Zephyr Dear

Hear that? That’s the sound of me pulling on my asbestos underwear. I know that this is the the myth which is going to get me flame-broiled. But hell, it’s November, so let’s talk turkey anyway.

When we last talked, I was mythbusting a long essay by an agency owner who himself was trying to out the “myth” of the consulting agency-turned-product company.

Let’s pick up where we left off, shall we? Here’s a choice quote for starters:

“As mentors to TechStars, MassChallenge and other accelerators we’ve seen a lot of startups come and go. Their initial enthusiasm is often followed by waning cash reserves and one too many pivots. The reality is that only a small percentage of startups actually return anything to their investors. An even smaller percentage hit the big time. Being on the client [startup] side of the fence is way more risky than being the designer or developer [agency].”

Now, none of the above quote is myth; all of it is god’s honest truth, more’s the pity. As the real mythbusters say: Well, there’s your problem.

Think about it…

Imagine a world where every startup was expected to actually make money:

• They would build things they could charge for…
• They would charge for them from day 1…
• which would, of course, cut the dream of hockeystick growth just to pieces

These startups (call them “businesses”) would make good, solid profit, grow slowly… and rarely get bought for a higher than 3x multiplier of yearly revenue.

The whole VC world would collapse.

VCs don’t like small sure things. “You have to speculate to accumulate.” They prefer a bumper crop of failure and one incredibly slim speculative chance at a 10x return. And there’s not much room for speculation when you know exactly how much a product is profiting today, and what its growth trajectory will be. (And by “not much” I mean “virtually none.”)

The only investors famous for betting on sure things are just like Warren Buffett — and nobody reads BuffetCrunch. There is no Buffet Disrupt. “My favorite holding period is forever,” says no VC ever.

Fact: Startups are intended to fail at incredibly high rates.

They are, by the kindest VC-provided definitions available, an act of frenzied hunting-around. No matter how much money or how many mentors you pump into them, that does not change the facts of their existence: They are inherently random and speculative. And thus wasteful.

It sucks to be cannon fodder, but that’s startups, for you.

If you try to emulate this cycle in your product business, you’re either a glutton for punishment… or poisoned by prolonged exposure to Other People’s Money.

Fact: Startups don’t — can’t — care about users.

Startups aren’t actually designed to attract paying customers — you can see that, above, in our little thought experiment. But, you may be saying, they’re sure designed to attract users! Right? Right?

Wrong.

Fact: Startups are designed to attract acquirers.

Yes, I lied a bit above… Startups are designed to attract customers. Or, well, one customer: The one who buys the startup. (In an ideal world, two customers, so they can create a bidding war.)

You know that saying, “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product”? Well, that’s not nearly cynical enough.

You’re not that desirable to the startup, really; it’s not even really selling you. If it were, it’d treat you at least as well as a prize show animal. You’d get premium feed and regular grooming appointents. No, a startup may be patting you on the head distractedly with one hand, but you are not its precious blue ribbon, not by a long shot.

You’re not the product; you’re so much lower than that. You’re destined for the grist hopper, to feed the actual product (the startup itself). Sometimes the startup smears buckets of your blood on its face and says

“Hey Google, look at my sexy bright red lips, I’m soooo fertile and full of users, don’t you want me?”

— but mostly it just eats you up and shits you out. For fuel. Thus, instead of special care and attention, you get abominable Terms of Service and monetized cow-clicking.

And that’s why…

Fact: Startups don’t have products.

A product business lives by the customer and dies by the customer. A product must attract, serve and retain many customers… by making them happy, by helping them do more, achieve more, earn more, save more.

Startups live and die by the customer, too — but their customer is Google or maybe Yahoo, which comes with a completely different rule set. This is the real reason most startups are doomed: their only survival strategy is a sugar daddy. And there are thousands of startups, competing for just two or three major sugar daddies. Not good odds, those.

This gets really confusing when you spend your creative career serving them. You find yourself thinking things like this, found in that essay I’m skewering:

“A dangerous side effect of the myth is that as product designers we think we are automatically going to be good at creating products for ourselves. Not true.”

*snap-checks asbestos underwear* OK, guys. Here’s the thing.

The dangerous side effect is actually this:

Fact: If you work for a startup, doing app design or development or something, you only think you are working on “product.”

But you’re not, because the product is the startup itself — all the shiny software is merely an asset. Why else would so many acquirers spindle, bend, mutilate and murder the software and services they buy?

If you work for startups, you and your work are lipstick on a pig.

If you’re lucky, your lipstick finds itself on a Berkshire pig, which Google will want for its tasty, marbled bacon, and maybe they’ll want you, too, to tart up other projects post-acquisition. But Berkshire pigs are rare; most pigs are simply, well, pigs. In reality, most of your startup clients/employers will pivot til they can’t pivot no mo’, and your hard work is extenguished, again.

Thus, it follows that if the vast majority of your clients go out of business — not because it’s your fault, but because that’s how startups are — then,

• You can know that you’re good at making things from scratch.
• You can believe you’re good at making things pitch- and investment-worthy.
• You can even feel confident in your ability to make your clients happy.

But… you can’t say you’re good at product. Because you’ve never actually touched the real product.

Fact: Without long-term engagement with the real world — with many human customers — you have no idea if you are any good at making or designing products.

A product cannot exist in a vacuum. Without a customer, it’s not a product, it’s just a project.

As famed management thinker Peter Drucker wrote, “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.” He elaborated, later, that the purpose includes keep and serve a customer, too. All true. Sub “business” with “product” and it is still true… if not more so. It’s a statement so spare, and simple, that it’s undeniable:

Fact: The purpose of a product is to create a customer.

So, if you work for startups, and startups are designed to attract a single (institutional) customer, and yet they don’t even manage to achieve that…

You’re not working on product. Maybe it’s Maybelline.

Of course, when you go from this kind of consulting career to building products, it’s natural and expected that you’re going to do what you know. There’s just one problem…

Fact: What you think you know is wrong.

So, naturally you’re going to fail.

You might, for example, think that when attempting to bootstrap a product, this kind of approach makes sense:

“…Even when we spun out our ideas and brought on a full-time CEO and operations team…”

But it doesn’t. This kind of approach only makes sense when you’re risking OPM (Other People’s Money), and even then, only sometimes. As the author discovered:

“…we discovered that the funds needed to get to profitability would eventually bankrupt our core business.”

That’s the problem. VC is essentially a way to keep on doing something that shouldn’t survive, in the hopes that a rescuer will appear.

But waiting for your Magical Business Prince to come is a losing proposition.

Fact: If you treat a product business like a funded startup, you will fail.

Then, once you do fail, you may find yourself — having swum so long in the murky pool of startup effluent — colonized by beliefs that prevent you from learning, and keep you doing the same broken things again and again.

Beliefs like this one:

“Even if you’re supremely passionate and you’ve invested all your personal savings and hundreds of late nights to build a beautiful product it still might fail.”

This sentence sounds reasonable, on first read, doesn’t it? It sounds, in a way, humble, and honoring the truth of failure. It makes you want to nod your head and tweet things like, “This.” and “TRUTH!”

But it is full of lies.

How can I say that so confidently? Well…

Imagine a world where you have as much chance of selling your startup as you do of being struck by lightning.

And yet, there is an industry hungry for your labor. Yes, your labor. Everyone’s labor! The industry needs a 10x moon shot, but they don’t have a space program; all they have to bet on are horses. So, naturally, they want to bet on as many horses as possible, because hey, if a thousand monkeys on typewriters can bang out Love’s Labor Lost, maybe one of a thousand horses will turn out to have a rocket booster hidden in its ass.

If this were the world you lived in…

What would the industry need you to believe?

It would need you to keep trying and trying and trying and TRYING until you slip the surly bonds of earth… for them.

It would need you to believe that you need to be supremely passionate, invest all your personal savings, and hundreds of late nights… and you’ll still probably fail, so steel yourself, get up, and try again, there’s no shame in failure, you can do it!

Fuckin A, man.

So, sadly, you can only conclude that,

Fact: The advice, the beliefs, the truisms you’ve learned in Startupland will not only not help you, they will actively undermine you.

I know this is a tough nut to swallow for many; I know because they email me and tweet at me regularly and call me an extremist (and worse). Maybe you, too, think I’m being extreme. Maybe you think I’m biased.

Well, here’s a question for you: Where’s the customer?

In the 1,912-word post I’ve been debunking, the word “customer” appears just once.

Remember, now, that the post is a recitation of the author’s agency’s failures at making profitable (paying) products despite many attempts.

That’s a topic where you’d expect the word “customer” to appear more than once, don’t you think? Somewhere? But no — just once.

Is that single appearance about the author’s customers, or the customers they attempted to create with their doomed (but passionate!) products?

No, of course — rather than analyzing his own business, the author is arguing (poorly) that 37signals shot themselves in the foot:

“Now [37signals'] very customers were distracted from the [consulting clients] that made [Basecamp] necessary in the first place.”

I’ll leave it to you to decide if 37signals shot themselves in the foot, or if they are, in fact, more profitable than ever. Back to lexicological analysis:

• “product” appears 36 times
• “idea” appears 7 times
• “passion” appears 4 times
• “customer” appears 1 time

This is anecdata, I know; but it’s very, very strong anecdata. Go on, go read other popular startup blogs — you’ll find the ratio to be quite uniform.

This is the legacy of living too close to the nuclear reactor that is Startup Island. Your brain — irradiated with lethal levels of PASSION!! — has forgotten somebody. Who? Oh, nobody special, just the person whose Magical Wand of Commercial Alchemy can transform your fun toy project into a Real Business.

It’s so easy to overlook what isn’t there.

Fact: Peter Drucker is rolling in his grave.

But not because 37signals “distracted” their customers. No, Peter Drucker is rotating in his tomb because the startup world continues to perpetuate the lie that it knows anything about “products” — all the while de-skillifying the designers and developers who work for it.

All that said: There’s hope, you know.

Yes, you can overcome your startup roots and make things people actually want to pay for — and succeed doing it, too. Yes, you will have to unlearn a lot of things. Yes, you will have to become a beginner again. Yes, it will be hard and not especially pretty.

But, if you’ve spent your professional life claiming, “I love solving hard problems,” here’s your chance to prove it.

What should you do first? Well, for starters, you should steal this astute mantra from the 37signals:

We’re not designers, or programmers, or information architects, or copywriters, or customer experience consultants, or whatever else people want to call themselves these days…

Bottom line: We’re risk managers. Designers who sell ‘design,’ programmers who sell ‘code,’ information architects who sell ‘diagrams’ are selling the wrong thing. The thing to sell is reduced risk for the client. That’s what people want.

— SvN, Aug 2003

This is the philosophy they evolved that enabled them to build a desirable product, Basecamp, which they used to lift themselves out of consulting. You know, the transformation that was “mythical”.

This philosophy does double duty:

First, it focuses the mind beautifully: What does the customer need?

Second, it also explains why consulting for startups is a mind-altering drug — and a dangerous one, at that:

Startups are made of risk. They’re risk generators. If you could actually reduce startup risk, does that even make any sense? A low-risk startup would make customers, make money, fund itself, and grow slowly. You might even call it a business. Which means it’s not a startup, just a business that is… new.

Which is why my motto is: Fuck startups. Focus on the customer. Relentlessly. That’s how you create something people want to buy.

Once again to quote Peter Drucker (the man was a genius):

Entrepreneurship is “risky” mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing. They lack the methodology. They violate elementary and well-known rules. This is particularly true of high-tech entrepreneurs.

Thanks, Peter Drucker. We get the message.

