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The Hillary supporters I know are in a tizzy because King Donald I (a.k.a. Prince of Darkness) has appointed Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State. They love John Kerry (because he exemplifies the American dream of living off someone else’s labor? Kerry tapping into wealth created by Henry J. Heinz and son/grandson by marrying a rich widow is inspirational?) and they already hate Tillerson.

A few years ago I read Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power and, if you’re curious to know more about Mr. Tillerson, I would recommend the book. What did Tillerson actually do in Russia? Here’s a sample:

It was not until 1996 that ExxonMobil closed on terms for what became known as the Sakhalin-1 project. It was an undertaking that would test the corporation’s engineering prowess like no other. Hurricane winds swept the Sakhalin region each autumn, and ice packs up to six feet thick built up during the winter. After the spring, melting ice floes threatened to knock down any offshore oil rig in their way. Exxon decided on a plan to drill a seven-mile horizontal well from mainland Russia underneath the ocean waters. It was the only well of its kind in the world. Sakhalin-1 suggested some of the appeal of Western oil technology and engineering skill to Russia. But to make the deal on terms acceptable to Exxon, Russia’s government had had to set aside its nationalism and share oil ownership.

Tillerson formed a friendship with the Sakhalin governor and decided to rope in a state-owned Russian oil firm as a project partner, so that ExxonMobil and the Russian government would be “on the same side of the table,” as Tillerson put it later, if disputes over the project arose. ExxonMobil had connections at Rosneft, one of the smaller state-owned oil and gas companies, with about 10 percent of the country’s reserves, a company widely regarded as a bureaucratic mess even by Russia’s standards. Around 1995, Lee Raymond had met with Rosneft executives to talk about a possible acquisition of the firm. The Russian company’s leaders had said they were willing to merge into Exxon, and “begged and pleaded” to be acquired, as an executive involved recalled it, but Raymond declined because even Rosneft’s leaders seemed unsure about what their company legally owned.

[a few years into the project] Under pressure, Tillerson applied the Exxon formula: no surrender. “We jacked this all the way to the top,” recalled one of his colleagues. “We brought the issue up with the president [Putin] and we said, ‘Look, we have got the contract signed, we are doing everything we are supposed to do—here are the rules. And these guys don’t want to follow the rules. What are you going to do about it?’” Putin offered to write out an executive order saying that Sakhalin-1 could proceed, but Tillerson refused. Putin did not have enough legal authority to satisfy ExxonMobil; Tillerson said he did not want to operate by decree, but by durable laws. Tillerson wanted to have “all the t’s crossed and i’s dotted exactly according to Russian law and regulation, and if we couldn’t get it done, then we were not going to do it,” the former executive remembered. Ultimately, after Putin “blew his stack” at ExxonMobil’s affront, the Russian president agreed.

Tillerson is also characterized in the book as taking an actuarial approach to climate change. Upon taking over as CEO he assembled a team of experts to try to figure out how much could be predicted. Then Exxon tried to sit down with people who made a living as climate change alarmists:

On climate change, Cohen and Stuewer flashed PowerPoint slides outlining draft language of a new formulation of ExxonMobil’s position. “They were really dancing around the question of certainty” about the risks of global warming and the evidence that man-made activity contributed, recalled Leslie Lowe, one of the participants. Lowe introduced the metaphor of having insurance against fire: Why not work against man-made contributions to climate change, even if there remained uncertainty about every last detail of cause and effect? Yes, the ExxonMobil side responded, but you don’t spend all of your money in life on insurance. You calculate how large and valuable an asset you are trying to insure, and how big a risk you face. Climate was like everything else ExxonMobil did: It was a matter of risk management, Cohen emphasized.

