Do you have questions about the site? Write to bruce at perens.com .
List of all articles we've ever published.
Source Code
Developer's Documentation
RSS
XML Sitemap
XML News Sitemap
![[Valid RSS]](/images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")
Credit where credit is due.
A few years ago, the Christmas turkey had been in the oven for an hour or so when "pop" and the oven died.
To me, who grew up differently, it wasn't such a big deal, take the turkey dish out of the oven, put it on a hotplate on low, and cover the whole thing, three hours later it was cooked, beautifully.
"Her indoors" refused to eat it, having declared 3 hours previously when the oven died that Christmas dinner was "ruined", because as far as she was concerned once the oven died there was no other way to cook it.
I hear the same sort of attitude now, but this time about credit, without credit you can neither live, nor run a business, but it is just like the turkey story, if X is the only way you know of doing something, you simply give up when X no longer works.
That's kind of what we have now with the credit crisis, for the past 25 years at least credit has been universally available, so the chances are that the person reading this has never known a life without "easy" credit, so cannot imagine how it can be lived.
Businesses, we are told, depend on lines of credit, to pay wages, to bridge the gap between order and delivery, to invest in production equipment.
No credit = no business, no employment, and total economic meltdown, the turkey is raw and inedible.
But the fact is, this just is not so. No business needs credit, but a full generation has grown up knowing no other way.
In fact, the generation of businesses and employees who have grown up with easy credit are completely blind to the fact that not only is there another way, but their way of involving easy credit in everything is a sure sign of lack of skill, experience, and acumen.
To cook a turkey you apply heat, and heat is work, provided your heat source is sufficient to overcome losses and energetic enough to provide an adequate cooking temperature, it does not matter what your heat source is or how big it is. A few candles wouldn't have done the job, nor would an oil lamp, but a pressurised oil lamp would have... when I grew up a "cooker" was a an oil tank full of paraffin with two circular wicks, and the "oven" was a tinplate box that sat on top of the two wicks.
So doing a job, whether it be cooking a turkey or making widgets, is done by applying work, not by applying credit. Sure, credit will buy you a microwave, but now you're slicing pieces off all future work to pay for the credit.
The newspapers here are now talking about all the poor students, finishing their courses this year to find that corporate graduate employment programmes have gone "pop" like our oven did at Christmas past, and there these poor students are, saddled with "student debt" of around UK£ 30,000 each.
Well I'm sorry, but anyone who can come out of 3 years of tertiary education, with a degree purporting that they are more intelligent than the norm, saddled with massive debts like these is demonstrating in the clearest way possible that they are stupid and unthinking, with a vastly over inflated opinion of their own abilities and worth.
In about 1 more year's time the girl will get her degree, BSc in Business Management, with an additional minor qualification in Accountancy.
Arguably, economic conditions at that time will probably be even worse than they are now, with all the current university students finishing their degrees and saddled with debt.
However, she will be awarded her degree and she will owe precisely zero debt.
K came into my life at 14, a confused and resentful (granted, with some reason) child, and thanks to the support of the school system and english society managed to stay that way until she left school.
When K left school at 16 it was a bit of a quandary to determine what, if anything, she had learned in 11 years or primary and secondary schooling, long division was out there somewhere with the Higgs Boson and FTL spaceships, vocab was limited to a few thousand words, all from pop songs or television soaps.
She had had a paper round for a couple of years, but now school was over and she had basically graduated without any of the worthless qualifications that schools bestow on their product, perhaps the main thing that school had bestowed upon her was the belief that, Pink Floyd style, she didn't need no education, and anyway, she wasn't clever, so one of the few accessible jobs was cleaning rooms at a local motel.
I can distinctly remember saying to her when she got her first month's pay packet, "so you work X hours a week, you worked for four weeks, does your wage meet or exceed the Legal National Minimum Wage?"
After having patiently explained what the minimum wage was, and its amount, she attempted (reluctant doesn't come into it, I literally had to force her) with pen and paper and electronic calculator, to calculate whether or not she was being paid a wage that met the legal minimum.
30 minutes later she still did not have the answer. It was utterly clear to me that in 30 years she would not have solved this problem, as the only thing she knew for sure was that she was too thick to solve such a difficult problem, so she just fiddled and sulked, knowing from experience that eventually the problem would go away, given enough time something would come along, maybe the bell for the end of class.
Something had to be done, and I was there on the spot, and at 16 she was now a young adult, not just a girl child.
I'll admit, I was tough on the kid, making a point of telling her that real life and the real world out there was orders of magnitude tougher, because real life and the real world literally didn't give a shit about her.
For her 18th birthday present I took her to a bookshop and bought here a proper (not concise) Dictionary, and from that point on in conversation any time I used a word she didn't understand I told her to look it up, read the definition, look up any words in the definition she didn't understand, and then tell me (with dictionary closed) what the word meant.
By the time she was 19 I had pushed her into applying, on spec, for a job as a receptionist at a local 4 star hotel. I say "pushed" because despite the fact that she was learning and improving herself and had grown as far as she could at the Motel, where she was now Receptionist, she still thought she wasn't good enough.
By the time she was 20 she was working in a 4 star hotel and enjoying it, but realising that her lack of education let her down, so I told her to do something about it, and we enrolled her into the Open University.
She pays for the OU courses herself out of her wages, (not inconsiderable sums, the accountancy section alone is 2,000 UK Pounds) and studies while holding down a full time job.
Today as I type this she is about a year from completing her BSc degree course, she is Reception Manager, she has never owed or borrowed money, no credit cards, loans, hire purchase or overdrafts. She is 23 years old and she herself finds it difficult to look back six or seven short years, she finds it unsettling to look at what she was, and what the future held for her.
Yes, I pushed her, yes, I coached her, yes I encouraged and supported and advised her, but, the fact is she is the one who went to work every day for those seven years, she is the one who came home and studied the dictionary and started reading, she is the one who studies her degree course and passes each stage with flying colours.
However, quite apart from the success she has made of her career and education to date, the actual process itself has of necessity taken a confused and resentful child with negligible self esteem and self worth and turned her into a thoroughly pleasant young woman.
For years while her school contemporaries drank deeply of the "entitled" society and adorned themselves with the trappings of the easy credit society, she put actual work into the job, and now she has all the trappings she wants, but she owns them outright and worked (hard) for every last thing, plus, she has something far more valuable, she has that untapped, unsullied and uncompromised potential for the future.
She is not indentured, she owes nobody, she owes nothing (she says she owes me a debt that can never be repaid, I tell her this is another lesson that takes years to learn, "pass it on") and she is beholden to no-one. She has never allowed herself to become compromised.
I'm reminded of the old Oscar Widle joke.
Wilde "Madam, would you sleep with me for a thousand guineas?"
(a guinea was one pound and one shilling, 105 pence in new money)
Woman "Why, of course Mr Wilde!"
an hour passes
Wilde "Madam, would you sleep with me for a single guinea?"
Woman "Why, Mr Wilde, what do you take me for! A prostitute?"
Wilde "Madam, we have already settled that, now we are arguing about the price."
Which pretty neatly sums up this new generation that know no other way than easy credit.
They literally cannot conceive of any other way of living, either as individuals or as businessmen, and so in sure and certain knowledge that the world is flat, than man will suffocate at speeds above that which a galloping horse can achieve, that man will never fly, that the earth is at the centre of the crystal spheres, the only responses they can contemplate are the responses of the born and bred prostitute or indentured servant.
In a world where all drug companies make prozac, all doctors prescribe it and all patients take it you will not find any solutions to the drug problem by consulting the pharmaceutical companies, the doctors or the patients.
In a world where all financial institutions, businesses and consumers live on easy credit you will not find any solutions to the problems by consulting banks, managers or consumers.
Worse still, those who have the answers, like the girl, will not be listened to, because, much like her looking back at what she was when she left school at 16, the diagnosis makes for extremely uncomfortable reading, it is much easier to take another of mother's little helpers and live another day on easy credit and wait until the bell rings for the end of class and the problem goes away, as it always has in the past, at least, within the timeframe of their experience.
The girl is proof that even today, it takes nothing more than a willingness to work exclusively for yourself and not for the usury of credit for six or seven years to transform utterly your life and to transform permanently your future.
K isn't especially gifted, she isn't especially smart, she is quite ordinary in every way, she didn't have any special opportunities, and she didn't travel a road free of pitfalls, nor was she perfect in her attempts.
She made mistakes, she missed opportunities, she made a full complement of cock-ups, some major, but she persevered, and that, more than anything else, is the reason that she is where she is today, and faces a future as full of promise as she does.
If she can do it, anyone can.
Looking ahead time can seem to be a very long road indeed, but that same period of time in a rear view mirror is just the blink of an eye.
It has taken us 30+ years to completely dismantle a culture and society where we worked, and to replace it with a live now, pay later, society, and now the waiter has come with the bill and everyone is dashing for the toilet, hoping someone else will be left with the bill, hoping the bell for the end of class will ring.
We can turn around, we can go back to giving credit only where it is due, and in six or seven years time we can look back and say, truthfully "that wasn't actually that bad, and just look at me now and the future I have!"
But we won't, even in extremis, not unless someone in authority, both moral and actual, makes a stand, and as I look around me I see no hope whatsoever of any of our "leaders" filling those shoes.
That is work for individuals.
Given that we have a technological and technocratic society, that is work for technological and technocratic individuals.
This is work for the plethora of small, one, two and three man band commercial software houses and widget makers, this is work for the Open Source community.
Just imagine, if you will, the commenting readership of Technocrat.
Imagine such a group of individuals that happen to live in one place, imagine that they give what time they have, anything from one to five days a week, working as a team, going out into the small, independent, business community, giving freely of time and expertise.
Imagine what that region would look like six or seven years later when all that perseverance starts paying off in spades. When all those small, independent businesses are debt free and any work they do is not sliced off for future usury payments.
The local 2 man plastic retailer who was helped to build his own IT system and CNC machinery for a few thousand dollars, instead of having to borrow 20k from the bank for an IT system and 200k for a CNC machine, with a 3 year depreciation you just saved that small independent company what amounts to a tax of over seventy thousand dollars a year.
Suddenly their products are cheaper, signmakers and other can afford to buy the product, and the parasitic taxes of usury and live now pay later are replaced with the productivity of reinvested, self interested, selfish work.
One of the old Directors of Rolls Royce said, and I paraphrase, "There are three ways to create wealth, you can dig it up, you can grow it, or you can work for it, anything else is just shifting bits of paper around."