demarquis

Detroit USA—ACX Mee­tups Every­where Fall 2024

• demarquis 26 Jul 2022 14:42 UTC

  −1 points

  −3

  in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: The Reader’s Guide to Op­ti­mal Mone­tary Policy

  The way a government normally services it’s debts is to create new money, and use that to pay off the debts. However, the principle way that government creates new money these days isn’t to print it, it’s to lower the interest rate so that private banks will borrow more money from it. This represents a credit, that then balances the debts the government owes (typically from selling bonds). Raise the interest rates, and banks will borrow less money from the government, tilting the balance toward debt. There is, however, another way to reduce debt, which is to sell fewer bonds.

• demarquis 26 Jul 2022 12:35 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: The Reader’s Guide to Op­ti­mal Mone­tary Policy

  One problem with monetary policy is that new money (lowered rates) isn’t distributed evenly across the population of consumers. It’s a little like a Pachinko machine, where you drop the ball in the top and hope it ends up in a particular bucket. It only works if people spend their savings, and right now, that hasn’t been happening. In theory, their bank should be spending it for them, in the form of business to business loans, but corporate lending has been somewhat disconnected from GDP growth for some time now, if you exclude security speculation from GDP growth (which I do because security markets are supposed to cause growth, not be the growth). One result has been increasing levels of wealth disparity. We don’t need more money in the system, we need to distribute what there is more evenly (not perfectly evenly).

  Confiscatory taxes, anyone?

• demarquis 4 Jul 2022 19:01 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: What Are You Track­ing In Your Head?

  The extent to which you can benefit from asking what someone is tracking in their head, and the degree to which they can usefully explain it to you, will depend critically on how much information, basic to the topic at hand, you two of you already share.

  You can learn more from a master, using this technique, the more you already knew.

  If “cognitive capacity” is the amount of information useful to some specific domain of problem solving one has in one’s head, then everyone on Earth has more or less the same cognitive capacity (excepting only people with some diagnosable mental disability). Everyone has, more or less, the same amount of information in their long term memory as everyone else, applicable to the problems they have had the most experience with during their lives to that point (controlling for age).

  If you ask why some people demonstrate greater ability to master certain problem-solving domains than other people do, then the answer lies in the way that human long term memory is organized. Our ability to learn new categories of things depends on our prior possession of categories of similar things: people assimilate new knowledge to old knowledge that shares similar characteristics. For example, the more types of animals one already knows, the easier it is to add another type of animal to memory, which will allow that person to make finer distinctions between specific animals (that’s not just a cat, it’s an American Longhair).

  “Tracking” information while considering someone’s explanation of a problem probably includes observing how closely new information corresponds to previously encoded categories. That certainly seems to be what Feynman was doing: he was able to apply a schema based on the characteristics of balls, along with information he knew about set theory, to a proposed set of new information from another expert in his field. When the new information deviated significantly from what he knew about sets of actual balls, he concluded that the new idea was “false” (ie, he could not assimilate the new information into the categories he already had).

  Therefore, my prediction is that the more advanced the student in a specific domain, the more they will be able to benefit from asking the teacher what they are tracking in their head, and the more elaborate the set of knowledge categories the teacher has already developed the easier it will be for the teacher to report tracking something that would be of benefit to the student (plus the degree to which the teacher is able to self-reflect on what is going on in their own head, an entirely different set of skills).

  In other words, it’s a technique that is most appropriate for advanced students, and skilled teachers.

• demarquis 29 Jun 2022 21:46 UTC

  3 points

  on: Non­profit Boards are Weird

  I am a former (now retired) management consultant and human resources trainer and manager. When I was professionally active, I specialized in non-profit and government clients. I recognize nearly everything that X said about non-profit governing boards, with the caveat that what he describes is typical for larger and more complex organizations (https://​​www.academia.edu/​​download/​​42331960/​​Nonprofit_Boards_Size_Performance_and_Ma20160207-32480-1x3h68o.pdf). There are very few good primers on non-profit governance (https://​​ideaexchange.uakron.edu/​​cgi/​​viewcontent.cgi?article=2482&context=akronlawreview) However, I would like to add a few additional details, based on my personal experiences.

  One of my clients was a government agency whose primary mission was to receive and distribute grant money to chronically unemployed residents of the local community. There were over a dozen different grants, each from a different federal or state agency or private foundation. Each of these funders had their own unique, very stringent reporting requirements, and to satisfy this requirement my client agency had hired twenty or so “grant administrators” whose job it was to monitor the services being delivered, how many recipients there were, compile reports and send them to the funders. When the local government hired a new agency director, one of the first things she tried to do was get these grant administrators to report summaries of this information to her, in a format that she believed would be maximally useful to the department as a whole. There was a great deal of resistance to this, to the point that many of the administrators simply refused to follow her instructions on the basis that they had limited time to do any more paperwork. When she tried to force the issue, they complained to certain members of the City Counsel, who took their side against the department director. Reporting to her was seen as less essential than reporting to the funding sources, because any compromise there could threaten the source of the revenue.

