Through the Looking Glass

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Look what I found in the attic!

It appears to be a small old book, but actually it’s a game for the 1984 Apple Macintosh.  It appears for a moment at time stamp 2:41 in the original Steve Job’s announcement for the Macintosh.  Oh dear, he’s wearing a bowtie!

The game was written, originally for the Lisa, by Steve Capps; and there is a nice story by Andy Hetzfeld of how it and he came to be moved over to the Macintosh.

You can play a somewhat limited version of the game, implemented in Javascript, on here at Steve Capps firm onedoto.  And there is an iPhone version.    For the search engines, let me note that this is Apple part #914-0183-A.

Curiously I have no memory of playing this game.  I’d sell it, but it’s a rare object with a very thin market; so I have no idea how to sell it :).

Cost of that Car

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I just sold a car I bought back in Sept. of 2003.  Back in 2005 I wrote a posting attempting to estimate the cost of owning a car.  At the time my estimate was $12.65/day or 42 cents per mile.

I’m not going to attempt to redo that calculation having just handled the  appropriate  bits of paper I know that if I consider only amount I paid to buy the car and how much I just sold it for; then the two odometer readings the it comes out to twenty five cents per mile.

Where I estimated the depreciation as $5 per day back in 2005 it turned out to be $6.30 per day.  You can take 3 bus and subway rides for six dollars in Boston.

$13 dollars/day is $4745/year.  Which is enough to buy two unlimited bus and subway passes along with 500 hours of zip car rentals.  Food for thought; and that’s before tax rebates and bargaining.

Guard Labor – II

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I’m still chewing on the idea of guard labor, so a pile of random thoughts I’ve been having.

Businesses adapt the ratio between guard labor v.s. productive labor. That ratio varies across firms within industries, from one industry to another, and inside of firms from on department to another. Presumably there is a great deal of peering over the walls. A lot of monkey see monkey do as people search for a different balance. For example if the neighbor organization appears more successful and they don’t spend time on daily progress reporting and your organization does then you might be tempted to jigger things; reducing the ratio of guard to productive labor.

The work done by labor shifts. It can shift into automation or codified processes and procedures. If the neighbor is using an elegant status board your organization might be tempted try that out. In effect shifting guard labor into automation. Processes and procedures are a capital investment. How you depreciate and retire them feeds directly into organizational agility. If a neighboring organization appears to be successful by setting aside their rule book and replacing it with a charismatic manager then you might try that. In effect shifting automation into guard labor.

If you cast this in an exaggerated light you’ll notice plenty of opportunity for polarization. For example guard labor may fall into the bad habit of talking up how lazy the productive labor is; not because they dislike the productive labor but because it helps to justify their role (talking their book). Same thing happens for al the pairs; e.g. X v.s. automation and other roles like customers and suppliers. Most organization players flirt with the guilty pleasure kind of such exaggerated behaviors. It’s worth noting that there is plenty of opportunity for similar polarizing behaviors to be found the variability across departments, between firms, etc.

Automation (or processed and procedures) means that productive labor can be highly guarded even in the absence of guard labor. The assembly line worker’s role is extremely guarded, by the machines that surround him. In that scenario the guard labor ratio is low, with say only one supervisor for a a dozen production workers. So how guarded work is somewhat independent of how much guard labor is involved. Mechanical turk workers might be a example of an outlier in that space – highly guarded work with very minimal guard labor.

It is a challenge to label the axis for how guarded labor is. One extreme might be labeled slavery, bound labor. At the other end we might expect to find labor that is enjoying very high values of achieving the people’s core concerns (appreciation, autonomy, affiliation, …).  There are plenty of things that can bind labor: salary; stock options; roots in the firm or locality; specialized skills; lack of other options. In the Americas importing slaves from Africa was more effective v.s. enslaving the natives, I presume because natives had the option of running away.

Like all costs the cost of guarding can internal or externally born. One point the paper makes is that unemployment acts as a kind of systemic guard. Obviously unemployment insurance acts to temper that effect. If incidences of unemployment tend to be short in duration, that also tempers the effect. The paper suggests that Italy, with high unemployment and low guard labor ratio, might be an example of an economy where the cost of guarding has been externalized. In this mindset taxing firms that tend to have high labor turn over is a Pigovian or pollution tax and helps to encourage the guarding to move in house where it will be on the books.

