance indicators matter at the lowest level, and as they percolate up they get more general and abstract, until they roll up to numbers that make sense across almost every industry: revenue, some indication of margins, some measure of return on investment, and some proxy for making sure the business actually generates cash in a timely fashion.

This is most visible in franchise companies. From an investor’s perspective, a franchise business looks very low-risk: it’s capturing a fairly fixed piece of the upside from a brand, without all the messy operational intensity of buying or building a location, staffing it, and operating it. But from an operating perspective, it’s a nightmare. Every time Starbucks opens a new location, it’s betting a brand worth tens of billions of dollars on one store, and, really, on every worker in that store. Any bad decision at the lowest level can threaten the brand equity of the entire business.

This may be why franchise-based models eventually slow down. After a while, the accumulated value of the business is so high, and the marginal benefit of one location so relatively low, that it doesn’t make sense to risk so much brand equity on one more spot. Meanwhile, the existing store base is, presumably, continuing to compound the value of the brand, so a store-growth model slowly shifts to a same-store-sales based one.

The implementation of this is, in practice, signing a monstrously detailed franchise agreement, with the agreement devoting lots of space (starting on page 57 in this case) to enumerating all of the additional training sessions that will be required to cover material not mentioned in the agreement itself.

Any big company is, in historical terms, a miracle of human coordination. It’s astounding that on any given day, 2.3 million Walmart associates spend their workday more or less the way Walmart CEO Doug McMillon wants them to. That’s more direct influence on human behavior than historical heads of state could command. And entropy constantly pushes against this coordination working. The profits a company produces, and the share price that represents the expected future sum of those profits, is the source of organizational negentropy that justifies the otherwise herculean task of keeping everyone on task.

Posted in Business, Economics | 4 Comments »

Hitler was committing the same error he had made at Stalingrad

October 14th, 2023

How Hitler Could Have Won World War II by Bevin AlexanderThe campaigns of 1941 and 1942 showed that German panzers were virtually invincible, Bevin Alexander explains (in How Hitler Could Have Won World War II), when they maneuvered freely across the great open spaces of Russia and Ukraine:

The proper decision for Germany in 1943, therefore, was to make strategic withdrawals to create fluid conditions so panzers could carry out wide movements and surprise attacks. This would have given maximum effect to the still superior quality of German command staffs and fighting troops.

Instead, as General Friedrich-Wilhelm von Mellenthin, one of the most experienced panzer leaders on the eastern front, wrote, “The German supreme command could think of nothing better than to fling our magnificent panzer divisions against Kursk, which had now become the strongest fortress in the world.”

Head-to-head confrontation was becoming increasingly unrealistic as the disparity of strength between Germany and the Allies grew. By mid-1943, even after urgent recruiting of non-Germans, Hitler’s field forces amounted to 4.4 million men. The Red Army alone had 6.1 million, while Britain and the United States were mobilizing millions more. In war production the Allies were far outproducing Germany in every weapon and every vital commodity.

[…]

As soon as the Russians launched an attack southward, he said, all German forces on the Donetz and Mius should withdraw step by step, pulling the Red Army westward toward the lower Dnieper River around Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhye. At the same time, reserves should assemble west of Kharkov, and drive into the northern flank of the Russians as they advanced westward.

“In this way,” Manstein asserted, “the enemy would be doomed to suffer the same fate on the coast of the Sea of Azov as he had on store for us on the Black Sea.”

Hitler did not understand mobile warfare, or surrendering ground temporarily to give his forces operational freedom. He rejected Manstein’s plan. He turned to the kind of brute force, frontal battle he did understand.

[…]

The Russians picked up evidence of the Kursk buildup from radio intercepts and a spy ring in Switzerland. They began to assemble overwhelming strength in and around the salient.

The only forceful opponent of the attack now became Heinz Guderian, whom Hitler had brought back in February 1943 as inspector of armored troops. At a conference on May 3–4, 1943, at Munich with Hitler and other generals, Guderian looked at aerial photographs showing the Russians were preparing deep defensive positions — artillery, antitank guns, minefields — exactly where the German attacks were to go in.

