Why double monk straps are ace

Double monks have made a resurgence in the past half a decade, and considering I am just about to embark on yet another trip and am mainly waiting for the boarding and need to kill time, I decided to list some reasons:

• Very simple in security -- don't buckle the upper strap and you can kick them on and off like loafers and just glide through security
• No need to swap laces all the time. Conversely, no need to fear about having a lace give out at just the wrong point of time
• They strike the perfect balance between casual and formal; they're definitely not sneakers, but depending on the material can pass off with even a suit under certain circumstances. As a corollary, in a pinch you don't need to carry so many shoes with you on a trip
• They have been interesting, as in they have only recently been breaking into the mainstream, so they easily add a little interesting detail

Exploratory behavior

Part of current day problems that I believe I observe both in my professional life in the industry, as well as from the sidelines of looking at the political and social discourse happening in Finland, may stem from a similar source. My pet peeve for a long time has been the overt theoretization of problems, in practice characterized by the old wisdom that boxing is not a purely theoretical exercise. In boxing, one also needs to be prepared to put theory in practice and apply pragmatism and evolve one's thinking as the empirical evidence starts pouring in.

What this means in the context of companies is that especially in turbulent situations where power has become institutionalized into structure and process, a lot of energy and time seems to often be wasted on contemplating things, planning, and strategizing. All of these are good, but at the end of the day one must be prepared to take a step forward, test out the thinking, and adapt as required. However, in very turbulent environments the cycles may get so short that in practice no practical steps are ever taken and the cycles consist of only theoretically pondering over and over again. It sounds like a caricature, but seems to be rather prevalent.

I fear that a similar dynamic may have also found its way to the political landscape of present day Finland, perhaps elsewhere as well. The previous government was a case study of a very broad-based and heterogenous bunch, incapable of getting very many initiatives from the drawing table into execution. This has been clearly called out by very many observers, and the newly elected government has taken clear steps to rectify the rampant indecisiveness of the previous one. Interestingly enough, however, the discussion has again immediately found its way into a mode where all views are heavily polarized and argued from ideological positions without a hint of real, tangible empirical evidence. And more worryingly it seems like not too many are even interested in honest testing of ideas and would much rather sling mud and have rhetorical arguments rather than attempt to solve problems.

In my very limited experience of how the world seems to work, I have tended to take the stance that is roughly in line with empiricism, where possible. This may stem from the mindset of a mere engineer, but I find that at the end of the day I value getting things done more than being right or wrong. Unfortunately it often seems people would rather not do anything than risk being wrong, or even worse, look silly. Hence, I suppose, it is a lot safer to sling rhetorical arguments back and forth without worrying about stepping into the empirical world to test out and adapt accordingly.

The current mess

What are the issues with the current day Finland? Attempting to boil it down to the essentials, a layman could note the following:

• Our economy is not really doing too hot and a big part of this is coming from the difficulties in our export industries. Probably the major contributing factors to this are, in no specific order:
1. The downfall of telecommunications and the pulp/paper industry
2. The EU/Russia situation and the impact on Finnish companies doing business in/with Russia
3. Lack of competitiveness of the Finnish companies compared to competitors
4. ... and probably a long tail of other things...
• Finland is a relatively small country, so managing with only the internal markets isn't probably feasible. This further emphasizes the importance of solving problems in the export sector.
• The aggregate of most of these issues can be in a stagnating, or even decreasing GDP.

So, this in essence means that for some reason or another, our businesses aren't doing too hot. Sure, the profits have been surprisingly decent in many parts of the world over the duration of the financial crisis, but these are probably hardly relevant indicators as they probably just demonstrate that companies are aggressively reducing costs to try to stay afloat, and actually doing a very good job of that, from the perspective of the companies. What this leads to, however, is probably the following:

• A significant cost of companies stems very likely from the cost of labor. Hence, in reducing costs, companies will often shed a lot of employees. This leads to increased unemployment.
• Increased unemployment has probably a couple of major immediate impacts on the economy: immediate loss in taxable income (shrinks the money available to the government to take care of entitlements, etc.), relatively immediate change in stance towards consumption (the unemployed individuals probably will stop consuming, which impacts companies in lower sales and the government in lower value add tax), and immediate increased costs in the form of unemployment benefits and costs associated in handling the related bureaucracy, as well as the activities aimed towards attempting to get the individual employed again. Over a longer period of time it probably increases e.g. healthcare costs, and so on.

So from the view of the government, it's very likely that entitlements go up while income goes down. This is what is commonly probably called a non-sustainable situation, especially if it extends for longer periods of time, since now the situation is that overall GDP stagnates, absolute amount of tax euros goes down (consumption and income taxation), entitlements go up, etc. And there is probably an added issue of a perception of increased inequality, which leads to unhappiness in the population (i.e. "the amount of people suffering is increasing, some people are doing well off, why isn't the system changing to support the people who suffer, shouldn't we increase taxes on the ones who still do well, etc.").

What should, then, be done about this?

• If it is expected that the less than ideal situation of the economy is a temporary blip and unrelated to structural issues, then probably the situation will eventually sort itself out, fingers crossed, and for the time being the government can bridge the gap by just bearing the brunt of the expenses via debt, and then managing the debt when the situation improves.
• However, if the economy suffers for 1) an extended period of time due to reasons beyond your control and/or 2) you have structural issues impacting, then probably at some point bridging the gap via debt will explode your debt (and if GDP stagnates or decreases, you start breaching politically agreed limits in e.g. the EU), your interest rates go up ("hey, these guys may not make it, I want more return if I give them money"), and as a corollary your absolute interest amount significantly goes up, and this will just cause the whole system to implode.
• Traditionally this could be fought against by devaluing your currency, which causes two beneficial things: your companies should receive a boost from a weak currency (it becomes cheaper for other countries to buy from you) and debt denominated in your currency will essentially be wiped.
• If you can't devalue your currency, then you might always just default on your debt. This probably means that your interest rates significantly increase, so most likely in the short term your access to money from the markets will be relatively heavily impacted, i.e. better get ready to bear the hangover from the withdrawal effects from being cut off of debt. This may also cause a fair bit of bad feelings in the international landscape.
• You could always invite the Chicago boys, but then you probably will defer all decisions to them and for better or for worse no longer need to too much worry about doing any thinking yourself. Just implement whatever is prescribed to you, and probably your citizens won't really like too much.