Exxon under Tillerson agrees with the rest of the engineering world:

Battery technology interested ExxonMobil’s corporate strategists most of all. If there was one emerging energy technology that seemed to have the practical potential to disrupt the oil industry’s assumptions about the transportation economy, this was it. “I always put batteries in the category of game changers,” an ExxonMobil executive involved in the strategic technology review recalled. The most important questions involved the potential for breakthroughs in the “energy intensity” …

Other than the money he presumably takes for himself, Tillerson tries to be conservative:

Clinton introduced Diane Sawyer. She summoned to the stage members of a panel to talk about women’s issues; the panel included Tillerson and Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank with a public reputation as much in need of repair as ExxonMobil’s. The ballroom atmosphere suggested the laying on of liberal, globalized hands to cleanse sinful multinational corporations. “These are some of the power hitters,” Sawyer said of Tillerson and Blankfein. Tillerson talked about ExxonMobil’s charitable initiatives to support girls and women in some of the poor countries where the corporation extracted oil. “Technology comes very natural to ExxonMobil,” he said. “What are the technologies that will provide them [girls and women] capabilities to undertake their daily activities in a more effective and efficient way?” Sawyer later asked him: What is the responsibility of a multinational corporation to make the world better through charitable activity? Is it a tithe of 10 percent? How much? “Ultimately,” Tillerson said, “this is our shareholders’ money we’re spending. It’s not my money to tithe. It’s not the corporation’s. It’s our shareholders’.”

The most damning part of the book is that in 2009 Tillerson spent $41 billion to acquire XTO, a shale gas company, just in time for the complete collapse of natural gas prices (XOM has a market cap of $380 billion today). Maybe it will pay off in the long run?

The author of the book seems to be primarily in sympathy with Obama and other Democrats. Nonetheless he gives Tillerson some credit on financial performance:

On July 28, 2011, ExxonMobil announced its profits for the first half of the year. The total came in at $21.3 billion, a whisker under the amount the corporation reported during the same period in 2008, when it set a record for the most nominal profit earned by any corporation in American history. Eight days later, on August 5, 2011, Standard & Poor’s announced the first-ever ratings downgrade of the bonds issued by the United States Treasury, marking them down from a AAA rating to AA-plus. The Standard & Poor’s downgrade meant that ExxonMobil, one of only four American corporations to maintain the AAA mark, now possessed a credit rating superior to that of the United States.

Standard & Poor’s received intense criticism for its judgment that the American government’s ability to repay its lenders might be in any doubt. Yet the fiscal trajectories of the United States Treasury and ExxonMobil had certainly diverged. In 1999, the year that Exxon’s acquisition of Mobil closed, the federal government and the corporation each took in more money annually than was required to meet expenses. Their paths then divided. In an era of terrorism, expeditionary wars, and upheaval abroad, coupled with tax cutting and reckless financial speculation at home, one navigated confidently, while the other foundered. From the day of the Mobil merger closing until the day of the S&P downgrade, the net cash flow of the United States—receipts minus expenditures—was approximately negative $5.7 trillion. ExxonMobil’s net cash flow from operations and asset sales during the same period was a positive $493 billion.

More: read Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power

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Latest book that I’m reading: Dreamland by Sam Quinones.

The book is about the rise of prescription opiates, such as OxyContin (1996), based on a flawed interpretation of the literature:

One day twenty years earlier, in 1979, a doctor at Boston University School of Medicine named Hershel Jick sat in his office pondering the question of how often patients in a hospital, given narcotic painkillers, grew addicted to these drugs. … Hershel Jick was in a better position than most to gather findings on the topic. At Boston University, he had built a database of records of hospitalized patients. The database charted the effects of drugs of all kinds on these patients while they were in the hospital. … Of almost twelve thousand patients treated with opiates while in a hospital before 1979, and whose records were in the Boston database, only four had grown addicted. There was no data about how often, how long, or at what dose these patients were given opiates, nor the ailments the drugs treated. The paragraph simply cited the numbers and made no claim beyond that. … A graduate student named Jane Porter helped with his calculations in some way that Dr. Jick could not remember years later. As is the practice in medical research papers, she received top byline, though Dr. Jick said he wrote the thing. The secretary put the letter in an envelope and sent it off to the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, which, in due course, in its edition of January 10, 1980, published Dr. Jick’s paragraph on page 123 alongside myriad letters from researchers and physicians from around the country. It bore the title “Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics.”

