Investment in a whitewater world

During the last half of the 20th century retail investors earned positive returns with some mixture of stocks, bonds, real estate (personal) and cash. Mutual funds, and especially index mutual funds, made middle class investing possible.

Then came the great market bubble of the 90s, the real estate bubbles of the 00s, and the rise of IT enabled economic predation. The vast flow of growth returns was diverted from the middle class investor to corporate executives and sharper, faster, players. Corporate financial statements became less and less credible as new ways were found to obfuscate financial status. In a world of IT enabled complexity, risk assessment became extraordinarily difficult. Where growth opportunities were strong, as in China, the markets were corrupt and inaccessible.

Maybe we'll return to the relative calm of the 1980s, or even the slow growth of the 1970s. Oil prices may stabilize around $150/barrel. China's economy may make a soft landing and the Chinese nation may follow Taiwan's path to democracy. The GOP may shift away from the Tea Party base and, once in power, raise taxes substantially while implementing neo-Keynesian policies by another name. North Korea may go quietly. The EU may hold together while gradually abandoning the Euro. Cultural shifts might make personal integrity a core value. Disruptive innovations, like high performance robotics and widespread AI, may slow. The invisible hand and social adaptation may solve the mass disability problem of the wealthy nations. Immigration policy, a breakthrough in the prevention of dementia, or the return of ubasute may offset the impacts of age demographics. We may even ... we may even look intelligently at the costs of health care and education and manage both of them.

If these things happen then some economic growth will return, stock prices will reflect fundamentals, bonds will become feasible investments, and interest rates will be non-zero.

Or they won't happen.

In which case, we can look forward to more of the same. The best guide to the near future, after all, is the near past. In this whitewater world then, in which financial statements are unreliable and wealth streams are diverted, what are the investment opportunities? We cannot recover the lost returns of the past 11 years, but it would be nice to be less of a chump.

Real estate seems a reasonable option, though there we face the problem of untrustworthy investment agents. There is not yet a John Bogle of 21st century real estate investment. (This, incidentally, suggests something government could do -- engineer a trustworthy investment representative for American real estate.)

The other option is to switch from prey to predator.

During the 20th century retail investors could only make one way bets. We basically had to bet on economic growth and prosperity. For a time we could shift a bit. If we thought near term growth looked bad, we could shift to bonds. If we thought a crash was coming, we could shift to cash. Basically, however, we could only get good returns by investing in stocks and betting on growth. This worked under conditions of economic growth and relatively integrity. Under the conditions of the past decade this made us prey.

Predators don't make one way bets. They make bets on downturns, on upturns, on volatility, on stability, on irrationality, on continued fraud, on reform. They make bets on bets. They play the options and straddle options games that brought down the world economy. It's too bad they won, but, with a bit of help from our AI friends, they did.

So I'm learning about options. It's not what I like to do, but I don't make the rules.

Saletan on the ethics of wealth and transplants

I'm a physician. I bet most physicians have been thinking about this over the past two years as Steve Jobs' health deteriorated ...

Steve Jobs liver transplant: Organ donation is the best way to honor him. - William Saletan - Slate Magazine

... there’s something you can do to help people such as Jobs. You can supply replacement parts for the machines that keep them alive. You can sign up as an organ donor...

... To get the liver, Jobs went to Tennessee, because the waiting list in Northern California was too long. There weren’t enough livers to go around. Lots of other people in Northern California needed livers but couldn’t get them, because they didn’t have the kind of money or savvy Jobs did. They couldn’t afford to fly around the country, go through extensive evaluations at multiple transplant centers, and guarantee their availability within an hour for the next liver that became available...

