learning to deep fry

I started frying at around age 12, under my parents' supervision.

It was almost certainly fried plantains, either the savory or the sweet kind. (Both perfect foods.)

But I don't think my frying skills progressed very much for the next 30 years.

Frying is hard to do at home, and relatively cheap to buy as a service outside.

(At least, if you like potatoes. And, recently, tortillas.)

I finally got good at frying during the quarantine portion of the pandemic. 

The quarantine gave many of us the chance to improve essential skills. (The skills that essential workers have.)

Like frying.

Now I deep fry all the time. About every other day.

I use a wok, a frying pan and even a saucepan (for deep frying). I make croquetas and kibbeh, chilaquiles and Laziji chicken, Korean Fried proteins and Taiwanese Popcorn proteins. 

I fry it all. Even beans!

As you may know, frying at home can be thrilling.

It's a little more dangerous than baking or sautéing, and certainly requires more concentration. (Even hand-eye coordination.)

But, also, it's the kind of skill that you just get good at with repetition.

Which is very pleasurable. As manual labor can be. 

While we associate it with exploitation, manual labor doesn't have to be. (We call it craft when we pay for it.)

That doesn't mean that all manual labor is created equal.

Some manual laborers are given very bad to no tools, at all.

Consider farm labor. I think it should be mostly automated. But I think the people to automate it should be the people who have done it the most, longest. 

(Just as I think the best people to automate coding are coders.)

I'm not some kind of altruist. On the contrary, I'm motivated by capitalist ideas of progress.

I care deeply about manual labor because that's where the greatest body of untapped knowledge is stored today.

(The pun was not intended but I'll take it! Untapped bodies of knowledge. Take me seriously and literally!)

Remember, we are bodies.

Always. 

In English, the very act of remembering, ostensibly a cerebral activity, evokes a corporal feeling: remembering vs. dismembering.

Even if you go back to the Greeks, who gave us our word for it – mnḗmē – you find the body greeting you!

How did the Ancient Greeks create memory? By going on walks.*

[Why was there no post-rock group called Method of Loci? ugh.]

We hide our deepest truths in our plainest words.

Thus, it's often useful to state the obvious:

Manual labor is a full bodied experience – meaning, you solve problems with your whole body.

What you think about while you do manual labor depends on the problems you're asked to solve. 

The advantage of using your body to think is that you become acutely aware of risk, pain and inefficiency. 

The more you take on risk with your body on the line – not someone else's – the better you get at managing risk.

Contra this otherwise wonderful essay, more than a few companies are making machines that spray shit into their workers' eyes.  And/or into the eyes of their customers. Because the owners' eyes are far away / covered, etc.

That's why it's essential to have skin in the game when assessing the risk associated with tools. 

Especially the catastrophic TAIL RISKS of new technologies.

[INSERT SVB DUMPSTER FIRE EMOJI HERE]
Yesterday, I watched this wonderful video about the airline booking meltdown that marred winter travels for many Americans and cost SWA nearly a billion dollars. (Or more, perhaps, assuming its brand suffered a lasting ding.)

In that video, you hear a common refrain in any large organization, especially when it comes to infrastructure: someone else will fix this, sometime later.

And what is that valuable infrastructure?

The tools its workers use.

Literally, it's a labor issue. 

I've recently had a professional experience – maybe more than one – where it was thought that brute force might exact more efficiencies from labor when in fact they were working with deficient machines, processes, techniques. 

Time and again, the boiler rooms knows best.

Scotty is 10x more relatable than Captain Kirk and the latter is widely known to be a campy fool.  (If you haven't seen Galaxy Quest, run don't walk.)

All of which is to say: ask labor, not management, about new technologies like AI.

Why not managers? Because they often don't understand the labor they manage.

Because they don't have to.***

Worker complains about the job being too hard? Tell them to go work somewhere else. 

Worker tells you about an inefficient process? Throw more cheaper people at the problem.

Worker says there's a high risk of failure? Ask them if that's against the law. 

If it's really that big a deal, they'll pass a law about it.

Or enforce the law they already passed.

Also, government is bad for business. 

(Until you need government to bail your ass.)

I know I make them sound like caricatures, but there are more than a few important companies led by men who believe – and tell us, often! – that their success is due to survival of the fittest.

If they're successful, it's because they're more ruthless.

They're not here to make friends.