Quote of the Day
Power is the ability to do good things for others.
Brooke Astor
Tragedy in Japan... 8.9 Richter Scale Earthquake...Tsunami
Less than a dozen years ago I was corporate DBA for the Santa Clara-based American subsidiary of a major Japanese computer chip testing equipment manufacturer; our clients included Intel, Micron, and IBM. I myself never went to Japan, but my boss and my best friend, a project manager, did. I contacted my old friend today, now the IT manager; I was relieved to hear my former employer headquarters and company employees were not affected. In a manner of speaking, it's ironic, because I felt my first tremors literally in my first days of work in Santa Clara as a subcontractor; having slept as a Kansas tornado ripped through the neighborhood and survived a hurricane as a graduate student in Houston, I used to kid my colleagues that the "Big One" would surely hit while I lived in California...
The disaster has resulted in hundreds of casualties, staggering property damage, and a handful of nuclear power plants (a third of the country's energy is supplied by over 50 nuclear plants) struggling to cope with cooling system failures. My sympathy, thoughts and prayers are with the survivors, relatives and friends of casualties; President Obama has my full, unconditional support to provide any assistance we can provide to support the beautiful, honorable, industrious people and government of Japan, our faithful allies, in this time of need.
A Great Day for the Citizens of Wisconsin:
Governor Walker Strips Public Control
of the Budget Away From Special Interests:
BOTH THUMBS PROUDLY WAY UP!
Governor Scott Walker (R-WI) signed a historic public sector union reform measure into law. Pro-union thugs continued their lawbreaking temper tantrums, vowing retribution against the governor and Republican legislators. Given the fact that Wisconsin voters decided against union-endorsed candidates last fall, how successful do you think the recalls are going to be? What a winning platform for the spendthrift Wisconsin Democrats: vote against these Republicans for doing their jobs! What an example for the fine young people of Wisconsin to emulate--petulant state senate Democrats running away from their jobs in Madison because they don't get their way on a vote!
Will Wisconsin's voters recall Governor Walker or the profiles of courage in the House and Senate, risking their political future to do right by the people of Wisconsin? Might I suggest awarding medals of honor?
Let us put in more concrete terms just why the pro-union thugs were breaking into state buildings, just what union teachers illegally taking the day off and getting a phony medical excuse were fighting to keep. Here are some fine examples from the Union Hall of Shame that the taxpayers of Wisconsin have had to pay for because of collective bargaining that the courageous legislature, mostly Republicans, have had to rescue from the corrupt union-bought-and-paid-for Democrats:
- Walker notes in his own Wisconsin County exec dealings, unions blocked privatization efforts at every turn to reduce costs and also rejected a no-layoff deal which would have reduced hours to 35
- a union filed a grievance against the use of prison inmates doing lawn care
- despite up to $60K in salaries, several correctional officers and bus drivers, because of overtime, have received into the six-figures in compensation up to almost $160,000
- Green Bay teachers at retirement can get a bonus full year's salary for working 30 days total over the following 3 years; the Madison union did a better job bargaining their own "emeritus" status, eventually driving down the number of hours of work required from 20 hours down to zero
- Milwaukee school teachers get TWO pensions, both totally paid for by taxpayers
- a union filed a grievance due to an 86-year-old in Wausau volunteering to serve as a school crossing guard
- some state employees have to wear pagers for emergency purposes and granted 5 paid additional hours/prorated salary (i.e., over 10%) each week, whether or not they are contacted or do any work
- the termination of a teacher caught viewing pornography on a school computer had to go all the way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court
- Milwaukee had to lay off the Outstanding First Year Teacher recipient because of union seniority rules; union members decided to keep a more expensive health care plan (neither plan required teacher contributions), even though the cost savings could have saved some teaching jobs
I mentioned in a past post one sample example from my own experience. The assistant dean of the School of Business had asked 3 or 4 professors, including me, for a favor carrying a few items between offices. It took 15-20 minutes, no big deal. I had all but forgotten about it until one of the professors later told me that the union had gotten wind of the incident and had billed the business school for the work it never did; it was morally outrageous union greed, pure and simple.
