O'Rourke accounts for our sins

PJ O'Rourke is mad at everyone:

What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That's not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 pounds!" But you can't pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters--all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs--think so too.

We, the conservatives, who do understand the free market, had the responsibility to--as it were--foreclose upon this mess. The market is a measurement, but that measuring does not work to the advantage of a nation or its citizens unless the assessments of volume, circumference, and weight are conducted with transparency and under the rule of law. We've had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980. Where is the transparency? It's one more job we botched.

Mostly, though, he's mad at conservatives for not making the most of 28 years on top (he dates being on top all the way to Reagan and dismisses the '93-'94 period, I suppose). His rant - which is quite lengthy - is half over-the-top and three-quarters spot-on.

What he does not offer are any ideas on how to fix it, though he seems a bit fatalistic and unencouraged that we shall ever get the opportunity in the lifetime of anyone alive today. But perhaps conservative leaders will read it and be jolted into reality, causing some smart thinker to begin getting us out of this mess.

Joys of Twitter

Curious about Twitter? The Wall Street Journal ran a nice article on the service the other day. People use Twitter for lots of things, from personal to professional to promotional. The article is also frank with the downfalls of Twitter, particularly the fact that if people don't use it then it's not really serving its purpose.

Do you Twitter? You know I do - you can see my most recent tweets over on the right. Several readers of the blog do, and several more - particularly dear friends of mine - are signed up but neglectful.

Make Twitter valuable for you - find two or three people who you care about knowing what they're up to and who would be interested in knowing what you're doing. Sign them up. Most importantly, register your phone with Twitter and get the alerts for your five favorite people on your phone. Send tweets from your phone. That funny thing that happened to you on the subway or at Subway will likely be appreciated by someone else - but if you don't tweet it now you'll probably forget it by the time you're back at your computer.

Toilet news for a Friday

"One of the cleanest things in the bathrooms we find are the toilet seats," Gerba said. "I'd put my fanny on it any time -- unless it's wet; then you'd want to wipe it first."

Still prefer to know where the cleanest toilets are outside of your home or office? The market came up with a solution to that, too. It's in the article.

I've never wanted to be in a Mamet play more

Stumbled on this in today's Political Diary from the Wall Street Journal:

"I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind. As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.... [Now I] question my hatred for 'the Corporations' -- the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live. And I began to question my distrust of the 'Bad, Bad Military' of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world.... I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism"

-- Playwright David Mamet, writing in the Village Voice on why he is no longer a
"brain-dead liberal."

That. Is. Awesome.

Governmental Success

Seth Godin lists the points below under the heading "Small Business Success," but it's something we could all take to heart.

Three things you need:

1) the ability to abandon a plan when it doesn't work
2) the confidence to do the right thing even when it costs you money in the short run
3) enough belief in other people that you don't try to do everything yourself

Specifically, I would love to see government applying these. Government is typically very good at the 2nd rule, but usually at the expense of rules 1 and 3.

I'm not so libertarian as to think government serves no purpose. There are some "right things" that government should do, and when it is doing them it should spend money. But when things aren't working as planned or when there are existing market solutions to problems, the government needs to step back, re-evaluate, and either exit gracefully or reorganize (generally the former).

Hard work

Seth Godin has a really great Labor Day post about what hard work really means today:

Richard Branson doesn't work more hours than you do. Neither does Steve Ballmer or Carly Fiorina. Robyn Waters, the woman who revolutionized what Target sells -- and helped the company trounce Kmart -- probably worked fewer hours than you do in an average week.

None of the people who are racking up amazing success stories and creating cool stuff are doing it just by working more hours than you are. And I hate to say it, but they're not smarter than you either. They're succeeding by doing hard work.

There's a new book out there that I thumbed through at the bookstore recently (and I'll put in the name when I remember it). I enjoyed a particular passage that argued that the biggest different between those in the middle class and those in upper class is that most of us in the middle class are risk-averse. We don't want to take big risks because, even though there could be pots of gold at the end, it's really hard to get to there. Most of us will give up before we get to the reward, which means most of us will fail, which means why bother in the first place.

I'm as guilty of this as anyone. I keep hoping for the "right" idea to come along, and I keep pushing off big ideas that aren't quite "right enough." I'm slowly waking up to the fact that it can't be "right enough" without a lot of effort.

Starting this blog was a risk that I easily could have not taken. I'm still not working hard enough on it to make it a product people really want to read regularly, but I've done the hard part, which was committing publicly to do something. If I'm going to own a domain name, I better keep putting new stuff up there. And (I think) it gets better over time, so even if it stinks now, I'm in a position to continually improve. Remember, even today's favorite swans started out ugly.

If you have a big idea you're hedging on, start with committing publicly. Get the idea out of your head and tell someone who can hold you accountable, "I'm going to do this." When you've told people that you're in the game, your incentive strongly biases success.

A $20 Million Idea

We have a neighbor who owns more than her fair share of Crocs - to the point that on the Fourth of July she was wearing one blue one and one red one. My wife pondered, as we sat on the porch sipping wine, whether she had any Jibbitz, which apparently are little plastic charms that can go on your Crocs. All the kids have them, she said.

What a brilliant idea, I said. How come we're not thinking of an idea like that? As Don Boudreaux points out:

Note that this invention isn't high-tech -- it's about as simple as simple can be. Yet it is indeed something that enough consumers choose to buy at prices that make the product profitable to produce.

And then I heard that he sold the company for $20 million. Now I really wish I had thought of it - and I've spent lots of time since then trying to come up with my own little big idea.

