| | Jules:
Wish I knew; the operative plan when caught in a stampede of stupid seems to be 'duck' as best you can, which is often imperfectly. I'll tell you how I've attempted to duck it.
A new efficiency has arisen. These aren't the days when Beth Steel(who I once consulted for in the 80s)employs 330,000 people.
The modern narrative is and has been, when you employ others, you are riding them like ponies, extracting all of their excess value. Your guilt is precisely your ability to employ others.
Marx and his have won that argument in this North America.
So don't.
Instead, focus your efforts on the new efficiency, which is, how much value can you create on your own, without unfairly taking advantage of others by offering them employment? Or, and this is getting harder(but not impossible) -- choose those you work for and with carefully. It's never been more important.
In the broken modern political environment, who is left who swallows that yoke proudly and goes ahead and takes advantage of folks anyway, by employing them? There is a new political bias that shepherds those who could care less about any stigma associated with taking advantage of others into that role; we've exaggerated that with our politics. If being an employer is defacto evidence of criminality, then might as well be a criminal if you are an employer. That is not to say that every employer is corrupt these days and every employment opportunity ripe for a hosing, just that, our politics have encouraged that state of affairs.
Your other option is, don't be an employer or employee.
Facebook, the biggest IPO excitement in recent history, employs maybe 3,400, not 330,000; whatever Wall Street once was, it is today a cul de sac where capital goes to die in quiet little eddies, employing as few as possible as the new efficiency.
I've done business the past 30 years all over the world, for all kinds of entities. Governments, militaries, businmesses -- even CND. (Spent a lot of quality time in Halifax at The Five Fishermen and drinking Moose Milk on Sunday mornings. My tech toys ended up on every Canadian destroyer and all four CND submarines.)
Without so much as a secretary, working with others organized amazingly similar to me, not only in America, but everywhere.
Diversity, Trust, and Prosperity.
Not just Canada and Mexico. Qatar, Egypt, Bahrain, Israel, Chile, Argentina, Panama, Brazil, Phillipines, Tahiti, Guam, Korea, Japan, Bangladesh, UK, France, Greece. I might have missed a few. Oh yeah -- Cuba. With some irony, during the Clinton administration, under advice of the lawyer manning the Cuba desk at the State Department, who laid out precisely for me the blueprint of how to legally get my product into the Havana Airport; sell through a Canadian distributor, into his general inventory.
Caymans corp, fully disclosed to the IRS, as an aid to international business. Diversity and Trust, when it comes to international business, still includes a healthy dose of L/C handling. Still no secretary. At most, partners. Peers, organized in a similar fashion, with similar incentives. Was as much freedom as I could find in this world; doing business out of the Caymans was especially eye opening.
That part of my career was a fifteen year run. It was fun. Lost in plain sight, buried in a tiny niche.
What was the proximate cause of this run? There was no singular cause, other than risk based effort and reward. Part of it was figuring out how to get DOS to do four things at once, back in the late 80s. Three independently scheduled synchronous (ie, not interruptible) channels of satellite data downlink plus a normal foreground DOS session. It included an 'aha' moment, me waking up at 4:00am and driving to my office to try it. Part of it was risking tens of thousands of dollars on a speculative prototype and showing it to our Navy. I bid on what they asked for, and then I showed them what I thought they actually needed, which was not what they had asked for. (They asked for some functionality in two 19 inch racks bolted to their ships in comm rooms, I showed them a prototype running on a ruggedized laptop deployed out of a duffel bag, deployable with their teams.) That was risk, and it resulted in a fifteen year run of opportunity worldwide in that niche. I was able to carve out a niche against the Harris Corps and Raytheons and British Aerospaces for as long as my technology was better...and until their assembly line of soft landing corruption caught up. But it was an interesting fifteen years in the meantime. No complaints.
Could I have employed more people in that enterprise and made more money? Sure. Towards what end? Theirs or mine? Because the narrative I was spoonfed everyday by Marxists in the Ivy league was that employers suck all the excess value of their employees and ride them like vultures on ponies. (Or at least, in the case of Harris Corp, Raytheon, and British Aerospace, those willing to be ridden like that.)
For 30 years, I've heeded their scolding; neither an employee nor employer be. Now, at the far end my career, purely consulting, that is still the new efficiency.
It's important who you work for; it's important who you voluntarily team with. That is the new efficiency. That is the challenge of skirting tribal politics.
And it isn't hard at all, especially today, when the myth of job security is becoming apparent. (This used to be #1 thing holding people back.)
That is how folks duck today...and many are.
If that isn't a problem, it isn't a problem. I know it isn't a problem for them. If it is a problem for others, then others need to decide if their solution to that problem is going to be based on force or a new politics based on free association and incentives.
In the meantime, while others figure that out, let's look forward to those Super Bowl parties this weekend,
I could be wrong. The answer might be, not enough federal spending on defense contractors like me. Or too much. (I've been mostly out of that for over twelve years.)
Or the stinking turd at the bottom of these failing economies is the politics we've long suffered, going back to LBJ and Nixon and his 1970 Economic Stabilization Act, and these two parties of fools.
Freedom finds a way.
regards,
Fred
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