Guderian said Germany ought to be devoting its tank production to counter the forthcoming Allied landings in the west, not wasting it in a frontal attack against a primed and waiting enemy.

[…]

Hitler was committing the same error he had made at Stalingrad: he was going to attack a fortress, throwing away all the advantages of mobile tactics and meeting the Russians on ground of their own choosing. Besides that, he was concentrating his strength along a narrow front and gravely weakening the rest of the line, as he also had done at Stalingrad.

[…]

Russian defenses were formidable, and the main hope of the Germans, ninety Tiger tanks made by Ferdinand Porsche (who had designed the Volkswagen automobile), had no machine guns. As Guderian wrote, they “had to go quail-shooting with cannons.” The Tigers could not neutralize enemy rifles and machine guns, so German infantry was unable to follow them. Russian infantry, in no danger of being shot down, approached some of the Tigers and showered the portholes with flamethrowers, or disabled the machines with satchel charges. The Tigers were shattered, the crews suffered high losses, and Model’s attack bogged down after penetrating only six miles.

[…]

Immediately after Citadel, Rommel devised a method that would have worked: building a heavily mined defensive line perhaps six miles deep protected by every antitank gun the Germans could find. Russian tanks would bog down before such a line, and from then on would have to gnaw their way forward. Meanwhile the Germans could build more minefields and antitank screens behind.

But Hitler would not listen. When Guderian proposed such a line, Hitler asserted that his generals would think of nothing save withdrawal if he permitted defensive positions in their rear. “He had made up his mind on this point,” Guderian wrote, “and nothing could bring him to change it.”

Posted in War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

He was rejected by 16 out of the 18 colleges he applied to

October 13th, 2023

Stanley Zhong, 18, is a 2023 graduate of Gunn High School in Palo Alto:

Despite earning 3.97 unweighted and 4.42 weighted GPA, scoring 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT’s and founding his own e-signing startup RabbitSign in sophomore year, he was rejected by 16 out of the 18 colleges he applied to.

[…]

He was denied by: MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, UC Davis, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Cornell University, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, Caltech, University of Washington and University of Wisconsin.

His only acceptances: University of Texas and University of Maryland.

He won’t be going to either of those:

Zhong just started his Google job this week,

Posted in Education, Policy | 3 Comments »

Gaza has no resources that make it worth living there

October 12th, 2023

Back in 1980, Arnold Kling and his then-new wife spent some time in Israel near Gaza:

“You’re about to see the saddest sight of your entire life,” our host told us. My wife and I, recently married, were riding in a tractor that was pulling the accumulated week’s trash from our small farming village to a dumping area in the sand just outside the boundary of the village. The cart we were pulling was about 15 feet by 15 feet, piled high with what today would be composted by environmentally conscious elites: moldy bread, rotten fruit, scraps of vegetables.

As we approached the dumping area, we found ourselves surrounded by Arab residents of Gaza. They came running, competing to be the first to have access to what we were dumping. They were dressed in rags, which were torn, patched and ill-fitting. It was indeed the saddest sight I have ever seen.

Gaza has no resources that make it worth living there. It is hard to get historical demographic figures for the Gaza Strip, but it seems that at the end of World War I the area had fewer than 20,000 residents. It . As of 1948, according to Michael Oren, the population was just 80,000. He says that nearly 2 million people live there today.

[…]

Arab refugees, there and elsewhere, were kept in a state of dependence. No one ever made an attempt to create an actual economy in Gaza, with people working and producing. It was all handouts, and even those were inadequate.

The Israelis conquered Gaza in 1967. They, too, made no effort to develop it. They approved a handful of Jewish settlements there. From a strategic perspective, the strip is a buffer zone between Israel and the Sinai Peninsula. Israel captured the Sinai in 1967 and gave it back to Egypt under the Begin-Sadat peace agreement brokered by President Carter in 1979.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 14 Comments »

The fiscal pressures generated by the expansion of army sizes induces the creation of the bureaucratic tax state.

