Saturday, March 16, 2024

The Power of Loafing

Introduction

I am not a lazy person and don’t consider myself an expert loafer. Nor do I advocate sloth in general. That said, I will argue that being judicious about when to take your foot off the gas can turn loafing into a superpower.

Who, what, where, when, why, and how?

This post is for the modern knowledge worker who nowadays has a lot of flexibility in his or her workday. The what herein is to explain how this freedom can be an issue. It doesn’t overmuch matter where this work is done, but the ability to work from home is part of the equation. When is of course right now and going forward, and the why is because I sense the encroachment of so-called “grind culture” and want to help spare you from it, just as I continually attempt to spare myself. Now, there is plenty of literature out there about the evils of grind culture, but I’m going to illustrate, through what I hope is a potent metaphor, how to convince yourself to passively fight it—that is, to loaf strategically.

Some background

If you haven’t come across the term “grind culture” (aka “hustle culture”), you either lead a blessed work life, or (like me up until recently) you have been missing out on a handy way to describe something you’ve surely noticed, probably pondered, and—I hope—have found yourself questioning. The New York Times, in this article, calls grind culture “performative workaholism” and cites Elon Musk’s pro-grind tweet, “Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” It’s worth pointing out that Musk, who advocates working at least 80, is a douchebag.

Grind culture promotes unabashed ambition, supported by long hours and what its proponents like to call “grit” (though “self abasement” would be more accurate in this case). Its adherents don’t seem to realize, or at least don’t tend to acknowledge, that a company’s executives are the main beneficiaries of this culture. Grinders also apparently don’t grasp (or perhaps simply don’t care) that this relative minority of highly ambitious people can set a new productivity standard for a workplace, that spills over onto colleagues who might prefer greater work/life balance.

The Times article I just cited was written before the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, I fear things have only gotten worse. These days, a lot more knowledge workers work from home, and the flexibility this gives them to tend to personal matters (e.g., picking up a kid from school, putting in a load of laundry) also gives management a reasonable basis for expecting employees to be available for a much longer period of time each day. As another Times article explains, “Cellphones and laptops have made it impossible for many people to wall off eight hours of the day for paid labor and another eight for everything else, and they threaten to return all of us to an era of nonstop, undercompensated labor.” And as this Forbes article asserts, even as productivity has increased with teleworking, management doesn’t often perceive this; a study by Microsoft found that “49% of managers of hybrid workers struggle to trust their employees to do their best work.” In this climate, perhaps the nervousness we may have about the visibility of our output (since we’re not observed to be in the office at our post) contributes to our temptation to send emails or Slack messages at 10 p.m.

So how do we combat this impulse to work longer and more? How do we fight the trend toward performative workaholism? For me, it’s a matter of differentiating between doing more and doing my best. Since this is a vague notion, I will now proceed to my metaphor.

Life imitates sport

I’m an assistant coach for a high school mountain bike racing team. Unlike a track coach who just stands around on the infield with a clipboard and shouts instructions, we cycling coaches actually ride with the kids, the whole time, every practice. This gets progressively, inevitably more difficult every year. The kids obviously never age because it’s a rotating crop: every year a quarter of them graduate and are replaced by incoming freshmen. I, on the other hand, am not getting any younger, or stronger, and my bike gearing isn’t getting any lower. Needless to say, the hills around here aren’t getting any flatter.

It’s been such a wet winter, there are only a few trails we can reliably ride without getting bogged down in mud. This leaves two main routes we can ride right now: Big Springs Trail and Seaview Trail. The summit of Seaview, at 1,905 feet elevation, is the highest point in the Berkeley hills, and the climb up it is a bitch. In fact, there’s a section I can barely make.

Let me describe how this works for me, with my last trip up it as an example. There’s this long, steep opening bit that is a total grind, but doable, and then we descend for a bit and catch our breath. Then it the trail starts climbing again, and this time of year we’re dodging puddles and so forth, and then, just before the grade gets truly brutal, there’s a very shallow, almost flat bit. I happen to have a photo.


After the slow slog up to this shallow bit, it’s always tempting to pick up the pace, but I never take the bait. For this reason, I frequently get passed at this spot, as happened last time. One of the kids I coach had been nipping at my heels the whole way, and when I laid off the pace here he blew right by me. I cared not a whit. He’s inarguably faster than I am, and after all my job isn’t to beat him, it’s to coach him. Moreover, my job in this moment was just to get up the damn hill.

I continued to loaf, and before long could hear another rider behind me. And now the grade suddenly became almost unbearably steep. I had no choice but to dig deep. I could still hear the kid behind me, gears whirring and panting increasing, and I now faced the hardest part of the climb: a very rocky place with a lot of tree roots, which don’t actually look so bad in this photo but can easily stop a middle-aged rider dead when he’s barely handling the climb to begin with.


Over the years I’ve compared notes with other coaches about the best path through this notoriously difficult section. On this last trip, I managed to thread my way through, just barely, through a combination of the perfect line and an all-out, leg-searing effort that bumped my bike over the inevitable rocks and roots I couldn’t steer around. And now here’s my point: the rider behind me didn’t manage it. I heard the distinctive sound of a cleat clicking out of a pedal (so he wouldn’t tip all the way over after losing all momentum) and the inevitable whuff of frustration. A rock or root had stopped him cold. And this didn’t happen because he’s less strong than I am (after all, in the group I ride with these days, they’re all stronger than I), nor because he’s less skilled. It’s almost certainly because he was closer to being redlined than I was when he reached that section: because he was already drilling it before the steep stuff began. On the shallow section, I wasn’t just loafing to loaf. It was a matter of survival. That steep, rough part is so hard, I have to be rested—physically and psychologically—before giving it my all to get through it. When a 100% effort is required, you (or at least I) cannot already be maxed out before reaching it. That pause to collect myself was as important as the odd, protracted centering routine a high-diver goes through before starting his or her dive.

Alas, the grade doesn’t ease up: this section of climbing demands several more minutes of excruciation. But you know what’s worse? Trying to get rolling again on a rocky, pebbly, loose, root-infested 16% grade with only one foot clipped in. It’s awkward and frustrating and saps your will. There’s a world of difference between making it the whole way in one shot, and getting stymied and starting over. Having to unclip from your pedal is how you lose a mountain bike race.

I trust this metaphor isn’t particularly hard for you to decode. Just as I would advise you, on your first-ever bike ride up Seaview, to ease up and rest your legs before the really steep part, I  want to convey to you how important I think it is to pace yourself elsewhere in life. Alas, the metaphor falls flat pretty quickly, because life does not  always imitate sport. In real life, you’re not heading up a known trail; you can’t plan ahead where you’re going to strategically loaf.

When to loaf in life

My workplace, which I suspect is typical of a modern American corporation in a fast-changing industry, is unpredictable. It’s generally impossible to predict when the hammer will come down. (I sometimes envy tax accountants or line cooks who know in advance when things are going to get crazy.) In my industry we’re conditioned to see change as opportunity, and to embrace the ethos of “disruption,” to figure out new schemes to go take more market share, and blah blah blah. We don’t have the luxury of cooling our jets just ahead of a big effort because we never know when that will be—or, more to the point, we’re supposed to be bringing it about ourselves, constantly. That is the essence of grind culture. (This extends beyond the workplace, of course, unless you’re a childless bachelor(ette) and orphan. Families introduce countless opportunities for entropy to throw us into a tailspin, particularly if we’re trying to run our family like a CEO would run a business.)

So, without guideposts like a really steep, rough section of trail, and with the constant pressure to find more work to do, how are we supposed to know when to loaf? My answer is “whenever we reasonably can.” Of course this will vary from job to job, and from life to life, but the point is, we are all free to pause and question, throughout our workday, what truly needs to be done next, and when, and why. Who is waiting on it? Am I doing this because somebody is counting on me, or am I trying to show somebody up?

In my experience, we’re not always given deadlines, but instead are asked how soon we can have something done. This question can feel like a version of “How good are you?” It can seem to force a reckoning: am I going to do right by my employer no matter what the personal cost, to prove I’m a team player and the kind of baller Elon Musk would praise? Or do I stick up for my right to work a normal day? Actually, I think this is a false dichotomy. Over-committing yourself and failing to deliver doesn’t help anybody. We have to accept—actually, to understand and to some extent define—what is sustainable for us. I define “sustainable” not as “the outer limit of what I am capable of” but “what I can sustain without wearing myself down, making mistakes, and spinning my wheels.” To return to my cycling metaphor, I don’t want to overextend myself, grind to a halt, and have to clip out of my pedal.

