“Easy to Use”

A pen and paper are “easy to use.” You just take the pen, remove the cap, put the point on the paper, and carve out letters. Children learn how to do it over a couple years of practice as they learn language.

Typing a message on a keyboard into a Twitter update box is “easy.”

But how long does it take to learn how to type? How many people in the world know how to do it? How many people in your market can touch type? How fast do the people in your market read?

How long does it take to punch in a sentence on a smart phone? Is that ‘easy?’ It might be ‘easy’ for a kid who grew up texting. It won’t be for a 55-year-old arthritic.

Programmers and other professionals assume that their specialized skill-sets are standard issue. They’re not.

A lot of people in the US and abroad read much slower than you do, can’t touch-type, and struggle to comprehend text. It takes many more multiples of effort on their part to gain knowledge. Their lives are tougher as a result. Their problems appear tougher for them to surmount.

Creative people have a tremendous structure of knowledge inside themselves built up over years of effort. As we’re all trapped in our own heads, it takes extra effort to figure out how other people think and act.

It helps me, at least, to make an analogy with areas that I’m ignorant about. Some people are as ignorant about gaining and applying knowledge as I am about cleaning drain pipes. Or building a plumbing system for a large office building. I’m dimly aware of the principles of water pressure. That’s the extent of my plumbing knowledge.

It would take me years of focused effort (or months of crash-studying and apprenticeship) to become a good enough plumber that I could be trusted to lay pipe.

Many users become frustrated by a product when it assumes that they have skills that they don’t. There’s nothing that you can do on Instagram that you can’t do with a pirated copy of Photoshop.

Photoshop is intimidating to someone who hasn’t yet learned its esoteric mysteries. Editing a photo that you’ve taken on your smartphone on a desktop copy of Photoshop takes at least several steps and perhaps some format conversions.

Instagram allows anyone to transform poorly-taken photographs into pretty pictures in a few taps.

People who are ignorant of photo editing and don’t care to cure that ignorance can now achieve their ends.

There’s a wealth of product ideas to extract by examining tasks that requires special knowledge to accomplish and then using technology to eliminate those requirements.

It seems like an obvious concept. It’s not. People continue to mistake complexity for utility. A complex product may be powerful, but increased complexity limits how many people can derive utility from it. The complex product delivers zero utility to a wide swath of the population, but may have a lot of potential for a skilled operator.

Photoshop is worth nothing in the hands of someone who doesn’t know how to use it and doesn’t want to learn. A designer can use Photoshop to earn a salary and equity besides.

During development, ask:

“Who’s going to use this? How skilled are they? How much effort are they going to expend using this before they give up?”

“How much utility are those people going to get from this?”

“How many people are we losing for every new feature we’re adding?”

“What skills are we assuming the user will have?”

Many products would be drastically different if the principals creating them took those questions seriously.

Book Review: Ogilvy on Advertising

I was glad to find pictures of tits in this book when I didn’t expect them.

Ogilvy on Advertising is one of those books that I routinely thought “you should buy this book, JC” many times over the last two years. It took me a long time to act on my self-nagging, because it  costs $35, and I experience conniptions whenever I spend more than $20 at a time.

It’s embarrassing to me that I avoided reading this for so long. It’s not that I couldn’t have afforded the $35 earlier. It’s just that I was always reading something else, and had grown to prefer digital books. All of those were dumb rationalizations.

This is more than just a useful book for people interested in advertising. It’s valuable for anyone even vaguely interested in managing people, running a business, or persuading others to your point of view. Even though I’ve probably read dozens of blog posts and articles about Ogilvy’s work, I still learned something new on almost every page.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, there are tits in this book. It ostensibly demonstrates differences in mores between advertisements from different cultures.

Reading Ogilvy made me feel like I was in the presence of a powerful mind. He writes on knowledge and advertising:

“What distinguishes the great surgeon is that he knows more than other surgeons. It is the same with advertising agents. The good ones know more.”

It’s not always easy for people to make this connection. I don’t always make this connection with myself (hence why I delayed reading this book for years after I put it on my Amazon wishlist).

