You wouldn't think a travel publication would buy into a three-day "travelogue" that consists entirely of drinking at the beach, but Newsweek's Budget Travel Online did. There's not much "budget" involved, either, since not a price is mentioned. But it is online. How can I get WaPo to subsidize my drinking excursions?

Michelle Boardman and Nick Rosenkranz testified before the Senate today, and I'm testifying tomorrow morning before the Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Sponsored Enterprises Subcommittee.

Those interested in soundbites can see me on CNBC tomorrow at approximately 1:20 pm (which will keep me from wearing my new glen plaid as I had previously planned).

"To AEI - 64 questions from a former Executive Director of the World Bank"

75-second UK public service announcement starts off like it's going to be about domestic violence, but teaches a much less obvious truth. (via GruntDoc; NB more graphic than typical US PSA)

So am I a "lawyer... not formally schooled in economics" or an economist who doesn't "really know what the substantive law is in an area, or even have a grasp of why lawyers might be arguing over an issue"? Hard to know, since the anonymous blogger doesn't identify anything wrong with my argument other than the unrelated ad hominem about a notoriously absurd case. He does make the following non sequitur, which he(?) seems to think dispositive:

On the other side, asking someone who was injured by a drunk or incompetent doctor whether they should have to foot the bill for their injuries (assuming the doc didn’t cut off their feet) probably isn’t the most productive intellectual exercise.

Since both Peter Nordberg and I agree that doctoring while drunk is medical malpractice (and I even explicitly said so), I'm not sure what the poster thinks he's proving with his snark, other than that he doesn't know what he's talking about when he's criticizing me. (He even gets the blog name wrong, since my posts were at Point of Law.)

All of this is beneath discussion, except that I have a strikingly intelligent friend who recently graduated law school who sometimes worries about her future in the legal profession. I suggest to her as a confidence boost that it's worthwhile to see bloggers like S.COTUS, who claim to be lawyers, yet are able to afford internet access even as they exhibit absolutely no reading comprehension ability. (Another example: compare S.COTUS's characterization of Easterbrook's citation of Liebeck with the real thing. Does S.COTUS exhibit any understanding of why Easterbrook cited the case? Or what "urban legend" means?) But if S.COTUS can make a living (though this is uncertain, because of his anonymity), surely someone who can simultaneously hold two thoughts in her head can.

Coincidentally, this is relevant to the post I made that started the underlying debate: the standards for legal malpractice are considerably different than the standards for medical malpractice. A doctor who makes the basic errors of medical analysis that S.COTUS does on a regular basis with legal analysis wouldn't last a year. (But, then, that's perhaps why he posts anonymously.) In contrast, I've sat on a jury in a courtroom where neither side's attorney nor the judge understood the hearsay rule (and the damages expert wasn't all that strong on his explanation of the discount rate, either), and all of them are likely still happily practicing. (And an attorney friend recently forwarded to me a firmwide request from a $150,000+/year $400+/hr BigLaw associate who sought to find out how one asked a state appellate court to certify a federal question to federal court. Oy.)

I also strongly suspect S.COTUS is "Angry White Clerk" on the Greedy Clerks board (which would make this post an interesting Mary Roshism), but that's another story for another day.

(Update: S.COTUS makes the mistake of attempting to respond substantively, and I take him to task at Overlawyered.)

Was kind enough to wait until 2:45 am to telephone me that they were screwing up my weekend by making it impossible to make my connecting flight. If I find out that there are problems with the credit card charge reversal, I'm going to be even angrier.

Also on my angry list: Dish Network, which violated the FTC Do Not Call list telemarketing rules by (1) calling me; and (2) using a blocked caller-id to do so. The first iteration response from Echostar:

Dear Sir/Madam,

Thank you for your email. We have removed your information from our predictive caller list. Please understand that independent retailers are making telemarketing calls as well. If you receive further calls, you will need to notify the telemarketer that you wish to be removed from the retailers individual call list. All independent retailers of DISH Network are separate business entities and are not under our direct control.

We appreciate your email and we are always happy to be of service.

That ain't going to cut it on at least three different levels:

(1) There's no exemption for "predictive caller lists."

(2) They're telling me that they contract with independent retailers who ignore the Do Not Call list, and don't care.

(3) They're telling me that they contract with independent retailers who ignore the FTC telemarketing rules about caller id, and don't care.

