A Goofy Foot in Mouth

It could be that I suck at being a son because I never send mom a present or even a card.  I always remember to call.  She thinks I don’t remember and will sometimes call me with some silly excuse to talk to cover for what she thinks is my forgetfulness.  That’s how cool my mom is.

“Thanks” just doesn’t go far enough.  After the car accident (thanks a-hole drunk driver) mom gave up a lot to have me.  Throughout my life she did so too.  She found a way to work at home, and made numerous sacrifices for Jenn and I that only now do I recognize.  Seeing what my mom did for me throughout my life is much clearer now that I am a parent and try to place what I learned from her into context with Taylor and Haley.  In a lot of ways I think she did a much better job than we are.

I was spectacularly disrespectful to mom. Dad too, but more mom just cause I was a bad kid and she was around more, especially each day after school.  But there are lots of great memories that made me who I am.  I wonder if these anecdotes are some of the same ones she has for me.

I remember her teaching me to drive by letting me sit on her lap to steer in the neighborhood on the way home.

While I am blind as a bat and have trouble doing it today, I can still see clearly mom’s sewing class at the JCC and threading needles for her students.

I remember how happy she looked when grandpa came to pick me up on Sunday mornings to take me out to breakfast or Friday nights to go to shul.

I remember the birthday cakes and how long it took her to make each.  Spaceships, trains, cars, no matter what crazy shape I wanted, mom was getting it done long before Buddy on Cake Boss.

Some are funny and more contemporary memories.  Like my quilt.  The last (and I think only) hand-stitched quilt mom ever made was for me.  She absolutely HATES it, but it is really special to me.  I was maybe 10 and wouldn’t let her do any patterns (“no flowery paisly crap mom”) except one polka-dot and she thinks the colors are boring.  But to me it is earthy and plain and I love it.  If you have ever seen what mom can do with scissors and a sewing machine, you know what having a completed project actually means.

I love watching mom show the girls her butterflies and how she brought some chrysalises (that is spelled correct, I had to look it up) on the airplane up here from FLA so the girls could watch them hatch.

I remember the time she brought a whole suitcase of fresh grapefruit on the plane (before the surcharge days) because I asked how their trees were doing.

Mom loves shipping us stuff and everytime a UPS box arrives, we always get a kick out of quessing what it will be (even if we forget to call).

My mom is really cool and while she drives me nuts, she wouldn’t be who she is if she didn’t.  And who I am, what I feel, how I think, what I hope for, is all affected by her and what she does every day, even now, to make me a better and more likeable person.

Thanks mom, and happy mother’s day.

Yeah that Paul Krugman.  I don’t care what degree he has or who gave him a prize.  He may be a genius, but when he acts like an idiot, someone should call him on it.  This isn’t my idea, it is his argument.  He noted that someone should call out Ron Paul when he gets facts wrong.  I think he is correct when he says in that same post that face-to-face debates are silly because you can’t present data.  What you present instead are ideas.  And when he presents stupid ideas, someone should call him on it.  Eric Schmidt (Google) tried but his argument was flawed.  Details please?  Yeah I hear you.

I just got finished with this past week’s episode of This Week with George Stephanopoulos.  There was talk on the show of how to get the economy growing.  Krugman continues to argue that a bigger stimulus is needed to get out of the current “depression.”  He notes that private sector employment is back to pre-recession levels, so when questioned if government should hire the unemployed he replied “… the government should actually re-hire the 300,000 school teachers who have been laid off because of — because of misplaced austerity …”

If you know me, you know that I am a strong supporter of education, and at a local level, I believe in much higher funding levels because I want better equipment, teachers, schools, resources, etc.  Colleges and universities need a MAJOR theoretical overhaul.  Primary and secondary education has been neglected for too long.  To ignore an opportunity to make quantum shifts, is just stupid, and ‘calling’ it the way Schmidt did, is simplistic and misses the point.  He replied “…the easy way to do the 300,000 is to do government block grants. I’ve never understood why government can’t do one-time grants. The government basically funds things, but then they become perpetual.”

This is a good point and seems to address the original point about spending stimulus money, creating jobs and ‘investing’ in education, but why would we just rehire the teachers en-masse?  People need to question fundamentals.  In a similar theme, on March 19, 2002 there was a Congressional hearing I was watching on CSPAN (you know me).  This was just after the INS had sent Mohammed Atta his student visa approval.  The House Judiciary committee held hearings on how the INS screwed this up.  I am listening to testimony about how the applications are sent to a vendor and the vendor (ACS, $3B revenue) does some data entry and then puts the images on microfilm.  There is a lot of discussion about how long it takes to get the film back, and how the vendor is planning to work with INS to get it back quicker and they even modified their contract to do so.  Good ideas to fix the current problem of time delays and helping the operations of the INS.  But I am SCREAMING at the TV, “Microfilm!?! We can’t burn the image to a CD so we can actually search it on a computer instead of some stupid 1950’s overhead projector?!?”  Well there was a lot more colorful language, but you get the point.  None of the Congressmen did.