This is probably because it took me a long time to actually think that business was worthwhile. I thought that business was for stupid chumps. I wanted to write about politics — African wars, Russian corruption, and American scandals. I wanted to be a big-shot writer.  I never wanted to be a plebian pusher of products. I was much too brilliant to bother.

I had it backwards, intellectually, and it’s taken me a long time to go into reverse and drive myself along a more productive route. I had to develop a little humility. I had to develop the wisdom that selling products to people is a lot more helpful than lecturing them about obscure political topics that “they should” care about.

No busybody intellectual ever clothed anyone, fed the hungry, or cured the sick. The tailor, the baker, and the doctor did all three — and the ad-man told the people that their services were worthwhile and explained where to find them.

On leadership, Ogilvy writes

“The best leaders are be found among those executives who have a strong component of unorthodoxy in their characters. Instead of resisting innovation, they symbolize it — and companies cannot grow without innovation.”

Principles like these don’t expire. Innovation requires unconventional characters.

Speaking again of breasts in advertising, Ogilvy counsels against cheap stunts that fail to feature the product:

“Some copywriters, assuming the reader will find the product as boring as they do, try to inveigle him into their ads with pictures of babies, beagles, and bosoms. This is a mistake.”

Many young online businesses continue to struggle with this concept. That which people click on does not necessarily sell a product. People will click for the boobs, but leave the product behind.

Ogilvy knows how to make a reader feel like he’s the only person in the room. Reading his work, I felt like I was the only guy that the author cared about, even though he died when I was 13 years old. It was like reading a long letter with beautiful illustrations by a guy who cared ferociously that I would learn everything that he could teach me in as short and appealing a package as possible.

I feel ashamed that I was that copywriter guy who wrote advertisements without caring to educate myself about the field until I had been working in it for a couple years. I coasted on “talent,” which is to say that I muddled through on youthful passion and privilege until it stopped working. Avoid the same mistakes that I did, no matter what field you work in.

What I’m starting to understand is that real knowledge compounds rapidly. That ‘genius surgeon’ doesn’t emerge fully formed into the emergency room jamming scalpels into brain matter.

He gets that way by accumulating more knowledge than the lazier surgeons and applying it more effectively.

Apply Ogilvy’s advice in general and not just specifically to advertising:

“If you follow the advice I have given you, you will do your homework, avoid committees, learn from research, watch what the direct-response advertisers do, and stay away from irrelevant sex.”

Damn! If only I’d read this when I was younger.

The Web Teaches Curiosity



On Fred Wilson’s blog today, user Mark Slater commented

how many of you have young kids? (2-4 yrs)

how many of you have had that experience watching them swipe and tap on a device.

My 2 year old picks up the Ipad – swipes the unlock – swipes to the youtube icon, launches the app, locates saved searches, selects “how to milk a cow” puts it down on the floor and watches as a farmer demonstrates the milking process…….”

its absolutely amazing to watch – and i know i am not alone.

i’ll tell you what disruption is – disruption is doing away with the entire notion of a textbook in the first place – replacing it with digital immersive experiences coupled to structured conversations.

textbooks are like phonebooks. An archane outdated approach to packaging and organizing a body of information. explode the textbook in to a million digital pieces – let innovation put the particles back together.

ofcourse – some old world entitty thinks it has the rights to that body of info and will end up suing its customers much like the labels did i guess.

The technical problem of sharing knowledge with the people who want it has been solved.

The political problem of managing a system that inculcates obedience in the name of providing knowledge is insoluble. If you want to know something, you can learn how to do it with a search query. Even a toddler can do it. Social networks allow anyone to track down someone who knows what they’re talking about and grill them for information.

Now that this powerful networking technology is ubiquitous, it introduces a painful question  to conventional people. Why do we still force children to attend technologically antiquated schools for such a large portion of their active hours?

Are they really receiving the best education at the lowest cost possible? What’s the opportunity cost of keeping a curious young child confined to a chair?

Is community college  or ‘vocational school’ really the best way to turn an unskilled person into a capable factory worker?

