It’s easy to think that because suburbs are being built and people are moving into them, that these are the sorts of places that people want to live in. It turns out that there are a lot of people who would prefer a small-town environment.
Here is a lecture by Andres Duany, an architect and housing development planner.
What stuck with me most were images presented early on, of one standard separate-use housing development and one old, mixed-use neighborhood. The second one looked absolutely more attractive, built on a human scale, and more expensive a place to live.
The other lasting impression I had was that the people who think traffic needs to be fed into faster-flowing arteries are probably the same people who thought that channelizing and paving streambeds was a great idea for flood control.
I keep thinking there must be more options, that there are more things to be cut, more places to shave, more details that could lead to some good solution, but I know the truth, that the referendums, extensive earmarking, and federal laws (ironic given California’s attempts to have stricter legislation elsewhere) form the walls of a very nasty little cage.
I went with 18bil in cuts and 6bil in tax increases (gas, of course). I kept the parks and community colleges too. I’m not dead-set against other taxes, but something has to be done about the base budget. No furlough band-aid is going to fix it.
I was speaking to a friend in Australia who had been house hunting for months and suddenly she wasn’t anymore. I asked her what happened.
It turns out that her government was giving out a first-time home owner incentive and that she was going to use it to buy an apartment. But the incentive was set to expire sooner than most applications could get through the pipe so this incentive was increased and extended ‘indefinitely’.
This caused the real estate market to respond by raising prices, negating the benefits of the incentive because a significant number of home buyers would have exactly that much more money available to buy a house with. Gotta check that elasticity before setting up those incentives.
I’m sure we wouldn’t mind a misguided housing price bump around here.
I was reflecting upon the many programs that have come and gone from my system. MiniTab, GAUSS, Stata, SAS… well at least there’s one that I can’t lose a license to.
A while back, Thomas L. Friedman was on the Daily Show to advertise his new book Hot Flat, and Crowded. It may be that he oversimplified his explanation for the show, but I am terribly unimpressed. He said we should overinvest in green technologies, cause a bubble, and reap the benefits.
He said that the dot-com bubble left us internet infrastructure and the financial crisis left us with overpriced condos, and now we need a green bubble to get us out of the financial crisis.
The definition of a bubble is putting in more money than it’s worth. Period. If it is going to pay off in the future, that would be called an investment. So this guy wants us to throw more money into an industry’s R&D than it’s worth, he wants us to lure people into investing in the training, experience, and time that is going to dump their job when the bubble comes due. Ask those bankers and financial analysts if there’s too many to go around. He wants us to do it right now so that we can solve or past excesses, not by learning from our mistakes but by repeating them.
The money that Friedman advocates wasting could be better used in making bigger differences on other problems. Those people who are now considering their careers possibly for the rest of their lives may have been more valuable to society learning and performing in other industries. Our current opportunities as they are, to make investments, could be better spent on less ridiculous schemes.
We did not have to overindulge in internet startups to benefit from investing in IT infrastructure. We didn’t have to make ludicrous choices about home ownership in order to gain what dubious benefits we will get out of this mess. And we certainly don’t have to do it again.
To recognize underinvestment is one thing. To deliberately waste money when there are better uses is absurd.
I’ve had some interesting experience with two insurance companies. I find the contrast in their business models to be quite interesting and their relative behaviors of economic note.
The Subjects
Insurance Company 1 was extremely professional, very polished, respectable, and downright thoughtful. When I came in for an interview, the manager had water on the table, sitting on coasters. He knew I had a bit of a hike to get there. It didn’t take long for both of us to realize that this job was not for me, but he and the front desk treated me with the utmost respect. If I ever want to buy financial services, I would go to this company.
Insurance Company 2 seemed to find things like honesty and integrity to be irrelevant criteria for picking employees and in business practices in general. They may even be a hindrance. I made the mistake of having my contact information available and I received a call, offering me an interview. The phone conversation moved very fast, and deliberately kept me off balance. Long story short, I ended up cold-calling to book interviews for a day.
Manual Spam
The job is pretty simple. You take a stack of names and phone numbers from Monster or Craigslist etc, of all the recently updated resumes. There is absolutely no weeding or grooming. You call. You tell them you’re from the company of a very vague name and want to set up a personal interview. You put in a few questions to see if they are open to selling insurance in the most general sense. You ask a couple questions to strengthen legitimacy. You consider if they will actually show up if you book them. Most likely, you tell them they have an interview tomorrow at some specified time. Here’s the address. Dress well. Have a nice day.
So basically their job is to trick people to come in for interviews, ideally without letting on that the business has anything to do with selling insurance and that the company is interviewing tons and tons and tons of people in group interviews, anyone they can convince to show up.
Booking Incentives
The pay schedule for bookers works like this: A flat fee for every interview you book, an additional flat amount per person that actually shows up, and bonuses for the first two hires that month. They expect a certain percentage of booked individuals to actually show up to the interview.
A booker wants to hit the percentage of shows, but maximize the number of interviews booked from their pile. They want to convince as many people as they can to show up. They are not selecting for people who are best suited to the job. They aren’t looking for those who are particularly inquisitive, bright, or interested. They’re selecting for those who are either complacent or coerceable.
Contrasting Strategies
The strategies of these two companies couldn’t be more different than night and day. The first company while they were willing to speak to anyone, were highly selective and conveyed a sense of integrity. They are looking for people who will have faith in both the company and the product.
