Tech

Burnout

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Emmett Shear, at Twitter (@eshear) suggests that Burnout, which he defines as “a particularly modern affliction, feeling simultaneously overwhelmed and paralyzed” is best thought of as a symptom with many different causes–the most important of which are permanent on-call, broken steering, and mission doubt.   ‘Permanent on-call’ is self-explanatory, ‘broken steering’ is the sense that your actions have no impact, ‘mission doubt’ arises when you question whether this work is really worth doing at all…ie, even if the steering was functioning properly, maybe this trip isn’t worthwhile.

It’s a useful formulation.   I’d note that some jobs have always had a permanent on-call aspect; railway workers, for example…see Linda Niemann’s memoir of her experiences on the old Southern Pacific Railroad–no cell phones or even pagers in those days, but there were ‘callers’ who would come to your residence and wake you up when you were needed.   Also sailors.   But on-call jobs are a lot more common today than they were 20 or 30 years ago.

I think the feeling of ‘broken steering’ has also long been present, in the case of large-bureaucracy employees and some manufacturing workers.   An assembly-line worker knows that his task does contribute to the final product..but the connection probably seems pretty remote and abstract when your actual job is to tighten three bolts.

‘Mission’ can be understood in two ways: the purpose of the job in terms of what it produces, and the purpose of the job in terms of income to support yourself and your family.   As the second factor becomes taken for granted, the first surely becomes more important.   (See Maslow)

Very relevant to this topic is Zeynep Ton’s recent book The Good Jobs Strategy.   She discusses the unpredictably-fluctuating employee schedules which are so common in retail..maybe not pure on-call, but close to it…and the disruptive effect these schedules have on an employee’s personal life.   She also talks about time pressures that lead to jobs inevitably being done poorly.   A former Target cashier, for example, said she was under so much pressure to ring up sales as quickly as possible that if a customer bought 10 bottles of Gatoradein two flavorsshe would scan the first one and then hit the quantity key for ten.   The inventory system thought the store had sold 10 lime-flavored Gatorades and no cherry-flavored Gatorades, rather than the mix that had actually just been sold.   She also cites a study of a $10 billion company which found that the system had the right information for only 35% of the products…for the other 65%, the discrepancies between the system inventory balances and the actual quantities available averaged 5 units…a third of the target stocking levels.   In one case, a certain item was continually out of stock, to the frustration of a regular customer.   It turned out that the inventory system thought there were 42 of these on hand, whereas there were actually none.   AND, since this particular store hadn’t sold any units in several weeks (because they didn’t have any to sell), the system automatically reduced the target stocking level for that item!   Situations like this are surely destructive both of sense of mission and of a functioning steering system.

Your thoughts?

Humor and Seriousness

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Katherine Boyle is a partner at the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz and she is a thoughtful writer on many topics.   See her post The Case for American Seriousness at Bari Weiss’s substack; also, her posts at her own substack, The Rambler, especially those concerning family, parenting, and technology.

In an interview, she said “The biggest criticism I got from the (American Seriousness) piece, and other times I’ve written about seriousness, is that it doesn’t leave room for frivolity, play or the unseriousness that makes us deeply human. And I empathize with that sentiment, but I don’t think the opposite of seriousness is humor: the opposite of seriousness is irony.”

I agree absolutely that there is no inconsistency between seriousness and humor…quite the contrary, I would say.   Concerning Irony, I’m reminded of something C S Lewis wrote.   The following is from The Screwtape Letters, a book of advice from a senior devil to his protege about how to do the maximum harm to humans:

But Flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers that inherent it the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy: it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it.

Irony, I think, is closely related to the Flippancy about which Lewis’s devil wrote.   Also related to irony is Sarcasm, concerning which Field Marshal Lord Wavell offered some thoughts:

Explosions of temper do not necessarily ruin a general’s reputation or influence with his troops; it is almost expected of them (“the privileged irascibility of senior officers,” someone has written), and it is not always resented, sometimes even admired, except by those immediately concerned.  But sarcasm is always resented and seldom forgiven. (emphasis added)   In the Peninsula the bitter sarcastic tongue of Craufurd, the brilliant but erratic leader of the Light Division, was much more wounding and feared than the more violent outbursts of Picton, a rough, hot-tempered man.

Wavell defined Sarcasm as “being clever at someone else’s expense.”    In his view, sarcasm always offends, and a general (or, presumably, any other officer or individual in a position of authority) should never indulge in it.

I think that in many organizations in America today–perhaps, even, most organizations of any size–fear of Cancellation has reached the point at which easy interaction among people–which includes a certain amount of humor–has been replaced with a kind of fragile pseudo-formality.   This is not good for either innovation or productivity, not to mention its toxic impact on individual lives.

What are your thoughts on humor, seriousness, irony, and sarcasm?

 

Visit to a Noteworthy Robot: The Amazon No-Check-Out System

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Amazon has been developing a no-check-out system for retailers…the idea is that the customer just picks up up what he wants, walks out, and automatically gets charged the proper amount.   The systems were initially installed at some Amazon Go stores, and there is now one installed at a Whole Foods in the Glover Park neighborhood of Washington, DC.

I needed to pick up some groceries, and had been curious about how well the system actually works, so stopped into this store last week.