The most important distinction between a knowledge worker and a laborer is curiosity. No one will become a world-class developer unless they have the motivation to continue their studies throughout their working life.

The internet generates pleasurable feedback loop for curiosity. Curiosity is repaid with the reward of new knowledge time and again. When I search on Google, I usually get what I want. When I want more detail on a topic, I can download a book from Amazon in less than 30 seconds for a small fee.

Schools train passivity and rote learning. Machines are better at obedience and rote learning than humans are, which is why low-level laborers have been replaced at such a rapid rate since the industrial revolution began.

 

Let me e-mail you this mug

Why ever go to a store ever again?

Digital distribution will be the chief form for delivering any product within my lifetime.

This may occur by the next decade. It’s already happening in stages. We’ve become increasingly comfortable with digital transmission of media. Amazon already earns more every year selling eBooks than physical books.

The main hang-ups are still in the manufacture and distribution of tangible products that are more than just images, text, software, video, and audio. I can download software, but I can’t download and print a chair yet.

My thinking on this topic was re-ignited by the book The Homebrew Industrial Revolution by Kevin Caron back in 2010.

Sci-fi involving replicators and nanotechnology excited me about this topic many years before that, but I had filed it away as a distant advance before I started reading more on the topic. I’m confident that this is the most important and under-examined technological trend that there is today. It’s understood that digital distribution is one of the most successful business stories of the last few years. But it’s not widely understood that digital distribution will completely supplant traditional retail rather soon.

Take the case of the 3D-printed bikini available on Shapeways. 

She makes distribution sexy.

Shapeways is an intermediary for the design. The customer orders the bikini, Shapeways manufactures it. The customer gets the bikini in the mail.

This is not the way that I anticipate it working in the future.

Some time in the next couple decades, instead of that process, I would expect a woman to have a digital wallet or a series of subscriptions to different designers that she uses to craft her clothing on demand. Instead of a wardrobe overflowing with dresses, a woman will have a massive digital collection of designs accrued to her account that she can use at any time.

A game on Steam is not a fundamentally different thing from the design for a bikini. They can both be reduced to data and transmitted over a network.

The tough task is to lower the cost of decentralized manufacturing so much that few products actually need to be delivered.

One weakness of many retail business models — both online, like Amazon, or hybrid online-physical, like Walmart — is an over-reliance on public infrastructure. That infrastructure is unlikely to be maintained over the next few decades in the United States and elsewhere. As the government cannibalizes itself to wage foreign wars and bribe old people with existing transfer programs, less money will be available to run highways. The financial condition of the US Postal Service is driving up shipping costs for retailers of all sizes.

We’re within reach of a future in which there is no more public postal service.

Large retailers have thrived thanks to many subsidies that the general culture has become inured to. Walmart runs its warehouses-on-wheels and its Just-In-Time inventory system effectively because it can externalize so many costs onto other people through the government. Companies reliant on massive trucks that cause wear and tear on Federal highways can expect other taxpayers to pick up those bills for them.

Companies like Amazon relentlessly digitize everything that can be possibly digitized. The next step is to cut reliance on shipping products . Shipping increases the delay between purchase and gratification. This is why Amazon uses services like Prime to enhance the experience of its most loyal customers — two day shipping at a flat rate plus other perks. There are many intermediary steps between that and a delay of two hours while your home fabricator crafts the sneakers that you just downloaded a pattern for.

The largest stumbling block for decentralized manufacturing, however, is that centralized manufacturing seems to be getting cheaper even faster. The cost of 3D printers has dropped to less than that of a home computer with the recent release of the Replicator by Makerbot, but it’s still cheaper — if not yet consumer-friendly — to manufacture most complex products through conventional methods using foreign factories.

It’s now possible to buy or download the design for a toy for your kid on the internet and then print it out a few minutes later.

College kids will one day torrent and print the designs for new sheets instead of buying a new set from Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Instead of buying a new set of IKEA furniture every few years when it breaks, you could subscribe to IKEA’s service and download a new set when you get sick of the old one.

