Taking a Whack Against Comcast

This week Comcast came to our apartment building and did their usual "two-phase" installation for a new customer. It's always the same - we've seen them do this maybe 8 times in the past 10 years.

First, one guy comes, gets what seems like 100 extra feet of bright orange cable, and runs it from the junction box at one end of the building across the middle of the lawn, across the sidewalk at the entrance to the building, around my mother's plants, up over a patio wall and down into a snaky spiral of an extra 40 feet or so, left on their patio before it connects to the service entrance there.

After a few days of disbelief that they really consider this "done", we call our landlords, who call Comcast, who sends a second guy to do it right. The second guy always seems very sincerely irritated with the first guy. In a way, too bad - I was thinking if my mom tripped on it, we'd be set for life once our attorneys got done with them. Then I dismiss that thought, mostly.

Anyway, it baffles us how they make money doing this, let alone good customer relations. It makes me wonder again if this is even visible at the top, or if every instance of this is discounted and written off as "grumpy customer - isolated incident." It has to be the latter.

It reminds me of when my then wife and I got "Swine flu" shots back about 1980. We'd been healthy for years, got the shot, and woke up the next day very sick. We were sick for days. When we reported this to our doctor, he said this couldn't be a result of the shot, because it didn't have that reported side-effect. We asked if he was going to report our experience. He said no, there was no point, because this was clearly an isolated coincidence. Hmm.

In that mood I was perversely delighted to see the article in this mornings's Washington Post
titled "Taking a Whack Against Comcast", about a 75-year old lady who took her irritation at poor customer service to a new level, involving a hammer. I won't spoil it for you.

Still, it seems a prototype of a reality that belongs in the comic strip Dilbert. How can a company's top management be so blind, or uncaring, or out of touch with reality that they can't believe this is happening, or, believe it but don't care?

The first impression is to say "Well, they are bad people." However, I warned against that repeatedly in recent posts, and suspect that they are actually, as bizarre as it seems, good people who are victims (on their end) of looking at reality through the wrong end of the telescope, and not being able to see what all the fuss is about, and therefore writing it off as "Well, they are bad people" (that is, the customers who complain.)

This problem is so widespread, among companies, that it becomes really important. And when the companies are hospitals, say, as the issue at Kaiser earlier this week in California, the problem becomes life-threatening at the bottom, and then, probably to their surprise, life-threatening to the whole company at the top, who "never saw it coming."

No one wins from this, and no one really investigates "it" because it's so "obvious" to people on each end that the problem is due to "bad people" on the other end.

Those are the kinds of situations we study in Systems Dynamics, and in books such as Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline - where "the system" is actually the problem, but no one understands how that happens, so everyone assumes the breakdowns are due to "idiots" or evil people at "the other end."

That's the challenge for the conflict-resolution crowd - to disentangle all the entrenched blame from a problem that is as subtle as the error in M. C. Esher's Waterfall, and then to find the structural "system" problem actually responsible for the resulting perceptions and behavior.

Yes, I think there are "bad people" - but way fewer than we commonly assume. Hybrid scale-dependent vision seems to me the most common culprit in setting the stage for things to go wrong, and then feedback loops close the trap and lock it in place.

Comcast could probably save enough money if they fixed this problem on their end to relieve the pressure that makes them push the first installers so hard that their only choice is to rush and run. There are two "stable states" of the system -- doing a good job and making a decent profit, and doing a terrible job, with everyone unhappy, and making less profit. The problem is that the middle state is worse than either of those, so the system gets hung up on the "less profit" local maximum (the top of the little hill) and can't find its way down and back up to the top of the larger profit hill, because "down is bad" and pressure to make profit is so high.

The challenge is getting people to believe long enough that the "obvious culprits" might be innocent that they can step back and look at what is really going wrong.

Federal budget stalemate hurts the poor

While many organizations are inconvenienced, unable to plan or budget due to the failure of Congress to pass a budget by the start of this year (October 1), the limbo is literally killing individuals who depend on that funding. What isn't said is that federal budgets assume that the price of food is the same today as it was in 1989 when the guidelines were written.

It's part of the psychology that tells us "Inflation rose at a modest rate of 2% last month, excluding the volatile food and energy components." In other words, the rate of inflation experienced by corporations may have been 2%, and that experienced by individuals more like 20%, but you'd never know from those numbers.

