Worthwhile Reading

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Waiting for Good Dough.  Excerpts of some thoughts on central banking and monetary policy, from a newsletter issued by Paul Singer’s hedge fund, Elliott Management.  Best post/article title I’ve seen in a long time.

Remote work in industry during the pandemic and maybe afterwards…some thoughts from the CEO of GE Digital.

Skills development in industry.  Career progression doesn’t always have to involve college education.

Grim excerpts and critiques an Atlantic article which is a rather hysterical attack on a class of people who are very different from the author.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen  (he was coauthor of the first widely-used web browser and cofounder of Netscape) writes about the need for America to focus on building things. Surely most of us here will agree with that spirit, but a lot of his specifics seem dubious to say the least. Stuart Schneiderman offers some thoughts; worthwhile comment thread.

A cat and a dog offer differing views about the merits of the work from home approach.

25 Stories About Work – Harassing a Fortune 500 CEO

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A short one here.

I run a small business here in the hinterlands of this great country and many years ago I had the opportunity to poke a Fortune 500 CEO in the eye, repeatedly.

To this day I can’t remember how or why I got his personal email and cell numbers but I did. It was likely some sort of a mistake that was made at a trade show or something. The net is that I had them.

I was a distributor for one of this company’s many lines. They made some completely awful decisions that had to do with the local market. I called the CEO several times and told him that these decisions needed to be reversed, immediately, or literally 100% of their sales would go away in my markets.

Of course this is exactly what happened, and with relish, I called the CEO after their sales in my markets went to the level of zero, previously predicted, and asked him to tell me that I was right and how smart I was. I also told him what a great job his competitors were doing since we had moved away to their products in a heartbeat when the disastrous strategy was rolled out. He shouted at me and I laughed at him and asked him again to tell me how right and smart I was. He hung up on me after using some bad words. I laughed my ass off.

Eventually he got tired of my nonsense and blocked me, but it was fun since he actually took my abuse so many times (even though my “abuse” was actually the boots on the ground truth). I started out polite and respectful, but when he acted like I was just some dopey hick from the sticks that didn’t know jack, well, I was forced to taunt him several times, as Monty Python used to say.

25 Stories About Work – The Sales and Use Tax Audit

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During a recent conversation I was reminded of our fabulous “25 Stories About Work” series here on the blog and thought I would share one with you. This post is going to be fairly boring to most, although it will be interesting to those who like to hear about what small business owners go through on the daily, and who may also be interested in what happens if you are presented with a sales and use tax audit. The rest is below the fold.

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Cytokine storms

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Covid-19, as a virus, generally does not directly kill. Instead, it fools our own immune system into killing us via the mechanism of a cytokine storm.

It is not the only disease that can provoke cytokine storms. We don’t know how to reliably stop cytokine storms. If we did, we wouldn’t have to shut down the economy. We could just treat those who are starting to get sick so they wouldn’t develop into a cytokine storm, pay the bills, however, and we would all come out trillions of dollars ahead with a death toll of no national or international significance as the only people who would succumb would be those already on death’s door.

If nobody else will say it, I will. We don’t need to close down the majority of our economy just to change what’s written on a death certificate that was coming out anyway.

Diseases will continue to emerge. Any disease that provokes cytokine storms while not killing many itself will be just as scary as Covid-19 and we’ll be back to the question of whether we have another economic shutdown.

Cytokine storms are not just associated with infectious diseases. The first mention of the term in the literature was about graft vs host disease in a 1993 article. They entered into the general public’s imagination 15 years ago with the H5N1 flu. We don’t really understand why they happen and how to reliably stop them from taking a life. This is a public health issue deeper than how we pay for healthcare. It threatens us all and will continue to do so at irregular intervals as new diseases emerge that cause cytokine storms.

So as we move past our currently unsustainable shutdown due to Covid-19, we all have to decide whether we’re going to let cytokine storms go until the next time some disease breaks out and kills significant numbers of people via this mechanism or whether we’re going to treat this seriously so that the next time we’ll be ready. It’s our choice.

Risk Register

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There are, of course, many items that could be placed in a risk register for our ongoing management of COVID-19. I find myself drawn to those categorizable as, or perhaps triggered by, human perception and behavior. By way of limiting the scope of this post to reasonable attention spans, here are my current top 3:

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