Although I thought it was just my idle babbling as I started writing this post, I discovered from this Fast Company article that Jeff Bezos has indeed taken a personal interest in the success of 3D printing companies like Makerbot:

“In a culture with no widespread experience of 3-D printing–and thus no real way to gauge its mass appeal–it is difficult to imagine how big MakerBot might get. But in recent months, Pettis’s company began selling prebuilt printers and taking its first steps into traditional retail. “I think it’s an enormous business,” says Brad Feld, managing director of Foundry Group, a firm that led MakerBot’s venture-capital round and has also invested in Zynga. Jeff Bezos’s venture-capital vehicle put some money in too–after Pettis met the Amazon founder at a conference and Bezos proceeded to grill him about the MakerBot strategy for half an hour.”

The reason why is clear: why deliver stuff thousands of miles when you can send the product in the form of data over a network, like you can with a book sent to Kindle?

Investors like Bezos don’t need to give any fucks about the limitations of the present.

When you have a scads of money, what the world is going to be like in ten years becomes more important than how the world is now.

The world now runs on huge stupid trucks running on these long roads made out of petroleum byproducts. It’s ugly and stupid and I want to tear it all up, and I’m sure that there are at least a few people like me who want to destroy the old world and build at better one in its place. 

Instead of having a cluttered suburban megahouse full of crap,you could have all of your crap keyed to your accounts. If you want something new, you can make it, as long as you have the materials on-hand.

The computer needed decades of development before it could be mass-adopted as the primary means of production and consumption world-wide. Decentralized manufacturing will need a similar sustained push to promote it as the superior alternative.

Technological change does not happen through a magical Hegelian process of ‘societal forces’ — it occurs thanks to the tremendous amount of capital, blood, and snot expended by entrepreneurs and investors.

I consider this technology as an outgrowth of digital distribution. It’s about expediting delivery times and almost eliminating the need for maintaining inventory.

 

Book Review: The Design of Everyday Things

Finishing The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman leaves me feeling like I’ve just joined a high-end cult.

Reading it made me feel like an uneducated rube that had just gone through a crash course taught by a genius-level professor. Norman respects his readers. He’s earned respect in industry that goes back decades.

This is a book of principles. It’ll hold up decades from now.

The book used to be entitled The Psychology of Everday Things, but as Norman explains in the introduction, it lead to the book being mis-categorized in bookstores. It felt almost as revelatory as one of the many affecting psychology books that I’ve read. Instead of human on human relations, this book puts man-on-thing relations on the couch.

The author writes

“Each time a new technology comes along, new designers make the same horrible mistakes as their predecessors. Technologists are not noted for learning from the errors of the past. They look forward, not behind, so they repeat the same problems over and over again.”

This is much like other human endeavors, from politics to love relationships. Technologists often find new ways to reincarnate ancient errors. Norman writes that ”we are surrounded with objects of desire, not objects of use.” Bad but flashy products that succeed on the marketplace are like beautiful girls with big breasts that also have vacuous minds and cruel temperaments.

Norman suggests that designers should “Analyze a task, and… see how it can be made easier.” Developers are more likely to analyze some existing interface and how its aesthetics can be altered. Instead, it’s better to ask what task you want the user to accomplish and to remove any impediments to them.

The author’s observation that…

“It is the rare organization that is content to let a good product stand or to let natural evolution perfect it slowly. No, each year a “new, improved” model must come out, usually incorporating new features that do not use the old as a starting point. In far too many instances, the results spell disaster for the consumer.”

…left a bitter feeling in me. Companies like Twitter seem to be superb at this (ignoring a few mis-steps). Most others aren’t. There’s nothing wrong with picking a popular problem that a lot of people want solved and then delivering a more effective solution for it at a great price.

The Design of Everyday Things fits well with a running theme in most of the books that I’ve read recently: the limitations of the mind. A major error that I grew up believing was that there were “no real mental limits” — that mental exhaustion was some combination of moral failing and laziness. It’s been rough for me to learn my own limitations and to understand those of others.