So if we assume that the problem is of the latter kind, i.e. won't go away by closing your eyes. What then?

1. Fix the economy. In this case export industries need to start pulling again.
2. Manage government spending

Looking at the economy, there are a couple of things:

• Devaluing the currency would be nice. Unfortunately thanks to being bound to the Euro, that can't be done. So scratch that.
• "Innovate" your way out of the mess. Invent new technologies, products, push the boundaries, and conquer the world with your brilliance. Probably more difficult than it sounds. In practice it probably means encouraging a lot more failure to happen, since the search of a new "innovation" goes heavily hand-in-hand with failing. So encourage the formation of new companies (reduce bureaucracy, simplify rules, taxation, hiring/firing, and make sure that in failure the entrepreneur is not ostracized too badly).
• Improve efficiency in operations so your costs in companies go down. Won't probably yield immediate results (you need to invest to improve efficiency, and you risk being bankrupt by the time your investments yield results in the company). Additionally increasing efficiency may often put people out of work ("I'll replace you with a very small bit of software").
• You could try to make sure that the costs don't go up, i.e. keep wage increases to the minimum, which would theoretically improve the competitiveness of your company when compared to companies in countries where the wage costs do increase. Cut salaries or freeze increases. Note: increasing taxes is not a valid solution here, since you want to treat the competitiveness of the companies, and while increased taxes give the government more income, it doesn't help the companies and their costs.
• You could try to decrease the inertia impacting your companies. Big words, but in practice it would mean making sure that companies have more freedom to move. Reduce or optimize mandatory bureaucracy so the companies can spend less time filling forms and more time doing value adding work. Make it easier for companies to hire and fire employees (this allows companies to take more risk when they know that if things go bad, they can always adjust, and as a corollary it should mean that more people might get employment).
• ... and so on...

The second problem is the one that obviously upsets people even more:

• By simplifying heavily, the public sector expenses could probably be grouped into: 1) entitlements (giving out benefits, etc.), 2) providing services (maybe could be rolled into entitlements?), and 3) the overhead required the coordinate and manage the previous two.
• Starting from the last, it's not a big surprise that public sector officials are probably not the most efficient bunch. There are examples where the Finnish government has been able to improve efficiency (surprisingly the tax officials have managed to streamline and automate their processes). The immediate negative thing is that this will probably make some public sector employees redundant, but over a longer term it's probably more worthwhile to try to encourage movement towards private sector jobs anyway. This area bleeds into the first two categories, so probably worth to tackle them still separately.
• The levers to pull when managing service costs include: breadth of service recipients, service quality, and efficiency at which services can be provided. Short of going towards a total overhaul, probably beneficiaries will observe a change in the service being provided and this will not be fun.
• Dipping into entitlements is not fun either, but similar dynamics are present there: adjust the entitlement amounts, narrow the group of beneficiaries, reduce the overhead (e.g. simplify the structure of the entitlements), or then just axe entitlements.

Overall I think the current government is doing a reasonable job of attempting to address the above situation. This has of course, rather predictably, caused an uproar in the opposition. Of course navigating the mess described above is not a simple thing, so the risks are quite high and chance of failure is equally high. I'm personally, however, withholding judgement for now and waiting to see what will in fact happen. But in the meanwhile I think it would be interesting to think a bit about some of the comments and objections being flung around:

•  "The poor are being impacted more than the well off in cutting the public sector": Of course; by definition the poor are on the receiving end of entitlements and services from the government more often than the well off. There's not as much to cut from the well off, and even if you cut generally across the board, probably the poor will be more impacted, on average. I'm not saying whether this is right or wrong, this just seems to be the dynamic of how governments work.
• "Because the poor are impacted, the rich should be impacted as well, e.g. by increasing their taxes if we can't cut from them": The social justice argument probably is more related to just venting understandable frustration. Increasing the income taxes does increase, temporarily, the income that the government gets. However, increasing taxes adversely affects the competitiveness of companies. Pay cuts and freezes are better at decreasing the costs of companies, so pay cuts of more well off would be better than increasing their taxation, from a company competitiveness standpoint. Also, progressive taxation means that the more earning individuals are already bearing more of the costs.
• "Well, then lets force the companies to cut the compensation of the better off people": A worthy objective, but probably the only way of doing this is via voluntary cuts. What would the alternative be? Companies are privately held by their owners and short of the owners cutting executive compensation, there's probably very little that the government can do but plead this case. The discussion about private ownership and similar is a different discussion, and overhauling that system is of course possible, but probably causes so much hassle that in the short term it's not feasible. Interestingly enough the pay cuts of the well off will probably adversely impact taxes, since for every Euro cut, the government would lose around 50 cents.
• "The inequality will increase as a result of these measures": It very likely will, at least in the short term, and I imagine there's really no way around this, either. But, looking at the inequality figures is also something that is a bit misleading for me: if the assumption of a smaller Gini coefficient is considered to be more preferred than a high one, then by definition a small coefficient can be obtained by just destroying the system. However, the system would probably not work very well after that.
• "The capital gains taxation needs to be increased and/or made even more progressive": Part of the problem with Finland is that Finns tend to put their wealth to bricks and mortar in the form of houses. Ownership of companies is rather small in Finland, and from the perspective of a layman, if the middle-classes don't start accumulating wealth and owning companies, then we risk foreign investors taking over our companies, in which case the profits will bleed outside of Finland. Increasing taxes on capital gains will probably decrease the incentive of individuals to invest in these types of assets. Also, increasing capital gains does not address the situation that a bulk of invested capital resides in funds and other instruments which are exempt from capital gains taxation until they pay funds out, so effectively increasing capital gains taxation will probably have a lower impact than expected (it will hit low net worth individuals who cannot incorporate their investments into funds). Finally, increasing taxation will probably drive capital abroad, and even for individuals the breakeven point will become lower for offshoring their investments (e.g. into companies which allow incorporation of investment portfolios more easily, or which may have lower corporate taxation). Capital is more fluid than buildings or people, so flight of capital is probably a realistic risk.
• "Education is being cut, which will impact the country in the future and is very shortsighted": Probably very true, but again I'm withholding my judgement until I see what exactly is being proposed. Knowing quite many researchers and having heard of the amount of rigidity and bureaucracy associated with the university landscape, I'm very biased to believe that things could be done more efficiently. As for potentially cutting student allowances, my understanding is that in practice this would just drive the students to either work more (which in case of e.g. engineers is often considered a good thing, since it gets a foot in between the door of the industry and turbocharging learning by allowing students to apply learnings to practice even during studies) or fund their studies with increased debt (for non-Finns, Finland has free education and with the student allowances and later tax breaks on student loans, it's very much possible to achieve Masters' level education with little to none costs; and for Finns, further education should be considered as an investment into the future, so comparing students and government-backed loans plus allowances to unemployed individuals doesn't really work). Furthermore, and this is a shortcoming on my part for not knowing the literature, I have an intuitive feeling that there are probably diminishing rates of return to education, i.e. it's important to have everyone go through primary schools, but the further we go, the less benefit we gain from educating everyone. In my mind it's completely fine to try to shift the default university degrees to Bachelor degrees, rather than automatically having everyone study Masters degrees. Those who wish to pursue higher degrees can naturally do that, but if we have to save somewhere, shifting costs from higher education to guarantee the breadth and quality of primary education is, based on my intuition, more prudent. Yes, I am of course slightly worried about what will come of this, but I think it's only intellectually honest to not have taboos.
• "Economics tells us that instead of austerity we should be using government debt to jumpstart our economy": Sure, Keynesian theory would probably imply this. My question is that where should these investments be directed to? Historically governments have had a notoriously bad track record of picking winners in e.g. technologies. If there's cheap debt available, of course it might be prudent to fix infrastructure. However, if the issue is with competitiveness in export markets, pumping companies up with more debt may not solve the underlying issues creating the competitiveness. If the alternatives are between the government actively driving an agenda and speculating using debt to finance companies or using similar amount of money to reduce boundaries to entrepreneurship, I think the latter is probably more sustainable. But ultimately I think it's a bit premature to say that economics ultimately says one thing or another, since everything is dependent on the actual problems and whether they have been appropriately diagnosed and understood. Curing the slightly wrongly diagnosed illness may not be too good either.