People need to fundamentally rethink the way we do things.  Does the Ryan budget plan “end Medicare as we know it”?  Yes and it should.  Why else would Health Care “reform” have to pass provisions that target “waste, fraud and abuse” in Medicare.  The administrator can’t have operational procedures to fix that which is already illegal (fraud)?  If we come to know something as one way and we change it, by definition, that ends it as we know it.  Same with Welfare reform in 1994, and no children died starving on the streets.

Think about the 300K teachers.  A fully loaded (benefits, FICA, overhead, management) teacher costs probably $100K per year.  So the one year cost of Krugman’s idea is $30B.  But if we look at that $30B as an opportunity to rethink education, imagine what it could do.  And how exactly has student performance looked over the past 20 years?  Would the same exact 300K teachers suddenly change that trajectory?

For $1B in the first year, you could buy tablets for 1M students and give them unlimited internet service for the year.  For $3B, you could fund an education pool for those 300K teachers at $10K each to take two programming classes, plus memberships in Codecademy, Lynda.com, etc.  Add in another $2B to fund a venture fund managed by professional VCs to look for high tech education opportunities (built by those teachers) that would require mere breakeven profit models (who cares about a 10x return at this point).  Let’s throw in a $2B fund to pay bonuses to students (up to $2K each) that excel in their coursework and/or show significant improvements.  So what are we left with? At the end of 1 year you spend only $8B and you get; Retrained education-experienced developers, Close the technology gap with (what will probably be) lower income students, Create a scholastic incentive to achieve, and Fund the development of lots of new startup businesses themed like Khan Academy or something we haven’t even dreamed (which by the way, could be sold to other countries).

Would it work?  Who knows, but it would cost less, be something new, and address problems in a way that doesn’t lead to the stagnation of the past 30 years in education.  Would it pass?  Who knows, I don’t get to sell creative ideas on This Week, or Meet the Press or the floor of any hall for that matter.  The people who are, have a responsibility to be smarter than that silly watered down hire-more-teachers union-liberal-dogma-crap.   I only have 1 degree, no Nobel gold medal and it would seem I can be more creative than Dr. Krugman.

A few minutes later in the debate they talk about how the investment in GM (how did liberals manage to change the language of “government spending” to “investment”) which was out of the box thinking by the Obama administration, worked so well.  So why is it a great idea for GM to start from scratch, lay off a bunch of workers, restructure union agreements, change the product model, but not for education?  When faced with the same opportunities in education, Medicare reform, and SS reform we lose all sense of creativity?  Is that what smart people do?  Because if creative thought is both good and bad but only when Krugman says so, I agree that We’re Doomed.

Point 2 of Krugman being an idiot…Oh wow, this post is getting long.  Suffice it to say his notion that the US doesn’t have a worker shortage in high tech (have you seen how many Indians are here as developers?) and that companies don’t move where taxes are cheaper (because the data says so), well these are just ludicrous.  I noticed in his bio, while the professor has written 20 books and 200 papers, he has never had a job in industry.  How can he possibly comment on a company’s decision making process vis-a-vis their tax preferences, using macro-economic statistics as a leading indicator?  You really think a CEO says, “We need to move to a new office building.  Hmm, let’s not move to a state with lower tax rates because history shows that when states lower tax rates it doesn’t necessarily increase their total tax receipts.”  Individuals make decisions based on financial facts and intuitions, economies do not make decisions.

An egg-head isn’t always smart.  Someone who didn’t go to the same Ivy league schools isn’t necessarily less-smart.  But the genius is correct, when you act dumb, no matter who you are, someone should call you out on it.

Ben Horowitz starts a lot of his posts with a song quote.  When I started thinking through this one, I couldn’t stop singing this song in my head even though it’s not really relevant.

Regrets, I’ve had a few; But then again, too few to mention. I did what I had to do And saw it through without exemption.        -Frank Sinatra  “My Way”

The other day marked one quarter (the 27th) of the year and half way to my goals deliverable which I targeted for my birthday.  I was thinking of my progress to date and my new motto “Self-Control and Focus.”   That lead to thoughts of how I have made a lot of choices to sit on the couch on many nights instead of getting things done, which finally leads to regrets that I have.  At some point, I will get this question in an interview.  So let’s get some prep work done.  This has been a good exercise just writing it down, I would recommend it for everyone.   “Mr. Rutstein, what is your biggest regret?”

There are two kinds of regrets.  Some are just choices you make in life, we evaluate these on how they affect our decision making process in the future.  Hopefully, we learn from them.  I wanted to cite a few examples:

• I should have done homework in high school, I was smarter than my grades reflect as college showed.  I also should have kept my mouth shut more – special apologies to Miss Moynahan, Mrs. Peal and Mr. Fitzpatrick
• I should have played football in HS, I would have been a great corner
• Sucking up debt to live at college would have been worth it.
• I screwed up so many interviews at Bentley, I won’t even mention those
• Megan and I should have dated more people so we could have had the perspective to appreciate each other more
• I should have taken the $5000 offer for the Alfa
• After quitting IBT in 1995, I should have really started a business, not that half-hearted crap.  Home theatre then, was a great opportunity
• I should have focused on my career instead of working on the house at 30 Windsor, probably the same here in Salem
• I should have stuck with programming on my Commodore 64 and kept with it now
• Respect your parents more than I did

These are all lessons I have learned, and I think about them when similar choices come now or when the results of those choices become poignant.  But they aren’t the second kind of regret.  The life altering kind.  This is something that changes your path in life and affects the core of who you are.  If someone asks “what is your biggest regret” you should know it right away, because it hits you every moment of every day.

