SRF Heavy Industries

Whenever I think I’m going to sit down and write some cool weird original fiction I stumble across something like this magical penis thieves article and realize I’m going to have to try a little harder to top reality for strangeness.

I will note that the above article makes some intriguing mentions concerning certain classifications in the DSM-IV and how the illnesses referenced seem quite a bit more rare in non-Western cultures, indicating a certain amount of bias toward which diagnoses might be “culture bound” and which are more universal. Scan down until you see the phrase “Healthy Migrant Effect”.

In any case, if such things interest you, a couple hours researching Koro might do you some good. Or do you some damage. Depending.

[*]

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that for some people, words are hard.

I don’t have illusions that I can make myself understood to everyone, but some of the things I do nearly automatically are unavailable to some people. When I talk to someone, I have a sense for the feeling of engagement. I can tell when the engine revs too high or starts chugging and lurching, and maybe it’s time to change gears — either complexify or simplify the syntax to make the information load more efficient, open up or close boxes of topic-specific jargon to suit the background of the other conversant, construct metaphors to bridge between disciplinary backgrounds, or give up on traditional language entirely and draw a #^@&ing picture.

Writing is a bit harder. You can’t see the face of the person you’re talking to. You have to imagine them from little bits of whatever feedback you’ve gotten before. Starting a new conversation with an unknown audience is completely hit or miss.

The past two days I’ve been visiting Space Collective to try to make out what they’re about, browsing around in something closer to the traditional definition of the word “browsing” — a nibble here, a nibble there — and I see some important things being discussed. But mostly what  see is a discussion among maybe fifty to a hundred people, much of which is a bit evangelical, but most of which is couched in language that’s pretty exclusionary and jargon-filled. The upshot is that their only possible audience is each other.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Experts discussing difficult concepts in their own fields can have much more efficient and unambiguous conversations if they revert to a subset of the language constructed to bear the semantic load, rife with and accelerated by jargon. This is a critical part of refining the concepts in question. It’s why there are professional conventions.

But I also sense some frustration in the conversations about why there isn’t a larger audience and/or more participation for such important concepts as, well, what humanity (or some substantial portion thereof) will be like in the near future. What we are, or possibly are, or could potentially be, becoming.

I don’t know how much of the isolation the discussions are experiencing are deliberate and how much is accident of not having the toolset to convey the concepts to outsiders.

On pursuing a similar topic, I once ran afoul of the transhumanists (the Ray Kurzweil/Max More/Natasha Vita-More crowd) and wandered quickly away once I began to see it as rife with an elitist disease — a playground for the cultural and financial and intellectual elite which was (possibly still is, but I haven’t really been back to check on them) quickmarching toward outright bigotry against those who are unwilling (or simply can’t afford) to surgically or chemically accelerate their own personal development — and for some, the construction of a new master race.

Seriously, those people ought to play some Bioshock. The storyline is quite educational.

For those people, isolation seemed to be, on the whole, deliberate. And bidirectional.

The future arrives first for the wealthy and privileged. That is merely an unfortunate fact. But you don’t have to deliberately enforce it via the Republican fallacy — that your good fortune is exclusively the result of the sweat of your own brow and/or Divine Will or some combination of the two via the mechanism of (wealthy, privileged) Ben Franklin’s maxim of “God helps thofe who help themfelves.”

A sideline thought, but an important one: It’s not God’s will that millions of people starve to death every year. It’s the collective will of those wealthy enough to contribute a bowl of gruel every now and then, but, somehow, rationalize that upgrading their iPhone is more important. Call it a systemic problem. If you must.

The playground that Space Collective is playing in is an attempt to predict and, to a certain extent, attempt to steer the future of humanity towards a suite of more positive and powerful expressions, some more inclusive than others. But, back to my original point, the language being used to discuss the phenomena in question is excluding to outsiders because of an extremely high jargon content and apparent linguistic assumptions of the audience already being insiders….

