Tag: Politics

Real People

When I was in college, I went out to a bar with some friends. They had a friend, who had graduated a year or two previously, visiting; this guy came out with us. This friend-of-a-friend and I were sitting at a table while everyone else was getting a drink, and the guy said he wanted to meet a beautiful girl like me … but he doesn’t know how to approach one. What, he asked me, would be the best “pick up line”? To which I quickly answered “Hi, I’m Eric”. Why is speaking to a cute girl different than talking to any other human being?

I subsequently learned that, indeed, young attractive women are treated a lot differently — the sort of things people assume are acceptable make the 2005 ‘grab them by the pussy’ recording … well, not surprising. My office at the University had been a photography darkroom. It had two separate rooms — an antechamber and the darkroom part. A friend of mine and I were in the darkroom part, and she was on the phone with someone. Glenn, one of my work-study students came in to speak with me. Not wanting to interrupt her conversation, I asked him to come into the antechamber. He proceeded to back me into a chair, physically restrain me by sitting on me, and kiss me on the mouth. My rather loud entreaty for my friend to come into the other room was met with an annoyed “I’m on the PHONE”. Luckily she finished her call before the student got beyond unwanted kissing, and he backed off when he heard her walking.

And to people who say “but no one reported it happening, so it didn’t happen”. I didn’t report the student either — there’s no evidence. There’s nothing beyond my say-so. And I’m sure he’s going to say it never happened. And that’s a scenario where I at least knew the person. Random guys at a club who take similar liberties — how would that work? Gently move his hand from my crotch to the table, then ask for his name and number? Remove yourself from the situation, and make sure a friend stays close to you at the club — that was my realistic solution.

Loopholes

When Mitt Romney was running for President, I recall some disclosure about his 401(k) value — something like 20-100 million dollars. The guy was like 65 years old. Even if he’d started contributing in 1978 & dropped in the full 30k you could do at the time … that’d be 1.2 mil in contributions over the course of his lifetime. Which is an amazing rate of return if you factor in normal market performance over the 34 years. Contribution limits sure aren’t 30k per year anymore! How do you get tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in an account? You get a special class of stock priced at one penny, put in 15k worth of it (1,500,000 shares) into your 401(k). And then revalue the stock at 10$ a share. Giving you 15 million dollars when there’s a 15k contribution limit.

Donald Trump’s billion dollar loss (great business acumen, huh?) — assuming it was a legit loss (and I think we know why the guy gets audited every year. If he’s still carrying forward his billion dollar loss … he’s got something funky on each return that may well flag it for audit) and it’s actually debt (not just loss of value) — where is that debt? That’s what reminded me of Romney’s 401(k) … if you are dealing with internal funny money, can you then proceed to buy that debt for pennies on the dollar (I’ll sell you this billion dollars of debt for a mere million dollars) and then never attempt to collect it? The debt still exists, your earnings are tax free as they are offset by that loss … but really there isn’t even debt.

Non-solutions

This post takes as a priori knowledge (i.e. not something I necessarily believe to be true based on my experience) that white flight is still a thing – that African Americans primarily live in urban centers – and that these urban centers are an absolute wreck of violent crime and disintegration.

I’ll admit to being advantaged by a lot of implicit bias — I’m a grown up white person. A female, though … and a female in science/technology fields … so it is something I’ve experienced occasionally. The first major company for which I worked, a top-level manager in the IT org hired in a lot of his at-the-time girlfriends. The new girl showing up was assumed to be incompetent, and it is a lot harder to convince someone of your competence if they start out knowing that you are only here because you are sleeping with the boss. Frustrating, but nowhere near the level of “the cops got called when I was standing at my front door trying to find my key”.

My specifics don’t give me a lot of understanding of minorities who suffer implicit bias, racial profiling, and outright discrimination … but I cannot fathom how “stop and frisk” is meant to solve either problem. Even if 25% of the people who live here are degenerate criminals, 75% of the people aren’t. Statistically you spend a lot of time hassling innocents — who may well not consider it a worthwhile trade-off to eliminate one burglar.

