Daughters

Southern Belle called the house phone this evening.  She was worried because she could not get through on my cell phone.

She was last mentioned on this blog HERE and HERE.

She is teaching ninth graders in Miami.  There she is, the blonde from Michigan and she is the redneck.

Some of the questions the kids ask almost leave her stumped.  They had been reading John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.  They asked her, "What is brush?"

She responded, "Well, you know, it is like when you are hunting rabbits and there is a pile of branches on the ground that you kick.  Or it might be bushes that are not trimmed as topiary (that is, bushes that do not look like poodles or ATMs) but are just growing wild." 

Silence.

Belladonna

As reported earlier, Belladonna reconnected with her birth-family earlier this year.

Belladonna's biological siblings went to Godwin Heights High School.  One still attends and is a member of the men's basketball team.  Godwin Heights is still in the Michigan basketball play-offs.  By a cosmic twist of fate they played their last two games in Charlotte, Michigan, a scant 10 miles west of Eaton Rapids.  Bella was in attendance.

This video is from when Godwin Heights played the sixth ranked Class B school in Michigan.

Tonight, Belladonna got to watch her brother Leon (#5) play against Charlotte, one of Eaton Rapids arch-rivals.  The only thing better than watching Eaton Rapids beat Charlotte is to watch Godwin Heights beat them like a rented mule.  Godwin Heights squeaked by 81-37.  Proof that big-and-fast beats lucky most days of the week.

Belladonna is a happy girl.

One gallon of paint and 500 square feet of wall

Perhaps you are coaching a team of very young players in a recreation league and are staring across the field at your nemesis.  During his first three practices your nemesis ran his players until they puked and the three most-out-of-shape players quit....only to be replaced by three ringers he had waiting in the wings.

Or perhaps you were volunteered for a project only to have your "leader" increase the deliverables by an order of magnitude in a spate of machismo.

Or perhaps you inherited a job in a unionized or family environment and learn that compliance to Federal laws and due process had been "winked" at.

Or perhaps you found yourself staring at 500 square feet of wall and have one gallon of paint at your feet.  And the can of paint clearly states that it will only "cover" 300 square feet.

Surely, this is the universal management problem:  One gallon of paint and 500 square feet of wall.

On the soccer field

The team I coached tied the nemesis (the one who ran his girls until they puked) the last time we played.  It may have been my finest hour.

The other coach called the league coordinator to complain that I did not rotate one girl in violation of one of the league rules.  Frankly, I don't think the league coordinator gave a rat's asp.

He called me to complain that one of my girls trash-talked.  I was not on the field. I did not hear it.  He was not on the field.  He could not have heard it.  It could have been excuses for not crushing us as they had done ever other time they had played my team.  I told him I would address it.  And I did.

It may have been my finest hour.

The key, I learned, was to stack the players so the weakest players (known as "place holders") had stronger players fore-and-aft of them.  It was OK to have two weak players side-by-side.  It was fatal to have weak players one-behind-the-other.

The machismo boss

Sadly, I have no answers for the machismo boss.

Attempts to explain the disconnect between resourcing and deliverables were met with a lecture about the need to embrace failure.  I was informed that our CEO told him personally, via video link, that we needed to stretch more.  We needed to fail more as that is the only way to find the limits of human potential.

Without going into details, I can attest that we found the limits of human potential.  It was excruciatingly painful.

Inherited jobs

New bosses have a honeymoon period when underlings expect to see differences.  Tom Peters firmly advocates making all of your big moves in the first three months when everybody is looking for the new broom.

Most organizations have an "Employee Improvement Process".  The sooner non-compliance is identified and placed on the EIP the sooner they will quit, transfer or get with the program.  It sounds cold-hearted.  But most people recognize that the most demanding, the most critical positions have a high burn-out rate.  Those people need to be moved into positions where they can heal, both for the good of the firm and for the good of the person.

Perhaps the family or organization will not support you.  Better to learn that in the first six months than to grow five years older and fifteen years less salable in the marketplace.

Paint

It helps immensely if the primer is a close match to the color coat.  Primer is your friend.  Use a lot of it. Then use some more.  This is analogous to backing up three mediocre mid-fielders with two outstanding defensive players.

The color must match where it meets up to other surfaces...hallways and such.  Use the full compliment of paint there.

The color should be done as well as possible eye level.  For most humans this will be at approximately five feet of elevation.  If you cannot completely hide something, highlight it.  Throw noise at it.  Hang pictures or murals.  Use borders and shelves, mirrors and curtains.

Through the mid-regions where you do not have enough paint, thin it so it spreads evenly.  Thin and even is better than thick and clumpy.