Strategic loafing isn’t just about how we run our day, but how long we run our day: when we decide to shut down and what shutting down means. Just as a physical workplace used to help us segregate work and life, the act of powering off our computers became the more modern way to close the door on the workplace, even for telecommuters. Now, as the Times has pointed out, cellphones can tether us for our entire waking life. Strategic loafing means the courage to close down Slack (etc.) at a reasonable hour and resolve not to open our work email until tomorrow. (Ideally we’d resolve also to limit indulgence in our digital “feed,” that fusillade of incoming crap so many invite in for their poor brains to grapple with on personal time. But that’s another post.)

More cycling metaphor

Cycling has taught me more than just how to pace myself in the moment. It has also taught me how to pace myself through the season. There is a time for rest, and a time to hammer. Yes, I can give it my all, that heralded 100%, but only for about two hundred meters until I go anaerobic. And I can dial my effort up until I’m at my anaerobic threshold (e.g., like when going up Seaview), but I can’t keep that up for hours at a time. And not every ride can be a hammer-fest; some days need to be mellow—a conversational pace. Time off is necessary, to let the body recover. The analogy here to resting our minds and psyches throughout our workweeks and careers should be pretty obvious to anyone who doesn’t brag about how long he’s gone without a lunch break or a vacation. What if all that world-beating doesn’t end up enabling a person to make a killing and retire at 45? Then what? Twenty more years of the same? I guess Elon Musk has never heard of base miles.

Call to inaction?

When I entered the corporate workforce, I was terribly afraid of workaholism. What if it ran in families? My dad was a hopeless workaholic. Every morning he was in the office by 8:30, came home promptly at 7:45 for dinner, then left again and wasn’t home until after 10pm … seven days a week. It was the rare week he didn’t put in at least 80 hours. Alas, this didn’t result in a particularly brilliant career; in fact, when he was right about the age I’m at now, he burned out completely and fell out of the workforce. (All three of his marriages had already ended.) That was my example of what not to do.

Such was my paranoia about falling into bad work habits, I made a point not to put in too many hours. I was willing to risk not meeting some vague expectation; I figured if my hours were too low my manager would let me know. Obviously my output had to be on par with my overworked colleagues, which meant working fast. Cycling had given me an obsession with efficiency, and I applied that to my career. Hoping that MO would be enough, I didn’t layer overlong workdays on top of it.

So did this approach work out? Well, here’s a telling anecdote. A few years into my career, I was at a team-building offsite in Palm Springs (back in the days of such things) and management presented a bunch of awards. I don’t remember the categories, etc. but toward the end our branch director presented a big one, and started describing the winner: he’s this, he’s that, and (this is the part that jumped out at me), “He is no stranger to working long nights and weekends.” At this, I started to feel something like sour grapes—as in, “Is that what it takes to get recognized around here?” but then I caught myself and reflected on my principles. I reminded myself, “Hey, I don’t need to be the big winner. There’s more to life than career ambition. I have work/life balance. Let this guy have his glory, he’s made sacrifices for it.” My rumination was suddenly interrupted when the director called out the name of the winner: “Dana Albert!”

I was absolutely stunned. Me? Long nights? Weekends? Huh? It wasn’t until I reflected on this later that I realized the director wouldn’t have been around in the evenings or weekends to see me hard at work, any more than my dad’s bosses had witnessed him. That I put in long hours was just an assumption. My reputation was based more on results than on rudimentary metrics like hours worked. So: if what ultimately matters is our output, who needs the performative workaholism of grind culture?

Let me be clear: I’m not advocating naps throughout the day, or only working eight hours a day as a golden rule. I’ve used the word “loafing” here somewhat flippantly, to get your attention. What I am talking about is more of a return to a work life with guardrails. If the traditional work/life boundaries are no longer available, at least we should have an awareness of the need to set new ones. I want to take care of myself first, and my employer second, because this serves us both better in the long run. Professionally speaking, I want to be the guy who, when a bomb is dropped, isn’t already overwhelmed, isn’t sleep-derived, won’t get frazzled, knows how to work fast, and can quickly put his hands on all the resources he needs. In a nutshell, I want to be the guy who’s not gonna clip out and tip over. To the tired old cliché “I work hard and I play hard,” I would add a crucial third element: “I rest hard.”

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Thursday, March 7, 2024

From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XIII

Introduction

This is the thirteenth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, and Volume XII is here. (The different volumes have nothing to do with one another and can be read in any order, or underwater, or not at all.)

The Bits & Bobs series is the reason I’ve been called “a master of the short, short form” by … nobody! These are excerpts from emails, letters, etc. that I wrote to friends and family before I started this blog and channeled all my literary compulsion into this single endeavor. Read on if it’s bedtime and you’re jittery, or even better, read this aloud from your phone to some rando on the bus.


October 13, 1995

Thanks for offering me the TV, but no thanks, I’m good. I don’t miss having one, and when someone asks something like, “Did you see ‘Friends’ last night?” I kind of enjoy replying, “No, I don’t have a TV.” No matter how offhandedly I deliver this message, I probably come off sounding sanctimonious and superior, which causes my interlocutor to judge and despise me, which of course everyone enjoys doing, so I can feel good about doing someone a favor in giving him that pleasure. Often, I’ll be asked, “No TV?! How do you keep up with the news?” The answer is, I mostly don’t, since we don’t get a newspaper either. I figure if something’s important, I’ll hear about it one way or the other. I get enough news by reading the headline thru the window of the newspaper vending machine while I’m waiting for the bus. What’s the point of being more informed than that? What am I going to do about anything? Is there a cautionary tale in the OJ Simpson murder case? As long as I understand that 1) our country is a vicious planet-plundering machine, and 2) people are dying all over the world and I have it so good, and 3) we won’t know how the Raiders will stack up this season until we see them play Dallas, then I think I’m informed enough.

November 12, 1996

Since I’m not hosting Thanksgiving, I guess it’s really not my call as to whether you invite B—. But since you asked, my personal opinion is ABSOLUTELY NOT. First of all, in the best of scenarios, the guy is a jerk, a pain in the ass to have around, he’s ugly, and he stinks. I know that it’s customary that one’s parent is automatically entitled to bring his or her spouse to a holiday gathering, but with a divorce pending it really seems like we ought to have some wiggle room here. Of additional consideration are the specific facts of the case: B— has zero tact, zero hygiene, and zero sense of humor, and he has shown rising resentment at the fact that we Albert boys are typically kind, tactful, humorous, fun to have around, inoffensive visually, and known either for no odor at all, or for a swarthy, masculine sweat smell that isn’t unpleasant (lacking, as it does, that strange and somehow non-human scent element that makes you want to hurl, that afflicts certain men perhaps at random, or perhaps as a form of punishment). If you said you were considering inviting Charles Manson, I would be more ambivalent; after all, he would at least be interesting company. We could interview him and gain insight into the life of a sociopathic, psychotic killer. But with B—, we’d just have a whining, complaining, jittery, humorless little pot-bellied man lashing out against everything and everyone in his environment, wishing he could be somewhere else—playing bridge, perhaps, accumulating the points necessary to be an All-Time Grand Master Great King and Grand Poobah of that discipline. Finally, I offer you one additional consideration: if B— were to attend (and I don’t know why he’d even accept other than to deliberately be a pain in the ass, in addition to having nowhere else to go), I might be tempted to tell him what I really think of him, without the extraordinary tact and restraint I’ve demonstrated here. But of course, it’s all up to you as you’re the host. So please do feel free to invite him, in which case I will simply cancel my flight and make other arrangements, such as biking over to McDonalds on Thanksgiving, even if I can’t be sure it’ll even be open.

