Category Archives: Politics

Last minute Arizona wall pillow fort

A makeshift new barrier built with shipping containers is being illegally erected along part of the US-Mexico border by Arizona’s Republican governor – before he has to hand over the keys of his office to his Democratic successor in January.

Arizona governor builds border wall of shipping crates in final days of office | Arizona | The Guardian

It continues to amaze me how certain executives only want to build things that divide us. Imagine this amount of effort being put into something that unites us with our neighbors.

Good on the Guardian with leading that this is an illegal action.

The Politics of Clean Energy is changing

Analysts say there’s a lesson in that: The new jobs at these green factories may function as a political game-changer. “That may be an implicit long-term strategy for the Democrats: With domestic manufacturing likely in traditional Republican districts, the partisan split may soften on renewables,” Timothy Fox, an analyst at ClearView Energy Partners, told me.

Some Republicans in Georgia also see these factories as politically beneficial. Governor Brian Kemp, in his successful campaign for re-election, touted a surge in green jobs across the Peach State. There’s a battery plant so massive that it stretches half-a-mile along a freeway northeast of Atlanta — and more facilities are on the way. Hyundai Motor Co., for instance, just started building a $5.5 billion electric-vehicle plant near Savannah.

Green Factories Are Changing Minds in More Conservative US States

This was one of the most important things the IRA will do, change the politics around clean energy. Clean energy production is going to be the jobs on the ground that people see in lots of parts of the country that were left behind.

That is going to change the politics of future climate legislation, and what is possible. We might even see this in the 118th Congress coming up with a razor thin Republican majority.

Do Demographics impact Leadership?

This morning on NPR there was a piece with Howard Dean about how older leaders should step aside and make way for a new generation. This has popped up in politics a bunch of times over the past couple of years, as the elected officials seem quite old. Our last presidential election gave options of a 69 and a 70 year old. With an ex president leaving office at the age of 55. The thing that most frustrates me about this reporting is it never talks about the root cause, which is demographics.

Birth Rates in the US 1943 – 2004: By Before My Ken – Wikipedia EN, Public Domain

After the baby boom, there was quite a baby bust. Births don’t tell the whole story, as immigration / emigration still move population around, people die, etc. But here is a 2015 snapshot of population by age.

Population by age in the US (2015 snapshot)

You can see that birth shape still in overall demographics, including the 1970-71 mini spike. It’s been filled in a bit by immigration, and the baby boom is less evident now that boomers are in their 60s and up and dying off. But it’s still there. And it’s important.

The Leadership Hole

About a decade ago I had the incredible opportunity to participate in a year long leadership excellence program at IBM. One of the classes was generational leadership, at a time when millennials were just about to enter the workforce. The teach talked about this demographic hole (all in generalizations).

The Baby Boomers were one of the largest generations, Gen X one of the smallest, the Millenials are nearly as big a generation as the Baby Boom. Gen X saw their parents laid off by large institutions, and the reaction is a huge upward trend in starting their own businesses. There are both less Gen Xers, and far less of them participating in large institutions still.

This means that as the Baby Boomers age out, who steps up? There aren’t actually a ton of Gen Xers there in the wings. And the Millennials are all very young and haven’t had the depth of experience yet. Do you try to fast promote them and hope they pick up enough along the way?  Many will, lots of “tribal knowledge” is going to be lost along the way. That might be good or bad depending on what habits were carried forward, but it’s unlikely to be a smooth transition regardless.

What Generational Discontinuity Looks Like

same-sex-marriage
Pew Research Center

 

FT_16.10.11_marijuanaLegal_trend
Pew Research Center

This is what generational discontinuity looks like. A flip of 60 / 40 opinion of something being bad vs. good in a 10 year period. Conventional wisdom, accepted norms, flipping really quite quickly after decades of the old attitude being around without any real changes.