People couldn’t get opiates easily after they left the hospital back in those days so of course only about 1 percent became addicted. These data were cited in support of the idea that you could send Americans home with pills and no supervision and they wouldn’t get addicted to opiates.

The book is also about the genius of an American marketeer and friend to the lover of Asian art:

In 1951, an adman named Arthur Sackler from a little-known marketing firm met with the sales director of a small hundred-year-old chemical concern named Charles Pfizer and Company in New York City. Arthur Mitchell Sackler was thirty-nine and already had a career of achievement as a psychiatrist behind him. … Sackler became a psychiatrist at Creedmoor, a New York mental hospital. There, he wrote more than 150 papers on psychiatry and experimental medicine, and identified some of the chemical causes in schizophrenia and manic depression. He was an antismoking crusader long before it was popular, and prohibited smoking at the companies he would later own.

He switched careers in the 1940s and hired on at William Douglas McAdams, a small, rather staid medical advertising firm. Before long one of his clients was Charles Pfizer and Company, then the world’s largest manufacturer of vitamin C. The company’s newly formed pharmaceutical research department had developed a synthetic antibiotic, first derived from soil bacteria, that it called Terramycin and that had proven effective on more than fifty diseases, including pneumonia. The company was moving from chemical manufacturing to pharmaceuticals. Instead of licensing it to a drug company, Pfizer wanted to sell the antibiotic itself. In the office that day, Sackler told the company’s sales director, Thomas Winn, that with a large enough advertising budget for Terramycin, he could turn Charles Pfizer and Company into a household name among doctors.

Meanwhile, Sackler’s ad writers in New York wrote thousands of postcards meant to appear as if they were from Egypt, Australia, Malta, and elsewhere. They mailed these cards, addressed individually to thousands of U.S. family doctors, pediatricians, and surgeons, describing how Terramycin was combating diseases in these exotic locales—“milk fever” in Malta, “Q fever” in Australia. The cards were signed “Sincerely, Pfizer.” Doctors already known to prescribe a lot of drugs got extra direct mail.

All that combined with the drug’s efficacy to make Terramycin a blockbuster—with forty-five million dollars in sales in 1952. Based on its Terramycin success, Charles Pfizer and Company expanded to thirteen countries, and eventually changed its name to Pfizer.

Sackler’s campaign marked the emergence of modern pharmaceutical advertising, a field that up to then, in the words of one executive, “existed but it didn’t.” Seeing the future, Sackler bought the firm he worked for, William Douglas McAdams. As an aside, he and his brothers also purchased an unknown drug company: Purdue Frederick, formed in the 1890s, during the days of patent medicines, by John Purdue Gray and George Frederick Bingham. The company had limped along since then, and until our story begins to unfold in the 1980s, it was still known mainly for selling antiseptics, a laxative, and an earwax remover. Arthur Sackler, meanwhile, continued to transform drug marketing. In 1963, he licensed from Hoffman-La Roche the right to import and sell a new tranquilizer called Valium. Sackler again emphasized direct doctor contact to promote the drug. “Detail men”—salesmen—frequently visited doctors’ offices bearing free samples of Valium.

Part of the campaign aimed to convince doctors to prescribe Valium, which the public saw as dangerous. Ads urged doctors to view a patient’s physical pain as connected to stress—with Valium the destresser. If a child was sick, maybe her mother was tense. Valium was marketed above all to women, pitched as way of bearing the stress of lives as wives and mothers. Before the feminist movement, women were presumed to need that kind of help for the rest of their lives, thus there was no worry then about its addictiveness.