Last week the Vatican released a document laying the groundwork for next year’s Synod of Bishops on the Family, a gathering of bishops from around the world focusing on pastoral challenges related to modern family life. As well as laying out the essentials of relevant Church teachings, the document poses 39 questions to the bishops about the actual families living and working in their communities, and how the Church can best minister to them. Here are the questions under the heading, “On Unions of Persons of the Same Sex”:

a) Is there a law in your country recognizing civil unions for people of the same-sex and equating it in some way to marriage?

b) What is the attitude of the local and particular Churches towards both the State as the promoter of civil unions between persons of the same sex and the people involved in this type of union?

c) What pastoral attention can be given to people who have chosen to live in these types of union?

d) In the case of unions of persons of the same sex who have adopted children, what can be done pastorally in light of transmitting the faith?

The meaning of all this is as vague as the questions are conspicuously neutral. The Vatican has given some conflicting signals as to whether this is something new or something habitual, whether it is a consultation directly between the faithful and the Vatican, or whether the various bodies of national bishops will be the intermediary. In England and Wales, the bishops have put the questionnaire online.  In the US, where the bishops are still dominated by reactionaries, no such direct input outside the bishops’ control looks likely. That effectively means, I fear, that the US hierarchy – think Cardinal Dolan – may not convey the real sensus fidelium on these matters:

In the letter he sent to the bishops’ conferences in October, Archbishop Lorenzo Baldisseri, the secretary general of the Vatican’s Synod of Bishops, directed the prelates to distribute the questionnaire “immediately as widely as possible to deaneries and parishes so that input from local sources can be received.”

One question is whether the archbishop and the Vatican meant for the world’s bishops to conduct a survey of their populations using the questionnaire. The U.S. bishops’ conference did not request the U.S. episcopate to undertake that wide of a consultation, telling the bishops in an Oct. 30 memo sent with Baldisseri’s letter only to provide their own observations.

I think American lay Catholics should download the English questionnaire and send their views in directly, if the bishops still insist on controlling the data. And in any case, we already know what American Catholics think on many of these questions. Sophisticated polling outfits have provided the data for a long time. Either this initiative will echo those views or it will skew toward what the bishops want to hear.

But my sense of this Pope – especially in his direct interaction with ordinary people – is that this is a chance for real democratic input, of not democracy itself (which would not be appropriate). Amy Davidson gives them a close read, and comes away thinking that this could be where the Francis revolution begins to move beyond rhetoric:

What Francis seems to be looking for is not a doctrinal or political response to same-sex unions but a pastoral one: taking modern families as they are and live, and seeing how the Catholic Church can be part of their lives. (There is not a question about how best to lobby legislatures.) The synod, according to the document, is meant to address “concerns which were unheard of until a few years ago.” Its summary of these concerns is not in all respects liberal; it mentions “forms of feminism hostile to the Church,” and emphasizes the indissolubility of marriage. And certain situations that it calls novel, like that of single parents and of dowries “understood as the purchase price of the woman,” have been less unheard of than unheeded.

But there are the seeds of something radical here.

There is, for one thing, an attempt to get past pretense. It asks how many people “in your particular church” are remarried, or separated, or are children whose families aren’t the kind in church picture books, and how to reach and include them. In terms of abortion, it asks how people could be persuaded to accept the Church’s teachings—but also how good a job churches are doing at teaching them about “natural” means of family planning, like the rhythm method. Mercy was also a word that came up, with regard to families living “irregular” lives.

It’s not too early to wonder if that synod could be a landmark moment for Francis’s papacy, and his Church.

The divisions in the Vatican are real and obvious:

When Archbishop Lorenzo Baldisseri was asked at the Vatican press briefing Tuesday if that action was something other bishops’ conferences should emulate, he said the “question answers itself” and was “not worth considering.”

I suspect the Pope’s moving accretion of moral authority these past few months with Catholics and non-Catholics alike – along with his new structure of eight cardinals as a kind of cabinet outside the Vatican bureaucracy – will give him more lee-way for change than some might expect. Michael O’Loughlin is optimistic:

I could not have imagined that the church would recognize gays as human beings even a few months ago, never mind ask for ideas on how to serve them, and their children, better. It’s truly revolutionary. And what’s not there in those questions is just as amazing as what is. There’s no mention of sin. Nothing about intrinsically disordered desires. The children aren’t called illegitimate. Instead, there’s language that recognizes gay and lesbian Catholics as human beings, as people who long for lives of faith and meaning.

(Photo: Pope Francis salutes the crowd as he arrives for his general audience in St Peter’s square at the Vatican on November 6, 2013. By Vincenzo Pinto/AFP/Getty Images.)

Lest we think of Mayor Rob Ford as only a murderous crackhead, there's another more human side of the man.

Read More →

Olga Khazan on the crushing neotenous homogeneity of Disney's female character design: 'Brenda Chapman, the creator and co-director of the 2012 Pixar movie Brave, said she came under fire for attempting to make certain characters more realistic-looking. “At one point they thought I was making the mom too big, her bum too big,” she told Time. “And that was frustrating for me because I wanted her to feel like a real middle aged woman.”'

“For every person who looks down on you, I noticed there is someone looking up to you because you got help.” http://t.co/3QKHyHJm9p

— Thomas James Brennan (@thomasjbrennan) November 6, 2013

 
Take a moment, if you have one, to read this wrenching, deeply moving and enraging testimony from one Marine veteran with a Purple Heart who returned home and became immobilized by post-traumatic stress. You can read about his heroism – “Oh, so you want to use us as bait? Thanks a lot!” – from an embedded photographer here. Here is his suicide note:

“To the woman I love with my whole heart and soul: You are finally free of the terror I have caused in your life. I am sorry for everything I have done to you. I deserve every bit of sorrow I feel. Never forget how much I love you and cherish the times we spent together. I’ll hopefully see you on the other side.”

He swallowed a bottle of pills, and then somehow reached back to life and vomited them back up. What makes this story more than distressing is that part of what compounded his PTSD was the mockery and contempt of other service-members toward his condition. It was viewed as weakness not illness, even for a Purple Heart winner:

I wondered if asking for help for my post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury was the smartest decision – after all, it had ended my career.

The way my leaders had treated me tore me up on the inside, and their words haunted me. They had convinced me that I was not a Marine in pain, but someone looking for free benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs. At work, at home, in bed, all I could think about was how my career in the corps had ended in such a terrible, tasteless fashion, with my peers and leaders turning their backs on me because I had enrolled in treatment.

When he checked himself in to a mental health facility – the VA turned him down because he had two days left before he retired! – he was treated horribly. I don’t know about you, but this kind of story rips my heart out. It must not happen to anyone. The military has to make much more of an effort to destigmatize those psychologically traumatized by a war so intense for so many it has understandably altered them for ever. There is hope. But not if there is stigma.

After a traffic stop, David Eckert was forced to undergo multiple enemas and a colonoscopy so police could search for drugs. They found nothing. Ken White reflects on the horrific case:

Some people are citing this incident for the proposition that it is terrifying that police officers and doctors would break the law and violate a suspect’s rights. I submit there is something far more terrifying about it: the prospect that a court might find that Mr. Eckert’s rights weren’t violated at all, and that he has no recourse for a team of cops and doctors raping and torturing him.

What’s terrifying is that the warrant requirement is supposed to protect our rights from overzealous cops, but here a judge approved a warrant to probe a man anally premised on fluff an a tip from an anonymous cop.

What’s terrifying is that lawyers are supposed to guide cops in the law, but a Deputy DA approved this warrant.

What’s terrifying is that thought the warrant is extraordinarily flimsy, there’s a decent chance a judge might find it sufficient. That’s because the judiciary has been steadily ground down by decades of law-and-order thin-blue-line rhetoric and by the purported imperatives of the Great War on Drugs, and judges routinely shrug and accept transparently bogus police speculation and awful warrants.

The poll result that seems to most frustrate budget analysts is the apparent belief among Americans that foreign aid is a huge cost to the federal government. The latest poll that my colleague Ezra Klein cites finds that the average American thinks the United States spends 28 percent of the federal budget on aid to foreign governments -- more than the country spends on Social Security or Medicare or defense.

In reality, we spend only 1 percent on foreign aid.

This gap between perception and reality is ridiculously large. That's depressing, but it also presents an opportunity. The case that 28 percent of the budget should go to foreign aid is very strong. And if Americans already think we give that much -- well, the least we could do is accommodate them!

We could even announce that we're obeying the American people's wishes and cutting aid to be only 25 percent of the federal budget. Or 15 percent! Or five percent! Any of these moves would lead to a massive increase in the well-being of the average human being, and here's why.

The simple case

Let's say you think the proper role of government is to try to make as many people as better off as possible. It's a plausible belief, not least among the economists who tend to make social policy. When economists talk about "maximizing welfare," this is usually what they mean. When they talk about "optimal tax rates" or weigh how high a carbon tax should be or how much cash assistance should go to the poor or how best to cover the uninsured, maximizing welfare is the goal.

So how does foreign aid look on that scale? Well, let's take the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) as an example. It started in 2004 and has a reputation for being among the most cost-effective aid programs the United States has invested in. One study estimated that PEPFAR spent $2,700 for each life it saved. That's in keeping with other highly effective aid interventions. GiveWell estimates that providing insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent malaria costs around $1,500 to 2,000 per life saved. Deworming efforts cost somewhere between $1,700 and $4,000 per life saved.

Let's compare that to a major social policy meant to improve welfare here in the United States. The Medicaid expansion included in the new health care law is a good example. Health wonks like MIT's Jon Gruber have long argued that expanding Medicaid is the most cost-effective way to expand coverage, and numerous studies (this one being perhaps the most pertinent) have found that insuring more people saves lives. Friends-of-the-blog researchers Aaron Carroll and Harold Pollack estimate that expanding Medicaid costs $1 million per life saved.

I don't want to diss Medicaid expansion: $1 million per life is actually really good compared to a whole lot of government programs. I suspect you'd get a number many orders of magnitude higher if you tried to do the same calculation for, say, a fancy new spy plane. But that would be hundreds of times less effective than increasing aid to developing countries. The case for redirecting spending — particularly truly wasteful spending, such as much of the defense budget or farm payments or unnecessary medical payments — toward more aid to the third world is extremely strong.

The equality case

Perhaps you don't buy the utilitarian intuition that we want to make as many people better off as possible. Let's say you think it's more important that government treat people fairly. The case for redirecting money to the developing world is still very strong.

The most basic reason why is that place-of-birth is as arbitrary a reason to treat someone differently as is race or gender. Someone living on less than $1 a day in Haiti no more chose to be in that position than I chose to a white male in the richest country on Earth. If world institutions are to be structured to treat both of us fairly, they would allow for the Haitian to at the very least have the same starting resources, if not the same outcomes, as I do. For that to happen, something dramatic has to change in U.S. policy. One way to shrink the gap is to let many more people come to the United States. But assuming that nativistic attitudes prevail, foreign aid is the next best option.

But there's another wrinkle here, as well. It's not just that we fail to provide enough resources to the Haitian. It's also that world institutions are set up so as to actively harm him.

One of the most prominent voices making this kind of argument is Yale's Thomas Pogge, who alleges that "most of us do not merely let people starve, but also participate in starving them." We elect politicians who allow business owners to take the land's natural resources, compensating only illegitimate and dictatorial rulers for the privilege. We buy goods, including those ill-gotten natural resources, from those businesses. The politicians we elect have created a system of international finance that allows those illegitimate rulers to borrow in the name of their people, which materially benefits those rulers, increases incentives for bloody coups d' tat and prevents later governments from spending on anti-poverty programs. We also enforce immigration laws that keep people from moving to countries where they could escape poverty.

