The issue of "process knowledge" and early-on Silicon Valley calls to mind the founding and building out of Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild, Varian Associates, Intel itself, Apple, amongst many other companies, both large and small. All profited immensely from a tightly-packed, innovative environment centered about Stanford University as the intellectual inspiration, thence translated into physical plants producing cutting-edge products, and where engineers of varying disciplines moved between companies, or started their own firms based upon accreted knowledge gained.
Now, mostly gone, scattered to the winds, and replaced by parasitic predators such as Facebook/Meta, Google, AI, and their ilk. Much has been lost, and few prospects of regaining that once world-class edge.
Dan Wang did us a great service. Everybody: read his book, and also "Apple in China."
The elephant in the American room, not to mention the Trump in the room, is the fact that the American economy for decades has had one purpose only: to increase the return on capital. This it has achieved.
We can barely make planes that fly anymore, but stock prices are as high as the stratosphere. The DJIA in real terms is 10 times what it was 40 years ago, when the "deregulation" era was getting going.
This rising tide left everybody but the yacht owners behind, and with no means of ever catching up. This is what happens when you "optimize" outcomes for one thing only, and thereby one group of people only. If you are one of these people you get free money. Free money unattached to reality, unattached to doing anything worthwhile. Merit-less money. Crypto being the ultimate expression of this. Just declare yourself rich, and get people to invest in your "brand."
So: the predators have been having a ball. They feel entitled now. And one of their own is in charge. I am referring to the USA, not Russia.
However, the natives are restless, as the health care monopolists are already beginning to discover.
One pioneer in the industrial-district literature of the 1980s and '90s that you don't mention is Charles Sabel, a theorist of industrial organization, initially at MIT (where he was Anno Saxenian's dissertation advisor), currently at Columbia Law School. His first book Work and Politics told the history, if I'm remembering correctly, of the Italian textile-industry industrial districts in Prato, near Florence. And his book with MIT economist Michael Piore, The Second Industrial Divide, imagined a "post-Fordist" American economy that drew lessons from the industrial-district model. I'm curious whether Sabel's more recent work which, as I understand it, focuses on distinctive modes of participatory decision-making and regulation in the European Union and other governance entities might represent a particular kind of, let's call it, "administrative process knowledge" that would have useful lessons for addressing the limitations of the administrative-law formalism characterizing US industrial policy. A kind of "meta" process knowledge, if you will.
I’m going to throw this in quickly because I need to get outdoors and build something. The US still has some of this. Check out Fine Homebuilding, the magazine and podcast. These are carpenters and other trades people working with inspectors, builders, manufacturers, architects, building science people trying new products, providing instruction, reporting back on the performance of the products and processes. They aren’t just reporting on new builds but also advising on how people can upgrade the enormous existing housing stock. They have exactly the kind of process knowledge you are describing. I don’t think this just applies to construction or manufacturing. We don’t talk nearly enough to the people who are actually doing things.
The most important process China took from the west was a monetary system, and thus a banking system, since only banks create money, via loans. The Chinese monetary, banking and financial systems mimic Capitalism's. Mimic in every way except the absolute direct party (government) control of the banking and credit system. Unlike our 1 or 2 degrees of separation. Well no longer. We are now adopting Chinese State Capitalism, with American characteristics
China's rise is a monetary phenomena. A credit phenomena. Industrial processes just followed. China has the exact problem we have. Vastly inflated asset markets which require more credit, then more again, and again and again.
China's building of whole cities, vast transpiration networks, industrial plants and on and on and on, were all made possible by credit. A credit system and a monetary system based upon credit creating money is the mother process.
I'm retired. One of my current passions is 3-D printing - creating objects using software and realizing them on a piece of hardware and software called a "3-D printer". Before I retired, I began exploring 3-D printing as a tech journalist. At the time the field was a mess. Printers were very touchy and regularly failed, and the object being printed failed. I finally gave my printers to my grandson who had the patience to make them work. Recently I read a review article from the New York Times "Wirecutter" about a printer from a Chinese company called "Bambulab". The review made the printer sound like a wonder of the modern age. It fully and automatically took care of all the problems that haunted the printers I had worked with and more. So, I bought one (the Bambulab A1 for $499 with 4 color printing capability). That was 6 months ago. Since then I have been happily printing single and multi-color objects with only a couple of easily resolved issues.