October 11th, 2023

To the ranks of Maurician infantry, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden appended two key innovations — a massive battery of field artillery and the cavalry charge — and he grew the Swedish army from 15,000 men in 1590 to a peak of 150,000 in 1639:

But larger armies, whether mercenary or conscript, were expensive. Paying for expansion and professionalization placed enormous demands on the primitive financial systems of European states. Rulers met these challenges by extending executive authority and increasing tax burdens (as well as corvees), which in turn required the creation of a new bureaucracy of administrative officials. The men had to be recruited, equipped, paid, and fed. They needed barracks, clothes, and roads — outside Italy, there weren’t enough roads capable of moving a large army, its supply train, and artillery.

[…]

In the military revolution model, the fiscal pressures generated by the expansion of army sizes induces the creation of the bureaucratic tax state.

[…]

Colonels were responsible for raising regiments through voluntary enlistment, selling captaincies to high bidders who then went around collecting men — some seigneurial lords rounding up their peasants, and other men raiding hospitals and prisons. These ‘military contractors’ were also charged with disbursing payments (which they reduced for their own profit), providing clothes and arms, and giving medical care to their troops. Faced with this perverse incentive, the commanders skimped on their responsibilities and flagrantly overcharged for what they did provide. Starvation and disease were rampant in the camps, from which desertion was equally common.

What held this motley crew together was not patriotism, but plunder—the opportunity to loot on campaign and thus replace what income the financially inept French state would provide. Richelieu encouraged plunder as an incentive for better performance. Towns could be nailed again under the ‘Contribution System’, pioneered by Portuguese pirates in the Indian Ocean, which allowed towns to pay cash in exchange for exemption from plunder. Beyond open loot and heavy taxes, citizens — in lieu of centralized barracks — were also forced to billet soldiers in their homes and provide them with food and bedding.

The increasing costs of raising large armies without adequate logistical systems induced state formation. As armies grew, they required larger foraging areas — effectively an invitation for foraging parties to desert. Desertion prevented the training essential to the function of a modern combat infantry and thus had to be stopped. The only remedy was improving systems of centralized taxation and supply.

[…]

By creating non-venal posts in the high command, Richelieu and the heads of the War Department gradually subordinated the officer class and introduced promotion by merit. Weapons production was standardized and centralized in state arms factories; magazines were established to supply the troops on home soil; French officers took responsibility for raising foreign troops; and in 1763 recruitment was made a royal monopoly.

Posted in Policy, War | 4 Comments »

These highly sophisticated technological assets were ultimately ineffective

October 10th, 2023

Ten years ago, on the 20th anniversary of The Battle of Mogadishu, I shared some of the lost lessons of “Black Hawk Down”. The first lesson seems apropos:

Technology Does Not Guarantee Success

The Centra Spike signals-intelligence team was pulled off the hunt for Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar in order to assist the search for Aideed.

These highly sophisticated technological assets were ultimately ineffective because they could not pick up the lower-level technology used by the Somalis. Aideed communicated with his militia with couriers and dated walkie-talkies too low-powered to be detected by America’s sophisticated electronic eavesdropping equipment.

Retired US Air Force Colonel Cedric Leighton called Israel’s handling of the recent Hamas attacks a “classic failure of technology”:

“What Hamas did, what their leadership did, was apparently they moved off of the normal modern communications links that we take for granted every day, and went back to what you did in the 19th century: face-to-face meetings, they went and used couriers instead of going in and using the telephone or the cell phone,” he said.

Posted in Technology, War | 6 Comments »

Even as he made the pledge, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter

October 9th, 2023

Elon Musk by Walter IsaacsonWalter Isaacson addresses Elon Musk’s need for risk and drama early in his biography:

“Elon wants risk for its own sake,” says Peter Thiel, who became his partner in the early days of PayPal. “He seems to enjoy it, indeed at times be addicted to it.”

