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| Beware the Ides of March La Morte di Cesare di Vincenzo Camuccini Courtesy Wikimedia Commons |
Quote of the Day
The higher type of man clings to virtue,
the lower type of man clings to material comfort.
The higher type of man cherishes justice,
the lower type of man cherishes the hope of favors to be received.
Confucius
British Blog Quote of the Day on Obama
In criticizing (conservative?) British PM Cameron's fawning adoration at Obama's "beautiful words" [just words...] at the recent state dinner, British-by-birth, American-by-choice Toby Harnden has this to say:
Obama, says Cameron "has pressed the reset button on the moral authority of the entire free world". What? Pass the sickbag. Whichever way you look at it, that's ridiculous. Under Obama, despite his campaign promises and indeed an executive order when he took office, Guantanamo Bay has remained open. Drone strikes have increased exponentially - it being judged easier to kill suspects than capture and interrogate them. Military trials outside the federal system continue, as does indefinite detention without trial.
In Strasbourg, he apologised for the times when "America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive" towards its allies. But Obama has certainly shown arrogance and dismissiveness towards the UK in a way that President George W. Bush never did. Israel considers the US an unreliable ally under Obama. Iran's green revolutionaries might question Obama's "moral authority" after he allowed them to be crushed by Tehran's theocratic regime, as might the Syrian rebels and civilians currently dying at the hands of President Bashar Assad.I agree word for word. And sweet angel of democracy, Neda Agha-Soltan, we remember. Always.
I See Dead People... At the Polls
James O'Keefe, whose infamous undercover investigation of Acorn (remember when he went to local offices posing as a pimp and got advice on how to work around the law in qualifying for government assistance?), notably released on the late Andrew Breitbart's new media outlets, politically embarrassed the Obama White House and led to a rare Congressional rebuke of the now defunct organization, is taking on the issue of voter fraud. (One should note that this is a natural offshoot of his earlier work on Acorn, which was charged by multiple states on relevant grounds.)
If a dishonest person cannot get his papers directly (e.g., providing a birth certificate), quite often it's simpler just to piggyback off someone whom has already been authorized. We see this all the time in real life: for example, you don't have a swipe card or combination to get into a building or floor, so you bide your time until someone else goes in or out of the facility. In theory, if relevant databases are properly designed and updated, you shouldn't experience issues like multiple or unexpired registrations, posthumous transfer payments, etc. Never mind biometric matching of the individual with an identification--and isn't it ironic that you get more scrutinized going through an airport security line than getting into a voting booth?
O'Keefe does a superb job here, unmasking the blatant hypocrisy of the progressive/liberal groupthink establishment, showing it's easier and more politically correct to vote without proper identification than for a young adult to get served an alcoholic beverage or even register at a hotel. Doesn't lax enforcement of voter identification raise the prospect or likelihood of manipulated, corrupt elections and an intrinsically unconstitutional violation of equal protection principles? (We already know that some politically active college students illegally double dip, voting both from home and college.) After all, relaxed voter ID laws not only have the morally hazardous effect of excusing the prospective voter from doing his due diligence well before an election but can also serve to open the doors for voting abuse over and beyond membership in target politically correct special interest groups.
It's bad enough realizing that progressive Democratic operatives every 2 or 4 years suddenly rediscover the "disenfranchised" homeless person or member of the minority community just in time for the election (not that they did anything constructive in the interim to legitimately raise registration rates); perhaps in exchange for a pack of cigarettes or something to drink, the person, pampered all the way to the voting booth, agrees to vote for the candidate wearing the union label: what's not to like about a politician whom promises to give you free stuff with no strings attached? "Obama money..." Don't worry about the check: the other guy will pay the bill.
What a wonderful thing, this democracy of ours! As a serious political blogger, I have no more voice in the next election than a drifter with no knowledge of the issues and whom couldn't pick Joe Biden out of a lineup if his life depended on it... (Did you ever stop to think what if, say, conservatives, instead of sticking to their moral principles, decided to meet progressive bribes for votes and upped the ante?)
