McCain’s Economic Advisor
(posted by Kevin Carson)
Economics, John McCain says, is “not his strong suit.” So it’s nice to know he’s being tutored on the subject by one of the best. His new economic adviser, Carly Fiorina, is the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
During her stint in that company, she was a classic textbook case of MBA Disease: stripping assets, gutting human capital, downsizing, piling work on the survivors–and getting a big, fat pay package for herself.
According to Sam Pizzigati at Alternet,
she followed standard, raze-and-reap CEO operating procedure chapter and verse. She merged. She purged. She walked off with a fortune.
Her approach at Hewlett-Packard was a considerable departure from what had been regarded until then as “the HP way.” In the late ’70s, HP had avoided a layoff by resorting to an across-the-board 10% pay cut–a pay cut that included executives. In the ’80s, although HP senior management was well-paid, its salaries underwent nothing like the mushrooming of management compensation in the corporate economy at large. All that ended under Fiorina.
Coming into the company, she gave indications of honoring the “HP way” in her cost-cutting approach. In lieu of layoffs, she offered a package of voluntary pay cuts to make the company more competitive. The options were a 10% pay cut, a 5% cut with the loss of four vacation days, no cut with the loss of eight vacation days, or no cuts at all. Amazingly, 86% of the HP workforce voluntarily took cuts, saving the company $130 million (Fiorina’s compensation package at the time of her hiring included $90 million worth of stock and other benefits).
Less than a month after the workforce accepted this sacrifice for the good of the company, Fiorina blindsided them with a layoff of 6000 out of 93,000 employees. She subsequently negotiated a merger with Compaq and purged ten percent of their combined 150,000 employees. She also did a classic reorganization, the kind Scott Adams’ Dilbert described as “fixing a flat by rotating the tires” (her successor immediately reversed the reorganization after she left).
Amazingly, all this gutting of human capital didn’t make the company more productive. Imagine that!
Fiorina’s recipe was essentially the same approach Bob Nardelli took at Home Depot. As T. Blumer described it at Bizzyblog,
* His consolidation of purchasing and many other functions to Atlanta from several regions caused buyers to lose touch with their vendors…..
* Firing knowledgeable and experienced people in favor of uninformed newbies and part-timers greatly reduced payroll and benefits costs, but has eventually driven customers away, and given the company a richly-deserved reputation for mediocre service. [BizzyBlog, January 8, 2007]
*Nardelli and his minions played every accounting, acquisition, and quick-fix angle they could to keep the numbers looking good, while letting the business deteriorate. [BizzyBlog January 8, 2007]
Blumer also informed me, afterward, that he’d learned Nardelli’s asset stripping had gone even further:
I have since learned that Nardelli, in the last months before he walked, took the entire purchasing function out of Atlanta and moved it to …. India — Of all the things to pick for foreign outsourcing.
I am told that “out of touch” doesn’t even begin to describe how bad it is now between HD stores and Purchasing, and between HD Purchasing and suppliers.
Not only is there a language dialect barrier, but the purchasing people in India don’t know the “language” of American hardware — or even what half the stuff the stores and suppliers are describing even is.
I am told that an incredible amount of time, money, and energy is being wasted — all in the name of what was in all likelihood a bonus-driven goal for cutting headcount and making G&A expenses look low (”look” low because the expenses have been pushed down to the stores and suppliers).
Nardelli, as you might not be surprised to find out, was a big fan of Six Sigma. His idea of “process improvement” was to simultaneously downsize the service staff and almost double the number of customers each “associate” had to serve in an hour. This is very much in keeping with the Wal-Mart, Lowe’s, and Home Depot model of “customer service”: a bunch of high school kids in dayglo smocks, saying “I dunno. I guess if you don’t see it, we ain’t got it.”
But there’s no need to pick on Fiorina and Nardelli in particular. They’re operating from the same MBA playbook that the rest of Corporate America has used for the past twenty years or so (I described it in depth in a Freeman article: “Economic Calculation in the Corporate Commonwealth“).
The Holy See of this model of corporate management, through the twentieth century and beyond, has been General Motors. The Sloan/GM/DuPont approach to accounting was brilliantly described by org theory blogger Eric Husman. As Husman points out, GM has ceased to be a company that makes cars and has instead become a company that makes its profits marketing and financing cars. Its auto finance arm, the GMAC, is its main source of profit. And in any year that the production side turns a profit, there’s a good chance it comes from liquidating a couple more plants.