And that’s unfortunate. And probably unintentional.

It can sound a little hubristic for a writer to say that the very evolution, and possibly definition, of life began with writing, but it’s true — at least in the sense that certain self-replicating forms of chemistry found a way to physically record a mechanism for the process of duplication in a central location (call it RNA-ish precursors to DNA) and transformed the process of replication from a strictly competitive process, each molecule grubbing to consume all resources present, into a cooperative process. Over a billion years that offloaded information has extended capabilities for organizing intracellular coordination to extracellular cooperation and beyond — to an extent that only a few scientists and mystics seem to realize (and realize that I’m not really including myself in the set that have grasped all the ramifications).

Communication in general, but writing in particular, enables the scripting of behavior of an arbitrarily large number of individual organisms and allows them to act, as it were, in unison. Or in concert. And, of course, the ability to read, or at least to understand when someone else reads to you, is also important. (Strong oral traditions also count as writing, but if you’ve played the gossip game, you can understand that the capabilities of oral traditions are weaker when the stories and/or rules can mutate accidentally, intentionally, and, more importantly, undetectably as copies are made.)

It really is the ease of copying written (for various definition of the term written — call it externalized and easily error-checkable against the original) information that enables the formation of massive cooperative organizations composed of individuals that used to compete. The printing press, the computer, the Internet — these all enabled, in their time, the massive copying and duplication and error-prevention regime necessary to unify religions and nations.

That process isn’t over. Not by a long stretch.

Cells — single-celled creatures — are a cooperating suites of specialized chemicals, organized by strands of RNA or DNA or variations on that theme. Organisms are cooperating suites of specialized cells, the more successful examples of which are organized by some nod towards a centralized storage of behavioral data and process replication. Call it a brain or centralized nervous system, but the most critical part of that centralization is the storage of memories. Organizations are cooperating suites of specialized organisms, organized by some set of slow-to-mutate principles to which everyone has either direct or second-order (interpreted by a specialized fellow) access.

The process would appear to be open-ended. You are probably already aware of meta-organizations composed of cooperating cartels of organizations, either financial or governmental or perhaps following some other meta-ecological specialization…

In any case, the success of evangelism, or recruitment to organization and/or organism, is reliant on the ubiquity and accessibility and understandability of your organizing principles. Or documentation. Or stories/moral tales. This seems obvious to me, and I’m frequently confused when it doesn’t seem obvious to others.

Directing this process intelligently includes developing a toolset of grammar and syntax, of vocabulary and metaphor that is as universal as possible. Debabelization, if you will.

I really don’t know who is still reading at this point. It’s one of the drawbacks to the written word. But for the one or two of you who are writers/communicators for your causes/evangelists, may I recommend an emphasis on inclusivity and accessibility of your message?

Perhaps you could enlist the aid of a few people for whom words are easy.

[*]

Some quick bullet points.

In a tanking economy, companies that are unfit for the situation will also tank. Many, many small and midsize companies did tank.

The ones that did not crash and burn were the ones that were able to reduce costs and overhead as income also shrank.

Reducing costs and overhead means these things: accepting tradeoffs in terms of taking performance hits in flexibility, in uptime, in turnaround, in inventory; outsourcing everything that can possibly be outsourced in terms of infrastructure and labor; reducing headcount; reducing payroll/compensation/benefits

Until companies require the extra flexibility and speed of turnaround and reliability, they will not tolerate the expense of adding these things back in. Companies will not require these traits until there are more companies competing with each other. When the herd got thinned, competition was reduced. With corporate/business credit availability depressed, there will be no startups or spinoffs leaping into the fray.

Of the business components that got outsourced… those aren’t coming back either. Manufacturing, skilled labor and assembly, IT infrastructure (including telephony, training/support, even applications and office automation), sales, customer support — it is a flexibility hit to have these things offsite, but good planning replaces the need for flexibility to a huge extent. These jobs now only exist in huge farms that work for many different companies, composed of teams of people and pools of resources that shrink and grow without the need to hire and fire and train.