The nearest analogy in my life-experience is DUI and seat-belt check-points. I remember being late to work one morning because a seat-belt check-point was on my route. Slowed down traffic quite a bit, stopped on the queue waiting for my turn. Plus it took a couple of minutes for the check itself (they were doing about the nosiest check-point I’d ever seen — basically taking as much time as they could to peruse the plain-sight contents of your vehicle, asking questions, etc). There’s a sanctity of human life argument that says that the potential to save one life has more weight than a hundred people being delayed for twenty minutes that morning. Which, as a one-off … whatever. How many times, though, could I be detained before *I* don’t care all that much about the life of some goober who intentionally refused to fasten their seat belt.

And there’s a difference between reducing and relocating crime. New York City got very “tough on crime” and was able to reduce crime significantly. But Philadelphia saw a dramatic increase in crime — NY didn’t stop people from committing crime, they just stopped people from committing crimes *in NYC*. I don’t see stop-and-frisk having the slightest chance of reducing crime. Relocating, sure, but not reducing.

Knee-jerk reactions

Companies for whom I have worked have blown many millions of dollars on knee-jerk reactions to bad situations. Some of the biggest expenses never even addressed the problem at hand — but the business directive was essentially that we had a big problem and needed to be seen spending money “fixing it” even if a more nuanced study of the situation and solution showed a complete disconnect. No one outside the company could even see the details of Project CYA, and everyone inside the company was complicit in perpetrating the belief that Project CYA did whatever you needed it to do today.

I appreciate the need to do something immediately, but it seems more sensible to me that the immediate action be a stop-gap solution to provide time for a more thorough review of the situation. One of the most egregious examples was a situation where an employee was terminated under bad circumstances, drove over to one of our retail stores, and asked to borrow the logged on computer of a sales guy. Who let him use it. The guy then proceeded to credit thousands of dollars to his friends’ accounts. We spent a year and quite a bit of money implementing an identity management system — one that had many benefits, but didn’t stop an employee from letting someone else use their already logged on terminal whilst they went back and grabbed a cup of coffee. My proposal was a termination alert & photo e-mailed to all employees working within X miles of the terminated employee’s location code be sent for a few weeks while options (beyond the obvious “don’t let anyone use your logged on terminal – log off & let them go in under their ID) were explored. It would have taken a day of coding, but we already have each employee’s photograph in the security system for ID badges, a feed of terminated employees, and a work address for all employees. Sure, not everyone is going to read the message right away … but someone in the store is apt to have read it in the two hours between the guy’s manager bringing him in for the unhappy talk and the guy’s arrival at the retail store.

Reliance on knee-jerk solutions was the biggest fault I saw in George W Bush’s governance — the “trust my gut” and “go with my instincts” methodology. Without the hubris to come along later and analyze how those instinctive decisions worked out.

Trump makes George W seem positively restrained and self-aware. Beyond his constant self-aggrandizing, self-serving tax and regulation policies, and middle school bully approach to inter-social relationships … I cannot fathom how this man will lurch from manufactured crisis (the Iranians gave us the finger!?!) to manufactured crisis (Some world leader won’t meet me on the tarmac, I’m going home) to real crisis (Russia invades the Eastern Bloc, Pakistan and India decide to nuke each other, manufacturing continues to collapse even after illegal duties are slapped on everything brought into this country, Iraqis object to our plundering their oilfields and a whole host of other countries who fear the same thing join their defense against us).

Reality

Donald Trump has two premises behind his ‘make american great again’ initiative — (1) the solution to outsourcing and automation is to ask [a.k.a. use presidential power to bully] companies into manufacturing products domestically and (2) that no one has tried this because they just aren’t as clever as he and never thought of it.

Reality is that most people have a much firmer grasp of the long-term and wide-scale repercussions of their actions. His approach may work as a one-off — a single company or industry certainly doesn’t want the bad publicity associated with the president of the United States denigrating their reputation (see broccoli & Pres Bush #1 in 1990). Specifically mentioning Carrier during the debate was notable. A president specifically singling out one company for offshoring manufacturing jobs will be national news. There’s a cost/benefit analysis. Shifting manufacturing overseas saves a million, but bad publicity costs five mil in sales … OK, we’ll ship a quarter of the jobs overseas and keep more than the 0 we initially planned on leaving here.

