Manufacturing guy-at-large.

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More Kahneman

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Again, from "Thinking, Fast and Slow." Again, emphasis mine.

Reciprocal links are common in the associative network. For example, being amused tends to make you smile, and smiling tends to make you feel amused. Go ahead and take a pencil, and hold it between your teeth for a few seconds with the eraser pointing to your right and the point to the left. Now hold the pencil so the point is aimed straight in front of you, by pursing your lips around the eraser end. You were probably unaware that one of these actions forced your face into a frown and the other into a smile. College students were asked to rate the humor of cartoons from Gary Larson's The Far Side while holding a pencil in their mouth. Those who were "smiling" (without any awareness of doing so) found the cartoons funnier than did those who were "frowning." In another experiment, people whose face was shaped into a frown (by squeezing their eyebrows together) reported an enhanced emotional response to upsetting pictures - starving children, people arguing, maimed accident victims.

Simple, common gestures can also unconsciously influence our thoughts and feelings. In one demonstration, people were asked to listen to messages through new headphones. They were told that the purpose of the experiment was to test the quality of the audio equipment and were instructed to move their heads repeatedly to check for any distortions of sound. Half the participants were told to nod their head up and down while others were told to shake it side to side. The messages they heard were radio editorials. Those who nodded (a yes gesture) tended to accept the message they heard, but those who shook their head tended to reject it. Again, there was no awareness, just a habitual connection between attitude of rejection or acceptance and its common physical expression. You can see why the common admonition "act calm and kind regardless of how you feel" is very good advice: you are likely to be rewarded by actually feeling calm and kind. 

These are lessons that I should fully integrate into my everyday life. All the time I find myself scrunching my eyebrows and pursing my lips, and I'm sure it effects my overall mood. I imagine that I seem to see my work as a curse to be endured, whereas I truly enjoy and relish it... Kahneman leaves me somewhat unsure, though at least he gives a clear remedy.

=> :-)

Kahneman

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From "Thinking, Fast and Slow." Emphasis mine.

If you quote a source, choose one with a name that is easy to pronounce. Participants in an experiment were asked to evaluate the prospects of fictitious Turkish companies on the basis of reports from two brokerage firms. For each stock, one of the reports came from an easily pronounced name (e.g., Artan) and the other report came from a firm with an unfortunate name (e.g., Taahhut). The reports sometimes disagreed. The best procedure for the observers would have been to average the two reports, but this is not what they did. They gave much more weight to the report from Artan than to the report from Taahhut. Remember that System 2 is lazy and that mental effort is aversive. If possible, the recipients of your message want to stay away from anything that reminds them of effort, including a source with a complicated name.

Placebophiles

Added on by Spencer Wright.

This is definitely worth reading: Rob McGinley Myers on placebophilia. He takes his erstwhile obsession with audio equipment as an example - one in which he eventually concludes that "he was listening to his equipment rather than music."

It's easy to sneer at the placebo effect, or to feel ashamed of it when you're its victim. And that's precisely why I found Felix Salmon's piece revelatory, because instead of sneering at the placebo effect of fancy wine, its marketing, and its slightly higher prices, he thinks we should take advantage of it. If the placebo effect makes us happy, why not take advantage of that happiness? The more you spend on a wine, the more you like it. It really doesn’t matter what the wine is at all. But when you’re primed to taste a wine which you know a bit about, including the fact that you spent a significant amount of money on, then you’ll find things in that bottle which you love ... After all, what you see on the label, including what you see on the price tag, is important information which can tell you a lot about what you’re drinking. And the key to any kind of connoisseurship is informed appreciation of something beautiful.

...

Maybe each of these activities (listening to high end audio gear, drinking high end wine, having needles inserted into your chakras) is really about ritualizing a sensory experience. By putting on headphones you know are high quality, or drinking expensive wine, or entering the chiropractor's office, you are telling yourself, "I am going to focus on this moment. I am going to savor this." It's the act of savoring, rather than the savoring tool, that results in both happiness and a longer life.

Diamonds are Bullshit

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From "Diamonds are Bullshit," 2013.05.19 by Rohin Dhar of Priceonomics.com. Emphasis mine.

