Recent Reads, Recent Thoughts

It's been a good end-of-year/start-of-year. I don't know if I'll ever "work" again, or have to, but I'm getting ready anyway. A guy has to do something with his time. I put that dangerous word "work" in quotes because "work-for-money" is definitely a different beast from "work-for-gain". They aren’t the same. I'm going with Plan B for Max Gain.

Being paid isn't necessarily a "gain", either. It's just money. Money is handy to have, and useful for many things but not for all things. Mostly I'm interested in becoming better, as in sharpening my thinking, improving my ability to understand, and being able to reliably tell which from what.

So, in keeping with the title of this post, here are my recent technical reads.

(1) "Ship It!: A Practical Guide To Successful Software Projects", by Jared R. Richardson, 2005. Unfortunately, there will never be an update since the author died in 2016, but it's still a great book, even after two more decades.

(2) "The Pragmatic Programmer, Your journey to mastery", 20th Anniversary Edition by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, 2020. New, fresh, even better than the original, which I re-read about two years ago.

(3) "Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change", by Kent Beck, 2005.

(4) Basecamp/3ySignals books...

• "Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application", by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, 2006.
• "Rework", by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, 2010.
• "Remote: Office Not Required", by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, 2013.
• "It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work", by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, 2018.
• "Shape Up", by Ryan Singer, 2019

I was hoping to find a newer edition of the extreme programming book, but no. Too bad. It's surprisingly great, and reading it left me wondering what Kent Beck has rethought in the last 19 years. I guess he done wrote it all out the first time. Pretty good as-is anyway.

So — There are lots of things to chew on presented in these books, but mostly they boil down to paying attention, working together, and using the best available tools and processes to best advantage. And these days there are lots more tools, more-capable tools than there were 20 years back when I had to smile and keep eating shit, if I wanted to keep my job. And pound my head against the wall just to get some relief.

If I may over-summarize what I got from the above books, collectively:

• Get some input.
• Use that to create a working system right now.
• Put everything into version control.
• Create tests and run them constantly.
• Integrate constantly.
• Maintain a working system from day one.
• Be transparent.
• Review, collaborate, compare, rethink, revise, redo, repeat.

Some ideas, not all of them new, from the above authors, and from some other research I've done lately:

• BDD: Behavior Driven Development
• CD: Continuous Delivery
• CI: Continuous Integration
• CIT: Continuous Integration Testing
• DbC: Design by Contract
• DTD: Design Top Down
• ESA: Environment Setup Automation
• FBoxing: Feature-Boxing, aimed at getting specific features done
• FDD + WBS: Feature Driven Development + Work Breakdown Structure
• Jugaad: Humility, Openness, Frugality
• Linting: Random input stress testing
• Preemption: If it isn't going, kill it
• TBD: Tracer Bullet Development
• TBoxing: Time-Boxing
• TDD: Test Driven Development
• Value: Do the most important thing first

I hereby recommend all of these books, and all of the topics in the list directly above.

Yeah, so fun. It looks like fun, if I'm up to it. I have enough topics to keep me busy for as long as I can keep my eyes open and my heart beating.

Besides that, I'm now reading "Poor Charlie's Almanack" ("Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger" edited by Peter D. Kaufman, 2005.) Until just a few months ago, when he himself stopped breathing, Munger was Warren Buffett's longtime partner in Berkshire Hathaway. They did well. Together, and even separately. They knew lots.

This book contains my final kick in the butt, the push past the tipping point, the item that suddenly allowed me to consolidate all of my new thoughts.

Munger mentions the "Five Ws" (five dubble-youse): Who, What, Why, Where, When. And I now throw in a "How". I don't recall the context of Munger's use of these, but the concept has been around at least since ancient Greek philosophers began anciently, greekly, philosophizing. And it's been used, with a "How" added on, in journalism too, also from pretty far back.

Anyway, it came to me in a flash of at least reasonably bright illumination, considering the amount of intelligence that I'm capable of bringing to a subject, that this is the whole of software development, and a lot of other problem solving and engineering approaches as well: Who, What, Why, Where, When, and also How.

The "w" items set the stage. They're the user stories, the problem statements, the business rationale, the requirements, the documentation, the contracts, the law, and all that. They set the stage. And the "How" is the code that comes trotting along behind to make it all dance.