We'll see if a second e-mail mentioning legal action changes their mind.

A telemarketer from a mortgage company lied to me, saying that my registration with the FTC "expires after six months." For future reference, not even remotely true. My 2003 registration doesn't expire until January 19, 2011.

I'd been scanning Daily Kos because of the Kosola scandal, and I really don't understand the site's attraction. On the front page is a report claiming that Laura and George Bush are fighting over the latter's supposed affair with Condi Rice; the source is a supermarket tabloid that in turn sourced a guy who has previously claimed that an "Israeli nuclear submarine" blew up the USS Cole. Ok.

And then Kos himself goes off on this incoherent rant about The New Republic, threatening litigation and whatnot, and demanding everyone unsubscribe. I was going to comment about it, but Jonathan Chait takes it down so adeptly that there's nothing for me to say. (I did like Hugh Hewitt's take: "Kos goes Life of Brian on TNR.")

I suppose the left needs an Ann Coulter of its own, and Kos fills that role, but I don't see Republican presidential candidates genuflecting at Coulter's altar.

that "Neocon" is the new code word for "Jew" (second cartoon). The two cartoons combined, and the fervent defense of them in the comments are further evidence of the anti-Semitism infecting Democratic Party activists. (via Frum)

Eugene Volokh quotes an 1881 style guide:

As for ice-cream, there is no such thing, as ice-cream would be the product of frozen cream, i.e., cream made from ice by melting. What is called ice-cream is cream iced; hence, properly, iced cream and not ice-cream.

I still don't like "ten times lower."

Fans of Edward Tufte will likely like the junk charts blog. Some fifteen years ago, I almost chose Yale Law over Chicago Law in part because Tufte taught a class there, but then I read my first Posner book. Ok, the scholarship helped, too.

New York Times covers the first synagogue in Wal-Mart's hometown, in a state with 1700 Jews.

Inter alia:

1) The use of an en-dash with spaces where there should be an em-dash without spaces. No telling how many attorneys who used to work for me have secret blogs complaining about the crazy supervisor they had babbling about dashes. I gave up on this because not even the word processing staff understood what I was talking about. Après moi, le déluge.

2) Underlining in word-processed documents. Underlining is an artifact of typewriters. You don't have to use a typewriter, and be thankful for it; not only is word processing easier, but you don't have to make your document more difficult to read because you have to use underlining instead of italics.

3) Use of superscripts in case citations. At least it sunk sank Dan Rather. [Update: I knew that. Really I did. This is a good lesson not to do irregular verbs at 2 in the morning, or to at least proofread the next day.]

4) The failure to understand how a word processor's "smart quotes" work, with the resulting confusion of someone who thinks an open single quote is the equivalent of an apostrophe. MS Word doesn't make this intuitive (ctrl-' + ' produces an apostrophe, even at the beginning of a word), but you'd think someone who designs book covers can get this simple matter right.

5) The fact that HTML doesn't easily support smart quotes.

Will Baude complains that Slate's "Dear Prudence" has had no real point "since its inception," which allows me to play old fogey and note that "Dear Prudence," at its inception, was wittily and anonymously written by AEI senior fellow Herbert Stein to provide "advice on manners, morals, and macroeconomic policy," and was quite entertaining while he was in charge of the project. Reader e-mails, however, focused much more on the first two, and Steing gave up the column three months later, replaced a few months later by Margo Howard without the macroeconomic policy. It was fun while it lasted:

"One cure for unrequited love," Prudence reminded a lovelorn reader, "is requited love. There are other cures also, such as devotion to the study of the Finnish language." To a reader worried about being bad at small talk, Prudence counseled, "You are making too much of this. What everyone wants in a conversationalist is not a good talker but a good listener. You could be Oscar Wilde and no one would go home from a party saying, 'Gee, Oscar was witty tonight.' Many would go home saying, 'Gee, I was witty tonight.' " In the day of automatic door unlockers, should a man still walk around a car to unlock the door for the woman he is escorting? Absolutely, Prudence replied, noting the opportunity thus afforded for "sweetly kissing her on the cheek. Modern gadgets will not do all that and real men don't want them to. Something has to be left for the men to do."

That last one gives away a secret, I see, but my exes will testify that I didn't take that approach for just anyone.