I’ve heard endless accounts of the same basic process just from talking to middle aged veterans of Corporate America. For example, a retired VP of Kinney Shoes, who worked his way up from the bottom, told me that back when he started, the sales staff were career people who knew the product line, the market, and customer tastes inside and out. By the ’90s, they had been replaced by the above-mentioned high school kids on minimum wage, who weren’t getting paid enough to either know or care about the product line.
During this same time period, we’ve seen the universal adoption of the automated “customer service” system, the kind that makes you want to visit corporate headquarters with an assault rifle and get yourself on the Six O’Clock News. But take comfort in the fact that all that asset stripping has been in the service of a good cause: since the ’90s, average CEO pay has gone from forty times that of the average production worker to more like four hundred times.
At the Employer Whose Name Must Never Be Mentioned, senior management gave us a poormouth story last December about how PTO’s were being refused for that month (something I wouldn’t have thought they could legally get away with short of Chapter Eleven) as an emergency cost-cutting measure. This month, we got a memo informing us that the same senior management had leased skybox seats in the new corporate welfare baseball stadium to entertain “visiting executives.” The only proof you need that corporate management is a pack of liars is to compare their official happy talk at any given time to what they were saying a few months before.
April 12th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
That is a great post.
This may sound silly, and I hesitate to write it for fear I’ll make a fool of myself, but it is worth remembering that CEO’s are hired hands of capital, just like janitors and sales clerks are. In America, this fact has been somwhat obscured by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which established managers as a unique class that is not allowed to unionize.
When people hear the phrase “class conflict” the usual picture that comes into their heads is one of coal miners facing off with security guards who are working for the Boss. And yet, I think the phrase “class conflict” can be used in another way. I think it might be worth considering that a CEO who guts a company and gets 90 million in pay is, in fact, in class conflict with the Boss. The CEO is not Boss, no matter how much they enjoy play-acting the role.
I’ll confine my remarks to the US. Investors who own shares in companies are, legally, the owners of the company. They are, therefore, the Boss. They hire the CEO, who is a worker.
Let’s remember, for a moment, the harm that CEOs have done to companies in recent years. There is the case of Enron, of course, still the largest bankruptcy in the history of the world. There is the slow suicide that managment has inflicted on GM, Ford, and Chrysler, a sort of inbred cultural thing that keeps them from competing with foreign car makers. There is the above mentioned Hewlett-Packard.
Clearly, the interests of CEOs diverge shaply from the interests of capital. Even if we assumed, for a moment, that limited liability corporations are a great idea, and stock markets that facilitate the aggregation of capital into limited liability corporations are also great ideas, couldn’t we find a better model of corporate governance than the one that America currently has? The system is broken, even when evaluated on its own terms.
In the past, the obvious class conflict in the US was that between capital and the non-management workers. But in the current era, it seems to me the most damaging class conflict (damaging to the interests of capital) is that between the owners of corporations and the CEOs they hire. Capital no longer has to worry about strikes that cost $200 million and threaten the life of the company. But they now have to worry about CEOs who do exactly the same thing.
April 12th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Thanks, Jackson.
What you say is probably true of corporations where a controlling block of stock is still held by one family (like the Waltons), and comparatively small close corporations.
But on the whole, I tend to agree with those who say shareholder ownership is a myth. The shareholder is just another class of creditor entitled to even less consideration than the bondholder, and with almost no real control. As I argued in an earlier post (”‘Public’ vs. ‘Private’ Sector”), corporations are really just masses of unowned capital run by a self-perpetuating managerial oligarchy.
April 12th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Well speaking as one who has had good experiences with both of my local Wal-Marts I’m a bit skeptical. While it true that during peak shopping hours there are: (1) too few checkers and so one must wait in line for what seems to be be forever, and (2) too few employees on the floor — but they are knowledgeable when I can track one down. Further, most are adults.
But this is what I do not get. If CEO’s are destroying businesses whilst generating huge compensation packages for themselves — with HD as an example — then WTF is the matter with the Boards of Directors who hire these people? Surely they (the BoDs do not want the HDs of the world to decline?
