11.01.10
The Logistics Song
Postcard from the war on terror. Wish you were here!
The Logistics Song — here. Yes, click that link!
Y’all did see this coming Friday, right?
Heh. Played all the instruments, too.
10.28.10
The ‘Artisan’ Economy
Whether it’s writing the next Harmonica-like app or making the $180 blues harp, one of the dogwhistles heard regularly is how every US worker will have be ‘value-added’ and very special to earn a living in the future.
It’s another way of saying that everyone unemployed now needs jettisoning. Forget about ’em. We need to get away from the slug dead weight.
For the plutonomy to succeed one has to focus on making stuff for the haves.
Here’s an example of the industry model, again on Harrison Harmonicas in Rockfield, Illinois.
From a September press release:
Harrison Harmonicas is hiring two to three entry level workers to help construct its B-Radical Harmonica featuring replaceable reeds.
The premium harmonica is the only harmonica made in the United States. They sell for $180 each.
Harrison Harmonica is accepting applications in person from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. Tuesday at the EIGERlab, 605 Fulton Ave. during an on-site application process.
For more information and to download an application, log on to the Harrison Harmonica website at harrisonharmonicas.com/careers.
It is the second day of the on-site application process for the company.
EIGERlab Director Dan Cataldi estimated there were 60 applicants for the jobs on Monday morning.
“Located in Rockford, Illinois, Harrison Harmonicas is the United States’ only harmonica manufacturer and was named by Businessweek magazine as one of America’s Most Promising Startups,” reads yet another press release.
The perfect model of the ‘artisan’ economy, one in which you make goods for the superwealthy is Elon Musk’s Tesla.
It also helps, if like Musk, you can get the US government to prop you up.
Another California ‘artisan’, of sorts, is Solazyme, the company that makes ‘biofuel’ from algae.
Here’s a laugher story on Solazyme’s big client, the US military, a couple sentences picked to tell readers all they need to know.
The [Navy’s experimental boat that runs on a 50-50 mix of algae-derived ‘biofuel’ and regular gas] is designed to be deployed in rivers and marshes and will eventually be used to guard oil installations in the Middle East, The Guardian reported. It’s part of the Navy’s first green strike force, a group of about 10 ships, submarines and planes that run on a mix of biofuels and nuclear power. They’re expected to be developed by 2012 and deployed to the field by 2016.
Last month, the U.S. Navy ordered more than 150,000 gallons of ship and jet fuel from Solazyme, a California company that produces biofuels from algae.
‘[Be] used to guard oil installations in the Middle East,” is all you need to read. Does … not … compute, Will Robinson.
Solazyme’s ‘biofuel’ costs the Navy $424 a gallon. Which makes it, by definition, anti-green in terms of energy and carbon footprint needed to get it to the Navy. Despite the Navy’s insistence that it is committed to fielding a ‘green strike force,’ whatever that may be.
The ‘artisan’ economy is warmed-over hash. It has been written of many times.
It goes like this: Creative and innovative Americans need only start their own businesses, come up with great ideas for stuff, and have it made overseas, like in China or India.
The most popular example being Tom Friedman famously airing the claim, in 2004, of an alleged American who had lost his job to outsourcing and recovered by selling a T-shirt on it.
This was subsequently exposed as a joke on the Register, where it was discovered by cartoonist Tom Tomorrow who called the columnist over it.
A Times ombudsman insisted it was coincidence. So Tomorrow went further, finding an American who had devised a similar ‘artisan’ shirt as a joke. That man had made $10 in profit.
Still another way of looking at it: The ‘artisan’ economy is a modern variation on the Pet Rock concept of business.
If you can come up with something like the old Pet Rock — or some similar gimmick like they used to sell in the old black-light junk gift shop stores in shopping malls, then that’s the ticket.
For those who can’t make something that cheap, through manufacturing in China, there’s stuff like Harrison Harmonica’s $180 blues harp.
Fender Musical Instruments is another example of ‘artisan’ business.
The book on its musical amplifiers entitled The Soul of Tone is an unintentional profile of a company that went from being a middle class employer in California, one making things for the middle class, to a company that sent all its manufacturing overseas, reserving its domestic manufacturing — greatly decreased — to stars and big deal corporate lawyers.