... Earlier this year, when Jobs took a leave from Apple because of deteriorating health, I asked whether he should have received his transplant in the first place. As bioethicist Arthur Caplan has noted, almost none of the 1,500 people who received liver transplants in the U.S. when Jobs did, in the first quarter of 2009, had cancer. That’s because there’s no evidence that transplants stop metastatic cancer. The much more likely scenario is that the cancer continues to spread and soon kills the patient, destroying a liver that could have kept someone else alive for many years. Among liver recipients, cancer patients have the worst survival rate. While more than 70 percent of liver recipients in Jobs’ age bracket are still alive and functioning five years later, Jobs lasted only half that long.

In theory wealth and genius are not part of the criteria for liver transplant. In theory, even goodness isn't part of the criteria.

In reality, money makes a huge difference with most things in life. Nobody has ever said Jobs was saintly. Most people with money and/or fame or both would have done what Jobs did. It would have been good if he'd left some money for less privileged people in need of new parts, but that wasn't his style.

Even though Jobs only did what was normal for the powerful, The Tennessee transplant center did worse than most. They do deserve some hard questions.

Jobs parents

I've read the obits. Steven Levy (Wired) and John Markoff of the NYT were best. The Economist disappointed.

I've also read many of the posts from longtime Apple bloggers. They rightly express sympathy to Jobs wife and children.

Noone, though, has expressed sympathy for Jobs parents - Paul and Clara Jobs. It is a terrible thing to outlive your child. From the bit I've read they gave their challenging son all they had. In a way they could not have imagined, their sacrifices changed our world for the better.

I assume Jobs did well by them.

My thoughts go to you Paul and Clara.

Update: Paul Jobs died in 1993 at age 70; Clara Jobs (nee Hagopian) died in 1986 at age 62. They both lived to see Jobs early success. I found one 9/2/11 article about them.

As the father of 3 adopted children I noticed a few things in the coverage of Jobs death. There is much more discussion of his birth parents than his adoptive parents. From what I have read, Jobs had little or no contact with or interest in his birth parents. I saw some articles claiming they might have some claim on Jobs estate. I'd be astonished if that were true.

I also notice that references to Jobs' adopted sister Patti seem to assume they were loosely connected. Jobs grew up with Patti; she was his sister.

Jobs parents seemed to value their privacy more than most. Jobs did too.

GTD: Create appointments not tasks

Since nobody will make the software I want I often have to choose between creating a task and creating a calendar appointment. Sometimes I do both, but mostly I do one or the other.

If it's a task I really need to get done (A) I schedule it on my calendar. I don't create a task. When I schedule it I add a note on what I want to do and what the next steps are (if any). I schedule the time I need to do the work. Sometimes there are some related tasks, but I try not to get fancy.

B Tasks are things I want to do. Sometimes I need to do them, but I may not have any capacity to schedule them. I put B tasks in my task/todo software and I usually assign them a target date based on their size and my predicted capacity. If they get more urgent I make them A tasks and schedule them (so in this case I have both a task and appointment, but it started as a task).

C Tasks are often ideas or future projects. Sometimes they're important, but can't be scheduled (too big, too expensive, etc). C tasks are a "backlog" of work. Periodically I purge them if they don't get done, but they mostly sit quietly in the queue, not bothering anyone. A C task can be promoted to a B task -- and it might even get a date. Or, if time/money arrives, they go straight to A.

See also:

• GTD: Introduction to a series
• Appigo Todo.app and Todo Online: best solution for most
• Toodledo: power user solution, best import/export/integration. Lacks full text search (!).

Your public Facebook posts - try this Google search

If you've ever used Facebook, log out of Facebook then try this search:

site:facebook.com "your name"

I don't share publicly - but I do post and comment on "Pages" which belong to organizations.Those pages are always public, so what I have written there is also public.

You can't make these posts non-public, but you can delete them. Log in to Facebook, then repeat the search. You should now see a delete box.

I found some posts could not be deleted. I got the "failed to hide minifeed story" bug on one.