I have never received a dime for working literally thousands of hours of overtime over the years, and bonuses were more the exception than the rule. As a DBA I've often had to do upgrades and maintenance when users were off the system (e.g., holidays, evenings and weekends). But, and this is an incident that I don't recall having mentioned in the blog, I was working on a Wisconsin county project (not Walker's Milwaukee) The county Unix system administrator and DBA's had responsibilities for backing up a critical test server in the flat-bid project. One Friday afternoon I started suspecting issues with a RAID drive on the test server and had to have them contact the Unix administrator (whom for some reason was off by 3PM every day). [Oh, that's another Wisconsin quirk. I was briefing a county DBA at her desk at 5PM, and her boss showed at her desk telling her it was okay to blow me off and leave. Me, I had to be on site at 7:30AM, commuting 83 miles, and I couldn't leave until 7PM. Longer if I had to do patching. I sometimes ate dinner in an I-94 diner at 11PM or midnight on the drive home.] The Unix administrator first claimed there wasn't a problem he could see. For some reason I remember seeing him on site bouncing the server at around 7PM. Everything was lost. We had to go to backups. The DBA's didn't have a valid backup script but by some miracle I managed to fish the missing 2-GB datafile out of the "lost and found". The county DBA didn't want to take responsibility, but I managed to bring up the database.
The story wasn't over, unfortunately. We had a critical test scheduled for Monday morning. But the heavily patched application software directory was gone without a contract-required backup. I had to spend long days over the weekend reinstalling the software and all the patches, and the test went through Monday as expected. My company gave the county an invoice for my services compensating us for the county failing to live up to the terms of its contract. The county rejected the invoice on the bases this was a flat-bid contract and the well-known legal principle "sh*t happens". My employer at the time (which was morally challenged in its own dealings with me) decided not to pursue the matter, hoping it would give them an edge in bidding for a "phase 2" project.
I'm not writing this for public sympathy. But it does give a good example of how contractors can be treated by the public sector and why I get a little testy over these self-serving studies about the educated, underpaid Wisconsin public servants. (Don't ask me about the time I had to work late one night because the county DBA decided to take off without notice in order to get her dog's nails clipped one afternoon. No, I don't have a dog, and I don't want angry notes from dog lovers everywhere. If you need your dog's nails clipped, please have it done it on your own time. I've never once seen a business meeting delayed in the private sector because a participant had to personally escort his or her dog, having it groomed during business hours.)
President Obama's News Conference: Energy Deception:
Thumbs DOWN!
Today's news conference picked on one topic which shows how deliberately deceptive Barack Obama is; the man just lacks integrity. He picks and chooses facts he wants in putting lipstick on a pig and leaves out highly salient facts that contradict the essence of the message Obama is conveying. He claims production is in the highest in years and last year foreign liquid fuel imports fell to less than 50%--which he, of course, credits to conservation efforts... He is dismissive of any claims that his administration's policies have adversely affected domestic oil production.
As predictable as always, Obama used the occasion to put in a plug for his tax subsidy-heavy "clean fuels" alternative energy production policies (pay no attention to that $14.2T national debt and $1.65T federal deficit behind the curtain!) and reiterated his populist nonsense about keeping his eye out for price-gauging at the gas pump. Isn't it obvious that every once in a while gas retailers just get a "green light" on their price gauging indicators: "I know: I'll raise my prices so I'll sell fewer gallons, earn big profits, and alienate my customers!" I have little doubt during shortages some will take advantage of temporary supply problems (e.g., around natural disasters) to charge what the market will bear, but that's not a sustainable business model. Wal-Mart builds its profits by selling volumes of consistently low-markup products.