This posting about slavery is interesting to mix up with the guard labor meme. It’s all a bit rough but there are two rolls of the economic dice mentioned there that encourage the rise of slavery. Let’s decide that what we mean by slavery is state sanctioned and enforced slavery. Not that the other cases aren’t interesting.

The first scenario is the case where owners have land, but labor is scarce. The scarcity of labor means that the cost of owning slaves is lower than the cost of paying them a salary on the open labor market.

The second scenario is high demand for some good. I don’t entirely understand this suggestion; but i find it plausible. If I replace high demand with high volume it begins to make sense. If some labor intensive good is produced at very high volume an large industry will emerge and scaling effects will kick in. That will trigger the search for both the balance of guard to productive labor, the codification of process. In time the nature of the productive labor will become increasingly guarded. The guard labor ratio will rise – the absence of either automation, or technological schemes for assuring the productive labor adheres to the processes. In the extreme case that high ratio will lead to introducing slavery.

Of course you’d also need to be able to implement the bondage. So if the labor can run away, as in the early American colonies, it maybe a lot harder – even with the help of the state and cultural sanction and enforcement. Labor can also run away if you have a diverse economy; so it would seem to me that both these scenarios are much more likely and possibly even require homogeneity – a company town.

The first scenario suggest that in any case where labor becomes scarce the incidence of binding devices will rise. So when labor is scarce during the second world war and wages are capped employers introduce health insurance, which has turned out to be a very effective binding device. It is exaggerated to suggest most of these are equivalent to slavery, but it’s interesting to float the analogy.

The Game

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Living as I have for decades right off the information super highway I was already aware of the seedy underworld of pick up artists. Or, if your the kind of geek who likes a mnemonic: PUAs.

Some commodities suffer from an imbalance, high demand and low quality of supply.  The skill of how to get the girl is one, as are cures for cancer, weight loss programs,  or how to close a sale.  There is a kind of evolutionary arguement to be made that in all these cases if a high quality solution were to emerge the other side would come under  powerful evolutionary pressure to discover a counter measure.  One reason the hucksters thrive in these markets by virtue of the plausable premise that it just might  be some secret high quality trick to it.  Cancer?  Positive attitutde.  Weight loss?  Bacon!  Close a sale?  “Would you like it in blue or grey?”  Get the girl? Demonstrate value and  play hard to get.  Humans are a mess, the ultimate rube goldberg device, so these all work.  Sometimes.

You could write a book like Neil Strauss’s The Game about any one of these markets the exhibit high demand and an unlimited supply of low quality goods.  And in each case you’d get the same assortment of characters; the desperate, the needy, the clueless, the hucksters, and the occational guys with talent.  You’d also get that delightful pattern, common on the internet, of groups of common cause forming. Random samples of people who share the problem at hand who gather and toss about ideas about what works and what doesn’t work.

The nature of such groups can cut across a wide spectrum from cheerful good fun, thru wholesome, into vile, and unto distructive cultism.  In the venn diagram of what kind of book The Game is one bubble should be about the transition of one such community thru all those stages.  At the beginning we have a bunch of dweebish shy disfunctional guys who are teaching each other to take a bath, wear snappier cloths, how to approach a stranger, how to make small talk, how to avoid wearing out your welcome.  At the end we have power hungry entrepeurs pulling down vast sums of money to teach this demographic the skill of being assholes (see photo of author and his teacher) and how best to apply their new found skills – approach women in quantity.

The venn diagram of what kind of book this is would include quite a few more bubbles.

This is certainly a book about cults.  And I might add it to the small pile of my favorites.  It’s a rare example of a “I was a cult victum” narrative where the author is not entirely angry, alienated, and damaged at the end.  That said I suspect there is more of that then he is letting on.

This is certainly travel narrative of that fun kind: fool goes to strange and exotic foreign land where he behaves like an idiot and makes a long series of very bad choices.  As readers we get a continual perverse frisson from that.  We regularly roll our eyes, gasp in disbelief, and take comfort in the fact we wouldn’t be such a bozo.  By way of example at one point he, as instructed, picks up a set of thick acupuncture needles and shows up at he dissheveled home of an amazingly  dysfunctional  celebraty where she alternately sticks him and runs out for junk food.  And that’s only an example!

It is also a fine example of the classic story of hero leaves home, has adventures, return home wiser.  But oh our hero is flawed, which makes us sad.

It is also a comedy, we know because it ends romantically.  But then is is also a tragedy, since many people die – well they don’t necessarilly die but there is a souless cult leader with his nest of scary of zombies left unresolved at the end.