Why all this about 3-D printing. Bambulab designs and builds all of its hardware and software products in Shenzhen and Shanghai China. They also have an office in Austin, TX, but all products are built in those two parts of China. Local process knowledge development cycles clearly play a part in the quality and functionality of the products. Aside from in the products themselves, you can see this in the many social media sites dedicated to 3-D printing where you can literally feel the local process knowledge loops in action. What you can also see is that Bambulab listens to its customers. There is no way a company like Apple and its Chinese fabricators can benefit from process knowledge in the way Bambulab does. And, I would guess this is part of the reason Apple is struggling with the development of AI. Software is developed and built here, but hardware is developed and built outside the US. Can we ever expect the US to return to total local development? Probably not. Our industries have lost the ability to appreciate such development processes, and they prefer the cost savings available to them, at least for now, from using foreign fabricators.
Fascinating post and a great comment thread too. There's something about this topic that speaks to the personal experience of a lot of us. I've been in the vicinity of this issue too. For one thing, I might have crossed paths with you (HF) during the years in the 90s when I was the US "rep" to EUNIP, the European Network on Industrial Policy. My one and only paper for them was on the theory of industrial districts.
And in my case, I guess it's a looks-like-a-nail for the hammer. The tool for me has been the economics of interactive nonconvexity (sorry), the way complexly interactive processes yield multiple equilibria, strategy, planning across local structures. This applies across firms as well as within them, which is the point of ID's. A lot of process knowledge is exactly this, generating understanding how different operations benefit or conflict with one another. To take a large chunk of them and send them away for reasons of insufficient profitability on their own is self-defeating. The OP mentions the decline of apprenticeships, and the same points apply. Workers who can develop or alter routines, production software etc. on their own initiative have an important role to play.
The big question is *why* process knowledge is insufficiently valued or even ignored altogether. That's another post.
Short answer: employees are not valued. They are an "expense."
It's called capital-ism because the theory of it puts capital first. Whereas communism puts the state first.
Did you see the news in January about the ski patrollers strike at Park City Utah vs the Vail Resorts ski conglomerate? The patrollers are out there on the slopes, sensing the snow with their skis, keeping an eye on conditions, putting their bodies at risk, and can't afford to live anywhere near where they work....while the management sits in a shiny multi-story office building surrounded by a parking lot in Denver, far from the mountains. Google map it to see. They are focused on The Street, not The Rockies, or the skiers. Sadly, they recently sacked, I mean "transitioned" their CEO out of the company. Try not to choke on the BS:
> There are aspects of context that simply cannot be represented well by quantitative data
This ties into your previous post about how states always get it wrong.
> algorithms don’t win battles
We’re seeing this in the Russia-Ukraine war. Despite all their technical ingenuity, firing hundreds of missiles every night, at $100K a pop, to shoot down $20K Russian drones, is not financially sustainable for the Ukrainians. So they’ve turned to tactics last used against German V-1s: scrambling WW2-era prop trainers with a pilot and a gunner, getting close to the drone and either downing it with a shotgun from the open cockpit or tipping its wing with theirs.
Way back in the late 70's the long late Digital Equipment still had some pilot lines of manufacturing running at the "Mill" headquarters even though the bulk of the work was done at other sites. Seemed like a good model. I also heard stories of Ken Olsen, the founder and then CEO, wandering the cubicles at night and asking random employees how they were doing.
That was when "managing by walking around" was still a thing. It has been replaced by Zoom calls and algorithms. Mill towns are now upscale housing and micro-breweries for desk workers.
Do read "The Soul of a New Machine."
People lose sight of everything but the gold in a gold rush.
One of my first jobs fresh out of college was working as a draftsman under a engineer who told one of his first jobs was working under an engineer designing tea bag filling machines. 1959. I was just pondering the little paper bags holding the sweetener I put in my morning coffee. Thinking all the people who think they can solve any problem by the force of their will.
If you read the above you will find that the "loyalist" Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson was literally being paid by the Crown, to preserve his loyalty, and his sons were tea importers. I see no evil, do you?
The sage Groucho Marx said:
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies."