December 12, 1996

Did you hear about this woman who sued DEC for her carpal tunnel syndrome? It’s kind of odd. The reason she won her case is that DEC had done employee training on ergonomics & stress-injuries, but didn’t give the same training to its customers, and didn’t post a carpal tunnel syndrome warning label on the keyboards they manufactured for sale. Flagrant disregard for health and safety! So why didn’t this woman sue her own employer for not giving her ergonomics training? Probably because DEC has deeper pockets. So I’m going to sue UPS (both because I hate them and because I like money). The way I figure it, there’s no way they don’t train their employees to lift heavy objects with bent knees, using the leg muscles and not the back muscles. And yet I’ve received many a heavy box from UPS without a warning label of any kind. I’m also considering a lawsuit against the novelist Danielle Steele because her novels are famously “impossible to put down,” are usually well over an inch thick, and come out a couple of times a year. That’s a lot of reading, and it’s a known fact that too much reading causes myopia (heck, John Milton went blind from it), and yet not one of Ms. Steele’s books (so far as I know) has a warning label about too much reading causing eye strain. Ms. Steele is loaded (her Pacific Heights home is right next to a member of Metallica’s) so she’ll probably settle out of court and I can quickly make some pretty good money.

December 17, 1996

Well, our office holiday party just finished. It was at this place called MacArthur Park, a restaurant with a large lobby area that my company rented. E— wasn’t able to come because she had a city council meeting to go to. Because of my injured foot I spent most of the time sitting down instead of milling about. There were these “crab” cakes that tasted kind of like tuna salad—they were definitely stretched. There were also these ribs that were remarkably bland given that MacArthur Park is famous for its ribs. There were also these sautéed mushroom sandwiches, open-faced, which were startlingly good. Finally, there were these half-baked apples with bacon around them that were okay. You’ve never seen such a sober bunch, not in terms of spirits but . . . boy, it’s hard not to commit double-entendres here. Let’s just say that nobody was even one sheet to the wind. Very non-drunk, and therefore non-rude and non-embarrassing, which I like. Still, it’s not quite as festive as when you have a sit-down dinner and people get up and make sentimental, half-clocked, maudlin speeches like at my old work, where people were desperate to eat as much food and drink as much booze on the company’s dime as possible, out of spite. Anyway, I behaved myself as well; that is, I managed to keep from eating so many mushroom sandwiches that I became gassy or hurled or something. The only problem is that now my best suit smells a bit like cigarette & cigar smoke. But I’m back in the office and it’s not even 7:00 p.m. (And what am I doing in the office? That’s a very good question and I’m afraid I have no answer other than I decided to walk home and it’s on the way.)

Undated, ca. 2004

We are up visiting Mom. When we arrived here, I was surprised by two things. First, she was not here to greet us—turns out she’d been called in to work at the hospital. Second, there was something really wrong with S— [her cat]. His entire body was trembling, and he struggled to stand up. There was a frightening jerkiness to his movements, like early Hollywood animatronics or first-generation CGI. He had a wild, feral look in his eyes and was emitting low, metallic yowls. He was like half cat, half Terminator, and it seemed he could be capable of anything.

E— led the kids to safety while I called Mom at work. She told me S— had been recently diagnosed as diabetic and put on new medication, and given the crisis she’d come right home. In the meantime I called the veterinarian, who determined that the cat’s blood sugar had crashed and that he probably wouldn’t survive the trip to her clinic. She told me to try rubbing corn syrup into the cat’s gums with a Q-tip. It was his only chance, she advised. Corn syrup? Seriously?

Hoo boy. This wasn’t going to be easy because as you know, S— is a bit of a tricky cat to begin with, having that strange tendency to occasionally turn on you. Like, he’ll be contentedly sitting in your lap, relaxed as could be, and then will suddenly try to bite you. And that’s when he’s behaving normally, not when he’s having a life-threatening blood sugar issue. Heck, if my own life were in danger I might try to bite people, too.

I set out the Q-tips, poured corn syrup from the jug into the cap, and steeled myself for the ordeal.

The beast must have known that his life was in danger but without understanding why. His reaction was to mount a strong defense. In other words, he was in full kill mode. As I approached him, he lunged, narrowly missing, his teeth snapping audibly together. “Aren’t you afraid he’ll bite you?” E— asked. Um, yeah. Of course.

I wrestled the poor creature onto my lap, trying to pin down his windmilling hind legs. S— was making good headway on my forearms with his barbed-wire claws. My base impulse was to hurl him away from me, but with great resolve I stayed at it. When I was able to overpower the animal and hold him still, I felt less panicky. A human, I reminded himself, is stronger than a cat.

A long moment passed, S— straining uselessly. Still pinning him down, I inspected the deep scratches he’d made on my arms and considered the etymology of “cat-o’-nine-tails.” Eventually S—, exhausted, went limp and I set about rubbing the corn syrup into his gums with the Q-tip. I worked quickly, carefully pulling back his lips with one hand and working the Q-tip with the other.

Suddenly the stricken creature came back to life, as though hit with a thousand volts, snarling and trying again to bite his tormentor. I got a good grip on his body. I could feel the knobby bones across his back. His front legs were a blur as he flailed, and I jerked myself back to keep my face out of biting range. This attack, too, petered out and he slumped again. I pried his jaws open and rubbed some more syrup in. He still trembled, and periodically he weakly tried to bite, but he was too weak to fight anymore. Eventually, amazingly, as I continued rubbing the syrup into his upper and lower gums, the treatment began to work. S—’s shaking stopped, and in time he seemed to relax. By the time Mom arrived, he seemed stable, and he survived the trip to the animal hospital. They gave him some basic treatment and now he’s sound as a pound. It seems he had developed some kind of fleeting diabetes, and when it went away, the medication he was still on messed up his (now non-diabetic) blood sugar. Wacky!

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Thursday, February 29, 2024

Virtual Reality Killer App!

Introduction

For many years we’ve been hearing about how Virtual Reality (VR) is going to be a game-changer across the human experience, and not just a whiz-bang enhancement to video gaming. This is an amazing technology just waiting to be monetized. We’ve heard various proposed use cases involving education, physical therapy, tools for first responders, etc. but decades on VR is still kind of a fringe thing, without the “killer app” that will launch it into the forefront of blah blah blah. Well, this post proposes a truly germane use of this technology that could benefit millions of people. Instead of boring you with an essay on what I’m proposing, I’m going to walk you through the experience I have in mind. Call this post “VVR” ... as in, Verbal VR.


The experience

You enter the VR facility, receive a brief tutorial, don a haptic suit and a virtual reality headset, and mount an omnidirectional treadmill. Immediately you are immersed in a totally new world … but actually, it’s not exactly new. It’s all too familiar, from the dry heat of a late spring day (courtesy of the haptic suit) to the sound of yelling and cheering, to the sight of a red-orange running track surrounding an unrealistically brilliantly green infield. It’s a lot like where you ran track in high school except that the bleachers are completely full.

You look down at yourself and you’re wearing the same track uniform, with the distinctive Cobra insignia, that you wore in high school. You explore your environment and find you’re surrounded by ultra-fit looking teens in the identical uniforms, many of them calling you by name. “Stacey, are you pumped?!” a girl asks. After a pause she gives you a simpatico look and whispers, “Gawd, I’m actually so nervous!”

You look down again and see that you’re definitely wearing track cleats. You realize you’re not just here to wander around. “Stacey, we gotta warm up, we’re up next!” someone yells. She jogs over to you and says, “Let’s go!” But before you can follow her, a gruff forty-something man with a Cobras cap, a tracksuit, a clipboard, and a whistle hanging on a lanyard approaches. “Stacey, I need a minute with you,” he says, and ushers you off to the side.

“Look, today has got to be the day,” he declares. “We’ve never been this close to winning Conference. All our top runners are totally peaking right now. This is a massive opportunity. And like we talked about after last practice, I’m not having you run any events except the 100 meter hurdle, so you can just focus purely on that. Obviously there’s no way you’ll win, but I really think you can get top three. Your speed, your form, it’s all there—but as I’ve said all season, you need to three-step it. It breaks my heart every time I see you heading for the hurdle, flying along, everything perfect, and then you suddenly chicken out and do that childish stutter step. You should be well beyond this. I know you can three-step because you did it that time in practice when I ran next to you and yelled at you the whole time. You did it perfect. I really thought that was the breakthrough, that you’d do it right from then on.”

It’s all coming back to you now: the dreaded three-step, the bane of your high school existence. When you graduated, most of your excitement was actually relief that you were done with track: you’d managed to get your letter, you’d put the experience on your college essay, but you wouldn’t be running in college, and nobody would ever hassle you about three-stepping for the rest of your life. And yet here’s this coach, practically frothing at the mouth, exhorting you all over again.

