The Las Vegas Rules II: Stuff Science

June 16, 2011 By

In lifestyle design, your relationship with your material possessions — “stuff” — is perhaps the central issue. Digital stuff is stuff too, since it has to physically live somewhere. Stuff is the locus where theories meet reality. It is not particularly hard to think about money, careers and investments in reasonably clear-eyed ways.  If it weren’t for stuff, execution on those fronts would also be easy.

Stuff is different. Even thinking about it is hard. We don’t even have a good word for it.  If you’ve been living on your own for at least a couple of years, getting a clear sense of all the stuff in your life takes an intense, draining and intellectually demanding exercise like a GTD Sweep (the first stage in getting on the GTD wagon; just spending a weekend making sense of all your stuff). By comparison, developing situation awareness of your finances is as simple as logging into your major accounts. Stuff diseases, such as extreme hoarding, seem to me to be much worse than financial diseases like being over-leveraged.

In lifestyle design discussions, I find that people vastly oversimplify the stuff side.  They pick unexamined philosophies about stuff, like “minimalism” or “go local,” without ever looking at how the stuff in their life actually works. This is like deciding to save $1000 a month without actually looking at your income, debt and expenses. Worse, they try to pitch their unexamined “stuff religion” to others.

So a few months back, I decided I needed to understand stuff and start experimenting with doing things to it, before getting all caught up in pretty lifestyle theories. Understanding stuff is Stuff Science.

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A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100

June 8, 2011 By

On 8 June, a Scottish banker named Alexander Fordyce shorted the collapsing Company’s shares in the London markets. But a momentary bounce-back in the stock ruined his plans, and he skipped town leaving £550,000 in debt. Much of this was owed to the Ayr Bank, which imploded. In less than three weeks, another 30 banks collapsed across Europe, bringing trade to a standstill. On July 15, the directors of the Company applied to the Bank of England for a £400,000 loan. Two weeks later, they wanted another £300,000. By August, the directors wanted a £1 million bailout.  The news began leaking out and seemingly contrite executives, running from angry shareholders, faced furious Parliament members. By January, the terms of a comprehensive bailout were worked out, and the British government inserted its czars into the Company’s management to ensure compliance with its terms.

If this sounds eerily familiar, it shouldn’t. The year was 1772, exactly 239 years ago today, the apogee of power for the corporation as a business construct. The company was the British East India company (EIC). The bubble that burst was the East India Bubble. Between the founding of the EIC in 1600 and the post-subprime world of 2011, the idea of the corporation was born, matured, over-extended, reined-in, refined, patched, updated, over-extended again, propped-up and finally widely declared to be obsolete. Between 2011 and 2100, it will decline — hopefully gracefully — into a well-behaved retiree on the economic scene.

In its 400+ year history, the corporation has achieved extraordinary things, cutting around-the-world travel time from years to less than a day, putting a computer on every desk, a toilet in every home (nearly) and a cellphone within reach of every human.  It even put a man on the Moon and kinda-sorta cured AIDS.

So it is a sort of grim privilege for the generations living today to watch the slow demise of such a spectacularly effective intellectual construct. The Age of Corporations is coming to an end. The traditional corporation won’t vanish, but it will cease to be the center of gravity of economic life in another generation or two.  They will live on as religious institutions do today, as weakened ghosts of more vital institutions from centuries ago.

It is not yet time for the obituary (and that time may never come), but the sun is certainly setting on the Golden Age of corporations. It is time to review the memoirs of the corporation as an idea, and contemplate a post-corporate future framed by its gradual withdrawal from the center stage of the world’s economic affairs.

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The Las Vegas Rules I: The Slightly Malevolent Universe

June 2, 2011 By

Update: Greg Rader pointed out over email that my diagram was messed up in Economics 101 terms: the production frontier is usually convex and the utility/indifference curves concave. I had things the other way around. Total sloppiness on my part. In fixing the picture, an additional insight struck me: the normal outcome of such diagrams usually the achievable optimum somewhere in the middle, where it can “kiss” the most valuable concave utility curve. The interesting thing is that it is much easier to gamble with a surplus of money or a surplus of time, than it is to gamble with an optimal mix. This suggests WHY lifestyle design may be hard: you have to move away from your current optimum in order to gamble effectively. The normal way is to work harder than you want to, in order to accumulate the surplus money to gamble with. Lifestyle design moves away from the optimum in a different direction.