And if your efforts prove insufficient, if the omniscient powers who gave you 500 square feet of wall to paint and only a gallon to paint it call you to account.  Be humble.  Beg forgiveness.  Promise to repaint and to thin no more.

Liberals are O-D-D

More accurately, many liberals suffer from ODD, Oppositional-Defiance Disorder.

Liberals are mentally ill

I have friends; intelligent, reasoning, educated friends who contend that liberalism is a disease.  Sometimes it is very difficult to argue with them.

The City of Seattle recently increased the minimum wage to $15/hour.  The City Counsel justified it on the basis that "everybody deserves a 'living wage'".

Businesses pushed back but they did not immediately close their doors.  City Counsel took that as evidence that they had really "stuck it to The Man."

And now those mean-spirited people, those haters...those capitalists are doing this:

As the implementation date for Seattle’s strict $15 per hour minimum wage law approaches, the city is experiencing a rising trend in restaurant closures. The tough new law goes into effect April 1st. The closings have occurred across the city, from Grub in the upscale Queen Anne Hill neighborhood, to Little Uncle in gritty Pioneer Square, to the Boat Street Cafe on Western Avenue near the waterfront.

The shut-downs have idled dozens of low-wage workers, the very people advocates say the wage law is supposed to help. Instead of delivering the promised “living wage” of $15 an hour, economic realities created by the new law have dropped the hourly wage for these workers to zero.   -Forbes

Ecosystems

I am mystified and baffled.  Liberals claim to have an inherent empathy for ecosystems and they constantly berate conservatives for not "getting it",  that everything is hooked to everything else.  If an organism is not directly to another organism then it is connected through trophic flows or nutrient cycles.

Simplified representation of the Nitrogen cycle

A mature ecosystem is tightly woven and every resource is competitively fought over.  Those resources include oxygen, energy, heat, protein, DNA, phosphorus, calcium, sodium and so on.  Sometimes the tiniest perturbations cause the entire system to thrum like the top of a trampoline.

Mature ecosystems are also highly buffered.  Sometimes it absorbs undesirable inputs and "sinks" them.  In those cases perturbations can seemingly disappear without a ripple only to reappear at inconvenient times.  Inconvenient because the time lag makes cause-and-effect relationships harder to diagnose, harder to communicate.

A case-in-point is the effect of DDT on raptor populations.  DDT and its metabolic byproducts bioaccumulated as they went up the food chain.  High levels of those pesticides interfere with the bird's calcium metabolism.  The effects of those "inputs" did not become apparent for twenty years....and only then for a short period while the mothers were incubating their eggs.

The business environment is an ecosystem

This is not a difficult concept.  Resources flow via an interdependent web of relationships.  Resources flow in many directions.  Those flows include money, knowledge, labor, benefits, social connections, floor space and rents, equipment, farm produce, services (laundry), prestige and so on.

Labor, rents and "consumable inputs" are all about equal in magnitude for typical, low-tech, high-labor businesses like restaurants.  The revenue-in-excess-of-costs is about 4% for a highly profitable restaurant.  Doubling the cost of the labor increases the business costs by approximately 15%....almost four times greater than the 4% cushion that the most profitable service businesses enjoy.

The business owner has some choices.  They can raise prices 15%.  They can fire half of their staff.  They can cut the size of the serving by 50% or they can not renew their lease when the lease expires and relocate seven miles away (maximum) outside of Seattle City limits.

A goodly number of the restaurants are choosing the last option. The owners are calculating the profit potential in their current location under the current cost structure.  They are requesting lower rents from their landlords, rent reductions that the landlords are loath to give.  Looking ahead, more and more of them are closing down operation inside of Seattle and reopening in nearby suburbs.

An important part of the "buzz" or the "energy" of a hip part of town is the illusion that EVERYBODY wants to be there.  It does not take a very high vacancy rate to puncture that illusion.  This could be the start of a death spiral for Seattle as a "Smart City"".

O-D-D

Illustration by Rachel Harris

 Oppositional-Defiance Disorder is a primitive interpersonal relationship model that works pretty well for two year old toddlers.  It presumes that the Parent is infinitely powerful and has infinite resources.  For all practical purposes this is a viable world-view for a two year old child.

The model also presumes a fixed pie.  That is, gain by another party necessarily means I got less.  Again, this is a concept that places very small demands on cognitive ability.

The model also requires very little computational buffer.  It only looks at 1-v-1 (pairwise) comparisons.  Again, this algorithm is appropriate for very young children who trapped in reptilian mind and are not capable of dialectical thinking.