If ever Slate wishes to return the column to the auspices of an AEI fellow, I'd be happy to take the laboring oar, provide economic advice currently lacking, and do so less offensively.

I'm late to the whole high-pitched ringtones discussion. My father thinks the whole thing is an urban legend because cell-phones supposedly don't play such high frequencies, but the New York Times article seems much more elaborate than the typical hoax. I don't see why a polyphonic MP3-playing cell-phone can't handle a high frequency.

This page, however, has the interesting feature of lots of MP3 files of various high-pitched tones so you can tell where your hearing goes out. I can hear 15,000 MHz, can barely sort-of hear 16,000 MHz if I turn the volume all the way up, and can't hear 17,000 MHz at all. (Via clean-living Stuart Buck, who can still hear up to 25,000 MHz.)

The whole phenomenon explains why, when I was a kid, I complained about noises certain electronic devices made and all the adults looked at me like I was crazy, which taught me to stop complaining. I can also hear when the light bulbs are about to go out in my kitchen. And I get a headache from holding batteries, which is perhaps the only superpower lamer than Aquaman's.

Separate story: decades ago, when I was a teenage minimum-wage sales clerk at Videoland, someone was fiddling with the BASIC programming feature of the display Atari 800 that emitted various sounds. He made one last programming fiddle, walked away, and the sounds "stopped", or at least ceased to be audible to me—except the next time the other salesman and I looked at the window the computer was near, it had pebbled into hundreds of pieces. I still think the computer did that. It would be an impressive prank to doctor a popular MP3 so that it also played an inaudible high pitch with the resonance necessary to shatter glass. But I went to Brandeis, rather than MIT, so, despite being the 1987 Louisiana State Literary Rally champion in physics, I don't know enough physics to know if that's plausible.

Coincidentally, the #2 finisher* in the 1987 LSULR physics competition also went to University of Chicago Law, and is now teaching at Temple Law. I think it's a microcosm of the problems of American society that the two top physics students in Louisiana high schools ended up in law school.

*Update, June 26: I got an email from an Archbishop Shaw graduate who says he was the #2 finisher in Physics at LSU, and he did go into science. I suppose I could write Salil Mehra and get a third perspective that would resolve precisely where he finished (there were multiple divisions), but I'm sure my correspondent is correct. Substitute "two of the top" for "the two top" in the preceding paragraph.

Her new book is out, I skimmed it in Barnes & Noble, it doesn't mention me, and it's not especially funny, worth buying, or further discussing.

Congratulations to my former law-school classmate and cut-throat late-night Monopoly opponent, Dan Greenberg, who won his runoff primary election for the Arkansas state house 788 to 747 and will run in the general election unopposed. There's hope for thinktank research assistants everywhere now.

Charming:

Webb, 60, referred to [his Jewish primary opponent Harris] Miller in a televised debate as ''the anti-Christ of outsourcing,'' ... Also, a Webb flier contained a caricature of Miller with a hooked nose and cash spilling from his pockets.

Combine this with the irrational hatred of the Kossites for Joe Lieberman (as compared to a half-dozen Democratic senators running for reelection who vote the party line far less often), and with the fact that my Democratic representative blames the Iraq war on the Jews, and it's amazing any Jews are still Democrats.

Don't mention the war.

A commenter at PTN writes about my review:

[If] I read one more reviewer expressing grave doubts about whether a blog or series of emails could be a successful novel, I am going to die of mortification. Are people really unaware that the English novel was essentially BORN IN EPISTOLARY FORM?

I have no doubts about epistolary books. I had doubts about this particular blog turning into a book in particular because of the fact that the interest in the blog stemmed from the credulous belief that this was a real law partner speaking. It's the difference between J.T. LeRoy the memoirist and J.T. LeRoy the fictional character.

"Anonymous Lawyer" had no hope being about the potential insights into law firm life and had to be about the satire. I will say that my reaction to the satire is muted because, well, it may be new to law students, but I've seen it before. From the 1980s' "The Official Lawyers Handbook" to "The Rodent" (a pre-blog mid-1990s newsletter written by an anonymous law firm associate) to the somewhat more serious 1999 "Double Billing" to the short film I scripted and we showed at the law firm retreat where I put on a bow tie and played the managing partner seeking to improve profitability by charging associates a fee to look at the art on the walls.