And so, in 1938, De Beers turned to Madison Avenue for help. They hired Gerold Lauck and the N. W. Ayer advertising agency, who commissioned a study with some astute observations. Men were the key to the market:

Since “young men buy over 90% of all engagement rings” it would be crucial to inculcate in them the idea that diamonds were a gift of love: the larger and finer the diamond, the greater the expression of love. Similarly, young women had to be encouraged to view diamonds as an integral part of any romantic courtship...

...Lauck needed to sell a product that people either did not want or could not afford. His solution would haunt men for generations. He advised that De Beers market diamonds as a status symbol:

 ”The substantial diamond gift can be made a more widely sought symbol of personal and family success — an expression of socio-economic achievement.”

"Promote the diamond as one material object which can reflect, in a very personal way, a man’s … success in life."

This article also contains an interesting discussion of the price economics of diamonds, which due to their complicated and subjective valuations end up being remarkably poor investment vehicles. Interesting stuff.

The Reserve.

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From "Analysis of Reserve and Regular Bottlings: Why Pay for a Difference Only the Critics Claim to Notice?" Published by Roman Weil, Co-Chairman, Oenonomy Society of the US, 2013.05.16. Emphasis mine.

The wine maker harvests the grapes, sorting the best from the ordinary. At the end of the harvest, the pile of ordinary grapes exceeds the size of the pile of the best grapes, often by a factor of more than five. The wine maker takes special care in turning those best grapes into wine, bottles it separately, labels it differently, calls it the Reserve Bottling, to distinguish it from the bottling of wine made from the ordinary grapes, and offers it for sale at a price from as little as 40 percent higher to as much as three times the price of the regular bottlings. The process of sorting ordinary from best may involve the wine maker's selecting barrels of grape juice after the press or after some aging, or from sorting wines grown on one plot differently from another plot. One way or another, the wine maker distinguishes regular wine from similar, putatively great wine, with a reserve designation, perhaps using a different word, but the same concept.

Here, I report my tests of wine testers' ability to distinguish reserve bottlings from regular. My results show that:

  • just over 40 percent of my wine tester subjects can distinguish in blind tastings the regular from the reserve versions of a wine, whereas one-third could if the process was random, and
  • of those who can distinguish, half prefer the reserve and just under half prefer the regular.

Conclusion: Wine drinkers cannot distinguish much better than chance between regular and reserve versions of a wine. Those who can distinguish the difference do not prefer the more expensive reserve except at random. In only a fifth of the tests could the tester both distinguish the regular from the reserve and prefer to drink the more expensive reserve.

Later, on the experimental methods:

Most of the testers were either MBA students at the Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago or its alumni, alumnae, and their companions. They are primarily upper middle-class, experienced and enthusiastic wine drinkers, but not experts. All testers paid an entry fee for the testing, which fee covered full costs of the testing, and in the case of some of the alumni, more.

And later still:

What to do with these results? ...If you serve the reserve wine, be sure to show your guests the label, because the chances are four to one against any one person's being impressed by the taste, so that any warm feelings the guest forms of your generosity will likely come from visual, not olfactory and taste, stimuli.

Massive

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From "Google Puts Money on Robots, Using the Man Behind Android," The New York Times, 2013.12.04. Emphasis mine.

“The opportunity is massive,” said Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business. “There are still people who walk around in factories and pick things up in distribution centers and work in the back rooms of grocery stores.

What McAfee is saying here is totally nontrivial. All around the world and across every sector of the economy there are human beings performing menial tasks.

Until I see evidence that menial work is useful for more than building character, I'm all for ending that.

Control

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From "Why Gamers Can't Stop Playing First-Person Shooters," by Maria Konnikova, New Yorker Online. Emphasis mine.

Control, compounded by a first-person perspective, may be the key to the first-person shooter’s enduring appeal. A fundamental component of our happiness is a sense of control over our lives. It is, in fact, “a biological imperative for survival,” according to a recent review of animal, clinical, and neuroimaging evidence. The more in control we think we are, the better we feel; the more that control is taken away, the emotionally worse off we become. In extreme cases, a loss of control can lead to a condition known as learned helplessness, in which a person becomes helpless to influence his own environment. And our sense of agency, it turns out, is often related quite closely to our motor actions: Do our movements cause a desired change in the environment? If they do, we feel quite satisfied with ourselves and with our personal effectiveness. First-person shooters put our ability to control the environment, and our perception of our effectiveness, at the forefront of play.