It has that nerd, fantasy fiction, geeky element where in you learn a secret language.  Not Kilingon.  I was reminded of that fun book Edge City where you can learn bits of the secret language of Real Estate developers.  For example here we learn the term “Chick Crack,” i.e. those little personality surveys found at the back of women’s magazines.  There are plenty more.

I recomend this book for all that.  Who doesn’t like a book about men behaving badly.  It’s expensive, but if you get it from your local library you get a kind of director’s edition.  Since at least one sad sweet shy dweeb will have selectively underlined portions in the hope of treating his problem.

(I have a bad feeling this post is going to attract a lot of spam.)

Guard Labor

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I’m reading, savoring actually, a fascinating essay  on “guard labor” i.e. people paid to enforce the rules upon others.  The TSA, those guys at the front desk of office buildings that check ID cards, the mall cops, the supervisors who’s only role is to be sure everybody keeps their nose to the grind stone, etc. etc.  To first order guard labor is unproductive labor.

One fascinating story in the essay is about canning.  Unsurprisingly cans used to be sealed by hand.  That labor was skilled and scarce; and so they could organize to demand high wages during the short but intensive periods when the crops flowed in and had to be canned before they spoiled.  Naturally the canners sought alternatives and inventors were happy to sell them machines that promised to seal the cans – converting a labor expense into a capital expense.  Interestingly the machines didn’t work but the canners still bought them.  Why?  Because they could use, as a threat, to negotiate lower wages.

Look at this amazing photograph of a sardine canning factory.
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These are packers, not can sealers though.

There is another fascinating story about long haul truckers.  If you drive a truck, but you don’t pay for the gas, then you tend to drive faster so you can get the job done and go home.  That tiny detail shapes the trucking industry.  Owner operators (i.e. small businessmen) have a competitive advantage on long routes because they drive slower so their overall costs are lower.  Well, at least that used to be the case.  Once technology allowed the fleet owners to monitor the moment by moment trajectory of the truck they could automate the behavior.  A lot of owner-operators went out of business.

That is, in effect, the same story as all of franchising.  If you can create guards then you can roll up small businesses into a franchise chain.  The guards might be technology based (as with the tracking computers in the fleet’s trucks), or they might be tight process and procedures (as with six sigma or some currently popular team programming methodologies), or they might be done with guard labor.  In most cases you use a mix of all the above.

Like “coordination cost” the term “guard labor” (with it’s hint of unproductive and oppression) is a good tool to stuff in your tool kit.  Enjoy the paper  (pdf).

hat tip to mtravers!

Microsoft using patents to shape standards

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I’m writing this because Microsoft recently granted a limited license for some awesome intellectual property they acquired two years ago.  I want to temper the press accounts that are tending suggest they granted a generous license.

Almost immediately upon the wide spread adoption of patents industries fell into gridlock.  In a classic game of mutually assured destruction the individual firms in the industry would gather up patents.  Sooner or later somebody pulled the trigger.  If you lack a license to a patent the judge can shut down your entire business.

I think the first historical example of an entire industry shutting down was back in the late 19th century and involved the sewing machine makers.  That was in the days before antitrust laws.  So the captains of the sewing machine industry all got on the train and gathered in a smoky hotel room in Florida; where they invented the patent pool, cross licensing, etc.

An interesting side effect of a good patent pool is that it keeps other players out of your industry.  They only way they can get in is to accumulate enough patents to demand entry.

The anti-trust laws don’t prevent patent pools from arising.  They are common around industrial standards.  The players contribute, often under surprisingly murky terms, patents to a pool.  In this scenario the patents often play an interesting disciplinary role, if you try to implement the standard in a way the standards body considers offensive they remove your access to the patent pool.

Using IP rights in a disciplinary, or exclusionary, manner is also key to the solidarity of the FSF community.  Microsoft plays similar games as well.

For example Microsoft has a short list of psuedo-standards – i.e. standards they either wrote up entirely in-house or were the work of captive standards bodies.  You can see  that list here.  In entirely an entirely unexceptional manner they then grant a license to practice a limited amount of the IP on some of their patents.  Just what you need to implement the standards, nothing more, nothing less.  Of course a naive journalist might think these licenses are more generous then that.