For a whole long time now I've been amazed that developers keep going on about just churning out code, "self-documenting" code even, as if that was even a thing, while completely ignoring the whole core of the issue. Code says "How", but the important parts, the central issues, are "What" and "Why". What the hell are we doing here and why in the hell are we bothering? How is actually pretty easy, even its hard parts. As a former co-worker of mine used to say "I can teach a chicken how to code. The important part is keeping the big picture in mind and solving the right problems."

The last job I had before giving up was in a completely dysfunctional state agency. (Go figure.) I was hired to work on a project rewriting a mainframe system as a client-server system. As usual, one of the first things that happened was that all the work went to contractors, and then it got worse from there, before it got worse, and then kept getting worse.

Back then, "UML" (Unified Modeling Language) and "RUP" (Rational Unified process) were state of the art, big-time practices as was hiring a person to sit at a computer and do manual testing, all day, every day, forever. But we didn't even do much along those lines, beyond management saying that we were doing it all. So things have come a long way. People actually follow actual processes now. Verifiable processes.

Even Kent Beck, with his 2005 book on XP (Extreme programming) was about 16 decades ahead of where we were, even though I quit that place in 2003, before the book, before "Agile" and "XP" even became common, though well after their principles had come into use here and there.

But I think I've got it now. After it's too late for my so-called career, of course, but my aim is understanding, rather than hoping for a someday promotion from Information Technology Applications Specialist 4 to Information Technology Applications Specialist 5 so I can qualify for higher retirement pay and just get the hell out.

It's not a competition between hotshot coders who say code is everything and documentation is unprofessional and a horde of buzzing bureaucrats intent on filling shelves with neatly-bound volumes that no one ever reads or can understand, documenting a system that was never actually built that way anyhow, but a cooperation of all involved, fully and completely understanding "Who", "What", "Why", "When", and "Where", as implemented by a working and fully functional, ever-improving "How". To get things done.

Yeah, so thanks, Charlie. I needed that. Decent kick in the ass. I'll keep these ideas in mind, whatever it is I happen to be doing from now on.

Now I need to get back at it, just for my own satisfaction and personal edification, maybe by starting with learning Go. We'll see. Maybe I still have enough time left to do something useful with my life.

 

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Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? As noted above, but maybe a little crazier.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Who Me? Yes.

See "How To Live Like A Cynic" by Ansgar Allen, December 6, 2023 at psyche.co ( https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-live-like-a-cynic-and-challenge-social-norms OR https://web.archive.org/web/20231207101328/https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-live-like-a-cynic-and-challenge-social-norms )

For a while I thought this was it. Not quite, but it's close. It's inspiration.

I keep thinking that if I had my life to do over again, everything would be different. True. True of me an everyone else, but how? Definitely more along these lines:

• Improvise your life.
• Live shamelessly.
• Push against all boundaries.
• Act with courage, refuse to respect the powerful.
• Give up everything you can live without.

I also recommend "Mornings on Horseback" by David McCullough, an amazing and thorough book-length biography of Theodore Roosevelt. He lived somewhat along the lines of the principles listed above, better than I have, though much more conventionally than Diogenes. Everyone has lived much more conventionally than Diogenes, but it's the core ideas. Very similar in both cases. Both fearless beings.

Particularly, in my case, I come from people who try to fade into the background, and had almost no education in how to get through life from my parents. They were both clueless, both the youngest of large families, my mother being a good little girl and my father being a spoiled brat who never worked. Both incapable of actually dealing with what life threw at them.

Being shy, and bookish, and having no clue about anything, and seeing my relatives wander aimlessly through their own lives, I grew up making lots of mistakes. Mostly mistakes. All the way through. My whole life so far has been one continuous mistake.

I have missed nearly every opportunity, played by the rules, deferred to authority, hoped for the best, and continued getting it all wrong.

Now I'm revamping myself, reinventing, reforming, redoing. Though I no longer have to work for money, I am working, working at making myself the person I should have been all the way through. My one practical talent is that I know how to live within my means and with that have always been good at saving money, so I've got enough of that anyway, and its freedom.

I read Allen's "How To Live Like A Cynic" piece, and then got his book and a couple others on cynic philosophy and started reading them. And quickly gave up on all. Three academic works, going into endless detail about everything except the subject that I was interested in. The bullet points above do a better job, and Allen's piece is stellar. He hits the relevant points and covers them in enough detail to get the core ideas across. That's enough right there. You don't need more.