“I should have served my country in the Armed Forces.”  If you know me and how I approach politics and civil discourse, it probably makes sense that I regret this one.  I will walk it through.

My dad served in the Navy and my grandfather served in the Army in WWI.  I have two uncles that served as well.  Growing up, dad talked about his service, but more in the context of stories that he remembered;  Dragging the MG with a troop transport to free a ceized engine, his friends, fixing a radar with a meter that somehow would only work when attached, mess hall serving better food than my grandmother (that is a whole separate thread that I will deal with at another time, but it’s a funny string of stories that my grandmother would love).  Dad’s service is important to him and I used to like to wear his coat (which wasn’t his, another funny story) but he never displayed his military career in any sort of overt way.

I had always thought of joining the military.  I wanted to join the Navy like he did and fly.  In the 80s after Top Gun, who didn’t?  I remember dad took a trip to Mirimar for work and I wanted to go and just walk around.  It wasn’t until I met Tom (father in law) that I really started to think through the specifics.  Tom’s career was much different and he displays his medals and citations around the house.  Each has a story, only some of which I have been privy.  He recommended that with my 18 year old mouth (yeah that is a pervasive theme) and inability to take orders, that I should only consider service after college and try to become an officer.  That actually worked with my flying plans.  Despite the first Gulf War while I was in college, I always thought this is the way I would go.

College changed this, but before I detail why, let me be 100% clear.  I don’t blame anyone for my decisions, these are all on me.  And while I regret this decision, I am not sure that given other choices I made that I would have made this one differently.  A whole series of events would have needed to be different.  So while I regret the way things unfolded, it is the result of life and not because I was pushed somewhere.

As with any story, it begins with a girl.  Megan was always supportive of me joining the military, we talked about it during college a good bit.  Being a military brat, she knew exactly what it was like (even though she can’t spell Huachuca:) ).  As our relationship evolved, I saw more and more how military life effected her.  She was quiet, shy, in a way that was always the source of jokes with friends.  “Was Megan ok last night?  She hardly spoke”…”Yeah she’s just quiet.”

I attributed this character trait to growing up and moving around.  By college, she had only lived 3-4 years outside of the military construct.  We were getting closer and she was opening up and developing close relationships, the kind you only grow by being around people for a sustained period of time and having stability.  Could I really ask her to go back to a life of moving around following me?  Her success in college definitely pointed at a career that could not sustain picking up and moving every few years.  Would that lead to resentment?

Despite the crappy job market in 1993, the 4 months I spent landscaping, and the HORRIBLE first job I eventually landed, I decided against enlisting.  1993 was a strange time politically.  The country was in the midst of being convinced that a smaller and nimbler military was all that was needed to win wars.  I believe that was about the time that the 2MRC strategy went into effect.  Also, I had been following the procurement of the F22 and JSF programs and knew that better planes than the F14 were on the way.  I would have to truly be “the best of the best” to fly fighter jets.  No one inspired me to take risks in life back then, I just didn’t have that sort of circle, and I never read anything inspirational.  So I took the other route and went back to being inspired by another movie of the 80’s “Wall Street” (yeah I know, but back then I didn’t understand it as the social commentary Stone meant).

Over the years I have had thoughts of going back and enlisting in the National Guard.  The age maximum is 35 and as I watched that creep up, something always got in the way.

After 9/11 my brother-in-law enlisted in the Army and he has developed a career that amazes me.  I miss skiing with him, but every day I think about the fact that he gets to make a difference in the world.  As of yet, I have contributed exactly nothing.  I remember talking to him just before a deployment a few years ago.  “Take care of yourself and be safe.”  I will never forget his response, and this was right around the time that his daughter was a newborn,

“Fuck that.  We’re the US Army, we lead from the front.”

If you know a soldier who has a family, you know the toll that it takes on what is normally a pretty boring home life.  Their devotion to their unit and country is beyond question.  It’s something I wish I could experience firsthand, something that I wish I had in me, something I wish that was part of me.  It has changed the course of my life and effected who I am.  I am turning 40, I am in the best shape of my life and while I read every Navy SEAL workout program I can find and train as hard as I can, I will never be that guy.  No one will ever think of me the way I think of Ian, Tom, Dad, and the millions of others that can say something that I can’t:  I love this country so much, that I was willing to risk (or give) my life for it.  I follow the news and I write my little blog and someday I hope to run for office, but that is all just my way of making up for the gaping hole in my resume that will never be filled.  Imagine having military service as the cornerstone of every decision you make;  Should I cut corners in production, should we offshore these jobs, if we use chemicals it will preserve this food longer, how can we squeeze more profit.

How can anything be more regrettable than that?

This morning driving into work I was listening to my Supreme Court podcast and the oral arguments from last week’s Affordable Care Act testimony.  Justice Scalia had a really funny comment that drew laughter from the attendees in the court.  It reminded me of something at work that I wanted to joke about.  Poking fun at your friends is always good to keep spirits light and my friend Chris has a good heart.