Finally, I strongly disapprove of corporate welfare for such as baseball stadiums. But in the grand scheme of things, I don’t care of the higher-ups at Acme have skybox seats.
April 12th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Mona,
A major portion of corporate boards are made up of inside directors, often the senior management themselves wearing a different hat. And boards of directors commonly engage in mutual logrolling games with senior management, rubber stamping each other’s salaries.
April 12th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
“I tend to agree with those who say shareholder ownership is a myth”
I was only speaking of what is legally asserted as normative - shareholders are the nominal owners of corporations. My point is similar to yours - these shareholders have no real power. That is what I meant when I wrote “The system is broken, even when evaluated on its own terms.” On its own terms, the current (legal) setup suggests that shareholders are the owners of corporations. And yet, that is not true in any meaningful way (save for the exceptions you mention - where the original family or a single shareholder holds a large plurality of stock).
April 12th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
I’ve generally had a good experience being a Wal-Mart customer. It’s being a Wal-Mart employee I’d have a problem with. I’ve usually had a good experience being a 7-11 customer. But when I was a 7-11 employee some years ago, it was a whole different ballgame. I’m for worker sovereignty, not consumer sovereignty.
On the question of corporate ownership, I think what’s being discussed here is what James Burnham called the “managerial revolution”, which I also think is a key theoretical component to understanding how a modern society actually works.
April 12th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
I’ve generally had a good experience being a Wal-Mart customer. It’s being a Wal-Mart employee I’d have a problem with. I’ve usually had a good experience being a 7-11 customer. But when I was a 7-11 employee some years ago, it was a whole different ballgame. I’m for worker sovereignty, not consumer sovereignty.
Keith:But what is wrong with “consumer sovereignty?” And who stays at Wal-Mart or 7-11 in a low-level position unless they are older folks supplementing income, teens working for fun $$, or what have you? Those positions are entry level, or for the retired.
Kevin: Yes, I’ve read about the logrolling phenomenon, but nevertheless, destroying the company is bad for everyone. Surely the BoD at HD does not wish to see that company plummet?
In my view, much of the ire directed at Wal-Mart and other reviled corporations pertains to benefits. It is unfortunate that via historical fluke health insurance became tied to that. But poor people cannot buy the stuff they need at anything but Wal-Mart, Goodwill, Salvation Army stores & etc.
And none of this is theoretical for me. I don’t know how I would have raised kids without K-Mart, when it was the Wal-Mart of its time. (And no small amount of time perusing what was just in at Goodwill.)
April 13th, 2008 at 12:20 am
Jackson: Thanks for clarifying. The way things are now, shareholders have the best of both world. They can use the leverage created by the threat of capital flight to pressure companies to externalize costs, pollute, and otherwise behave in antisocial ways. But at the same time, they’re sufficiently removed from actual control of the corporation that they can avoid direct liability for such actions by management. It amounts to plausible deniability.
The worst of it is, the threat of capital flight only works selectively. It works to deter social responsibility, because that isn’t part of the standard corporate culture. As a result, social responsibility is only practiced by corporations catering to a niche market. On the other hand, management self-dealing IS part of the standard corporate culture, so the threat of capital flight doesn’t touch that.
Mona: If I lived anywhere but NW Arkansas, I’d probably shop at Wal-Mart, because they’re really no different in kind from other big box stores I do patronize. But given the role of Wal-Mart in local politics, and especially their role in railroading through a regional airport against the wishes of the local population, I’d like to spit in the Waltons’ faces if I could. I haven’t set foot in a Wal-Mart in ten years, I hate them so badly. I do tend to buy used appliances, though, and to buy almost exclusively store-brand or generic food.
I’d like to see the bargaining power of both workers AND consumers strengthened against big business. But I agree with Keith that, in a pinch, it’s better to have leverage as a worker. We spend a major part of our waking hours in a position of near-total subjection to someone else’s will, and completely vulnerable to dismissal on their whim. Whether as worker or consumer, increasing our bargaining power translates in material terms into reducing the number hours’ labor it takes to buy a good, and reducing the ratio of effort to consumption. But in addition, increased bargaining power for labor involves economic security and the knowledge that we’re not a paycheck away from being unable to buy the goods at Wal-Mart or anywhere else. As much as the standard of living has increased over the past fifty years in so many ways, a large percentage of Americans back then were at least enviable for the near-lifetime job security they enjoyed in a unionized labor force.