PS. In the midst of this exercise my (true and unusual) name was registered as a Tidbits author with a 1996 article. This was a puzzling experience, because it was at first completely unfamiliar. As I read it, however, it became vaguely familiar. I remember the ideas, if not the article. I'm pretty sure it is mine. Weird.

GTD: Introduction to a series

With this post I'm starting a 'gtd' labeled series of posts. GTD is an acronym for "getting things done", a productivity methodology that was fashionable a few years ago. It's less fashionable now, but it will return under another name. After all, the base approaches have been rebranded many times over the past two thousand years.

These will be short posts - shorter than this introduction and much shorter than my old GTD posts [1]. I'll space them out. If you're interested you can experiment and add things to your own way of working. If you're not interested, they should be easy to ignore. There won't be anything truly novel - this ground has been well worked.

Posts will focus on things I've done since at least 2004. I'll mention the tools I use, but the main focus will be methodology. Each post will be limited to one component spanning tasks/projects, calendaring, and email. They will incorporate my more recent experiences with Agile development methodologies.

See also: [1]

• Getting Things Done and Managing Email with Lookout for Outlook 2004
• The Fallows Summary of Getting Things Done (GTD) 2004
• Getting Things Done: integrating the Outlook add-in with Palm synchronization across multiple machines 2004
• Google - please give me tasks that appear on my calendar 2009
• Using Outlook Tasks: a mini-tutorial 2008
• What the iPhone needs is Gorilla Haven’s DateBk6 2009
• Tasks and calendar items - what I'd like 2009
• Task management: a feature request 2008
• Inbox zero - mastering email 2010
• Inbox zero - zero - at last 2010
• Toodledo gets it 2008
• TAGBAG Dashboard Widget: spotlight metadata management 2005
• Ed Eubanks articles on OS X task, project and data management 2009

The 4S is fine, but it's Sprint I'm interested in

I've never seen so few posts after an Apple keynote. Clearly the iPhone 4S disappointed many; though it's noteworthy that Apple's web site cratered today. I've seen it slow, but never with a server error.

Personally, I'm fine with it. I own a 4 and, with the slender and high quality case I use it's been robust and excellent. The 4S may (who knows) fit many existing cases and it should work fine with existing peripherals. Since it's an iteration on an established design it's much less likely to have Apple's inevitable new product issues. All the improvements are appreciated.

The 4S is exactly what I'd hoped for. [1]

Emily will get the 32GB model and we'll extend her AT&T contract ... unless ....

Unless Sprint does something interesting.

The Oct 7 Sprint announcement is the one I'm waiting for.

Sprint has nothing to lose. They're fourth down at their own 10 yard line with two minutes left in the game. Time to put the ball in the air.

The WSJ has already told us that Sprint has sold their soul to Apple, but all we're told is that they committed to selling a lot of iPhones. We don't know what orders Apple gave Sprint.

From the sound of it Apple acquired Sprint the same way Microsoft acquired Nokia. No cash down, but a promise of a future.

If Apple is now effectively running Sprint the way Apple thinks a mobile phone company should run, then things could get very interesting for the American mobile phone industry -- and quite profitable for Sprint shareholders. (Sprint's share price was on a roller coaster today. I haven't bought shares in a long time, but I may buy tomorrow.)

This is what I'm looking for on the 7th. I'm looking for Sprint to provide low cost unlimited texting/SMS support as part of their iPhone data plan. With iMessage they're not losing out much anyway; iPhone to iPhone texts are free.

I'm also looking for Sprint to offer a 5GB data cap to their iOS customers for the usual monthly data fee - instead of their "unlimited" phone data service.

Huh? What's good about that?! What's good about that is that the 5GB data allowance will include free iPhone mobile hot spot services (tethering) over Sprint's 4G network.

Lastly Sprint will offer an Apple style approach to mobile phone contracting -- simple plans, clear costs, consumer-friendly voice minute options.

Apple will use Sprint to beat Verizon and AT&T over the head. They don't want those two to get the power of a duopoly. Sprint will, in turn, become Apple's mobile phone company. Droid users will not stay with Sprint.