In the context of the book, it’s written of as straightforward smart business. When it was published, three years ago, it seemed that way.
Now it reads poorly. The first part of the book is filled with great amplifiers made in America by guys and gals in Hawaiian shirts.
The end of the book is quite different. It’s filled with oral history from its current designer/artisans explaining how they ship their everyman stuff manufacturing to whatever overseas place is the cheapest.
Coincidentally, all the guys pictured in the front of the book are dead.
This transformation is encapsulated in a quote about one premium domestically made guitar amplifier, the Vibro-King, a $2500 item used by Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend.
“If you’re a rock star or a lawyer who wants a Vibro-King, you’re gonna get one, but the Cyber-Champ (a low end Chinese-made Fender-branded amp) is an example of the relentless march to Asia for manufacturing,” states Shane Nicholas of Fender.
Coincidentally, all economic reports indicate that class hit hardest by the Great Recession has been the low wage earners, those customers targeted by Fender’s cheap goods made in China.
The other option is to get your ‘artisan’ business, like Tesla or Solazyme, gifted partially or entirely by the US government.
However, as a model for the future of employment in a country as big as the United States, the ‘artisan’ idea is utterly ludicrous.
10.27.10
The I-Fart-Sunshine Crowd
The bleeding heart of innovation is in making stuff for the haves. If it’s too damn hard figuring out how to watch college football on Saturdays, they’ve got it covered. If there aren’t enough apps like Harmonica for your TV set, there will be. (Then you can put your kisser to your TV, sort of like James Woods in Videodrome.)
The app economy train, driven by the toil and sweat of Tom Friedman’s value-added “artisans,” is leaving now for the bright new future. Toot-toot! All aboard!
From today’s Wall Street Journal, the Personal Journal section:
“When Chuck Hermes wants to watch a good movie at home, he often shuns [his] 40-inch HDTV … It’s too much trouble for Mr. Hermes, a Minneapolis web designer, to use the cable box and remote … Instead he usually picks up his iPad, which lets him watch a TV show or movie from Netflix with just a few finger swipes on it’s 9.7-inch display.”
Just a few finger swipes.
“Change can’t happen soon enough for Thomas Hawk, an investment adviser in San Francisco … Finding programs to watch or record on [some cable service] is a tedious process, Mr. Hawk says … Mr. Hawk says he has a much better experience accessing television shows and movies … through his Xbox 360 game console. Titles are arranged by genres and represented by colorful artwork which is easy to scan quickly. And … recommendations of movies and television shows, based on his past viewing habits, help him discover interesting new videos to watch.”
From the lede graf on D6, by Katherine Boehret:
“Have you ever watched someone editing photos and videos on a Mac and wondered why they seem much more talented and tech savvy than you are with your Windows PC?”
Yes. Sadly, DD is given the opposite feeling. I want to leave as quickly as possible without seeming too rude.
Meanwhile, in another section of the paper, a news report notes steel production is off worldwide due to the Great Recession. There will be layoffs and profit loss.
And here’s an “innovation camp.” (You won’t be able to watch the link for more than forty seconds, I guarantee it.)
But first, here’s the “innovation camp” showing good ol’ lumpy white nerd “innovation” with iPhones. Jump on this grenade, fellows.
The joke continues to be on us.
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10.26.10
National Bedbug Blitzkrieg
The Environmental Protection Agency is planning its second national bed bug summit for this winter in Washington, D.C. as the blood-sucking pest continues its blitzkrieg on the United States and EPA bans of more effective pesticides are under increasing scrutiny.
The long and short is that bedbugs can’t be controlled in 2010. The story blames most of it on pesticide resistance and the banning of some chemicals in 1996 and 2007. But that’s too simple.
Bedbugs travel with people and the Great Recession has caused a great dislocation. This churn in residences was very apparent during the 2010 Decennial Census. It was and is a golden opportunity for bedbugs to be fruitful and multiply.
Add to it an initial cutback in spraying regimes by property managers faced with diminishing revenues.