Henry Ford used to talk about paying his workers enough that they could afford to buy his cars. With Wal-Mart, it’s just the opposite: pricing their goods low enough that even their workers can afford to buy them.
April 13th, 2008 at 1:13 am
Fiorina is a special case, because her history overtly shows how shareholders are sidelined.
Almost the last thing before her day, HP was turned around by bringing back one of the two garage entrepreneurs who founded it, even at his advanced age (I forget whether it was H or P).
Then time meant that a new generation had to be brought in - it was Fiorina. A liitle while in, one of the HP scions led a boardroom battle against her, her kind and her ways, and for a while looked like winning. Only, despite all the natural persons against her, she got practically all the proxies and the clout of the funds, with their own distancing of ownership and control.
So, everybody who looked saw it coming and objected - to no effect. It’s a worked example of the neutralising of the theory of owning shares.
By the way, what is this US jargon “PTO”?
April 13th, 2008 at 5:13 am
I recall hearing some union organizer saying that the Waltons became billionaires creating the kinds of jobs where if you have three of them, you still can’t make rent.
The standard of living has increased in recent decades in some ways, mostly due to technological expansion. I remember the days when VCRs were considered luxury items for the rich. I remember the first person I ever knew who had a cell phone, a friend of mine’s dad who was a neurosurgeon. I remember when my brother first got a PC, I thought, “Why the hell would someone want one of those things?”
I don’t know that this has translated into more real freedom or security for the average person. Most genuine economic statistics I’ve seen indicate real wages have actually gone down considerably since the 60s and 70s. The manufacturing jobs Kevin mentions that offered near cradle to grave security have disappeared and been replaced by service industry jobs at places like Wal-Mart. Also, the number of people who have to work two jobs and the number of families that need two incomes seems to have increased as well. The amount of time we spend at work seems to be going up.
Some have attributed this to the fact that so many people seem to live beyond their means or that the list of “necessities” continues to include more items of a dubious nature. I’m not so sure I buy this rationale. Most working class people spend the bulk of their income on rent, bills, food, transportation, day care, etc. Also, there are things conisdered to be luxuries that one is actually expected to have to survive in a modern economy. For instance, a car was once very much a luxury item. Nowadays, some employers won’t hire people without a car. Same with a telephone. And it’s even getting harder to get by without internet access. Also, college education once carried a good deal of status. Now an undergraduate degree is just a glorified high school diploma. To have any real educational credentials you need a graduate if not a post graduate degree.
The lack of job security Kevin mentions is no small matter. I come across people all the time in the business I’m in who were making $75,000 one year and unemployed and broke the next.
April 13th, 2008 at 11:48 am
PML,
Thanks for the backstory on Hewlett-Packard. The article on Fiorina suggests her successor came in initially trying to appease employees by appealing to memories the “HP way,” but quickly turned to the orthodox model of downsizing and “reshuffling the bureaucracy.” PTOs are paid time off. It’s a version of the time bank concept, where sick days and vacation days come out of the same pot. PTO hours are accumulated on each paycheck according to the number of hours worked. So I don’t see how they could have gotten away with it legally, short of bankruptcy; it’s as much a breach of contract as refusing to issue paychecks.
Keith,
That economic insecurity is one reason why paying off debt and growing as much of my own food as possible are such high priorities for me. I see a lot of libertarians stressing the beauties of “division of labor” as if they invented it, and rhetorically challenging “If someone else can do something more cheaply, why not hire them to do it instead of doing it yourself.” I get this a lot from programmer types who think life will go on forever just like now. The answer, of course, is you have to have money when you buy instead of make, and you can’t depend on always being able to sell your labor.
April 13th, 2008 at 11:50 am
P.S. The irony of it is that some of the most strident and patronizing critiques of the DIY ethos and home production come from the regulars at Mises–the very same people screeching the loudest about the impending “crackup boom.”
April 13th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
It seems contractually quite feasible to withhold PTOs, then. Unless the contract specifies that they must be released in such and such a manner, the management can witthold them as long as they like and only release them when “mutually convenient” (or maybe even write them off if an employee does not agree to take them as management wants), so long as they keep making book entries accruing them. It’s also quite likely that they don’t have to pay for them in cash at termination, but are allowed to write off any balance over some amount - or indeed, any time carried over from one accounting period to another (I’ve seen similar things).