It may not be as cathartic a discovery as a personal psychological breakthrough, but the book persuaded me to stop blaming myself and to never again blame a user for a failure to understand a product. Once you accept this, it becomes easier to critique existing designs — because when you fail to understand something, you can halt the impulse to self-attack for screwing up and blame the product instead.

Be the kid in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes when it comes to design. It seems like so many products are build from the perspective of that emperor and his sycophantic courtiers. This short (~200 page) book provides a usable toolkit for both critiquing existing design and building usable products.

Killing Hollywood is a Great Idea

Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red by Piet Mondrian (1937 – 1942)

I’ve mellowed since I wrote about SOPA last month.

One occupational hazard of being a radical is that it makes you want other people to be as radical as you are. It’s always tough to empathize with other people who haven’t taken the same intellectual path as you have. They haven’t read the same books, met the same people, attended the same lectures, or read the same articles. Their families are different. They may have religious beliefs, while I don’t.

Jeffery Tucker’s essay on the protests of January 18th shifted my thinking.

And who and what started all of this? Strikingly and notably, it was the “conservatives” — or even the “libertarians” — who continued to be oddly confused by the whole topic. It was the “civil libertarians” and people associated with what is commonly called the “left” that became the machine behind the protest. This is a beautiful demonstration that you never really know for sure where to find the true friends of liberty.

People have asked for my speculations on the future of this legislation. My guess is that this protest will effectively kill the current versions of the bills in Congress. They will be tabled, and the corporate interest groups pushing them will quiet down. Then in the summer and fall, it will all start up again with less-objectionable legislation that claims to remove the offending powers, but, in reality, does largely the same. Will the protesters sit this one out, or will they see that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty? In the end, the freedom of the Internet can be guaranteed, not just by stopping new legislation, but by repealing old legislation. In this respect, this protest represents not an end, but a beginning.

 

At least some of my objections came from that it wasn’t “my team” behind the protests. The rhetoric wasn’t totally libertarian and neither were the main people behind it. In real terms, the protest worked. The government and its corporate allies backed down, for the moment.

Self-interest motivated the protests rather than principles.

It’s not as convincing to other people for political beliefs to be dependent on what’s expedient for you rather than a set of consistent moral principles. Whatever gets people to oppose onerous legislation is at least a little pleasing to me — especially when it succeeds in preventing an expansion of state power, however temporary.

Radicals like me are prone to agreeing with one of Lenin’s statements: “The worse, the better.”

The worse it gets, the more radicals there are, and the less lonely it is to be one. But the corollary to that is that you might get machine-gunned or thrown in prison because of how bad it gets, defeating the entire purpose of silently cheering on onerous new laws because more people will join your little club instead of conforming.

Back to the title of this post.

Killing Hollywood peacefully seems like an effective strategy to me. While it doesn’t strike at the intellectual root of the problem, it does attack the financial supply lines to onerous legislation like SOPA and PIPA.

I don’t understand the various calls that I’ve read for “peace” and “compromise.”

There’s no compromise with a gun shoved in your mouth.

The distinction between Paul Graham’s approach and that of Chris Dodd is notable. One wants to beat another industry through peaceful competition. The other wants to send kevlar-armored thugs riding helicopters to destroy an entire sector.

There’s no moral equivalency in that. One is a non-violent call to action. The other is a howl of aggression.

Why Complain Now About SOPA?

I struggle to comprehend the mindset of the people who made the “I Work for the Internet” page.

I, like most of the faces there, work at a tech startup.

Unlike the majority of the faces on that page, I’ve been arguing against the advance of statism for as long as I’ve been shaving.

I don’t understand the occasional politics. The president is a wonderful guy to vote for who will bring you hope and change, apparently, up until the political system creates a bill that actually threatens your ability to do your job.

It’s fine when car manufacturers, energy companies, chemical companies, guitar companies, meat-packers, farmers, and anyone else that you can think of get subjected to draconian regulation that determines everything that they can and can’t do–

But when it comes to your industry, a totally awesome page full of people springs up out of nowhere arguing against the latest egregious law.

The destructive regulations proposed are no less damaging than any of the other millions of laws that control other industries.