While on an extremely boring call at my desk I searched for the quote so that I could get it right.  I searched Bing for “Justice Scalia 8th Amendment Healthcare”.  The results are a little different right now but at the time the Politico article was third or fourth.  Normally, I like and trust Politico.  Scalia’s quote to the Solicitor General is as follows…

Mr. Kneedler, what happened to the Eighth Amendment? You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages?            (Laughter.)       And do you really expect the Court to do that? Or do you expect us to — to give this function to our law clerks?  Is this not totally unrealistic? That we are going to go through this enormous bill item by item and decide each one?

Politico goes on with the following, which if you don’t know the Constitution (I have a copy on the dash of my truck) makes the joke.

The 8th amendment is the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The bill’s length and complexity were a major GOP talking point in 2010.

People talk about the “liberal media” all the time (well Newt does at least) but no one talks about how exactly they get away with it.  It’s not obvious like when Chris Matthews and Keith Olberman gushed over Michelle Obama on MSNBC.  That stuff is obnoxious.  Look at the line above “…a major GOP talking point in 2010.”  The word “major” implies a certain sarcasm in the way that “often cited” would not, but the overt meaning is the same.  The use of “GOP” is a political term instead of using the word “opponents” which is actually more accurate.  And “talking point” implies that it was rehearsed and coordinated by the central party organization instead of saying “theme”.  You walk away from reading this thinking that Justice Scalia is making fun of the bill before he even rules and is trying to score political points.  Your opinion is easily tainted by a few otherwise innocuous and well chosen words.  (I will concede he screwed up the “Cornhusker kickback” comment because that isn’t in the final bill).

Let’s set this aside for a second.  I follow Mark Suster’s blog closely (not “religiously” because that would imply I view it as dogmatic – word choice).  He once talked about being a news junkie which made my heart jump.  And then he wrote “But I tape the shows. I can’t watch them live because I have to skip through the guest interviews. I’m tired of hearing one side of the story – it’s pre-packaged BS. I like the round table discussions they have later in the show because you get to hear opposing views.”  This was disheartening, but I think most Americans act the same way.  Here is someone who claims to want news, and then bypasses the pure for that packaged and artificial stuff.  I agree 100% with his idea of getting opposing views, but how on earth are you supposed to put those views in context without knowing the true facts upon which the commentators base their views?

In this world of social media, what you read and share (who else is sick of those FB posts, “Joe Schmoe just read…”) is very important and we have a duty to curate that media.  More critical is to police your own inbound feed so that you don’t only consume opinion material.  Get your own facts.

Back to Politico.  If I didn’t know any better I would be irritated at Scalia for using a political reference to the 2700 pages.  Another site “ThinkProgress.org” had an article condemning the jurist for having the audacity to pronounce that the court shouldn’t have to read a bill that it was about to pass judgement upon.  Yeah dammit, that would surely turn me into a true blue liberal, dying to get those crazy radical Republicans off the bench.

But that’s not what happened.  That was not the context of the quote.  And I know that because I heard the exchange.  I got the raw data and I processed it myself.

You may be surprised to know, but a good chunk of the questioning was about “Severability”.  The idea that if one part of a law is deemed unconstitutional, can the rest of the law exist without it.  Normally this would not be a problem or even an issue.  Most bills have a specific clause that states clearly whether Congress intends the bill to be severable.  But in 2700 pages this time they forgot.  There is a general rule in the House that says that all bills are severable, but where does that leave the Supreme Court?  Justice Breyer actually made a great analogy about an expenditure that is funded by two taxes 50% each.  If one is ruled unconstitutional, then the expense can’t be incurred without the funding revenue.  But should the government keep collecting the other tax?  In that case the law is clearly not severable.

The exchange with the Solicitor General and Justice Scalia was about how to determine if a law should continue to operate if part of it is severed.  The SG said that the courts would need to evaluate that test on the merits.  At which point Justice Scalia raised an obvious red flag.  Criticisms of an activist court are tied to the need to seek “Legislative Intent” when Congress is vague.  Does the Executive branch really expect the Judiciary to rule on every point of the ACA seeking to understand what Congress really meant?  This might include spending provisions like a program to fund abstinence awareness (that was one of the examples).  As Justice Scalia pointed out, who would even have standing on a spending bill?

My point is this:  Journalists are really smart and they write very well.  You have to be careful when your read or listen to processed news in the same way that you have to be careful when you eat processed food.  I like my vegetables as close to the plant as I can get them.  I would pick them if I had the time.  To get my news fresh, I would sit in the halls of Congress and the Judiciary all day long if I had the time.  But that wouldn’t work.  My news grocery store is the internet…I just make sure I know the farmer actually grows the food instead of manufacturing it.

We were talking at work the other day about how after a Patriots night game (aka kickoff after 4pm) it’s hard to get into work the next day.  To paint the picture, a 4:15 game ends at 7:45, back to the tailgate by 8:00.  Grills on, eat supper and watch the night game until traffic calms down (usually halftime).  Pack up and hit the road around 9:30-10 which means pulling into the driveway at 11:30 after you drop off the crew.  Lets not talk about the 8:30 game, too painful.  The question came up: On Monday why can’t you call in sick for a hangover?

