Women at Work

Since I’m generalizing….

I’m the CEO of a company that employs about 150 people, 97% of them are women.   After 15 years as a chief executive, I observe no evidence whatsoever that women get along with each other better than men — and the women are the first to point this out.

I do see talented women managers who bring collaborative skills to the table — more such skills than men.   But they need them more — with each other.

I hope this doesn’t sound like I look down on women.   The best managers I’ve ever known are women, and I learn from them every day.

What Does Medicare Mean?

The health care debate is raging in America.

“Medicare was called socialized medicine back in the day, and it has turned out to be a highly successfully program.”

All transfers of wealth are, by definition, successful.   Cash-for-clunkers was widely described as a “successful” program.  What that meant was that the government offered to buy cars for more than they were worth, and people lined up.  It was no different than handing out cash on the street.   These programs will always “succeed”.   So the word has no meaning.

By the way, I’m not saying such programs are actually unsuccessful.  I’m not disagreeing with the observation; I’m saying it has no significance.   It implies nothing.

But back to Medicare.

First, human needs that are universal can be socialized.   Said another way, the more certain it is you will have a certain need, the less your behavior matters, since the flaw in socialized costs is moral hazard .   So the human conditions common to all people are the low-hanging fruit in the welfare state.   These are easy: children, elderly.   Widows, orphans.

Health care in general is precisely unlike this, because the needs are linked tightly to behavior.   So Medicare implies nothing about health care for the general adult population.   It is superficial to draw such implications.

Second:  if you had to pick one social status to advocate supporting , you’d pick the elderly, since we all intend to be one someday.   So Medicare and Social Security are the least like a wealth transfer of all social programs,   because we all expect to someday get back the wealth we paid in.   Psychologically, then, it is a perfect condition to socialize.   You need it now, I’ll need it later.   I’ll pay for you, someone else will pay for me.   No net transfer of wealth.

That’s the psychological truth of Medicare and Social Security:  savings account.

(Though their literal truth is:   Ponzi scheme.)

Gender in the Workspace

I’m generalizing.

Managers need to understand that women need more physical space than men do.  Especially for jobs that do not anchor the worker to one spot on the floor, but require her to move about.

It’s the invisible bubble of personal space we’re talking about, of course.   I’m not saying the female bubble is bigger — rather, the membrane around the female bubble is much less permeable.   Women don’t tolerate other people in their space as much as men.   I should say, men don’t care as much.

But it isn’t that.   It’s the reflection of that;  women hate to get in other people’s space.   This actually troubles them as much as the converse.   Hence, the constant apologies and kow-towing (sorry, ladies, this is how it looks from the male perspective.)

You men….haven’t you been puzzled by walking down a hall at work, and a female co-worker steps aside with an “I’m sorry” which actually slightly irritated you, because you wouldn’t have been bothered if she had just blown past you?

That’s the difference I’m talking about.  (Women also tend to concede at 4 way stop intersections.)

Whether we oppress this onto them or they come out of the womb like this is not my concern.  It’s just a practical observation:

Male managers who have the responsibility for a floorplan need to check it with females in a mock-up of the actual space before you ok the plan.   Especially if the architect is male.

The Layers of Intelligent Design

1.   Primordial cosmos:  ”without form and void”.   This is not matterless.   It is unorganized matter/energy.   It suggests the existence of random events, without — surprisingly — a moral color  (we are inclined to see randomnity as bad.)  There is no reason to believe the creation week obliterated or exhausted this formless stuff.   I believe we still see this with senses and  scientific instruments.

2.  Creation.   The stuff got organized.    The residuum of this is what we perceive when we look at the night sky, and this is the Design the biblical writers talk about.  But  the biblical writers are not necessarily seeing what we think when we think “design”, which is more like “pattern”.   They are seeing size, scale, and beauty.   The fabrication of the Garden, later, will reveal that this Creation,  whatever it looked like, though it is “very good”,  has no clear human purpose, except as raw material for a further ordering.   Even before the Fall there were at least two strata in the created universe that were not meant to look “designed” to unfallen human perception.    What we see now has no apparent purpose, unless explained by revelation, but we’re not seeing it clearly.