Years later, Purdue would put those strategies to use marketing its new opiate painkiller OxyContin.

The book is topical because it covers black tar heroin sold by illegal immigrants from a forgotten corner of Mexico:

The system operates on certain principles, the informant said, and the Nayarit traffickers don’t violate them. The cells compete with each other, but competing drivers know each other from back home, so they’re never violent. They never carry guns. They work hard at blending in. They don’t party where they live. They drive sedans that are several years old. None of the workers use the drug. Drivers spend a few months in a city and then the bosses send them home or to a cell in another town. The cells switch cars about as often as they switch drivers. New drivers are coming up all the time, usually farm boys from Xalisco County. The cell owners like young drivers because they’re less likely to steal from them; the more experienced a driver becomes, the more likely he knows how to steal from the boss.

Cell profits were based on the markup inherent in retail. Their customers were strung-out, desperate junkies who couldn’t afford a half a kilo of heroin. Anyone looking for a large amount of heroin was probably a cop aiming for a case that would land the dealer in prison for years. Ask to buy a large quantity of dope, the informant said, and they’ll shut down their phones. You’ll never hear from them again. That really startled the informant. He knew of no other Mexican trafficking group that preferred to sell tiny quantities

Moreover, the Xalisco cells never deal with African Americans. They don’t sell to black people; nor do they buy from blacks, who they fear will rob them. They sell almost exclusively to whites

The Xalisco traffickers’ innovation was literally a delivery mechanism as well. Guys from Xalisco had figured out that what white people—especially middle-class white kids—want most is service, convenience. They didn’t want to go to skid row or some seedy dope house to buy their drugs. Now they didn’t need to. The guys from Xalisco would deliver it to them.

As I listened to Chavez, it seemed to me that the guys from Xalisco were fired by the impulse that, in fact, moved so many Mexican immigrants. Most Mexican immigrants spent years in the United States not melting in but imagining instead the day when they would go home for good. This was their American Dream: to return to Mexico better off than they had left it and show everyone back home that that’s how it was. They called home and sent money constantly. They were usually far more involved in, say, the digging of a new well in the rancho than in the workings of the school their children attended in the United States. They returned home for the village’s annual fiesta and spent money they couldn’t afford on barbecues, weddings, and quinceañeras. To that end, as they worked the toughest jobs in America, they assiduously built houses in the rancho back home that stood as monuments to their desire to return for good one day. These houses took a decade to finish. Immigrants added to their houses each time they returned. They invariably extended rebar from the top of the houses’ first floors. Rebar was a promise that as soon as he got the money together, the owner was adding a second story. Rods of rebar, standing at attention, became part of the skyline of literally thousands of Mexican immigrant villages and ranchos.

The finished houses of migrant Mexico often had wrought-iron gates, modern plumbing, and marble floors. These towns slowly improved as they emptied of people whose dream was to build their houses, too. Over the years, the towns became dreamlands, as empty as movie sets, where immigrants went briefly to relax at Christmas or during the annual fiesta, and imagine their lives as wealthy retirees back home again one day. The great irony was that work, mortgages, and U.S.-born children kept most migrants from ever returning to Mexico to live permanently in those houses they built with such sacrifice.

But the Xalisco heroin traffickers did it all the time. Their story was about immigration and what moves a poor Mexican to migrate as much as it was a tale of drug trafficking. Those Xalisco traffickers who didn’t end up in prison went back to live in those houses. They put down no roots in this country; they spent as little money in America as they could, in fact. Jamaicans, Russians, Italians, even other Mexican traffickers, all bought property and broadcasted their wealth in the United States. The Xalisco traffickers were the only immigrant narcotics mafia Chavez knew of that aimed to just go home, and with nary a shot fired.