It seems so obvious: duh Slappy, you are hungover because you drank too much, it’s your own damn fault and was totally avoidable.  Response: I feel sick as a dog, should it matter WHY and HOW I got to be feeling this way?

Not that I advocate this kind of behavior but the guy has a point.  We work with another knucklehead who smokes like a chimney.  He is away from his desk at least 45 minutes to an hour each day walking downstairs and outside to smoke his cigarettes.  Inevitably, he is going to get sick more than us.  So since he makes a choice to pollute his body and create a situation that increases the likelihood of illness, should we not also question those sick days?  And if you don’t, why do you draw the line at a self-induced hangover?  Would a skiing accident or falling off the ladder of your house be any different (both avoidable)?

I know what you are thinking, this sounds like some adolescent excuse to drink and not go to work, but I think the issue merits discussion about the notion of healthcare and personal responsibility.  Last week Justice Scalia asked why you can’t make people purchase broccoli because it makes them healthier.  The corollary= Should we grant you sick status even when you haven’t taken reasonable steps to keep yourself healthy?

Side note: I predict that Justice Ginsburg will pen the decision (inc Kagan, Sotomayor, Breyer) upholding the individual mandate (invalidates the need to rule on separability)with Justice Roberts writing a separate concurring opinion that very narrowly defines the conditions for a 5:4 majority.  It will be her last opinion and she will retire giving Obama one last appointment before the SC term starts in October.  The Senate confirmation will be SO contentious that America will get fed up with Republicans and Obama will get re-elected.

I’d like to see some more conversations about personal responsibility in healthcare.  I know I seem cruel, but fat people should pay more for insurance.  As an adrenaline junky, I should too (offset partially by my regular exercise and diet).  I admitted that I was once diagnosed with asthma and had to pay a higher life insurance premium (I think it is just allergies).  I am at about 10% bodyfat and can run a half marathon in 1:45 but I am a higher risk than a couch potato eating MCDs all day but doesn’t have asthma?  Please.

If we say that personal responsibility has no effect on your risk profile for health insurance then how can we say that personal irresponsibility is not a valid excuse for using your sick days when you actually feel sick?  Yeah I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but I can’t stand the inconsistency with this stuff.  If you believe in a theoretical course of action, then you should follow it through wherever it applies.  If nothing else, it should force people to think through their positions a little more thoroughly rather than just blindly listening to Limbaugh, O’Reilley, Maddow or Maher.

The press always talks critically about “outsourcing”. But the term “outsourcing” gets a bum rap. It is often confused with “offshoring” and I think politicians use the lack of clarity to exploit their cause and journalists perpetuate it by not doing their homework. Outsourcing is switching a mindset from feeling the need to hire people internally to do a task; to recognizing that there can be specialists in a field outside of your company that can do something more efficiently. Janitorial services is a great example. It used to be that everyone had janitors on staff. Now we “outsource” this task to cleaning companies. I think this is a good thing as it allows small entrepreneurial companies to create scale and efficiency, mastering a particular business function. This works both for a small manufacturer that has no interest in worrying about janitorial functions as well as the janitorial service provider who cleans the shop floor. In most cases, the service consumer recognizes that there is a cost saving (at the macro level) for outsourcing non-core work.

When this same idea is employed except that the service providing company is outside the US, then that is “offshoring”…same principle, just different geography. In many cases, an offshoring effort is tangential to the business function (accounting and finance could be offshored at a large law firm). In other cases, wholesale components of the core business are offshored in the interest of saving money: car assembly in Canada/South America or technology development in India or toy manufacturing to China. Obviously you can’t offshore janitorial services. I think it is important to recognize the difference between the scenarios. In my opinion, outsourcing is good for the US economy, while offshoring has different consequences. In some industries like national defense, we play closer attention to offshoring because critical technology cannot be lost from a strategic perspective. In others, like high-tech, there is recognition that there is a labor shortage in the US. While this may or may not be true, I would argue it is only because we have trained people with the wrong skills. Inevitably that leads to structural unemployment which is a drag on the economy. Somewhere in there is balance between my belief in a free market and going where cost is cheapest.  I like to think of it more from this public policy perspective, that decisions have consequences and we should fully load the cost of a decision.  Manufacturing is a great example of this. We offshore manufacturing to China because it is cheap, but that produces unemployment here, but since those workers (who lost their jobs) aren’t trained as programmers we also need to hire programmers offshore. That just all seems to be ridiculously myopic.

From a consumer perspective, I think it is important to know where something comes from or is made. It’s why I try to look at labels for everything I buy (makes Megan crazy). I paid $7 instead of $5 for a tape measure made in the US rather than China (thank you Stanley). I do this because I believe that small difference in cost and usually poorer quality from the Chinese good, isn’t worth it. I do it for clothes too. I think the press does a pretty good job of making working conditions in offshore companies clear (like Foxxcon and the iPad in China) and that is a good thing. Raising awareness for the consumer at the very least gives them the ability to make an educated choice.  Sometimes you make a choice based on your ability to fully load the cost of your decision.