April 13th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Henry Ford used to talk about paying his workers enough that they could afford to buy his cars. With Wal-Mart, it’s just the opposite: pricing their goods low enough that even their workers can afford to buy them.
Did he really? From what I read, he was having trouble retaining workers and there was a substantial cost to training them (even on an assembly line) that he lost out on when they left after only a short period of time, so that was the reason he raised wages.
April 13th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
He’s widely credited with saying it, anyway. I wouldn’t put it past him to pay $5/day as an efficiency wage, and then make up some other self-congratulatory explanation for it.
April 13th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
PML,
Thanks for the info. It struck me that the “contract” was in the accrual of PTO hours stated on the paycheck stub. Stating that they would cease to accrue in the future would be one thing; but this was reneging on them after they had been earned.
April 14th, 2008 at 12:57 am
Was it reneging on them, in a technical sense? As long as the accrued PTOs were kept on the books, there was no reneging - technically. It appears more as if HP simply stopped the employees from being able to access them. If the standard contract wrote off any PTOs above a limit for a worker who left, that would still work - because that sort of provision was inserted in the good old days, when workers could take them during the year, and stopped them taking cash in lieu if they left of their own accord. Never mind that it’s actually management that stopped them winding back the overhang.
I was once asked to sign a paper agreeing to reimburse my employer for some training they sent me on, if I left within two years (I think it was). I pointed out that the training was non-portable and only served their needs, and that that would allow them to fine me if they fired me, in fact prioritise me for retrenching if that ever came up (I put it more tactfully than that). I told them I wasn’t the one asking for the training, it was their idea, and that anything like that would need a shorter date interval and safegurads against retrenching etc.
April 14th, 2008 at 7:38 am
“But what is wrong with “consumer sovereignty?” ”
I can ask just as easily, what is wrong with ‘producer sovereignty?’ And that’s assuming that the average consumer is actually sovereign. The reality is much more complicated than the catch-phrase thrown around by most libertarians. The reality, right now, is much close to ‘capital sovereignty’ than anything else.
But putting all that aside, I’d refine Keith’s point a little and ask, as a matter of policy, should we prioritize consumption or production? Although I’m against the whole concept of central planning, if I had to pick one, I’d rather prioritize production. And to me, one way to prioritize something is to give me some meaningful standard of control over it. I have almost 0 control over the productive aspect of my life - I’m an employee, so I don’t derive much pleasure from the process, in general. I seek to put in the minimum time necessary to get the job done properly so that I can spend more time doing things I enjoy.
In contrast, I have quite a bit of control (nothing close to sovereignty, but still, significant control) over my consumptive processes. Guess what? I enjoy being in control! This is at least one aspect of compulsive shopping - it’s a joyful experience to have some control. I’m not a compulsive shopper, but I can see where the phenomenon comes from. (especially the old stereotype of the compulsive housewife - who had less control over any aspect of their life than the 50’s housewife?)
Given this current dynamic, is it any wonder why our culture is overriden by consumption and self-motivated productivity is a virtue in short supply (there are other reasons for this, too).
April 14th, 2008 at 11:56 am
Come to think of it, PML, you’re probably right on that. It makes me wonder what sleight of hand they could get away with when it comes to wages: “After all, we didn’t repudiate your pay. We’re just delaying it for two weeks.”
Thanks for the point about the real extent of consumer sovereignty, quasibill. The transformation of the economy in the early twentieth century, from bulk commodities, to push distribution based on brand name competition and mass advertising, was itself a massive assault on consumer sovereignty. The package goods that prevailed in the ’20s were around four times as expensive, in real terms, as the bulk goods that prevailed around 1900.
Wal-Mart gets up to some pretty good shenanigans when it comes to pricing. Aside from their loss leader in each category, their appliances tend to be prices pretty much the same as those of the other retailers. They advertise the loss leader to get people in there, and then hope when actually get there and scan the shelves, they’ll see the $80 microwave immediately to the left of the $60 loss leader, and say “Oh, what the hell, it’s just another twenty bucks.”
They also engage in what I would consider fraud. For example, I learned from a former Wal-Mart vendor that the appliances they sell in their stores are made with cheaper and lower quality part substitutions, but they require the manufacturer to label them with the same product number as their regular product line to give the false impression it’s the same thing.