Illegal immigration was (and remains?) critical to the effort because the Xalisco footsoldiers seldom had enough heroin with them to be worth imprisoning. If a footsoldier were caught, the U.S. taxpayer would buy him a plane ticket back to the sugarcane fields from which he’d come. He’d be replaced with a fellow ranchero within a few days.

I’m partway through Dreamland, but it is fascinating material. It sounds pretty easy to become addicted.

Related:

• Prince and Donald Trump
• Who funded America’s opiate epidemic? You did.

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Four different readers asked me for comments on “Hedge Funder Offered $75,000 to His Girlfriend for Abortion” (Yahoo! Style) or an underlying NY Post article: “My hedge-fund boyfriend tried to bribe me to get an abortion: suit”.

My response: Given that New York family law provides for a fixed 17 percent of her defendant’s pre-tax income in child support revenue, mostly this is just some added color for Elmira Naymark’s lawsuit. If her 29-year-old defendant earns more than $360,000/year, the profitability of the child beyond $61,200/year (tax-free; $1.285 million over 21 years) will depend to some extent on judicial discretion, so highlighting the failed abortion transaction may yet have some practical significance.

Why did this transaction fail? When we interviewed lawyers for Real World Divorce we found that abortion negotiations are commonly handled by attorneys, not by a “friend” and and the mom as in this case. As with taking pills to ensure pregnancy following a one-night encounter, abortion sales tend to occur in states where collecting child support is potentially more lucrative than going to college and working at the median college graduate wage. The friend’s purported offer of “50k-75,000+” is not consistent with attorney-handled transactions, which more typically are completed at roughly 50 percent of the net present value of the child support cashflow (21 years in New York), plus the potential plaintiff’s legal fees.

[Note that the net present value of obtaining custody of the 29-year-old defendant’s biological child would be totally different in various jurisdictions around the U.S. and the world. The plaintiff would receive a maximum of about $5,000 per year in Germany, $8,000 per year in Denmark, $13,000 per year for 18 years in Nevada, and just over $20,000 per year for 18 years in Minnesota or Texas. The child’s schedule would be completely different among these jurisdictions as well, ranging from about 17 percent of the time with the loser parent in New York to a statutory 50/50 schedule in Nevada or Arizona.]

Related:

• “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage”
• “Abortion Is Found to Have Little Effect on Women’s Mental Health” (nytimes)

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One hazardous mental attitude in aviation is over-commitment to a course of action and a failure to keep all alternatives in mind. You plan to depart in the morning and stick to that plan even when the terminal forecast shows that much better weather is expected for the afternoon.

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East gives us some history about one of the worst examples of this, the British Gallipoli Campaign:

But when it came to committing folly, British war planners were just warming up. The principal landing zones for Med-Ex, it had been decided, would be on the Gallipoli peninsula, that thin ribbon of rugged mountains that forms the Dardanelles’ western shore. Rarely more than six or seven miles across, the peninsula runs northward for some fifty miles before finally broadening out onto the European mainland. In selecting where to go ashore, the British could have chosen any number of spots along Gallipoli’s length where a ground force, once gaining the ridgeline and climbing down to the opposite shore—a distance of less than three miles in places—would have split the Ottoman army in two and trapped any enemy forces positioned below that line. Of course, the best option might have been to sidestep the peninsula completely and put in at the Gulf of Saros at its northern end. An invasion force coming ashore in that broad bay would not only maroon all the Turkish troops garrisoned on Gallipoli, but would then have a virtually unimpeded path through easy countryside to Constantinople, just 100 miles away. This was certainly the greatest fear of General Liman von Sanders, the German commander recently appointed by the Turkish government to oversee the Dardanelles defense; in anticipation of a landing at Saros, he had placed his headquarters and fully a third of his army there.