I do think there needs to be more awareness at a governmental level and the WTO when we open our markets to these nations. China and Japan are notorious for creating red-tape on importing foreign goods after trade deals are negotiated to open our markets to their products freely. Our free market system is based on reducing overhead and complexity (ie cost) while Chinese civil servants make a living off of skimming off the top when US companies come in to try to sell something.  Would you buy something if you knew that some US executive had to pay 5% of the cost to bribe some local regulatory official?  Even if that good cost 25% less than US made?  Can we have growth and scruples at the same time?

No one remembers this, but modern China was built by Bill Clinton. Prior to 1993 China was not on the permanent Most Favored Nation trading list. Every year Congress would have a big debate about renewing China’s  MFN status (for 1 year). The congressional speeches railing against human rights abuses were legendary. Because of the uncertainty, no company would go there and risk capital when they couldn’t know if MFN would be granted the following year. Once China was granted permanent MFN status, there was much less uncertainty, manufacturers flooded in looking for cheap labor and political (even if there is no political freedom) stability which was guaranteed by the Chinese government and military (see Tiananmen Square). Stability is something companies can’t get in Africa or the Middle East or even South America.

In the manufacturing sector, offshoring is largely a net plus as domestic companies can now focus on creativity, design and technology (upper income positions) and have a low cost producer in China. Unfortunately, this perpetuates an income gap as we create fewer high paying domestic jobs, and eliminate the lower paying ones. This is a structural change in the US economy and needs to be recognized and addressed. Some of these jobs may come back as a higher skilled labor force might be needed for quality, but that can be engineered out of the mix. The only manufacturing jobs that will come back are ones in which we can either compete on cost (higher efficiency makes up for higher labor costs) or where proximity to the design teams makes a difference.  There aren’t many of these situations, so get realistic about expectations.

I think it has been wrong of service companies to flock to India and China looking for well educated workers, trying to replicate in services what was done for manufacturing. It is a different dynamic and the idea of team unity is now gone. This happens with IT as developers are viewed as a commodity skill that can be executed where labor is cheapest. I would argue that the lack of integration in product execution and lost efficiency from proximity and latency (time changes) offsets all of the cost savings. Large companies fall victim to this dynamic all the time. You compartmentalize product from marketing from finance from developers and pretty soon no one knows how to solve problems. I see this on a daily basis, where we build apps for a customer we have never met.  When there are issues we have no idea who to contact to resolve problems. You spend 30% of your time figuring out who is the relevant SME, what a waste. And quality becomes a huge issue, no amount of agile interaction over a 10,000 mile wire can replace sitting in the same room with a whiteboard.

In summary, there is good and bad in offshoring. And while the “it depends” answer sounds cliche, that’s because it actually is true. But the real problem lies in out-of-touch managers who have forgotten how team dynamics produce efficiency (real cost savings) because they become too focused on one aspect of the business, their P&L, cost saving targets (and bonus impact), or some other focus area that clouds their ability to see the big picture.  This prevents them from having an incentive to work cooperatively with a peer because when you report up the same vertical, every win or loss MUST be a zero sum game.  You might be able to hit the same cost targets by thinking creatively about the whole process, rather than each area grabbing 15% efficiency by offshoring or cuttting heads or eliminating services.
The solution here is not in government. But public figures can use their pulpit to champion economic heroes; people that create or save private sector  jobs. Not by passing bills or spending tax money on construction projects, but by making a decision to hire a worker to perform a meaningful job right here in the USA.   Find it and celebrate them.

The component of a solution that government can actually help with is in not making stovepipe decisions the way myopic companies do.  Commerce, Education, Labor, and HHS cannot operate with their own single-minded focus.  If Commerce recognizes the need to have more high skill technology jobs in the US to continue our growth and desire for increased standard of living, then Education needs to reform to train those workers adapting quickly so that community colleges actually train workers rather than bulding liberal arts programs, Labor needs to stop tree-hugging to the dream of the past and buy into the reality of the future of dynamic work requirements requiring constant retraining and little to no job security to promote innovation and lastly HHS has to develop policies and standards to breed this new worker, one that is healthier, spiritually balanced, and able to handle longer work hours that are woven into home life.  It has to be a coordinated effort.  And it will take someone with a much broader perspective than a community organizer, private equity executive, blue collar senator or big mouth historian to make that happen any time soon.

I attended Peak Pitch today up at Sugarbush, VT.  It’s a brilliant event.  Do your best elevator pitch while sitting on the chair lift.  I did 14 runs/pitches in 3 hours, with no water to drink.  13 of them went really well and I got some great feedback.  Everyone liked the idea and I got some great suggestions.  It was good to strategize with professionals in the space and they really helped me refine my thinking on the business.  In short CoolReplies was a hit as I was told that several of the investors were discussing it as a creative and new idea that they had not seen before. 