I’ve been thinking  and writing about the idea of lifestyle businesses and lifestyle design for several years now, and attempting to actually play the game for a few months.  It is not easy, and I have not been satisfied with how others have been framing the subject. In particular, I have been disturbed by the “anyone can do this, guaranteed” attitude of cheery optimism around the subject. Unqualified optimism of any sort immediately makes me skeptical.  Perhaps this is because I am an engineer both by training and philosophical inclination. Engineering knowledge is usually expressed in terms of fundamental limits, conservation laws and constraints. So it was natural for me to frame the challenge of lifestyle design for myself with this time-money Pareto frontier diagram. 

I’ve been criticized in the past for talking a lot about lifestyle design, and critiquing others’ ideas, but never actually adopting a definite position myself. So I am about to start taking one. In honor of my new home and the central role of gambling and risk-taking in my model, I am calling it the Las Vegas Rules.

I am going to bite off one little piece at a time, and point out differences compared to other models as I go along. This time, I just want to talk about the role of gambling in lifestyle design.

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Dulce Domum

May 24, 2011 By

Post comments on the original post on the Tempo blog.

I haven’t liveblogged much of the last week of the road trip, primarily because I was doing broader ribbonfarmesque things, rather than meeting readers. Expect to see some blog posts out of my travels between Omaha, NE and Jackson, WY soon, both here and over at Tempo blog.

I am now in Vegas, and I’ll be here for a few weeks before hitting the west coast. All our stuff is currently in storage, and we are subletting a part of our in-laws’ house for a few months while we figure things out.  Arriving in Vegas felt strange. It wasn’t like coming home because it isn’t my home. Over the years, I’ve moved so many times (14 times in the last 14 years, across 5 cities, so an average of once a year) that my sense of place and home has mostly been about a few possessions that have traveled with me through all of them.  Getting used to true nomadism and living out of others’ homes for the last 3 weeks has deepened that sense of comfortable rootlessness. Now I am going to be living in limbo for about 6 months.

These thoughts reminded me of one of my favorite chapters in The Wind in the Willows, “Dulce Domum” (Sweet Home), which is about the sudden attack of homesickness that descends on one of the characters, the Mole, after he’s been on the road having adventures for way too long. Sample this chapter.  You don’t need to understand the plot or characters to appreciate this chapter. Here’s a particularly eloquent chapter.

Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way! Why, it must be quite close by him at that moment, his old home that he had hurriedly forsaken and never sought again, that day when he first found the River! And now it was sending out its scouts and its messengers to capture him and bring him in. Since his escape on that bright morn ing he had hardly given it a thought, so absorbed had he been in his new life, in all its pleasures, its surprises, its fresh and captivating experiences. Now, with a rush of old memories, how clearly it stood up before him, in the darkness! Shabby indeed, and small and poorly furnished, and yet his, the home he had made for himself, the home he had been so happy to get back to after his day’s work. And the home had been happy with him, too, evidently, and was missing him, and wanted him back, and was telling him so, through his nose, sorrowfully, reproachfully, but with no bitterness or anger; only with plaintive reminder that it was there, and wanted him.

The call was clear, the summons was plain. He must obey it instantly, and go. “Ratty!” he called, full of joyful excitement, “hold on! Come back! I want you, quick!”

“Oh, come along, Mole, do!” replied the Rat cheerfully, still plodding along.

“Please stop, Ratty!” pleaded the poor Mole, in anguish of heart. “You don’t understand! It’s my home, my old home! I’ve just come across the smell of it, and it’s close by here, really quite close. And I must go to it, I must, I must! Oh, come back, Ratty! Please, please come back!”

The Rat was by this time very far ahead, too far to hear clearly what the Mole was calling, too far to catch the sharp note of painful appeal in his voice. And he was much taken up with the weather, for he too, could smell something—something suspiciously like approaching snow.

“Mole, we mustn’t stop now, really!” he called back. “We’ll come for it to-morrow, whatever it is you’ve found. But I daren’t stop now—it’s late, and the snow’s coming on again, and I’m not sure of the way! And I want your nose, Mole, so come on quick, there’s a good fellow!” And the Rat pressed forward on his way without waiting for an answer.

Week 3: Memphis, St. Louis, Omaha, Carhenge, Deadwood, Yellowstone

May 16, 2011 By

Post your comments over on the original post on the Tempo blog.