If I'm right, then Emily's 4S may be coming from Sprint -- because we'll be moving the entire family over. If Sprint doesn't do this, then I'll sell my shares at a loss.

[1] What I really want is a water resistant iPhone. I wasn't hoping for that. That's not Apple's style.

Update: Early signs are that Sprint whiffed. They are said to charge $30/month to tether, and also to introduce a 5GB/month data limit. That would leave me with AT&T.

Update 9/7/11: Good thing I was too tired and busy to buy any Sprint stock. They blew this opportunity. I wonder if Sprint knew their network couldn't handle the bandwidth from a 5GB capped bundled mifi/iPhone service. I fear they're goners; they certainly blew a great opportunity to differentiate. We signed up for 2 more years with AT&T.

Occupy Wall Street (OWS): the mass mind masticates

Two months ago, Israel was protesting ...

Gordon's Notes: Israel's uprising: Is it about the failure of 21st century democracies?

... Israel is our latest example. Like the Wisconsin protests, this is best understood, I think, as a collective protest against a failure of citizenship. It's the middle class beginning to realize that the top 0.5% owns the game. I hope this movement visits America soon...

Israel's "social justice protest" grew from a small start to 100,000 participants in about 16 days. It ended about 6 weeks later. After an inchoate beginning it was classified as a part of the 2011 Israeli middle class protests.

The Occupy Wall Street protests began about 15 days ago...

BBC News - Occupy Wall Street protests grow amid Radiohead rumour

... An estimated 2,000 people have gathered in Lower Manhattan, New York, for the largest protest yet under the banner Occupy Wall Street. Demonstrators marched on New York's police headquarters to protest against arrests and police behaviour. Several hundred people have camped out near Wall Street since 17 September as part of protests against corporate greed, politics, and inequality...

Despite the best efforts of the coward cop and the champagne toasters the OWS numbers are growing slowly. The numbers are unlikely to approach anywhere near the scale of Israel's protests. Adjusting for population size a similar US protest would involve millions.

Unlikely, but not impossible. These social movements are fundamentally chaotic. Why did the Berlin wall fall when it did? Why not five years earlier? We can't say why. We can't say when.

The pressure is building though. Sometime in the next year Americans between 40 and 70 are going to do some basic math. When they run the numbers most of them will realize the lost years from 1999 to 2011+ cannot be made up. Their retirement will be very different from their current life, and very different from what they expected. The mass mind is going to begin to process what hit us all.

Maybe then we'll see some real unrest.

Update:

• Historical perspective on when protests arise. In the last depression unrest appeared two years after the great crash.
• ‘Occupy Wall Street,’ a primer -  Ezra Klein - The Washington Post

Fractal universe - Galactic cymbal

The Dark Side of the Milky Way (Sci Am) tells us that what we perceive as a warping and twisting of the galactic plane is a massive wave of gravity passing through. Like a sound wave passing through a cymbal. Struck by a hammer of dark matter gravity it oscillates in time scales far beyond our ken.

Fractal universe; each bit a reflection of another.

If You're Not Paying for It; You're the Product

This Andrew Lewis meme surfaced on the net about a year ago: If You're Not Paying for It; You're the Product. Lewis has since happily sold out, though the wording is evolving.

It's a good meme. Thanks Andrew.

I give Apple a lot of money, they give me products. I wish I were paying for Blogger, or that I could move all of my Blogger content to something I pay for. I'm glad Google charges me for my Picasa Web Album storage.

I don't invest in free things these days. Free is too expensive.

Global warming: Doonesbury and China

This Doonesbury is a keeper, but it's incomplete.

It's not just that corporations and their investor owners (me, you, etc) value 10 year returns more than 100 year outcomes.