If you buy any part of Pogge's argument, then it follows that we must stop propping up structures that perpetuate world poverty and support policies that undermine them. Pogge's preferred plan is known as the global resources dividend, in which all countries pay a 1 percent fee on any natural resources they use, and the proceeds are spent by NGOs or democratic governments of poor countries to fight world poverty.

But an increase in the U.S. aid budget would similarly counteract whatever harms the United States may be inflicting on the people of poor nations.

The nationalist case

At this point, you might still think the case is weak. The U.S. government exists for Americans. Why should we have to care about saving the lives of people abroad, or even about not harming them?

The most plausible defense of the United States only caring for its own citizens is that our country knows what Americans need better than it knows what people abroad need. More generally, one could argue that a system where nations take care of their own produces the best outcomes, and that a self-interested policy approach on the part of the United States brings us closer to that system.

The philosopher Robert Goodin has a great explication of this argument's limits in the paper "What is so special about our fellow countrymen?" Our relationships to our countrymen are indeed special, but they're special in the costs we impose on them as much as in the benefits we give. We let our fellow citizens, and no other nation's, vote, but we can also conscript them, force them to pay taxes and purchase their property against their will. So, on what grounds can we treat our citizens better than foreigners some of the time but worse on other occasions?

"It's a two-way deal!" you might say. Taxes and eminent domain and the like are the prices we pay for special treatment from the state. But few of us would be willing to accept the implications of treating the government like a mutual-benefit society of that type. Chances are that many congenitally handicapped people will, throughout the course of their lives, receive far more in benefits from the state than they'll contribute in taxes; indeed, if they are unable to work, their contribution will be quite minimal. If the government is a mutual benefit society, we must expel people like that and deny them any benefits.

No one would accept a state that cruel because governments are not, in fact, mutual benefit societies. Instead, Goodin argues that states are just ways that we fulfill our general ethical obligations to other human beings. That, for practical reasons, involves some divvying up of roles on national lines. It wouldn't make much sense for German taxpayers to pay to repair American roads. But it also means that we shouldn't pass up opportunities to help people from outside our political community. Indeed, we're often morally obligated to seize such opportunities.

Call the bluff

So, Congress and the president could call the American peoples' bluff and direct 28 percent of the fiscal year 2015 budget to foreign aid. According to the Congressional Budget Office's latest projections, the United States will spend $3.777 trillion that year. Twenty-eight percent of that is a little under $1.1 trillion. We might be able to slice that from the budget through cuts to defense, farm subsidies and wasteful health spending, though it would take a lot of doing.

But, given that investors are literally giving money away to the United States for free at the moment, why not take some of it and give it to poor people abroad? Borrowing $1.47 trillion (minus the paltry sum we now spend on USAID, PEPFAR, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, etc.) would get us to 28 percent.

As for how to spend it, the sky's the limit! We could spend it on highly cost-effective interventions, such as an expansion of PEPFAR, deworming efforts or anti-malarial bed nets. We could try more ambitious projects that are possible only with funding of that scale. Or we could just, you know, give the money to poor people. A newly released randomized trial shows that practice improves any number of health, education and financial outcomes for poor people, and most importantly, it allows them to direct aid dollars to what they actually need, which they usually understand better than do outside aid workers. Cash transfers would also minimize administrative bloat and corruption; in poor countries with cellphone-based payment systems, you can evade corrupt governments entirely.

Would this be politically unpopular? Obviously. People hate spending this much on foreign aid. But given that they already think we're spending this much anyway, why not anger the voters and save millions of lives as a consequence?

Altruists of Congress, unite! You have nothing to lose but your seats (possibly).

Felix Salmon:

I, for instance, am absolutely convinced, on an intellectual level, that the whole concept of “super-premium vodka” is basically one big marketing con. Vodka doesn’t taste of anything: that’s the whole point of it. As such the distinction between a super-premium vodka and a premium vodka is entirely one of price and branding. And yet, it works! The genius of Grey Goose was that it created a whole new category above what always used to be the high end of the vodka market — and in doing so, managed to create genuine happiness among vodka drinkers who spent billions of dollars buying up the super-premium branding. But if someone asks me what kind of vodka I’d like in my martini, I still care, a bit. And if I my drink ends up being made with, say, Tito’s, I’m going to savor it more than I would if I had no idea what vodka was being used.

What’s more, you don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on first-growth Bordeaux for this to work. You just need to spend a little bit more than you normally do — enough that you consider it to be a special bottle of wine. That’s it! When you sit down and pop it open, probably with people you love, in pleasant surroundings, everything is set for a very happy outcome.

David Crumm at Read the Spirit asks Anglican bishop and theologian N.T. Wright why he doesn’t like Fox News. Wright responds with a sharp critique of the political tribalism that shapes white evangelical Christianity in America:

I’m not talking about Fox News in any detailed way and I’m not claiming that everything they tell you is wrong. I’m just referring to the well-known political viewpoint that comes through Fox News and I’m saying: We should be careful about listening to that point of view exclusively. There is a striking, radical polarization between your Left and Right that I have to say is really disturbing because it distorts so many issues. This Left-Right polarization forces people to say: We are all on this side now! We must check off every box on this slate! We must keep in line!

As an example of how this political tribalism “distorts so many issues,” Wright discusses America’s recent modest health care reform, the vehement opposition to it from white evangelicals here, and how utterly bizarre that appears to our evangelical brothers and sisters everywhere else in the global church:

In your country, for example, there seem to be Christian political voices saying that you shouldn’t have a national healthcare system. To us, in Britain, this is virtually unthinkable. Every other developed country from Norway to New Zealand has healthcare for all of its citizens. We don’t understand all of this opposition to it over here in the U.S. And, we should remember: In the ancient world, there wasn’t any healthcare system. It was the Christians, very early on, who introduced the idea that we should care for people beyond the circle of our own kin. Christians taught that we should care for the poor and disadvantaged. Christians eventually organized hospitals. To hear people standing up in your political debate and saying—“If you are followers of Jesus, you must reject universal healthcare coverage!”—and that’s unthinkable to us. Those of us who are Christians in other parts of the world are saying: We can’t understand this political language. It’s not our value in our countries. It’s not even in keeping with traditional Christian teaching on caring for others. We can’t understand what we are hearing from some of your politicians on this point. Yet, over here, some Christians are saying that it’s part of the list of boxes we all should check off to keep in line.

I came across that interview via Michael F. Bird, who writes the Euangelion blog on Patheos’ evangelical channel. Bird fits there because he’s a theologically conservative Protestant who clearly aligns with any theological or doctrinal attempt to define “evangelical.” But he also doesn’t fit there very well because he’s Australian, and the political tribalism that shapes white evangelical theology in America is literally foreign to him.

This is a longstanding tension between American “evangelicals” and “evangelicals” in the rest of the world. We use the same word, but not in the same way. Adding to the confusion is the pretense that this word is primarily a theological term, referring to a strain of Protestantism that expresses itself, in David Bebbington’s terms, through “biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism and activism.”

That “quadrilateral” comes from Bebbington’s history of Evangelicalism in Modern Britain. It’s a terrific framework for understanding British evangelicalism. It’s useless for understanding American evangelicalism, which is not a theological stream defined by those characteristics but a white subculture defined by its political tribalism and its whiteness.

Before about 1980, an American “evangelical” was a white Protestant teetotaler. American evangelicalism has shifted over the last 30 or so years. Nowadays, we drink wine and beer. Today, an American “evangelical” is a white Protestant Republican.

In that N.T. Wright interview linked above, Wright offers some appreciative criticism of C.S. Lewis. At the same time, Wright precisely echoes Lewis’ puzzlement over the tribalism of American evangelicalism. Like Lewis, Wright is a prolific writer who enjoys enormous popularity among American evangelicals. And like Lewis, Wright is bewildered by the tribal totems those American evangelical readers have latched on to as paramount .

For Lewis, half a century ago, this involved American evangelicals’ condemnation of beer (see several asides in Mere Christianity, or the parody of American teetotalism in Prince Caspian). For Wright, in 2013, it means American evangelicals’ Fox News-shaped politics, their knee-jerk opposition to social justice, and their pervasive anti-feminism (another point on which Wright and Lewis would disagree).

Michael Bird shares Wright’s bewilderment over this reflexive antipathy to universal access to health care. Here’s Bird:

When it comes to the American  evangelical opposition to universal health care, global evangelicals look at them with a mix of disbelief and disgust. Its not just N.T. Wright, ask someone at the Lausanne Congress or at the World Evangelical Alliance or at the Tyndale Fellowship what they think about American evangelicals howling protests against Obamacare! We are mystified as to how can good Christian men and women oppose – in some cases in the name of religion — providing health care for it citizens. … Adequate healthcare for all should be championed by evangelical Christians who follow the teaching of Scripture.

I’m writing this so my American friends can, as your own poet Robert Frost said, “See ourselves as other see us.”  Why do global evangelicals look at you in this way? Maybe its not us who are enthralled to a godless philosophy! I want to challenge my American evangelicals friends to consider whether your views of health care are truly biblical, and to consider whether you have been blinded by a culture of hyper-individualism, economic rationalism, placing faith in market forces. Because to outsiders the anti-Obamacare thing looks like “civil religion,” a syncretistic concoction of Christian teaching, Republican partisanship, capitalistic-worship, and  social Darwinism with its mantra of the survival of the fittest.

Let me explain why, to global evangelicals, it appears as though white evangelicals in America are captive to civil religion and “a syncretistic concoction of Christian teaching, Republican partisanship, capitalistic-worship, and social Darwinism.”

It’s because white evangelicals in America actually are captive to civil religion and “a syncretistic concoction of Christian teaching, Republican partisanship, capitalistic-worship, and social Darwinism.”

Evangelicalism in America is shaped, primarily, by political tribalism. Not by doctrine. Not by the Bible. Not by a conversionist spirituality that emphasizes a personal relationship with God. Not by admiration for Billy Graham, or by an aversion to drinking, dancing and R-rated movies. Not by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

White political tribalism. Period. American evangelicalism may admire or aspire to many of those other things, but when push comes to shove, they’ll all be eagerly jettisoned if need be to check off all the boxes that need to be checked off to stay in line politically.

White political tribalism. Above all else. Above biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism and activism. Above Christ, above the Bible, above love.

White political tribalism is pushing all of those aside, gradually becoming not just the primary characteristic of American evangelicalism, but the only characteristic of American evangelicalism.

“Change is not a process for the impatient.” ~Barbara Reinhold

I love it when change happens quickly. Sometimes things just click, and everything shifts all at once.

When I met the man who’d become my husband, we were married only thirteen months later, and in those thirteen months we both transformed to our very cores.

The problem is that those thirteen months aren’t the entire story. They cut off the three years of intense personal work I did before I met him, all the while wishing to be in a healthy relationship.

Without those three years of work (and the years of work he did before meeting me), we couldn’t have moved that fast from a healthy place. We would have been living a fantasy.

I’ve done that before in relationships—pretended that I was changing faster than I was. Eventually the bubble would burst, and we’d need to see where we really were.

Real change usually takes a long time.

So how do we deal with this? How can we embrace three (or one, or five, or thirteen) years of working on a change without caving in to our impatience?

1. Find ways to get the qualities you’re wanting right now.

Some of the qualities I wanted out of my changed relationship pattern were love, companionship, and adventure.