But then we already know how seriously Democratic voters think through the issues. We have the iconic example of the Democratic nomination for the US Senate from South Carolina in 2010. Clearly the majority of Democrats thought they were voting for a famous soul singer, not an unemployed candidate with unknown stands on the issues. (But his idea to boost the economy by creating and marketing an action figure patterned after himself certainly was refreshing...)
Not that the Democrat voters knew why a famous soul singer would be running for office, any relevant qualifications, or even his stands on the issues (although presumably he would vote consistent with a pervasive Hollywood progressive perspective).
Barriers to Entry:
IRS and Big Tax Preparation Service
My last client at IBM was a well-known national franchise tax preparation service (not H&R Block). I essentially single-handedly did a migration of the client's ERP (Oracle E-Business Suite) nonstandard configuration, previously installed and maintained by a well-known management consulting company to work in our business model (assuming a plain-vanilla installation, patched up to date with standard functionality for database patching and refreshes). [Another IBM business unit had hosted the configuration on its own servers.] The prior vendor had done few patches since installation (some 18 months of so of literally dozens of major patches had to be done), they used proprietary methods inconsistent with Oracle's supported patching and RapidClone setups (in fact, I considered what they did as a poison pill). The new client and my manager pointed fingers over whom was responsible for patching the status quo production environment before rehosting and going live; I knew that I would be doing it during the migration because the client wasn't going to risk their existing production environment requiring a separate advanced unplanned outage in the shrinking time period before migration.
In fact, the client wasn't even aware how much out of Oracle support compliance their installation was; I did know the client wasn't happy with the management consultants but I wasn't familiar with the specific complaints. I understand IBM's rationale for going after the business--we're already hosting your server environment; we have a one-stop-shop solution for doing everything--hardware and software.
The fact is my business unit management did not do due diligence on the client. I was literally the only competent person on the project; I ended up doing at least 85% of the work single-handedly, no exaggeration. I was dealing with Unix/network administrators whom didn't properly configure the environment to enable reasonable file transfer speeds (MB vs. GB per hour), I had a database crash caused by a Unix sys admin whom violated his department's own standards in setting up storage for the development server (the database crashed right in the middle of patching one day, and I had a 2-day delay as he tried to diagnose what happened and reconfigured the structures--I didn't lose any data, but he had blown a 2-day hole in the timeline), and we were hours from starting go-live and the "project manager" still hadn't secured access to a production server. The night before go-live, the IBM operator had only managed to dump something like 50MB from a tape overnight and never escalated the issue on his own, I got my functional colleague the upgraded database by noontime on a Saturday when he suddenly discovered his off-site account didn't work (I had asked him days earlier to double-check), and we were running a skeleton crew, meaning his account wouldn't be serviced until Monday. I asked him to go to the nearby client site, and he refused, saying "it can wait until Monday".
In the meanwhile, the client technical contact had given me materially wrong documentation over their servers (critical information about ports and related information I needed to know for networking tasks); he belatedly swerved me by mentioning a critical once-daily bank download (because of bank security procedures, only one download per day was allowed, and I had to set up a standard upload procedure, which was like doing a crossword puzzle in ink). Processing the bank data required the installation of certain standard encryption/decryption software--not part of our supported server software list. So I had to pursue the politics to get that done.
Not to mention other politics going on. My (Indian/American) boss, a former long-term high-ranking Oracle manager, had recently promoted one of the Indian DBA's to management. I had had issues with the Indian DBA in question on a prior Netherlands project we were helping to staff with another IBM business unit. I discovered an installation/patching problem this DBA was responsible for while troubleshooting a technical issue. He had used the wrong Unix user account (by Oracle's own instructions--and you have to understand our business model required compliance with Oracle Support standards), and he blew me off when I complained.
So this newly empowered DBA manager decided to attack me politically by flagging to business unit management he would refuse to accept responsibility for the new client's database maintenance on the grounds that I had not spun off enough cookie cutter tasks to his staffers and, unlike the clients whom were glowing over my results, thus had "no confidence" in my efforts. [IBM trained new DBA's at their Bangalore, India facilities for doing routine tasks, patching, etc.; these DBA's would often leave after 6 months or so for a higher-paying position elsewhere.]