No company who has made a transition to this form is going to say, “Now that profits are back up, let’s rehire 30% of the sales force we outsourced. Let’s bring our Google-hosted email back onsite. Let’s reopen a customer-facing datacenter in our basement and migrate our data back to a custom in-house application maintained by a small team of onsite designers and developers.” Instead they will say, “Spend a few extra bucks expanding our outsourced capacity and dump the rest into that marketing firm we hired.”

If your work was in sales, in customer support, in application development, in infrastructure support, in training, in marketing, in manufacturing, in skilled labor — your job is never coming back. You have no choice but to sign on with one of these huge pooled-resource scenarios — if the one that replaced you is actually in the country — or retrain for something that is impossible (for now) to outsource. Like hands-on healthcare. Or K-12/college/university teaching. Automotive repair. Construction. Mining. Transportation. Bureaucracy.

The cataclysm has happened. Extinctions have occurred. Your old niche no longer exists. It has gone to where all the Hummers have gone.

[*]

I’m extremely grateful to the government of the Netherlands for the exoneration and apology that they have given to a dear friend of a dear friend concerning one of the strangest miscarriages of justice in the modern-day industrialized world.

In 2004 Lucia de Berk was convicted of murdering patients who died in her care, starting with an infant that was suspected of dying from an overdose of a medication that it had been prescribed, back in 2001. From there, prosecutors performed a truly brain-damaged statistical analysis of deaths that occurred within 24-hours of her having been on shift (several deaths potentially attributed to her had to be removed from the list after reviewing attendance records) and made some truly juvenile errors in their statistical approach. These errors got her a conviction for three deaths, only one of which could have been classified truly as a murder, if not proven to be an accidental overdose.

When her case came up for review/appeal in 2006, the errors were REPEATED AND MAGNIFIED, and even more deaths were tacked on to her conviction. Shortly after receiving this news that her conviction and life sentence were to be upheld, Lucia suffered a stroke.

Thankfully, in 2008, the convictions started to unravel. In one of the early infant deaths, it was showed that the “overdose” was in high risk of being a false positive for the test performed because of the breakdown products of decay of the corpse. A better test, which took these breakdown products into account, showed a negative. But the results had “gotten lost” and were not presented in her defense at her original trial.

Examination after examination failed to show any conclusive evidence of foul play in these other deaths for which she had been convicted. Expert after expert showed that, statistically speaking, deaths on shift had decreased after Lucia had been added to the staff. Expert after expert showed the correct way of doing the math involved, showing that any nurse on staff would have had a one-in-nine chance of being the one who had been the victim of a bizarre witch hunt like this in any similar hospital. No matter how low an opinion we might have of having to go to a hospital, we can’t believe that one nurse in nine is a serial killer. It was just dumb luck. Any nurse on staff could have been the victim of this kind of crappy math.

There were no murders. There is no murderer or murderess. Lucia lost six years of her life, away from her partner and growing daughter, and is still hoping for some kind of reasonable compensation for these missing years of her life and her suffering.

But today she is free.

It was quite a blow to Dutch pride to have to admit the huge chain of mistakes that snatched a mother away from her family, out of a rewarding career of helping the sick, and threw her in prison for life. They missed the boat a number of times to prevent this travesty, to reduce the impact, to turn things around when things started to smell. I respect them deeply for swallowing that pride and coming to Lucia today with an official exoneration and a sincere apology. And I am counting on them to help her reestablish herself as completely as possible, considering everything that has happened.