One type of swing, etc.

Added on by Spencer Wright.

A number of things struck me about this Cubed podcast from a week or two ago, which was primarily a discussion about Apple's place in the market. They're all a bit non sequitur, but I think there's a lot of insight here. Throughout, emphasis is mine.

The discussion started out with Horace Dediu talking about what he calls "the innovator's curse." He applies it to Apple, with the point being that although Apple has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to produce massively successful products, financial analysts use that fact against them - expecting a regression towards the mean. He cites a quote by Steve Jobs as a jumping off point: "Babe Ruth only had one home run, and he kept hitting it over and over." The conversation takes off from there; here's Dediu:

So, Apple is in the business of hitting home runs. And I would use the analogy of Pixar, which only makes blockbusters - they are just a blockbuster manufacturing company. If you *knew* that any company was only in the business of making only home runs, then you would conceivably price them as a discounted current value of all of the home runs they might hit. Why is it, then, that Apple isn't valued at even the net present value of all of the current products that they have? And actually, the expectation is that the iPhone will diminish, and go to zero, and thereafter the company will be worth nothing. That is indeed what you would get if you did the simple arithmetic of their P/E ratio...So my point was that if [Apple's ability to produce successful products] was a repeatable process, then why doesn't the market believe that it's going to actually repeat? ...so [the innovator's curse] is that you've proved that you can do something over and over again, but nobody believes you. In other words, you've done five home runs in a row, and the expectation the next time you're at bat is that you will never hit another home run, *ever.* That's how the market thinks, and it's believable to think that way. Because they say "it's hard enough to hit *one* home run - how do you expect that you can hit *six*?"

So if you use the markets as they were originally conceived, as a source of funding, and you've had six home runs in a row and you go back to the market to raise money and say "give me the chance to hit seven," and they say "no way - we're not going to give you a penny."

The more successful you are, the more likely it is that you won't be to get funding going forward. And that's why Apple needs so much to have the [financial] resources internally - because no one will trust them.

The consensus on the podcast is, of course, that Apple's success *is* repeatable, and that the market has it wrong. 

Later, Benedict Evans on Apple's resurgence:

One of the things that strikes me is that in a sense, Apple has been doing the same thing for 30 years - it's just the market's changed. So Apple has always been about product fit & finish and the user experience, and not going below a certain level of quality in order to hit a certain price point where there's a market opportunity. And in the days of the PC industry, that model didn't work, because that wasn't how PCs were bought. They were predominantly bought by corporate buyers who wanted 500 with a certain number of features and a certain price and they were going to go under the desk so they didn't care what they looked like and they were never going to be configured after they were bought, so they didn't care what the user experience was. So Intel had product-market fit, but Apple didn't.

As we've now come around to the smartphone and the tablet world, products are bought in line with Apple's values - with the way that Apple tries to make products. And so part of the reason that Apple has been winning for the last ten years, say, is that the market came around to where Apple was, rather than that Apple created out of thin air some amazing product that nobody could have conceived of before.

Next, Evans again on Apple skeptics:

If you don't see what the common thread is between Apple's products, then you will think that each one of them was somehow some unique stroke of genius. And it's only if you see what it is that unifies all Apple products, and their approach - and it's not unique to Apple, you see the same kind of product quality in Nokia Lumia phones, for example, which are lovely pieces of hardware which aren't selling for a bunch of different reasons; or you can see it in some HTC product, or in some Sony product, but you probably don't see it in some South Korean product.

But if you come from position which says "I don't see any difference between an iPhone and a high end Samsung and a high end Nokia," then you will look at the iPhone with a degree of mystification, and you will say that it's somehow because of marketing, and it's because Steve Jobs had some unique genius to create that product, rather than seeing that it flows out of an underlying approach to creating product. It's a bit like the way that communist governments used to explain failure by saying it was sabotage, because they couldn't actually understand what the real process was that was causing the problems. That wasn't something their mindset could deal with, so it had to be sabotage. So you get a class of minds that look at Apple products and say "Well it's all a fad."