So of course you are wondering about the 14th pitch.  It was some guy from the VT business development authority and he didn’t get the idea.  Everyone else got it just fine, but he proceeded to tell me that I was doing it all wrong.  Problem, Pain, Solution.  Or something like that, he kept blurting at me.  At the top of the lift he told me that he would stick around for 20 minutes “if I have to” and explain to me how to do a pitch appropriately.  I was actually magnanimous to him.  He had a good point about one thing, the idea of expressing the pain point, but I chose to go about that another way.  I took the Calacanis advice and made it personal bringing in the person to my ‘story’.  But he didn’t want to hear any of that, he was all Joe Friday, just the facts.  It reminded me of Mrs Moynahan from sophomore English class.  Things must be done in one way only and that is the ONLY right way!  There are some people that get set in their ways and they just can’t see any other persepective.  I was talking to him about other ways to do a pitch, but he kept telling me that I was wrong.  I used to argue this stuff (Re: Moynahan), but now I just get no satisfaction from pointless discussions.  The second you think that there is only one way to do something, by definition, you have abandoned the idea of innovation, that is not a life I want.

After a few minutes we parted and I skied away.  It got me to thinking about people working for the state tasked with helping VT businesses and I genuinely felt bad for the startups.  But I soon forgot all about him.  I am learning to disregard people of inconsequence. 

I met some great people and got contact info and I will hopefully follow up with several of them.

The day works like this:

• All of the pitchers line up in the liftline
• As the catchers (I thought that was a creative way to describe the VC’s and other business people) come up to the line, we pair up and grab a chair
• Each catcher is given three $1M ‘checks’ that they can give to the pitcher as an investment if they like the pitch.  1 to 3 or give all 3 to 1, it’s up to them.
• At the end of the 3 hour session, the pitchers turn in their investor checks and we see who are the leaders by counting the checks
• The top 5 placers get to do a ‘pitch-off’ and we all score the winner by applause (there was a tie today, so there were 6 pitchers)

Now, not all of the catchers are VC’s so some of them have different persepctives on ROI and exits and investment.  As they are all Vermont supporters, I think that the potential for a big return is somewhat offset by strivingfor focused benefit to the VT social and economic fabric.  That sounds like a copout, but I heard at least twice “It’s too bad you aren’t in VT” – despite my protests about the Killington house.

The winners were as follows in order (note that I did not get a single ‘check’)

1. A woman who was selling special kid sippy cups that somehow did not promote tooth decay because kids don’t have to suck in the liquid
2. A chest mount strap device and iPhone case/camera that turns your iPhone into a GoPro camera
3. An iPad app that can turn your ipad screen into a rolling screen saver to display what is going on in all of your apps, one at a time per minute.  You can thumbs up/down items to refine what it displays.  He makes money by placing relevent ads next to the content
4. Super insulated water tanks to hold water that is either heated or cooled by solar power to help environmental efforts
5. A college kid built an app that takes photos of an object and converts them into HTML that you can paste into a Craiglist ad.  I assume it was a $.99 app and he wanted a “500k – 1M” investment
6. A computer training center in Burlington wants to start broadcasting their courses on line (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc)

It was a serious effort to not laugh at some of these.  The camera was a good idea, but Megan and I noted, who wants to risk a $500 phone on the slopes?  The water tanks are a good idea as everyone knows I love anything that promotes environmental concerns, and I have seen that Vermonters love that stuff.

The rest of it though…seriously?  Sippy cups?  That market isn’t saturated enough?  The Craigslist thing has been done at least 10 times already, plus rule number 1, never ask a VC for a range of money, it means you haven’t thought through your business model.  The iPad thing, who even uses a screensaver any more, would you really sit and watch that?  On line computer training, yeah never seen that one.  Online education is a huge growth area, but jeez, innovate!

At first I was a little dismayed and hurt that I couldn’t even get one check, I have a revenue model and even a viable exit strategy.  But driving home I realized that this was the wrong venue for my business.  I learned a lot about what I need to do, who my market is and where I should go.  I have tons of notes on my whiteboard and a new plan of attack.  And I got a free day of skiing on a 58 degree blue sky morning…I think I won after all.

I call it “skiing” even when I am on my snowboard.  To me it’s the same.  What doesn’t count are those silly bikes, snowblades and the ridiculous telemarkers…“Oh look at me, I knee the snow.  You stupid snow, I shove my knee at you” (said in my best fake French accent).  A corduroy day is best spent on my skis, but powder days are meant for snowboarding.  Heading back country or in the bowls with 2 feet of powder is my heaven.  It truly can stimulate all your senses at once; the desolate quiet punctuated only by that familiar crunching sound, the smell of pine or cedar, bouncing from one turn to the next by digging in your back foot, the blindingly sparkling whites on a bluebird day and the taste of the snow splashing in your face as you brush by snow laden branches.  There is nothing like it on earth.

I wish skiing weren’t so expensive, so more people could find peace on the mountain.  I argue that it is the ultimate family activity.  It’s a personal badge of pride for me that I taught the girls (starting at age 3) without ever a lesson.  Granted those were rough days on my back, but the investment has paid off.  When the four of us are blazing down a trail, there is no point when we are all closer.  For the most part, there are no distractions.  We plan our route, talk about navigating ‘skier’s left’ or right, and where the jumps are.  We stop at a precipice to strategize on where the best snow is, who is getting too far in the back seat, who is using their poles, and the best route through the trees.  Never am I closer to the girls and Megan than when we spend a day on the mountain.  Never are we more a team, all focused on the same goal, all negotiating the same obstacles.  Never are we more humble than when Haley takes a ‘superman’ duff with 4 part yard-sale (skis and poles) or when, hey look, “dad took a digger too.”  “Tay, you’ve got twin tips, go switch!”  “Watch how mom keeps her feet together.”