The IP that Microsoft captured two years ago is incredibly useful for solving internet identity problems.  In particular it could be used to allow users to reveal only exactly the minimum amount of information required to do this or that.  If the site wants to know if your over 18, you can let them know yes, you are.  Proving it.  And revealing nothing else.  If the site wants to know if your credit score is over 550; it can do that that.  It’s incredibly clever tech.  It’s incredibly useful.  If your the kind of person who thinks patents should exist, but only for really really innovative ideas – well this is it.

Sadly though.  This tech could be solving a vast range of real world problems today.  It could have been solving them for years and year now.  So if you looking for an example of IP rights undermining innovation and real world problem solving – well this is it.

If you are looking for interesting examples of a company using patent rights to shape the market toward standards that they own and operate then – well this is it.

Of course nothing is to stop  foolish journalists from writing junk like: “This is a irrevocable promise by Microsoft that the company will not assert any claims against anyone using the technology that relate to any patents covering the technology.”  Which is bull.  You can use this IP only in implementing that short list of standards.  Only two on that list actually.  And I suspect only one of them, e.g. the standard that implies you have adopted Microsoft’s in house solution to the identity problem.

Moved Permanently

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bash-3.2$ curl -I http://www.sun.com/
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: Sun-Java-System-Web-Server/7.0
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:39:03 GMT
P3p: policyref="http://www.sun.com/p3p/Sun_P3P_Policy.xml", CP="CAO DSP COR CUR ADMa DEVa TAIa PSAa PSDa CONi TELi OUR  SAMi PUBi IND PHY ONL PUR COM NAV INT DEM CNT STA POL PRE GOV"
Location: http://www.oracle.com
Content-length: 0

bash-3.2$

Style as a Middleman

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I’m reluctant to write this up.  I feel I’m wandering onto really fresh turf here.  Because this is really about style and design; and the various audiences that craft addresses.  Something I don’t really know anything about.

One thing that caught my fancy in the book “Buying In” was the idea that products are two faced, like the middleman.  Products you use in public, like an iPod, have one face they show to the public and another which they show to you.  To hear him tell it when the iPod first appeared cultural observers took two quite polar positions about it.  Some celebrated way it empowered a deeper intimate relationship between citizens and their music collections.  While some railed about how the white headphones created a tribe, a kind of social signaling, and members of this tribe were walling themselves off inside a cult of iPod.

There is a large literature that presumes most style and fashion exists to serve a social signaling function.  For example to denote membership in a tribe or to make the owner appear high-value.  And no doubt that is one function of style, but yet I’m starting to think such talk is often just a cheap shot.  It’s easy to see the signaling, the public face of the product.  It’s hard to see the private face.  Intimate relationship between the user and the product and intimate and complex relationship between the member and his tribe.

There are some products were this public/private tension is particularly high.  I have a beautiful scarf.  Nice enough that people feel free to comment on it.  But they have no idea how sensual it’s cashmere is, nor other things about it I’ll pass over.

In another portion of the book he mentions how some publishers engage claques to ride public transportation reading new books, carefully so other passengers can take note of their dust jackets.  In telling the iPod story it sounds as if Apple’s designers were largely unaware how the white headphones would create a unified field for the products branding.  That white headphone decision appears to have been forced by the white packaging.  Of course Apple is often quite aggressive in shaping the public face of their products.  The iPod on the table here is black, but the headphones are still white.

The public/private face of stuff takes a odd turn when you move into a private space, say someone’s home or office.  Corporate buyers sometimes decorate their offices with false signals to undermine the salesmen, i.e. photos suggesting hobbies the buyer doesn’t actually engage in.  I once scanned the book shelf at a party only to become confused by the diversity of the owner’s taste.  Later I discovered the owner was a publisher and he had a copy of most everything the firm had ever published.

I have gone into homes that are indistinguishable from a high end hotel suite.  I wonder then, does this mean the owners have no intimate relationships with stuff; or does it mean they are just that aggressive about keeping that information private.  I’ve been in the homes of some people so rich that they have rooms which reveal only a public self, while further in you’d find more revealing rooms.  People do manage their public presentation of self, and if you often bring people into your private home then your likely to manage it there.

Yesterday Karim came at this from another side, writing on “The Anti-Social Nature of the Kindle.”  He complains about how his Kindle denies him the ability to present a public face.  But I notice how Amazon, the middleman, stripped one of the product’s two faces of as it passed thru their distribution channel.  And while that must drive the publisher’s crazy, as Karim points out sometimes you want to reveal the public face of your stuff.