The exclusion makes sense if food prices shoot up and down, averaging zero change. The exclusion sabotages the truth if food prices, gas prices, and heating oil prices just keep going up. With oil passing $88 a barrel yesterday, it's not clear how many hundreds of thousands or millions of people are not going to be able to afford heat this winter.

Maybe, Congress is unaware of the "hybrid" or fractal quality of this set of numbers as well, hiding the pain individuals feel from the comfort of on high. It seems that way from below. See Hybrid Images and Hybrid Reality. It would be a different kind of tragedy if the government is not responding because it actually appears to sincere people who would care if they knew that there is nothing important to care about. My "hybrid" posts discuss that possibility.

Certainly other guidelines to policy, such as the Gross Domestic Product, completely mask damaging actions and count spending our nations resources as "income" with no corresponding charge against "assets". (See Genuine Progress Indicator( Canada) :

GDP-based measures were never meant to be used as a measure of progress, as they are today. In fact, activities that degrade our quality of life, like crime, pollution, and addictive gambling, all make the economy grow. The more fish we sell and the more trees we cut down, the more the economy grows. Working longer hours makes the economy grow. And the economy can grow even if inequality and poverty increase.

The more rapidly we deplete our natural resources and the more fossil fuels we burn, the faster the economy grows. Because we assign no value to our natural capital, we actually count its depreciation as gain, like a factory owner selling off his machinery and counting it as profit.

and the US "Redefining progress", Wikipedia on the Genuine Progress Indicator with a link to the one article that is a must read if you can only read one. (But you need a subscription or to go to the library to get it.)

"If the GDP Is Up, Why Is America Down?" by Clifford Cobb, Ted Halstead, and Jonathan Rowe. Atlantic Monthly, October 1995, pp. 59-78.

Also see: Wake Up, the American Dream is over, Guardian, June 8, 2006:

Even America's richest think they're getting too many tax breaks from a government determined to keep the poor in their place. As poverty in the US grows, Paul Harris wonders what happened to the Land of Opportunity

This flawed accounting is like your child suddenly discovering that they can buy things on your credit card or their cell phone without having to "pay anything" and going on a spree. The result of that flawed perception, as we've demonstrated in our Systems Dynamics class, is that things just look just great, better than normal in fact, in a climbing curve until they abruptly hit the limit when it crashes to zero. This is what happened to the Georges Bank, once the best fishing in the world off Cape Cod, now an underground desert and junk yard.

People only respond to things they see, that seem real to them.

Supplies Dwindle at Food Pantries as Financing Bill Stalls in Washington New York Times Oct 18, 2007. by Winter Miller. emphasis added.

On a recent weekday at the BedStuy Campaign Against Hunger, one of Brooklyn’s largest food pantries, shelves that are usually piled high with staples like rice and canned meats were empty, a stark illustration of the crisis facing emergency food providers across the city.

The Brooklyn organization is among about 1,000 food pantries and soup kitchens supplied by the Food Bank for New York City, the largest distributor of free food in the city, whose mission has been crippled by what officials describe as its worst food shortage in years.

At its sprawling warehouse in Hunts Point, in the Bronx, the Food Bank is storing about half what it housed in recent years....

“It’s the first time in a few years that I could walk into the warehouse and see empty shelves,” said Lucy Cabrera, the president and chief executive of the Food Bank, which helps feed about 1.3 million people a year.

Officials at the Food Bank say the bare shelves stem from a steady decline in federal emergency food aid, though a farm bill stalled in the United States Senate could increase that aid.

According to a study to be released today by the Food Bank and Cornell University, New York City receives a little more than half the amount of emergency food annually from the federal government that it did three years ago. The shortfall is occurring as the number of families and individuals relying on soup kitchens and food pantries in New York City has risen to 1.3 million from 1 million since 2004.

The problem besetting the citywide Food Bank is also affecting providers of emergency food nationwide who are supplied by America’s Second Harvest, the country’s largest hunger relief organization, which assists 50,000 providers. Federal food donations to food banks have been stagnant since 2002.

But organizations have been hit hardest by declines in a separate federal program that buys excess crops like peaches and potatoes from farmers and then donates them to food banks. Those donations have shrunk to 89 million pounds last year from 251 million pounds in 2003.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York and a member of the Senate Finance Committee, says he is optimistic that the farm bill will pass within the next month. He said the delay involved sections of the bill unrelated to the nutrition portion.

Separately, the House of Representatives voted in July to increase the budget for food stamps and other nutrition programs by $4 billion, which would include an increase in emergency food assistance to $250 million from $140 million. It also would require an automatic increase in food assistance based on the rate of inflation, addressing one of the reasons food banks are now struggling.