It's not clear if this 2005 column is written by the same "Rodent", but note that it's the same theme as the Blachman book, and is funnier to boot, in part because it's much closer to the truth (and reflects the perspective an attorney who's dealt with several years of summer associates, rather than the perspective of a summer associate's understanding about how attorneys perceive summer associates). (Not that the Rodent is always funny: this column is a clunker, perhaps because, like Blachman's book, it's so over the top.)

I don't think Blachman stole the joke of the law firm hiding certain attorneys from the summer associates just because The Rodent made that joke before he did; law firms do hide certain attorneys from the summer associates. Blachman likely reinvented the wheel rather than cribbed from his predecessors. But, hey, good for Jeremy if he can sell old wine in new bottles.

Jeremy Blachman is living many a blogger's dream: he turned a popular blog into a book deal and the possibility of a writing career.

I'd previously expressed skepticism about the "Anonymous Lawyer" book, so Jeremy Blachman included me on the list of bloggers he offered advance copies to before its release on July 25.

This was a generous (and gutsy) offer that I accepted, and Jeremy seems like a nice guy, so it disappoints me that I can't report that I was wrong. The book doesn't work for me.

Blachman solves the blog-to-book translation by making the book a series of blog posts (and e-mails). And, like a lot of blogs, you can't believe everything you read.

Fair enough. The Anonymous Lawyer blog was supposedly written by a mythical hiring partner, who made acerbic observations about the hiring process. Some credulous people believed it was written by a real hiring partner, until Blachman outed himself as a Harvard Law student in a New York Times interview.

In the book, the blog is written by a real hiring partner, the character that Blachman created. But printing out the blog does not a book make, so Blachman interlaces a plot of sorts.

And this plot is the first fatal flaw of the book: now the Anonymous Lawyer has an aspiration, to become the managing partner at his law firm. But Blachman, who at least had some sense of how law firm summer programs work, has no sense of how internal law firm politics, or even internal law firm management, works. In the fictional world, the managing partner serves for life and is given dictatorial micromanaging powers by an executive committee, and elevation to managing partner is treated by the protagonist as the natural next step from being elevated to partner. Right down to the frustration the protagonist expresses over the decisions of the executive committee (which raises the question why he doesn't aspire to be a member of the executive committee, much less why the executive committee would grant such power in someone other than one of its own). And as Tung Yin notes, completely absent from the competition between Anonymous Lawyer and his rival is any sense of what competitive law firm partners really care about: shares and draw. (It's astonishing and entertaining how any complaint by a partner about a fellow partner will, within the first few minutes, note the inequity of their draw. No sense of that in this book.) Okay, a satire doesn't have to be realistic, but what precisely is this plotline satirizing? This main story (which I could never bring myself to care about) dominates the book, and its irrelevancy to reality and earnest lack of humor detracts from the elements that are satirical. One mourns the lost opportunity: anyone who has spent time in a law firm committee where micromanaging decisions are actually made has much funnier stories to tell about the battles over office assignments and furniture and coffee service.

The plot creates other problems combined with the blog-structure of the book. Because the book is told entirely from the files of the Anonymous Lawyer, we never see the other characters of the law firm except through his (not especially perceptive) eyes. And, as a result, the plot moves along almost entirely through outside events that just happen, and are never explained adequately. The plot is moved by at least eight deus ex machina events that do not arise organically out of characters' motivations, and the book is about Anonymous Lawyer's reactions (and only occasionally choices of which actions to take) to those events. A charitable interpretation is that Blachman is trying to show that even hiring partners are not in control of their legal careers, but I don't think so: this theme is never developed for anyone, and the book has very little to do with the law. Worse, at least four of those events require outside characters to act in a short-sightedly reckless manner entirely inconsistent with intelligent and experienced attorneys and executives: is a bank vice president really going to commit to paper a step-by-step guide to embezzlement? Is a law firm partner really going to write an e-mail explaining that he fired someone to punish them for reporting on a partner's wrongdoing? Yes, people do make reckless mistakes in real life; one need only point to my marriage and many other of my former relationships. But too many characters doom themselves by foolish actions without any explanation for why they were acting foolish other than to move the plot along in a way that it wouldn't if they hadn't acted foolishly.