These are the family times I cherish most.  Even the bad stuff is good.  We brave the severe cold and I have to take care of the girls by packing extra hand and feet warmers.  I can even tolerate Taylor’s adolescent grouchiness with a smile because I know that she uses it to extort hot chocolate from me.  These aren’t the hardcore days with my friends when we eat protein bars on the lift because we hate wasting valuable time in the lodge.  The four of us NEVER make first chair, but that’s ok because we eat breakfast together and get suited up as a group.  “Dad, did you remember the poles THIS time?”

I love the lodge and sitting around a fire at the end of the day with a cup of coffee or a local brew…or both.   We talk about the day and joke about our goofs.  I can’t tell you what day the girls have soccer practice, but I remember every run, every turn, and every time the girls caught air coming out of a trailside loop.  I get accused of being a “foo foo” skier because I judge not only the terrain, but the lodge and its fireplace.  For me, the experience is the whole day, including what we do after 4pm. 

As an aside, note that one of these days, I’ll be with my buddies and we’ll get stuck on a lift.  I will repel myself down, because I believe in the pioneering spirit of NH where you take care of yourself; never be at the mercy of ski patrol.   We’ll see how funny my climbing harness is then when you are still sitting up there!

I’ve never done more than 15 days a year, but I can hold my own on any trail on any mountain.  I started skiing in 1981 (Jeremy Webb) and picked up snowboarding on a Burton Cruiser 165 (hat tip to Eric Burger) in 1988.  All in all, I’ve been to a lot of mountains and there are a lot more that I want to see.  My goal is to run at least one new place each year.  Despite the fact that this is the worst season ever (of course the year we buy the place at Killington) every day on the mountain is still special.  And even though I am the one fighting to get us all motivated to get out of the house in the morning, all of that work is worth every second when I can have just 1 smile from the girls after they giggle with the personal satisfaction of cranking through a steep run.  I get bonus points when they race each other trying to catch dad or when Megan shoots video of us taking turns.   I am honored when Tom gets to ski with his grand daughters, because he can see that his passion has become theirs.

Every day on the slopes is magical, every image is a story, and every moment is a memory.  I love skiing.

I forget who I was reading, but they mentioned that one of the first pieces of a pitch deck should be a “We believe…” statement.  It’s not so much what the product does but why we think it will be successful.  Today I met Brad Feld at work and I was inspired.  I can at least get the material for the first slide done. 

This is a post and not a simple slide that I can talk to, so I think it needs some color.  This all started about 5 years ago.  I was trying to rebel against the stoic and stiff culture at Fido.  Specifically, I was sick of the formulaic vacation auto-replies.  “Hi, I am out, will be back x, contact so-and-so for any issues while I am away.”  B-O-R-I-N-G.  So in an effort to inspire people to be creative, I bought www.ccooors.org which is now defunct because I wouldn’t pay the yearly fee.  Citizens for Creative Out-Of-Office ReplieS (the last capital S was a tribute to Club GROSS from Calvin and Hobbes).  The idea was to get people to do something out of the ordinary.  In one reply, I wrote a poem “Ode to Data Management”, in others I would post links and have trivia questions.  I had a scoring system for rating replies and our long term mission was to get the email providers to add auto-reply functionality.

It never really got that far.  Maybe 15 people actually participated in being creative.  I think it was too hard for people to rebel against the machine and/or actually be creative.  But more importantly, people would email me when I was away, just to see what was in my auto-reply.  I’d get at least 10 messages with “Test” as the subject line, with no message.

When someone sends an email, it is a direct attempt at communication.  In the absence of a reply, people have no idea what you feel about their note.  The auto-reply is a welcome form of communication and serves the purpose of educating the receiver of your status and why you can’t communicate on your own.  The auto-reply has meaning, it has purpose, and the receiver is interested in its content.  The sending of this note is an automatic response mechanism tied to an intentional inquiry.  The auto-reply has power.

At CoolReplies, we believe that the auto-reply is an underutilized channel for creating useful and meaningful communications back to an email sender.

Our first deliverable will focus on vacation auto-replies, as they are the most common.  When you book a vacation, you should be able to set your auto-reply right from the vacation web site.  An embedded picture of the site you are visiting will enable you to brag to your friends when you are away (who doesn’t love doing that?) through your auto-reply.  What’s more, it is a useful advertising channel that will probably have a higher click through rate than buying meaningless border inventory through Adsense.  Who clicks that stuff?  But a personal endorsement of a hotel or resort (with a sub ad for where you booked the trip) has meaning.  And that endorsement has usefulness to the hotel, who would probably pay more for that ‘ad’.

Later iterations might enable you to update your auto-reply with a picture taken from your phone while on vacation… “Look where we are suckers!”   Thinking broader, the auto-reply can be a virtual assistant that can be updated from an iPhone app or customized by a foursquare/facebook checkin… “I’m having lunch at x and will respond in a few hours, or come join me for a bite! [insert link here]”.

We believe there is huge potential for the auto-reply to really disrupt the hotel/resort advertising world.  As they say…coming soon.