There are probably many other viewpoints to all of this, but I just wanted to try to clarify my thinking. And as such, I am not entirely ready yet to proclaim the Armageddon just yet. Sure, the upcoming years will be painful in Finland, but after the last government's inability to get anything done due to internal bickering, the thing I fear more than our current direction is having another round of no direction or momentum at all. Instead of saying that nothing can work, we should probably be trying different things and being pragmatic: if after trying something doesn't appear to be working, let's then eject it and replace it with something else. Sitting and theorizing doesn't create movement and without movement the situation won't improve.

Finally it should be said that I'm not an economist, so this is just layman's logic. At the same time I outscoped the "softer" aspects from the analysis. Sure, the picture can be changed by applying different schemes of values, but my logic is roughly that without solving the hard problems, the softer problems don't really matter.

Some observation's about Rainaldi's Sapiens

I love ideas, hence I also love books. Living in an apartment in the city, unfortunately, poses some limitations based on the square meter pricing of housing, so this makes books a valuable proposition. Or alternatively it makes the priority of packing books as efficiently as possible a higher priority. Another criteria stemming from the initial observation is that I do not like to wrap books into shelves that hide the books. Put these two things together and I have had a problem of finding good shelves for a while.

Some years ago I ran into a rather elegant spine bookshelf by Bruno Rainaldi, called the Ptolomeo. The shelf has multiple variations with the X4 with the lie-flat configuration affording an incredible amount of storage efficiency, but alas, it was not one to easily fit into my apartment, and at that moment of time also the price seemed quite steep. Fortunately I rather quickly discovered that Rainaldi had created a slightly cheaper alternative for Gruppo Sintesi called the Sapiens bookshelf, and I immediately jumped on board and ordered the tallest, nearly two meter tall variant of it. As of today I have two of them and a third one as a smaller variant.

In general I am very satisfied with the Sapiens shelves, although they seem to split opinions a bit. But what is not to like about a stack of books? There were, however, some observations that I had not immediately thought of when I ordered the shelves. Firstly, the shelves stand alone, which is nice, but creates an interesting situation where the spine stands rather far away from the wall. This is fine, but only if you do not view the shelf from the sides. In practice this ended up causing some head scratching and compromises in my current apartment, and over a longer period of time in my next apartments I will from the get-go just probably end up getting the wall-mountable Ptolomeo shelves, since it will solve the problem and also make the shelf that much more compact.

A second observation was a corollary to the first one: a single Sapiens shelf looks good in a corner or comparable location where it is not as apparently obvious how far away it stands from the wall (i.e. no direct views from the sides), but a single shelf against a larger wall is a bit lost. Fortunately this is relatively easily overcome by multiple shelves side by side. I think this is due to the fact that a lot of the "marketing" or interior decoration pictures of the shelf are of spaces that are not really too compact and hence can dedicate lots of air and space to bring the focus to the single shelf. In practice, especially in smaller apartments, this type of situation rarely happens and hence there is force in numbers.

Aside from these caveats, I still very much like the product and at least for me the concept of spine bookshelves was finally an answer to a long standing problem. Brilliant design based on a simple insight. And the spines of the books are for once in the right orientation as well.

Bad product design

I like design and have a huge respect for people involved with product design. At the same time I admit that I am a very novice person in this specific area, hence amplifying my respect for good design. But as a consumer, I am also quite convinced that if I identify something that I believe is bad design, then it must be seriously bad design. Above are the instructions for changing a lamp; this design is utter rubbish.

Just to labor the point a bit more, first of all you can't tighten the lamp with your fingers, as there is too little space. Secondly, while you can remove the glass lamp shade, it does not help much as once you tighten the lamp, you can no longer screw the shade back into place. Hence an elaborate scheme involving suction cups to twist the lamp into place. The person who as an afterthought came up with the idea involving suctions cups should be shot twice, just for good measure. At the point of product development when you have a nearly finished product and you have that "oh shit" moment when you figure that you have designed yourself into the corner, you should either go back to the drawing board and change the design to make it functional or then just abandon it and go to work on cutting grass or comparable. Under no circumstance should you have an "a-ha" moment involving elaborate hacks like this.

Decentralization

I've been for the last 10 months rather tightly tied down to a relatively heavy transition program; how do you sell a substantial portion of a company away and make sure that what is left behind continues to function from a technical standpoint ("did you remember to find all your data", "how do you develop new environments from scratch at a rapid pace", etc.). The exercise has been quite rewarding in very many ways, and I think reflecting and post-processing the experiences will continue for the next couple of years.