3.  The Garden.   The creation of the Garden in Genesis seems not to mean anything to Christians who argue with the evil evolutionists about design in the natural world.   But it seems crucial.   The distinction between the garden and the wide world is precisely the degree of apparent order.    And, in this context, the word “order” means something like “pleasant to humans”.    It was an island of suitableness within the infinite ocean of the Creation, which was itself on top of, or imposed on, the deep layer of formless stuff.   The idea was probably that the Garden would grow and take over all the Creation, which of course never happened.   So the Garden was the one place visibly designed for humans.    We do not perceive it now.   A flaming sword has been set at its door.

4.   The Creation, fallen.   Whatever degree of design the original creation displayed — something less than what God had in mind for us — must be broken down now, to some unknown degree.    And our vision is also broken.

I realize I am speculating here.  The point is not to nail all this down into creedal clarity.   The point is that the concept “design” is used by culture-warriors as if it means one thing.   It is either “evidence of design” or, I guess, “evolved by chance”; I find this dichotomy laughably simplistic — from a biblically literalist point of view.    Actually, the biblical concept of design is richly nuanced.   And that nuance not nearly mined to date.   We do the biblical picture great trauma by talking about it so carelessly.

Those of us who aren’t so certain to argue that we see “design” in the physical universe are often looked down on by our more dogmatic brethren.   As if we don’t really believe the Word.   Not so; we just see more in it than you, and see more that we don’t clearly see.    It’s hard to fight over something you know you aren’t seeing clearly.

 

 

Government workers

People who work in government are normal people (you might be one) but their organization hamstrings them — necessarily.    It is not possible for a government institution to compete with a private institution.

Their work takes place in an adversarial arena with legislated transparency. Nobody can do well in this environment.   It’s like practicing your disco moves in a glass bedroom; there is no way to look good.   By “adversary”, we mean “organized, intelligent bands of predators who have a religious zeal to ruin you forever.”   Yes, political Left, this is you.   Yes, political Right, this is you.

In private industry, there are adversaries, but you can keep the walls opaque.   Those who would love to kill you (professionally) can be kept out and kept relatively blind to the details of your team’s work.

No matter who you are, the closer your job is to an elected person, the more vultures there are from the other party whose hot passion is to demonstrate your evil and take your job away from you.   This usually has little to do with factual content.   There are plenty of people, in both parties, down to the local level, who are perfectly willing to falsely imprison people from the other party in order to seize their power.

Though the individual job may not be important to the zealots and party activists as a prize, they  have made “flipping” the little guys  into an art form any mob prosecutor would be proud of.   Find incompetence at some level, and leverage it, to dislodge higher ups.   This is common, and ugly.

The only protection for the little people is formal  procedure.   Government workers would be crazy not to formalize everything down to the paperclip requisition.   Paperwork, jargon, algorithms — all that we mean when we say “bureaucracy” is the inevitable product of normal people acting in an expected level of self-interest.

It’s a commonplace to note the absence of market discipline. I’ve nothing new to say, except that it can’t be rated too important.   Private companies get slovenly and weak very quickly when there is not perceptible threat from competitors.   Like the gallows in the famous quote,   the prospect of having your livelihood ripped away will focus the thoughts wonderfully.     Those of us in private companies who do well will become inefficient if this pressure goes away.   We hate it, but it is the source of whatever excellence companies create.

This pressure is wholly unlike the political pressure that ruins work, because it can be responded to rationally, by people working in teams, who can hide their tactics behind closed doors.   And there is an external check on the final product — the market — in place of the false and malicious evaluation of the political climbers.

There is no substitute for competitive pressure.   Its effect cannot be built into a federal agency by any means whatsoever.    You can fill a government agency with geniuses and the lack of competitive pressure will ruin their work.

Career politicians have never felt this pressure.   They discount it congenitally.

So the government workers have a massive pressure to be inefficient — the protective bureaucracy —  and an utter lack of healthy pressure.   They can’t win even though they are good and talented —  except by a fiat, from those who possess the guns — the legislators.

Numbers, by journalists

I try to conceal my disdain for the average journalist.   They really are educated in nothing in particular.