The one possibility that Sanders tended to discount entirely was a landing at Gallipoli’s southern tip, simply because the most basic rules of military logic—even mere common sense—argued against it. Not only would a landing force there be vulnerable to defenders dug in on the heights above them, but completely exposed to whatever long-range Turkish artillery remained operable in their nearby fortresses. And even if such a force managed to scale the heights and seize those forts, the Turkish defenders could then begin a slow withdrawal up the peninsula, throwing up new trenchlines as they went, neatly replicating the static trench warfare that had so paralyzed the armies on the Western Front. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find a worse landing site most anywhere on the three-thousand-mile-long Mediterranean coast of the Ottoman Empire—yet it was precisely here that Med-Ex was going ashore.

Along with condescension for the enemy, always a perilous mind-set for an army, that decision was apparently born of sheer bureaucratic obduracy. Since the Dardanelles campaign had been conceived as a naval operation, the success or failure of the expanded mission would continue to be judged through the narrow lens of its original objective—clearing the straits—leaving its planners quite blind to the idea of trying a different approach that might ultimately achieve the same end. Incredibly, it seems the Gallipoli strategists had less rejected alternative landing sites than never seriously considered them.

A look at the map does make one wonder why the British were on the peninsula at all. How did it go?

By the end of that first day, the advance landing forces at Gallipoli had already suffered nearly four thousand casualties, or considerably more than the total number of men Lawrence had projected would be needed to secure Alexandretta. So bewildered was General von Sanders by his enemy’s idiocy that for the next day he remained convinced the southern landing was a mere feint and that the main invasion force was still coming elsewhere. This left it to a local Ottoman divisional commander, Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal, acting on his own accord, to repeatedly hurl his men against the invaders clinging to their tiny beachheads in an attempt to throw them back into the sea. The first-day objective of those landing on Cape Helles had been to secure a small village some four miles inland, and then to advance on the Turkish forts just above. Over the next seven months, the British would never reach that village, but would suffer nearly a quarter of a million casualties trying.

The author quotes “the old maxim that war can kill all things except bad ideas.”

We’re not fighting in trenches anymore, but I wonder if we’re pretty much doing the same thing as the British did, only in slow-motion.

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Some Christmas gift ideas, while there is still time…

For the Hillary supporter still weeping with grief… a mail order from the Trump Winery (I recommend New World Reserve (red) or their award-winning sparkling wine). Also fun to bring to dinner parties (assuming you don’t want to be invited back).

A custom photo puzzle from Ravensburger (they will do up to 1500 pieces from your own photo or photos (you can collage them on their site)).

For the photographer with children… Sony A6500 (great image quality and good autofocus).

For a favorite dog: Chuckit Kick Fetch ball.

For the chef: this amazing $12 bread knife.

Readers: Perhaps based on stuff you’ve bought recently and enjoyed, what are your best Christmas gift ideas?

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I was driving Domestic Senior Management’s car to the instant oil-change place yesterday. We are having our first cold snap in Boston this year, with highs below freezing and lows down to about 13F. On the way I passed the Quick and Clean car wash and decided the vehicle needed an interior vacuum and window cleaning. No doubt emboldened by Trump, the car wash owners had applied a glass ceiling to the floor. Based on wardrobe and hairstyle, there were exactly zero employees identifying as women working on the detail crew, which conducts its work entirely outdoors from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm.

[Note that this gender-based discrimination should not be confused with the pre-Trump Sex discrimination at the car wash that I observed back in August, before the entire world changed.]

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In “One Job Is Enough. Sell the Hotel,” the New York Times Editorial Board gives direct instructions to Donald Trump. Haven’t we just seen about a year of the Times writing about how Trump and his supporters wouldn’t listen to their intellectual superiors (e.g., the Editorial Board of the NYT) and switch to supporting Hillary instead? Now that he has prevailed against all predictions (including my own!), why would Trump be waking up every morning and saying “Let me just check the NYT to see if my intellectual superiors have any agenda items for me today”?