Some things that have, however, immediately come to mind is the split between centralized and decentralized ways of working. Again, it reverts back to an evolutionary argument: if your organizational design is very centralized, it may provide faster execution and clearer structure. Emphasis on the word "may", as this is not always the case. This all assumes that the core has a good sense of what needs to be done and has the capability to carry out whatever work needs to be done, or alternatively has an efficient way of delegating work down. In the latter case, especially, the clarity in thinking and knowledge about how things should be gets emphasized even more. It's be no means a trivial challenge, and often what is asked are near omniscience from the key people. For good or bad, I think our program was very centralized.

Another way of going about it is obviously to decentralized. If the culture is already heavily emphasizing distribution of authority into self-contained, autonomous entities, this will probably be a walk in the park. Every entity clearly carries responsibility for sorting out how they survive these types of transitions. The amount of chaos, especially when observed from the outside and above, can be quite high, which easily explains why managers often appear to hate this kind of setup as this not only makes them nervous about their inability to control the larger context. A leap of faith, if you will.

Interestingly enough, at the end of a transition you are also faced with the question of cultures, and which way you want to start cultivating your culture. For us, this discussion resembled a bit of a farce; at first the general consensus was that a smaller, leaner, and more decentralized way would be the thing to go for. The problem with this is of course that everyone needs to become more accountable, because ultimately you need to get your job done and if it's a free-for-all at worst, then you probably should already be solving all of your problems.

What we amusingly enough encountered very quickly was a rapid swing back where people and projects started asking about who is responsible for delivering this and that. Paralysis was close-by as the supporting infrastructure and processes had been designed to tackle only the skeleton requirements, but this had been lost in the communication, or more likely a lack of appreciation for the true degree of changes was plaguing many parts of the organization. Unfortunately at precisely this moment it seems that the discourse takes a drastic turn and people cling onto centralized models; there needs to be someone who will provide answers for very specialized topics. And paradoxically enough the empowerment of individuals and greater accountability goes out the window as learned helplessness takes hold again.

This might be a bit of a cynical portrayal, and it is likely very clear that I'm much more in the decentralization camp than the tightly centralized one. This also means that I'm very sad at the fact that we had a chance, a very good one at that, to try to embrace a more dynamic way of working and organizing ourselves, but when push came to shove and we were standing at the edge of the cliff, we took a step back and didn't have the courage to see things through. As a result, the road ahead will be again long and painful and I keep wondering whether we've ever learned anything or if we continue to make the same mistakes over and over again if only because they are comfortable mistakes to make since we've done them so many times already...

Boxing is not a purely intellectual exercise

For the past half a year I've been fairly deeply embedded in the bowels of a relatively large divestment operation of a multinational corporation. No points are given for guessing what it might be, but as part of the program I've been thinking a bit about my working life as well. At a very early stage I was thrown into what I would characterize as the cargo-cult school of strategy and spent quite a few years in positions that, if I'm honest, I didn't really understand and became highly sceptical and cynical of.

Fast-forwarding to the present, having ditched the strategy-land for at least a while, I've gone back to my roots in technology and been solving very tactical issues with visibility to the future measured at best in days. Quite a stark contrast to the horizons of over ten years, which made me disgruntled earlier. Running in the trenches and occasionally coming up to sit across the table from the generals, I've struggled to put into words my frustration. The best I've come up with so far has been the notion of comparing the working life to boxing; too often I have a feeling that senior management is treating boxing as an exercise in intellectual and abstract thinking. However, at the end of the day the objective in boxing is to knock the other guy out while avoiding giving the other guy opportunities to do that to you. It has an intellectual component, however relying purely on that will result in you going to sleep relatively quickly.

In practice what this means is that outside of all the theorizing, at the end of the day the strategizing and thinking must turn into tangible action. In technology industries typically we utilize, well, technical tools to achieve different results we deem worthy of pursuing. Technology is especially interesting as it is one of a handful of force-multipliers in the world. An example would be that if measured in distance per calorie used (i.e. how efficiently one is able to move), humans are not that great, ranking a bit above the average when compared to all animals. But a human with a bicycle, that's off the charts. So in many cases the ability to wield technology effectively allows one to greatly magnify force. In boxing the analogy would be to create a base of strength, agility, speed, and a handful of other attributes and magnify them by appropriate application of technique.

Often, it appears, getting "stuck" in matters of tactics and execution is not deemed too sexy or glamorous. In the trenches of divestment operations the reality is quite harsh and decisions and actions have to be done quickly. For individuals higher up in the corporate food chain, this leads to the second force-multiplier: organization. If appropriate experience in commanding technology greatly magnifies output by scaling vertically, the appropriate organization of resources will allow one to scale out horizontally. That is, by effectively commanding more units, one is able to again magnify force.

There are undoubtedly more force-multipliers than the two listed above, and the natural third one goes back to the initial topic of the post: strategy. When an effective commander is able to organize a technically competent group to achieve results more efficiently, the next force-multipleir can be argued to relate to having a deeper understanding of the mission at hand, the larger landscape, knowledge of other players, and so on. It could be argued that individually any of these might be characterized as superior ability in relation to technologies. But, and pardon the bullshit, putting all the pieces together might give superior insight on elegant approaches that might have been otherwise missed. Identifying pivot points and opportunities for leverage. At best this can result in again greatly magnifying force, and historical precedent is abundant in quantity. However, the pitfall here is that no amount of strategizing will make up for inability in the two previous areas.

To put the above in a different way, no amount of thinking about how to win a boxing match will get you any closer to victory if you have not done your share of conditioning, developing and honing your technique and creating a solid base from which to knock the other poor guy out. Only once you get over a certain threshold level can you actually reap competitive advantage from theorizing. Prior to that, it doesn't matter how big the force-multiplier is if you are multiplying zero. If you can't meet the table stakes, you don't even get a seat at the table. And that, annoyingly enough, is what many people do not seem to comprehend.

Culture

For a bit over a month now I've been trying to get my head and heart around the situation of a former mobile industry heavyweight finally exiting the business by selling "substantially all" of its operations related to its core business. Retrospection is fine and dandy and everyone has a theory and nobody has the data to back it up, but sufficient to say, I think it has to do with the decline in culture and general confusion which took hold of people. But, more interestingly I've been thinking about why I feel so bad about the future as well.