It's also that our best data suggests expected 50 year temperature and sea level changes will be manageable within the US. Bad news for Arizona, but not so bad for Minnesota. Sure some cities get flooded, but Venice managed. Yes, there is the little problem of massive worldwide conflagration, but Americans expect that anyway.

So don't expect leadership on global warming from Americans or, for that matter, Canadians (go tar sands).

China and India though; they have a problem. Global warming looks very bad for China in particular.

China is going to have to lead.

Deep history and the lifespan of the australian aboriginal

The paleolithic is the time of the pre-historic hominid tool user. It begins 2.6 million years ago with Australopithecine-like hominid tool users and ends with the last ice age 8,000 years BCE [1].

The paleolithic is divided into three variably defined ranges, something like this: [2]

• Upper: 45,000 - 8000 BCE.
• Middle: 300,000 - 30,000 BCE
• Lower: 2.6 million to 100,000 BCE. (The great age of exploration, including, it seems, rafting [3].)

It's helpful to know this, because it's otherwise hard to understand what Caspari is saying in her recent SciAm article. She claims that humans had short lifespans throughout most of the paleolithic ...

The Evolution of Grandparents - Rachel Caspari - Scientific American

... the Krapina Neandertals are not unique among early humans. The few other human fossil localities with large numbers of individuals preserved, such as the approximately 600,000-year-old Sima de los Huesos site in Atapuerca, Spain, show similar patterns. The Sima de los Huesos people had very high levels of juvenile and young adult mortality, with no one surviving past 35 and very few living even that long...

...We observed a small trend of increased longevity over time among all samples, but the difference between earlier humans and the modern humans of the Upper Paleolithic was a dramatic fivefold increase in the OY ratio ... adult survivorship soared very late in human evolution...

... Lee and I analyzed Middle Paleolithic humans from sites in western Asia dating to between about 110,000 and 40,000 years ago. Our sample included both Neandertals and modern humans, all associated with the same comparatively simple artifacts. ... We found that the Neandertals and modern humans from western Asia had statistically identical OY ratios...

Caspari claims that the great leap in longevity occurred within the past 45,000 years. She seems to think this was a cultural change, but I don't follow her logic. Most modern hunter gatherers age and die at the same rate as eurasians.

In modern human terms forty thousand years is a long time ago. But recent sequencing of 100 year old DNA suggests the indigenous Australians split from other humans before then ...

Gordon's Notes: Deep history - 40,000 years without change

... Based on the rate of mutation in DNA, the geneticists estimate that the Aborigines split from the ancestors of all Eurasians some 70,000 years ago, and that the ancestors of Europeans and East Asians split from each other about 30,000 years ago....

... the split times calculated by the Danish team are compatible with the more reliable archaeological dates, which record the earliest known human presence in Australia at 44,000 years ago. The Aborigines’ ancestors could have arrived several thousand years before this date.

There are a lot of Google hits on the life expectancy of the indigenous Australian. It is usually estimated at 15-20 years less than euro-Australians. That is not, however, all that different from the life expectancy of modern Russians. The data neither supports nor refutes Caspari's hypothesis, but it suggests things are, as usual, complicated.

Anything about the biology of the Australian aboriginal is very sensitive. It's easy to see why.

-- fn

[1] Via Wikipedia, I have just learned that the scientific practice for dating is now BP for "before present," where the present is arbitrarily assigned to 1950 ACE. I've converted to BCE here.
[2] There's obviously no consensus on where to draw these largely artificial boundaries.
[3] The truly great explorers died before modern humans were born.

Update 1/30/2012: From a NYT review of the state of mongrel man (emphases mine):

... little is known about the Denisovans — the only remains so far are the pinky bone and the tooth, and there are no artifacts like tools. Dr. Reich and others suggest that they were once scattered widely across Asia, from the cold northern cave to the tropical south. The evidence is that modern populations in Oceania, including aboriginal Australians, carry Denisovan genes.