One issue that you hint at is the difficulty of getting investment capital to start a small factory. As long ago as the early 1980s in the UK, I was told by a commercial banker that they did not want to lend money for a business model with high upfront capital costs and low variable costs. They preferred minimal startup costs with high variable costs. So much for encapsulating process in machinery! In teh US, where VC investment is very important in some industries, the model is to take more risks than banks, and hope that a portfolio of risky investments will have a winner, preferably a "unicorn". VC's also want a quick ROI, often with deleterious effects on a company.
A least a decade or two ago, there was a worry that offshoring manufacturing would result in the loss of manufacturing expertise and thus manufacturing innovation. To this day, you can see the shoddy imports of Chinese consumer goods with a US brand name. Is there anyone in those US companies with any manufacturing knowledge left? Do they even care?
I am reminded that in WWI, Britain supposedly had to import dyes for the military uniforms from Germany. If the US ever goes to war with China, is there enough manufacturing expertise to convert factories to build war materiel, as was done in WWII?
It strongly echoes Switzerland’s longstanding focus on early apprenticeships, a key source of its ingenuity and practical innovation. Roughly two‑thirds (about 65–70%) of young Swiss immediately enter vocational education and training (VET) through apprenticeships after compulsory school!
Henry Farrell: "The current approach of the United States government is more focused on ripping out America’s existing knowledge advantages in cutting edge research and innovation without any very coherent plan for creating new ones."
The dangerous war on universities can permanently damage America.
In the 19th century, academia required knowledge of the German language, because the whole of Middle and Eastern Europe used German as a lingua franca, and the great fields of learning were populated by German-speaking scholars. W.E.B. Du Bois obtained a doctorate from Heidelberg.
Hitler committed war on the Universities, with brownshirts pummeling non-Aryan professors.
Hitler YELLED at Max Planck, a founder of Quantum Physics. President Tramp sues Harvard, UCLA, Columbia.
Although Germany repented of the war crimes, the damage done to German academia was PERMANENT.
Many, many fields LACK German experts.
Most of the great historians, for example, have come from Great Britain, France and the United States, with a notable ABSENCE of German scholars.
I know, because I am bilingual, and seek scholarly books in German, the few of which in history exist are usually translations from English.
Now turn to the United States.
With the war on Yale, the University of Toronto has taken some of our Ivy League's best scholars.
French universities are hoping to skim the best from the American brain-drain.
Even if we elect liberal minded leaders soon, the damage may be permanent.
Anecdotal sign of what the US should be doing. Hoping this is more than just a hope. Ford brought out the Maverick pickup about four years ago, starting price $20,000. While they had to raise the price, and it is made in Mexico it was and is a winner. Ford has now announced an under $30,000 EV which will hit all the right notes, decent seating for 5, decent range, a pickup with a decent sized bedtoo, plus built in the Rust Belt. And my ps - after grad school, 1965,I bought my first car, a Red Mustang, $2250. About what that Maverick went for, in inflation adjusted dollars. My current 'chariot' is the Mustang Mach-E, again Red, and I got it because at my age if I were going to have an EV I needed to do it now.
I must read this book! So I too have a strong interest in process knowledge but as a software developer and a manager of software developers. I have a wonderful book on Agile and a wonder full book on DevOps, both of which refer to Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (TOC). I've had the process bug, and TQS bug and VSM bug ever sense.
So when you say, "...we need to understand how to build up and maintain process knowledge, as an essential element of economic development, and even the good society." my question is do Germany or Japan or South Korea have any lessons for us?
The issue of "process knowledge" and early-on Silicon Valley calls to mind the founding and building out of Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild, Varian Associates, Intel itself, Apple, amongst many other companies, both large and small. All profited immensely from a tightly-packed, innovative environment centered about Stanford University as the intellectual inspiration, thence translated into physical plants producing cutting-edge products, and where engineers of varying disciplines moved between companies, or started their own firms based upon accreted knowledge gained.
Now, mostly gone, scattered to the winds, and replaced by parasitic predators such as Facebook/Meta, Google, AI, and their ilk. Much has been lost, and few prospects of regaining that once world-class edge.
Dan Wang did us a great service. Everybody: read his book, and also "Apple in China."
The elephant in the American room, not to mention the Trump in the room, is the fact that the American economy for decades has had one purpose only: to increase the return on capital. This it has achieved.