With my background in technology, I'm of course biased to view things from that angle. And technology has, for better and for worse, over the course of history allowed people to improve things by harnessing natural phenomenons and exploiting them to achieve different goals and solve different problems. Tool building at its core. The sad thing when looking around is to notice that these days people who have formal education in engineering have gone far from their roots and are no longer building useful things. Instead a type of cargo cult behavior has taken over and some have even forgot what it is like to do things with ones hands. That's also evident by looking at higher education statistics, where young people are more often than not avoiding "hard" subjects and the natural sciences.

But ok, what has this to do with the subject at hand? Well, for years I've been frustrated as the company I've seen fall has, to an extent, been plagued by confusion where people think that success comes from optimizing the bill of materials and squeezing your suppliers, from clever marketing tricks, or worse yet, from strategizing and other similar things, while in the end at the core is the product. Technology, which is packaged and produced in a way that it solves real problems, is elegant, and has a certain amount of artisan spirit forged into it. And with the product divisions sold away, what little culture in product creation was left is now finally sold away and what remains is an empty shell of people who shovel paper and Powerpoint in an illusion that they are doing something productive. But with the product culture finally extinguished, how can one of an engineering background be happy in such a brave new world?

Training strength

Over the past 14 and a half months I've been putting an increased emphasis on learning about strength training and trying to apply the things I've read to my training. Initially I started with the heureka moment that what I'd been doing was, to a great extent, just wasting time at the gym without any clue of what should be done and how stuff should be programmed. So, as appears to be the fairly common story online, I ran across Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength, and spent time learning the lifts, learning the program and learning the ideas behind building strength. At the same time I also started to increase the granularity of the data I was tracking from my exercises, and strength training is very nice as it allows you to follow with a relatively high granularity what your strength with respect to different exercises are and accumulating the data was relatively easy.

I recently also wrote some scripts to programmatically extract my training data from Fitocracy, which otherwise would have been a relatively tedious task (for those interested, the key words here are phantomjs and scraping the site). Having automated this, the next task is to start building up some dashboards for displaying the data to help give a more intuitive feeling for what has been going on. For now there is no neat interactive widget yet for that, but I did try out some rather rudimentary tests in Excel.

First off, the first diagram below represents the maximum weight used for an exercise at a given date in time and the 30 days prior to it. I should have filtered based on maximum weights for certain rep counts, but because there is a bit of flakiness and certain periods of not following the program exactly, I opted instead to use the maximum weight observed. This is a relatively good proxy as I don't progress to higher weights prior to being able to achieve five reps with the lower weight first. An additional thing to note is that the initial steep climb with the barbell squats isn't really as steep; having barely hit 120, I used a belt to get up to 130, so the first two peaks for the squats should in reality be lower. Asides from that all of the reps have been done raw with no belt or other weight lifting gear.

It should, I guess, be mentioned that adhering to the program turned out to be too much at times and hence the best I can say is that a followed the spirit of the program. :) To a certain degree, however, one can see the waves emerging as patterns in the training, which demonstrate the deloads at certain points and then the pursuit for newer records. The deadlifts illustrate this the best way.

I also ran across an interesting article on T-Nation, in which the author outlined some strength standards he had observed over the duration of his career. The standards had been structured as relative comparisons to a certain baseline. For instance, with a deadlift of X, his empirical observations would suggest that the person should be able to back squat 71.4% of the deadlift. So, taking the deadlift as a baseline and using that as a predictor for the other lifts and using that to scale the actual lifts, we're able to draw a picture of which lifts are relatively higher than they should and which lower.

Of course every individual is different, so strong conclusions can't really be drawn from these types of analyses. What they are, however, somewhat useful for are identifying if you have significant imbalances between lifts, which perhaps should be addressed to achieve a somewhat stable system. Imbalances tend to often be associated with decreased progress later on as well as potentially causing injuries or other problems.

What is apparent in my case is that the lifts where the main components stems from pushing, namely the press and the bench press, my long arms give me an inherent disadvantage, which is also apparent in that they are relatively speaking the weakest lifts at the moment out of the five lifts. That is mainly due to the recent advances made in deadlifting, which in turn mainly stem from some a-ha moments with my deadlifting technique. Also, the disproportionately strong squat as visible in the left part of the diagram wasn't in fact as strong, mainly because of the aforementioned use of the belt, which inflated the results a bit.

Going forward from this, I think that the current "fuckarounditis" of a program that I have at the moment, which is a very much bastardized Starting Strength routine has served its purpose of getting me acquainted with training with weights and the next thing is to move onto some other program. At the moment I have a feeling I'll be giving Bill Starr's intermediate 5x5 program a try for some cycles. But we'll see.

Ideas and execution...

This may be a bit of a beating-the-dead-horse thing, but one which again reared its ugly head today when I ran across my old boss, who had heard that I'd been hacking away at various products and services and forging my own interpretation of Quantified Self and whatnot. I'm one of the easiest people to get to engage in all forms of discussions on various different topics, and even more so when you hit some of the topics that I happen to be interested at the moment.

The problem with the brief discussion today was that it was not really a discussion. It was more of a "tell me what you are doing with these things", which itself wouldn't be too bad either as it's something that I actually like talking about. However, it is not a discussion if the other party does not contribute anything meaningful. In this case the main contribution was that "I have a great idea how to change this fitness/wellness field, but I won't tell it to you." Which sort of leads me to a second pet peeve of mine: ideas without execution are hallusinations (apologies for ripping that off, can't recall who said it)...

Over the years I've been involved in various things in the corporate world, the common thing I've observed is the completely misguided notion that it's the idea, or the strategy, or the whatever that is valuable and then when this intangible brainfart is reared, the job is done. Which sort of aptly explains why certain companies are in the situations that they are in. What I keep wondering is whether this is because of a fault in the thought process or because in fact it appears that not many people can or will bother to execute the idea. It's truly a pity, because the corporate world seems to kill the will to do something and in turn appears to incentivize people to not even try but to instead spend their time on more philosophical things, the merit of which is harder to assess without bringing them into the real world.