“It’s not just the points, Stacey. I mean, it is—you definitely need a top three here, and like I said you cannot get that with all the momentum you lose stutter-stepping—but it’s bigger than that. We need every girl to be totally on today. Do you remember how stoked everyone was when Barb won the 400 at the last meet? That lifted everyone. We were having a good meet but after that win, everyone dug deeper and we had a great meet. If you do your typical step-stuttering thing here you’re gonna bring down morale for everyone. We’ve worked on your speed and technique all season and I know you can do this, you have to do this.”

Here he peers over the top of his sunglasses and looks you right in the eye. “Are we good? Are you gonna do this right?” You manage to croak out some kind of response and he nods and trots away. There’s a lump in your throat. Before you can make another move, a girl has bounded over and says, “Okay, Stacey, today is the day! We all gotta give our 110%! It’s Conference!” When you don’t respond, her smile vanishes and she glares at you. “This is our senior year. Our last chance. Don’t you fuck this up for us!” This girl must be the team captain.

Now the first girl is grabbing you by the wrist. You’d marvel at the tactile accuracy of the haptic suit except that you’ve entirely forgotten this is VR … that’s how good it is. It really feels like you’re being tugged toward an actual infield by a real teammate. “Wait,” you tell her. “I … I kind of need to hit the restroom.” And it’s true. Along with the butterflies in your stomach you’ve got the age-old pre-race instinct, deep down in your body, to lighten the load. You really need to go. Like, number two. It’s a strong urge—your bowels are starting to churn. Your teammate points toward the restrooms and you start jogging over there. You start to worry: am I gonna make it in time? But when you get there you remember this is only VR and there’s only so much it can do. You need an actual restroom. Merely touring the virtual one would be no more satisfying than those nighttime dreams you have of eating, where the food always vanishes as soon as you try to take a bite.

You paid good money to play this game, but that’s not important now. You lift the VR goggles off your head and prop them on your forehead, and step off the treadmill. You head over to the lobby and tell the attendant, “I need to use a restroom.”

“Now?” he says. “It can’t wait? You still have 20 minutes on your game! By the time you take off the haptic suit, do your business, and zipper yourself back in, it’ll be half over!” But his eyes are smiling: he knows how pressing your need is. You nod vigorously. “Right over there,” he points. You stride swiftly to the restroom and push through the door.

It’s not just any restroom: it’s gleaming perfection, all brushed aluminum surfaces, a big drain in the floor and state-of-the-art sprinkler system overhead. There are giant fans in the louvered windows. It’s clear the entire room is totally sanitized and refreshed between uses. The throne-like toilet even has a bidet option. You’ve never been so glad to see a public restroom in your life. And that’s when you know: today’s VR experience isn’t about the game at all. It’s about this.

Conclusion

According to Johns Hopkins, about 4 million Americans suffer from frequent constipation, which “is the most common gastrointestinal complaint, resulting in 2.5 million doctor visits annually.” It causes bloating, sluggishness, and abdominal pain. Treatment is challenging, because laxatives cause side effects and prolonged usage can become a problem of its own. Diet and lifestyle changes are a good long term course of action, but don’t provide much help when you’re having a bad bout … maybe you haven’t had a good bowel movement in days, and you wish there were just some silver bullet providing instant relief. Well, I just contrived one.


Of course there are details to work out, like matching up the details of the specific gameplay and script with the player’s individual history. (For example, maybe you never did a sport, but at least used to run through the neighbor’s yard and had to make it to the far fence before their dog caught you.) The game makers could create versions involving other fraught human enterprises like dating or public speaking. Fine details aside, I think you can agree that the immersive VR technology now available could provide exactly what so many people really need: a non-ingested, 100% safe, 100% effective psychological laxative. Now someone just needs to go code this game!

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Friday, February 23, 2024

Ask a Cheap Bastard

Dear Cheap Bastard,

I’m kind of fascinated by cheap bastards like you, and I have often wondered: do you guys feel a kinship with one another, or do you clash?

Justin C, Austin, TX

Dear Justin,

Who are you calling a bastard?! Haha, just kidding. I know Cheap Bastard is my name, and my game, etc. Anyhow, I’ll grant you there’s a mutual respect when I encounter another cheapskate, and we’ve been known to trade money-saving tips. That being said, I absolutely cannot stand it when a manufacturer of something (i.e., some executive making cost-cutting decisions) skimps on the cost of materials just to save a few cents per unit. This is particularly common with anything related to the home. As detailed here, I had a plumbing emergency once because the valve (or more precisely the “angle supply stop”) of my bathroom sink was made of plastic and spontaneously failed. This could have cost me many thousands of dollars had I not been home to deal with the crisis, but that doesn’t matter a whit to the cheap bastard who chose to make this important object out of plastic. Parsimonious though I am, I will always gladly pay more for durable stuff. How many more time bombs may be lurking in my house due to the ubiquity of cheap bastards in the manufacturing business?

Dear Cheap Bastard,

My husband is a cheap bastard and often cites your column as validation of the way he lives his life. As a result, he’s refusing to help with our son’s college costs. I guess this isn’t really question, but more of a statement: damn you. Damn you to hell.

Monica J, Phoenix, AZ

Dear Monica,

Not all cheap bastards are created equal. Your husband is of the sort that should be described more precisely … the better term would be “dick.” Let me make something clear: for me, being a cheap bastard is a deeply personal matter and doesn’t affect my family. The very reason that I strive to always get the best deal, and to do without overpriced crap, is so that I’ll have enough money to apply it where it matters, such as my children’s education. Having sired these kids intentionally, I consider it my duty to provide well for them and not let my miserly ways extend to them. Thus, they kind of get the best of both worlds: they get to party like rock stars and make fun of their tightfisted father.

Dear Cheap Bastard,

I’ve been a lifelong cheap bastard myself and proud of it—but I feel like I’m losing steam lately. Any words of encouragement?

Duane S, Chicago, IL

Dear Duane,

There are various ways to define what a cheap bastard even is. One type is a person who refuses to part with money for just about anything; another is happy to buy stuff but only if he or she gets a great deal; another refuses to pay for labor, preferring to do everything on his or her own even if it means taking a lot of time to learn how. A cheap bastard may fall into one, two, or all three categories. With the third in particular, one’s approach may naturally change over time and/or based on circumstance. In some cases I think it’s perfectly reasonable to lighten up a bit.

Here’s an example. When I’d just bought my home, I was basically broke (as one tends to be) so my wife and I repainted all the rooms ourselves. Since then, as our burden of debt has lightened, we’ve tended to hire a crew. I don’t fault myself for that because as I’ve aged, my net worth has increased while my remaining time on this planet has declined. In other words, time is starting to be worth more than money. So when my laziness and thriftiness fight, the lazy side wins more often and I don’t beat myself up about it. (Sure, my cheap bastard cred may be thus questioned, but being a guy who’ll willingly drink sour milk and often sifts through the family compost bin for perfectly edible food, I think I’ve got some wiggle room.)

Dear Cheap Bastard,

My proudest feat as a cheap bastard is making a pair of underwear last more than a decade by fixing tears, holes, etc. with my sewing machine. What’s your favorite cheap bastard trophy?

Geoff A, Amersfoort, The Netherlands

Dear Geoff,

I guess I’d have to say it’s the beat-to-hell brake/shift levers on my flagship road bike. Although they’re top-of-the-line Dura-Ace, they’re 25 years old and I bought them used (at least 15 years ago) for like $100. They still work reasonably well, and that’s good enough for me.


I guess this isn’t really like a trophy, since I doubt many people notice my levers and wouldn’t have much of a reaction to them one way or the other. Real cyclists, in my experience, judge me by how well I ride, not what equipment I’m using. I suspect it’s the same with your underwear.

Dear Cheap Bastard,

There are so many ways to be frugal beyond just price shopping. For example, cooking dried beans instead of buying canned, or making your own laundry detergent. What cost-cutting opportunities do you think most cheap bastards miss? In other words, what makes the difference between a good cheap bastard and a great one?

Alex R, New York, NY

Dear Alex,

From what I’ve observed, the greatest blind spot for cheap bastards is simply not understanding the concept of opportunity cost, and specifically the cost, in terms of gains not realized, not investing your money. My father, for example, was a notorious cheap bastard, but he also never saved for retirement. In his old age he ended up pinching pennies out of necessity rather than preference, which really takes the fun out of it.

How one manages debt is another example: it’s somewhat useful to buy in bulk at Costco but far more useful to pay down your mortgage early. Coupons are chump change; paying interest ought to be the bane of our existence.

I know this is all pretty boring compared to eating compost, etc., so I’ll talk a bit more about spoiled milk. My mom, a microbiologist, assures me that sour milk can’t hurt you; it’s just unpleasant. In fact, a family legend maintains that when my brothers and I were young, and our (powdered!) milk went bad, my mom would say, perfectly seriously, “Just plug your nose and drink it!” Which we did. Allegedly.

Dear Cheap Bastard,

I really don’t understand people like you. Isn’t there a social cost of being a cheap bastard? Like, not looking your best, coming off as low-class, etc.? Which could adversely affect your social and professional opportunities?

Becky G, Miami, FL

Dear Becky,

Being a cheap bastard is more than a mentality; it’s an art. Ideally, the cheap bastard doesn’t appear cheap to the casual observer. If I were just a cheap dumbass, I’d wear Toughskins jeans and dumpy Kirkland shirts, or buy defective clothing at Ross Dress for Less. Instead, I buy most of my clothes at thrift or consignment stores, which means getting really good stuff that a filthy rich person changed his mind about. I also closely watch the online sales at J Crew (e.g., I’ll get 60% off on already discounted price, so I can pick up a nice t-shirt or pair of boxers for $3 or $4). I also only buy used cars, so I can afford to pay cash for a pretty nice one, because who cares if someone else drove it for the first couple of years? A final point: anybody who judges me for not having the latest styles, or luxury brands, is probably a jerk whom I wouldn’t want to befriend or work for. (Are you thinking this may just be sour grapes? Perhaps, but hey, sour grapes are cheaper than wine.)

Dear Cheap Bastard,

I will never be a cheap bastard, but times are a bit tight and I’d like to save where I can without going overboard. What’s my best bang for the buck in terms of non-annoying thrift?

Ron T, Council Bluffs, IA

Dear Ron,

My most basic advice is twofold: 1) avoid buying on credit whenever possible (i.e., no credit card balance, no car payment) and 2) avoid subscriptions. Interest is just money down the drain if it’s for consumer items that aren’t advancing you. Subscriptions (other than for magazines or newspapers) are all about getting you to buy more of something than you need. Why do I constantly get stuff in the mail about subscribing to prescription medications, as if planning for ongoing poor health? And why would I pay for satellite radio in my car when my phone can stream the Spotify I already have? And why does Audible.com exist, when you can check out audiobooks from the library (not just on CD, but via instant download to your phone)? Perhaps the most egregious example is Harry’s, a subscription razor blade replacement service. As detailed here, I switched to old-school double-edged razor blades over eight years ago and am still working through the 100-pack of Feather blades I bought back then for $23. Do the math: there’s no way a razor blade subscription could be cheaper.

Dear Cheap Bastard,

Any advice for a fellow cheap bastard married to a big spender? How can me and her meet halfway?

Ted H, Denver, CO

Dear Ted,

Naturally, a couple needs to be in lockstep on fundamental financial decisions such as renting vs. buying, having kids or not, and where to live. But for the day-to-day cheap bastard stuff, it’s best to just let it go … you’ll never turn a spendthrift into a skinflint. I myself take a day-trader approach to grocery shopping, honing my discount-finding skills to the point that I have a Spidey-sense about when Peet’s coffee will go on sale. My wife, on the other hand, literally doesn’t even look at price tags at the grocery store. The way to reconcile yourself to this is to look at the tremendous cost of failing to maintain marital harmony. Consider that her manicure, or your family’s expensive weekend getaway, are way cheaper than marriage counseling, which in turn is cheaper than divorce. And how you make the big financial decisions (e.g., how much to contribute to your 401(k), whether or not to refinance your home loan) will make a much bigger difference in your overall situation than all that penny pinching.

Dear Cheap Bastard,

I’m not a cheap bastard, but I bristle at the “tip inflation” we’re seeing lately, with the tab listing “suggested” tips of 18, 20, and 25%. If I ever say anything, people accuse me of being cheap. How do you get away with sticking to your guns here?

Mark K, Seattle, WA

Dear Mark,

First off, being a cheap bastard should never extend to tipping. Having your wife cut your hair to save money is your business (well, and hers too since she has to look at you), but stiffing a waiter is just poor form. That said, I agree that tips above 20% are uncalled for, since the rising cost of restaurant food automatically increases the dollar amount of waiters’ tips. In fact, as described in a recent New Yorker article, attempts by restaurants to improve employee wages by increasing prices have mainly benefitted waiters, not so much the cooks and managers. One restaurateur contends that “since he got into the business, front-of-house pay has climbed two hundred per cent, compared with twenty-five per cent for the back of house.”

Another area where tipping has gotten a bit whacked is with the digital replacement for a tip jar when you get counter service. I have always put a buck or two in the jar, but the modern POS terminals they flip over to you now suggest the same tip as you’d leave for table service—typically you’re choosing between at least 15%, 18%, or 20%. I always take the “custom tip” option (which they might as well call the “cheap bastard” option), and key in a more reasonable amount, because I refuse to be bullied by a POS terminal. Recently this bit me in the ass at one of my go-to local taquerias, Gordo’s. I’d bought two burritos and tried to tip $2, but I guess I hit the zero an extra time. It wasn’t until I saw the total—a little over $40—that I realized my mistake. “Oh, shit!” I blurted out. The cashier looked shocked and concerned and said, “Oh no, is everything okay?” I just had to laugh. “I accidently tipped you $20,” I said. I wasn’t about to make him do any work to correct it, so I added, “No worries—enjoy.” I guess you could call this a cheap bastard tax.

A Cheap Bastard is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask a Cheap Bastard,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Thursday, February 15, 2024

albertnet 15th Anniversary + My Favorite Posts!

Introduction

I almost missed a big milestone this week: the fifteenth anniversary of albertnet! 

I well remember the day I decided to start this blog. It was a blustery afternoon in early February of 2009, and I was having a late lunch at a Russian tea room in San Francisco, south of Market, with some long lost UCSB friends. We got to talking about writing, and S—, who had seen some of my freelance articles in the Daily Peloton, suggested I take a crack at blogging. He had a blog about travel gadgets at the time (though I cannot find it now).

So, on that cold February day I decided to take up S—’s suggestion, and fifteen years on I’m still at it. Should I be? Is albertnet a success? Well, as a former boss once told me, “Metrics are important in this space.” He was talking about a different space, but let’s look at some numbers anyway.

albertnet metrics

  • $0 – how much money I’ve made from albertnet
  • 714 – number of posts so far
  • 2.2 million – estimated number of total words
  • 3.7 – times the size of War & Peace
  • 144 – estimated hours it would take to read it
  • 3,500 – estimated hours I’ve spent writing it
  • 1.9 – estimated years writing it, if a full-time job
  • 26.5 – months it would take to read it, at 1 post/day
  • 5.7 – estimated # of reams of paper to print it out
  • 46 – number of followers
  • 921,373 – number of total page views to date
  • 186,000 – estimated cumulative hours readers have spent here*
  • 1 – *Number of very big ifs regarding that last metric

In a previous post I defined a successful blog as “one that shows up for work.” By that measure, I’d say albertnet is doing fine. My goal has been to blog four times a month, and I’ve averaged 3.97. Moreover, irrespective of what others think of it (e.g., followers, readers, skimmers, randos who stumble in here and quickly leave, haters, and bots), this blog has amused me all the way along … and as I’ve recently explained, that’s pretty much the whole point. See how easy success can be when you narrow the definition this way? It reminds me of this motivational poster:


(If that looks familiar, it’s because it’s from this very blog.)

Other measures of success

Okay, great, I consider albertnet a success because it’s been a good hobby for me. But has it contributed to the world in any way? Well, I do think it’s made something of a mark, based on certain posts that have been popular enough to climb to the top of Google’s search results. Here are ten search phrases that produce an albertnet post on the first page of results:

  • spelling of kindergartner (second result listed, right after dictionary definition)
  • cowboy sam review (second result)
  • bicycle “corn cob” poem (first image result, second text result)
  • inner tubes fascinating (first non-video result)
  • tire chains seething (my East Bay Times story is the first result; my blog post is second)
  • velominati “BS” (second result)
  • missy giove acne (second result)
  • lance eminem (third non-video result)
  • cycling world record Berkeley
  • “how to write a sonnet”

Google searches used to be a more helpful measure of my blog’s impact, back when merit alone determined placement in a search. For example, for at least five years my vasectomy post was the very first result when you googled “California vasectomy law.” But those were the olden days. There’s money to be made on search results, and over time companies have learned how to use SEO, content marketing, and various other techniques to get themselves featured higher, confounding the “organic” search results of yesteryear. The fact that some albertnet posts still perform well in Google searches tells me I really am touching a nerve here and there.

Which brings us to reader comments. Candidly, I don’t get a lot of comments on this blog, but sometimes the quality of a reader’s feedback is so heartwarming, it fuels my resolve to keep going. I’ll give you a couple of examples. I blogged about a favorite children’s book, Cowboy Sam, and as you can see here, the granddaughter of the author left this comment:

Dana, I have to say that I enjoyed your post about the Cowboy Sam series. Very entertaining, well written and definitely brought a smile to my face! Edna Walker Chandler was my Grandmother and passed away in 1982. Her son (my father) passed in 2014 and I inherited copies of most of her books. Would you mind if I copied your post to my family history book for personal purposes only? Thank you! --Celeste Chandler

And below my post “Farewell, La Fiesta” about a favorite restaurant that closed, you can see this gem of a comment:

This made me cry.

They called me “Cinco Verde, Budweiser” for many years. A #5 is a Chile Relleno, an Enchilada and Rice and Beans.

I’m bawling. 

How am I celebrating?

So … you may be wondering if I’m doing anything to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of this arguably successful blog. Will I be buying a new car for every one of my readers? Or throwing an amazing party with a free taco truck and a live band? Alas, I don’t really have that kind of budget. So, along the lines of the the albertnet index that accompanied my fifth anniversary, I’ll provide something here that should interest my loyal readers: a list of my very favorite posts.

You may wonder how this would be more useful than the list of most popular posts that I already provided. Well, popularity is not necessarily the best indicator of quality. Sometimes a post goes viral (at least, in a modest, albertnet way) because it gets referenced in some other place that gives it inordinate traction. This was the case with “No Mo’ NoDoz,” which was cited in a scientific journal for some reason. Not a bad post, but for about 18 months it was insanely popular and until I chased down that source, I couldn’t figure out why.

So, I’m reasoning that if you like my blog, you must like my style, and would naturally respect my literary taste, and it’s pretty likely you’ve missed a few great posts over the years. So, with no further ado, here is my list. It was really hard choosing my favorites so I didn’t narrow it down too much: I came up with my top 35. That might seem like a lot, but it’s only the top 5% of all posts. I couldn’t possibly decide which are my very favorites among these, so I present the list chronologically, with the most recent at the top:

Dana’s favorite albertnet posts:

I’ll update the above list over time, like I’ve done with the index. Check back often! Tell your friends!

Well, I guess that’s about it. Thanks for fifteen great years, unless you just got here, in which case it’s about time! ;-)

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.




Thursday, February 8, 2024

From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XII

Introduction

This is the twelfth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, and Volume XI is here. (The different volumes have little or nothing to do with one another.)

“Bits and bobs” are little anecdotes from my letters and emails to friends and family, which comprised most of my writing before starting up this blog. The dispatches in this volume were to my brother Bryan, written when I was newly married and living in San Francisco. He was still living in our hometown of Boulder, Colorado. Here is a photo of the two of us from around the time I wrote these.


January 25, 1995

I bought the Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing program for DOS. (I call it “Mavis & Butthead.”) It was supposed to run on 560K of RAM, & they recommended a “meg.” Now this is really confusing: how much is a meg? I’ve heard it’s 640,000 bytes, but I’ve also heard it’s 1,000,000 bytes. Very confusing. Anyhow, it wouldn’t even run when installed, although I have a meg. I made a DOS bootable diskette with modified AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files to get past its memory verification, and was therefore able to run it. However, it really was slow. I couldn’t make it keep up with me. I would type, “Mavis Beacon, your program stinks!” and on the screen I’d get, “Mvi Bn, yr pgm sk!” It was absurd, a total disaster. I took it back.

So, instead I bought this cheesy el cheapo Typing Tutor software. It only requires 512K of RAM; an IBM XT, AT, 286, 386 or higher; hard drive optional. Now that’s my kind of program. Its proudest feature is the Typing Lobster Sea Adventure game:

The Lobster Sea Adventure(TM) is an exciting game of chase and it’s an incredibly fast way to increase your typing accuracy and speed. Avoid being “pinched” by the lobster while typing in full sentences and using the shift keys. So many users have increased their typing speed and accuracy with the lobster and had fun at the same time!

Pretty much the most amazing video game ever. Not. 

Feb 1, 1995

Thanks for clearing up the meg issue. I grasp now that there is no standard. Say, that reminds me: at work I sent around these Computer Information Forms to get an inventory of what software people have, and what they want. I put a checkbox for “I need Microsoft Office” and another for “I only need Word.” On one form, an engineer had drawn in a new box and written “I need a new computer” and checked it. That inspired me. Our office manager (or “Director of Marketing and Administration,” a lofty title designed to boost her morale on the cheap) is using a petrified HP fossil called a Vectra. It’s so slow I made a special computer information form just for her; instead of having her fill in the RAM, ROM, MHz, CPU, etc. I just made one checkbox next to the text: “My computer is a tired, crippled old thing that barely runs anything at all. I’m surprised it doesn’t use 8-track tapes instead of diskettes. Somebody should just take it out and shoot it. But please, back it up first.” She put a huge check mark in that box. Alas, as it turns out nobody’s PC seems powerful enough to switch from WordPerfect to Word. Cash flow is too tight. We’ll all have to wait.

March 22, 1995

Things are pretty stressful at work. My boss, the company president, totally dissed me. He’d promised a paper to a magazine called the Inspectioneering Journal, but totally forgot to write it. At the last minute, realizing he had nothing to write, he kicked the project down to me, telling me to write a paper on Mechanical Integrity, on the double. I wrote one, in a huge rush, and I thought it came out pretty well … I even put in some neat visual things, like a table and a pie chart showing the types of issues discovered by OSHA during inspections. I sent the finished article to the journal’s editor for review; if it passed muster, he’d submit it to a panel of other editors for final approval. There wasn’t time to run it by my boss first—we were literally right against the deadline. Well, my boss read it after the fact, and totally bagged on it, freaking out that it would be torn apart by the editorial panel and this would make him look bad (since he was the alleged writer). He said I needed to extensively revise it immediately before the editor could pass it along. He didn’t say one positive thing about it.

One of my boss’s main demands was that I eliminate my entire introduction, which was an overview of OSHA’s Process Safety Management standard (upon which the guts of the paper were based). He also wanted the whole article put into the passive voice (e.g., “we determined” becomes “it was determined”) which of course violates one of the most fundamental principles of style. There were a few more nitpicky “corrections,” all of which were equally wrong. So, my morale being in the gutter, I just didn’t bother making any of the revisions and sending along a new version. I did call the editor and left him a voicemail saying, “With the benefit of hindsight we’ve determined that our initial paragraph may have been needless so I’d like to revise the paper before the panel review.” I didn’t hear back right away, but when I did, it was a message on my voice mail saying, “Well, I wanted to let you know that I got the paper and ... congratulations, you did a great job, it’s just perfect for our journal. I’m really impressed with the clarity of your writing and I am very excited about working with you on more projects. As for the introduction, I wouldn’t change a thing. It’s all appropriate. Further, I would like you to submit a photo of yourself along with the one of your company’s president, to accompany the article, since I’m listing you as a co-author.” Needless to say I feel totally vindicated. I’ve been leafing through The Joy of Cooking for a good crow recipe to give my boss. I need a low-cal one because he really ought to be eating this all the time.

April 27, 1995

You might remember my cool Benrus analog wristwatch with the fancy rotating bezel on it. I’ve known for well over a year that that ring is in fact kind of like a slide rule. Yesterday an engineer at work ripped it out of my hands when I showed it to him, and fairly drooled all over it. In the course of two or three minutes he demonstrated like twenty different calculations you can do with it. But “slide rule bezel” is confusing because it doesn’t slide and that doesn’t sound cool. So I call it the “hyper-alloy detonator depth-charge bezel.” The only problem is, it only rotates one way. Does that mean you can add but you can’t subtract? Multiply but not divide? Clearly I did not retain the engineer’s lesson; I only use the bezel to time parking meters, but rarely, and I usually forget I’ve used it and just go by sixth sense anyway. Besides, I don’t use parking meters that often, since I don’t have a car.

May 11, 1995

I can’t believe you actually complained about the poor bike racing coverage in the [Boulder] Daily Camera. You’ve got to be kidding me. That paper has the best racing coverage I’ve ever seen. We’re lucky to get a list of top ten results in the back pages of the Sunday sports section, next to the bowling results. I can get a little bit of information from CompuServe, the online information service, but my main source is forwarded messages from my friend who can get complete results from America On-Line, which has a Bicycling Magazine forum or some such thing.

October 29, 1995

On a cold, blustery day we went to the San Francisco Center and poked around. One of the things I looked at was a thick wool button-down shirt from Woolrich, just like the ones we all wore back in high school (and which are featured in our Four Brothers portrait that hangs proudly above my desk as I sit here typing).


Lo and behold, I did finally find some wool button-down shirts, but the price tag was staggering … close to $100. Just for a shirt! (Okay, a nice, thick one, but still.) You’ll certainly recall that we bought ours at the Factory Outlet in Broomfield, back when Factory Outlet meant slightly irregular and overstocked stuff that was really cheap, instead of what it means now (which is nothing more than a company-run store that sells only their brand of product and nobody else’s, for a price that is supposedly cheaper, but usually not by much). I’m sure there was something wrong with our Woolrich shirts, but I never could figure out what. A friend of mine back in high school once hit upon a theory: my shirt was defective because the front pockets didn’t have buttons. Well, they did: I just hadn’t buttoned them. So much for that. I have to wonder: now that factory outlet stores generally sell all first-quality stuff, what do companies do with their seconds? Surely they must have seconds. Do they just pitch it? Or do they pretend it’s fine and put some extra tag on there talking about how such variations give the garment character or something?

Finally I came upon some reasonably priced shirts but they looked really cheesy. I was lamenting the downfall of this once proud brand when I realized I’d drifted right out of Woolrich and into the Dockers store. I guess I’m just not cut out for shopping

November 25, 1995

My job is slowing down somewhat. Now that I’ve given notice, I’ve been branded a treacherous backstabber, not to be trusted. I’m having my projects taken away from me and given to people who don’t know how to do them, which leads to these people tearing their hair out while they come up to speed. At least I’m around to help for a while. (“Like this,” I’ll tell them, grabbing a huge hunk of hair in both hands. “You want to tear as violently as possible.”) I’m also helping to interview the candidates for my replacement. This is good too, because I get to ask those probing questions: “You’re walking in the desert, and you see a tortoise flipped up on its back, its stomach baking in the hot sun. You could flip it back over, but you don’t … why is that?”

December 12, 1995

Well, I hope y’all had a good time at Dad’s birthday dinner. I talked to him today briefly. To have an excuse to keep the call short, I used a long-distance calling coupon that the cash register at Safeway spat out when I bought some gum. I dialed the 800 number and a recorded message said, “Thank you for buying Carefree gum at Safeway!” and gave me directions for entering my PIN, etc. The coupon was good for five minutes, which was really kind of strange because you feel like you can’t think of anything to say since you’re so hurried. I managed to remind Dad to reimburse me for Max’s b-day present; Dad had called me on Max’s birthday to say, “Give Max $50 for me and I’ll reimburse you.” But when I reminded him, he claimed he didn’t know what I was talking about. Could he be that scatterbrained? It was only three weeks ago! I’m trying to convince myself I haven’t just been scammed by my own dad.

December 12, 1996

Yeah, I know what you mean about web pages. I could make one using this CompuServe web page wizard, but what’s the point? The only reason I could think of is that by doing a search engine (i.e., AltaVista) search, a long-lost friend could find me. But I got no friends.

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Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?

Introduction

One of the great things about Artificial Intelligence is how well it drives hype. The media, instead of just delivering bad news about yesterday and today, can now get us really excited—and worried!—about the future. One of the most potent forms of this hype is the widespread suggestion that many of us may lose our jobs to A.I. (My mother-in-law was asking me about this just the other day.)

In this post, I’ll examine the topic. I’m not an expert on A.I., but I’m confident that my credentials as a male will serve me well in mansplaining this to you, regardless of your own sex. And actually, I’ve been blogging about A.I. for over ten years, having produced over a dozen posts (linked at the bottom of this one). I’ve even done some light research for today’s topic. I’ll wrap up by telling you what I think ought to be a much larger concern around A.I. than job preservation.


Which jobs?

Before I can answer your question, “Will A.I. steal my job?” of course I’d have to know what you do. Obviously I can’t just ask, so I’ll have to make some assumptions. I suspect you’re a college graduate to even be visiting albertnet, because my blog posts are long and difficult. Moreover, I researched the most common jobs in America for the non-college educated, and the results—which include “fast food and counter workers,” “home health and personal care aides,” and “stockers and order fillers”—wouldn’t leave any employee with enough energy to plow through this much text.

So, with that assumption in mind, I’ll go with the top five careers for college graduates based on current labor statistics. I’ll also cover the classic professions: medicine and law. It doesn’t matter if your career isn’t any of these; what I cover should be illustrative examples.

The top five careers

The five most abundant job prospects for new graduates in America, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, are as follows (along with the number of openings per year, average, for 2020-2030):

  1. General and operations managers          229,600 openings
  2. Registered nurses                                       194,500
  3. Software developers & testers                  189,200
  4. Accountants & auditors                             135,000
  5. Elementary school teachers                     110,800

I’ll explore, briefly, each of these careers in turn, before going on to doctors and lawyers.

General and operations managers

Now, I don’t know exactly what this rather general label means, but clicking on the BLS hyperlink for it takes me to a page describing what executives do. The summary is that they “plan strategies and policies to ensure that an organization meets its goals.” This would be very difficult for A.I. to do, because it cannot form opinions, doesn’t have the ability to effectively promote ideas and inspire people, and couldn’t have any clue about navigating office politics. The managers and executives at my company do a lot in person, which attests to the company’s conviction that this is necessary (vs. telecommuting). A.I. cannot, needless to say, do anything in person. It produces rivers of text on any subject by regurgitating gobs of highly masticated learning data from across the Internet, but this has nothing to do with forming and fostering creative ideas.

Much of the tech world, in my personal experience and as chronicled widely by the media, is devoted to “disruption”—that is, coming up with a completely new idea that turns existing business models on their heads (like Uber did to the taxicab industry). A.I. is often employed, tactically, in such disruption, but it cannot drive it the way an industry leader does. A.I. is very good at certain tricks, but it’s not good at visionary thinking because it literally lives in the past. (Consider that ChatGPT’s training data hasn’t had an update in over two years, by its own admission.) I think managers and executives can rest easy here (so long as they keep their companies poised at the leading edge of the A.I. zeitgeist).

Registered nurses

I think we can all agree nursing is a hands-on occupation, and for that you need actual hands. But you don’t have to take my word for it. I just asked ChatGPT, “Can you please change the dressing on the laceration on my right leg?” and it swiftly replied, “I’m not able to provide physical assistance or medical care as I am a text-based AI language model. It’s crucial to seek help from a qualified healthcare professional for proper wound care.”

Software developers and testers

The full title of this occupation is “Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers.” Everyone knows what software developers do; as for the others, the BLS writes (here), “Software quality assurance analysts and testers identify problems with applications or programs and report defects.”

Let’s start with developers. I interviewed a friend of mine on this, who is a manager and software developer specializing in A.I. for an extremely well known tech company. Not only does he know all about developing software, but he knows lots about A.I. He started off by saying that ChatGPT is actually a powerful tool in the hands of a good developer, and can lead to much greater work efficiency. ChatGPT can provide blobs of code that do a specific thing, but of course this is only a small part of the job of a software developer. The developer is essentially a problem solver and has to figure out the right approach to doing so. In theory, the increased efficiency that A.I. enables could reduce the number of jobs, since doing everything faster means needing fewer hands. But, my friend advised, this would only be true if there were a finite number of problems to solve. In fact, the number of problems, and the number of projects, and the number of innovations, are infinite, and it’s a company’s job to tackle enough of them to keep an ever-growing number of developers busy. So not only will A.I. not replace these jobs, but it won’t diminish the number of them.

Moving on to QA analysts and testers, I believe their jobs are equally secure. Have you ever done a CAPTCHA—that simple task of, for example, looking at a 3x3 grid of thumbnail photos and counting the number of traffic lights? That’s a website’s way of making sure bots don’t impersonate humans. CAPTCHAs work because A.I. is stymied by graphical user interfaces (GUIs). So it wouldn’t be able to test software, or at least the type used by humans (which is a whole lot of it). Moreover (and I know this from my own professional experience), software testing is all about how straightforward and useable an interface is to a human. Testers need to be able to imagine the perspective of the human who will use the software. A.I. lacks this capability; although it can mimic human thought or impression, it has no grasp of these things; it’s essentially autistic.

Accountants and auditors

Okay, I’ll confess I’m kind of out of my depth here. I gather that accountants balance the books, and auditors keep the accountants (and everyone else) honest, but that’s about all I know (or care to know). I will say that obviously accuracy is the name of the game here, which is where A.I. needs to be handled carefully. As you probably know, generative A.I. platforms, such as the GPT-3.5 model that drives ChatGPT, are prone to “hallucinations”—where they basically just make shit up and present it as fact. The poster child here is the case (described by the New York Times here) of a dumbass lawyer who used ChatGPT to prepare an argument in a court case, and got into big trouble because his argument cited half a dozen previous relevant court decisions, all of which were pure fabrications—ChatGPT had pulled them out of its ass. As the Times dryly concluded in its article, “The real-life case of Roberto Mata v. Avianca Inc. shows that white-collar professions may have at least a little time left before the robots take over.”

Elementary school teachers

It’s pretty clear that the education of elementary school kids needs to happen in person. Countless articles about the result of distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic recount how far behind students fell. For example, according to this article, half the nation’s students began the 2022-2023 school year a full year behind grade level due to the poor education they’d received during the lockdown. Granted, there was a lot more going on during the pandemic than just distance learning, but if there was one thing Americans could agree on during that time, it was that in-person instruction needed to come back.

Until we have sophisticated, affordable, and ubiquitous animatronic robots, A.I. simply cannot provide in-person instruction as we know it. It’s just a digital tool, not at all what kids really learn from. And robots will never be people, with personalities. Elementary school teachers connect with students, draw them out, encourage them, understand their struggles, and have firsthand knowledge of how humans learn. A.I., of course, has none of this. As described here I tried to teach ChatGPT how to write a proper poem (in terms of a specific meter) and it confessed, “As an AI language model, I do not have the ability to practice or improve my skills in a traditional sense.” All it can do is ingest troves of training data and reference them later. It cannot relate to the human effort to learn. It cannot come up with creative strategies for connecting with kids. Also, it would never settle for the piss-poor salaries paid to elementary school teachers. (Yes, that was a joke. Another thing A.I. can’t really do.)

Doctors

Having completed the top five careers for college graduates, I’ll now move on to a field that affects us all: medicine.

As with nursing, medicine obviously needs to be hands-on. My doctors (and physical therapists) have all relied heavily on touch and (literally) feel in evaluating and diagnosing injuries and health issues. Meanwhile, the important dialogue I’m able to have with them about my health requires advanced “soft skills” far beyond what A.I. could get from training data. The reason I even entertain the notion that A.I. could replace doctors is that I’ve read, here and there, about how well A.I. does interpreting radiology images. I just did a little refresher research and found in this article that it still isn’t as accurate as a human. Moreover, as the article attests, “radiologists are more than just interpreters of images. They connect the findings from imaging analysis to other patient data and test results, discuss treatment plans with patients, and consult with their colleagues.” Meanwhile, the A.I. that performed well had been trained on billions of images from the public Internet, whereas “radiological datasets are also often guarded by privacy regulations and owned by vendors, hospitals, and other institutions”—meaning that advancements in A.I. in this industry will lag behind that of autonomous vehicles or retail.

I interviewed a friend who’s a medical doctor and his dismissal of A.I. as a threat was pretty curt. Alluding to its tendency to hallucinate, he mentioned how poorly the patient community would react the first time A.I. casually told a relatively healthy patient, “You have twelve months to live.” And though I suppose we could entertain the idea of a robot doing a fine job with a surgery, what happens when it hallucinates? “Mr. Smith, I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is, instead of a pacemaker I accidentally installed an ice maker. The good news is, if I pull on your ear you’ll cough up an ice cube.”

Lawyers

What is the output of a lawyer? I don’t work in this field, but I think it’s fair to say the two main outputs are documents and spoken testimony. Let’s start with the latter: A.I., lacking a human presence and thus the ability to provide moving verbal testimony, probably wouldn’t do well in a courtroom. What would that even look like? A person simply standing up and reading an A.I.-generated testimonial? How would A.I. negotiate? What would its powers of persuasion be like? Do you agree we could rule out its ability to testify effectively in a live environment?

If so, let’s move on to documents. A.I. does seem really good at spewing forth gobs of text on pretty much any subject. Now, as I recounted earlier, it does have this little problem of providing fictitious citations as legal precedent, and since nobody really knows how A.I. works there doesn’t seem to be an easy solution on the horizon for such hallucinations. But that’s not its only problem.

Unless I’m just hopelessly naïve, the practice of law requires the ability to delve into complexities and tease out the legal basis for one’s position—the point of law on which the case can turn. This is why law school and the bar exam are required, right? Well, how good is A.I. at this kind of analysis, really? I haven’t fed it any legal quandaries to chew on because I don’t have any, but I have experimented with trying to get it to explain something similarly abstract: dramatic irony. How did it do? As detailed here, it totally crashed and burned. Not only did it betray a total lack of understanding of what irony is (though it can spew out a canned definition of it), it fabricated evidence from a children’s book in explaining instances of it. It was just swinging wild, and did shockingly badly. Make no mistake: ChatGPT can assemble basic (if torturously verbose) sentences out of building blocks of reconstituted training data, but it still doesn’t analyze anything in any useful way.

For my family holiday newsletter this year, I sent out a quiz. I asked fifteen questions about what my family did in 2023, and put an A.I. spin on it: for each question, one multiple-choice response was true, another was generated by ChatGPT, and the third was a lie I wrote in the style of ChatGPT. Most of the recipients were able to identify most of the correct responses, but very few were able to reliably determine which of the other responses was A.I. vs. my mimicry of it. In other words, ChatGPT was very bad at pretending to be human, but I was very good at pretending to be ChatGPT. Trust me, humans are still better at actual thought.

What we should be worried about

So what is A.I. really good at? Well, I’m sorry to say, I discovered recently that it’s phenomenally good at faking photos. I took this brief quiz in the New York Times asking me to identify, out of ten photos, which were real and which were fabricated by A.I. I did horribly, getting just 3 out of 10 correct. The friend who turned me on to the quiz scored only 2 points. My daughter and her friend both scored 4, and my wife got 5 right (which is the same as guessing at random). The quiz was based on a scientific study which found that the vast majority of participants were misled by the A.I. fakes. For four of the five fake photos, 89 to 93% of participants erroneously labeled them real. For four of the five real photos, 79 to 90% of participants erroneously labeled them fake.

Fortunately, I don’t think very many of us are employed in a field where generating fake photos is a big part of the job. That being said, the ability of A.I. to fool people is very disconcerting anyway. Referring to one of the study authors, the Times article declared, “The idea that A.I.-generated faces could be deemed more authentic than actual people startled experts like Dr. Dawel, who fear that digital fakes could help the spread of false and misleading messages online.” Indeed, when deployed by bad actors, this A.I. capability could wreak havoc on the public discourse, further befouling the already squalid troll-o-sphere and perpetrating pervasive new acts of societal vandalism. So let’s be careful out there…

Other albertnet posts on A.I.

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