I'm thinking a lot here of software development, but I'm actually more interested in process than in programming, though in my so-called "professional" life, producing software was supposedly the goal. In line with this, I'm also working my way through Andy Hunt's "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware", which is all about thinking. Also great. Ground-breaking, earth-shaking. More than reformative. Revolutionary.

For me it's all about the principles. I'm abstract, more interested in "what" and "why" than in "how". Cynicism and pragmatic thinking have been key parts of me since the beginning, and I'm only now, late in life, realizing that, and identifying who I could have been and what I could have done. I'm an inventor, a designer, a creative, iconoclastic dirty-fingernail philosopher. For me, what works is what works, and I keep trying to figure that out, no matter how anyone else does it. ("If it ain't broke, don't fix it," and "We've never done it that way" have always enraged me, and will forever.)

OK-fine and too bad. My life has been a waste, but here we are.

At least I do recognize the truth of things and am working on it. I like clarity and direction, unencumbered by the clutter of life, so once again:

• Improvise your life.
• Live shamelessly.
• Push against all boundaries.
• Act with courage, refuse to respect the powerful.
• Give up everything you can live without.

These are things that I've been doing all along, but accidentally, too quietly, in private, internally, without a real plan.

I'm not now headed for the street to run up and down, howling, and knocking the hats off people to get my point across. No. I plan on asserting myself when necessary, standing my intellectual ground, never being intimidated, living bullshit-free, and just getting on with it. Anyone else wants to do it a different way, fine, go ahead. Not me. I won't get in your face unless you force it.

It's December, the Xmas season, again. When I was five years old I badgered my parents until they finally gave in and admitted that Santa Claus was a fake, didn't exist. That's me. I'm proud.

And that was about five years before we had television. Before we had television, so I wasn't seeing programs every night with plots about guys dressing up in funny red suits to lie to children. How I figured it out I don't remember, but I did. Santa Claus is the first deep societal evil perpetrated on children.

I got past that and want to live the remainder of my life getting past the rest. End of story.

 

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Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? As above.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

As If It Mattered

This can't be a new idea, but it is new to me, and I doubt that very many people have paid enough attention to the problems of software to have thought it through well enough.

Estimation. How long will it take? When can I have it? Why isn't it done yet? Perennial issues. I know — writing software isn't the same as building a bridge. Writing software isn't building anything. Writing software is imagining something.

The building part is hitting a key or two and generating another copy of the runnable software, but the writing of it is not equivalent to construction. The writing of software is equivalent to one part of the planning and design process. Equivalent to one of the last stages of that, but still not the same as piling bricks on top of each other.

And yet, especially with what is called "agile" software development, or more often these days, what has been congealed into "Agile", the process depends on starting by asking naive users of an existing system, or equally naive future users of a system not yet built, what such system should do: Getting "user stories".

Does anyone suppose that this might be a way to build a nuclear submarine? A power grid? Would anyone ask a few random commuters how a new highway bridge should be built? No? Then why ask "users" what a software system should be like?

It seems to me that any business that needs a software system should put muscle into the process, should get serious, should actually commit. Experts should come in on the first day and really seriously hash out in detail what the laws are, what the business requires, how things are done now and how things need to be done once the new software is in place, and skip the story nonsense.

User stories be damned. Get serious already.

Sure, lots of big material projects go sideways all the time, but no one starts building a bridge across a river and ends up with a barrel factory. Because people are committed to getting it right. Things get sloppy when people do, not because things are inherently sloppy and completely unpredictable. Pay attention, work closely together, and don't let anything happen without it receiving close and continual scrutiny.

Run this sort of system a couple of times and you have a factory that can generate solid, clean, working software, and if you need estimates, then good ones ought to come along as an inevitable part of the process.

Can't be that hard, not if anyone really cares enough to treat development as if if mattered.

 

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Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Haven't quit thinking yet.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Getting Your Head On Straight

There is a fundamental problem in building software, and that is deciding what to build. It is fundamental because everything else rests on this one decision, and it is often overlooked, or made in the wrong way. Because everything else depends on it, you have to start at ground level, from first principles, if you want to make a sound decision.

Thinking from first principles is simple but hard. Very hard.

The need for a piece of software may come from several directions. It may arise because of a critical need of the business. Then again it may be only a perceived need. It could be an impulse, driven by one strong personality or the tide of politics internal to the business. This would not be good.

You may need software because of new laws that must be complied with, from fear of competition, or just because you're feeling a little behind and want to keep up with trends by copying everyone else.