There are plenty of ways to connect to those qualities without actually being in a relationship. I went on adventures with my roommates, talked things over companionably with my best friend, and learned to accept love from myself and those around me.

Not only does this help you feel better in the moment, it also helps you begin the inner changes that lead to outer change.

(Sneaky benefit: sometimes we only think we want something, and that’s why it hasn’t happened yet for us. When we connect to the qualities behind the change we’d like to make, we get what we’re really wanting, whether it goes according to plan or not.)

2. Trick yourself back to the present moment.

When my “internal committee” is throwing a small fit about how long something seems to be taking, I call its bluff.

So you think it’ll take me ten years to get to the place where I can have the kind of relationship I’m wanting?

Well in five years, would I rather be five years closer to that desire or not? In eleven years? In two months?

Usually even my most stuck-in-the-mud resistance answers “yes” to all those questions. So then I bring us back to the present.

Since I know I want to move forward on this no matter how long it takes, what’s one action I can do now to embrace the change I’m making, slow as it may be?

(Sneaky benefit: though you’re focusing on the future, this gets you back into cultivating the qualities you’d like in the present moment, which is the only place you really live anyway.)

3. Make friends with your resistance.

If you could wave a magic wand, right this moment, and have the change you’re wanting, would you feel 100% satisfied with it?

Hopefully at least part of you says “no,” because that means you have information on where to work.

If a small part of you thinks that a relationship sounds rather terrifying, then you can ask it what needs to change so you can feel safe.

Maybe you need to learn better boundaries. Maybe you need to choose better partners. Maybe you need to feel more comfortable receiving love from yourself first.

Repeat this often enough, and you’ll have connected with all the parts of you that need to change.

(Sneaky benefit: this helps you make a change from a place of wholeness and alignment, instead of running roughshod over parts of yourself to get what other parts of you want.)

4. Let it be hard.

Positivity is a wonderful thing, but forced positivity puts you in resistance to what’s really going on in you.

So take ten or fifteen minutes to let it be hard.

Write a rant in your notebook.

Ask a friend for a hug.

Listen to a sad song and cry a bit.

When you free up the energy trapped in the sadness (or anger, or fear—whatever you feel), you may find it easier to embrace change with grace.

(Sneaky benefit: this is also a backdoor to wholeness. While wallowing in negativity is usually counterproductive, giving yourself time to grieve helps you heal.)

How about you?

What changes are you working toward that you really wish would just happen already? What helps you deal with your impatience?

Photo by Hartwig HKD

The post 4 Ways to Embrace Slow Change When You’re Feeling Impatient appeared first on Tiny Buddha.

Peter Baker is a White House correspondent for the New York Times and author of the excellent "Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House". We spoke on Wednesday, and a lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Ezra Klein: When the George W. Bush administration ended, a lot of people were really eager to move on. There was even this whole presidential campaign about “change.” So why did you decide to dive deep back into those years?

Peter Baker: I’m a masochist, basically. I think reporters get 10 or 20 percent of what’s going on at any given time. It’s a fraction of what really goes on. To go back and reexamine and re-interview, to talk to people who can be more candid now, let’s us learn more about what really went on. It produces surprises. In this case, the surprise was how dramatically this unique partnership in American history changed and evolved over time.

EK: Reading the book, it felt like Dick Cheney was the main character of the first half and George W. Bush was the main character of the second half. In those early years, Bush may be the decider, but Cheney really seems to be setting up the administration, driving the agenda and providing the core philosophy. Did you intend to write it that way?

PB: No, I think the book follows the reporting in that sense. Cheney is so much more of a force in the first term. Bush really comes into his own later in the presidency. He becomes more comfortable in his own skin, more grounded in his judgment, more seasoned. He’s dealt with so many world crises and other leaders by that point. He no longer feels like he needs a guy like Cheney as much as he did in the first term, and he begins setting a different direction that alienates and aggravates Cheney. People like Karen Hughes say he got his presidency a little more in the direction he meant it to go in the first place before it got hijacked by 9/11 and Iraq.

EK: But it wasn’t hijacked by Iraq. The Bush administration chose that war. And, to be honest, that’s what I read the book to understand. I’ve never felt like I understood the reason the Bush administration decided to go to war in Iraq. Once that decision was made, I feel like I can track the arguments for and against it. But the fundamental choice to make that the project is a mystery to me. Now that you’ve written the book, do you feel like you understand it?

PB: I have a better understanding, but I think it’s one of these questions that will be revisited and re-debated for decades to come. My guess is 20 years from now we’ll still be seeing more books on that question. It is the essence of this presidency: Why go to war in Iraq? Some mention Bush’s father. Some mention Cheney’s sense of unfinished business in the Gulf War. There’s the false intelligence.

And overlaying all that is what it felt like in that moment. They were operating in an atmosphere of fear and anger and uncertainty. They were seeing these threat reports every day -- including episodes we didn’t even know about, like the botulism scare. When they come into office, they had thought, at the time, that Iraq was a top threat. Then once 9/11 happens it sort of removes all constraints that they might have had prior to that in their interest and inclination to use force. There’s a quote in the book from a senior administration official who was really involved in the decision to invade Iraq and who regrets it now who says we went into Iraq because Afghanistan was so easy. We needed someone harder to beat; 9/11 felt like such a signal event that it required action and response beyond simply toppling the Taliban.

EK: That quote is amazing. But it sounds like he also doesn’t know why they went into Iraq. And he was there! That’s less an explanation of the policy than of the psychology. And that’s something the book details really well. I think people can remember what it felt like to be scared after 9/11. But the amount of fear there is in the White House and the degree to which fear of a worse attack drives the decisions after 9/11 -- it’s a really psychologically unusual administration.

PB: That’s absolutely right. Every day they receive a briefing telling them 100 ways bad guys around the world are trying to kill Americans, Some are real, and some are fanciful. But in that moment the intelligence agencies, having missed the dots on 9/11, begin throwing everything they have at the White House.

Cheney has this history in continuity-of-government issues. He has for years contemplated the notion of an apocalyptic attack on the United States -- 9/11 convinces him his fears are real. Nineteen guys with box cutters, to him, are only a scratch on the surface compared to what could have happened. And that makes a lot of things seem more reasonable. Eventually, Frances Townsend becomes head of the Homeland Security Advisor and begins taking some of these threats out of the briefings because she felt it was so skewed towards danger and it was warping everyone’s mindset to be so exposed to every piece of raw data like that.

EK: One of the really interesting threads in the book is the way Cheney wields power. I think it’s fair to say he’s one of the most talented executive branch staffers of his generation. He’s chief of staff in a White House at a young age. He served across many presidents at top positions. And so with Bush, he runs the transition and manages to really stock the bureaucracy with allies in key spots. His approach to influencing, it seems, isn’t so much whispering into Bush’s ear but having control or at least a lot of influence over the way decisions are framed by the time they get to Bush’s desk. Agreeing with Cheney’s agenda ends up looking like the only logical thing to do.

PB: There’s no question that he understood how power worked. It’s not just the guy who’s loudest at the table. His power emerged from the ability to sprinkle key people throughout, to make himself indispensable to a president who didn’t have much national security experience. And some of his power comes from being able to subordinate himself and be deferential to Bush in ways others can’t. He comes in with no aspirations to be president, and that takes away the friction that often exists between presidents and vice presidents.

That quiet, deferential approach actually enhanced his power in the White House. He spoke so rarely in meetings that a lot of staffers didn’t even know what his position was. He was a black box to them. But he was there when they left, talking to Bush. So staffers often didn't even know if Cheney had won or lost on an issue, and they couldn't rebut him because they didn't know what he was saying.

EK: There’s this theme in the book of Bush looking for his Bob Bullock, a reference to the Democratic lieutenant governor of Texas who was so crucial to Bush’s governorship. You mention Tom Daschle and Ted Kennedy in that context. But it seemed to me that it’s really Cheney. The Texas governorship is unusually weak, and the lieutenant governor is actually the strongest position in the government, so Bush’s experience before the White House was that the number two is an older, more experienced political hand who knows where the bodies are buried and who drives the agenda. There's a division of labor there that he seems to replicate in his first term in the White House.

PB: That’s right. When he looked for Bullock he thought he was looking for a bipartisan partner. But the fact is, a Texas Democrat is a center-right Republican in Washington. What Bob Bullock really meant to Bush was a mentor, someone he was careful to court and win over, and who could help him advance his own causes and career. And Cheney does play that similar role.

EK: How well did Bush actually understand policy? There’s this moment around TARP where he tries to describe the proposal as buying low and selling high, and his staff says he can’t do that because that’s not the point of it, and he asks, “Why did I sign onto this proposal if I don’t understand what it does?” You think, reading that: “Good question! But not a question for your staff!”

PB: I think the TARP example is also an example of how fluid things were at that time. The TARP proposal was changing quickly.

But Bush was not a details guy. He certainly wasn’t a policy wonk. You do hear from people who worked closely with him, and even Democrats and scholars who came in to see him, some expressed surprise at how much he had a mastery of some subjects. It wasn’t with everything. But it was with the issues he cared about, like national security. On things he didn’t perceive as top priority, though, he didn’t have [Bill] Clinton’s innate appetite for policy books. He preferred oral briefings to written briefings. He liked to talk things through. All that led to some misimpressions. And he himself certainly encouraged people to underestimate him. He bragged so often about being a C student that people began to think of him that way.

EK: There’s an airless quality to the book where you’re really trapped in the White House for the whole thing. Congress just isn’t a huge factor. Is that a function of how you wrote the book, or is it a function of how the Bush White House actually conducted itself and its focus on national security issues where continuous checking-in with Congress was less necessary? How insular was it, in other words?

PB: They believe in secrecy. They believe in executive power. Even their allies were often surprised at who they would nominate for key positions. When they did the second inaugural address and the president decides to focus on freedom around the world, I asked [Bush counselor] Dan Bartlett whether that was provocative to people at the State Department. He said, “Yeah, that's why you don’t show it to the State Department.” There’s a cost to operating that way. President Bush himself has said that some of the mistakes he made was not getting buy-in from Congress on some of the policies that later proved really controversial, like surveillance and interrogation.

EK: When you tick through the domestic agenda in the book a lot of it really is bipartisan -- and certainly less polarizing than the foreign policy agenda. Democrats don't love the tax cuts, but they end up having a fair amount of Democratic support. Medicare Part D is a massive entitlement expansion with roots in Democratic policy ideas. No Child Left Behind is very bipartisan. Bush pushes immigration reform along the lines of what Obama favors now. He wants to do more on climate change. If 9/11 hadn’t happened, what kind of domestic policy legacy do you think Bush would’ve had?

PB: That’s the great what-if. His original mandate was compassionate conservatism. He was going to push his party in the way Clinton pushed his party away from some of the orthodoxy that turned off the middle. It doesn’t make him a moderate. But it makes him a different kind of conservative, certainly. You remember when he was governor he publicly split with [California] Gov. Pete Wilson on immigration and with Republicans in Congress on what he called “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.” And if you talk to Karen Hughes today that’s what she laments: the dropping on compassionate conservatism. One I’d add to your list is PEPFAR, literally the most ambitious effort any president ever made to combat disease in the Third World. All this got overshadowed by Iraq, of course.

EK: And the result seems to be a Republican Party that really rejects Bush and his legacy. That’s true on domestic policy, certainly, but there’s also been a rise in Rand Paul-esque isolationism and skepticism of the national security state, which is far from the Bush-Cheney doctrine, certainly. What was the impression you got writing the book of Bush’s reputation in Republican circles today?