I don’t know if the movement to oppose the legislation will succeed or not. But the hypocritical outrage bothers me.

When I complain about one of the various wars the US engages in, I get almost no backing from normal people. I don’t get the sense that the people in these photos gives much thought at all to the millions of people imprisoned in this country at all.

Moral outrage is only meaningful if it comes from something other than narrow self-interest. For it to have a wider impact, it must be universally applied.

It can’t just be ‘murder is bad, except when I’m killing people’ or ‘government oversight and regulation is wonderful, except when it’s my industry.’

I fail to perceive the moral difference between the regulation that outlaws high-water-pressure showerheads and SOPA.

I don’t get the mentality that cheers when the president announces a round of multi-billion dollar subsidies to the tech industry and then boos when the same guy threatens to pass crippling regulation on the same industry.

When he is doing something ‘nice’ for your industry, he’s the ‘good daddy,’ but when he threatens to do something mean, he’s suddenly the ‘bad daddy.’

Greedy amorality seems like a great survival strategy until someone with a bigger gun comes along. Morality is itself a social technology that, properly used, results in a society that increases in prosperity through the ages.

A completely amoral society always devolves into apocalyptic bloodshed.

The tech industry has benefited massively from the purposefully ‘hands-off’ regulatory approach that the government has taken towards the internet since its inception. It means that venture capitalists prefer to fund tech startups with little-to-no regulatory overhead — other industries are hobbled by the need for constant compliance, regular bribes to politicians, and often (as with finance) near-total domination by the state. Capital flows to where it’s least-impeded.

I suppose this kind of behavior is to be expected — it’s in the narrow, amoral self-interest of internet tech workers to be in favor of regulation for everyone else and to be for no regulation when it comes to their own industry. It ensures that the industry retains its relative privilege, which translates into higher salaries for workers and greater chances of success for companies.

It is also ultimately self-destructive, but not necessarily within the lifespans of the people promoting this state of affairs. The same tech muck-a-mucks who are happy to fête whatever bozo president is in charge with fancy suppers at $50k/plate may die long before the consequences of their appeasement ever impacts them personally.

I see these periodic dramas as a sort of bribe-collection moment for politicians. Tech types are notoriously stingy with bribes. It is a way for the political class to signal that, on a whim, they could destroy the industry. No rational argument, apparently, can tame this desire for destruction. Only a sudden mass outbreak ofbegging and money-raising can prevent the Orc-like politicos from Washington from rampaging through the industry, cutting down thriving companies with deadly cease-and-desist letters.

I, for one, don’t think that my freedom is something that I need to lick anyone’s fancy leather shoes for. It’s not someone else’s to give to me in the first place.

I have been on the other end of calls that this site asks people to make to congressional offices.

I would expect these calls to go to the same places that I put them when I received them from angry constituents — the notepad of some stressed-out, low-level government worker. It would then be ‘brought to the attention of’ some politician, which would in all likelihood never happen. Constituents only meet with politicians in staged, Potemkin events like ‘town halls.’

If you want to have dinner with a politico — a real conversation — you need to pay for it.

Considering the financial shambles that the American government is actually in, I’m more inclined to reply to these sorts of proposed laws with a…

“Do you feel lucky, punk?”

…because the hysteria is just what the political class wants. They want the rending of garments and maybe the formation of some insufferable PAC that will run advertisements targeted towards geriatric voters that have nothing in common with me.

The best answer to this legislation is, in my opinion, to taunt ‘em to pull the trigger.

Nothing good ever came of appeasing bullies.

Your Dream of Home Ownership is Stupid

I read this article about a Brooklyn couple who wants to buy a house but can’t afford to while I waited for my bacon to cook this morning.

I lived in Boerum Hill for less than a year a couple years ago. I’ve lived in Brooklyn for most of my life. Boerum Hill in particular is a gentrifying (read: affluent whites are displacing West Indian immigrants and African-Americans) neighborhood with a stunning number of vacant condominiums due to overbuilding during the bubble. That’s probably eased since I was last in the neighborhood on a daily basis.