A good reason will arise from a true need, and if carried through it may result in a real benefit to your business. If you are working from faulty principles though, you will have not only a poor foundation but a poor result.

You need to know your business through and through. And your customers. One way or another you are in business to do something for someone else, something they cannot do, or do not want to do, so they come to you. If you can deliver they will be glad to pay you what you need to get by. But you do have to keep their needs in sight.

Somewhere along the way you will have to deal with staff, even if you are self-employed. The people you directly employ are the experts in running the business. They know how things work, and when, and all of them are acutely aware of exactly everything that does not work. They are your surface of contact with customers, the membrane your business breathes through, its nerve endings.

Staying close to your customer's needs is critical, but so is anticipating where they might be going, so you need to make your decisions match the long term interests of the business. With the customers, and your staff, and the long term in mind, go for the greatest gain possible from the minimum investment, but always focusing on that "greatest gain".

Plan to start small, with something functional, something you can use tomorrow, or the day after, but don't shoot for something sometime next year. You need to start small and see how it feels, then let the software evolve and accrete over time while it's being used, and lead you to a successful end point.

Evolution is a wonderful thing, and it has a proven track record.

If you build software that your business really needs, and start small, and keep adding to it, then you will get to keep testing it every day, starting from the first day, when that software is still very small and very simple.

Daily stressing of any living thing is the best way to have it grow up to be strong. The more you use the first parts you create, the more time you will have to fill all the gaps, and build more and more strength. As time goes by, your foundation will be more than strong enough to support the whole edifice, no matter how big it gets, and the whole structure will have been thoroughly tested by time.

By starting small you will also be able to stay within your budget, and within your competence, and assess all risks. You can measure small things pretty easily, so when faced with small problems you will be able to head them off, knowing that they do exist, and knowing exactly where they are, and that they are small. You can also measure progress a whole lot better on a small project. Because it is small, it is small enough to understand.

By starting small you can also keep an eye on resources. Not just money, but time and the energy of your staff as well. Burning through your money, wasting your time, and flaming out your staff are all bad, but much less likely to happen when your project starts small and grows organically.

Then, with a little success under your belt, and because you have learned to assess risks and measure resources, you can think about going outside your areas of maximum comfort and competence and gradually branch into new areas.

But first, last, and always, you have to keep your head on straight. There are some deep pits to fall into. Maybe you don't need software at all. If you do, you will likely be better off buying something rather than building it.

If you do decide to build software, there are two attitudes you especially want to avoid. One is dismissive, and it runs something like "Why should I have to get involved? You're the computer people. You should know what to do."

The other is arrogant, and follows the rule that we all have running around in our heads, no matter who we are, that if I don't understand something, then it can't be important, so I don't have to pay attention to it.

Considering that about 80% of software projects still fail all these decades after computer programming became a thing, you really want to avoid a losing attitude. If you are going down the route of building software, then you have to be real. You have to be serious about knowing what you want, why you want it, and what it will do.

You need a real plan, you need coordination, and you have to measure everything and make sure that you are on track. You need to keep checking your sanity all the way through, and every day you need to wonder if this is really the right thing to be doing.

If you don't treat software development like a real job, it can eat you up and put you right out of business. It happens every day.

 

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Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Yep.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Sheep Sheep Poo Poo

First comes the grass.

Then the sheeps.

Poo follows shortly. Endlessly. Forever.

A resource waiting for its chance to shine.

All poo really needs is a chance. A chance to show the world what it is capable of. A chance to prove its worth. A chance to reach into the note card market, bookmarks, and, yes -- air fresheners.

Creative Paper Wales is a creative paper company in Wales, wherever that is. Possibly near an ocean. Maybe on an island. An island infested with sheep.

What to do? Where to find creativity?

Ah, the sheep. Close at hand, ever churning away at the grass, veritable fountains of poo.

Creative Paper Wales, located at Twll Golau Paper Mill, Aberllefenni Slate Quarry, Snowdonia, Wales, United Kingdom, said: "Yes, we can do it." So they did.

You can too. "Making simple and attractive paper is enormous fun and remarkably easily learned. You can do it yourself with improvised home made equipment...start making your own paper at home using a kitchen blender." Presumably a spare, but who knows? You can visit Creative Paper Wales's site to find out.

And pursue answers to other questions such as "What is the furthest a sheep has ever flown, unaided?", "When faced with a 'water emergency' a sheep will...", and so on. Sounds like real fun.

Oh, and where can you buy "Rose fragranced Poo-Pourri", and so on.