“It’s devastating,” said the Rev. Melony Samuels, a minister at the Full Gospel Tabernacle of Faith who oversees the food pantry. “It has gotten so bad.”

In better times, the pantry might get 190 cases of assorted foods every week; now the shipments are much smaller. One recent week, all it got was six cases of peanut butter and pasta.

“In order to keep food on our shelves, we need to roll in $5,000 per month easily, and you’re looking at half or less of that coming in,” Ms. Samuels said, adding that she might not be able to stock her pantry with turkeys for Thanksgiving.

See also: Flash, US Solves World Hunger

By Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 16, 2006; A01

The U.S. government has vowed that Americans will never be hungry again. But they may experience "very low food security."

Discussion of hybrid images

Detailed commentary on slide from my recent presentation

Slide 29 - Albert Einstein or Marilyn Monroe?

(picture credit: That picture is the work of researcher Gregory T Huang, from New Scientist's 31 March 2007 issue at newscientist.com, subscription required. The original covers a larger portion of the torso and the effect is much more pronounced.

===== Extended commentary on how the way humans process images can cause interpersonal conflict ==

You can see smaller partial versions of it here. The MIT Hybrid Image page is here with a three faces that are both smiling or/and frowning, depending on your distance. This illustrates the problem with the terms "or" and "and" when considering phenomena that cover a broad range of scales simultaneously. It can cause amazing conflict by two viewing groups who can't understand why the other group, looking at the "same thing" on a different scale or from a different distance, can possibly be so stupid as to see the "wrong" thing.

Another "angry illusion" on www.hemmy.net shows an angry and a calm face that change to the other expresion as you move further away.

It may be that a number of international conflicts are due to this exact phenomenon, or its analog, where those close to the front lines perceive very clearly one thing, and those at a comfortable distance away perceive something entirely different, leading to total internal chaos because of the mistaken stereotype that a perception "must be one or the other". It could explain some "you had to be there" excuses.
The sad truth is, like thinking there must be a "best", this is another comforting and simplifying error on the part of humans. Some things are both "chickens and eggs", and almost everything takes on that property as soon as you close the feedback loop of causality so A causes B which in turn causes A, and let it stabilize into a strange resonance state that we simply never see when feedback is not involved.

Regardless, this is one way that the situation at "the front lines" of an organization might be astoundingly different than the way it is so clearly and unambiguously viewed at the top. Repeatedly, the question asked by CEO's or top officials is "Why bother going down there? I can see from here!" The answer is that even you would see why if you went. That's why Toyota has a policy of "Genchi Genbutsu" -

You have to go down there and take the time necessary to settle down and actually see things from that viewpoint before you rush to judgment or speak or come up with "a plan" that won't have such a high risk of being nonsense or worse.

All our images, including mental ones that use the same hardware in our brains, have the problem of "filling in" gaps for us (to be "helpful", like Microsoft Word's paperclip) whether we asked them to or not. There is no way for us to know by looking at our mental picture that our head has papered over details it couldn't make sense of and replaced them with something that made more sense to it. (almost the definition of a magnetic "stereotype" that grabs hold if we get anywhere near it.)

Life is "fractally complex" and sometimes the fine-grained details change the entire equation. There are shapes, like the famous snowflake curve, that can be filled with paint but not painted. Our intuition misguides us. The "genchi genbutsu" rule of thumb is probably the safest bet.

Along with the other rule of thumb - "the time to furl your mainsail is the first time it occurs to you that maybe you should furl your mainsail." If it occurs to you that maybe you should go and look for yourself, don't put it off.

(from Rules of Thumb.)

Put in other terms, it's possible that there is way more energy in the high-frequency "details" than the low-frequency "overview", and that the details do NOT "go away" and can NOT be "put off till later."

That is pretty much the case with the Escher "Waterfall" picture. The tiny details that were wrong, that our eyes "helpfully" insist on discarding entirely for us from each local area of the picture, actually are coherently and systematically wrong and do not "cancel out." They are not "negligible" precisely for that reason.

In mathematical physics terms, we are used to the high-self-energy, low-interaction-energy world, where the inner product is
dominated by |a| and |b|. We tend to forget about <,> and can get away with it when thinking about rocks and simple machines. But when we get to social interactions, or plasma physics, or galactic centers and black holes, the interaction term <.> dominates, and the self-energy terms are negligible. 1 + 1 becomes dominated by the nature of "+" and doesn't care much about "1" any more. We have about zero intuition regarding that world, although we can compute the equations for it and simulate it.