We can barely make planes that fly anymore, but stock prices are as high as the stratosphere. The DJIA in real terms is 10 times what it was 40 years ago, when the "deregulation" era was getting going.
TEN TIMES!
https://www.macrotrends.net/1319/dow-jones-100-year-historical-chart
This rising tide left everybody but the yacht owners behind, and with no means of ever catching up. This is what happens when you "optimize" outcomes for one thing only, and thereby one group of people only. If you are one of these people you get free money. Free money unattached to reality, unattached to doing anything worthwhile. Merit-less money. Crypto being the ultimate expression of this. Just declare yourself rich, and get people to invest in your "brand."
So: the predators have been having a ball. They feel entitled now. And one of their own is in charge. I am referring to the USA, not Russia.
However, the natives are restless, as the health care monopolists are already beginning to discover.
Don't built your house on quicksand.
One pioneer in the industrial-district literature of the 1980s and '90s that you don't mention is Charles Sabel, a theorist of industrial organization, initially at MIT (where he was Anno Saxenian's dissertation advisor), currently at Columbia Law School. His first book Work and Politics told the history, if I'm remembering correctly, of the Italian textile-industry industrial districts in Prato, near Florence. And his book with MIT economist Michael Piore, The Second Industrial Divide, imagined a "post-Fordist" American economy that drew lessons from the industrial-district model. I'm curious whether Sabel's more recent work which, as I understand it, focuses on distinctive modes of participatory decision-making and regulation in the European Union and other governance entities might represent a particular kind of, let's call it, "administrative process knowledge" that would have useful lessons for addressing the limitations of the administrative-law formalism characterizing US industrial policy. A kind of "meta" process knowledge, if you will.
I’m going to throw this in quickly because I need to get outdoors and build something. The US still has some of this. Check out Fine Homebuilding, the magazine and podcast. These are carpenters and other trades people working with inspectors, builders, manufacturers, architects, building science people trying new products, providing instruction, reporting back on the performance of the products and processes. They aren’t just reporting on new builds but also advising on how people can upgrade the enormous existing housing stock. They have exactly the kind of process knowledge you are describing. I don’t think this just applies to construction or manufacturing. We don’t talk nearly enough to the people who are actually doing things.
The most important process China took from the west was a monetary system, and thus a banking system, since only banks create money, via loans. The Chinese monetary, banking and financial systems mimic Capitalism's. Mimic in every way except the absolute direct party (government) control of the banking and credit system. Unlike our 1 or 2 degrees of separation. Well no longer. We are now adopting Chinese State Capitalism, with American characteristics
https://asiatimes.com/2025/08/chinas-mao-has-nothing-on-chairman-trump/
China's rise is a monetary phenomena. A credit phenomena. Industrial processes just followed. China has the exact problem we have. Vastly inflated asset markets which require more credit, then more again, and again and again.
China's building of whole cities, vast transpiration networks, industrial plants and on and on and on, were all made possible by credit. A credit system and a monetary system based upon credit creating money is the mother process.
I'm retired. One of my current passions is 3-D printing - creating objects using software and realizing them on a piece of hardware and software called a "3-D printer". Before I retired, I began exploring 3-D printing as a tech journalist. At the time the field was a mess. Printers were very touchy and regularly failed, and the object being printed failed. I finally gave my printers to my grandson who had the patience to make them work. Recently I read a review article from the New York Times "Wirecutter" about a printer from a Chinese company called "Bambulab". The review made the printer sound like a wonder of the modern age. It fully and automatically took care of all the problems that haunted the printers I had worked with and more. So, I bought one (the Bambulab A1 for $499 with 4 color printing capability). That was 6 months ago. Since then I have been happily printing single and multi-color objects with only a couple of easily resolved issues.
Why all this about 3-D printing. Bambulab designs and builds all of its hardware and software products in Shenzhen and Shanghai China. They also have an office in Austin, TX, but all products are built in those two parts of China. Local process knowledge development cycles clearly play a part in the quality and functionality of the products. Aside from in the products themselves, you can see this in the many social media sites dedicated to 3-D printing where you can literally feel the local process knowledge loops in action. What you can also see is that Bambulab listens to its customers. There is no way a company like Apple and its Chinese fabricators can benefit from process knowledge in the way Bambulab does. And, I would guess this is part of the reason Apple is struggling with the development of AI. Software is developed and built here, but hardware is developed and built outside the US. Can we ever expect the US to return to total local development? Probably not. Our industries have lost the ability to appreciate such development processes, and they prefer the cost savings available to them, at least for now, from using foreign fabricators.