PB: The tea party is in part a reaction and a rebellion against Bush. It certainly has its roots in Bush’s term. He was a big-government conservative. He did believe in a federal role for education. That part of the party wants to get rid of the Department of Education. He did spend money, and not just on security. And I think he sensed the beginning of isolationism in his presidency. It crops up in the speeches in his last few years. So I think today he watches what happened in the tea party with concern. Look at who he gave money to. It was to Sen. Lindsey Graham, who faced a challenger on the right. I think [Washington Post reporter] Dan Balz’s book shows he talked to Chris Christie. He's trying to encourage people who see the Republican Party a bit more like he does.

EK: At the end of the book, you talk about the idea that there’s more continuity than one might’ve thought from Bush to Obama, particularly on foreign policy. Obama ends up following, to some degree, Bush’s timetable for withdrawal, and he keeps some of the surveillance programs in place, and he’s not able to close Gitmo, and so on. You have this nice line that Obama runs against Bush’s first term and ends up inheriting his second. How much of that continuity do you think is agreement and how much of it is simply this White House having to bring Bush’s initiatives in for some kind of gradual landing?

PB: By the end, Bush had made enough compromises that he made more of a bipartisan consensus then you would’ve thought a few years earlier. And when you get into the Oval Office, as Obama did, and hear these threats every day, the world does look a little differently to you. On national security and foreign policy, for the most part there’s usually a lot more continuity between Democrats and Republicans in the White House than we think, and Iraq was kind of an outlier in that way.

The big place where they divide is the big idea of Bush’s second term -- the freedom agenda and a values-based foreign policy. Bush sometimes only follows it in the breach, but he did articulate this idea. That’s not really Obama’s approach. He’s for democracy and freedom, but he doesn’t prioritize it in the sense that America needs to be delivering it.

EK: I’ve found that the Obama team does have a lot of respect for Bush’s foreign policy, but it’s Bush 41, not Bush 43, they admire. In that way, George W. Bush really did do the work of rescuing his father's legacy.

PB: Obama has said that publicly. And that’s because the father’s foreign policy is more of what we inadequately call the realist school. It’s interest-based. The son attempts to be values-based. Now, George W. Bush made the argument that our values are our interests and vice versa. But his second inaugural call for ending tyranny around the world is not something that’s been emulated or adopted by Democrats -- or even his own party.

Old riddle/joke:

Q: How many legs does a dog have if you call it’s tail a leg?

A: Four. Calling it’s tail a leg doesn’t make it one.

Most of the jokes Jon Stewart tells on The Daily Show are funnier than that one, but it’s not at all funny when Stewart contradicts the truth expressed in that joke and says President Obama is lying for not agreeing to count tails as legs.

John Stewart just isn’t making much sense here. “The president has been somewhat dishonest about the promise of his health care program,” Stewart says, playing a long string of clips of Obama saying “If you like your plan, you will be able to keep it” as though this were a big “Gotcha” moment.

That’s not a gotcha moment and that’s not “somewhat dishonest.” It’s true: “If you like your plan, you will be able to keep it.”

But what about those people whose old plans no longer exist in that same form because of the health reform law? Well, that’s only true for those old plans that were basically screwing over customers. The new law doesn’t let insurers do that anymore.

So, no, if your old plan was screwing you over, you won’t be able to keep it.

Here’s the “Gotcha” moment then: Ah, but what about people who liked getting screwed over by their old plans? They liked being ripped off, but they’re no longer allowed to be ripped off in quite that same way — therefore Obama was lying when he said “If you like your plan, you will be able to keep it.”

This is just weird.

“If you like your diet, you will be able to keep it.” But we’re no longer going to allow people to sell you a plate filled with broken glass and feces and call it lunch.

But I liked my broken glass and feces! If you won’t let me keep paying top-dollar for that, then you’re a liar!

Seriously, I’ve come to expect this level of journamalism from Politico and cable news pundits, but it’s disappointing to see The Daily Show parroting such strangeness.

In what sense was Obama’s statement — “if you like your plan, you will be able to keep it” — “dishonest”? I suppose the criticism is that the president failed to account for the possibility that some customers would be eager to redefine “insurance plan” in a way that allows it to refer to an expensive scheme that denies them insurance. Such redefinition is certainly dishonest, but the dishonesty is not on Obama’s side of the ledger.

I suppose one could argue that Obama ought to have anticipated this response. He ought to have realized by now that polarized partisan attitudes have pervaded all of our lives and culture, and that a big chunk of the public seems to have embraced such a knee-jerk antipathy to anything he says that they’re no longer concerned about reality or the concrete meaning of words. In such a context, Obama probably should have foreseen that some people would insist that they like eating feces and broken glass, and that they’d prefer to keep eating that instead of paying less for a more palatable meal of actual food.

Obama, in other words, ought to have realized that others would lie and that still others would eagerly swallow those lies. But his failure to insulate his otherwise accurate statement from the challenge of those lies does not constitute a lie on his part.

Shit and shards are not a meal. And no matter what some people are happy to pretend in an attempt to score political points, no one really “likes” eating it.

 

A recent study investigated the impact of culling and relocation on elephant decision-making and cognition decades later. African elephants are highly intelligent and social creatures, and rely on their sophisticated communication skills to survive in the wild. How does the trauma of being separated from "loved ones" and their native terrain change how orphaned elephants think, and cope?

From a recent National Geographic article by Christy Ullrich Barcus:

Behavioral ecologists from the University of Sussex in England led an international team to study two different elephant populations: one relatively undisturbed group living in Amboseli National Park in Kenya and another translocated population in Pilanesberg Park in South Africa. The Pilanesberg elephants were moved there as calves following managed culling of adults and older juveniles in Kruger National Park in the 1980s and 1990s.

Survivors from the translocated elephant group showed signs of negative long-term psychological impact that affected their decision-making process, paralleling post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in humans, according to the study, which was published in Frontiers in Zoology on October 23, 2013.

In other words, they experience PTSD in ways that are not entirely unlike human beings.

"Orphan Elephants Lack Social Knowledge Key for Survival" [nationalgeographic.com]

Just your average cell phone vid of drug addled Mayor in rage-rant threatening to murder people. The latest from Mayor Ford.

And just for if you're keeping score at home, this does not seem to be the fabled 'Second Rob Ford Tape.'

Many claim Virginia's gubernatorial campaign was all about women's issues, yet Erin Matson at TPM Cafe counts exactly zero women on the ballot. What's up with that, Virginia?

A reader dissents:

You do yourself and your argument no favors when you refer to industrial pork farms – however cruel they may be – as “America’s Concentration Camps.” These farms may be barbaric, but to refer to them as “concentration camps” is spectacularly disrespectful to the six million people who were murdered at Nazi camps.  Unless you believe that a pig’s soul is the full equal of a human one (and I have never got that impression reading you) the comparison is completely inept.

I should have been more sensitive to that in my desire for a provocative title. I apologize. Hence our new headline above. Another reader:

I just finished reading Dave Warner’s response to your reader’s e-mail and the one thing that stood out was his continuing insistence that the use of gestation cages helped with caring for (and protecting!) their well-being. I’ll let that point aside, but I would have been much more receptive to his point if he’d had the honesty to admit that it also allows for the housing of substantially more pigs for all those concerned hog farmers. Even if he’d tried to pass it off as an unexpected side benefit, I could have given him a nod. To exclude the reason for the incarceration and try to pass it off as the result of medical studies strikes me as the epitome of chutzpah, if that’s the right word.

Another:

In regard to Warner’s comments, not all pork producers agree:

[Bob] Johnson [president of Johnson-Pate Pork Inc.], who has lived on this farm since he was a teenager, saw a business opportunity in getting rid of the cramped crates, as well as eliminating the routine use of antibiotics. So in 2010, his company switched — a big undertaking for a farm that sells 20,000 pigs per year. Traditionalists say that gestation stalls are indispensable because when pigs are housed in groups, they fight — with bigger and fiercer animals injuring smaller ones and getting more than their share of the feed. But that’s not what is on display in the gestation building, a structure about 60 feet wide and 250 feet long occupied by some 625 pregnant sows. They are walking around and lounging quietly in large group pens. Some cool off under sprinklers that go off intermittently, as a few take their turn to eat. When the weather is good, they can go into an outdoor enclosure.

Another:

You quoted the NY Times: “Nine states in the United States have banned the use of these pens …” Everyone should be aware that the farm bill passed by the House, and currently being negotiated by a House/Senate conference committee, contains the King Amendment, which would trample states’ rights and overturn many state protections for animals nationally. It is from, and named for, Rep. Steve King of Iowa. Iowa is the number one pig-torturing state in the USA and the pig torturers are significant contributors to King. From the Humane Society of the United States (pdf):

Rep. King’s amendment takes aim at state laws such as California’s Proposition 2, approved overwhelmingly by voters across the state in 2008 – to ban extreme confinement cages and crates for laying hens, pigs, and veal calves – and a law passed subsequently by a landslide margin in the state legislature to require any shell eggs sold in CA to comply with the requirements of Prop 2. In addition, the King amendment seeks to nullify state laws in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Oregon, Washington, and Rhode Island dealing with intensive confinement of farm animals.

Two other things to consider: 1) while gestation crates may be among the worst torture inflicted upon pigs, even without them their lives would be non-stop misery; and 2) chickens are intelligent and emotional as well and their abuse is similarly atrocious in the egg and meat industries, and birds are exempt from the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. See this recent Washington Post article:

Nearly 1 million chickens and turkeys are unintentionally boiled alive each year in U.S. slaughterhouses, often because fast-moving lines fail to kill the birds before they are dropped into scalding water, Agriculture Department records show. Now the USDA is finalizing a proposal that would allow poultry companies to accelerate their processing lines …

I didn’t think I could find another reason to despise the politics of King, but I just did. Another also defends fowl:

Your essay “Abatement of Cruelty” was forwarded to me by a person who drew attention to your statement that “There are also types of meat. I think we can make distinctions of degree between, say, the emotional experience of a chicken and a pig.” We cannot knowledgeably make such distinctions at all. They are passé. I respectfully point out that your claim – that the emotional experience of a chicken is inferior to that of a pig – is an assertion without a foundation.

Perhaps you are not aware of the modern cognitive science showing that, contrary to false stereotypes and conventional assumptions, birds, including chickens and turkeys and other ground-nesting birds, are every bit as cognitively complex as mammals including dogs and pigs. (See, e.g., The Development of Brain and Behaviour in the Chicken by Dr. Lesley J. Rogers, 1995).

I grew up with dogs and later worked at a farmed animal sanctuary comprising rescued pigs, chickens, turkeys and other animals, many of whom came from so-called “humane” family farms, where abuses are commonplace and whose traditional practices and attitudes are the very basis for the development of industrialized animal farming in the 20th century, e.g. mutilations including painful debeaking, tail docking and castration. And these examples are far from all.

Chickens and turkeys are complexly emotional and intelligent birds. I’ve kept chickens since 1985 and turkeys since 1990. My experience with them influenced my decision to found United Poultry Concerns in 1990. I ask you please to read this essay, “The Social Life of Chickens”, which evokes and speculates about actual chickens.

Another reader:

The information you have shared on pork processing in the US is appalling. I keep kosher and so do not eat pork, but descriptions of these crates are horrifying. And I am shocked that my soon to be re-elected governor vetoed a bill banning them. I immediately went to Empire Kosher’s website only to learn that they do not crate their birds at all … all are raised to exacting standards on small family farms. No antibiotics and only strictly vegetarian feed is good enough for their birds.  I know many non-Jews who only eat Empire for just those reasons.