Regardless, it the article tells the tale of two public school teachers (whose salaries are paid by private sector workers like myself) who want to buy a house, but can’t.

I struggle to understand the mentality of people who plan their personal finances around buying a house that will make up the majority of their net worth using leverage of at least 5:1 that may be outstanding for 30 years at a much higher interest rate than is sane to pay for leverage that extreme.

The marketing of mortgages and houses eshews the harsh language of risk that would accurately reflect the transaction.

The truth is that couples like this are trying to “save” up enough capital to leverage themselves by 5x to purchase a consumption good that’s subject to high taxes and maintenance costs. They want to do it because at least one member of the couple suggests that television tells them that it’s what they’re supposed to do.

TV rots your brain and encourages you to make stupid decisions!

$1,600 is more than enough to rent a spacious one-bedroom in southern Brooklyn — it would not consign this couple to studio or to a distant Queens neighborhood with an infinite commute.

News articles like this one just amplify the dangerous marketing language of the mortgage/real-estate/commercial banking/government-subsidized-lending quadrangle of doom. The subtext is that this couple has “done all the right things” and somehow deserves to live in the same neighborhoods as families that earn multiples of their incomes in the private sector.

I also read a racial subtext into the real estate purchasing decisions of white yuppies. You can live in affordable housing in NYC as long as you can at least tolerate — if not love — living among people who look different from you and come from a different country. The surcharge for living among white yuppies is a doubling to quintupling of your real estate price.

Their salaries don’t match where they work because socialism doesn’t work. Political bureaucracies decide what these teachers earn and not what the market is willing to pay.

For myself, I will not purchase real estate under these conditions unless the cash price is less than 5% of my net worth. Even then, the cost in terms of mobility, overhead, and illiquidity is a bad trade.

This is also the inevitable result of the Federal Reserve policy and other governmental initiatives to pump up the price of housing. People with ordinary incomes can’t afford to buy houses because the prices have never been allowed to fully clear.

That the couple saves money is supposed to generate sympathy for their fake plight:

So why can’t their savings yield enough money for a hefty down payment? “It feels like anytime we hit around $20,000 something terrible or some unexpected thing happens,” Mr. Kinney said of their savings which reached about $22,000 at its peak. He planned on coming up with another $20,000 for their down payment by borrowing from his pension.

Uncertainty is why you save money and refrain from consumption. The future is unpredictable.

A better dream for a young person or couple is to dream of having enough capital to protect themselves uncertainty. A house is not safety. It’s an anchor to a location that’s usually combined with more leverage than an ordinary person is equipped to manage.

A house that leaves you indebted and stuck to a location in a gyrating market is not a source of protection from the unknown future.

The savings isn’t there to be blown on a fucking granite countertop that you use to distract yourself from how empty your relationship is.

It’s there to make it possible to build wealth and to handle unforeseen events — like your wife getting pregnant, becoming unemployed, getting hit by a car, losing money in the markets, being the victim of a crime, or whatever.

$20k for two people in NYC is like a basic emergency fund that would cover circa six months of unemployment or adverse conditions for both people.

Are the Kids All Fucked Up?

I read an article about how people my age are struggling almost every day. I’ve tried to write about the topic repeatedly for months. I choke on my drafts every time.

A friend told me that I could write a good book on how to get work. I haven’t even started thinking about how to do it.

When people that I know who are still struggling ask me for advice, I can never offer them anything that’s useful. What worked for me could never work for anyone else.

I feel an uncomfortable sense of recognition when I read articles like this one in New York Magazine. I’ve resembled some of the characters in the story over the last few years. I know people who are like that, too: smart, formerly affluent people stuck working in strange jobs for pocket change.

I choke on my drafts because I despise writing about concepts that purport to describe people. There’s no such thing as a “generation.” There are no “millenials.” There are individuals that happened to be born during a particular year at a particular place and time.

Noreen Malone’s article only resonates with me because I come from the same milieu of New York private school-educated scions who expected to be masters of the universe because we happened to fall out of our mothers’ reproductive systems in the late 1980s in a nice neighborhood. This was not true.