Fascinating post and a great comment thread too. There's something about this topic that speaks to the personal experience of a lot of us. I've been in the vicinity of this issue too. For one thing, I might have crossed paths with you (HF) during the years in the 90s when I was the US "rep" to EUNIP, the European Network on Industrial Policy. My one and only paper for them was on the theory of industrial districts.
And in my case, I guess it's a looks-like-a-nail for the hammer. The tool for me has been the economics of interactive nonconvexity (sorry), the way complexly interactive processes yield multiple equilibria, strategy, planning across local structures. This applies across firms as well as within them, which is the point of ID's. A lot of process knowledge is exactly this, generating understanding how different operations benefit or conflict with one another. To take a large chunk of them and send them away for reasons of insufficient profitability on their own is self-defeating. The OP mentions the decline of apprenticeships, and the same points apply. Workers who can develop or alter routines, production software etc. on their own initiative have an important role to play.
The big question is *why* process knowledge is insufficiently valued or even ignored altogether. That's another post.
Short answer: employees are not valued. They are an "expense."
It's called capital-ism because the theory of it puts capital first. Whereas communism puts the state first.
Did you see the news in January about the ski patrollers strike at Park City Utah vs the Vail Resorts ski conglomerate? The patrollers are out there on the slopes, sensing the snow with their skis, keeping an eye on conditions, putting their bodies at risk, and can't afford to live anywhere near where they work....while the management sits in a shiny multi-story office building surrounded by a parking lot in Denver, far from the mountains. Google map it to see. They are focused on The Street, not The Rockies, or the skiers. Sadly, they recently sacked, I mean "transitioned" their CEO out of the company. Try not to choke on the BS:
https://news.vailresorts.com/2025-05-27-Vail-Resorts-Announces-Leadership-Transition?submitted=1
https://www.powder.com/news/ski-patrol-strike-movement
> There are aspects of context that simply cannot be represented well by quantitative data
This ties into your previous post about how states always get it wrong.
> algorithms don’t win battles
We’re seeing this in the Russia-Ukraine war. Despite all their technical ingenuity, firing hundreds of missiles every night, at $100K a pop, to shoot down $20K Russian drones, is not financially sustainable for the Ukrainians. So they’ve turned to tactics last used against German V-1s: scrambling WW2-era prop trainers with a pilot and a gunner, getting close to the drone and either downing it with a shotgun from the open cockpit or tipping its wing with theirs.
Way back in the late 70's the long late Digital Equipment still had some pilot lines of manufacturing running at the "Mill" headquarters even though the bulk of the work was done at other sites. Seemed like a good model. I also heard stories of Ken Olsen, the founder and then CEO, wandering the cubicles at night and asking random employees how they were doing.
That was when "managing by walking around" was still a thing. It has been replaced by Zoom calls and algorithms. Mill towns are now upscale housing and micro-breweries for desk workers.
Do read "The Soul of a New Machine."
People lose sight of everything but the gold in a gold rush.
Tea Bags!!!!
One of my first jobs fresh out of college was working as a draftsman under a engineer who told one of his first jobs was working under an engineer designing tea bag filling machines. 1959. I was just pondering the little paper bags holding the sweetener I put in my morning coffee. Thinking all the people who think they can solve any problem by the force of their will.
Funny you mention tea. An inconvenient historical fact:
Tea Made in China + Tariffs/Taxes + a Very Large Monopoly Corporation + No Say in the Matter = enraged Americans.
Has even the Former Elephant Party totally forgotten about our Boston Tea Party? That didn't end well for the British.
???????
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party
If you read the above you will find that the "loyalist" Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson was literally being paid by the Crown, to preserve his loyalty, and his sons were tea importers. I see no evil, do you?
The sage Groucho Marx said:
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies."