And Ben Bajarin on the importance of having a shared vision, regardless of what it is:

They [Pixar] believe that they are making the best motion pictures on the planet. And what is key to that is [Pixar employees] believe that these things are the best, and their talent and skill sets validate that and actually create the best. And so it comes down to the talent thing: you've got to have the right people with a shared vision about what the best is. And the best is going to vary. What's the best for Google might be very different from the best for Amazon or the best for Apple. But the point is that you acquire these people who share a vision of what the best is. 

And so you read this article about John Lasseter and these guys at Pixar and they'll say "We were working on this movie and halfway through we realized it really wasn't what we wanted it to be. And so we said well, we could ship it, or we could work a *ton* of overtime and stretch ourselves and really it right." And that's what they did - whenever they saw those things happening, they worked their tails off to make it right. Because they were so proud of what they were creating that they basically said "If I'm not willing to put my name to that, then I'm not going to ship it." And whether that meant being patient, whether that meant a complete restructure...

The culture is both dependent on a shared vision of what the best is - so for Apple, it's "what are the best personal computers on the market," or "what is the best products on the market with the best experience" - like I said, their vision might differ from Microsoft's and others' - but it comes back to hiring the people who believe that that is the best, and who more importantly will not ship a product with their name on it unless they believe that [it is the best].

I really recommend listening to this show yourself - it's got a lot of really interesting analysis and dialog.

Laura Klein

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From a 2009 blog post titled "6 Reasons Users hate Your New Feature."

The truth is that users will often ask you for a solution when it would really be more helpful to tell you that they have a problem...users aren’t great predictors of which brand new features will be big hits. Sometimes users will tell you that they want a toaster in their car, when what they really mean is that they don’t have time to make breakfast in the morning.

Little American flags

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From "That 'Made in U.S.A. Premium," NYTimes, 2013.11.30. Emphasis mine.

“A while back, we thought we’d stick little American flags on the products made in America,” said Frank Blake, chairman and chief executive of Home Depot. He said he had figured, based on the prevailing marketing wisdom, that customers would flock to the items. “But whatever segment really cares about it doesn’t make much difference from a retail perspective.”

So retailers are focusing on the quality when trying to justify the higher cost of American goods. The exception to Mr. Blake’s rule comes when buyers are willing to pay more for perceived quality. A majority of consumers, rich and poor, say they believe that American-made products have higher quality than imports, according to the Times survey. Fifty-six percent of those making more than $100,000 said so, as did 67 percent of those making less than $50,000.

Lands’ End promotes its American manufacturers as “the highest-quality companies, working with vendors and artisans.” New Balance says its American products are made by “highly skilled craftsmen.” At L. L. Bean, bags are “still made by us here in Maine from practically indestructible cotton canvas.”

“With higher-end fashion goods, where it’s made is an identifying source of quality,” said Anthony Dukes, an associate professor of marketing at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. “But at the lower end, I don’t get a sense that people pay too much attention to where it’s made.”

Get the Facelift

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From "Life Goals Matter to Happiness: A Revision of Set-Point Theory," published in 2006 by Bruce Headey, of the German Institute of Economic Research. Emphasis is mine; note that SWB is an acronym for subjective well-being.

SWB theory, as currently understood, has the depressing implication that one's level of happiness is extremely hard to change because it depends on characteristics one was born with or which are developed early in life. The most widely endorsed theory at the present time appears to be set-point theory...All these theories claim that a person's set-point or baseline or equilibrium level of SWB are near-automatic consequences of hereditary characteristics and personality traits. Conscious life goals play no role in these theories and major life events are viewed as having only a transitory effect.

In recent years there has been some questioning of set-point theory and its relatives. Some life events are so severe that victims never recover back to their previous set-point or equilibrium level. One such event is the unexpected death of a child...Repeated spells of unemployment, although not a single spell, have been shown to have a 'scarring effect' from which most people do not recover...Getting married temporarily raises the SWB of most people, but then most revert to their previous set-point. Entertainingly, the only positive life event which has been unambiguously shown to raise the SWB set-point is cosmetic surgery.