[…]

“I was born for a storm, and a calm does not suit me,” Andrew Jackson once said. Likewise with Musk.

[…]

“He is a drama magnet,” says Kimbal. “That’s his compulsion, the theme of his life.”

[…]

“I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode,” he told me, “which it has been in for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life.”

[…]

Even as he made the pledge, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world’s ultimate playground.

Posted in Business | 1 Comment »

Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety very easily attained, seem to lead to as a rule to Degeneration

October 8th, 2023

I recently revisited H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, first the audiobook and then the 1960 movie. Wells coined the term “time machine” and codified the trope of using a high-tech machine to travel through time, rather than “traveling” through dreams or visions.

Wells’ future darkly twists the utopian socialist vision of Willian Morris’s News from Nowhere:

In the novel, the narrator, William Guest, falls asleep after returning from a meeting of the Socialist League and awakes to find himself in a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. In this society there is no private property, no big cities, no authority, no monetary system, no marriage or divorce, no courts, no prisons, and no class systems. This agrarian society functions simply because the people find pleasure in nature, and therefore they find pleasure in their work.

One of the dark twists reflects what Wells had learned from one of his professors, Ray Lankester:

“Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety very easily attained, seem to lead to as a rule to Degeneration.” Degeneration was well known in parasites, and Lankester gave several examples. In Sacculina, a genus of barnacles which is a parasite of crabs, the female is little more than “a sac of eggs, and absorbed nourishment from the juices of its host by root-like processes” (+ wood-engraved illustration). He called this degenerative evolutionary process in parasites retrogressive metamorphosis.

When The Time Machine was published in 1895, The Guardian wrote in its review:

The influence of the author of The Coming Race is still powerful, and no year passes without the appearance of stories which describe the manners and customs of peoples in imaginary worlds, sometimes in the stars above, sometimes in the heart of unknown continents in Australia or at the Pole, and sometimes below the waters under the earth. The latest effort in this class of fiction is The Time Machine, by HG Wells.

It didn’t occur to me that the subterranean Morlocks were based, in part, on Wells’ own early-life experiences in the working class:

His own family would spend most of their time in a dark basement kitchen when not being occupied in their father’s shop. Later, his own mother would work as a housekeeper in a house with tunnels below, where the staff and servants lived in underground quarters. A medical journal published in 1905 would focus on these living quarters for servants in poorly ventilated dark basements. In his early teens, Wells became a draper’s apprentice, having to work in a basement for hours on end.

The 1960 film sheds the socialist-evolution theme of Wells’ novel for a series of vignettes of worse and worse wars, leading humanity to live underground. It’s not clear how the guileless Eloi evolve under those conditions, but they still hypnotically return to the shelters when the air-raid sirens call out.

The Eloi of Wells’ story are childlike, and the 1960 film portrays them as blond, Californian proto-hippies, but Yvette Mimieux, who plays Weena, the one named Eloi, is hardly androgynous.

I started wondering if a modern remake would have reality TV-star Eloi of indeterminate ethnicity, communicating through gestures and phatic expressions.

In the original novel, Wells simply refers to his protagonist as the Time Traveller. The 1960 film has his friends call him George. The name “H. George Wells” can be seen on a brass plaque on the time machine.

This brings us to The Invisible Man, which I also revisited recently, which features a certain Dr. Kemp, whose studies are interrupted by the sound of gunshots:

After five minutes, during which his mind had travelled into a remote speculation of social conditions of the future, and lost itself at last over the time dimension, Dr. Kemp roused himself with a sigh, pulled down the window again, and returned to his writing desk.