I am in Memphis, where I plan to meet up with Daniel Pritchett, some local entrepreneurs at a startup incubator, and anyone else who might be around. Next stop, St. Louis on Tuesday. As far as I know, I have no readers there, but I wanted to check out the Billy Goat chip company, maker of my favorite chips. If anybody is out there, it’d be great to meet up. From St. Louis I head to Omaha and after that, the road-trip basically goes into a sights-over-people mode, since my destinations in Nebraska and South Dakota (North Platte for a second visit to Bailey Yard, Alliance for Carhenge and Rapid City for Deadwood) aren’t places I am likely to find any readers. I’d be shocked to find somebody beyond Omaha. After South Dakota, I head to Jackson Hole in the heart of Yellowstone, where oddly enough I do have someone to stay with. After that, depending on how much time I have left, I might dawdle or dash my way to Vegas, the end point for this leg.

Posts from Week 2

Week 2: Ann Arbor, Nashville, Atlanta, New Orleans

May 9, 2011 By

Post your comments over on the original post on the Tempo blog.

I am in Ann Arbor, MI as I write this, preparing to head south tomorrow. The plan is to wander down to New Orleans over the week, and then start up along the Mississippi next week. For the coming week, I have Atlanta plans nailed down and Nashville and New Orleans plans almost nailed down. According to Google Maps, Dayton, Cincinnati, Lexington, Knoxville, Montgomery and Mobile are along the route. If you suspect you are within a reasonable band off this route, give me a holler.

Here are links to my the posts I liveblogged on the Tempo blog during the first week. Delay-blogged rather.

Some reflections on Week 1 follow, for those interested in the metatext.

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My Experiments with Introductions

May 7, 2011 By

Introductions are how unsociable introverts do social capital. Community building is for extroverts. But introductions I find stimulating. Doing them and getting them. This is probably a direct consequence of the type of social interaction I myself prefer. My comfort zone is 1:1, and an introduction is a 3-way that is designed to switch to a 2-way in short order, allowing the introducer to gracefully withdraw once the introducees start talking. As groups get larger than two, my stamina for dealing with them starts to plummet, and around 12, I basically give up (I don’t count speaking/presentation gigs; those feel more like performance than socializing to me).

I am pretty good at introductions. I’ve helped a few people get jobs, and helped one entrepreneur raise money. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least a half-dozen very productive relationships that I have catalyzed. I think my instincts around when I should introduce X to Y are pretty good: 2 out of 3 times that I do an introduction, at the very least an interesting conversation tends to start. Since I’ve been getting involved in a lot of introductions lately, I thought I’d share some thoughts based on my experiments with introductions.

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Week 1: DC, Wilmington, Albany, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto

May 2, 2011 By

Note: while the main stream of liveblogging will be over at the Tempobook blog, I will be cross-posting a weekly summary/itinerary on ribbonfarm. This is the first one. If you want to join in for this week’s action, post your comments on the original post. If you want the blow-by-blow liveblogging, subscribe to the Tempobook blog.

Here’s the itinerary for week 1, with approximate days/times and a partial itinerary of planned events. Post a comment if you want to do something at any of these locations or any obvious waypoints.

Tuesday, May 3

Morning: micro-meetup at Caffe Amouri in Vienna (a DC suburb) at 11 AM with readers Benjamin Eason and Julio Rodriguez. Join in if you’re around.

Afternoon: drive to Baltimore to check out the Beehive Baltimore, a coworking spot I’ve always been meaning to check out. Julio will be riding along and I’ll get to test my in-car iPhone based video interview rig. Fingers crossed.

Evening: drop Julio off and drive on to Wilmingon, Delaware.  Why? Stay tuned.  Plan for the night is to couchsurf.

Wednesday, May 4

Drive leisurely north to Albany, NY, stopping randomly along the way. Holler if you are along the obvious route. Will probably make a stop in New Jersey somewhere. Plan is to camp out at an old friend’s home for the night.

Thursday, May 5 and Friday, May 6

Drive to Montreal. Seb Paquet has kindly offered to host me for a couple of days and I’ll also be meeting up with Daniel Lemire.  Trying to pull together a talk about the book for the group Seb runs, Technologies et savoirs. I thought it means “Technology is our Savior” but apparently it means “Technology and Knowledge.” Good. I don’t do Messianism well.