And the Anonymous Lawyer protagonist is guilty of that, too. We're to believe that an ambitious attorney with eighteen years experience has started a personal blog that could endanger all he's worked for because... why? One understands why Jeremy Blachman or Melissa Lafsky anonymously blog about their legal careers directly or indirectly: they don't really want to be lawyers, and aren't afraid of the consequences of getting caught blogging. (A recent New York Times piece noted the irony that an intern could make substantially more money from a tell-all blog's book deal than from interning, but a senior law firm partner doesn't have that perverse incentive.) Other lawyers blog to get recognition in their field. Still others do it for attention, but this wouldn't be a problem for a hiring partner who can get associates and law students to genuflect before him. Why would a corporate litigator say such incriminating things in a blog? It's never explored, except in asides where the protagonist says he doesn't know why he's blogging. It's just assumed that Anonymous Lawyer (and numerous other lawyers who e-mail with Anonymous Lawyer) regularly commit to firm internal e-mail things that would be very embarrassing in a deposition, not to mention in the hands of the FBI.

There's a smaller subplot, a Blachman-like summer associate who is a favorite of Anonymous Lawyer (and who is the only character who is more than paper-thin) decides he really doesn't want to be a lawyer. But this doesn't work, either: we never see the progression, only hear it announced in an e-mail and a blog post. (And one suspects that it's a tacked-on response to this Amber Taylor post citing Blachman.) And we never see why the lawyers choose to be lawyers, either; it's not like the summer associates are treated so well that they're fooled or don't know what they're getting into, or that Anonymous Lawyer even pretends to put up a façade of what legal practice is like—summer associates are given dreary warehouse assignments reviewing documents and overnight busywork memos, precisely the kinds of assignments attorneys are forbidden to give summer associates in most law firms.

Blachman never decides who his main character really is. Is he a cynical excuse for a human being who cares about nothing other than money or power? Then why the sudden out-of-character blog posts of self-reflection exhibiting tremendous insecurity? And if the character really feels that everything he does is worthless and thinks his clients are all guilty, why does he try so hard to recruit his beloved niece to the firm? One notes that he does an awful job of selling the firm, but is somehow successful at it. We never see any indication that Anonymous Lawyer is anything other than absurdly incompetent at client relations, human relations, firm politics, Machiavellian manipulation, or recruiting. How did he ever get to be a partner in the first place? He's in a position of power when the book starts; there's a small reference to unhappy days in high school, but no hint of the 25 years in between then and now, and one can't bring oneself to care whether the career path continues upwards or fails to do so.

One could nitpick at other things: why does the cynical hiring partner have a reverence for Yale Law when real-life cynical hiring partners sneer at Yale Law graduates as prima donnas who have never learned anything practical in their Critical Gender Theory classes and have to be trained from scratch? How the heck does a hiring partner have so much time to bill law partner hours, run a recruiting program where he's attending or organizing nearly every event, write lengthy blog posts in the middle of the day (and go through the hundreds of emails those blog posts generate), and still be able to drop references to pop culture as well as any twenty-something? (The fact that we never see the protagonist deal with a client, an opposing counsel, a hiring committee meeting, or a business trip may have something to do with it.)

There are funny moments, such as the scavenger hunt where summer associates have no trouble tracking down a suicide note. But even as a matter of humor, the book doesn't quite work, because the tone isn't consistent. Sometimes the book strives to be a realistic view of law firm life with earnest regrets of sacrifices made; sometimes it's an over-the-top cartoon where paralegals quietly suffer lower-caste status and are given sub-standard food at the same events attorneys attend, and are lucky not to be left for dead in photocopying accidents. (Had Blachman spent more time in a law firm, he'd understand that long-time support staff and paralegals have more power than the junior associates. When I was a counsel, a favorite paralegal's complaint about treatment from a junior associate got a lot more weight than vice versa, because one is more fungible than the other, regardless of pay differentials. As satire goes, opportunity is missed because everything in the book is drawn in such broad strokes.)

I was wrong that this blog couldn't be translated into a novel; Blachman has the clever idea that the blog could be used as an unreliable narrator, something that fully comes into play in the last pages of the book. But Blachman's inexperience with his subject material and inconsistency in tone and characterization means that he ultimately fails to execute.

