Can we talk?

How did we arrive at a place where fortunes of companies, through their public stock offerings, must rise and fall based upon the vagaries of a supplier of computer chips?

Where does Intel actually lead the way?

Intel adds basically two things to the global economy : the technical enabling of endless digital advertising to users of that same digital technology and, second, technology that provides users with distraction from reality. Is this useful enough to be a leading indicator?

Stand on the train platform on any given morning and witness the ‘wired’ crowd furiously tippy-tapping on their PDA’s, all for nought. They command jobs which are the modern instantiation of blue collar jobs doing little to move things along, and they are in denial about it. Service flunkies, they are, in junk work jobs which produce absolutely nothing.

There is no higher ideal or value being sought after by digital technology as most of us business owners have come to realize that all the bells and the whistles of technology are little more than glorified file cabinets from decades past and do nothing.

My engineers using a Pentel marker on an artist’s tablet accomplish more than a boatload of yahoos sliding mouses along showing me Catia renderings.

I can download an app onto my PDA device which allows me to track the current weight of the contestants on ‘The Biggest Loser’ and that pretty much describes where we have come with all this technology.

Andy Grove sought to free us from the boundaries of the Picket 10 inch slide rule. Somehow, it just did not work out that way.

An article appeared this morning’s San Francisco Chronicle online version about the Potrero Hill Power Plant being closed down, finally.

It seems that Mirant Energy has arrived at a agreement with the local government to shutter the Potrero Hill power plant and wheel electricity in from other parts of the grid due, in part, to the plant’s inability to reduce NOX emissions from it’s natural gas combustion.

So how does coal find itself appearing in a natural gas plant story?

Easy. The article is crafted in such a way that the casual reader- and, there are plenty of them out there- would believe the Potrero Hill plant to be an ash-belching, sky-yellowing coal-fired behemoth.

Nowhere in the article is the term ‘natural gas’ used to describe the primary fuel for this 370MW plant. Instead, the authors found comfort in describing the plant as ‘fossil-fired’, not an untrue statement, but certainly a disingenuous statement, thus avoiding having the public wonder aloud how anything with the word ‘natural’ attached could be all bad.

It did not stop there, however.

If the reader was unsure whether fossil-fired meant coal, the disingenuous sleight of hand was driven to the end zone by painting into the minds of the readers a mental picture of ‘coal tar’ oozing into to the water from this ‘fossil-fired’ plant- coal tars being a loose, non-technical term for heavy petroleum residuum which could have come from anywhere given the industrial history of that area.

Good folk around the Bay area are probably sipping coffee this morning and chiming in their support of being rid of another environmentally damaging profit center of Big Coal.

In truth, the good folk of the Bay area are simply passing the buck to distant communities as a means of slurping down electricity without the attendant environmental hangover.

The writers of the article chose to invoke the mythical monster of coal to advance an agenda: one of pie-in-the-sky energy sources which are not yet commercial, rather than report in a simple, lucid manner the loss of yet another clean burning source of power which we all need to survive.

Wherever there is a chicken sandwich there is, somewhere, a chicken head.

Stop lying about coal.

They seem to be doing okay thanks, in no small part, to the great advice, instruction and tools provided by the folks at Primex Garden Center in Glenside, PA.

The Boxly Project seeks to propagate new boxwoods from the few remaining specimens at Frederick W. Taylor’s home ‘Boxly’ in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia.

These boxes are over two hundred years old and are worthy of preservation for generations to come.

Well, around 1902 these boxwoods gained notoriety in the press when Taylor spent nearly $300,000 in today’s money to have them moved to a new location at his grand new home, Boxly.

In order to move them, Taylor became an expert in boxwood horticulture and, in the fashion of the true engineer, designed a complete series of purpose built equipment to insure that not one single root would be disturbed in the move.

At one time, Taylor’s boxwoods were probably the most famous boxwoods in existence. Many people could be seen stepping down from the burgundy and gold cars of the Pennsylvania Railroad trains at Highland Park station, walking across Gravers Lane to stand under parasols and Homburgs pointing their silver capped walking sticks toward the plantings in admiration- even if only from afar.

All the care a savant engineer like Taylor could apply to the boxwood discipline could not save these fine old specimens from the toll that would be taken by time and benign neglect on the part of the later owners of Boxly.

At present, fewer than one percent of the original plant material remains viable.

What could a good Philadelphian do about this?

Well, one might just tiptoe away quickly in the shadows of a full moon, a few cuttings in hand, heading for the nearest warm greenhouse. Or, one might choose to make friends with other like-minded Taylorites who could help identify the best specimens for professional propagation- all with the blessings of the current owners of Boxly.

As much fun as playing James Bond might be, I chose the latter, of course.

As we speak, a gaggle Taylor’s little baby boxes are standing up shiny-leaved in their new homes; soaking in Root-tone through a special concoction of potting material designed specifically for this purpose. Just as Fred Taylor might have done.

If the little boxes prosper we hope that we will be allowed to re-plant some of them at Boxly again and distribute the balance for a final journey into the yards of other Taylorites, like the writer.

Perhaps when an enemy marches ashore along the California coast we can just line up- in an egalitarian way, of course- and throw our cellphones and iPods at them.

Or, tweet bad things about them.