Saturday, May 7 and Sunday May 8

Get myself to Ann Arbor, MI by Sunday night, weaving vaguely through Ottawa, the Lake Ontario shoreline and Toronto. Haven’t made any concrete plans yet, so I am very open to ideas. I’ll stop somewhere if I can find free/cheap  accommodations (hint, hint), otherwise it is a straight dash to Ann Arbor where I have accommodations.

The Tempo Road Trip

April 28, 2011 By

It’s been quite an insane few weeks, but finally I can cut loose and have some fun with my free agency. Tempo is now on Amazon.com. The early “Stealth Edition” on Lulu has been retired (sorry no more discounts until Amazon decides to offer some; I am doing my best to get the Kindle edition out as soon as possible though). The book site is up and running. I’ve also put most of my stuff into storage in preparation for a nomadic summer, based out of the Barbarian city of Las Vegas. The main act is a major road trip, spread across two legs, across most of the lower 48 states of the US. Here’s the rough map of the route. The first leg of the trip will be DC to Vegas, between next Monday (May 2) and approximately May 24.

The detailed logistics are in the inaugural post on the Tempo blog. If you’d like to meet me and participate in the road trip, click through and post a comment on that post. I am closing comments on this post to avoid confusion.

The immediate purpose of the road trip is to jump-start the Tempo blog and get the conversation around the book going in an interesting way. I will be live-blogging the entire trip in a Tempo-themed way, mostly in short-post, photo-blog and video-blog formats.  After ribbonfarm and the Be Slightly Evil list, the Tempo site is going to be my third major online property, and I am really hoping I can get good at the photo/video/short format/high frequency model I have planned for that site.

More broadly, the idea is to simply explore different places, meet different people and restock the hopper for all my writing with fresh experiences, conversations and other stimulating raw material. One of the dangers of blogging is that it is easy to get stale and start repeating yourself, drawing on fading memories of the same raw material over and over, especially if you don’t have a regular job feeding you live experiences to reflect upon. I hope the road trip recharges my writing.

It’s been insane getting ready for this trip (you’ll see glimpses of that once I start the liveblogging on Monday night), but I am hoping it will be worth it, and I am really looking forward to meeting some of the really curious characters I’ve met through ribbonfarm.

Before you click on over to the main post about the road trip, a couple more requests:

  1. If you’ve already read all or part of the book, I’d really appreciate a quick comment on the Reader Responses page.
  2. Now that the regular edition is out on Amazon, if you were planning on writing a review on your own blog, Amazon, or somewhere else, go right ahead. I’d appreciate a link to tempobook.com in addition to the link to the Amazon listing.
  3. If you were planning on playing the Tempo Tracer game at the back of the Stealth Edition, It would be a lot of fun if you finish the book, pass it on, and send in your picture sometime in the next few weeks

So head on over to the main post about the road trip.

p.s. Thanks to everybody who bought the Stealth Edition and helped fund this trip: I sold over 200 copies in less than a month.

p.p.s As expected there were some oopses with the Stealth Edition. Many US-based readers got copies with a misprinted page 12. Get the corrected page here. Readers in the UK and Europe appear to have received copies with all the apostrophes missing. Ouch. Sorry, but I can’t really fix that.

p.p.p.s Yes, regular programming on ribbonfarm and Be Slightly Evil will continue as usual.

The Russian Fox and the Evolution of Intelligence

April 21, 2011 By

This is a guest post by Brian Potter of  Coarse Grained. It explores a different aspect of some of the ideas in my post, The Return of the Barbarian, and Paula Hay’s guest post, Cognitive Archeology of the West. If you are interested in guest-posting, email me.

Consider the following experiment (the Wason selection task):

You are shown a set of four cards placed on a table, each of which has a number on one side and a colored patch on the other side. The visible faces of the cards show 3, 8, red and brown. Which card(s) should you turn over in order to test the truth of the proposition that if a card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face is red?

The correct answer is “8” and “brown”, but very few people get the correct answer – between 10-25% depending on the exact formulation of the problem. Even when its expressed in more familiar terms, such as “If a person goes to New York, then he takes the subway”, success rates remain extremely low.

However, consider the exact same problem, rephrased slightly:

You are shown a set of four cards placed on a table, each of which has a number on one side and a statement on the other side. The visible faces of the cards show 16, 25, ‘drinking beer’ and ‘drinking coke’. Which card(s) should you turn over in order to test the truth of the proposition that if “If you are drinking alcohol, then you must be over 21”?

Phrased like this, success rates shoot up to around 75%. But what makes this form different than a question about riding the subway?

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