In this economy, lots of people, when faced with bedbugs in their apartments or homes, aren’t prepared to spend a few hundred dollars for a professional extermination. Depending on Terminix for social generosity or some local trying to make opportunistic bucks with his new bedbug sniffing dog just isn’t in the cards.
So there has been this:
One of the arguments cited by Rosile and other proponents of reviving the effective pesticides is that desperate bed bug victims – who feel helpless as zombie bed bugs destroy their lives – are resorting to far less safe alternatives to hit back, do it yourself style … Needless to say, heavy-duty agricultural pesticides were never intended to be sprayed at the base of one’s bed, and while certainly effective, they’re a rather perilous route to sleeping soundly.
Blow it out your ass, as some used to say in Pennsy.
From the DD tune, “Bedbugs”:
Spray some Raid around the bed
So to bedbugs you are not fed
Nothin’ like personal experience for the tempering of a strategy.
The “Bedbugs” song by DD. Give it a listen.
The lyrics are here.
10.25.10
Monday Morning Fail
Weekend full of good news lads!
The President will cave and give tax cuts to the rich after the Democrats are bombed on election day. And 60 Minutes had roomfuls of desperate tearful people out of work for two years with no help in sight.
Then there’s Paul Krugman today:
And if they take one or both houses of Congress, complete policy paralysis — which will mean, among other things, a cutoff of desperately needed aid to the unemployed and a freeze on further help for state and local governments — is a given. The only question is whether we’ll have political chaos as well, with Republicans’ shutting down the government at some point over the next two years. And the odds are that we will.
The Los Angeles Times sent op-ed page dude Doyle McManus to Pennsylvania to the get the usual-mixed-up-voter likely to choose really bad things story. Every major newspaper has again gone to Pennsy.
One voter proclaimed himself a “Teddy Roosevelt” kind of guy. This is sort of bad news since William Howard Taft, in the guise of the Tea Party, is in the ascendant.
Really now, though, can you think of anything more witless than asking a 79-year-old white guy about his politic leanings in the interior of Pennsylvania in 2010?
Then again, the same guy, under the mistaken impression that the Democrats had political hegemony and actually were able to do great things with it. Like my mom, who always said the same thing for thirty years until she lost her mind, every election — a time for tossing out the party alleged to be in power so that too much of it wasn’t focused in the hands of a single philosophy.
He said that the economy made him want to vote Republican but that his support for abortion rights made him want to vote Democratic.
“I’ll say this, though,” he added. “I do believe in the separation of powers. You give the whole thing to one party, it’s not good.”
Watches only Fox, he added.
To give you an example of what Pennsylvania is like, here’s an item.
One of DD’s old pals sent this information in on a revolution about to take place in alcohol sales.
To get this you have to understand Pennsylvania has what’s called a Liquor Control Board.
That means you can’t buy wine, liquor or beer in the supermarket. Like everyone normal in most of the country.
So in 2010, a stirring change is being made.
Now the Board will launch wine kiosks in supermarkets.
Implemented in a way harmonious with security procedures for the war on terror, it is such a splendid idea, guaranteed to warm the hearts of teetotalers everywhere.
My friend informs, from the Lehigh Valley:
1. [Wine] will be in a vending machine.
2. I have to breathe into a Breathalyzer.
3. I have to look into a camera monitored by state employees.
4. I have to show my driver’s license. (Well, this one’s OK.)So, yes, it’s definitely Pennsylvania. We’ve been able to buy beer at some supermarkets, like Wegmans, for a while. I haven’t done it, but I’ve heard from others who say it’s a pain. The beer has to be purchased separately. You cannot add it to your cart with the rest of your order. If you have groceries, you apparently have to pay for those, take them to your car and come back to buy the beer.
And now you know why they are the way they are in Pennsylvania. Logic does not work there.
DD can’t think of a single better thing than putting your mouth around a supermarket wine kiosk Breathalyzer in Pennsy during the winter flu season. That’ll be way big.
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10.24.10
The Douchebag
Tom Friedman, today, filling the job he does so well. Being a public enemy, telling everyone else to eat their peas, consulting with his fancy and fine pals on what the unlucky proles are going to have to morph into so as not to always be in the poor house.