Forget process, it's the tools

It's a mantra in my world -- Concentrate on People and Process, not Tools.  It's not the tools, it's the process.

Bah, humbug.

Ok. I admit. Given the choice I'd take a good team, and a process that fits the team, over good tools. Problem is, that's a Hobson's Choice. It becomes an excuse to avoid investing in good tools. The phrase is particularly irritating when it's used to disparage the concerns of tool users by those who don't actually use the tools.

Those people feel very differently about the tools they do use. Try swapping their BlackBerries for a Kiln, or Eclipse for Turbo C, and see how how they feel about tools.

Tools matter enormously. They shape the work and the process. Software tools are notoriously "rigid" (software is a very misleading word); if they oppose a process the process will break.

Given the rigidity of software tools choices must be made carefully. Often complexity and power should be traded for flexibility, simplicity, data freedom and reduced switching costs. Early adoption is usually a mistake.

Choose carefully. Be modest about expectations. But never imagine tools don't matter.

Local politics - fury at the Jefferson bikeway

This is, on the one hand, a very local story. Local, that is, to my neighborhood of Macalester-Groveland, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

On the other hand, it's a universal story. Life is fractal. The smallest sample of political strife captures almost every detail of the national scene.

It's a story about a well intended program to identify a St Paul road, Jefferson Avenue, as a "bikeway". This doesn't mean bicycle lanes or parking restrictions; it means the city uses federal funds to make the road friendlier to bicycles and pedestrians and reduce through traffic.

This was very welcome along most of the road. The changes will increase property values and make resident life more pleasant. The problem, and it was a loud problem, arose in a wealthier neighborhood. There Jefferson was already somewhat pedestrian friendly, save for two dangerous cross streets -- Cleveland and Cretin.

For some residents along that part of Jefferson there was tremendous anger at the idea of the bikeway in particular and bicycling in general. This anger was stoked by mistakes made by city planners. A community meeting was called, and so, for the first time in my relatively political life, I attended a public meeting.

It was at once a painful and fascinating experience. The painful part came from the yelling and occasional ranting of several of the local opponents. It was almost as bad as sitting through AM talk radio. Their emotions were raw, and initially mysterious. Much of what they actually said was illogical; some spoke as though bands of chain wielding lycra-crazed fetishists were going to be keying their cars.

Sadly, although there was quite a good turnout of supporters, the opposition was much louder and perhaps more numerous. I know several friends of mine with active and busy lives were unable to attend, and that my own attendance will cost me sleep time. A public forum, by its nature, is friendlier to the retired and the inactive.

Pain aside, this was also a fascinating experience. Listening to things said and unsaid, it became apparent that for many of the locals, the real fear was not the packs of rabid riders they spoke of (who'd never go this route of course -- racing packs need space!). It wasn't even the stated anger at cyclists running stop signs.

In reality, and some even admitted this, many of the elderly audience feared injuring a cyclist. Worst of all, injuring a child. They know they, or their spouses, are not the drivers they were. They accept the cost and annoyance of a low speed collision with a car. That's just money. A collision with a cyclist, or even dooring a cyclist, is another matter.

There were other sources of anger. A number, particularly from the less elderly opposition, were angered that any amount of taxpayer money was going to spent on what they perceived as a foolish activity - riding a bicycle. They had difficulty with the concept of their taxes serving anything but their personal wants.

The fascinating bit was to see the emergence of common ground. Even many of those who yelled objections, recognized that as pedestrians they were unable to safely cross Cleveland and Cretin. One opponent, primed by a prior speaker, admitted with some surprise that she'd had to wait for "53" cars to pass before she was able to cross Cleveland. (Minnesota drivers are, by and large, unaware of the state crosswalk law. If they do know it, they pretend not to. We Minnesotans are not particularly good drivers.)