Posted in Media | 5 Comments »

The key to Sicily was the narrow Strait of Messina

October 7th, 2023

How Hitler Could Have Won World War II by Bevin AlexanderHitler’s senior generals had been pleading with him to follow a defensive strategy, Bevin Alexander explains (in How Hitler Could Have Won World War II), ever since the failure to capture Moscow in December 1941:

Victory, of course, no longer was possible. But Germany might have achieved a standstill in the west if Hitler had transferred much of his army and air force to challenge landings by the western Allies. By husbanding his forces in the east, and above all by avoiding an offensive that might consume his little remaining striking power, he also might have held back the Soviet Union until everyone was weary of war.

But such a reversal would have required Hitler to see that he had made mistakes — and this Hitler could not do. On the contrary, he began in the spring of 1943 to concentrate every man, gun, and tank possible for a final confrontation with the Red Army in the Kursk salient northwest of Kharkov.

[…]

German generals in the Mediterranean were seeing that the principal Allied commanders were hesitant, slow-moving, and insistent upon overwhelming superiority before they undertook operations. Allied obsession with security played directly into the strengths of the German army. Compared to Allied commanders, German generals were, on balance, bolder, more flexible, more inventive, more willing to take chances, and more confident of their ability to overmaster opponents.

A couple of decisions illustrate the attitude of Eisenhower, Alexander, Montgomery, and other senior commanders. First, though no one expected much opposition, they earmarked ten divisions for the invasion of Sicily (Operation Husky), more than they were later able to get on the beaches of Normandy. Second, they insisted on attacking the Italian boot at Salerno because it was within the 200-mile range of Spitfires operating from northeast Sicily. Since the Germans knew about the Allied fixation on air cover, they spotted Salerno as the target and prepared a gruesome reception there.

[…]

The key to Sicily was the narrow Strait of Messina (in Greek mythology guarded by Scylla and Charybdis), less than three miles wide, which divides the northeastern tip of the island from the toe of Italy (Calabria). Any supplies to and evacuation from Sicily had to pass this bottleneck.

Since the Allies held command of the sea, the way to assure the capitulation of the enemy on Sicily without firing a shot was to invade the toe of Italy. There were virtually no Axis troops in Calabria. Its occupation would have separated Sicily from the mainland and prevented the evacuation of troops from the island — except those few who might have been flown out.

This idea never received serious consideration.

[…]

Instead, Eisenhower approved a completely frontal attack.

[…]

It took Eisenhower and his senior generals until May 13 to finish their plans. Yet, since only one of the divisions intended for Husky was being used in the last stages of the Tunisian campaign, the invasion could have followed directly on the heels of the Axis surrender. If this had happened, the attackers would have found the island virtually bereft of defenders and could have seized it almost without casualties.

Posted in War | 4 Comments »

These were young men freed from tight controls of family, parish or guild

October 5th, 2023

In the 14th Century, Oxford had a per capita murder rate four to five times higher than other high-population hubs like York and London:

Newly translated documents list 75 percent of the perpetrators of murders with known background as “clericus”, a term most commonly used to describe students or members of the then-recently founded University of Oxford. And 72 percent of the victims were also classed as clericus.

[…]

“Oxford students were all male and typically aged between fourteen and twenty-one, the peak for violence and risk-taking. These were young men freed from tight controls of family, parish or guild, and thrust into an environment full of weapons, with ample access to alehouses and sex workers.”

Posted in War | 7 Comments »

The panacea was drill

October 4th, 2023

Early firearms were hampered by their extremely low rate of fire (about one volley every two minutes):

Thus an infantry formation would only be able to fire once at an onrushing cavalry charge. The innovative Dutch commander Maurice of Nassau devised a solution. He restored the Roman practice of linear formations, drawing his men up in thinly-packed ranks (at most 10 men deep) of long lines. The first rank would fire, then retire to the rear to reload; then the second rank, now at the front, would unleash its volley and then perform the same maneuver. By rotating through lines, a Maurician army could theoretically sustain an almost continuous barrage.