No value has meaning except in the context of its expected value.

“Today, 15 people died from Swine flu.   Stay tuned to find out what you can do. “

Really?   How many would we expect?   It’s not a peripheral question.

A Change expressed in units has little value; express it in percentage terms.

“Today, the Dow fell by 82 points.   The S & P 500 fell by 35 points. “

This is like saying “Joe lost his thingamabob.   Don lost his widgit.”

 

 

The Presidency

To the Left, the President is the Chief Executive of the country. That makes us his employees.

In the Constitutional vision, he is Chief Executive of the government. That makes us his customers.

You can’t have conversations when your words mean the opposite.

 

Liberal Money.

I’m constantly fascinated with the liberal mind.  I try to imagine the world the way they see it.

Today: money.

Money is a store of value that, in moral terms,  is just floating around out there in the ether.    Nobody in particular owns it.    Those who possess it are just lucky, or evil.    They are evil because they think they own it.   Their voices are just a distraction.

When I have money,  it doesn’t count.

Nobody in particular produces money.   The whole country, as a collective,   produces it.    This production process goes on the same no matter what laws are passed.   People work, and they are given the money they need — rather, the things they need.   There is no particular connection between the work and the money.   If anybody decides not to work, they should be given the things they need.

The more perfect the legal system, the quicker the money will be whisked away as soon as it drops to the ground at the foot of the production tree.   The word “tax” has no moral color whatsoever.   It is just a word for how we transfer the money to where it needs to go.

Because all the money just needs to get to the right place, and there is a lot of it, the legal system is obviously going to be highly complex, but that’s a good thing.   There are lots and lots of rules to make at any given moment because reality is always changing.   There will always be lots of rules to make about where the money goes.    This is called “public service.”

 

 

John 9: Jesus talks about design

The sermon today really was about the healing of the blind man in John 9, though my notes meander.

1.  Man chose a random universe.   If this part is left out, the rest makes no sense.  And this is the part secularists insist on leaving out, so that the rest makes no sense.  In other words, they choose a random universe, re-capitulating Adam’s choice.   5 minutes later,  they object to the very notion of a federal head.

2.  Bad things happen, randomly.   See:   statistics.

3.  God stops some bad things.   This is an assertion.   By definition, it is untestable, as are all assertions about the intangible universe.   That it is untestable means exactly nothing, unless you’ve already decided that all truth is testable.   That decision has nothing to do with the nature of the world, and everything to do with how you want to spend your short time in it.    It makes sense to hold that all truth is testable, if there are no truths outside the means of testing.    That the testers can’t see this logical circle is my personal all-time greatest mystery of life.

4.  Love does not excise bad things from the relationship, but builds them into the design.   All watercolorists will now say “amen”.   So, in the end, love is the intelligent design.   We cannot know the universe as it was built originally; the stamp of design from the act of creation has been written over by the palimpsest on our retinae.    Love is the intelligent design.   Since love never fails,  this is also an untestable assertion.   You can either live in this universe, if you like, or another kind, if you like.   Why you like what you like will always be perceived by yourself as an axiom.   The theological term for axiom is “ex nihilo”; the phenomenological term for the same…well, phenomenon…is “miracle” .     Since the atheist mind simply labels things that appear in his mind as axioms, he actually has more experience with miracles than the rest of us.   He has merely internalized them.

5.  The materialist might not allow for “love”, it might be just “the will to survive”.   Yet, in this view, isn’t the will to survive just another random event, seen from the inside?   So, the species has the will to survive, because the sun exists, but that the sun exists means nothing at all.   It just exists.   Therefore, the cessation of the will to survive is the loss of nothing at all.   Therefore,  to live is not preferable to suicide, and suicide is not preferable to life.   But the materialist is left with:   “It is axiomatic for me to want to live.”   I believe you — but all you are saying is that this impulse drops into your brain from an unknown source.   Suppose Hitler would have an impulse to kill you.   In the end, isn’t that war simply two inexplicable impulses, fighting at random?

I contain all Christendom

Every morning I’m a Wesleyan, but by bedtime I’m a Lutheran.

I mean that quite seriously.