Still, the kosher meat industry has had its embarrassments as well. Check out the book Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America by Stephen G. Bloom. A group of Hasidic Jews established a kosher slaughterhouse in a remote part of Iowa, only to be shut down several years later for health and immigration violations. The cost of kosher beef skyrocketed after that disaster back in 2011 (not that it was ever cheap). New sources were found in smaller processors here in the US and in Canada.

The incredibly high cost of keeping kosher is a burden on many Jewish families. But at least I can be assured that our meat – chicken or beef – is being handled in a ethical way.

Another:

One of these days one of my emails to you will make it on the blog.

Others have commented that they buy meat they know is ethically raised in order to circumvent the animal cruelty issue.  My family does as well.  We buy a monthly “meat share” from a local farm; it is essentially a meat CSA.  The farmers work hard to preserve agricultural traditions that have existed in New England for generations. All of the animals are all naturally raised; free of hormones and antibiotics.  The pigs and cattle are pasture-raised.  Not only do we feel better about the meat we are eating, but we are also supporting local farming and agriculture (not to mention that the meat is amazing).  And we consume less meat this way; we buy a certain poundage a month and only use that amount; I do not supplement from the grocery store.  We plan on taking our children to the farm when they are a bit older to explain to them where our meat comes from.  If they decide that they cannot support eating animal meat after the farm visit, I will help them become vegetarians if they want.

One more:

I grew up in NC, which is one of the top hog producing states in the US.  My neighbors raised a few hogs for their own table and when I was a little girl I used to go play in the pig pen with the babies.  What Mr. Warner said about family farmers is total bullshit.  The sows back in the day were allowed to roam freely in the pen until they delivered, when they were separated from the other pigs, because pigs being pigs, the others would eat the shoats if they weren’t protected.   The mother would even eat her own babies in some cases in the first couple of days after birth.

My husband used to call me the pork queen because I loved eating pork so much.  Not anymore.  I haven’t been able to eat pork, beef, or chicken, for years since I saw the video found at Meat.org.  My husband has been vegetarian for 7 years now and I only eat chicken occasionally and never mass produced chicken.  Between the cruelty to the animals and what the poor things are fed, including drugs of all kinds, and the environmental costs, I just can’t do it anymore.

I am so glad you are addressing this issue again.  If we would all stop eating meat for even one day a week, we could send a message to these factory farms that what is being done to these animals is no longer acceptable.

For years, the example budget wonks turn to when they want to underscore the public's ignorance about the budget is the baffling, but persistent, belief that foreign aid is bankrupting the country.

"Foreign aid is the only program that [people] consistently favor cutting," said Bruce Bartlett with a sigh, "perhaps because of grossly overestimating its share of the budget." He went on to list poll after poll showing the public's wildly incorrect opinions about how much the United States spends helping other countries.

And yet the perception persists. A new poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that Americans think 28 percent of the budget goes to foreign aid. That would make foreign aid pricier than Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or all defense spending.

Of course, foreign aid isn't that pricey. About 1 percent of the budget goes toward foreign aid. And the Kaiser poll found that when you tell people that fact, it changes their opinions:

But as of yet, budget wonks haven't had a shadow of success at convincing the country that foreign aid is a tiny sliver of federal spending.

How progressive is the Social Security program? It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

There are obvious ways in which the program was designed to be progressive, by redistributing (some) money from high earners to low earners. But it also has some regressive features: Because retirement benefits are paid out in monthly installments rather than in lump sums, wealthier people who live longer tend get bigger benefits than, say, poor people with shorter lifespans.

And now here's yet another twist: A new paper (pdf) from the Urban Institute finds that Social Security tends to redistribute money from Hispanics, blacks, and other people of color to whites. That's been true for many decades. It's true currently. And it will be true for the foreseeable future.

The paper starts by noting that there are all sorts of ways in which the Social Security program redistributes money. That's not necessarily a bad thing, the authors emphasize, but it's worth understanding how the system works. Some of these aspects are by design and well-known. Others are less well-studied. Here's a partial list:

-- From young to old: The fact that the program is "pay-as-you-go" redistributes money from younger generations to older ones. Benefits are based on earnings history rather than contributions, and each successive generation of workers has faced higher lifetime Social Security tax rates than the previous one did.

-- From rich to poor: Low earners receive somewhat higher retirement benefits than they paid into the program while they were working, while high earners get somewhat less than they put in.

-- From the healthy to the sick: The Disability Insurance program redistributes money from the healthy to the sick.

-- From singles to married people: The spousal and survivor benefits redistribute money from singles (who don't get the benefit) to people who are married.

-- From those with short lifespans to those with long lifespans: The fact that benefits are paid out in monthly installments, rather than in one lump sum, redistributes money from people who die early on in retirement to people who live longer lives. This is also by design.

--And also... from minorities to whites. What's less well-known, meanwhile, is that Social Security has also redistributed money from blacks, Hispanics, and other people of color to whites. The Urban Institute authors come to this conclusion after looking more carefully at transfers across multiple generations:

Specifically, for every $100 that white beneficiaries pay in taxes, they receive $113 in benefits, blacks receive $89 and Hispanics receive $58. The gap is particularly pronounced for retirement benefits, although the Disability Insurance program narrows the gap somewhat.

The disparity will continue to widen in the next ten years. Whites will receive $120 in benefits for every $100 they paid in taxes, while blacks will receive $91 and Hispanics $62. (Thanks to Eduardo Porter for crunching these numbers.)

There are a few possible reasons for this, the authors say. First, Hispanics and Asians are more likely to have immigrated recently, which means that they're more likely to be paying into the program than receiving benefits.

"Second," the authors write, "blacks and Hispanics have tended to have larger families than whites, thereby creating a larger share of taxpayers receiving lower returns on their contributions relative to parent and grandparent beneficiaries who got higher returns."

The authors make clear that they don't think Social Security benefits should be allocated by race. "We agree that that would be a mistake." They're also careful to note that they're not necessarily objecting to these aspects of the program — say, on the grounds that some recipients might not be getting their "money's worth." "In a system of transfers," they note, "'money’s worth' is a somewhat strange concept. Somebody usually pays on net."

But, the authors argue, if policymakers are planning to change the system in the future — by either raising taxes or altering benefit levels — and want to pay attention to how the program achieves specific goals like alleviating poverty or distributing burdens across generations fairly, these sorts of analyses are worth keeping in mind for reference.

"If one of Social Security’s goals is to provide greater relative protections to the most vulnerable, one must ask whether that was a desired or accidental outcome," the authors write. "Social Security legislation was usually passed without these types of data analyses and only a very partial understanding of the effects of its many regressive and progressive features."

Further reading:

-- The case for expanding Social Security, not cutting it.

-- Senior poverty is much worse than you think.

-- How to sort out Social Security’s finances while making it more generous

-- Health care costs are crowding out everything, Social Security isn't.

erstwhilegirl:

rabbleprochoice:

lancrebitch:

fabulousworkinprogress:

livenudetella:

inothernews:

Yep, Fox “News” really made this graphic.  (via The Colbert Report)

Because getting health care is such a BITCH MOVE

What the everliving fuckwagons?

fucking hell. Not only are they services not restricted to just women, THIS IS FUCKING RIDICULOUS. What the fuck are they on about? Like, how is Fox News allowed? IT’S RIDICULOUS

Because providing vision care to children is obviously a feminist agenda and not, like, a general thing you should do for your child’s eye health. 

STICKING IT TO MEN is this the real life

I think someone needs to literally explain to Fox News where babies come from.

So I’m back, and only slightly jet-lagged, and there are a million things to do and a proper look back at Nantes would take more time than I’ll have for the next day or so.  If you don’t want to wait to check out the Great Elephant, drop in on Caitlin’s facebook album. If you can stomach being on facebook.

Meantime, the pub date for Beyond the Rift kinda snuck up on me; I got back into town to discover that i09 gave it another boost in it’s November reading list, and Tachyon is doing some kind of ARC giveaway thingy over on Goodreads. I don’t know what exactly  happens when you click the “Enter to Win” button, but as of this writing you’ve got about 18 hours to find out.

One thing I do have time to mention about Utopiales is that I spent a couple of weekend hours in a little cubby doing interviews. I’m not sure when or where they’ll all be appearing— a couple of days back someone went on twitter to deliver the Peter Watts quote “All animals are assholes” with the promise of More To Come, so at least one of them is still in the works— but ActuSF has already Youtubed their interview with me. The last installment of the rifters trilogy has just come out in France, so the interview deals more with those early works than you might expect for 2013.  Some of you might be interested, if for no other reason than to see how goofy my hair looked last Sunday.

Finally, I stumbled across something called Fanfiction R&R, a site at which an animated blue pony in a pith helmet devotes eight minutes to a combination critique/analysis/performance of “The Things“, while clips from Carpenter’s movie play on screen. Features a  bonus a capella performance of Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack.

I don’t know if it’s art, but I like it.

kind of a bummer today, guys! i think about this a lot. there’s a way to convert that fear into action and improvement. it can be a good thing to worry about. i am convinced the bad artists of the world […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Winter Blues!

It’s been tough going from perpetual sunny Florida to a dark Pacific NW Winter and it hit me hard! Winter Depression is no fun! 

You may have heard that 5 (originally it seemed there were 6) of 11 counties in Colorado voted last night to secede from the state. Mainly they want less regulation of oil and gas drilling and more gun rights that the know-it-all city folks in Denver are willing to provide.

Read More →

My friend and fellow bootstrapper Allan Branch, of LessAccounting, also wrote a response you will enjoy. Read it here!

The Myth of the Design Studio Turned Product Company is a screed, penned by a consultancy owner who tried, and failed, to move his design consultancy to a product business… and who blames the 37Signals for putting such thoughts into his head.

You know I love a good polemic and I’m not above blaming an industry for twisted priorities. But this bugged me, big time, because it’s so unfactual and blamey.

In short, the author claims he copied the 37signals and it didn’t work. Ergo they’re a wild and crazy outlier, and you can’t learn from them. And thinking you can, well, that’s a destructive myth plaguing the consulting agency world. And damn them for making it so irresistible, against his better nature! You shouldn’t have worn that short skirt, Jason Fried, it’s all your fault!

*cough* Pardon me. I got a little overexcited there.

I, as someone who has truly, slavishly copied the 37signals, am here to say: It absolutely works. And also: The author guy skipped a bunch of steps. He got a lot of facts wrong. He willfully misinterpreted what they wrote. He imagined things that were not there. He lays a lot of imaginary bullshit at the feet of 37signals, and blames them for it not working.

He also conflates “startups” with “product companies” — and if you’ve ever read my blog before, you know that’s a deadly mistake.

So, if you’re curious about how I got where I am today — by following 37signals’ lead closer than anyone knows — then read on, because I’m going to rip apart the myth of “the myth” and reveal more detail about my backstory than ever before.

Rant Stick: ENGAGED. Ready to read it with me, critically? Let’s go!

Myth: They launched their first product, and BOOM! SUCCESS UNICORNS!

Let’s look at the myths that Richard Banfield has told himself:

“Early in 2005, as their first product, Basecamp… grew in popularity[,] something happened to the web development industry.”

Fact: Basecamp was not 37signals’ first product. Nope. It was their third:

• First: E-Commerce Search Report: $99, launched January 8, 2003.
• Second: Defensive Design for the Web: traditionally published March 12, 2004, which means it was under contract and finalized months before…

Yikes. How wrong can you be? Seriously, ouch.

Jason Fried & co didn’t appear out of nowhere with a massive hit. They also never claimed to. The evidence is all over their blog, the archives of which are still online.