Genetic testing

Having casually followed the quantified self movement and admitting a general tendency common for engineers to be interested in measuring stuff, I decided to pull the trigger and order a laboratory tube for my saliva from 23andMe. Even despite the hight shipping and handling costs to Finland. Maybe more on that later, but one interesting thing arose already after talking about genetic testing and sequencing of DNA with various colleagues and friends: people, at least in my circle of acquaintances, seem to be very much against these types of things. Which is interesting, because on average the data set consists of relatively highly educated and seemingly intelligent people.

The most common argument, based on limited empirical evidence, appears to be that people do not want to know about potential genetic diseases. Fair enough, I suppose, but personally I don't think there can be too much harm in at least having a cursory overview of what the most common pitfalls may be. At least then I'll know which research areas to donate money to, if nothing else. But regardless, the probabilities are there whether or not I sequence a bit of DNA, and forewarned is forearmed. But I guess if a person is prone to anxiety, these things may cause elevated stress. Amusingly enough it seems that ingesting excess amounts of calories, avoiding any forms of exercise, etc., don't seem to cause stress. Who knows how to interpret all of this.

Anyway, I think there is a much more fundamental argument for giving some organic material for the researchers to sequence: for the first time in history we are getting to the point where genetic testing is becoming so cheap that theoretically everyone will soon have a chance for genetic testing. The possibilities that these could provide for scientific research are huge, and in a sense I perceive this to be one of the biggest drivers for why I should take part in these types of exercises: what I get out of these may be, at least for now, of limited significance, but contributing to what has a very high probability of being a significant breakthrough for humanity and what will very likely down the road improve life for all, I think I just have to do it.

Oh, and in 23andMe's case they offer nifty APIs against which to write code. Who could resist that.

Clutter

If last year was the year of cleaning up my life financially as a part of the brief pro-bono stint to the non profit world of NGOs, the theme of this year has undoubtedly bean expanding that exercise to the realm of physical possessions. The housing co-op I've been living in from 2004 has finally pulled its act together and managed to begin the renovation of all the pipes and whatnot in the apartments. For me this in practice means vacating the premises for a good three months at least and packing my entire apartment up for the duration of the renovations.

The opportunity afforded by this change has naturally been to make a radical cleanup of most things. This, for me, has basically consisted mainly of getting rid of a ton of stuff. My wardrobe has, more or less, been reduced to a half of what it was. Most of the older electronic gizmos, laptops, etc. are out, along with a bulk of whatever happened to be in drawers and closets. The more stuff I've thrown out or given away, the better all of this is starting to feel. The counterpoint that some older people have raised has been that they would've in retrospect wanted to preserve some artefacts from their earlier lives. Sure, a nostalgic memorabilia are nice and everything, but more often than not it just adds to all the clutter. At least now for me preserving certain digital artefacts is more than enough; hard drive space is cheap, square meters are not.

Overall I think that this exercise has also highlighted what is important and what is not. In practice I've kept my books, some of my clothes, basic stuff needed for cooking and eating, sports gear (boxing stuff, clothes, kettlebell, ...), laptop (and phone, tablet, ...), hygiene gear, and that's more or less it. Now the real challenge will be to make the appropriate routines to try to preserve this type of lean approach, similar to the way how I've been keeping my financial footprint relatively small after getting things sorted out earlier. We'll see how this exercise will go.

Driving licenses in Finland

Starting last month the process for obtaining a driving license in Finland was changed again. The previous process consisted of two phases with the initial phase containing a bulk of the education and teaching. The second phase of the license consisted of some extra lessons and had to be attended within two years of getting the first phase license. Starting this year the amount of phases has been raised to three and the practicalities of all this are still fairly vague to me.

The multiphase systems have been always motivated by the desire to decrease the probability of young drivers to get into accidents. Proponents argue that more lessons will get young drivers to be more responsible and drive more safely. Perhaps so, but the flip side of the coin is that, well, this costs many more coins. Helsingin Sanomat, a Finnish newspaper, ran a story today where they had found that costs for the end customer obtaining a driving license had gone up by as much as 1 000 euros with the entire driving license costing at most around 3 000 euros.

At the same time we can take a look at the statistics provided by Statistics Finland. The chart in question visualizes the deaths in road accidents from 1970 to 2011, with the black line being total deaths, green line being age group of 25-64 years, yellow 15-24 years, and red 0-14 years.

So, to be honest, at least the mortality statistics do not really paint a very grim picture. The two-phase system was introduced in Finland in 1989 and the three-phase system now in 2013. However, I would venture a guess that a bulk of the decline in accidents can in fact be attributed to the improvement of car technology as well as the fact that Finns are finally buying newer cars with better safety equipment. Regardless, the trend is quite clear.

What, then, is the financial impact? Helsingin Sanomat mentions that on average the total cost for a license has gone up by around 600 euros. Over the past five years the yearly licenses granted have been quite steady at around 70 000, so with this single change the driving license industry has increased its revenues by a rather nice 42 million euros. Not too shabby when the current discourse is on how youngsters in cities are less likely to drive licenses these days as public transport coverage combined with limited parking spaces, high fuel costs, and whatnot make car ownership and operation not too attractive in the urban environment.

Only time will tell how the accident statistics evolve, but one thing is certain: the government has managed to quite nicely prop up an industry by bringing in added bureaucracy and legislation. I do not have statistics at hand, but a gut feeling would be that if road safety is something we want to improve, things like road design and maintenance, quality of cars, even speed limits would bring significant improvements to it. Of course maintenance of a road network is costly, but quality of cars can easily be improved by decreasing taxation of newer cars and offset by shifting taxation to fuels and speed limits can be changed by changing the sign on the side of the road.

Household taxation

The question of how much is enough has been a recurring thing recently in the Finnish press with different parts of society chipping in their two cents worth via comment sections in prominent local papers. On one hand better off individuals have shown up with statements that over 100k per year is enough for anyone while members of six person households have voiced their concerns that aggregate post-tax disposable household income of 9-10k per month is barely something that they can live on. Of course one of the key parameters here is the overall cost structure of your life, which I did not really care to get into here. However, one thing that does merit some comments is how to carry out the taxation.

Both in the aforementioned comment sections as well as in the sphere of people I know, there has been a somewhat interesting trend in people wishing to change from taxing individuals to taxing households. Supposedly this would be farer as it is not entirely uncommon in some families for one partner to earn very well with the other carrying a less well compensated occupation, which would result in the overall tax load of the family unit to be lower. The argument is precisely that: the family functions as a unit, so why not tax it as one.

