Month: September 2023

I’m putting this thought here for myself, as an employer.

Any complex business system built on a bet that cheap labor exists is a broken business.

Complex businesses require skilled labor.

Fewer people means fewer skilled people.

Fewer skilled people means wage demands must be met. The choice between lower margins and closing the doors is unpleasant but obvious.

The solutions are therefore:

• Simple businesses which can use less-skilled people. There are more of them, and they are cheaper.
• Abstract the complexity away from the people so you can use less-skilled people. Automatic transmissions.
• Charge your customers more.
• Re-engineer your customers’ lives. They have complex problems. (The real solution is here—upstream—where the problems exist. Eliminate the customer’s complexity to eliminate the need for your complex services).
• Create skilled labor. (Make shovels for gold miners). (This is another real solution).

But yeah. Expect wage pressure in all areas of life that require skill, training, experience, and judgment.

Maybe it has always been thus. But I doubt it. When the baby boom came after the war there was a surplus of labor. Many kids becoming accountants, lawyers, etc.

Not so much now.

OK Grasshopper. Which way do you hop?

Greetings from 247 W. 36th Street: Culture Espresso.

Related:

[Musk developed] the “idiot index” which calculates how much more costly a finished product was than the cost of its basic materials. If a product had a high idiot index, its cost could be reduced significantly by devising more efficient manufacturing techniques.

Rockets had an extremely high idiot index. Musk began calculating the cost of carbon fiber, metal, fuel, and other materials that went into them. The finished product, using the current manufacturing methods, cost at least 50x more than that.

[…]

The [“idiot index”] was the ratio of the total cost of a component to the cost of its raw materials. Something with a high idiot index-say, a component that cost $1.000 when the aluminum that composed it cost only $100-was likely to have a design that was too complex or a manufacturing process that was too inefficient.

Source: “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson (2023)

From a Sasha Chapin tweet, how to accomplish a lot:

“I ask, what is likely to make the thing I want happen,” and “when people tell me things, I ask, is this true”

Do what matters most and get good at noticing when you’re avoiding doing what matters most.

Couple this with the Pareto Principle.

Right now 20% of my activities give me 80% of the results. Look for what that 20% consists of. That’s what matters most.

Implication: 80% of my time is wasted on things that don’t matter most.

Yesterday, a man about my age woke up early and got dressed for a fun day on the river. Later that day, he was dead.

He made a cascading series of poor decisions. He chose a hardcore river, class 5 rapids beyond his skills. His companions were not skilled, either. Poor equipment—including a crappy life jacket that, when the time came, did not do its job. Drunk.

My daughter pulled him out of the river. He was already blue, rigid—dead. One and a half hours of CPR in the wilderness before help arrived, to no avail.

Know thyself. Know your limitations.

On a good day, the dice roll in your favor. Yesterday, he rolled snake eyes.

Even those who make good decisions roll snake eyes sometimes. This is the second death on the river this summer that my daughter witnessed—the first was the polar opposite of yesterday’s. Young, fit, equipped with top-notch gear, expert and experienced. Yet the river took him, too.

One day, I too will wake up and get dressed, full of expectations. It will be my last day.

I guess the moral of the story is . . . I don’t know what the moral of this story is.

Live. Life is ephemeral.

First. Do not expect your brain or body to function properly for three days. Jet lag for +9 time zones is a thing.

Second. Drink more water.

Third. Get outside, even when jet lagged. See above.

Fourth. Turn off the phone at night. Don’t rely on the silence switch. Lesson learned.

Fifth. There came a brief moment when I wanted the iPad. It passed. I’m glad I am not lugging it around. Does anyone want an iPad Pro 12.9”?

Sixth. I can put in five hours of work a day on the road. Do this more.

Seventh. Buy a new shell for the laptop—a bright color this time.