I should note that the takeaway from Headey's paper is that people who pursue non-zero sum goals generally have higher levels of subjective well-being. Basically, you're better off orienting your life towards family, health and altruism than towards financial success and social status. Heady also investigates internal locus of control as a factor in SWB:

People who have an internal locus of control believe that they can to a considerable degree control their own lives, that success or failure are in their own hands...There are theory-based reasons for believing that success in the pursuit of life goals may be related to internal locus. People with high internal locus tend to be persistent in pursuit of coals and have relatively good coping skills. By contrast, people who rate high on external locus of control tend to believe that outcomes are due to luck or the influence of powerful others.

So:

What makes for a happy person? Part of the answer seems to be a personality characterized by a high level of extraversion and a low level of neuroticism, coupled with a desire to pursue non-zero sum family related and altruistic goals...Such a person is likely to be happier in the first place, and to have a reasonable prospect of becoming happier over time. The role of internal locus s interesting in this context. Internal locus is probably best not thought of as a more or less fixed personality trait like extraversion or neuroticism. It is a disposition to take responsibility for one's own achievements and failures, and this is associated with persistence/perseverance and good coping skills. It is tempting to suggest that internal locus may be the link - the link in terms of perseverance and skills - between having non-zero sum goals, pursuing them effectively and increased life satisfaction.

So: Work on your priorities, and put family, friends, and health first. Take responsibility for your failures and accomplishments.

And in the meantime, get the facelift.

Charity

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Felix Salmon, from an excellent post arguing that privately-financed public parks (as Central Park mostly is) are a bad idea; emphasis mine.

Indeed, more generally, the big problem with the charitable-donation tax deduction is that it’s effectively a multi-billion-dollar tax expenditure on the rich, even as charitable donations by the majority of the US population don’t get subsidized at all. If it were abolished, or scaled back, the amount saved by the government would dwarf any reduction in charitable donations: in theory, the government could simply make up the entire shortfall and then some, and still come out ahead. As a rule, it’s always easier and cheaper for a government to subsidize something directly than it is to try to fiddle around with laws which have the same effect but don’t show up on the official accounts.

Sebastian Thrun on Education

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From Fast Company's interview with Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun; emphasis mine:

Thrun's 5-year-old son, Jasper, is not yet old enough to be impressed by his father's work, but he's already starting his education. "In my son's kindergarten, they're telling us how to get him into Stanford," he says. "By their advice, I'm doing everything wrong, because I'm trying to make him happy rather than putting him through as many piano lessons as possible." He dreams that his son will take a less conventional view of education. "I hope he can hit the workforce relatively early and engage in lifelong education," Thrun says. "I wish to do away with the idea of spending one big chunk of time learning."

Felix Salmon on Wine

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Felix Salmon has a bunch of great posts on the ups and downs of blind wine tasting on his Reuters blog. A few excerpts below, emphasis mine throughout.

From "The Negative Correlation Between Wine Price and Quality," 2008.14.26:

Eric Asimov thinks that wine is like film or literature: the good might not be popular, and the popular might not be good. Which may or may not be true – but no one tries to charge higher prices for better films or better books. He does however make another good point: that the real finds in the wine world aren’t the expensive famous wines or even the cheap famous wines but rather the tiny artisanal wines which have a personality and uniqueness which defies pricing. If you find a wine you really love, then it’s likely to be worth spending money on. But if you find a wine which everybody loves (Dom Perignon is the example in the book), then it’s almost certainly overpriced.

From "Tasting Wine Blind," 2009.09.12:

In any case, the various different factors which go into the enjoyment of a wine are so multitudinous that when you try to eradicate them all in order to allow different wines to compete on a level playing field, you at the same time eradicate much of what makes a wine so enjoyable in the first place. You might love your spouse’s [insert body part here], but it would be pointless and invidious for someone to test that love by presenting you with a series of carefully anonymized body parts and asking you which one you liked the most.