It turns out that, in order to do well, you need to be capable of performing tasks, building machines, generating ideas, and collaborating with other people in order to be judged worthy of a good paycheck. Merely attaining a degree in literature doesn’t guarantee that anyone will think that you’re worth a salary.

These trend pieces — and even reports that tout economic data about how so many young people are unemployed or struggling — are useless to people in those positions.

It’s not enough for a magazine to print a true first-person narrative. Editors and writers feel a need to project a narrative onto a trend that can’t be validated. The individual is never enough for these people with no self-esteem: everything must be sorted into a collective.

I have no relationship to the category of “Americans between the ages of 18-29.” I may be a young man who was born on this land mass, but I’m not somehow a fungus that lives in a mind-meld with all of these random people. Neither is anyone that age.

We tell stories to each other to connect, to share experiences, to carry one another to where we want to go. Stories with real people and real characters are more persuasive than a bland, “generational” trend story.

Isn’t a life in and of itself compelling enough to read about? Literature is built on characters and not abstractions.

The thought process that lead to my attaining my current job began with a question that I asked myself more than a year ago:

“What does it mean that word rates have declined so much over the last decade?”

I had recently met a bearded-and-bald author in a Brooklyn coffee shop. At the time, I was in a semi-psychotic-networker mode in which I was exchanging contact information constantly with random people that I would meet in bars and coffee shops.

He told me to get the fuck out of the business.

Word rates have dropped from $8 to $4 to $2 to $1 to $0.50 or less for freelancers at magazines since the rise of the web.

I’d known this for some years already. I’d counter-acted that knowledge with egotistic machismo. I would just work harder than other people and get to where I wanted eventually.

Examining that was not easy. It entailed investing time and psychological effort into changing what I thought of myself. I’d been calling myself a “writer” for years. I was immensely proud to have paid for rent, food, and cover charges at music venues from the proceeds of my typing.

It was also motivated by my failed search for a better therapist at the same time. The best woman that I found out of a dozen charged around $800 a month. While I realized that, while I could pay her, I would probably generate more stress than I would dissipate by doing so and destroy savings.

It’s also impossible to project anything when you’re a freelancer living from gig to gig. Revenue projection is a fantasy that you use to hide from reality and gain temporary relief from the terror of impending insolvency.

To end this digression, I thought more about that price trend. For a person who loves to read about economics and finance, I’d been terrible at applying that knowledge to my career choice.

I decided that it meant that it was the world telling me that it didn’t want what I was doing very much. I would need to work harder for less money for longer for less reward than doing almost anything else.

At the time, I’d recently read many books about trading securities based on price trends. I thought about how I could act on that knowledge, without actually having enough money to invest.

I decided that I would invest my most valuable asset — myself — into some business trend that looked promising, rather than one whose wage rates seem to cut in half every two years.

So, almost two years later, I work in one of the only growing sectors of the American economy. I feel like a bizarre exception, but anyone who has ever met me would describe me like that, anyway.

Prices are tremendously dense packets of information that some of us need to be walloped with repeatedly in order to understand what they’re trying to tell us about what people want and the current structure of the economy. You don’t need to know why something is priced in a certain way to act based on all the human action that the price implies.

Prices are objective. Explaining prices is, at best, shitty fiction.

In the face of plummeting wages for freelancers, the best ‘argument’ I could muster was that it was what I wanted to do. And that was true: I wanted to do it. But prices told me that the great masses of capital did not give a fuck about how I wanted to style myself.

I decided that I could do better at meeting the market, and started reading tons of books to build my confidence enough for me to get me into an industry that isn’t shambolic.

I think (with limited justification) that plenty of people my age struggle to cross the the gap between what the adults in their lives told them that life would be like and what adult life actually is like. Child-rearing in the Western world is mostly an enterprise of preparing kids to join a circa 1955 workforce. Leaving college can be a time-warp experience, especially for those of us with a liberal arts background.

Making that transition isn’t easy, especially considering the economic gyrations that the world continues to go through. Solutions to these life-problems need to come from within, they’re not coming from a politician.