Maurician tactics were demanding of the average soldier, now tasked both with performing coordinated actions with his comrades and standing firm in the face of enemy fire. The panacea was drill: practicing march and countermarch maneuvers. To facilitate this, Maurice divided his forces into smaller units and increased the ratio of officers to men. Companies of 250 with eleven officers were reduced to 120 men with twelve officers; regiments of 2,000 were replaced by battalions of 580. The diary of Anthonis Duyck, a member of the Dutch general staff, reveals a life spent constantly on exercises, supervising troops as they practiced forming and reforming ranks and marching in formation. These motions were codified by Maurice’s cousin John in an illustrated manual that sketched out how to use key infantry weapons. In 1599, Maurice also received sufficient funds to equip the Dutch army with firearms of standardized size and caliber. Standardization of uniforms followed.

It was not the Counts of Nassau, however, but rather Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who translated the ‘revolution in tactics’ into battlefield success. Thanks to extensive drilling, he improved his forces’ rate of fire until only six ranks were needed to maintain a continuous barrage.

Posted in War, Weapons | No Comments »

The TV set always needed something and so did Barbie

October 3rd, 2023

Philip K. Dick’s “The Days of Perky Pat” came up recently, because it inspired elements of Fallout, but I’m a bit surprised that I didn’t see countless references to it when the Barbie movie came out, because the story was clearly inspired by the doll:

It was the Barbie-Doll craze which induced this story, needless to say. Barbie always seemed unnecessarily real to me. Years later I had a girl friend whose ambition was to be a Barbie-doll. I hope she made it.

[…]

“The Days Of Perky Pat” came to me in one lightning-swift flash when I saw my children playing with Barbie dolls. Obviously these anatomically super-developed dolls were not intended for the use of children, or, more accurately, should not have been. Barbie and Ken consisted of two adults in miniature. The idea was that the purchase of countless new clothes for these dolls was necessary if Barbie and Ken were to live in the style to which they were accustomed. I had visions of Barbie coming into my bedroom at night and saying, “I need a mink coat.” Or, even worse, “Hey, big fellow…want to take a drive to Vegas in my Jaguar XKE?” I was afraid my wife would find me and Barbie together and my wife would shoot me.

The sale of “The Days Of Perky Pat” to Amazing was a good one because in those days Cele Goldsmith edited Amazing and she was one of the best editors in the field. Avram Davidson of Fantasy & Science Fiction had turned it down, but later he told me that had he known about Barbie dolls he probably would have bought it. I could not imagine anyone not knowing about Barbie. I had to deal with her and her expensive purchases constantly. It was as bad as keeping my TV set working; the TV set always needed something and so did Barbie. I always felt that Ken should buy his own clothes.

In those days — the early Sixties — I wrote a great deal, and some of my best stories and novels emanated from that period. My wife wouldn’t let me work in the house, so I rented a little shack for $15 a month and walked over to it each morning. This was out in the country. All I saw on my walk to my shack were a few cows in their pastures and my own flock of sheep who never did anything but trudge along after the bell-sheep. I was terribly lonely, shut up by myself in my shack all day. Maybe I missed Barbie, who was back at the big house with the children. So perhaps “The Days Of Perky Pat” is a wishful fantasy on my part; I would have loved to see Barbie — or Perky Pat or Connie Companion — show up at the door of my shack.

What did show up was something awful: my vision of the face of Palmer Eldritch which became the basis of the novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. which the Perky Pat story generated.

[…]

I found in the story “The Days Of Perky Pat” a vehicle that I could translate into a thematic basis for the novel I wanted to write. Now, you see, Perky Pat is the eternally beckoning fair one, das ewige Weiblichkeit — “the eternally feminine,” as Goethe put it. Isolation generated the novel and yearning generated the story; so the novel is a mixture of the fear of being abandoned and the fantasy of the beautiful woman who waits for you — somewhere, but God only knows where; I have still to figure it out. But if you are sitting alone day after day at your typewriter, turning out one story after another and having no one to talk to, no one to be with, and yet pro forma having a wife and four daughters from whose house you have been expelled, banished to a little single-walled shack that is so cold in winter that, literally the ink would freeze in my typewriter ribbon, well, you are going to write about iron slot-eyed faces and warm young women. And thus I did. And thus I still do.