We all have $20 million ideas in us. Step one is to identify them, and step two - and this is the hard part - we have to make big risks to capitalize on them. Start with step one...

Thinking big outside the box

At the end of a History Channel program about the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, they made a very interesting point. When the Eiffel Tower was built, it was a shocking design, completely out of keeping with French design at the time. Now of course the Tower is the very icon of all things French. The commentator noted that, had the tower been built in London (or in Barcelona, as originally intended) then we would see the Tower as a truly British piece of architecture today.

Sometimes the things we see as dramatically different and unthinkable will appear, after a time, to be common and unthinkable only in the sense of it not being there. Many ideas we have are borne out of the past. Sometimes they need to be borne out of the future.

Are you sitting on a Big Idea just because it's out-of-keeping with common standards? If you follow through with it, it could become the common standard.

[side note - read the wikipedia article on the Petronas Towers (or watch the History Channel show on it) to see the value the builders gained from having competing teams working on each of the two towers. A project of this size can almost be assured of coming in behind schedule, but competition led to an on-time completion]

If only he really understood what he was saying

From an interview with Michael Moore published today in the Seattle Times:

Q: Some people ripped me off on eBay. Could you stand outside their house with a bullhorn?
A: I don't do that anymore. You're going to have to do it yourself. That's the only way anything will get accomplished in this country, by people becoming more active and not relying on people such as myself to do the work. [emphasis mine]

I don't hate Michael Moore, probably because I use to watch whatever TV show he had for a bit that came on right before X-Files. I wish I did outright hate him, but I do have a certain level of respect for him (and his last answer in the interview suggests why). But I do wish all the answers he offered weren't absolutely missing the point.

Inconvenience stores

A new coffee shop has opened in my office building. Across the street is a well-entrenched Starbucks, so this new little place does not have an easy life ahead of itself. Somehow it has to be different. But how is it going to do that? I looked around the store and tried to figure it out. They offered a lot of premium beverages - just like Starbucks - and lots of snacks and breakfast pastries - just like Starbucks.

What they did seem to have was lots of coffee canisters around for folks who just wanted a straight cup of coffee - and the cups were out, so you seemingly could serve it yourself and bypass the line (assuming one day there will be a line) of folks waiting on fancy drinks. That's pretty clever!

But nowhere in the store could I find the price of the cup of straight joe. And nowhere did it tell me I could just go grab a cup, fill up, cream-and-sugar to my liking, pay and go. Their best feature - and they make it difficult!

When I looked at my Far Side calendar for today, it shows a little boy in a massive, barren store where the only shelves are ten feet above his head, and the guy behind the register is just reading a newspaper. The caption says "Inconvenience stores." I should take it to the friendly lady at the new coffee place.

Are you running an Inconvenience Store with your job/organization/relationship?

Are you coachable?

The always-interesting Seth Godin asks us to ponder if we are coachable or not. You can't get better at anything unless you're willing to be open to challenge and constructive criticism. Seth gives us warming signs:

Symptoms of uncoachability:

• Challenging the credentials of the coach
• Announcing that you're being unfairly singled out
• Pointing out, angrily, that the last few times, the coach was wrong
• Identifying others who have succeeded without ever being coached
• Resisting a path merely because it was one identified by a coach

Also, and he doesn't really discuss this, it is important that if you are going to be the coach that you approach giving challenge without being critical and by also being open to getting challenge in response.

Govthink

Has the increasing size of government jaded us into perpetual Govthink in our everyday lives? I called AB on this today as we were cleaning.

In an effort to control the sprawl of stuff that accumulates out of my pockets and onto the dresser at the end of the day, AB gave me a small plate where I must put all of my pocket things. So far, I have been very good about this, though my plate is a little too full at the moment (kind of a metaphor of my life), and things are falling onto the dresser.

"I'm going to get you a bigger plate," AB told me this morning. "No!" I told her. I don't need a bigger plate, I need to clean out the plate I have and take some responsibility for it. Shouldn't this be default answer instead of always running to up the size of our portion?

Spending growth to keep track with inflation or population growth is one thing, but automatically giving more resources when the allotted resources run out only encourages growth for growth's sake. I don't need to keep mountains of change or old receipts or empty mint wrappers on my plate - I need to use the space for the things that I consistently use. Maybe one day I will need to carry massive amounts of stuff in my pockets on a daily basis and may need a bigger plate, but until that time, I'm going to take responsibility for efficiently using the space I've been given.

And for keeping my wife happy.

Self Improvement

Since I touch on always finding ways to improve in my last post, I thought I would mention two things I found while flipping through the always fascinating blog, Marginal Revolution.

First is this:

I'd pretty much resigned myself to wearing specs. But recently I heard about a
new treatment promising the restoration of 20/20 vision without glasses or surgery. It's called Ortho-K, or Orthokeratology, and involves wearing special contact lenses while you sleep, to correct the curvature of the eye. When you wake up the next morning and take out the lenses, you have perfect vision throughout the day.

Read the article - highly entertaining, and suggests that this is for real. If I can get over my inability to deal well with intense bright lights mere centimeters from my eye, I may go for this one day.

Second, I learned about flaxseed oil, which seems to solve about every problem a person can have, from stress to skin issues to endurance. Its high level of omega 3 (and 6 and 9) are what make it so powerful, though some other things are in there too that are good for you. At my local Giant this evening I bought a big bottle of flaxseed oil pills and have decided to try taking them twice a day to see if they improve my life. There was some debate in the comments as to whether fish oil was better than flaxseed but I went with the latter anyway. I'll report back.