This attack would somewhat resonate with business unit management, on the business unit's cost-savings preference for substituting commodity Indian DBA labor for routine tasks. But there were no standard processes or blueprint for doing a nonstandard migration. I was having to muddle through serious technical issues adapting the infrastructure to accommodate a complicated ERP system, getting patches applied and autoconfiguration to work properly, prerequisites to our operating environment.
That project was as if God has a particularly perverse sense of humor. I was already unhappy with my boss, especially after the Unix support manager defensively tried to point fingers at ME for not noticing HIS subordinate had been violating his department's own storage standards (not communicated to me). And my boss AGREED. I had no authority over this guy; I trusted him to be minimally competent in doing his job (I don't double-check the due diligence of an elevator technician before using an elevator). Thanks, boss: do you want me to roll over so the bus can hit me a second time? It's not as if a manager should be held responsible for his own subordinate's failure to comply with departmental policies.
IBM overall is a well-managed and staffed company, and I don't hold them responsible for a relatively new acquisition with existing personnel whom probably would never have been hired by a different IBM unit. In fact, one of my dissertation committee members joined IBM a few years after leaving UH as a junior professor and holds a distinguished title at the company. (Unfortunately, when I left academia, IBM was on the verge of breaking up--and certainly not hiring researchers, until they hired the Cookie Man to run the company.)
I resigned my position soon after the client went live (IBM policies didn't allow transfers to other IBM units until you had been there, e.g., 18 to 24 months in your initial position).
But here's the broader point: it takes a lot of money to license Oracle EBS and database software, never mind pay for IBM Apps hosting services.
Now the video below talks about something that on its surface seems to make a lot of sense--establish a certification track for tax preparers, require them to engage in continuing ongoing education (e.g., about changes in tax law), etc. Who could argue with that?
Before going further, let me point out there is already accountability in the system (e.g., tax professionals sign off on their client's return), and small shop tax services aren't going to maintain or build their business if they don't keep up with tax laws or otherwise fail to provide quality services to their customers, whom also have the option of going to a competitor, including franchised operations. There is no sudden contagion of tax preparation issues, particularly centered on small operation "incompetence". (In fact, my baby sister, a CPA, has done taxes for other people for years, and is exceptionally professional and competent, better than any suit you'll find in a franchised operation.) If I had a complex tax issue, I don't need the IRS' imprimatur on my sister's qualifications: I'm sure my sister could jump through whatever bureaucratic hoops imposed by a megalomaniac IRS, but let's not put lipstick on a pig: none of this has any material bearing on my sister's service to her clients. All the IRS is doing is discouraging tax preparation entrepreneurs, creating an artificial shortage of tax preparation professionals, which will drive up the cost of services and create a deadweight loss for consumers.
Why argue with the IRS' power grab? Simple: in effect, this is the grown-up version of opening a lemonade stand. Kids would have to sell a lot of lemonade just to cover government costs. A small tax preparation operator faces the same type steep costs, and he can't really pass along government costs to his customers. The operator, in fact, may be very competent and keep up with new developments as they occur. Certainly their clients have the option of going to H&R Block or to a CPA firm. The big companies, as I've just shown, have to resources to accommodate financing of new requirements. Do they gave better advice and/or service than the small company? I doubt it. If a pregnant woman wants a midwife instead of an MD, why should we feel threatened? If the small operator doesn't do a quality job, he'll lose that customer. But that customer may receive better, higher quality service and attention that he or she would never get from a suit at H&R Block. We deserve a wider base of quality preparation personnel, not an artificial scarcity to push up prices, manipulated by the IRS and its crony capitalist partners, Big Tax Preparation.
[PS. It's ironic that a libertarian is arguing on behalf of the independent tax preparation profession. I, of course, prefer a non-Marxist utopia where the (lower) tax burden would be handled so simply and unobtrusively that the tax preparation profession would "wither away". But, alas, I live in the real world with Big Nanny.]
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Cars, "Shake It Up"