They started with a book. And a report. They built their readership. They taught people things. They learned how to sell.

You might be saying, “Well, Amy, Defensive Design actually was published a month after Basecamp had its public launch!” (In Feb, 2004.) Yes, but the book had been bought by the publisher probably at least a year before — and printed, and pre-sold to bookstores quarters in advance. That’s how publishing works.

And anyway, the ecommerce report shipped right after the new year in 2003.

Which means 37signals had been working on products since 2002.

Three years before Basecamp allegedly “blew up” in the scene.

Point of fact: I wrote a whole essay about this exact story, “Why you should create a tiny product first.”.

Why is this myth — created by the people who believe it, not 37signals — so pervasive?

Because it lets the believer do whatever they want, and then blame someone else for it.

Because intellectually incurious people believe the observable universe only exists when they are there to observe it. “If I didn’t hear about it, it didn’t exist.” They first heard of Basecamp, and never stopped to wonder:

What came before? How did they get there?

Incurious people fail. Because incurious people don’t rely on facts, they rely on story — a story that begins only when they, Homo Lethargicus Mythicus, appear on the scene. They wander in at the third act… then they wonder why their version of the story didn’t work.

OK, enough lecturing… back to… lecturing? Wait a minute! Back to myths. That’s it.

Myth: Product building is at odds with consulting… ditch those clients!

Guys, guys, GUYS:

“Some studios went to extremes. They dove headlong into the task of creating their own products. Their stunned clients stood by as their design and dev partners now shuttered themselves in and announced they would be working on their own products.”

This here seems to be the real thrust of Richard’s polemic:

It’s a distraction! People are going CRAZY and forgetting their station in life! And their clients are suffering! Poor, sweet clients… if only someone would help them… Someone who consults with TechStars and other big names… and who’s completed so many projects, see, that number right there… Someone who’s given up on this harebrained scheme and will devote themselves only to you and who is writing this blog post right now!

(Am I cynical? Guilty as charged, then. But read the whole thing again and tell me if it’s not a bit of very clever marketing.)

But, ahem, let’s take this complaint at face value. Let’s say there are foolhardy and impressionable agencies out there dumping clients willy and nilly, and “diving headlong” into creating their own products and neglecting, you know, their actual source of income.

Whose fault is this? Theirs. Not anybody else’s. If you want to copy 37signals, by all means copy them. This is not copying them.

37signals began building Basecamp no later than mid-2003. While working for clients. In fact, the earliest mention of Basecamp I could find is here, from a little guide they titled Why Should I Hire 37signals?:

The source? Dated December 18, 2003.

Fact: Basecamp didn’t detract from client work… it aided it. 37signals build an internal tool they could use as a competitive advantage to seduce consulting clients. They made one hour of product effort do the work of two: not only did they build a product, they built a product that helped them make more money consulting.

“A small irony is that their story distracted the very people that they had created their tools for. Now their very customers were distracted from the tasks that made the tools necessary in the first place.”

No, the small irony is that if you believe this, you have ignored the most important fact that enabled 37signals to do what they did.

Myth: You need infinite time and CEOs and ops people and and and!

Hoo, boy. So, I’m not being entirely linear in my takedown… but here’s where the product-startup conflation starts to get bad.

One of Richard’s biggest arguments — in terms of words expended — is time. He expends a lot of words about time. I almost get the feeling that he’s concerned about time. Certainly he thinks everybody else in the agency world seems to be talking about their internal project time, and that’s super scary because…

“For a small design or dev firm 20% time is often the difference between profit and loss.”

Which is in truth a completely separate point from the following sentence, but he treats it as if they are connected:

“If startups can’t produce guaranteed success even with all that support and a full-time effort, what makes us think that 20% of unstructured effort will get us?”

Let’s break it down, shall we?

First off, there’s one little word hiding in that last sentence of his. Why does he write “20% of unstructured effort“?

Why on earth would you spend so much time and not bother to structure it? Was he, in fact, plagued by random creative “noodling” on “ideas” — genuine time wasting — and not engaged in a serious effort to make products? I wonder.

Fact: “internal” doesn’t mean “product.”

A healthy agency requires all kind of internal (aka non-billable) internal projects… what else do you call hiring, marketing or training? These three activities are critical; nobody will tell you otherwise. Why? Because they deliver a ROI… IF you do them right.

Developing additional income streams is simply another internal line item. If you treat it like it’s special, different from necessary tasks like marketing or training, you are doing it wrong.

Fact: If you’re 20% from bankrupt, you have serious business issues.

Richard magnanimously warns away small agencies from products, because they “can’t afford” to lose 20% of their billable time to develop new sources of income over the long term. This may not be untrue… but even if it’s true, it is an absurd argument.

Here’s the thing, agency guys: A 20% loss could strike you at any time. It doesn’t take much:

• A major client could stop paying on time.
• The industry that feeds you all your clients (*cough* funded startups) could have an “upset.”
• One of your team could fall seriously ill, or quit.

If your business could not survive any of these things, you are in constant danger. And you have to fix that first. Luckily for you, there are entire books on this topic (the dreaded E-Myth, anyone?).

By the way… one great way to avoid being killed by a lost client, or industry having a “Series A Winter”? Create a diverse income stream portfolio. You know what that means, right? Products.

Myth: It takes years to see any return on products, unless you’re 37Signals.

He writes,

“Even the most efficient and well managed studio would struggle to lose 20% of their billable time each year without a tangible return.”

This is an interesting statement. He says “each year” — that implies that it will go on for several years, or at least more than one.

Now, you may know that I often write about exactly how long it does take to reach $100,000+/year from software as a service. (The consensus seems to be about 2 years of serious effort to reach $180-200k.)

But that’s not what Richard is saying. He’s saying: That time is GONE. ZIP. ZILCH. NADA to show for it.

To credit his honesty, he seems to admit in the essay that this is exactly what they did… but then he concludes “Maybe we’re not smart enough” to make it work. For that, he loses points. It doesn’t take special intelligence to see how “unstructured time” would fail to lead to structured results.

Here’s the thing:

If you actually copy 37Signals, you’d start with a white paper for $99 or so, which could not possibly take 20% of an entire year to produce. You could start to see some ROI very quickly. Maybe not enough to match your hourly rate — not at first — but there’s where your investment mindset comes in. You give up a little now, in exchange for a bigger return, later.

Once you’ve made a product, you can keep selling it, meaning that your initial hourly rate can get higher and higher from the future.

Fact: I am out of energy.

OK, I’m done for now. Seriously, there are so many other myths and half-truths in that one power-packed polemic, I’ve gotta split this sucker into 2 parts.

But I won’t leave you hanging without some actionable advice.

FACT: How 37signals ACTUALLY did it, and what you can copy, right now

37signals did not: quit consulting, work at odds with their clients, start with software, act like a VC-backed startup, hire a CEO and ops people right out the gate, tempt you like a Greek siren to ruin your life, etc., etc., etc.

So, what did they do?

Fact: 37signals created a very safe, risk-averse approach. One that is not hard at all to copy.

Here’s what they did:

• They had fixed price consulting packages. This helps everyone: clients know what they are getting, for a low (and fixed) risk; and the consultants have an easier time selling, easier time scheduling, easier time carving out time for internal projects. Link, screenshot.
• They created marketing material that brought clients to them, including their blog, their infamous manifesto, the 37Better project, Design Not Found, and more.
• They dipped their toes in with a Tiny Product First, the E-Commerce Search Report. Note that this product was not only tailored to their clients, but also the clients they wanted to have.
• They repurposed their content marketing content for their first book — Defensive Design clearly grew out of their free web site, Design Not Found… started in 2001. Double the results, single effort.
• They created products for people in their audience — not some niche industry they discovered maybe needed software or books… they focused on helping people who were like them (something I beat the drum for every damn day).
• They built reputations by educating — sharing techniques, tricks, foibles, and opinions with both fellow designers / agencies, and clients alike. Their content helped so many of us learn so much.
• They built a software tool that did double duty: As I showed above, Basecamp was a competitive advantage for 37signals: The Consultants. And they turned that into a product for other people in their audience. (This was no new approach for them. All their marketing and books, reports, etc. did double duty, too.)
• They did not quit right away. No, they streamlined all their efforts, so each activity they undertook fed into the next. Their consulting informed their product informed their marketing attracted customers.
• They knew how to Be Your Own Angel. They sold a book (Defensive Design), a white paper (E-Commerce), an ebook (Getting Real), held workshops (Building of Basecamp), to pad out the slow-building SaaS revenue. I don’t know if this was by design, but I am sure that it helped.

All of the above can be copied by anyone who has a skill that clients will pay for, be it design, code, writing, etc.

They had two advantages you are probably unable to copy: Ruby on Rails, and the first-mover advantage. But as you will see in my next essay (sign up for my newsletter below), you can still do great even without them. (We sure as hell are, and we are far from first!)

That said…

If you’re familiar with my business at all, you know I’ve run completely off this playbook — from the blogging and fixed price consulting, to the fun free projects that doubled as marketing for client work, to tools they served both us and our clients internally as well as other people like us who suffered the same issues. Oh, and there were the ebooks and workshops that helped us pad our coffers while weaning ourselves off consulting.

You’ve seen the 37signals versions… here are ours:

• the origin of my old blog where I wrote about Rails and design and everything else, and an old post about our prix fixe consulting…
• Twistori
• EveryTimeZone
• JavaScript Master Class
• JavaScript Performance Rocks!
• Retinafy
• and of course, Freckle and 30×500 itself

And while I don’t have any big OSS projects to my name, my husband, Thomas, certainly does.

The one place I failed to copy properly was: we started with software a little too soon, and bit off more than we could chew. In the first couple years, there were months where we couldn’t balance Freckle with consulting, and so Freckle was neglected. But it still grew.

And when I simply had to quit consulting, but the revenue wasn’t there yet, damned if I was going to give up. We filled in those long, slow months of SaaS growth with those other products & workshops.

Now, I teach my 30×500 students explicitly to avoid this particular mistake. I teach them to copy 37signals more accurately.

There you go… there’s the way 37signals actually did it. That’s the way you can do it, too. That’s the way I teach my students to do it. That’s what I blog about.

And I’ve given you proof that it can be done by utterly non-mythical creatures, like me. Our revenue is only a fraction of 37signals’ revenue, but that’s by design: we don’t work 40 hour weeks, and we don’t stress, and we have only 2 employees. Freckle will cross $1 million in lifetime revenue this month, and it’ll also be our best month ever by a long shot.

We’re happily, and very profitably, doing it our way… using the 37signals playbook.

Unlike Richard Banfield, who admits at the very end of his own rant:

“As 37Signals releases yet another book and another great new product I’m reminded that I still haven’t got round to finishing my first book.”

Perhaps, just perhaps, that has something to do with it.

Comments? Drop me a line @amyhoy.

IMPORTANT: Did you enjoy this essay? Did it help you? If so, can I ask you for a favor? I don’t take tips, but please consider donating $25 to help web pioneer Molly Holzschlag with her health disaster.

The Vessel is a hanging bathtub. Designed by SplinterWorks, it's constructed from carbon fiber and empties out the bottom into a floor drain. Sadly, it does not swing. "The Hammock Bathtub" (Homes & Hues, via Neatorama)

Remember Odysseus, the hero from the 2,800 year old Greek play The Odyssey? He may be more relevant than you think to all those reboots of old franchises like DuckTales: Remastered, Killer Instinct, or the otherwise inexplicable Typing of the Dead reboot. As the researchers Tim Wildschut and his colleagues note in a recent article about the triggers and function of the emotion,1 Odysseus’s ordeal is a good illustration of nostalgia as it was originally conceived. The word itself derives from the Greek words “nostos” (returning) and “algos” (suffering). For 10 years our Greek hero suffered a massive bout of nostalgia as he longed to return to the way things were. He wanted so badly to return to his wife Penelope and all his favorite games from the 16-bit generation that he turned down all kinds of offers from sexy sorceresses and a not very sexy cyclops to do so.