The obvious reason why not to tax the family as a single unit is obviously precisely that: very many of the good and functioning parts of the Nordic systems have spawned from accepting individuals as the primary component in the equation. Think of it this way: taxing the family as a single unit will drop the tax for the high earner, but will on an individual level increase the barrier to do more work for the low earner as they would be subject to the same higher tax rate. Would this matter? If we accept the assumption of using the family as the unit of analysis, perhaps not, but families do tend to break apart and actively designing a system which demotivates one person from working will be problematic if the family breaks apart.

Moving away from the individual level, household taxation would also introduce problematic things in the context of income equality. I am personally not entirely convinced that income equality in itself is a very crucial or key component in assessing the health of society, but many people do. If we hold income equality important, we also do not want to introduce mechanisms to grow inequality, which would undoubtedly happen if the above is assumed to hold true.

On a slightly unrelated thought, I was recently talking with a friend of mine, and he was saying that one reason given for the relatively well functioning Nordic system is related to the family unit being relatively small. Without the need of maintaining a large direct and indirect family system to ensure survival, the flexibility afforded by a small core family will bring benefits on the level of the entire economy where people are able to move more freely without having to consider safety nets and similar. Of course all of this is afforded by the ability of the state to provide the safety net in an economically efficient way. It is yet to see how economically efficient we will be in the long run, but this idea certainly sounds quite interesting.

More pendulums

While it's perhaps a bit of an undeveloped idea for me right now, one thing that just occurred to me recently was the pendulum between computing and communication in computers. Take the initial personal computers and they were standalone boxes for which the primary value stemmed from the ability to perform computing tasks quite handily. With the spread of internet and the web, the utility started transforming from compute-driven value to communication, which has recently pinnacled recently with the whole social media scene. But parallel to this, the networkedness of computers combined with the communication aspect we now have another interesting possibility to create utility from even more massive compute resources than back when computers were more isolated and standalone devices. And of course thanks to the pendulum having swung to the communication direction, we also have a ton of very interesting data to compute with our newly refound compute power.

This stream of thinking actually spun off from a separate question I was wondering, which revolved around whether or not there is perhaps a generational gap where numerical methods or analysis has, thanks to the advent of cheap computing, become a very viable tool for solving difficult problems but for some reason the slightly older people who I've been talking to, be it about my work with coevolution of technology and industry structures or other things, don't seem to intuitively see the power of numerical methods and simulations.

2012 exercise recap

Here are some statistics from 2012 in respect to exercise:

• Total exercise hours logged during 2012 amounted to roughly 301 hours, or roughly 49 minutes per day or 5 hours and 47 minutes per week.
• During the year I logged in 35 sick days. The granularity in respect to reasons is a bit lacking, but a gut feeling is that roughly half of those days were related to flu/cold and the rest were miscellaneous (e.g. small injuries). The sick days were relatively evenly spread out over the course of the year into 7 sick day stretches, averaging roughly 5 days per "sickness".
• The top three categories of sports were: 1) Savate (108h), 2) gym (98h), and 3) running (38h).
• Over the year I ran 384 km for an average pace of roughly 10.1 km/h and improved my half-marathon PR to 1h52min12s.
• During the summer I started to get into strength training and implemented Rippetoe's Starting Strength routine for beginners rather strictly for about two months, after which I made some adjustments to take account for some considerations from practicing Savate (e.g. a laxer emphasis on pushing up weight to allow for more recovery time, introduction of calf-work, etc.).
• Weight-wise my body mass increased by about 8.5kg from January to December due to conscious calorie intake increase and strength training.

Looking back on 2012, my only "official" target was to try to average 2 hours of exercise per week. This goal was achieved before midsummer. Overall I'm quite satisfied with how the year turned out in this respect and going into 2013, I'll continue along a roughly similar track, with the main new thing being that I'll try to cut fat during the Spring to drop my weight for the running season.

In terms of target setting, I don't think I'll define any strict targets for 2013. Time-wise the unofficial de facto target for 2012 turned into putting in 300+ hours by the end of the year. The temporal measurement is in my experience good if you are faced with a problem of not being able to motivate yourself to get to do any exercise. However, once you actually start doing stuff, the target becomes relatively irrelevant and needs to evolve into something else. Technically for 2013 I should be more focused on setting e.g. targets for running times, for weightlifting weights, etc., but as I'm not doing any of this too seriously, I'm afraid that defining hard goals like that would ultimately act as a demotivator. As such, I guess the goal then for 2013 would be to improve everything else but the overall time spent.

Parkinson's law and whatnot

So yeah, I've been lazy again at writing and since some people have thrown snide remarks about it, I guess this must be rectified. To get out of the hole, I decided to just briefly comment on my thinking regarding a recent blog post I read about how people overextend themselves financially and how that is a source of anxiety (related to Parkinson's law).

In general I think the guy hit the nail on the head very well; due to a variety of reasons, I guess, people tend to inflate their costs of living in tandem with increased income, sometimes even faster than their income rises. This type of pattern seems relatively universal, especially if you don't actively try to counteract it. If you don't think about it and have bad routines set out, of course you're going to expend more energy on what you're doing than is necessarily needed. Some energy, in this case financial resources, must be spent on combatting the second law of thermodynamics. You can do it intelligently or less intelligently. Doing things less intelligently often costs more than doing things intelligently.

One could of course argue that the top 1% has some type of moral obligation to do this or that, in this case to think about their spending and not overextend beyond their means. The original text suggests that this would have very direct implications on the wellbeing of the individuals in question and at least hints that the world might somehow be a better place. The first statement is undoubtedly true, but the second one is so much more complex that I would not take a strong stance either way. If the wealthiest people spent less, the only certain thing would be that the wealthiest people would be spending less. Of course one can extrapolate that it might cause unemployment to go up or the unfair distribution of resources to go down or get rid of all the wars. Who knows. I would imagine that it depends on how you scope the situation and what you are observing. As a whole the system is just so complex and interdependent that it's difficult to say what resultant effect will overpower other effects.