A reasonable compromise seemed, at least to me, to be evident. Both locals and family cyclists would love to have a pedestrian activated crosswalk stop and signage at both Cleveland and Cretin. The north-south drivers, after all, are largely suburban commuters. None of us mind slowing them.

Perhaps we could even forego the bikeway markings and signs. The most contentious road area is, save for the dangerous crosswalks, quite bicycle friendly already. It could become a de facto bikeway even as it became more supportive of resident pedestrians. In time, many of the fears will fade. Everyone, one day, will be happier.

See also:

• City of St. Paul, MN - Official Website - Jefferson Avenue Bikeway
• Saint Paul Bicycle Coalition (facebook page and blog)
• Bike Walk Twin Cities
• Smart Trips Neighborhoods
• City of St. Paul, MN - Official Website - Citywide Bicycle Plan

Netflix, Amazon, and Dickens

Netflix is getting out of the messy, labor intensive, business of mailing physical DVDs. Now they are purely digital. They won't need postmen or people to fill the gaps machines couldn't manage. They can scale without hiring.

It is the 21st century way.

Amazon can't do this [1]. They cannot, yet, make do with robots. They have jobs for the non-elite. Jobs in a Dickensian world...

The Fraying of a Nation's Decency - ANAND GIRIDHARADAS - NYTimes.com

... Thanks to a methodical and haunting piece of journalism in The Morning Call, a newspaper published in Allentown, Pennsylvania, I now know why the boxes reach me so fast and the prices are so low. And what the story revealed about Amazon could be said of the country, too: that on the road to high and glorious things, it somehow let go of decency.

The newspaper interviewed 20 people who worked in an Amazon warehouse in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. They described, and the newspaper verified, temperatures of more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 37 degrees Celsius, in the warehouse, causing several employees to faint and fall ill and the company to maintain ambulances outside. Employees were hounded to “make rate,” meaning to pick or pack 120, 125, 150 pieces an hour, the rates rising with tenure. Tenure, though, wasn’t long, because the work force was largely temps from an agency. Permanent jobs were a mirage that seldom came. And so workers toiled even when injured to avoid being fired. A woman who left to have breast cancer surgery returned a week later to find that her job had been “terminated.”

The image of one man stuck with me. He was a temp in his 50s, one of the older “pickers” in his group, charged with fishing items out of storage bins and delivering them to the packers who box shipments. He walked at least 13 miles, or 20 kilometers, a day across the warehouse floor, by his estimate.

His assigned rate was 120 items an hour, or one item every 30 seconds. But it was hard to move fast enough between one row and the next, and hard for him to read the titles on certain items in the lowest bins. The man would get on his hands and knees to rummage through the lowest bins, and sometimes found it easier to crawl across the warehouse to the next bin rather than stand and dip again. He estimated plunging onto his hands and knees 250 to 300 times a day. After seven months, he, too, was terminated...

Which brings me to Bernstein, who echoed a recent post of mine ...

The Policy Backdrop of Inequality and Its Implications for “Class Warfare” | Jared Bernstein | On the Economy

...Technological change, most recently computerization/IT, is also thought to be a significant factor behind the changes in the graph, though the evidence here is more ambiguous.  (One strain of work, for example, argues that technology has increased labor demand for both high skill and low skill work, while leaving out the middle.)..

... Then there’s a bunch of stuff that directly raises or lowers the bargaining clout of middle and working class families—policy changes or missed policy opportunities that have hurt or failed to help them.

–the long-term erosion of the minimum wage
–the absence of legislative protection to balance the organizing playing field for those who want to collectively bargain
–the inattention to labor standards such as wage and hour rules, overtime regs, workplace safety, worker classification ...

We have a diverse population. We are not all equally suited to the narrow range of work that seems America's natural fate. Education is not the answer; we are not all didacts. We need a diverse set of employment opportunities, and we need to prevent the cruelties of the market red in tooth and claw.

[1] Update: Duh. After I wrote this I remembered they started out moving books, and now they ship them by wire.