One issue that you hint at is the difficulty of getting investment capital to start a small factory. As long ago as the early 1980s in the UK, I was told by a commercial banker that they did not want to lend money for a business model with high upfront capital costs and low variable costs. They preferred minimal startup costs with high variable costs. So much for encapsulating process in machinery! In teh US, where VC investment is very important in some industries, the model is to take more risks than banks, and hope that a portfolio of risky investments will have a winner, preferably a "unicorn". VC's also want a quick ROI, often with deleterious effects on a company.
A least a decade or two ago, there was a worry that offshoring manufacturing would result in the loss of manufacturing expertise and thus manufacturing innovation. To this day, you can see the shoddy imports of Chinese consumer goods with a US brand name. Is there anyone in those US companies with any manufacturing knowledge left? Do they even care?
I am reminded that in WWI, Britain supposedly had to import dyes for the military uniforms from Germany. If the US ever goes to war with China, is there enough manufacturing expertise to convert factories to build war materiel, as was done in WWII?
And not just VCs, but monopolized investor-focused industries in general.
Cross out USA in favor of ROI.
It strongly echoes Switzerland’s longstanding focus on early apprenticeships, a key source of its ingenuity and practical innovation. Roughly two‑thirds (about 65–70%) of young Swiss immediately enter vocational education and training (VET) through apprenticeships after compulsory school!
Henry Farrell: "The current approach of the United States government is more focused on ripping out America’s existing knowledge advantages in cutting edge research and innovation without any very coherent plan for creating new ones."
The dangerous war on universities can permanently damage America.
In the 19th century, academia required knowledge of the German language, because the whole of Middle and Eastern Europe used German as a lingua franca, and the great fields of learning were populated by German-speaking scholars. W.E.B. Du Bois obtained a doctorate from Heidelberg.
Hitler committed war on the Universities, with brownshirts pummeling non-Aryan professors.
Hitler YELLED at Max Planck, a founder of Quantum Physics. President Tramp sues Harvard, UCLA, Columbia.
Although Germany repented of the war crimes, the damage done to German academia was PERMANENT.
Many, many fields LACK German experts.
Most of the great historians, for example, have come from Great Britain, France and the United States, with a notable ABSENCE of German scholars.
I know, because I am bilingual, and seek scholarly books in German, the few of which in history exist are usually translations from English.
Now turn to the United States.
With the war on Yale, the University of Toronto has taken some of our Ivy League's best scholars.
French universities are hoping to skim the best from the American brain-drain.
Even if we elect liberal minded leaders soon, the damage may be permanent.
Not to be missed: an eyewitness account of the Nazi takeover of a university.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1978/12/the-monster-and-the-lamb/662832/
John Harvey: Whew! Very moving eyewitness account!
Thank you so very much.
That was something, wasn't it? Also found in Peter Drucker's autobiography, "Adventures of a Bystander."
David Mindell makes a similar argument about the importance of process knowledge in The New Lunar Society, published this year: https://justtwothings.substack.com/p/9-june-2025-industry-transport
Anecdotal sign of what the US should be doing. Hoping this is more than just a hope. Ford brought out the Maverick pickup about four years ago, starting price $20,000. While they had to raise the price, and it is made in Mexico it was and is a winner. Ford has now announced an under $30,000 EV which will hit all the right notes, decent seating for 5, decent range, a pickup with a decent sized bedtoo, plus built in the Rust Belt. And my ps - after grad school, 1965,I bought my first car, a Red Mustang, $2250. About what that Maverick went for, in inflation adjusted dollars. My current 'chariot' is the Mustang Mach-E, again Red, and I got it because at my age if I were going to have an EV I needed to do it now.
I must read this book! So I too have a strong interest in process knowledge but as a software developer and a manager of software developers. I have a wonderful book on Agile and a wonder full book on DevOps, both of which refer to Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (TOC). I've had the process bug, and TQS bug and VSM bug ever sense.
So when you say, "...we need to understand how to build up and maintain process knowledge, as an essential element of economic development, and even the good society." my question is do Germany or Japan or South Korea have any lessons for us?
Sure, but who will learn from them? We got a bunch of stubborn people around here.
Our religions: "number go up forever," "free lunch," "I like me the way I am," and "nobody tells me what to do."
The drunk will stop drinking when you take his bottle away, if then.