[*]

The essentials: Air, water, and food. The typical model is a terrarium, where a closed cycle of water, breathable gases, and biomass can be maintained. In free space, you can expect no significant additions to materials to be converted into biomass. On the moon, I see no reason to expect that the mineral resources there would be significantly different from untouched volcanic soil on earth. Mars’ soils could be a bit more problematic, but could be refined, possibly even via a biological process, to remove metallic taints. Extremophile bacteriological processes currently being studied should point the way. In the cases of the moon and Mars, it may be useful to build underground for the purposes of maintaining proper temperature insulation. Electrical power may be generated easily on the surface from materials that are photoreactive or undergo physical changes with cyclic changes in temperature, or thermocouple devices with conductive probes located in different temperature environments. Generators that run on biomass conversions may also be added to the equation as long as they are affordable ecologically speaking and fit into the terrarium model.

The people. Make sure you’ve selected people with relevant fields of expertise. Also, make sure there is plenty of overlap among the fields covered. At least coarsely, make sure each person has a primary field of expertise at which they are an authority, has a secondary field at which they can function with assistance, and a third field in which they can provide assistance if necessary if provided direction. Make sure every critical field is represented at every level so that there is sufficient redundancy in case of accidental incapacitation or death.

The fields of expertise. The concept here is microcosm. The colony should be as self-supporting as possible, including not only engineering and agricultural support, but also low-level maintenance and social support, including religious counseling and entertainment. Gentle leadership and conflict resolution must be emphasized.

Governance. A colony must be self-governing, at least at the operational level. A charter delineating operating policies should be provided that emphasizes primarily the survival, health, and rights of the colonists and the survival of the colony itself, and then the operating goals of the colony, which may require periodic modification to prevent sapping energy and resources for the colony’s survival and/or to maximize the returns on investment. Justice, rewards, and punishments may need to be modeled on various examples of encapsulated systems, like those used on board ships, due to increase in risks of negligence and greater need for efficiency in terms of expertise and labor.

The goals. A colony must export some resource that’s needed elsewhere, though “export” can be a pretty flexible term. Exports can, of course, include raw mineral resources and, as manufacturing capabilities increase, manufactured goods. An orbital colony could, for instance, export vacuum. In sufficiently sealed and correctly constructed containers, enough vacuum could supply lift for lighter-than-air vehicles and platforms and reduce the weight of load-bearing foamed materials, including metals and ceramics. The moon could, for instance, export orbital crafts, probes, and satellites once sufficient manufacturing facilities are in place. The escape velocity for the moon requires a good deal less energy to put objects into earth orbit or to send farther out into space, meaning cost savings also in hardening delicate systems to survive the trip. There may also be added benefits to producing agricultural products in one-sixth of earth-gravity that may be worth exploring. Mars is at one-quarter of earth’s gravity and could also provide plant an animal life that could be more efficient in terms of ratios of nutritious material to inedible structure. Any or all colonies could provide for a tourism and/or education industry, or a medical industry to provide long-term or short term therapies that would benefit from various levels of reduced gravity.

The funding. Startup for a colony off the surface of earth would be enormously expensive, and thus largely dependent on the agencies and organizations with the largest amount of disposable funds. Usually this involves governments, but it doesn’t have to. And, in fact, probably shouldn’t. The purposes of a government include collecting funds as fairly as possible and using those funds to provide resources, infrastructure, and services for the public benefit. A colony, however, is almost certainly a for-profit venture (unless the “exports” are entirely military, scientific, health-related, or educational) and should be funded by investors or trade agencies that are comfortable with high-risk ventures that may not reap benefits for decades. Colonization of the western hemisphere was enacted by governments at first, and then by companies that were interested in discovering new wealth and founding bases for launching future exploration. Currently the only potential investors are governments that could, in ten to twenty years’s time, use some dividends to pay back huge debts that have been incurred, certain corporate concerns in the energy sector, a number of hedge funds that made out like bandits over the most recent economic collapse, and maybe Monsanto. Certainly a new corporation could be formed that would consolidate investments and put them to cooperative use.