You’ll have to be an “artisan.” In other words, the concept I’ve relentlessly dumped on over the last few months.
If you can’t write iGadget apps, you’ll can be a bedpan technician who gives value added, or be a maker of $180 dollar harmonicas for rich lawyers.
Or work in the Fender Musical Instruments custom shop, making $25,000 Eddie Van Halen relics.
Friedman:
Fifteen years ago, there were no industries around Google “search??? or “iPhone applications.??? Today, both are a source of good jobs. More will be invented next year. There is no fixed number of jobs. We just have to make sure there is no fixed number of Americans to fill them — aided by good U.S. infrastructure and smart government incentives to attract these new industries to our shores.
But not everyone can write iPhone apps. What about your nurse, barber or waiter? Here I think Lawrence Katz, the Harvard University labor economist, has it right. Everyone today, he says, needs to think of himself as an “artisan??? — the term used before mass manufacturing to apply to people who made things or provided services with a distinctive touch in which they took personal pride. Everyone today has to be an artisan and bring something extra to their jobs.
Yes, it’s pretty obvious not everyone can write Harmonica or be enough of a programmer to spend their spare time putting stubbornly antagonizing thirty second videos of their iPhones to their lips on YouTube.
You must bring something “extra” to your work of cleaning toilets, of delivering pizza, of greeting everyone as a potential shoplifter at the door of the big box stores, of being a whore.
Yes, even the days of doing a simple blow and go are over! That’s so average.
When you get a part-time job at the giant consumer electronics store selling everything made in China, you will have to have a deep knowledge of the crap you’re peddling to earn that barely about minimum wage.
Only the application or rocket scientist expertise and exquisite public relations with the customer in all things will get us where we need to be.
Friedman instructs, employing the wisdom of some Harvard vizier:
For instance, says Katz, the baby boomers are aging, which will spawn many health care jobs. Those jobs can be done in a low-skilled way by cheap foreign workers and less-educated Americans or they can be done by skilled labor that is trained to give the elderly a better physical and psychological quality of life. The first will earn McWages. The second will be in high demand. The same is true for the salesperson who combines passion with a deep knowledge of fashion trends, the photo-store clerk who can teach you new tricks with your digital camera while the machine prints your film, and the pharmacist who doesn’t just sell pills but learns to relate to customer health needs in more compassionate and informative ways. They will all do fine.
But just doing your job in an average way — in this integrated and automated global economy — will lead to below-average wages. Sadly, average is over. We’re in the age of “extra,??? and everyone has to figure out what extra they can add to their work to justify being paid more than a computer, a Chinese worker or a day laborer.
Think of all the people you pass on the sidewalk. Or those you jostle with in line at the supermarket.
Boy, that’s a crowd where everyone can easily figure out how to be “extra,” how to earn more than a computer or a Chinese factory worker.
All the young men in droopy shorts, the middle-aged guys with stomachs hanging over their belts, etc. Yeah, that’s doable.
In related news, a reader comment from Friday begs republishing:
DD, let’s help fund your fine blog and future tomes by releasing a China Toilet Blooz ringtone, made right here in the USA with homegrown talent for use on crap China phones.
That is a fine idea. I mean it, too!
The trick is getting it sold by iJobsland.
So lead me in the right direction.
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10.20.10
In France
“Never try to get your peter sucked in France,” sings Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson on Frank Zappa’s In France. “They got some coffee, eatin’ right through the cup!”
The lyrics are funny, juvenile and half supercilious and but the band can’t wait to get back to France. Well, maybe they can but the view is not as unremittingly hostile as the usual treatment given to the French in the US.
Here’s a rhetorical question: Have you ever not seen some American, when presented with a critical view by a Frenchman (or an Englishman), retaliate with a version of “We saved your rotten asses in WW II!”
Anyway, news from France these days shows the French have guts, something lacking in the land of exceptionalism in all things.
The Interior Ministry said that 1.1 million people demonstrated throughout France on Tuesday, down from 1.23 million on Oct. 12. In Paris, the police said that 67,000 people demonstrated, down from 89,000. The main union, the C.G.T., said that 3.5 million people demonstrated throughout France on both days.