Snapper lawnmowers quit selling through Wal-Mart because they were under pressure to do this sort of thing. Wal-Mart kept pressuring them to substitute cheaper and less durable design, and sully their own reputation for quality, in order not to make the other lawnmowers at Wal-Mart look bad. On one end of the pushmower display would be Snapper mowers priced at several hundred $$, designed to last forever and start up on the first try as long as you owned them. The rest of the display would be taken up with mowers, many of them priced well under $100, designed to be used for a year and then thrown away with the engine shot.
April 14th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
“The Sloan/GM/DuPont approach to accounting was brilliantly described by …”
… Bill Waddell. Sorry, much as I’d like to, I can’t take credit for it. Unfortunately, Bill has gone AWOL from Evolving Excellence, where he used to rant against stupidly managed, “publicly” owned behemoths like GM and GE, much to the amusement of everyone who tuned in to that blog (it’s still there, Kevin Meyer just isn’t the same brand of fire breather). Bill’s book, Rebirth of of American Industry, explains how DuPont, Sloan, and Brown created a system whose definition of profit was perverse. Enron didn’t really invent anything, they just happened to come about in less fortunate times.
Bill and Kevin have this radical idea that manufacturers ought to hire people who both know about and like manufacturing instead of the legions of MBAs who don’t know an orifice from a hole in the ground and who think that manufacturing is a dirty, disgusting, lowly form of employment reserved for people who were not smart enough to make it into a graduate business program.
Thanks for the kind words though.
April 15th, 2008 at 5:59 am
I suppose I ought to mention that, 15 years ago when I did my MBA, the literature did cover the idea of conflicts of interest between managements and notional owners under the heading “agency costs“. It more or less dismissed it as not having been substantiated by studies, concluding that it was theoretically possible but nothing to worry about in practice or some concrete and material evidence would have come up. But who would have been bringing it out, and how would they measure it except in terms of one firm’s performance relative to others, which would automatically tune out any across the board systemic effect? (That was also the theoretical catch that couldn’t be tested about the “efficient markets hypothesis” - systemic effects weren’t tested by the studies that could be conducted - with the same “in practice” rebuttal.)
Anyhow, it also struck me how relevant these issues are to the political framework, where “it doesn’t matter who you vote for, a politician always gets in”.
April 15th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Thanks for the clarification, Eric, although you’ve become something of an anti-GM commentator in your own right.
PML: I believe it was in part org theory literature on agency costs back in the ’60s and ’70s that led to the dramatic cultural change in senior management in the ’80s. Until around 1980, the typical CEO was a faceless bureaucrat or “organization man.” It was widely believed that stock options and bonuses would created an “entrepreneurial” mindset so that CEOs would maximize shareholder value. In fact, however, senior management are just as much an unaccountable bureaucracy as ever, but now the Cowboy CEOs think of themselves as “entrepreneurs.” They do indeed game stock value, but they do so to maximize their own short-term advantage at the expense of shareholders.
The old bureaucratic management displayed many of the shortcomings of Gosplan, but at least they had the comparatively long-term mindset of a career administrator, and not of an Ottoman tax farmer.
The “across the board systemic effects” you mention are exactly why arguments for a “market in corporate control” (Mises, Manne, etc., on capital flight and hostile takeovers as a way of disciplining underperforming firms) are so overblown. Such a market requires reliable comparative data, which isn’t there when the same corporate culture affects performance across the board. That’s one point I made in that “Economic Calculation in the Corporate Commonwealth” argument referenced above. As I argued in the article, capital is more likely to flee when a corporation treats its workers well and thinks in the long-term, even when the stock performs well. On the other hand, if it performs badly despite asset stripping and treating employees like shit, the conventional investor mindset is likely to be “Well, they followed all the rules, so it must be sunspots or something.”
April 17th, 2008 at 7:01 am
As a programmer type, I can confirm the stereotype. When your livelihood depends on massive networks of information, you can adopt some pretty distorted realities. However, I’ve sort of come full circle now that I’m working for myself at home - I’m finding I often enjoy household chores far more than I ever did before, because it’s a much more visceral, grounding, discrete experience, contrary to sitting in cyberspace all day. So I’m even trying to get into gardening, and Kevin, I’d love it if you could share any resources you’ve found about getting started growing your own food.