  It is common for larger non-profits and service delivery agencies to receive funds for multiple sources, each of which are required to be spent only on the specific services they were intended for. This means that money obtained this way cannot be mixed into a general overall budget, which is then dispensed by the organization’s executives at their discretion. The most common way for these organizations to ensure that this requirement is met is by organizing different projects groups, each of which is responsible for managing the funds obtained by a different funding source. Each of these will have their own project managers and project staff, which form a division within the overall organization. Such organizations can perhaps be better understood not as cohesive well integrated bureaucracies, but as a kind of mini conglomerate, with each project team as a kind of stand alone company within the larger umbrella organization. In such a conglomerate, the project managers might very well have more power over the services they are dispensing than the executives in charge of the organization as a whole.

  This will have obvious implications for a board of directors, who, being low engagement but high in power, will almost always defer to the funding sources, even to the point of undermining their own CEO, which they themselves have chosen. It’s generally just easier to read the funding requirements, which the agency will have agreed to in writing at the time the grant was accepted, and just defer to whomever is responsible for carrying out the terms of the agreement. This reduces the CEO to a kind of administrative caretaker, whose primary job is to find new sources of revenue when the current grants run out (and make sure the lights stay on).

  This is widely recognized among management professionals as problematic for the overall performance of the organization (https://​​journals.sagepub.com/​​doi/​​pdf/​​10.1177/​​0899764099283002). Non-profits, as the original post pointed out, are driven by their missions, not by profits, and therefore must depend on the clarity of their mission to derive any performance metrics for the organization as a whole. When funders impose strict requirements on the disbursement of their funds, they almost never consult the mission statement of the organizations that receive their money. At most, they might give lip service when selecting a set of recipients during the proposal review process, but once the contract is signed, there is little incentive for the grant givers to care much what the rest of the recipient organization is doing. Most granting agencies are non-profit foundations or government agencies themselves, and they have their own boards and sources of revenue to placate, their own agency performance metrics to meet, and all that depends on the success of the projects they fund, not on the projects other funders support even in the same organization. Therefore the non-profit which is receiving funds from multiple sources may find themselves stretched in multiple directions, “chasing the money”, and not in a position to either pursue overall organization effectiveness, nor even to respond in an effective way to the changing needs of the community they serve.

  So the way in which US non-profits are organized to receive and disburse money for services to the community has certain built in flaws to it (much of this is codified in state and federal tax law). All of this will be more true for large, complex organizations than smaller ones. Non-profits that only have one funding source, or one dominant source, or who are able to raise most of their own funds, have the freedom to follow a different dynamic. My consulting firm has a philosophy that organizational improvement starts with fundraising. You then follow the money until it reaches the clients and try to measure the effects. Ideally you come up with a “service unit per dollar per client” that makes sense for that particular organization, and that can become the basis of identifying areas of improvement (https://​​bizfluent.com/​​info-10062727-cost-per-unit-service-cost-per-client-outcome-cost-per-services-completion.html).

  I think one of the core duties of the governing board is to be aware of this information and use it as feedback every few years and use it for the purpose of strategic planning. This speaks to another principle that I haven’t seen published anywhere but is based on my own personal experience: The direction that the board provides, and their ability to provide it, depends on the quantity and quality of the information they have. Ideally this is provided to them by the CEO, who therefore has an opportunity to develop a relationship with the board and exercise strategic leadership. But the board’s job is to review this information independently, discuss it among themselves, and provide feedback to the CEO regarding what direction they think the organization should be going in. But to do that, you have to stop chasing the money, and put the mission first, the essence of strategic planning (https://​​c4npr.org/​​wp-content/​​uploads/​​2020/​​07/​​per_brief_tenkeys.pdf).

  Although I wouldn’t necessarily put it this way with my clients, the most fundamental decision the board can make under these circumstances is “what should we do when the terms of the current grant runs out” with the understanding that “renew the grant” isn’t the default option. It can be wrenching for the board and the executive to confront the risk of letting grants go, and looking for new ones, but that’s the most strategic decision they can make. Maybe they want to go for a different set of grants, or instead of grants they may want to build up a pool of small donors, or go to fee for service, or some other arrangement. Considering these options is what gives the executive and the board working together the freedom to even have an organizational strategy.

  But this approach is non-obvious and hard. So I would say that the a key approach to improving governing board effectiveness, in addition to various features of board structure and process, is a recognition of the importance of strategic governance.

• demarquis 31 May 2022 23:29 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Pato Lubricado’s comment on: Chap­ter 39: Pre­tend­ing to be Wise, Pt 1

  For my part, I think Dumbledore could have made a more compelling argument. One can easily claim that one should fear death, and that in fact everyone alive already does, whatever their belief system says. But saying that is like saying one should wash one’s hands before eating, until someone washes their hands until they bleed. Or that protecting people against harm is a good thing, until someone enslaves everyone against their will in order to better protect them...

  Dark wizards do not merely fear death, or simply desire immortality, like we all do. They are obsessed with it—consumed with it, to the point of a mental illness, such that they are willing to do any harm to anyone in order to avoid their own mortality. That was the element in Voldomort’s psyche that Dumbledore couldn’t understand.

  I don’t think Harry understands it either.

• demarquis 30 May 2022 0:57 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: GinHindew110’s comment on: Chap­ter 27: Empathy

  Neither have I, but I would have understood immediately, while still lying on the floor. In fact, I would have anticipated it. I think it’s a matter of how cynical you are, which is sometimes a function of how often you were disappointed in people as a child or teenager.