You scan your phone (with the appropriate app installed) when you walk into the store.   There are cameras everywhere; they watch what you get and, anything you put back on the shelf.   When you’ve picked up everything you want, scan your phone again when walking out (there are numerous parallel stations for doing this) and just walk out. Within an hour or so, you will get a receipt that shows what your bought and what you were charged for it.

I didn’t have a lot of time (the Uighur restaurant across the street was very slow), so didn’t get a much. But I did pick up 3 black plums, 2 bananas, and a steak…being curious about whether the system could really deal with picking an item and then putting it back, I did just this with a can of black beans…took it off with the shelf, took it around in the shopping basket, then came back to the shelf where I found it and returned it there.

The receipt did show up about an hour later, and was correct, including the absence of the black beans from the list.

Interesting question as to why it takes so long to get the receipt.   I’m sure there’s a lot of image processing involved, but an hour seems long for a fully automated process.   I suspect that there may be human involvement to deal with cases where the automation gets confused.

This system would seem to have quite a few advantages for a retailer…lower labor costs, potentially-improved customer satisfaction (compared with the often-very-irritating self-checkout systems in common use), AND better use of floor space…the typical grocery store requires a nontrivial amount of its space for the checkout lines and stations.

On the other hand, there’s no assistance for those who would like help with bagging.   And people without credit cards and phones are out of luck, there have already been some objections from activists on this point.

Has anyone else had any experience with one of these installations, either at the Whole Foods or at one of the Amazon Go stores?

 

Nancy Pelosi and I Have Something in Common

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…both of us will benefit from increases in the price of Nvidia stock.

Paul Pelosi acquired 20,000 shares of NVDA (via a call option exercise) in June of this year.   I’ve been an NVDA shareholder for several years, and sold part of the position at prices considerably more favorable than today’s price of $178/share.

Given that the CHIPS act, which is intended to benefit the US semiconductor industry, is now before Congress, concerns have been raised about whether Paul Pelosi’s purchase might have been influenced by insider information related by his wife.

I note that Nvidia is not thrilled with the bill as currently drafted: it provides benefits for semiconductor manufacturing companies, and Nvidia is not a manufacturer…it is a   ‘fabless semiconductor company’, ie, a design, software, and marketing house.   The actual manufacturing is done by contract manufacturers, especially Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.   Some market participants do,   however, have hopes that in the final version of the bill the subsides will be expanded to encompass chip-design companies.

The bill would include ‘guardrails’ to prohibit recipients of the subsidies from making investments to expand chip manufacturing capacity in countries of concern, namely China. There may be an exemption for countries-of-concern whether that chips being made are at >28nm notes, ie, a long way from high-end.   But one industry analyst said:

The guardrail doesn’t change that most of Intel’s or Texas Instruments’ test and packaging is done in China and will continue to be done in China. What use are new fabs for national security if they have to go to China for test and packaging anyways?

I think there are a couple of issues here.   First is the issue of Congresspeople potentially profiting from inside information.   The Pelosi buy does look very bad from this standpoint, especially when there are headlines associating Nancy Pelosi’s support for the CHIPS bill with increases in certain stocks–which include NVDA.   It’s quite possible that this particular transaction is an innocent one, given that the bill as it stands is not one that Nvidia would have preferred, and also that NVDA price is now low enough, in the context of recent history and the general excellence and positioning of the company, that one could develop an entirely reasonable ‘buy’ case without benefit of any inside information.   But the issue of officeholders profiting from inside information is a serious one, and becomes more serious with every further entwinement of government into the details of the economy.

But there is an even more important issue: Do we really want the level of investment in particular industries to be largely controlled by government?   It is true that the semiconductor industry is vital to the US economy and to US national defense…but this is true of a lot of other industries as well.   How about pharmaceuticals and their precursor materials, for example?…I seem to remember threats from Chinese sources to let American burn in the fire of Covid by withholding pharmaceuticals.   What about large transformers, which are vital to the electrical grid and take a long time to manufacture?   What about key minerals, many of which are in fact present in the United States but are mostly sourced from elsewhere because of legal and cultural hostility toward mining?   What about machine tools?

I have low confidence in the ability of Congress, or of government in general, to determine what industries and what specific segments of those industries are truly vital.   There are many complex interconnections which are not easily understood.   I remember that during the pandemic, GE Healthcare was asked to produce a large number of ventilators in an accelerated timeframe. It turned out that they were using a very small contractor…a 3D printing shop, IIRC…which had been shut down as ‘nonessential’.

I’d prefer to see legislative solutions which improve the US business climate for manufacturers in general and for ‘thing’ businesses in general, to the crafting of specific ‘solutions’ for specific industries.   Legislation should deal with the general case as much as possible, rather than functioning as a Reverse Bill of Attainder.   But developing such legislation requires ability to think in abstract terms, and is not a comfortable to politicians who think mainly in terms of interest groups to be used or placated.

Here is the text of the CHIPS bill.

There is also a proposed broader US competitiveness bill, the United States Innovation and Competition Act.

Here’s a WSJ Opinion piece on the CHIPS bill and its proposed galactic expansions.

And here’s Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and Ford CEO Jim Farley arguing the case for semiconductor subsidization.

Thoughts?

 

 

 

 

 

Extremely Cool

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An animated explanation of how a mechanical watch works.