And:

What is blind tasting good for? Well, for one thing it’s very good at showing how important knowledge of price, as opposed to price itself, is as a contributing factor to a wine’s perceived quality. If you know that a wine you’re drinking is expensive, you’ll probably like it much more. If you’re deceived into thinking that a wine is expensive (if someone poured Yellowtail into a Lafite bottle, say) you’ll like that much more, too. And if someone poured Lafite into a colorful screw-top bottle, you’d like it less.
When I say, then, that in wine there’s no correlation between price and quality, what I mean is that there’s no correlation between price and quality except for in the 99% of cases where in fact the correlation is very strong — the cases when you know, more or less, how expensive the wine you’re drinking is.
I’m trying to train myself out of that ingrained mindset, by drinking quite a lot of cheap wine and buying large quantities of the good stuff. And there really is a lot of good cheap wine out there. But I know that I do still have the same prejudices as everybody else, no matter how much I write about negative price-quality correlations. If I open a cheap bottle and I don’t think much of it at first, I’ll assume it’s not very good. On the other hand, if I open an expensive bottle and I don’t think much of it at first, I’ll let it breathe, I’ll revisit it later, I’ll try to see if I can discern some subtlety and sophistication which might not have been immediately apparent. And if I look hard enough, I’ll probably find it.

Also of note: In 2010, Salmon wrote a great post on how he structures his at-home wine tasting events. I've been wanting to host something similar for a while, and will definitely be taking his format notes into consideration.

Subjective well-being

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From the wikipedia page for "Hedonic Treadmill," emphasis mine.

Headey (2008) concluded that an internal locus of control along with "positive" personality traits (notably low neuroticism) are the largest significant factors affecting one's subjective well-being (SWB). The author also found that adopting "non-zero sum" goals, that is those which enrich one's relationships with others and with society as a whole (family-oriented and altruistic goals), increase the level of SWB. Conversely, attaching importance to zero-sum life goals: career success, wealth, and social status, will have a small but nevertheless statistically significant negative impact on people's overall subjective well-being (even though the size of a household's disposable income does have a small, positive impact on SWB). Duration of one's education seems to have no direct bearing on life satisfaction. And contradicting set point theory, there is apparently no return to homeostasis after sustaining a disability or developing a chronic illness. These disabling events are permanent, and thus according to cognitive model of depression, may contribute to depressive thoughts and increase neuroticism (another factor found by Headey to diminish SWB). In fact disability appears to be the single most important factor affecting human subjective well being. The impact of disability on SWB is almost twice as large as that of the second strongest factor affecting life satisfaction—the personality trait of neuroticism.

Management

Added on by Spencer Wright.

We believe great management is built on a few key capabilities: giving great, inspirational feedback; active improvement of colleagues’ skills over time; and constructing project rhythms that extract outsize value from each member on a team. It’s not about efficiency or Gantt charts, it’s about helping the people around you achieve more when you’re around than when you’re not.

-Clay Parker Jones, in Medium; emphasis mine.

Misplaced Optimism

Added on by Spencer Wright.

The following Q&A is excerpted from Makeway Magazine's interview with Jake Bronstein, of Flint & Tinder.

Through the journey so far, any particularly memorable stories that have helped you continue?

 

The first underwear factory featured in our video is particularly near and dear to my heart. It was in the foothills of PA and had been having a hard time for a VERY long time. We got them spun up making underwear (bought them a couple of pieces of equipment, learned to use it together etc) and in doing so kept nearly 100 people employed for 3 months. It wasn’t enough to keep the bank from foreclosing though. It was really hard watching, but it also crystalized the importance of what it is we’re going.

Here, a weird narrative. A "family owned and operated" factory in middle Pennsylvania is down on its luck. They're "ready for something better," so Bronstein - an entrepreneur and showman - makes them the lead role in his (highly successful) Kickstarter campaign. Here's the video:

I take Bronstein at his word that he worked intimately with his factory, and that if he could have had his way they would have remained open. But the portion of his $290K campaign that went to the factory apparently "wasn't enough to keep the bank from foreclosing," and the factory was shuttered.