This approach has diminishing returns. Who is going to read the White House Press Office’s list of today’s “companies that suck because they want to offshore production”?! Individually calling out one company is news partially because it is so outside the norm. If his plan was to select the three largest potential employers and strong-arm them into keeping jobs in the country … OK, it’s a strategy. I doubt, though, that Carrier is one of the largest potential employers in America.

The other reality that Trump ignores is that manufacturing automation negates wage differences — we’re all going to be unemployed while robots make everything, AI engines diagnose illness and negotiate legal proceedings, workflows process mortgages. We have the opportunity now to retrain people for the post-robotic world – hypothesize what jobs will look like and fund training programs to ready people for those opportunities. Bullying companies might work in the short term – even keep jobs around long enough for re-election. But this is the same ideology that wrote NINA mortgages a decade ago — *I* am making money *now*, who cares about next year. Eventually the conjecture of lost sales will be insignificant compared to the savings offered by automation.

Hypocrisy

First of all, some understanding of the NATO charter would be good before you go talking about countries not living up to contractual obligations. But eh, facts are so passe. NATO counties that are not funding their military at the 2% level (a.k.a. the countries that are not paying their fair share for protection) are a huge problem and we should remove our services … but not paying your federal taxes makes you smart? And failing to pay contractually obligated fees to vendors … also a good thing? As long as *I* am the one screwing someone, it’s fine but no one else better do it to me. Hypocrite.

And I’m surprised no one speculates on the awful judgement of someone who engages with so many vendors who fail to meet expectations (taking at face value the statement that the payments were not made for this reason). Either you have the absolute best judgement about everything (including the hire of subordinates who may be engaging these contractors) and could only select the best vendors (in which case, you should be paying them).  Or you’ve misjudged something in your life (oh, the horror).

Deregulation

I’ve always believed anarchy was a wonderful governance methodology — for very small communities of highly intelligent, self-aware individuals. I do not find the methodology scalable.

Pure free market principals suffer from the same problem. The free market involves informed actors making rational decisions. Rational is the word that always stood out to me — how many decisions (purchasing or otherwise) are truly rational?

But a recent report regarding a study from before there were regulations about disclosing the source of a study’s funding highlights the “informed” component. How can you be an informed actor without regulations that ensure the “facts” are not being paid for by industry associations?

This isn’t to say I believe we limitless regulations to avoid the possibility of an individual making a poor devision, or that it wouldn’t behoove us to review existing regulations to determine if they are still sensible. But I cannot understand anti-regulation fervor.

 

Debate “Instant Replay”

This: http://www.salon.com/2016/09/13/an-open-letter-to-the-commission-on-presidential-debates-bring-on-instant-replay/

Like my proposal of allowing AMT-exempted tax deductible donations to departments of the federal government, the implementation would be a little tricky but the outcome incredible. There are well defined facts, questionable facts, and then “facts” that have some kind of spin. It would be difficult to stick to the well-documented facts (is some research paper published by a group who got funded by someone benefiting from the result of the research still a “fact”?). I think I would stick to opponent flagged comments too — having a limited number of wrong challenges discourages challenging every statement. But as long as your challenge is substantiated, it isn’t like you’ll find yourself halfway through the fourth quarter, fourth down two yards from the goal line, and unable to challenge a call.

Alternately candidates could be provided a list of their top n lies and told that any of these statements will be immediately challenged by the moderator. The FBI says you were careless … you can say you thought you were doing everything you could, but were found to have been careless. There are recordings of you supporting a war, you can say you changed your mind as new information came to light (why no one does this is beyond me – the “he was for it before he was against it” thing a few elections cycles ago seemed to have such an easy answer to me. I was not privy to all of the information the President had available. Based on the information we were provided at the time, I was for it. Now that new information has been made pubic, I have changed my mind) but you cannot just say you opposed it.

Cultural Heroin

One of the most astute observations of what Trump has to offer comes from JD Vance in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/opioid-of-the-masses/489911/

“Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.”

I think Trump has a cathartic release of anger and frustration. He has someone to blame. He has a simple solution that sounds great unless you bother to question if summoning unicorns actually can cure Aunt Sally’s meth addiction or if pouring billions of dollars into “the wall” would actually bring back mining jobs lost to automation. It’s not real, but the idea makes someone feel better for a bit.