[*]

If you’re wondering how that ludicrous “Death Panel” thing got started, here’s how it goes as I understand it:

1. When you are past a certain age or battling a potentially (or guaranteed) terminal illness, you may wish to discuss your concerns with your doctor, particularly with respect to whether you feel you wish to undergo “heroic measures” to keep you alive once your quality of life has seriously started to decline, particularly if those measures will leave you in an even further reduced state.
2. You doctor can (and should) bill you for this time. If you carry insurance or are on Medicare, your doctor may bill them instead. There’s even a handy code for billing for “end of life” counseling.
3. Your insurance company, being basically The Enemy, may decide whether or not to honor this or any other claim.
4. Your government, were it ever to step in as a “single payer” — which last time I checked was off the table — would take the place of the insurance company in item 3, and (supposedly) whatever passes for a panel of experts would decide under what circumstances a claim for “end of life counseling” would get paid. Not that I have any idea what the problem getting the government to cover an “end of life counseling” claim might be. Medicare does it all the time — as long as the patient’s age and/or general state of health warrants it.
5. From here it kind of takes a panicked moron to take it from panel of government experts deciding which claims to pay under which circumstances (as if that’s any different from an insurance company’s panel of experts deciding which claims to pay under which circumstances) to a panel of government experts paying a doctor to talk to you about dying if they don’t want to pay for your expensive procedures anymore.
6. Yippee! Death Panels!

“Death Panels” aside, if you’re worried about this shadowy panel of experts who decide what claims get honored and which get rejected, odds are they’d just use the same shadowy panel of experts they’ve been using to judge Medicare claims for many decades, whose names are a matter of public record and whose opinions are published with much documentation in every edition of the freely available, published online monthly (if a bit hefty in page count) Federal Register.

Conversely, it would probably take a team of spies and possibly a thug with a crowbar to reveal who the @$$hole is at your health insurance company who has turned down treatment for your teenage daughter’s sexual assault due to it somehow being a “pre-existing condition”. (Actual example from recent press — look it up on Google if you missed it.)

You’re welcome.

[*]

For the record, regarding the current busted-ass healthcare reform bill lurching its way through the ol’ “I’m Just a Bill” system, I’m tremendously relieved that it’s finally here. I look at the motherless Frankensteinian corpse that’s just barely twitching, with a face not even a Nancy Pelosi could love, with outright glee and pride.

I’ll tell you why, because I can see from here that you’re curious.

We’ve been arguing for damned near fifty years — from back in Nixon’s day, when he first suggested maybe we ought to do something about the upcoming healthcare crisis — about what to even put on the slab. Now that we have SOMETHING on the slab, we can get busy with the sculpting and the surgery. Before we’re done we may replace every arm and leg a couple of times, every critical organ a dozen times, add more fat, remove the fat, switch out the brain several times for something a little less “Abby Normal”, but at least there’s something on the slab now, and … it’s alive.

The most back-assward part of the bill is that we’ve made health insurance (mostly) mandatory without actually making it affordable — and that REALLY SUCKS for broke people like myself, who start the game with no business subsidizing my policy. More on that later.

Anyway, via (largely) this Huffington Post article, these are the top eighteen or so things we can expect out of our new experimental beast:

• A ban on “pre-existing condition” clauses. ASAP for children (I don’t know whether this means dependents up to age 27 — see below — or tops out at 17 or 18) but won’t go into effect for us older folk until 2014, if we can hang on that long.
• Businesses with fewer than 50 employees can expect a tax credit to subsidize 50% of the premiums for covered employees.
• A rebate for seniors filling in 50% of that pesky donut-hole problem for Medicare prescription drug coverage. Expect 100% of these seniors to vote Democrat in the next election.
• You can keep your dependent younguns on a parent’s plan until age 27.
• No more lifetime caps on the amount of insurance payouts. Annual caps will be banned in 2014.
• A temporary pool to cover “high-risk” pre-existing condition adults. Won’t be necessary after 2014. Odds are, your ‘rhoids and recurring migraines (and anxiety and depression) will have to wait.
• New plans will have NO COPAYS for checkups and preventative care. Similar copays for existing plans will be phased out by 2018.
• You will not have your coverage terminated if you fall expensively ill.
• Insurers must now report regularly and publicly on how much of your premiums are wasted on company overhead.
• Insurers must provide an appeals process for matters of coverage and claims denials.
• Expanded Medicare services for rural areas  who typically have too few Medicare patients to make coverage cost effective to providers.
• A 15% cap to overhead costs for nonprofit insurance orgs that wish to keep their tax benefits
• Expanded nutrient (or lack thereof) disclosure regulations for our thriving crap-food industry
• A subsidy to help cover ludicrously expensive early-retiree policies
• A publicly funded website to help citizens and businesses shop for affordable insurance options
• A $2 billion fund to encourage investment in researching new therapies for preventing and treating diseases

Funding will come from:

• A 10%t tax on indoor tanning services (replaces a suggested tax on cosmetic procedures)
• Cutting out subsidies to banks for proving guaranteed student loans. The government will simply provide these loans itself and cut out the middleman, saving a tidy sum. And pissing off bankers. We’re all for that.
• New and improved screening procedures to cut down on insurance claim fraud and waste
• Umm?

As far as the missing pieces to make insurance cheaper are concerned…. What gives?

The entire system is built around “other people’s money” syndrome. It’s worse than what Vegas does by changing your money for chips so it hurts less to throw it away. I mean, who cares? Order every expensive and experimental test in the books because it doesn’t come out of a real person’s pockets. Keep the patient coming back in for whatever old reason because we only get income when someone submits a claim through the works. Prescribe a metric #^@&ton of barely tested designer drugs with a huge swathes of barely tolerable side effects FOR WHICH YOU CAN TAKE MORE DRUGS because pushing pills is how drug companies make their money, and BESIDES, IT’S ALL PAID FOR WITH OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY! Not REAL money, OUT OF YOUR OWN POCKET money….

Also, the medical industry organism, in the USA, in any case, is designed to operate as a parasitic infection. It must provide SOME symbiotic benefit to keep us from eradicating it completely, but it maximizes its own wealth and resources by KEEPING US AS SICK AS POSSIBLE FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE WITHOUT ACTUALLY KILLING US — and also encourages such bull$#!% as INVENTING NEW DISEASES TO CONVINCE US WE ARE SICK SO WE GO WASTE A DOCTOR’S VALUABLE TIME AND DEMAND SOME MEDICINE.

I’m looking at you, Latisse.

Until we fix that little design flaw — until the medical industry is redesigned to thrive ONLY WHEN WE OURSELVES DO, we will always be its prey instead of its beneficiary.

And yes, that means I think the current healthcare hoohah is simply rearranging deckchairs while the Titanic is sinking. But I am thrilled that people are beginning to realize that SOMETHING needs doing and are actively looking around for what to do — even if that means we’re going to be stuck with ol’ Frankenstein for a few years. He ought to be able to reorganize deckchairs like nobody’s business so we can get back to looking for a real fix.

[*]

Lucia de Berk’s conviction will go down as one of the most serious miscarriages of justice in Dutch legal history, according to the Dutch daily newspaper NRC.

I originally wrote about this case back around Halloween of 2007 here. If you haven’t read the background first, I recommend you go take a peek. It was some damned good writing, if I do say so myself — good enough to thoroughly alienate a few Dutch friends of mine.

Anyway, the Dutch equivalent to our Attorney General’s office has decided that there were actually no crimes committed, thus it’s pretty unlikely that Lucia de Berk is a murderess, serial or otherwise, and maybe she shouldn’t have spent all that time in jail away from her partner and growing daughter. It’ll take another month for the ruling judge to come back with his final verdict, and THEN there’s the matter of compensation for being unjustly imprisoned and having her life yanked out from under her feet like a cheap rug by a DA who was hot for the glory of putting away a rare pretty female serial killer.