[Separately, why is divesting just this one hotel good enough? The federal government does business in Chicago, New York, and other cities where there are Trump hotels. If Trump were so motivated he could enrich himself simply by scheduling a talk to a high school in Chicago. The entourage of Secret Service and sycophants that follows the President would tie up 500 or 1000 hotel rooms in the city. Even if none of these were booked in the Trump Hotel Chicago, that hotel would be able to charge higher rates for the night(s) that President Trump was in town.]

Related:

• New York Times suggests that companies other than the New York Times hire transgender workers
• White people at the New York Times bemoan the fate of the black man
• Why do people who chose not to study science and math opine on the virtues of studying science and math?

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Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East gives a summary of what we’ve accomplished for $2 trillion(?) in Iraq:

Certainly, blame for all this doesn’t rest solely with the terrible decisions that were made at the end of World War I, but it was then that one particularly toxic seed was planted. Ever since, Arab society has tended to define itself less by what it aspires to become than by what it is opposed to: colonialism, Zionism, Western imperialism in its many forms. This culture of opposition has been manipulated—indeed, feverishly nurtured—by generations of Arab dictators intent on channeling their people’s anger away from their own misrule in favor of the external threat, whether it is “the great Satan” or the “illegitimate Zionist entity” or Western music playing on the streets of Cairo. In an ironic and unforeseen way, that era now appears to be coming to an end. Beginning with the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, but greatly accelerated by the so-called Arab Spring movements that have roiled the region since 2010, the established order has steadily eroded before the force of the “Arab street.” Thus far, though, that “street” has shown little sign of coalescing around any notion of Arab unity, let alone the old dream of a greater Arab nation, but very much the opposite: a reversion to the balkanized patchwork of ethnic and religious enclaves that existed under the Ottoman millet system. While no American government official will publicly admit it, Iraq today has largely devolved into three mini-states, divided along those sectarian and ethnic lines—Kurdish, Shia and Sunni—that predated the Western imperial mapmakers.

Did the Western powers do any better elsewhere?

With the overthrow of Muamar Qaddafi, Libya, too, is rapidly becoming a nation in name only, separating into the three principal tribal regions that existed even before the Ottomans. With the brutal civil war in Syria now entering its fourth year, there is open talk of further disintegration there, of the ruling Alawite minority potentially carving out a mini-nation consisting of their ancestral strongholds along the Mediterranean coast.

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The Lockheed Skunk Works was pretty good at getting innovative products out the door. From Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (Ben Rich, 1996)…

some of our inventions: the P-80, America’s first jet fighter; the F-104 Starfighter, our first supersonic jet attack plane; the U-2 spy plane; the incredible SR-71 Blackbird, the world’s first three-times-the-speed-of-sound surveillance airplane; and the F-117A stealth tactical fighter that many Americans saw on CNN scoring precision bomb strikes over Baghdad during Operation Desert Storm.

How did they do it? The style of the top manager changed pretty dramatically over the years:

[Kelly Johnson] was the toughest boss west of the Mississippi, or east of it too, suffered fools for less than seven seconds, and accumulated as many detractors as admirers at the Pentagon and among Air Force commanders. But even those who would never forgive Johnson for his bullying stubbornness and hair-trigger temper were forced to salute his matchless integrity. On several occasions, Kelly actually gave back money to the government, either because we had brought in a project under budget or because he saw that what we were struggling to design or build was just not going to work.

With [Kelly Johnson’s] chili-pepper temperament, he was poison to any bureaucrat, a disaster to ass-coverers, excuse-makers, or fault-finders.

I began by loosening the leash on all my department heads. I told them what they already knew: I was not a genius like Kelly, who knew by experience and instinct how to solve the most complex technical problems. I said, “I have no intention of trying to make all the decisions around here the way that Kelly always did. From now on, you’ll have to make most of the tough calls on your own.”

So the productivity wasn’t due to a particular personal management style at the top. What about the physical set-up?

Designers lived with their designs through fabrication, assembly, and testing. Engineers couldn’t just throw their drawings at the shop people on a take-it-or-leave-it basis and walk away.