Our problem is that we are trying to use cold-earth mathematics to design policies for high-energy social interactions. We try to leave out all the feedback, and all the cross-product interaction terms, and then are baffled that our results don't match the data. Hmmm.

The lessons we should learn from "system dynamics" or books like "Feedback control of dynamic systems" is that not only is the feedback usually not negligible, it actually dominates every other factor. If you want a good "first approximation", leave out all the other stuff and put back in the feedback structure and see what that gives you!

Are important vertical or horizontal loops clearly broken? Are unexpected loops clearly present, given observed behavior? Start there. If you get a "hit" don't bother with any other details until you get that fixed, because they'll all become irrelevant as soon as you reconnect, or disconnect the flow power loops. These are the kinds of "facts" that are way more important than legacy "data" that so confidently (and incorrectly) extrapolate to tell you your quest is "impossible" and "nothing can be done about that."

This whole subject touches a point that Frank Drake and Carl Sagan used to make repeatedly in class, back in my astrophysics days at Cornell University in the late 1960's. (Sagan was briefly, my advisor before he left for JPL to work on launching Voyager) I was a grad student at the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research, acronym "CRSR", but we all called it "Charlie's Radio Service and Repair. " The group did many things, including running the world's largest radio-telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico - made famous in the movie Contact (Jodie Foster) and also some James Bond movie where they fought in huge antenna.

Speaking of which, I see the Arecibo radio telescope will close if they can't raise $4 million this year. It's a sad loss - I was yelled at once by the designer of the antenna (who was my roommate) because I wasn't"symmetric about my z-axis". That was the night, after two months of struggling, he finally solved the 4-page equation for his PhD thesis, which he couldn't resist phrasing in the thesis as "It is obvious that ... "

But the passing of Arecibo, a very large but single dish, is part of the larger trend that synthesized virtual arrays made of of may smaller component telescopes are far cheaper to make and maintain and extend. As with "supercomputers", they stopped making "one" huge computer finally and now are grappling with the problem of how to get 800,000 smaller computers to "work together".

Amazing how that question keeps coming up.

Anyway - in what I term "Drake's Other law", Frank taught us that

Every time humans move to looking at a different level of the electromagnetic spectrum, we don't see just different sides of the same old things -- we see ENTIRELY NEW PREVIOUSLY UNSUSPECTED things going on.

So, back in visual days, no one knew the center of the galaxy was off in the direction of Sagittarius, but blocked by dust. We had to look in the radio frequency spectrum to discover that we were, like the Andromeda galaxy, in the midst of a huge "dish" of stars, about 2/3 of the way out from the center in one of the spiral arms.

My point is that, the same thing seems to be true of our observations of this "LIFE" thing we are part of. Every time we rotate the microscope lenses and change to a larger view, the whole nature of LIFE changes, as dramatically as Marilyn Monroe's image changed into Albert Einstein when you changed the viewing scale.

I warned about this in another post as well, discussing the properties of "mid-field" components of a radiation pattern of an antenna. The field is "obvious" and we can measure it reliably with technical equipment, and it clearly falls of as the inverse of the radius.

I said then

The cleanest and least ambiguous example, physically, is the middle-range field of a radiating dipole antenna. As discussed in a prior post, very near the antenna the power falls off as the inverse of distance. At long distances, the stable pattern can be measured to be falling off as the inverse cube of distance. And, in between, in the really annoying and complicated mid-range field, the pattern is unstable and appears, if measured, to fall off as the inverse square of distance. Worse, in the mid-range, some fields build up that behave as if they are about to be radiated into space, but then sort of change their mind and get basically sucked back into the antenna.

Very near the antenna, less than 1/10 of a wavelength away, life is good and the equations are easy. Very far from the antenna, over 100 wavelengths away, life is good and the equations are different, but easy.

In between, things get extraordinarily messy. Power seems to get created out of thin air, then go away again, if you "neglect" all the terms that are "negligible" at each end, but not in the middle.

There's a lesson there. In the creation of LIFE ON EARTH, we're in the "middle" part. You can't assume any term is "negligible" -- you have to check it out and be sure it is. And even then, you could be wrong tomorrow about what it turns out was true today.

You end up learning what it means to say "The future isn't what it used to be."
If the past changes in the future, and the future has changed from the past, you really can't be sure any extrapolation of the "present" is reliable, whether you can "prove it" or not.