Paradise ponders: happy dogs, musical memories, declining savings, and dark nights edition...

Paradise ponders: happy dogs, musical memories, declining savings, and dark nights edition...  It's so easy to motivate dogs to do anything at all – just figure out a way to let them associate the behavior you want with getting a treat, and they'll do it.  Anything.  If you just give them a treat for no reason, their joy is nearly boundless.  Often, upon noticing this, I reflect on how much more difficult it was to motivate people to do what I needed them to do at any business I owned or managed.  There is no “treat” that works for everybody, though often one could figure out a treat that worked for an individual.  Even then, though, that treat didn't work all the time – and something else might come along that completely negated the effect of a promised treat.

For example, I recall an engineer who worked for me, who (I discovered) really badly wanted to take a couple of months off for an around-the-world trip with his wife.  I promised him that in exchange for solving a particularly tedious problem we were having with one of our products, a problem he was particularly well suited for.  This worked for about four months; he plunged into the work with enthusiasm and was making great progress – until he got offended at a completely unrelated decision we'd made about another part of the product.  In the space of a day or two he went from an energized, nothing-will-stop-me attitude to that of a defeated soldier.  He gave up.  The work didn't get done by him, and he didn't get his reward.

That sort of thing never happens with dogs.  They're so much simpler!  That tasty biscuit works every single time.  Oh, I'd have given a lot for an engineering equivalent of a Milk-Bone!

As I write this, I'm listening to Tommy!, by The Who.  It was released in 1969, and for whatever reason is one of the few dozen pieces of music from my youth that I remember most fondly.  I listened to that album many, many times in my electronics “shack” (a converted chicken coop).  I played it on an ancient Motorola stereo with a tube amplifier and 14" electrodynamic speakers, one that I picked up as not-worth-repairing junk from a TV repair shop.  I still remember the experience of troubleshooting it, as it was a significant learning experience for me.  I had no schematic (or any other documentation) for it, so the first thing I had to do was to reverse-engineer a schematic.  I ended up with about 10 sheets of paper with a pencil schematic.  Then I had to figure out how it all worked, and man, that was hard!  There was so much in that design that I'd never run into before.  Finally, once I understood (or thought I did!) how it was supposed to work, then I went to work troubleshooting it.  I didn't have an oscilloscope, so I came up with a “poor man's” approach.  I started with a little signal injector – a simple oscillator that sent a (roughly) 1KHz tone into the input from the turntable cartridge.  Then I built a little amplifier and a capacitively-coupled probe that let me touch points within the Motorola's amplifier to see if there was a signal there.  I worked my way through several stages of pre-amp to the first stage of the power amplifier, and there I found the problem: a shorted capacitor.  So simple!  I replaced that capacitor and voila! – I had a working stereo.  Every time I hear Tommy! it takes me back to that experience...

An email conversation with a (much younger) friend led me to do a little research this morning, and I found the chart at right (source).  It confirms something I suspected from my own  experience: people these days are saving (for all reasons, including retirement and buffer) at a much lower rate (~3% of disposable income today, versus ~12% in the '60s) than they did when I first entered the workforce (in the late '60s).  I don't know the reasons for this, but clearly some of it is a changing culture, part of the more general trend of people not expecting to have to handle the consequences of their decisions.  Anecdotally young people today seem much more likely to expect government intervention to support them in retirement.  When I've pressed people for details about this belief, I haven't run into anyone who has specific notions.  Everyone seems to dismiss Social Security as adequate for retirement, and many have a vague notion that the government will “do something” to provide for them in their retirement.  I saw figures recently (can't find them now, though) that less than 20% of people aged 50 had any means or even a plan for supporting themselves in retirement.  They had vague notions, like cashing in the equity on their house, but nothing more.

It seems rather obvious that a lower savings rate, combined with increased longevity (and therefore more years in retirement), leads to a bad problem for our society in general.  I don't understand why so few people seem to be concerned about this.  In that respect it reminds me of the under-funded pension problem hanging over so many cities, counties, and states.  Another very obvious problem, with relatively little general concern.  I'm very concerned about both, because I strongly suspect that in order to cover these deficits, the government will be trying to come after anyone who has assets in retirement.  Like us, if we live long enough...

This morning I walked from our house to our barn at around 6 am, and the skies were particularly dark.  Orion was high in the southwest, the Pleiades in the west.  As I was staring up at them, a big meteor, orange fireball, plunged straight down from between them.  I could even make out some smoke trail, so it must have reached a fairly low altitude.  The fireball was extinguished just before it would have disappeared behind the Wellsville Mountains from my perspective.  Beautiful!

Today is bookkeeping day for me.  I've got to catch up from my neglect over the past 10 days or so...