Through this lens, the “why now?” of the Silence Breakers are another one of these 60 / 40 flips that we are right in the middle of the crossover. All of this was “accepted” until it wasn’t, and it will take a decade to fully entrench the new norm. Lots of people knew all this wasn’t ok, but it took Millennials standing up, and Baby Boomers dying out, to flip it.

There are Costs

It’s easy to see social progress and assume this is mostly upside. But there are costs of not carrying down experience and understanding. This analysis of the USS McCain collision showed how this leadership hole is hitting the Navy:

But the US Navy has its own particular history of creating fatigue through stress. The Navy’s Surface Warfare community has a reputation for “eating its young.” A “Zero-Defect” management mentality toward leadership has, despite entreaties from higher in the ranks, been ingrained in the surface Navy’s command structure. When something happens, junior officers get burned. There is no learning from mistakes—only punishment for making them.

Couple that with tougher tasks than ever. Over the past decade, as a Government Accountability Office study in 2015 noted, “to meet the increasing demands of combatant commanders for forward presence in recent years, the Navy has extended deployments; increased operational tempos; and shortened, eliminated, or deferred training and maintenance.” And to increase the availability of ships for ongoing missions in the Mediterranean and the Western Pacific, the Navy has “home-ported” ships overseas.

But the increased use of these forward deployed ships—which spent twice as much time at sea as similar ships based in the US—has had an impact on the training and maintenance of those ships in particular. In the Seventh Fleet, ships no longer even have a designated period for training. These days some Navy observers suggest the US may have the best equipped fleet in the world, but it no longer has the most skilled sailors driving them.

It’s the same pattern. Extending the terms of older generation, younger generation not getting enough mentorship, and critical bits breaking down when younger generation are put on the spot without enough preparation.

Patterns in our Demographics

The predictive power of this demographic hole is important. Like a warming climate it’s not going to tell you exactly which new super storm is going to hit which state. But it does tell us to expect an increase in:

  • Breakdowns in large systems / companies / organizations as the leadership hole prevented the pass down of unwritten rules and important tribal knowledge that kept the system working
  • Quick 60 / 40 opinion flips as the lack of gradual pass down of culture caused the younger generation to reevaluate their definition of normal

I just wish that more folks reporting on the events of the day pondered some of these larger factors and forcing functions of history like population demographics.

P.S. That’s just from the disruption of flow of information through population bottle necks. If you start thinking about how opportunity exists when you hit the job market if you are in a dip or peak of the population, that gets fascinating as well. Malcolm Gladwell proposed that as part of the rise of the tech giants in Outliers. While he is always a bit light on research, it’s interesting to ponder.

 

Gameplan for the next 4 years

Thing is: There is no someone else. No one is coming to save us from Trump and his merry band of egregious nincompoops. If there is saving to be done, it comes from us, or not at all. Be the “someone else” you want to see in this world. Because otherwise you’re leaving it to the horde of racists and bigots following in Trump’s wake. And that’s not acceptable.

At the very least, if you can’t get out of oh shit oh shit oh shit mode, then make goddamn sure you’re not making things harder for the people who are stepping up. I think it’s time to realize that we’re in a “perfect is the enemy of good” situation.

Source: The Beginning of the Trump Years – Whatever

Of all the post mortem writing of the election, I think that the science fiction authors seem to have the most sane grounding. Scalzi, Brin, Stross have all been far more interesting and insightful reads over the last 2 months than any of the punditry of what happened and what’s next. You could do worse than follow those folks.

Scalzi’s post today boiled down to a couple of pieces of solid advice for the next 4 years.

Stand up for one thing you believe in, and push on that. But remember not to overextend yourself. This is a marathon. There is just as much danger in getting overwhelmed in all the crazy and throwing your hands up and giving up.

Support others that are doing the same. No friendly fire that their cause isn’t as important as yours. We make this world a better place by working in parallel.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. The point is to make progress, which you do one wandering and labored step at time.