On a more practical level I got around to thinking about my situation. After doing a one year stint at a local non-profit NGO on what were pretty much pro bono terms I did manage to shrink my financial footprint rather significantly, mainly by accepting that with less disposable income I would have to ditch certain things and introduce new things into my life. Forge new routines which were less costly than the old ones. And so on. Despite having gone "back to the industry" since, I've actually noticed that the new routines I've forged have kept me subjectively thinking more satisfied than my old routines. Another relatively cool extra perk is related to precisely what was discussed in the original post cited above: the "space" between what I earn and what I spend widened quite a bit and I can be fairly relaxed about survival (although as a person living in the developed world and enjoying the benefits of public healthcare, free education, social security, and so on, I wouldn't really have to worry about that in any case). Ultimately, though, I think that what is happening here is that from an evolutionary and survivalist perspective I've increased my odds of survival by increasing my level of fitness to survive. I wouldn't go so far as to argue being antifragile in the Taleb-ian sense, but certainly more resilient.

However, if everyone was to do this type of shift and go back to bare minimums, what would the impact on me be? Difficult to say, but right now I think that for instance professionally I exist only because there is so much waste from people being uneconomical and inefficient in what they do and because one can relatively easily make a career out of doing more for less. If everyone across the board not only in their personal lives, but also in the professional careers, started applying more clever tactics in how to spend less effort in doing more, it is entirely possible that my comparative competitive advantage would shrink and result in a more of a Red Queen competition situation for me. On a holistic level the world would quite possibly be better off, but on a personal level it would undoubtedly force me to run faster. I suppose that might be fun in itself, but would again require adjustments to be made on a personal level to again increase fitness in the changing landscape.

Homeostasis and disrupting it

It is somewhat curious and slightly amusing how many different ideas and observations can be boiled down to only a handful of fundamental concepts. It may be selection bias, but in the past years I have time and again hit my head on evolution in various different areas. More recently I have been very much intrigued by physical training and conditioning of humans, vis-à-vis my own journey in Boxe Francaise, which has also led me to briefly touch upon thoughts in the strength training field.

It is not anything new as such, but training, especially in respect to strength and general fitness, seem to again link back to forcing the human body to adapt to changing levels of stress. More specifically building strength through building muscle, which is ultimately just disrupting the homeostasis of the body to provoke a reaction and adaptation, fostered with enough resources to enable the adaptation to occur. Despite the early easy linear gains which can be achieved, at some point triggering the adaptation becomes harder and demands more. If the homeostasis is not disrupted by challenging the body enough, no adaptation occurs and training becomes stuck. Intelligent variation then becomes the key to betting unstuck; altering the program to build for the certain key training sessions when personal bests are strived for, followed by enough lighter training to allow for adaptation without overtraining.

Again this appears to link very much back to some of the core ideas in evolution and population ecology, be it biological organisms or artificial structures such as industries. Homeostasis can be met in organizations as well, which I guess can be related to inertia, which stabilizes the organization's structure. Changing environment reduces the fitness of the organization and ultimately results in existential questions regarding the survival of the organization. In a way, this can be indeed seen as a Red Queen race, where adaptation is needed not only to progress, but to even keep in the current competitive position. Adaptation tends to be painful, and hence disrupting the homeostasis in the organization is something that is met with the previously mentioned inertia and unwillingness to change until it is almost too late to change anymore. At the point when the proverbial shit is about to hit the fan, the amount of adaptation needed is so significant that again the existence and the ability to survive the adaptation comes into question.

Motivation: Part Deux

So, an interesting bit about motivation occurred to me today, especially in the context of my thesis. So far I've been fairly unsuccessful at it, due to many reasons. Some key things that have come to mind about it can be summarized below:

• When you're just serving a cake, i.e. waiting around for something gruesome to end and hope of better things happening if you just sit tight and weather the shit, it's really difficult to get anything intelligent done. You just wait for things to end so you can progress again.
• When the shit does eventually end due to the fixed term (temporal sense) nature of it, things should improve. But if you're in limbo, the uncertainty is again a bit painful. You learn to live with it, and you might get some things done, but it starts digging at you fairly quickly again, because there's a small amount of hope that things will take a turn for the better.
• When finally you get put into a hole where there is no real chance for things to improve, you finally find yourself in a situation where merely sitting and waiting things out does no longer look attractive. It means that you finally find yourself in a situation where you have to start shovelling shit and get things done or the pain won't go away. That's the only alternative and the only hope.

With the third phase beginning and the cruel reality setting in, I guess we'll finally see whether things take a turn for the better. So far in respect to the thesis, I've been setting up a new environment with which to crunch the data, which should address the performance issues which were previously encountered. Additionally I've finally been able to sort out the mess with the corrupted data for 2007 and onwards, which previously caused a bit of demotivation as that would be the very interesting bit of data. But, let's see... I should have my priorities finally straight again, as counterintuitive as it might seem.

Commensurability

A great many things in life can and should be measured, as I believe I've previously written. Measuring different things is crucial to be able to track progress and speed and without metrics, we have to rely on gut instinct. In this respect a certain degree of formality is very welcome, because this relates to the problem of commensurability and comparing one point of data with another one.

Very often, however, it seems that people either on purpose or by accident devise and change metrics at whim. This makes longitudinal analyses of the data pointless; establishing trends becomes very difficult if you are encountered with a data set in which each point has been measured using different methods and perhaps even with a different logic behind. With heterogenous data sets transparency and formal descriptions of how the data has come about are needed if the data set is to be cleaned, and even then it might be tricky.

With this consideration, then, the obvious question is why are people so horribly bad at measurements and tracking different variables? A pessimistic view might be that this is done on purpose. Companies change their metrics on purpose to through stakeholders off by ensuring that a clear picture of trends cannot be established and if someone does attempt to clean the data, the analysis and results can still be questioned. Another reason could be that the people developing the metrics just need something to do to legitimize their existence in the organization, hence new metrics are devised every so often.

An equally worrying notion is that metrics are changed and tracking is executed in a very ad hoc fashion because the people responsible do not at the end of the day understand what they are doing and why. Sheer incompetence. Related to this, perhaps another annoying bit is that people tend to measure what is easy to measure, not what would be useful to measure. Proxy measurements are of course fine as long as you spend enough effort to establish that the logic by which you argue the proxy to be good is rigorous enough. This, sadly, is not the case too often either.

Overall, this is a topic which seems to pop up and cause immense headaches for me ever so often, and I believe the only solution will be to start whacking people with the Clue Stick every time I run across some offender in the future. Sheesh...