Posted in Media | 5 Comments »

Bullying was considered a virtue

October 2nd, 2023

Elon Musk by Walter IsaacsonWalter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography explains that when Elon was twelve he was taken by bus to a wilderness survival camp, known as a veldskool:

“It was a paramilitary Lord of the Flies,” he recalls. The kids were each given small rations of food and water, and they were allowed — indeed encouraged — to fight over them. “Bullying was considered a virtue,” his younger brother Kimbal says. The big kids quickly learned to punch the little ones in the face and take their stuff. Elon, who was small and emotionally awkward, got beaten up twice. He would end up losing ten pounds.

Near the end of the first week, the boys were divided into two groups and told to attack each other. “It was so insane, mind-blowing,” Musk recalls. Every few years, one of the kids would die. The counselors would recount such stories as warnings. “Don’t be stupid like that dumb fuck who died last year,” they would say. “Don’t be the weak dumb fuck.”

Another heartwarming childhood story:

The Musk family kept German Shepherd dogs that were trained to attack anyone running by the house. When he was six, Elon was racing down the driveway and his favorite dog attacked him, taking a massive bite out of his back. In the emergency room, when they were preparing to stitch him up, he resisted being treated until he was promised that the dog would not be punished. “You’re not going to kill him, are you?” Elon asked. They swore that they wouldn’t. In recounting the story, Musk pauses and stares vacantly for a very long time. “Then they damn well shot the dog dead.”

And another:

“If you have never been punched in the nose, you have no idea how it affects you the rest of your life,” he says.

[…]

They came up from behind, kicked him in the head, and pushed him down a set of concrete steps. “They sat on him and just kept beating the shit out of him and kicking him in the head,” says Kimbal, who had been sitting with him. “When they got finished, I couldn’t even recognize his face. It was such a swollen ball of flesh that you could barely see his eyes.” He was taken to the hospital and was out of school for a week. Decades later, he was still getting corrective surgery to try to fix the tissues inside his nose.

[…]

After the school fight, Errol sided with the kid who pummeled Elon’s face. “The boy had just lost his father to suicide, and Elon had called him stupid,” Errol says. “Elon had this tendency to call people stupid. How could I possibly blame that child?”

When Elon finally came home from the hospital, his father berated him. “I had to stand for an hour as he yelled at me and called me an idiot and told me that I was just worthless,” Elon recalls. Kimbal, who had to watch the tirade, says it was the worst memory of his life. “My father just lost it, went ballistic, as he often did. He had zero compassion.”

Posted in Animals | 6 Comments »

Past athletic performance doesn’t guarantee future results

October 1st, 2023

Athletes who succeed in junior age categories are, for the most part, completely different from those who succeed in adult competition:

The overall pattern was that top juniors tended to pick a sport early, practice it to the exclusion of other sports, and progress rapidly. But those who made it to the top as seniors had precisely the opposite pattern: they had spent less time training in their main sport and more time playing other sports as kids, and they made slower initial progress in their main sport.

[…]

The results are clear: most successful juniors don’t become successful seniors, and most successful seniors weren’t successful juniors. One example: 89 percent of international-class under-17 and under-18 athletes never reach that level as seniors, and 83 percent of international-class seniors didn’t make it to international class at the under-17 and under-18 level. To put it another way, these junior and senior populations are 93 percent different and just 7 percent the same.

These results undermine both of the main theories of how outliers get so good—i.e. that it’s all about natural talent, or that it’s all about how much and how effectively you practice. Both theories imply that how good you are as a junior will predict how good you are as a senior, and that success at both levels is predicted by the same factors. Instead, Güllich argues that what predicts junior success—a focus on training to maximize immediate performance—might actually work against the prospects for sustained long-term improvement.

Posted in Fitness | 2 Comments »

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