The second company relied on less than honest means to bring people in. Neither did the company select for integrity nor did their employees self-select for integrity. They were merely going for quantity hoping to find adequate individuals.
This same strategy applies to the lowliest individual. Bookers are not selected for their integrity. Instead, they must be tolerant of some underhanded tactics. Consequently, the managers cannot trust the bookers. No-shows may have been faked. The management does not quite endorse a sense of honesty in whom they train. I watched one say one thing, then smoothly transition into the opposite, followed by “I believe that honesty is important here.” Oh really. It’s even possible that she lied about how many people showed up. I wouldn’t normally think this, but given I was paid in cash, all the alarms were already going off. Hoo boy.
There are two kinds of salespeople: those who sell products they believe in, and those who sell products they don’t believe in. The ones that are good at selling products they believe in tend to do poorly when selling products they don’t believe in. However, they tend to do better with a product they believe in than the other kind of salesperson with the same product. The first company is looking for those salespeople who will believe in the product. The second company is looking for salespeople that can sell anything.
In the long run though, it is hard to imagine that the second company is going to survive. It’s one thing to look for salespeople who will sell things they don’t believe in. It’s another to pick only from the candidates that have been duped by the booker selling them the interview, free as it may be.
The financial market craziness makes me wish we were back to relatively harmless presidential politics. Someone sent me this story about a honey-stealing bear just before McCain told his overused bear boondoggle story on Friday.
It was very interesting to observe peoples’ behavior last weekend. We went to pick up some kitchen stuff at a popular upscale outdoor mall and the place looked deserted. I mean, there were cars though not as many as usual, but we saw few people actually wandering around. Very dramatic change.
When I heard how Bernenke was on board on this bail-out, a chill went straight down my spine. I really hope that election politics takes a backseat for a bit. Small hope, I know.
I’d first like to say that this author is amazing. In the first few pages, I was struck by how he could present these real figures with the familiarity one would expect of a fiction writer the characters they designed. This is my first McPhee book and it probably won’t be my last. If you’re at all interested in a good story and a glimpse at the environmental scene in the past, stop reading right now and go get that book. If you’re not likely to read this book, read on.
As many of you know, David Brower is a prominent environmentalist best known for his campaign to prevent a dam that would flood parts of the Grand Canyon. McPhee has arranged an elegant setup. He takes Brower out into the field with three of his adversaries. He uses these encounters to portray the nuances of the issues and beautifully illustrates the depth of these four people with background information along the way.
Round 1: Charles Park; geologist, professor, conservationist
Round 2: Charles Fraser; sustainable developer
Round 3: Floyd Dominy; farmer, dam builder, improver of farmland
There are some very remarkable things about these matches that really give the story a lot of depth and much to consider. One is that they all believed that they were doing good. Park thought that mined resources will benefit humanity and not using those resources would result in suffering. Fraser wanted to make nature available to a large number of people and to create something beautiful. Dominy saw the suffering of those hard working people who’d moved out west and could not make a living on their homestead and so from an early age, he built dams so that pioneers could survive. Brower himself wanted to preserve the land for its own sake and saw his cause as a war of attrition.
What was also intriguing was the amount of knowledge the opponents had. Park spent large portions of his year prospecting all over the world, and spends more time outdoors than any of them. Fraser, while not an outdoorsman, has already built a successful development with many environmentally friendly features way ahead of its time, and he has done his background research with an interest in history, recognizing the long record of human use in the area in question. Dominy is a native of the drought-prone areas and knows the needs and desires of the people.
The other thing that was so striking in these comparisons was how they all appreciated nature. No matter how vehemently they may be arguing, no matter how much they may irreconcilably disagree, when faced with the beauty of their surroundings, they would all pause, and enjoy the sight together. They all appreciated and admired the same thing. There is no ruthless destruction. There is no raping of the earth as it were. There were just different priorities.
It was very touching to have this vision of the environmental discussion of the past, and to be able to see the changes and similarities with the discourse of the present day. This portrayal brought respect and humanity to both sides that often gets washed out in the us-vs.-them mentality that often arises. And aside from being useful, it was beautifully written.
Nothing like a 12 mile all-day hike to put you in the mood to sit down and not move for the rest of the weekend! We did Mount Defiance, finishing our trip in the dark due to missing a trail. 12 miles, 10 hours. And then I log in and see a lot of 50-year-olds bragging about doing it in 3 hours! We even ran into one coming down as we were heading up. Crazy!
Despite being relatively pitiful, I feel good.
I had a lot of stray thoughts while the site was down.
We were busily ignoring the Olympics when it suddenly dawned upon us… August 8th, 2008. That’s a very very lucky number. No wonder they tried so hard to claim this one.
Wall-e was an excellent environmentally-themed movie. Even those most distanced from the environment appreciate it and understand responsibility. I got to see the silly inspiration for Wall-e in Short Circuit too.
Kent State is using electric cars on campus. Using electric vehicles in short range places like that is a great idea.
A friend sent me a link to EcoGeek which looks interesting!
I read a few things.
Encounters with the Archdruid: John McPhee is an amazing journalist that takes David Brower out into the environment with three of his adversaries, bringing the environmental debate of the times into a very personal setting.
Stumbling on Happiness: What we think we want isn’t necessarily going to make us happy so we should look to see how it made others feel as our best estimate as to how it will affect us. The book is sprinkled with Adam Smith quotes.
Freakanomics: There’s a surprisingly fun number of ideas in there, basically based on going out and checking the data to see for yourself how people act.