I'm surprised at the warm reception the book is getting in the blogosphere. I think part of it is aspirational, and part of it is that it's coming from summer associates and law students who don't hear the dissonant notes in the book. Which suggests that Blachman will have some success, and will get a second chance to write. More experienced attorneys, like David Giacalone and Ann Althouse didn't like the book; but the experienced Evan Schaeffer hints that his review will be good, so I look forward to his take. Perhaps if one finds more subjectively funny material in the book than I did, one is willing to forgive the problems with the book's structure and characterizations and dialogue.

I guess this means that I don't get a blurb, but I will say that the disturbingly comprehensive Anonymous Law Firm website is very funny, and one of the best parody websites I've ever seen, on a par with the newspaper and yearbook parodies that National Lampoon did in the 1970s:

# The most satisfied associates reported that they receive an average of 2-3 hours of sleep per night, while associates who reported an average of 7 or more hours of sleep per night found themselves most likely to receive additional assignments in the weeks following the study questionnaire.

Esquivalience is an excellent title for a blog, and is a marvelously written travelogue of India to boot. Plus all you ever wanted to know (and then some) about Indian gynecologists. Where are the blog book deals when they're really needed?

Before I left for Paris, I turned off the air conditioning, and made space on my TiVo to record a week's worth of sweeps-week shows, including a number of series and season finales.

Unfortunately, clearing the hard drive space meant that the TiVo went into overtime recording recommended shows, and the hard drive overheated and crashed. Dead TiVo, losing the hours of Ted-Frank-on-C-SPAN coverage I've recorded, not to mention the week of TV I wanted to watch.

Comcast provided me with a DVR from Scientific Atlanta. A week's use of it has convinced me that it's vastly inferior to TiVo.

SA 8300 advantages

• $5/month vs. much more for TiVo


• Can record HDTV


• Can record two programs at once or record one program while you watch another


• Arguably higher-quality picture

SA 8300 disadvantages

• Higher-quality picture advantage dissipated by more distracting and frequent pixelation glitches, including pixelation of sound.


• Several button presses required to delete or record programs.


• Giving a command to record a program from the interactive program guide closes the guide, requiring one to scroll back to the original point if one wants to record 8pm and 9pm shows on the same channel.


• And navigating the IPG to get to that point is much less easy and convenient, displaying only two hours at a time versus the eight programs at a time that TiVo does; one can scroll the SA a half hour at a time, and TiVo scrolls eight programs at a time.


• No easy way to fast-forward through a program: TiVo permits 15-minute jumps.


• SA won't let you watch a program twenty minutes behind while it is recording — when it stops recording, it kicks you out of the program while you're watching it, and you have to restart the program from the beginning, and wait a minute while you fast-forward forty minutes.


• TiVo fast-forward has nice "jump back" feature, allowing one to precisely time regular play at the end of a commercial; SA doesn't, requiring additional rewinding.


• One can stack TiVo commands, e.g., hitting the go-back-eight-seconds button four times will rewind 32 seconds. Not true with SA.


• SA box will sometimes forget that it was supposed to record a program.


• Search function on SA box less convenient to use, has far less scope than TiVo, and works only sporadically.


• No recommendation engine.


• No record-by-keyword function.


• No automatic record-extra-time function. For example, Fox regularly runs the Simpsons one minute early and two minutes late. With TiVo, I can automatically record an extra two minutes for every Simpsons episode. For SA, I have to do it manually each week.

Conclusion: when The Sopranos ends Sunday, I get rid of my SA box. If Comcast wants me as a customer, they have to offer me TiVo.

I'm back from Paris (e-mail me for the flickr photo page for photos Slim took), and friendly comments and emails about resuscitating the blog are running about 4:1 in favor of, so, ok, I'm starting it up again.

Besides, my TiVo died while I was in Paris, so if I stop watching TV, I can have time to blog.

On top of everything else: I keep having ideas faster than I commit them to paper. It's very frustrating. In the last six weeks, I've outlined two law review articles and some book chapters, a book introduction, three Liability Outlooks, and two op-eds, and am now paralyzed like Barry Schwartz in a jeans store with the process of capturing these fully formed thoughts onto paper, which is decidedly the less interesting part of the process. I did get two speeches written for panels I'm serving on, more on later, which shows that I'm still afflicted with a law-firm mentality of responding to deadlines as a form of time management.

I'm likely being too hard on myself; I'm being productive and this blog isn't the cause of any failure to be even more productive.