No, seriously. They really do this.

Update: They really did this. Gone now. Poo is like that. Company dissolved around ten years ago. So, OK, good idea anyway. Creativity is like that.

Some images are still available if you search.

 

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Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Freshly washed and all sparkly, my hands too.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

No Gnashing

Biz Thoughts: Toothpaste Magnate Finds an Eco-Friendly Encore

I used to think that Tom's of Maine was a joke.

But I had the good luck to once know a woman.

She used good old Tom's.

("Calcium carbonate. Mild abrasive. Purified calcium from the earth.")

I jested.

"Brushing your teeth with dirt again?"

I haven't seen her since 1988. (Either no sense of humor or I'm a dickhead. Either could apply.)

But Tom is real, feels, and had a deal.

His first $5000 investment returned $100 million.

"He immediately flew to Europe with his son, Matt, for a celebratory trek across Wales."

And got an idea from watching wet sheep.

Which is what entrepreneurs are about.

What are you seeing?

The world around you must be hopping with opportunities.

After all, he only saw sheep. What are you looking at?

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Not good at business either, so far.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Wealth Is Evil

Right. I know.

Not evil for me you tell yourself, only for everyone else. Maybe.

But no — no maybe. It's not a maybe thing.

Wealth is evil.

Before the development of agriculture people had wars, but they were mostly symbolic, more like football. People did a little posturing, some hooting and insult-tossing, got it out of their systems, and went home to catch the latest on TV.

There was no ownership of land because, well, people had to keep moving and couldn't own things like land.

But after agriculture got a good start, there were surpluses.

Culture exploded. Land became something to own. Slavery and a lot of other things came into being, because people lived lives in fixed places and could afford to buy and sell anything, including one another.

Monogamy became both relevant and important when people had valuables worth acquiring and worth keeping, and gained the idea of passing on wealth.

Now we have entire armies composed of mercenaries, whole industries devoted to counting out wealth, socking it away, and defending it.

The wealthiest 1% of Americans have as much income as the poorest 50% of Americans, and own as much, in dollar terms, as the poorest 90% of Americans.

That's you and me, Bub.

I'm willing to work for things but the game changes when no matter how much you work it ceases to matter because nothing will change.

I don't know what you call it.

I call it evil.

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Only slightly evil.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

I Thought So

This is about why things are better than ideas, and maybe not.

This is about business, whether or not money is involved. That sounds strange but business is more than money. Hucksters have been saying so for years. Making money is easy they say, don't worry about it. Easiest thing in the world. Or, if you do the right thing the money will follow. Inevitably.

The real message is underneath, snaking around, sniffing for your wallet. What they really want is the money, your money, but they don't want you to catch on.

This reinforces what I just said. Really. Business is about more than money, and in a way money isn't the point, even if it is. If you focus on money, and only on money, you will fail. You can't help it. Money is the wrong thing to focus on.

I've always felt that competitions were pointless. Take a sport. Sprinting. Say you want to compete. You want to win. The idea is to win, and you want to do that. So what's the most efficient way to win? Kill off the other competitors. Get real. Anything else would be stupid.

How much time do you really want to spend training? Do you really want to find out after years of effort that the kneecaps you were born with prevent a win? Screw that. If you want the trophy then blow away everyone else. Walk to the finish line. If no one else is running then you have it made.

Want to make lots of money? Don't see the point in earning an MBA and spending decades clawing to the top? Rob banks. Do a bunch in one day. Bing. End of story. Vacation time. Forever.

So if the whole idea was the payoff then things would be simple. Cut the crap and grab the pie.

But it doesn't work that way. In case you hadn't noticed.

There are reasons why you can't rob a bank when you need money. Or rob the guy sitting beside you on the bus. The whole law enforcement thing is not what I'm talking about either. The real reason is that it doesn't work. Like trickle-down economics, being a robber baron was tried once and it failed, left behind by history. You may have heard of it. Called the Dark Ages. People learned slowly, but they learned.

We're beyond that now. The reason is efficiency.

Hitting someone over the head and making off with their loot sounds like an efficiency. But it doesn't work as a general way of doing business. Even if only a few of us try it. Tends to disrupt everything else. Causes system-wide failures. So we don't do it. Business is about more than money. Where have you just heard that?

One way or another you have to inspire people. Give them a thrill. Make them want to join your side. Then make your side big so everyone can join, or most everybody. Make some money on the side. If you focus completely on money then you lose focus on everything else. Then you fail. And then you don't make any money. At all.

