Outdoorsy Stuff

Black Bear

Here you can see how a Covert trail camera takes pictures at night.  Some cameras take better night pictures and they cost more.  The quality of the night, dawn, and dusk pictures is one thing that separates good cameras from bad ones.

Incidentally, my cousin had a good week.  She shot her first bear and caught her first muskie.  (Someone may have screwed up the net job on what would have been her first muskie a few years ago. But I don't want to point fingers.)

49.5" Muskie

The Best Things Are Often Cheap and Simple

Did you know that there are musky lures for sale for more than $70?  And yet you can buy excellent lures like a Jointed Rapala for less than $9 and Suicks for less than $20

In the movie The Warring States, about Sun Pin, the enemy of Sun Pin could not believe that the answer to his questions, about The Art of War, were as simple as they are.  Even if we read the introduction to the Art of War, we'll hear that some people have ignored it because it is too old.  How can striking your enemy where he's weakest get old?

Many, particularly on the left, think that the U.S. Constitution is outdated.  But is freedom of speech an idea that is too old to be of value anymore?

I like things that are simple.  And they are often better than what is expensive.

If You Favor Freedom, Read This

For a new machine that worked or a new wrinkle that
gave time another kick in the pants their glee was like
that of children with a wonderful toy. If the idea had
come from a foreman, or a worker, as sometimes happened,
Ford would stuff the man's pocket with money
on the spot. Yet no sooner had it worked than they all
began to think of ways to make it work better, and if
anybody could think of a way to do that the wonderful
toy was broken up for scrap.

When it was the wonder plant of the world for doing
impossible things in unheard-of ways they were still so
sure they could do every thing still better that anybody
was welcome to come and look, even rival motorcar
makers, Ford saying: "If they can do it better than we
do it they are welcome to it. Then we will go and look
at what they do."

-page 45 of The Wild Wheel

The Wild Wheel

From all of these excursions he came back to the
same place. What mattered above all was the wage. Not
a social wage, not a generous wage, not a wage arrived
at by the bargaining power of either labor or the employer,
but a scientific wage determined by the wage
motive. There was no social service that could take the
place of wages. Let the wage be the highest that mass
production could afford to pay and you would not have
to worry much about people. It was very simple, really.
Any confusion about it could usually be traced back
"to an unwillingness on the part of someone to work."
It was management's part so to arrange and organize
work that it could produce high wages, but the starting
point of high wages was the willingness to work. Without
that willingness, management was powerless.

-The Wild Wheel

page 44

More from "The Wild Wheel"

For example, the piston rod assembly. It was a very
simple operation. The foreman could not understand
why it should take three minutes. He analyzed the motions
with a stop watch. Four hours out of a day were
spent in walking, as the assembler gathered in his materials
and pushed away his finished work. The operation
was split into three parts, a slide was put on the
bench, three men on each side of it and an inspector at
the end. One man then performed only one third of the
operation without shifting his feet. Where twenty-eight
men had turned out 175 assemblies a day, now seven
men turned out 2,600.

Some of the repetitive work was so monotonous that
Ford himself wondered how a man could stick to it.
There was one man who did nothing but dredge small
gears in a vat of oil at the end of a rod and drop them
one at a time in a basket. This required neither intelligence
nor energy, yet he did that and nothing else for
eight years, saved his wages and resisted any attempt
to move him to another job, confirming Ford in the
opinion that "the average worker wants a job in which
he does not have to think."

-page 28

Things are easier to understand when they are simple.

More from The Wild Wheel

Paternalism, moreover, had an air of charity about
it, and that he hated; he thought very ill of charity. "It
is a drug," he said. There were emergencies when men
and women, and especially children, needed help, but
these cases were not actually as numerous as they seemed
to be. The very fact that charity could be had increased
them, for charity held out the promise of something for
nothing. The cases of real need could be looked after on
a personal basis without destroying, as by the machinery
of organized charity, the values of self-respect.

-The Wild Wheel

page 43

Unions

His answer was: "There is a law of the job higher
than any law Congress can pass. The law of the job will
prevail."

His feeling against unions was bitter and personal.
It rested on two grounds. First, he intensely resented
the idea that unions could do more for Ford workers
than he did for them. Secondly, unions committed the
unforgivable sin of interfering with the machine. They
slowed it down. They insisted on running it at less than
its full capacity. That was to say, as was already evident
in the General Motors and Chrysler contracts,
they laid their hands on production. They bargained
about how fast the assembly line should run.

-The Wild Wheel

page 36