Okay, where do we start? It is true that domestic consumption of fuel imports fell to 49% "primarily because of the decline in consumption during the recession and rising domestic production". THIS WAS A TEMPORARY DIP based on things like bloated inventories and reduced demand and is not relevant for a more robust recovery. For example, my work commutes in the DC area have sometimes extended up to 40 miles each way; between gigs, I don't fill up my tank as often. But those are temporary declines in my overall consumption (in fact, the government expects growth in liquid fuel consumption over the next few years). It is true that imports have been in an overall decline. No doubt due to Obama's policies? He wishes (i.e., of course not!). Actually, this trend of increased production started around 2006 (think George W. Bush), largely due to innovative extraction techniques allowing more recovery from existing (mature/declining) wells and development of certain shale properties in North Dakota and Texas. We could see up to a 25% related increase in production over the coming decade, but last year we were only able to inch back to 2002 production levels.
What Obama intentionally omitted to stress was that last year worldwide consumption grew by 2.4M barrels per day, with overall consumption beating 2007 (pre-recession) levels, the highest growth rate in 30 years, while expected maturing/declining OPEC surplus capacity next year is just over 3M barrels per day. If and when we are talking about 1M barrels per day difference, it is obvious that the supply and demand are uncomfortably tight, and there is little room for error, e.g., supply disruptions or higher demand.
Note: there are some non-OPEC sources, and the US is less reliant on hostile suppliers: of the 14.2M crude oil barrels per day the US imported in December, roughly 3.2 (23%) come from our (top 2) NAFTA neighbors. But even at 7.5M barrels a day (and growing) domestic production, we are far from self-sufficient when it comes to our dependence on some 11M barrels a day from sources outside of North America.
Let's not forget some of the non-fossil alternative fuels being discussed come alcohols (e.g., ethanol) or non-petroleum (compressed natural gas). Ethanol production is a major factor in current food inflation, is less efficient a fuel source, and is bounded by the percentage tolerated (up to 15%) by conventional vehicle engines, lack of flex-fuel vehicles, and inadequate distribution systems. CNG, prominently discussed by Boone Pickens in 2008, also lacks wide distribution and there are limited vehicle options in the US (unfortunate given the large natural gas supply resulting from innovative fracting technologies).
Obama conveniently wants the people to forget about his anti-carbon EPA policies and/or environmental lawsuits tying up production beyond North Dakota and Texas in shale properties, his unconstitutional moratorium on issuing offshore permits, and his heavily filtered exploratory areas off either coast, Alaska, and the Gulf of Mexico, with only a tiny fraction of promising areas made available via the usual arbitrary progressive labyrinth of rules (not too close to shore, etc.) or sellouts to crony political interests in heavily liberal coastal areas (e.g., California and the Northeast). And, once again, we hear the same old same old political rhetoric about how long it takes for coastal area discoveries to get to market (which, of course, professional oil executives contradict). When is Obama going to change the channel? (FYI: this is a play on Obama's trite words: "turn the page").
When is America going to get a REAL leader, not some all-hat-and-no-cattle Chief Executive? I'm getting sick and tired of reactionary, dithering, excuse-making, scapegoating, political-spinning, state-of-denial progressive administrative incompetence in the White House! (Ask me what I REALLY think of President Obama...) I dedicate the following song to #44 with an apropos chorus:
Political Humor
"According to Forbes, the richest man in the world is from Mexico. It turns out he’s Oprah’s gardener." - Conan O'Brien
[President Obama already has Carlos Slim on the IRS "10 Most Wanted" list.]
An original:
- Actress Julianne Moore has been chosen to play 2008 VP nominee Sarah Palin in the upcoming HBO movie Game Change. Although she didn't mention it, the (younger) Sarah Palin is not happy about being portrayed by the 50-year-old actress. As for John McCain: they're still trying to find an actor old enough to play the part...
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Bee Gees, "Jive Talking". NOTE: This is my last segment in the Bee Gees series. They have covered additional material during the last 40-odd years, also available through Youtube and other video and music portals, and their timeless music is available for purchase from a variety of vendors and in a number of formats. The next act I will cover is the soft rock group "America", which scored a number of major hits in the early to mid 70's.