The Flint & Tinder FAQ page claims that "for every 1,000 pair of underwear we sell per month, at least one sustainable job is added within our supply chain. " But what does "sustainable" mean, and why wasn't F&T able to keep the original factory open? What does a "sustainable" job look like once the bank forecloses?

I like American people as much as the next guy. But I'm highly skeptical of anyone who claims to be entering a business venture in order to lift American manufacturing out of its presumably sorry state. Poorly run operations will be shuttered, no matter where they're located. And procurement teams should choose suppliers based on whether they are able to fill orders.

I own F&T product, and I think it's totally fine. And I like a narrative as much as the next guy. But my experiences visiting factories in China were as compelling - if not more so - as my experiences visiting US facilities.  As a consumer, I appreciate $.35 worth of human toil that went into making my cheap nail clippers, no matter where they came from. And as a supply chain specialist, I appreciate the vendor that can deliver what I want, when I want it, at a price that my consumers will pay for. That's all. 


UPDATE: I posted this on 2013.11.11. On 2013.11.17, Flint & Tinder sent a sincere reply to me on twitter, saying they were confused by my post. I respect F&T's feelings, and will be writing up a clarification as soon as I'm able.

Naked

Added on by Spencer Wright.
The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.

Neil Gaiman. Via Brad Feld and Tim Ferriss.  

Not about form

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From Vanity Fair's recent piece on Jony Ive and Marc Newson. Emphasis mine.

“We are both obsessed with the way things are made,” Newson said. “The Georg Jensen pitcher—I’m not even sure I love the way it looks, but I love how it is made starting with a sheet of silver.
“We seldom talk about shapes,” Ive said, referring to his conversations with Newson. “We talk about process and materials and how they work.”
“It’s not about form, really—it’s about a lot of other things,” Newson said. Both designers are fascinated by materials; they understand that the properties of a material affect the way an object is made, and that the way it is made ought to have some connection to the way it looks. Theirs is a physical world, and for all that their shared sensibility might seem to be at the cutting edge, it is really a different thing entirely from the avant-garde in design today, which is the realm of the 3-D printer, where digital technology creates an object at the push of a button, craftsmanship is irrelevant, and the virtual object on the computer screen can be more alluring than the real thing.
Ive is the son of an English silversmith, and Newson, who grew up in Australia, studied jewelry design and sculpture; both were raised to value craft above all. It’s ironic that Ive, who has had such a big hand in the rise of digital technology, is made so unhappy, even angry, by the way that technology has led to a greater distance between designers and hands-on, material-shaping skills. “We are in an unusual time in which objects are designed graphically, on a computer,” Ive said. “Now we have people graduating from college who don’t know how to make something themselves. It’s only then that you understand the characteristics of a material and how you honor that in the shaping. Until you’ve actually pushed metal around and done it yourself, you don’t understand.

I should begin by saying that while I take issue with the finer points of Newson & Ive's comments - and with much of the pontificating that the Vanity Fair writer engages in - I found it refreshing to read this passage. I value my time building physical objects immensely, and while I'm somewhat ambivalent about some of the career decisions I've made, I'm proud of the artifacts that exist as a result.

Were I a bit more pushy re: my design career, I'd tout the above passage as gospel. But the truth is that I'm not sure I believe that designers *need* to make things first, and anyway it's not like the design world agrees wholeheartedly with Ive either (my file handling skills just aren't that much of a selling point, and with just cause).

I also take issue with the cynicism expressed re: craftsmanship being irrelevant in the age of the 3D printer. I see no a priori reason for that to be the case, and if it's indeed the way the design world sees advanced manufacturing, I'm certainly unaware of it. 

My time as a craftsman was brief; I shed the term almost as soon as it could reasonably have been applied to my work. But whatever its connotations are, I'm sure that my transition to digital design and manufacturing has not infringed. Craftsmanship - whatever it consists of - does not directly correlate with the size of one's calluses. Craftsmanship is an attitude about work and a focus on a particular (and generally small) skillset. And in my opinion, the romanticization of craftsmanship that I see around me (and in the tech world specifically) is unproductive and dangerous.

  Side note: I can't tell exactly which pitcher these dudes are drinking out of, but I'm pretty sure it's fancy as hell.