Unions, students and other workers have protested in a way that’s highly disruptive — blocking fuel distribution, ensuring one third of the country’s gas stations have gone empty. Among with many other actions.
All of it in response to austerity politics by the French government, the raising of the retirement age in France, along with other attacks on the social safetynet, for purposes of deficit cutting have the people in the street.
The French do not want American-style capitalism.
In 2010, that’s a logical and decent view to hold.
In the US, it’s obvious the opposite is in place.
The only social protester is by angry and nuts hick whites who hate the president and everyone not like them, who wish to destroy what little is actually left of any social safetynet. And, of course, protect the very wealthy from taxation.
Like Zappa, you could write a funny song about it. However, generally, the only songs written are like this or this. And they are neither funny nor satirical.
Pete Seeger it ain’t.
In France America.
The French do have some American-style rub off. The current national argument over the Roma has some similarity to the GOP antipathy toward Mexicans and the US Latino population. Only, by our standards, it’s more tepid. Their social generosity and tolerance would still seem to currently be much greater than ours.
The Tea Party has nothing on France.
“If it is not stopped quickly, this disorder which is aimed at paralysing the country could have consequences for jobs by damaging the normal running of economic activity,” [Sarkozy] said in a statement yesterday.
Jean Pelin, director general of France’s chemical industries association, said that the strike had already cost his sector an estimated billion euros in lost turnover, around 100 million euros (£88 million) for every extra strike day.
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10.19.10
Economic collapse causes road paint shortage
In the past few months there have been many stories, often buried inside newspapers, on a national shortage of road paint.
It’s a complicated picture but mainly has to do with the economic collapse and subsequent shortages of raw materials, one of which is made in China.
A collection of road paint shortage stories can be seen here using Google.
A report by the American Traffic Safety Services Association is here and describes the issues succinctly.
The problem is global in nature, the report states in its overview.
“The raw materials shortages are a result of limited availability of certain resins and rosins … as well as a shortage of titanium dioxide,” it continues.
As a result pavement marking paint manufacturers have been running below capacity in the US. And since many small business contractors are responsible for distributing and marking roadways throughout the US, their business has slumped. In the ATSSA June report reads “[this] would … likely result in bankruptcies and layoffs, thereby possibly reducing competition in the future when the market normalizes.”
In other words, only the strong survive.
“The chemical industry, as a whole, has endured the global economic downturn … and was forced to reduce production to retain profitability,” it reads.
Phenol and rosin ester production, key materials in the chain of paint manufacturing, slumped in the US. The economic collapse also brought about the shuttering of one Dow Chemical plant for the sake of retaining profit margins, thereby killing one third of American capacity.
China came through the global collapse in good shape and its roadway construction has soared.
Consequently, it has reserved all its production of titanium dioxide, another raw material used in road paint, for internal use.
And you have guessed it, the US gets fifteen percent of its titanium dioxide from China.
Oof! Another epic fail.
“These events have had a devastating impact on US production of roadway marking materials,” the report reads glumly.
“Now as the economy has begun to improve, overall demand has increased, but full production has not returned thereby exacerbating shortages.”
The ATTSA consulted chemical manufacturers in hopes of coming up with alternative courses of action for responding to the roadway marking paint crisis.
But no alternatives exist to the current market and conditions.
“Seventy eight percent of manufacturers reported they were having difficulty obtaining resins/binders to produce pavement marking materials while 56 percent reported difficulty in obtaining titanium dioxide,” it said.
The ATTSA suggested alternatives to roadway paint, in the meantime.
These included “temporary markers” and “flexible channelizers.”
“The shortage of materials has not affected tape, so inlay tape could be substituted on new asphalt.”
This year’s dead opossums will have to wait.
10.18.10
Right wing web only newspaper wonders about CA
“In some key Senate and governors’ races, the ‘left coast’ of California, Washington, and Oregon isn’t tilting toward GOP as much as the rest of the country,” writes the Christian Science Monitor. “Why not?”