There is a split right down the middle of this game. On one side you have things and on the other you have ideas. Generally speaking things are easier. Its easier to base a business around providing things than around providing ideas. It tends to be easier to set up, easier to administer, and more profitable. Sort of.

Think about things versus ideas.

Things are easy to grasp. You reach out your hand and grab one. People like to touch stuff. It's built in. That's one reason we use the phrase "grasp an idea". We are that way. We want stuff we can pick up and play with and bite and throw.

Things are discrete. You know where an apple starts and where it ends. You know how big it is and what it weighs. You're familiar with its texture and flavor and color. A thing gives you several dimensions to judge it by, and you don't have to think about it either. You are hard wired.

If you have something today you have it tomorrow. You know what it is and where. You can paint racing stripes on it, give it a name, and trade it for something else, even if it's a cat.

So you want to set up a business? It's easier if you sell things. You don't need a creed. No need to take sides or argue a case. Just say here is this here thing, it does this and doesn't do that, it comes in these colors, lasts this long and costs this much. Buy it and do what you want with it.

But wait, there's more.

Once you own this thing you can use it all the time or only now and then. Get tired of it now, put it down and find it waiting in your closet next year. It'll still be good.

Buying, selling, using, storing: all simple. Things are tidy and clean. As long as a thing works it's always new because every time you use it the situation is a little different. Every backyard game is different, and so the football is too, sort of, even though it's the same. But different.

But maybe you have more competition selling things. Everybody can sell the same things as you.

So ideas, now, how about them? Maybe tougher.

Each idea is unique. No mass production.

Ideas are slipperier. Juggling them can make your head hurt. You have to work to get a grip. Each one is different so each one is unfamiliar, harder to customize because you have to know it inside and out, where it came from and where it is going. No size, no shape, no taste, no smell, no texture, no color.

You can't have crates of ideas waiting in the back room. There is no volume discount. Every idea is hand crafted and requires its own care and feeding regime.

Ideas go stale, or age out, or fade away. Ideas are tough to fit into a business model. You can't order from a catalog, in every possible size and color, to keep them in stock, just in case. And an idea is new only once, no matter how good it is. It comes with its own environment and doesn't feel different if you use it on the beach instead of at the office. There is no way to paint racing stripes on an idea.

On the other hand, ideas thrive among people. Ideas have a life of their own. They bring people together. They are almost the only reason to keep living.

Check out a major league baseball game. If it's not baseball that moves you, then pick opera, or quilting, or a church service. Then bind. You bind to ideas.

If it's a baseball game you aren't there for the seats, or the restrooms. It's the idea. Your team versus theirs. Or a good team versus another good team. The idea of sport, life, a struggle. To see excellence and its acting out. Or some other reason, but a reason all the same, one full of life. Reasons are ideas.

It's the group though. Maybe you're just sitting there at the game surrounded by others and enjoying that, or maybe you help to run things, but it's ideas that bring you to a group and hold you. You have a place. You have friends and enemies. You have meaning. Commonality. Sharing. Purpose. You can make better sense of things with others. This is why an idea appeals to you as a buyer.

As a seller of ideas things are hard.

Ideas are new only once. Ideas are always hard to keep alive. They are so slow to sell. There is only one of each idea, but anyone can make infinite copies, without asking first. Ideas are a hard breed, as you know if you've tried to create a new one. And people shy from any idea too unlike any other they know about.

This can be a hard sell, very hard.

Selling ideas is a poor way to make a living. It's better to rob banks if you want money. Except that robbing banks is even worse. Like democracy being the absolutely worst form of government except for all the others.

The key to ideas is the group. A society. A clan. A band of disciples. A congregation. A family. A community.

Find the right idea and the right way to share it with the right people and you have a self sustaining system. Even one idea can start the process. An idea which forms a core and then draws in a community. The pull of more and more people keeps communities growing. Feed in a few more of the right ideas and the community will reach critical mass and grow on its own.

If you gently manage the habitat, tend the ecosystem, you may make it, but not by cutting throats.

The system can grow and remain fresh based on ideas. Those ideas that remind us of why we are alive, that bring us the pleasure in being together. Do it right and some money will come along for the ride. Maybe a lot, maybe not.

That's another story. Think about whether you would rather be J.K. Rowling or a flower seller.

 

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Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff+nosey@nullabigmail.com
Me? Learning to scheme.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals