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Bye Bye Facebook

2025 is a year for shedding extraneous baggage; I deleted my Facebook account. Facebook has been circling around my cancel drain hole from the day I first signed on. Mark Zuckerberg’s recent decision to cancel fact-checking was the straw that broke this old camel’s aching back. Read on for my complicated position on Facebook and justification for my decision.

You might guess from my dithering, I’m still not certain I made the right decision– I invite your comments.

To begin, my software engineer self has never admired Facebook. Their technology has never impressed me like Google’s search engine cleverness or Microsoft’s steady improvement of their operating system and office utilities. I took Zuckerberg’s motto, “move fast and break things,” as an insult to the software profession. Any idiot can move fast and break things. Engineers move fast and make things.

Facebook was a bulletin board with a graphic interface. La di dah.

For the next fifteen years, I was tolerant. Facebook provides a simple entrance to computer communications for folks who know little about computers. It gathered up family and friend diasporas, giving them an opportunity to exchange news and photos of babies, kittens, memorable meals, and birthday parties without taking a class on computers. A misguided cousin uses Facebook as a platform to broadcast groan inducing puns and dad jokes. Other friends voice snarky commentary on late-stage capitalism and income inequality. I enjoyed looking in on and occasionally sneaking in my “likes” and comments.

I don’t begrudge the targeted advertising on Facebook pages; everyone, even a billionaire, is entitled to make a buck to survive in this hostile world. With little to hide, I don’t fret much about privacy. On the technical side, I was impressed with the reliability of the service as it scaled to manage peta and zettabytes of data.

Facebook code running on servers in data centers all over the U.S. and the world improves lives without requiring their users to know anything of markup languages or programming logic.

The dark side of Facebook is the feed. If all I ever saw when I open Facebook were posts from me and my friends, I wouldn’t have a quarrel with Facebook. I wouldn’t want fact checking. I already know who among my friends are trustworthy. The ones I don’t trust, I like to keep tabs on their lies.

But my feed is cluttered with posts from people and entities that are not my friends and whom I know nothing about. Facebook has chosen these posts for me with their feed stuffing algorithm. I resent that Facebook chooses stuff that attracts my attention like house wiring diagrams or woodworking demonstrations to post on my feed. These tempting posts waste my time. I’m irritated when I discover I’ve spent ten minutes futzing on Facebook when I could have been in the kitchen refining my recipe for scratch-made bean with bacon soup or deciding which infinitives are worth splitting.

I frequently asked myself if my cousin’s puns and jokes were worth imperfect bean with bacon soup. Up until now, since I have never cared whether an infinitive is split or not, I stuck with my cousin.

When I read that the unasked for crap on my Facebook feed would no longer be fact checked, that Mark Zuckerberg no longer cares if my feed is filled with malicious twists on truth, I realized that my bean with bacon soup needs serious work.

Maybe a touch of cayenne.

Bye bye Facebook.

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Rereading W. Edwards Deming

I’m not feeling optimistic about the U.S. If there was ever a time for a U.S. turnaround, it’s 2025.

The bed rock of Deming’s method is respect for all the participants; the hot-shot CEO and the assistant janitor both contribute equally to the success of the enterprise. If everyone today took Deming to heart, the decade would turnaround in an instant.

Boeing, a company I respected, even idolized, forty years ago is in shambles. 3M, another company I once admired, is accused of foisting forever-chemicals on us, and now we’re supposed to get rid of our black plastic kitchen utensils because they are poisoning us.

We’re about to inaugurate a president who claims to be a business genius but went bankrupt running New Jersey casinos. He’s such a blunderer at moral corruption, the usual play ground of political types, he’s a convicted felon. Not my idea of success.

This week, I decided it was time to go to the all-time turnaround king, W. Edwards Deming, for advice.

About fifteen years ago, I wrote a book on computing standards called Cloud Standards. I covered ISO/IEC 270001, which is a basis for most IT security plans. Cloud computing services, such as Amazon Web Services, request public audits of their compliance to ISO 270001 aiming to increase their customers’ confidence in their IT security practices. 270001, as do many IT governance schemes, relies heavily on W. Edwards Deming’s Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle.

Consequently, I became interested in W. Edwards Deming; I read a number of his books and studied his work. In the 1950s, Deming went to Japan to advise industrialists on running their companies while they struggled to recover from WWII. Within fifteen years, Japan went from a bombed out and defeated ruin to the thriving second largest economy on the planet. They attributed their success largely to Deming’s tutelage.

In the 1980s, Ford Motor Corporation had trailed behind General Motors in automobile sales and profitability since the halcyon days of Henry Ford and the Model T. Seeing the success of Honda, Toyota, and Nissan, they brought in Deming. Following his advice, FMC soon took the lead among U.S. automakers in competing against the onslaught of well-designed and precision-built Japanese automobiles.

Maybe it’s time to listen to Deming’s advice. He died in 1996, so we can’t talk to him, but he left behind several books and many papers.

Deming applied statistical analysis to manufacturing and management. You might expect his method would be to measure productivity precisely and design processes around time and motion studies of worker efficiency.

Deming rejected all of that. Instead, he recommended abolishing performance reviews. The originator of Total Quality Management looked on product inspections with disfavor.  

His most popular work, Out Of the Crisis, was published in 1982. He wrote to address the crisis of American industry in the 1980s when Japan produced better cars at lower prices than Detroit and companies like Sony and Hitachi were innovating circles around the nascent Silicon Valley.

Out Of Crisis contains the kernels of his ideas. He demands that both workers and management have a through understanding of all aspects of their business and customers and focus on long term success while ignoring quarterly profits. He uses statistical analysis to distinguish errant processes from accidents. The job of both management and workers is to improve the process by iterating on the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle for continuous improvement.

The bed rock of Deming’s method is respect for all the participants; the hot-shot CEO and the assistant janitor both contribute equally to the success of the enterprise. If everyone today took Deming to heart, the decade would turnaround in an instant.

I wish I could recommend Out Of the Crisis as a book, and I do, but with cautions. Deming’s style is his own. He’s preachy. He works from examples more often than explicit statement of principles and reasoned exposition. Keep in mind that Deming was not a crackpot. He sounds like one, but when businesses followed his advice, they consistently thrived. He was the most effective business consultant of the twentieth century.

He could turn around the twenty-first century. Read him and follow his advice.

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Review of The Maltese Falcon

I am writing this after at least my third reading of The Maltese Falcon. Some critics say the book is Hammett’s best; it’s undoubtedly his best-known and most popular, but I prefer Hammett’s next novel, The Glass Key. TMF sports flamboyant characters and an exciting plot that’s nearly a conspiracy theory. The Glass Key contains more realistic views of corruption and human frailty, which is more to my taste.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed TMF and recommend it. The book is about Samuel Spade, private detective. Raymond Chandler modeled Philip Marlowe on Spade, but Spade has a far different role. Marlowe is clearly an errant underdog knight in Los Angeles. Spade may be a knight, but he’s not an underdog. He declares that San Francisco is his town, and, at points, he’s the town fixer who pulls strings to guide political outcomes. Note also that Spade has a partner, Miles Archer. Marlowe never had a partner and never will. The closest Marlowe had to a partner was his stumbling buddy, Terry Lennox, in the Long Goodbye.

Hammett’s style rings oddly in my ear. Hammett was widely read, but he dropped out of school in his early teens to help support his family. He claimed to have developed his authorial skills writing reports for the Pinkertons. His word choice is dated. His sentences often feel to me like he was pushing himself into a more elevated style than was natural to him. For example, “The boy raised his eyes to Spade’s mouth and spoke in a strained voice of someone in physical pain…” is awkward and abstract for pulp magazine readers. Chandler, on the other hand, writes with the self-assuredness of a well-trained Oxfordian, which he was. Nevertheless, both have an ear for the best in language. Compare the near iambic pentameter a few paragraphs later in TMF: “’Come on,’ he [Spade] said. ‘This will put you in solid with your boss.’”

I divide the book into three parts. The key to this division is the “Flitcraft episode” in which Spade tells Bridgid the story of a man from Tacoma who leads an ordinary moderately prosperous life with a wife who enjoys new salad recipes. One day, a heavy beam drops from a construction site and lands next to Flitcraft, barely missing him, and leaving him with a scratch from a flying concrete chip that becomes a permanent scar. Flitcraft immediately vacates his ordinary life. His wife and children are well provided for and he disappears into a life of wandering. After a few years, Flitcraft turns up in Spokane, leading an ordinary and moderately prosperous existence with a wife who looks nothing like his first wife, but enjoys new salad recipes.  The three parts of TMF correspond to Flitcraft’s Tacoma, wandering, and Spokane lives. The pursuit of the Maltese falcon is Spade’s wandering. That phase ends when the pursuers of the falcon exit and the final chapters are Spade’s return from the life interrupted by the falcon. This structure is like a fairy tale in which much of the action is in a dream that intertwines with the waking world.

I leave the book with a question: has Spade’s adventure in fairy land transformed his life and character? Or has Spade’s walk-about with the falcon only revealed what was previously hidden or latent? In Chapter 20, Spade says to Bridgid “Don’t be too sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be.”

Has Hammett told us that Spade has not changed, but we have?