Much later in the 1600s, Swiss physicians and fans of neologism coined the term “nostalgia” in reference to this kind of homesickness. They saw the condition as a literal mental illness caused by yearnings for past lives on the part of Swiss mercenaries soldiering for foreign kings. But while they did good to put their finger on nostalgia as a mental state, these proto-psychologists of the day weren’t very good at figuring out the causes For years they thought nostalgia was caused by things such as little demons living in one’s head, changes in atmospheric pressure, or the incessant clamor of cow bells. No, seriously.

Fortunately we’ve come a long way since then and many fewer physicians think tiny demons are involved. This is good, because appeals to nostalgia are currently everywhere and remain of interest to both psychologists and marketing professionals. Today, nostalgia is generally defined as a sentimental longing for the past, especially in reference to how things used to be better. Video games have at this point been around long enough that it’s not uncommon to encounter people thinking back wistfully about the days of blowing the dust off cartridge contacts, fiddling with HIMEM.SYS files, and covering their 28.8K modem with a pillow so their parents didn’t hear them calling a friend to play some DOOM deathmatch.

This isn’t lost on developers and publishers. For every new gaming franchise that comes along, it seems there are two others that are just re-launches of old properties that were popular when we were kids. And that’s not even considering the resurrection in other nostalgia-inducing goods, such as the PT Cruiser automobile, “Throwback” versions of Pepsi featuring the original formula and packaging, and Nikon’s new DSLR camera that looks like something you’d find at a garage sale.

This begs the question, though: why do we get so nostalgic about video games and other media from our childhood? The good old days are certainly old at this point, but are they really still good or are we looking at them through a rose-colored Occulus Rift display? Researchers in psychology and consumer behavior have studied these questions, and what they’ve found out suggests that video games may have the potential to elicit more nostalgia than any other medium.

But first, let’s consider the nature of the emotion in question. Nostalgia is often experienced as bittersweet remembrance tinged with regret about things lost to the passage of time, so the place many researchers have chosen to start is the simple question: is nostalgia a good thing?” Immersing ourselves in nostalgic experiences can have many benefits for us,” says Dr. Filliplo Cordaro of the University of Cologne, who studies nostalgia and consumer decision-making. “Things like fun times with friends, and family vacations we remember fondly are common examples. The positive and social nature of these experiences means they can fulfill a few important roles.”

Coping with stress and melancholy may be one of these roles. For example, when Tim Wildschut and Constantine Sedikides from the University of Southampton had study participants think about meaningful memories and write what kinds of experiences or states made them feel nostalgic, they found that sadness was far and away the most frequently reported trigger. In fact, simply putting someone in a bad mood makes him or her more sensitive to nostalgia-inducing stimuli and make it easier to dredge up cherished memories about how things used to be. Nostalgia seems to act as an antidote to sadness and feelings of loss. It elevates our mood and other research has found that people who tend to get nostalgic easily tend to have higher self esteem, find it easy to trust others, and suffer from depression less.

So why does hearing the theme music of Super Mario Bros. or catching a whiff of something that smells like an old arcade bring us out of a funk and lift our spirits when we have no way to recapture the original experience? It’s not just about the place or the thing. “On a basic level, recalling these positive memories simply puts us in a more positive mood,” continues Cordaro. “On a more complex level, recalling these experiences makes us feel a stronger sense of social connectedness with others. We’ve done some research looking at what people usually describe as a ‘typical nostalgic experience’ and find that people typically think about positive experiences in which the self is the protagonist, but they are surrounded and interacting with close others.”

Nostalgia and social connections go hand-in-hand. Thinking about the loss of social connection (as nostalgia often makes us do) primes us to think about repairing those connections, establishing replacements, or maintaining current ones. Wildschut and his colleagues also found that when asked to describe nostalgic memories, most people recalled social contexts and good relationships with others. Other research on the power of music found that song lyrics emphasizing social relationships –friends, lovers, family– were most likely to induce nostalgia. We tend to star in our nostalgic memories, it seems, but we usually have a supporting cast. You may reminisce about playing the original Starcraft but chances are you’re most nostalgic thinking about throwing down with friends in multiplayer or at least bonding with them over the shared experience of how you each managed the single player campaign. For us gamers, our most nostalgic memories probably revolve around sharing the hobby with others, making new friends through gaming, and enjoying a good couch co-op experience.

Social connections aren’t the only important facet of nostalgia, though. A lot of its psychological weight is due to how nostalgia relates to our identity and maintaining congruity between our current and past concept of ourselves. This is especially true when we think about our role in cultural traditions and experiences during our formative years. Morris Holbrook, a Professor at Columbia University, and his colleague Professor Robert Schindler have studied this aspect of nostalgia extensively. Holbrook notes, “We believe that there is a critical period –analogous to imprinting in a baby chick– during which we tend to form strong preferences for whatever objects we frequently encounter – say, music, movies, celebrities, clothing styles, automobile designs, or whatever. The timing seems to differ a bit from one product and one consumer to another, but our peak preferences tend to attach themselves to things we encounter when we are in the neighborhood of twenty years old.”

It’s experiences during these periods when we are crafting our identities and finding out who we are that come to mind later in life when we need a quick emotional boost or a reminder of what we have to be proud of. This can be achieved by thinking back on holiday dinners or school functions, but for many of us we create continuity between our current and ideal selves by remembering the special landmarks in the history of gaming that we were part of. Maybe you were hardcore into Ultima Online or Everquest and thus can see yourself as part of the birth of massively multiplayer games. Maybe you used to read trailblazing gaming news sites like PlanetQuake or Stomped and can feel like you helped support the burgeoning field of games journalism. Maybe you’re terrible at Battlefield 3, but how many of those kids at the top that game can say that they remember getting the Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942 to work? In all cases, we enjoy a mental pick-me-up by connecting our current selves to the big picture through our accomplishments in the past.

But how accurate are those memories? The fact that we seem to engage in nostalgia about games specifically to make us feel better suggests that we may be unconsciously biased towards remembering things that make us happy and against remembering the things that don’t –the so-called “rose tinted glasses” phenomenon. Was using graph paper to make our own maps in The Bard’s Tale really fun? Was manually entering IP addresses to connect to vanilla deathmatch games of Quake more of a pain than we remember? It turns out that humans have a remarkable propensity towards fooling ourselves. We generally require less information to confirm beliefs when they are consistent with our desired state of mind and a substantial body of research has shown that we are predisposed to remember more of the good things in life.

An additional wrinkle in memory’s landscape is that the emotional footprints of positive memories tend to fade more slowly than those of negative ones –something known as the “fading affect bias.” Or it could all be a case of bad mental aim. Some researchers claim that vividly remembered events seem so great relative to the hum-drum of the present because simply remembering something feels good. Jason Leboe and Tamara Ansons reported on studies showing that people tend to have an “Ah-ha!” moment when experiencing easy recall of information, and that kind of moment is innately pleasurable. It’s just a cognitive quirk in the brain. What we tend to do, the researchers argued, is mistakenly attribute the pleasure not to the easy recall of the experience, but to the experience itself. While some stand-out experiences obviously were pleasurable, this kink in the human brain biases us towards erroneously remembering such events as more positive than they were.

In the end, though, the rose-colored glasses phenomenon may be beside the point even if it is true. “I would argue that it’s actually adaptive, and part of what gives nostalgic experiences so much benefit for us,” says Fillipo Cordaro. “Usually when you’re in the middle of a largely positive experience, all of the annoying little quirks and frustrating things about that experience are noticeable. But as that experience fades into memory, we forget about the minor annoyances and more vividly remember the positive aspects.” This is good and fine, since nostalgia’s function is to make us feel better and happier with ourselves. If willful ignorance is self-imposed bliss, it’s still bliss of a sort and that’s okay.

Of course, this hasn’t gone unnoticed by people in the Marketing branch of any given organizational chart. As mentioned above, marketers constantly appeal to our sense of nostalgia in order to sell us products, including video games. One common tactic is to use packaging or music that was popular during our formative years. “It varies a bit from product to product and from consumer to consumer,” says Morris Holbrook, “but we tend to form preference peaks somewhere in late adolescence –say, around twenty years old. If we assume that a marketer is trying to target 40 and 50-year-olds, then it might make sense to drawn on objects from the 1980s and 1990s respectively.”

Again, one reason this marketing works is related to a need for social connections. The Journal of Consumer Research recently published a series of studies that directly tested this idea. Working on the hypothesis that consumption of old, nostalgia-inducing products restores feelings of belongingness, the researchers manipulated participants’ need to belong to a social group and then measured their preference for contemporary vs. vintage cookies, soup, crackers, cars, movies, television, and soap. They found that making people feel lonely not only made them prefer the vintage versions, but letting subjects tear open a package of cookies that were popular in their youth and eat them actually decreased their feelings of loneliness.

The implications of all this is interesting to consider for the specific and relatively under-researched case of video games. If nostalgia is tied so closely to social connections and a sense of community, games have the potential to evoke more of that emotion than any other medium because they are so inherently social and are becoming more so every year. Early video games might have been shared experiences on the couch or playground in much the same way movies or television were, but almost every new game that will come out this year will feature mechanics or tools that encourage players to share, compete, communicate, help, and socialize. And for many games, like MMOs or social games like Farmville, the interpersonal relationship aspect is central to the entire experience. The same can’t be said of music, movies, television, fashion, cars, food, or any of the other common vessels of nostalgia. Video games will someday boost more moods and sell more arthritis cream than anything else in history.

An earlier version of this article was originally published in Edge Magazine.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or RSS.

What is sex like for synaesthetes? Synaesthesia is a fascinatingly strange neurological condition in which two ore more senses are linked so that someone, for example, might "taste" sounds or "hear" colors. Emotional synaestesia is when pleasurable feelings may trigger the individual to see certain colors or have other sensations. Researchers from Harvard Medical School, Hannover Medical School, and University Bremen studied a group of emotional synaesthetes to gain insight into their sexual experiences. Below is a table from the scientific report revealing the subjects' experiences during different phases of the human sexual response cycle, such as: "In the moment of orgasm the wall bursts… ringlike structures… in bluish-violet tones." Far fucking out!

(click to see larger)

"Synaesthesia and sexuality: the influence of synaesthetic perceptions on sexual experience" (via Mind Hacks)

Lucy Burns on the Nazi dictator's willingness to put art he hated on public display:

The exhibition was laid out with the deliberate intention of encouraging a negative reaction. "The pictures were hung askew, there was graffiti on the walls, which insulted the art and the artists, and made claims that made this art seem outlandish, ridiculous."

British artist Robert Medley went to see the show. "It was enormously crowded and all the pictures hung like some kind of provincial auction room where the things had been simply slapped up on the wall regardless to create the effect that this was worthless stuff," he says.

Hitler had been an artist before he was a politician - but the realistic paintings of buildings and landscapes that he preferred had been dismissed by the art establishment in favour of abstract and modern styles.

He simply could not get them out of his head.

Braun's influence on the iPod's modernist design is well-established, but where did the key functional detail come from? Bang & Olufsen's wireless BeoCom 6000 phone, writes Austin Carr.