Our designers spent at least a third of their day right on the shop floor; at the same time, there were usually two or three shop workers up in the design room conferring on a particular problem. That was how we kept everybody involved and integrated on a project. My weights man talked to my structures man, and my structures man talked to my designer, and my designer conferred with my flight test guy, and they all sat two feet apart, conferring and kibitzing every step of the way.

The office space allocated to Kelly’s Skunk Works operation was a narrow hallway off the main production floor, crowded with drilling machines and presses, small parts assemblies, and the large assembly area which served as the production line. There were two floors of surprisingly primitive and overcrowded offices where about fifty designers and engineers were jammed together behind as many desks as a moderate-size room could unreasonably hold.

All that mattered to him was our proximity to the production floor. A stone’s throw was too far away; he wanted us only steps away from the shop workers, to make quick structural or parts changes or answer any of their questions.

Twenty designers were stashed away in choking work rooms up on the second floor. The windows were sealed shut, and in those days nearly everyone smoked.

Except for the smoking, not too different Facebook-style Open-pit Coding!

[The “engineers have to be close to the factory” principle seems to indicate a poor long-term prognosis for U.S. engineering employment (the E in STEAM!). If the engineers need to be close to the factory and the factory needs to be in Mexico or China then eventually the engineers will have to be Mexican and Chinese as well.]

Related:

• High CEO pay is one reason that American GDP growth rate is so low?
• Development of the First Stealth Fighter

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“Trump’s election stole my desire to look for a partner” is an interesting Washington Post article.

The author describes herself as having had “[e]nough of this dating unavailable men a half-decade younger than me”. Let’s assume that “dating” translates to “having sex.” The young cougar is now “ready to look for a partner” who is “an equal” (i.e., same age or older?). She has “two children and our needy dog.” She says she has “no idea what a supportive partner would even look like”.

She says that “on [her] own” she “can support [her] family.” This is fortunate because since she apparently has no “partner” of any kind, Perhaps her husband died and she and the kids were left without life insurance? But then who babysits the kids while she is having sex with these “half-decade younger” men?

I found the author, Stephanie Land, on Facebook. Here’s a May 8 posting:

It seems that she is a big Sheryl Sandberg fan. Also, though she has no “partner,” she is cashing child support checks on a regular basis. Perhaps due to an imperfect understanding of Montana family law, which does provide for potentially unlimited child support profits, Ms. Land says that she is struggling financially despite receiving these checks from a non-partner. Could it be that the father of these kids, when he is not writing checks to Ms. Land, is also caring for them every other weekend, thus facilitating the dates with younger men? Why doesn’t he then qualify as at least a financial partner in Ms. Land’s journey of single motherhood?

[Actually perhaps there are two different fathers for the two kids (generally the best financial strategy)? One of the cashflow-positive kids is 9 and one is 2. The author says “I’ve been on my own with my kids for most of the past decade”. Was she actually “on [her] own” when the 2-year-old was conceived?]

Now that Americans have elected someone other than Sheryl Sandberg to occupy the White House (Sheryl for 2020?), what’s left for this mom?

I’ve lost the desire to attempt the courtship phase. The future is uncertain. I am not the optimistic person I was on the morning of Nov. 8, wearing a T-shirt with “Nasty Woman” written inside a red heart. It makes me want to cry thinking of that. Of seeing my oldest in the shirt I bought her in Washington, D.C., that says “Future President.”

There is no room for dating in this place of grief. Dating means hope. I’ve lost that hope in seeing the words “President-elect Trump.”

On Facebook she says that she will be at a conference in Washington, D.C. on December 12 (“How Progressives Can Defend the Working Class in the Trump Era”). In case she does meet a higher-income “date” there among the “progressives”, her May 8th financial woes might dissipate (see Real World Divorce for the variation in potential child support profits among D.C., Maryland, and Virginia).

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