I predict future happiness for Americans
if they can prevent the government
from wasting the labors of the people
under the pretense of taking care of them.
Thomas Jefferson
Austrian Economist Chicks Are So.... Amazing
She had me by the time she closed the book on Keynes....
IBM CEO Ginni Rometty Pays Green, Gets No Green Jacket
The last thing I want to do is discuss ideological feminism in this blog. The next to last thing I want to write about are stupid "business expenses", like ultra-expensive sky boxes.
Maybe I'm just jealous, but I don't think so. I remember the last gig I did for Oracle Consulting as a senior principal. I had flown down to Oklahoma City to get a failing state government Oracle project back on track (which I succeeded in doing). The odd thing I remember about that gig is that the Oracle project manager was staying at the downtown Marriott. I was mentoring a new hire DBA on the project (whom didn't have prior exposure with Oracle e-Business Suite, which competes against SAP, the leading vendor in the ERP software business), and we were staying at the Marriott Courtyard (I think at half the rate), and I seem to recall the two of us had to share the same rental car. I guess management has its perks, but as I explained in a prior post, for another customer the year after I left Oracle, the CEO's secretary called me in to say that I was authorized to book a $200/night hotel in Santa Clara. But instead, I booked an extended stay room costing about $43/night in Morgan Hill, drove around in a subcompact rental, and instead of eating out, I simply expensed groceries.
About the closest I came to "business entertainment" was going to a Chicago BlackHawk game with co-workers on a south Chicago project at an auto supplier. The corporate box was empty that night, and we got invited. The food buffet was certainly above your typical hot dog, but to be honest, I am an embarrassment to my French-Canadian heritage: I'm not a hockey fan. To make things worse, I don't think Chicago won the game...
Yeah, I know that country club golf courses are legendary for being the place where big business deals are struck. But I would like to think if I ever got rich, which is never going to happen, I would be like Warren Buffett, whom has lived in same ordinary house for decades and has driven the same car for years, even though he could probably sleep for the rest of his life out of 4-star hotels and buy a new car every month and barely touch his net worth. (To be honest, if I was a CEO, I would love to do a deal at Goode Company Barbeque on Kirby in Houston: nothing like a platter of good old-fashioned Texas BBQ and a longneck. I haven't been there since I graduated...)
The Master's tournament is probably the most prestigious US golf tournament; many clubs have restrictive, unenlightened policies about membership, and the Master's, located in the Deep South, has faced controversies before based on individual differences (e.g., race).
We libertarians have a couple of principles at play here: (1) freedom of association and (2) equal protection. The all-male club normally gives memberships to executive officers of major tournament sponsors; for some reason, they were caught unprepared for a major sponsor like IBM fronted by a woman.
Personally, as a businessman, I look for ways to expand my business--not arbitrarily restrict it. If a competitor is stupid enough to discriminate, I would do everything in my power to let those people know that their business is welcome at my establishment, and I would feel privileged by having them as my customers.
I really don't care if the country club is all male; if I decide I want to invite only male Franco-Americans to my house for dinner, what business is it of anyone else's? But I don't think you vary your membership rules by sponsor: you should treat your sponsors the same way, and you need to deal with sponsor leadership which can vary from any relevant membership restrictions.
If I had a choice between a restrictive club and a heterogeneous one, I would choose the latter (unless we're talking about gender issues like prostate health).
As Gillespie suggests, I would advise my former employer IBM not to sponsor any event if the club discriminates against its key managers. That's morally unacceptable.
I'll never forget when Helen Reddy's feminist anthem (see below) hit it big. I may have mentioned in a past post, I'll never forget being without a car at OLL; I was taking a bowling/badminton class; one of the married coeds had a big station wagon and offered the two of us guys a ride to the alley with 3 or so other women in the car. Right after the chorus there's this "oooo" sound. So the song comes on, the ladies start singing along, and I'm getting increasingly uncomfortable. Then it gets to the "oooo" part, and I've got 4 pairs of female eyes glaring angrily at me, as if I'm the embodiment of every evil against women since the beginning of time. For a second there I thought I was going to get thrown out of the car. In fact, I've got 4 little sisters whom have no problem telling big brother exactly what they think...
Spinning the Employment Numbers
The new employment numbers came out today; a CBS news alert hit my inbox saying simply 8.2% unemployment (the fact that well-below project new hire numbers--112,000, well below the 200K-plus numbers we've seen recently). Keep in mind economists estimate that we need up to 150K jobs just to handle NEW labor market entrants--not to mention the fact that we have the lowest labor force percentage rate in roughly 3 decades. U-3 is, as faithful readers recall, is the official number with certain nuances: for example, how can unemployment go down while the number of new hires go down? You have arbitrary government criteria where discouraged long-term unemployed are no longer considered part of the labor force. It reminds me of lyrics from Cat Stevens' New York Times: "But no one gives a damn no one really cares, How they feel they're just paper people not real."
The long-term unemployed can float back in and out of official government statistics based on economics news. (Skeptical human resource professionals are indifferent, even hostile to the long-term unemployed, applying arbitrary criteria, questioning knowledge and skill obsolescence, etc.)
How bad is the real picture? The government's most "liberal" (realistic) number is U-6, which includes the underemployed. What's included in this number? Real-life examples I know include a former public school teacher whom finally found full-time employment at a private sector school, probably paying a market-based salary at about two-thirds of the public school monopoly salary for the same position--after spending several months of work on a reduced work schedule as a checkout cashier. In another case, there is a former high-level IT manager at a well-known telecommunications company now working part-time in a nearby university computing center, living in a small apartment versus his former upscale house in a Texas suburb.
I have sometimes gone between gigs, especially in the Obama economy. Just to give a few anecdotal examples: for some reason, some insurance company known for its duck mascot had all but stalked me for months at a time--not for my technical expertise, but to become a commission salesman/agent (by "stalking", I mean they continued to call and harass me even after I repeatedly told them I was not interested. I even started hanging up on them, hoping that they get the message, but even that didn't work. And then I started seeing their recruitment ads on my cable TV shows, which I seriously doubt was a coincidence: is my cable company trying to be another Google?) In another case, I got a "callback" for an in-person interview, presumably for a DBA position: only to discover I had been tricked into attending some cattle call for a sales position for which there never was a first contact. (In this economy, it's not unusual to put in for a gig and not hear back for 5 months.)
I recently contacted by a recruiter for a well-known corporation (known for not paying a lot of taxes under the Obama Administration); it would involve moving AT MY EXPENSE to a blue state headed by a governor even worse, if you can imagine such a thing, than Comrade O'Malley (D-MD). (No, I'm not talking about the People's Republic of California. I've made it clear in posts never again after that state stole a percentage of Illinois-earned Roth IRA and excess SDI contribution money from me. It's not so much the money (over $1500) as the principle.) In any event, assuming I survived various rounds of phone screens, she told me I would be expected to make arrangements (at my expense, of course) for an in-person interview. And, of course, they still weren't obligated to make an offer. Why would a multi-billion dollar corporation scrimp on business expenses and put them instead on the backs of applicants? (She did hold out the possibility of a small sign-on bonus if it ever got to the offer stage...) Well, of course, in this economy hiring managers don't feel the need to spend any more than for a locally-acquired resource.
And the same holds true of out-of-state contract gigs. Never mind that business expenses may amount to $35/hour or more, more than you would net from the gig. They don't feel the need to pay a penny over the local rate. (I think I've seen 2 gigs over the past year where the client was willing to pay expenses--but they wanted an impossible-to-find set of skills and experience.)
In another case a while back, I was looking to close on a perm New Jersey opportunity (not my first choice of location to begin with) when an account executive finally picked up the phone to talk to me and said, "I think you need to know the position isn't based out of New Jersey--it's in a war zone area (like Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.)." Let me get back to you on that.... As a DBA, I have more than my fair share of organizational politics to deal with; the last thing I need is to get targeted over foreign policy decisions I don't agree with...
John Williams' Shadow Government Statistics (see chart below) attempts to adjust for long-term discouraged workers, which the government hasn't officially measured since 1994. I have also included total nonfarm employment features; notice that we still haven't reached the level of employment since Obama's first full month as President, when the massive stimulus bill was signed into law--not to mention another 5 million since the start of the recession in December 2007. If we take into account at least 1M a year just for new labor force members, we're probably at least 9M in the hole since the recession began.