Essentially, it must be because we’re all anti-American anti-family anti-values gays and/or weirdos who smoke pot and still wear hippie clothes. Yep, guilty as charged.
It’s pretty simple, really.
It’s a bad time — in California, anyway — to be seen as a vain rich person from the Silicon Valley.
Barbara Boxer’s ads on Carly Fiorina aridly speaking of outsourcing HP jobs to China have killed her.
The imagery is stark and ugly.
As for Meg Whitman, she was called ‘robotic’ by the Los Angeles Times and pilloried over the lie detector thing by Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez. She also has the great reputation one accrues when tagged with having spent more of your own money on your campaign than anyone else in US history, ever. So if you want to create the impression that you stand for something besides government that can be bought by great personal wealth …
Whitman and Fiorina are repugnant candidates in a blue state where repugnance hasn’t been transformed into a character asset. Notably, Governor Arnold has not rushed to aid Whitman.
As for the Tea Party, it would be expected to be almost non-existent in LA County and around San Francisco, and it is.
It’s not South Dakota here, where 250 at a Ted Nugent showing in Rapid City is news.
When the Tea Party has made news in the local paper, it was to be made fun of for its rally in Beverly Hills starring Pat Boone and Victoria Jackson. It merited two articles in the LATimes, both ridiculing. The people in attendance, drily noted as examples of there not being many of the GOP over on the west side.
So despite the sign in the guarded property across the el Molino Street bridge in Pasadena, the one stating “Putting liberals in Congress is like putting PIRANHAS in your child’s playpool,” we’re immune.
It hasn’t helped that the Latino voting block largely despises the GOP.
“But the perception that the tea party has no effect in California is off base, says Eric Garris, a Republican activist and founder of Antiwar.com. He says he was at a tea party rally with more than 1,000 people a few weeks ago, but it received no press coverage,” added the Monitor.
One thousand is a counting error here.
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Made in China: Rare earth elements, US deindustrialization
About a month ago, Steve Aftergood’s Secrecy blog published one of the many Congressional Research Reports, a taxpayer funded analysis withheld from the public.
It’s title: Rare Earth Elements: The Global Supply Chain.
And it is here.
It discussed China’s virtual monopoly on the rare earth elements “needed in many industrial and national security applications, from flat panel displays to jet fighter engines.”
And over the past few weeks, news agencies in the US have published stories, usually in the backpages, on China cutting Japan off from rare earth shipments in a trade war, political retaliation for the latter country’s seizing of a Chinese ship.
Faced with separation from rare earth shipments, Japan promptly caved in.
The Congressional Research Service issues studies on policy issues when they’re requested by various members of that body, usually in advance of hearings or possible proposed legislation. The CRS reports do not reveal the identity of the requestors.
Today in the New York Times, Paul Krugman addresses China’s monopoly on the rare earth elements. It is just another example of American corporate business and political shortsightedness.
Or the attitude that rare earth mining had to be disposed of in the US because it was too damn dirty and there was so much more money to be made by shipping it to China and turning to financial instruments made by Wall Street.
I don’t know about you, but I find this story deeply disturbing, both for what it says about China and what it says about us. On one side, the affair highlights the fecklessness of U.S. policy makers, who did nothing while an unreliable regime acquired a stranglehold on key materials. On the other side, the incident shows a Chinese government that is dangerously trigger-happy, willing to wage economic warfare on the slightest provocation …
You really have to wonder why nobody raised an alarm while this was happening, if only on national security grounds. But policy makers simply stood by as the U.S. rare earth industry shut down. In at least one case, in 2003 — a time when, if you believed the Bush administration, considerations of national security governed every aspect of U.S. policy — the Chinese literally packed up all the equipment in a U.S. production facility and shipped it to China.
The news here, as usual in the US of Fail, is all bad.
“The United States was once self-reliant in domestically produced [rare earth elements], but over the past 15 years has become 100% reliant on imports, primarily from China …” states the Congressional Research Report at Secrecy blog.
Notably, manufacturing of all the domestic consumer products requiring the rare earths was also shipped to China.
Military hardware and weapons production that requires them — stealth bombers and smart bombs … was not.
But you knew that without me having to tell you.
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