“Table for three, please,” we say to the also smiling young lady at the greeter’s lectern. She looks down and slowly scans the plexiglas-covered dining room schematic for a few seconds then looks up at me and says, “It will be about fifteen minutes.”

Empty restaurant. Fifteen minute wait?

We are instructed to seat ourselves in the bench-lined alcove to wait until our table is ready. Soon, three of the wait staff arrive at the lectern to trade jokes; adjust hairstyles and, of course, check cellphones for text messages. Obviously, there was little to do.

No one else enters the restaurant after us and after five minutes of small talk in the alcove it became clear that those empty tables were not being held for a bus load of Canadian retirees soon to storm the gates of this restaurant, waving canes overhead or stamping aluminum walkers onto the tile floor demanding beer for their horses and whisky for their bus driver.

I ease my way to the lectern and ask, “If the restaurant is empty, why are we waiting so long for a table?”

“It will be about a fifteen minutes wait, sir.”, she answered in that monotone of rote memorization.

Quick to gauge my increasing level of ire, she lowered her eyelids; looked left and right to make sure the coast was clear and leaned toward me whispering, “They taught us to tell everybody that comes in that it will be fifteen minutes. That way, no one is disappointed if it does take fifteen minutes to get a table.”

Just when I thought my head was going to explode from logic overload, the receptionist picks up the black grease pencil and circles table 4C. Looking up she winks at me and says, “It’s close enough to fifteen minutes now, I’m gonna give you a table. Now, if you will follow me.”

A few minutes after we were seated, an elderly couple sauntered in and approached the lectern asking for a table and were told, “It will be about fifteen minutes.”

Perhaps lowering expectations is easier than raising performance.

New York Times article by James Friedman.

Enjoy.

My most beloved significant other and I decided to create some boundaries between the secular, real world and that which we considered to be reality and spent a good deal of time watching waves and petroleum tankers landing in the Caribbean.

It was nice not having to wade through presidential politics on the way to those issues which are far more pressing to the American public.

During this hiatus, I sojourned to the intersection of Roberts and Wissahickon in Philadelphia and, with the permission of the wonderful folks at SEPTA, was able to stand upon the ground which once served as the floor for the famous Building 10 Machine Shop at Midvale Steel in the Nicetown/Tioga neighborhood of Philadelphia.

From beneath building 10′s clairstoried roof came so much that we now accept as industrial management, in general, and that we revere as the Toyota Lean Production System, in particular. All of this was left for us through the work of those incredible genius minds of Frederick Taylor, father of Scientific Management; Henry Gantt, now famous for those charts we see on MS Project and Joseph Sellers, who grew tired of the serendipitous screw dimensions offered by machine lathe operators and created our now ubiquitous machine screw standards.

These days, the neighborhood surrounding the Midvale works is mostly derelict with few, if any, of the local folks who make their way along those cracked and spalled sidewalks of Germantown, Wissahickon or Roberts Avenue relating to the importance of the work which took place at Midvale long before they were even born.

In those days, standing upon the rail platform at Wayne Junction after quitting time at Midvale must have been such a challenge to the locals with all the young men from the mill -bowlers set back in a jaunty fashion and stiff collars undone and pocketed into vests- chattering, all too loud for the comfort of those engaged in the publishing trade on Rittenhouse Square, about the temperatures required to heat, anneal or harden this or that metal for the making of this or that railroad wheel tyre, or bracing a cigar between the front teeth in order to pencil in a new calculation for a process onto a celluloid cuff. Those less engaged with the arcana of this technology moved their afternoon paper forehead high and muttered about a life moving much too fast.

The excitement of the work at Midvale far outweighed the tiring draw of the day which began by the soft, amber glow of an oil lamp in Germantown and had ended in the intense radiance of a white hot billet of steel being set upon Mr. Taylor’s steam hammer in Nicetown.

Japanese industrialists in the nineteen thirties once begged Robert Taylor for anything- any scrap of paper, or even any worn out pencil stub- which had been used by Robert’s father, Frederick, during his life.

While standing on the paved over foundations of Midvale Machine Shop 10, I think that I know what they were seeking.

Just ask them if they can do anything real like this?

Nobody from that lanyard-enobled world of jargon tossers would last a day in the real world of iron and steel. Not one.

And, yes, that is a man standing in the lower right hand corner of the photo which was taken at Midvale Steel, in Philadelphia, PA, in 1875.

As we approach the precipice of economic failure in this country, and abroad, we should probably consider returning to the basic, fundamental concept of adding value to real commodities and technologies rather than chasing about after the vaporous contrail left behind by IT systems which do little more than was available through physical systems, heretofore known as file folders.

How can we travel to pray at the local Shrine of Shanghai Stuff after the repo guys with tattoos on their foreheads finally located our leased Cayenne parked at the mall in King of Prussia and drug it away with the tailpipe sparking across the pavement?

How can we kneel and receive communion at the altar of injection molded plenty while this week’s owner of our sub-prime mortgage is decorating our porch with angry looking certified letters written on hot pink paper?

How can we even call loved ones to wish them a gracious holiday when every phone call to our house begins with a scratchy recording instructing us to ‘stay on the line for an important message’?

Our first move in this most festive season will be to go to the basement- once they turn the electricity back on- and look for anything that has a high ‘re-gifting’ coefficient.

Happy Holidays, and remember to only call us on the cell number.