Business

Wisconsin Electricity Situation

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First and foremost I would like to thank Jonthan for inviting me to become a part of Chicago Boyz.   I have admired this blog  for a long time and am looking forward to being a contributor.   I have written for a while over at my “home base”, Life In The Great Midwest.   We have  three contributors over there and write on a variety of topics.   I  will keep most of my “cat blogging” over there and try to post  some of the more serious  issues  that I write about here.

 One of the topics we spend a lot of time on at LITGM is energy.    My co-contributor Carl is what  I would consider an expert in the field, having spent many years in various roles that have had to do with energy.   My post here about the current situation in Wisconsin  is in response to his recent post about the woes of  Illinois.  

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“Requirements Kill”

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A commenter on the post immediately preceding this one links to his own thoughtful essay on project management. This kind of thing may be old hat for the PM gurus here but it’s meat to me. You might like the essay if you, like me, are interested in the dynamics of managing big technical projects, and particularly if you are interested in how projects fail.

How I Learned to be the Adult – And Why I Often Forget – 2 –

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May 10 update: Instapundit links to another discussion of Rubin by Will Wilkinson in The Economist.

May 9 post:

When I started my little business, I despaired when a large chain opened down the street two weeks before we did. What I should have recognized was that large chains & naïfs could see our college town needed copy shops. We survived for quite a while. Tired and worn out, both from a pregnancy in my forties and a series of rather stupid business moves on my part, I sold out years later to a locally run company. We were doing several times the amount of business we had that first year and, while some such shops had come and gone during thirteen years, several survived, making varying but real profits.

I was wrong, but I was working from the gut. Paul Rubin’s “Evolution, Update: Immigration and Trade” points to why I felt as I did and why I was wrong. Just as it is probably not always wise to do what both villains & heroes do in adventure dramas head for the high ground we retain instincts that once helped us survive.

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How I Learned to be the Adult – And Why I Often Forget – 1 –

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This afternoon, while I was grading, I looked up, hearing in the background the great speech at the end of The Caine Mutiny, addressing the Fred McMurray character. He’s a writer – one of those articulate intellectuals Shannon describes. I wouldn’t argue that Shannon doesn’t have a point, but I think that speech points to what lies beneath the weakness of such men’s arguments. The writer is an observer, a voyeur, in the world of the Navy. He posits theories, in this case condescending toward the Humphrey Bogart character, clearly of a lower class and with limited education, but a man who has been willing to act in the Navy when few did. Applying the fount of so much theory of a half century ago (Freud) to him, McMurray found him inadequate. But the writer wasn’t even willing to take responsibility for those words. On the stand, he hemmed and hawed – and lied. Neither the men who mutinied nor the captain escaped because they made decisions – some wrong-headed. They were accountable. He was not: except in one brief, drunken speech by the defendant’s lawyer, a man who is ashamed to have made the ship’s commander come apart on the stand, but who realizes that is his responsibility to get his client acquitted.

Words were once commitments – our integrity rode on our ability to live up to those words. This is no longer true – that movie of a half century ago followed in the path of those like Prufrock, who see their lives as revised and revised again. We are not committed by our vows, by our loyalties, by our words.

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Perhaps the Most Bizarre Comparison of the Year (So Far)

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The American is an interesting new business magazine, edited by James K Glassman. In the February issue, there’s an article by John Makin on China’s new Tibetan railway. The article starts with the following comparison: In 2005, Americans spent about $10 billion on women’s intimate apparel. During the period 2001-2006, China spent $4 billion building the 710-mile rail line from Golmud to Lhasa. From this comparison, Makin draws the conclusion that the contrast:

…highlights the difference today between the richest country in the world and the country that is gaining wealth at the fastest pace. One is consuming, the other investing.

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