Girl Friday

For the appreciation of aesthetic beauty...

Travelling

While I have a scheduled item or two going up, I am traveling out of town with very limited computer access this weekend. Hope you all are well, I'll pick back up Monday.

What is Not Seen - Offshoring and Tribal Knowledge, Security

Peter Grant references an article by David Hunt on the impact of offshoring. In it, I saw this little comment by Vox (italics for emphasis):

And while I can, on an intellectual basis, appreciate the economic arguments in favor of offshoring – like the one put forth by scholar Walter E. Williams, a man whose views I generally admire, here, – I will counter that the greatest global economic good does not necessarily equal the greatest American good.  Nor does it take into account other factors like national security concerns.

Now, this is a pet peeve of mine, where efficiency, and long term resiliency and survivability don't mesh up, something I had begun hashing out even before reading Taleb's book on Antifragile systems. And if you believe that a nation has a right to exist, then yes, national security concerns are one of those long-term things you factor in. Whether or not you believe a nation has a right to exist, if you don't factor those in, then whatever nation/culture you are a part of will cease to exist because someone else will take advantage of your lack of foresight.

This strikes to the heart of several issues which, in and of themselves are not a big deal, but in concert, result in our culture and nation dying away, both due to demographic replacement as we chase career and alternate sexualities over family and children, and as we refuse to defend that which we have, and ensure we keep our capabilities to produce in the future. It's not just about not looking past the next quarter, or even year to prioritize long term viability of the company vice immediate profits. It's not just being dependent on other people for your raw materials or parts.

It's about security, it's about "tribal knowledge".

One example - I get it, the US Post Office is a "waste" - and bluntly, it's not terribly competitive. And even if every single USPS customer went to Fedex or UPS, I'd still argue in favor of keeping it. Why?

Let's step back a minute and take a look at what the post office is. Much like Guy Kawasaki pointed out that Honda wasn't a car company, or a mower company, or a motorbike company, but an engine company...

The USPS is a secure communication medium controlled by and beholden to the US government. Even if no other customers used it, it is theirs.

Ditto other similar wastes of money - train tracks or runway sites sufficient for large jets at places not commercially viable. The highway system. Sure, these provide a means for people to better do what they needed to do and transport goods, or have additional safety landing sites, but they also provide the logistical backbone to move goods across the country in the event of a war, or other national-scope disaster that is within federal scope of action.

In the Navy we referred to "tribal knowledge" - that knowledge passed on within the command as a whole as well as its subgroupings - auxiliary machinists, nuke machinists, electricians, etc. - about how things worked, what would get you in trouble, how to fix or deal with particular issues. A lot of it was accumulated over years and experience, and passed on to rising junior members.

A command had people, from top to bottom, knew intimately how everything worked. Officers were exposed to enough rising from their JO positions to at least (generally, of course)* ask their chiefs and petty officers, and chiefs and firsts had done bearing rollouts, worked the evaporator, etc., and knew the issues that didn't show up in the manuals.

We've seen in computer companies like Dell that basically slap their label on someone else's hardware, the fall to and below mediocrity that accompanies no longer designing from the ground up, at low level detail, nevermind building, their own product. All in the name of efficiency. The same thing can be seen at steel mills, etc.

Making parts isn't just about the final part, it's knowing how it fits together, how to manufacture it, etc. Companies that lose sight of the low-level detail become just another value-added vendor that is easily replaced.

The product suffers. Worse: We forget how to make it, how to machine it, lose the physical skillset to design it, or intimately understand how something meshes with software.

A company that wants to thrive for decades can't just be concerned about profits, but about flexibility, maintaining a knowledge base and deep technical skill and knowledge that make the difference between mediocre and great. The companies looking past the quarter and only to the next year aren't looking deep enough.

* I had the experience of seeing the Engineer come back to maneuvering to chew out a qualified, but junior, engineering officer of the watch, for trying to override the reactor operator, when the (very experienced) RO was right.

Music: Sabaton: The Last Stand: Rorke's Drift

Background: 

On January 22nd, 1879, a British force of nearly 2000 men fought a force of nearly 20,000 Zulu warriors in the battle of Isandlwana, and despite the technological advantages, was nearly totally destroyed. 4000 warriors of the reserve broke off near the end of the battle to cut off some of the British forces, and ended up marching onto a small garrison of roughly 150 men called Rorke's Drift.

Burdened down with hospital patients, they could not retreat, and decided to stand, and fight. They fortified the grounds and buildings. After eleven hours of fighting - often hand to hand combat - finally collapsing the perimeter to the stone Kraal, the Zulu forces left as a relief column approached the next morning.

Music: 

One of the scenes near the end of the movie Zulu, one I saw in my childhood, is still burned in my memory. The thin British line, each row taking turns firing, and the carnage at the end, despite the lack of blood a modern production would have used, was staggering.

Too bad it didn't really quite happen that way, and there were a number of liberties taken with the actual facts, but it was still a good movie.

The song starts on a fast pace, switching back to a power-metal run driven more by the guitars than a crushing, steady beat. The style, if anything, made me think more of some older Iron Maiden tracks from Powerslave, mixed with a little Dragonforce. But it's still all Sabaton. This is another track that didn't catch me at first, but ended up growing on me.

The Growing Realization of the Necessity of Christianity

Vox Day takes a look at Tom Howard's journey from religion, and back, adding this tidbit:

And it occurs to me that one of the keys to the success of the Alt-West is going to be a) Christians realizing that Churchianity is not Christianity and driving it out of their institutions and places of worship combined with b) non-Christians realizing that Christianity is, far from being a societal negative, a societal necessity for any Western civilization.

I had never thought of it as necessary before, but damn if it doesn't make sense.

First, one of the reasons why, despite Hoyt's huns, and Eric Raymond, and Larry all having a hands-off attitude toward Vox, I'd gravitated towards the vox populi blog was because independent thoughts, often from separate directions (especially in Eric Raymond's case), all were converging on a shared set of truths.

Eric, for one, had begun coming to uncomfortable conclusions about whether or not the western civilization we cherished was at all sustainable with the ideals of feminism per se. He still has a hard spot against christianity in line with his atheist/wiccan leanings, though he had also remarked that "white" in victorian-era literature was often about behavior than skin color, and could show the text to demonstrate the truth of the assertion. It's relevant because it's one of many factors that points out that the past isn't the totalitarian theocratic straightjacket progressives teach it to be. He also has come to several uncomfortable conclusions about race, and statistical behavior norms, that, alongside his articles on guns, drive some of his more liberal commenters batshit insane.

Another is Stefan Moleneux - who in several videos now has not only pointed out systemic problems with atheism that drive him to the conclusion that he'd rather live in a society of Christians than one run by atheists, but has also done a video on what evidence or arguments exist that there may be a god, and how the Catholic church built western civilization. Yes, he's still an atheist, but...

Also see the interview he did with Scott Adams, where they both discuss how their attitude toward Christianity changed, even if Scott particularly is still fervently Atheist.

It's not specifically about whether or not God exists, or Christianity is true, but that person after person who puts time and thought into these issues is coming to the conclusion that the tenets of the alt-right have merit (Eric) and that regardless of what one believes, that Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, are not only good things, but necessary for the attitudes that built our civilization, and for it to flourish.

And they're making these conclusions against their own personal interests.