Oppositional Defiance is not a disorder in two year olds (or teenagers going through "a phase") but it is a disorder in an adult.  There are simply much better inter-personal models available for people with IQs over 80.

Consider the liberal who knows that businesses are swimming in cash.  Perhaps they compute their cost to make a cup of coffee at home and compare it to the price charged in an up-scale cafe.  Using that analysis there appears to be a several hundred percent mark up.  The evidence suggests that the concept of labor, landlords and suppliers all attempting to maximize their share of the revenue stream is more than the typical liberal can hold in their heads all at one time.

---Sidebar--- 

The general public assumes that large businesses always command the lowest prices for all inputs.  This is not true.  The nature of business is that it must appear impervious to shocks and disruptions.  Also, there are huge amounts of overhead not being serviced if the business is disrupted.  The premium is not on lowest cost provider so much as most reliable, speediest delivery supplier.  True fact:  Electric motors have been purchased in Cleveland, Ohio and given taxicab rides to Lansing, Michigan (3 hours one way) to get production lines running by whistle-time the next morning.

---End sidebar---

Belladonna

I would not be paying this much attention to Seattle, Washington except that Belladonna wants to go their for our 2015 summer vacation.

We adopted the Steve Pettinger model for senior class trips.  Rather than have our high school teenager go to Daytona Beach or some other iconic destination, we allocate the money for a mega family trip.  Our graduated senior will plan a week-long trip for the entire family.  The only catch is that the destination and the itinerary must be in compliance with our family values.

It will be interesting to see if her itinerary for us changes.

Working in the woods

It is going to be tough walking around out there until I get the trails cleaned up.

Trail runs through the center of most of these pictures.

Early on I decided that I wanted to manage some of my trees as "pollard".  Both pollard and coppice are regenerative techniques that "recycle" the root system.  Coppice is cut flush, or nearly flush, to the ground.  Pollard is the same as coppice but atop a trunk.  The advantage of pollard is that the new growth is out of the reach of hungry herbivores.

Not all tree species coppice or pollard well.  Those that do are often ones that evolved in a "fire ecology" and their survival depended upon rapid resprouting.  Others evolved in flood plains where flood-borne trash  would scour the above-ground portions of woody shrubs and trees away thus favoring trees that could resprout freely from the roots.

My first iteration of pollard has 12' trunks in the hopes of getting some fence posts or sawlogs out of the venture.  The second generation has 5'-to-6' trunks to make lopping the limbs ergonomically friendly.  Working from a ladder is awkward, risky and slow.

This pollard will look like a palm tree by mid-summer.

This Black Locust was culled due to being excessively thorny.  The cuts at 1, 4 and 9 O'clock were filled with herbicide solution to discourage resprouting.

A quarter added to close-up for sense of scale.  Black Locust is notable for its rot-resistant heartwood and for the very high ratio of heartwood-to-sap wood.

"Bits of DNA" added to the blog list

This chart is from The perfect human is Puerto Rican.  "Perfect" human defined here as populations having the greatest likelihood of possessing genes associated with increased longevity.  This illustration charts the first two Principal Component Modes.  Additional PCMs do not fall so cleanly into documented human populations.  Unfortunately, nobody had the presence of mind to swab Lazarus Long's cheek prior to this study.

This blog was added because Lior Patchter writes about topics that are interesting to me.  He writes about complex topics but he is able to explain them clearly.  He is also very effective at using an array of graphics to help the reader get a grip on mega-topics.

Much of the blog-o-sphere is mindless drivel.  It is refreshing to see researchers making their work (and the work of others) available to mortals in ways that are logistically accessible and entirely readable.

Obamaville

Speaking of music, this song goes out to Doug and Suzie in Lake Orion, Michigan

The best music to play while cleaning house is...

Frankly, I am curious to hear everybody's opinion.

Clearly, there is music that enhances physical conditioning, i.e., working out.  The Theme from Rocky, Queen and so on.

There is music that enhances the romantic ambiance....Pachelbel's Canon, Roberta Flack, Bill Withers and so on.

There is deer hunting music, and beer drinking music.

But what music, pray tell, makes house cleaning an endurable....if not enjoyable...task?

The picture in my head is to throw together 5 play-lists of about 30 minutes long.  One play-list will be called Monday, the second play-list will be called Tuesday...and so on.

Mrs ERJ did not marry a house.  She is not a "house wife."  She married me.  She gently hinted that I need to step up a little bit.  I can see that she is right.  I have resources.  There is no reason this must become work or be tedious.  SOMEBODY out there, perhaps most people out there have solved problem.  I just need to ask.