She might not get as much recompense as I would’ve hoped because there were some problems with her qualifications for having gotten her job as a nurse in the first place, but anything would be good. Currently she’s on the dole because 1) she had a stroke in prison and is possibly worse off from that than she should be because no one was around (like, say, family) to notice quickly and get her to treatment and 2) no one will hire her for anything because, like, she’s still a convicted serial killer. Oh, but she’s NOT ACTUALLY on the dole because they don’t give out welfare to convicted serial killers.

But hey, at least she’s not still in jail.

This won’t be over until she has some kind of compensation in hand for what this failure of the Dutch legal system did to her. Let’s see what happens NEXT month.

[*]

I’m possibly not the right person to be writing e-mail marketing copy tutorials, but here goes:

1) Your promotional e-mail is an intrusion into someone else’s day. All other rules proceed from this one.

2) You get the subject line for free. Make it a summary, like a newspaper headline. If you resort to a clever trick to get someone to open your message AND THERE IS NO PAYOFF, they will resent you and not bother to open anything else from you, ever.

3) Yes, they actually clicked, but that doesn’t give you free reign. You now get MAYBE THREE TERSELY-WRITTEN PARAGRAPHS to get your point across. People are busy, mouse already hovering over the close box. If your point is below the scroll point — and many people are on phones and netbooks these days — consider it missed. If you have more to say, consider your e-mail an article abstract and link to the rest of your message elsewhere.

4) Marketing lingo and managerial buzzwords officially offend. Like bad breath or body odor. Just don’t. If you waste half a sentence with a meaningless phrase that is supposed to raise excitement and positive associations and contains no meaning, you have not only wasted time and space but goodwill from your reader. This communication technology is as dead as punched cards and paper tape. WRITE IN CLEAR, PLAIN ENGLISH.

5) Spurious font changes stop people’s brains from being able to interpret text. Seriously. It turns a stream of text into meaningless shapes. Pick a readable font, a readable color, and stick with it. Bold and italics are awesome if used sparingly. If you’ve used more than three fonts in a page’s worth of text, please shoot yourself so that someone effective can have your job. Also please stop using Comic Sans. Comic Sans gives the impression that anything written in it was actually a supposed joke that was faxed from office to office back in the seventies by automatons for whom ketchup is exciting.

6) Stop it with the inline graphics and attachments. You have no control over how your recipient’s e-mail client is going to handle them and you’re just making your message slow to load. And probably it will look crappy. And shove the meat of your message off the screen. If you must have an attachment, make sure it is small and NECESSARY. If you must present a graphical message, make it a web page and provide a link. If you must have a HUGE attachment, host it on a web site and let people download it at their leisure. The mail client on my phone will TRY ITS BEST to download your attached 23MB Powerpoint presentation with embedded video, but it will fail, and I will hate you.

7) Please include a signature block. For every piece of promotional copy, there should be a HUMAN BEING who is willing to take responsibility for having written and distributed it. More than four lines of contact info is obnoxious, so make it count.

8) MY BIGGEST POINTS WERE MADE IN ITEMS 1-3 because by now you have certainly stopped reading. Get it?

[*]

I understand Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion show on NPR isn’t exactly everyone’s favorite way to blow an hour or two of their weekend. While I can usually get a smile out of it, I will typically leave it up to chance as to whether I catch it.

But.

Embedded in this week’s (usually harmless) Powdermilk Biscuit Break is an extra-special, jaw-dropping message to our friends at Goldman Sachs that just has to be heard to be believed. Feel free to record it off the radio (just like old times!) and help me leave it on the voicemail for as many randomly selected extensions at Goldman Sachs as we can.

Listening info is here, including the link that will be available Monday to listen to it from the archives.

Share and enjoy.

[*]