Mark J. Perry's Carpe Diem blog seems to have multiple positive posts weekly on employment (including one on manufacturing jobs today, others on oil-boom North Dakota, want ads, etc.) But I am skeptical. I'm still seeing the arrogance in a buyer's market: almost none of the opportunities are perm, most are short-term contracts requiring the party to relocate (taking all the risk and expense, with no assurance of follow-up assignments), most selection processes are biased to reject candidates (e.g., by emphasizing trivial criteria).
Let me give a short example just to underscore my point. A few weeks back a recruiter was quizzing me about my exposure to Toad. Toad is a third-party utility which many Oracle developers prefer in interacting with an Oracle database. Oracle provides a variety of free tools to do the same functionality: plus DBA's also connect to Unix/Linux platform database servers using freeware ssh/telnet sessions. Most of my clients won't pay for the license of a third-party utility like Toad. The point is this: this isn't a legitimate job criterion (especially for any experienced Oracle professional). Suppose I was hiring a bike courier: I'm more interested in knowing whether you know how to ride a bike, not what models you've ridden.
Another recruiter I dealt with recently didn't understand the difference between public trust background investigations and security clearances (secret, top secret, etc.) The federal government, in its infinite wisdom, does not issue cross-agency public trust (or other types of clearances). So I knew a former Defense contractor whom had to apply for public trust because the Patent Trademark Office didn't recognize his clearance. If you wanted to go from USPTO to, say, Veteran Affairs, the latter doesn't recognize the former's public trust. If you then wanted to go to DHS, you need to go through yet another background check. Some agencies require the form submitted on paper; others require online entry. (Supposedly the investigators can reuse findings of prior background investigations, but you may still be required to spend hours tediously reentering detailed background details just to get your foot in the door. And heaven help you if, say, you've done a 2-week assignment here, a 3-month assignment there, a 6-week assignment next, a one-week vacation in between, going back 5 to 10 years; the paperwork is staggering.) Security clearances are somewhat different (I haven't had an assignment with a sponsoring vendor, say at the State Department or the Pentagon), with an active status granted for a specific period of time and which can bridge assignments. The recruiter called back 3 times with the same question: was my last public trust still in active status? I explained the first time she asked me that public trust status expires the date you leave the agency, and in any event, this (entitlement) agency would require a new public trust application. (I knew that because in the past a different agency recruiter demanded that I complete the public trust paperwork at the same entitlement agency just to be eligible for a job interview with the federal contractor: another example of employer arrogance. If the contractor was interviewing 10 other people, too, and/or decided that they didn't like you, all that paperwork is a waste of time. A few years back, potential employers were willing to interview first and then do the paperwork, required by the offer letter; today, the contractor may decide if and when they made a decision, they want the paperwork already completed and ready to go: why should they care that the applicant isn't getting paid for his time in filling paperwork? It's only government workers whom get paid for pushing paperwork.) It is not my function to train recruiters; I certainly haven't been compensated for the trouble.
I haven't heard the Administration response to the latest job numbers, but the spin is so predictable I can predict they said something trite like this: this adds yet another month of positive job growth to the ongoing consecutive string; we're not satisfied: there's a long way to go, some months will be better than others, but at least we're heading in the right direction, blah, blah, blah. I fully expect that the Press Secretary would then pump up the President's Keynesian job growth plan, criticize the GOP House for irresponsible austerity talk (or face ludicrous allegations of "social Darwinism" by the Deadbeat-in-Chief), etc. How did I do?
The danger I see for Republicans is that they should avoid playing on the President's court by his rules. Once you get into a bidding war over Keynesian (fiscal spending) policies, you've lost the game.
If I know GOP spin, they'll respond by pointing out the well-paying jobs associated with domestic oil exploration and production, Obama's irresponsible, counterproductive Keystone pipeline decision, etc. I also expect them to highlight that the average American business tax burden is higher now than even Japan's, the previous tax burden king.
I would probably add a line to GOP spin, noting Obama's hypocrisy in promoting proactive, preventive spending in health care, but he is hardly proactive, preventive in terms of fiscal discipline and the awful truth of debt compounding with interest. (Personally, I think there's a method to Dem madness. I think they specifically want the currency trashed so they can pay off past debts with cheap dollars. But a trashed currency leads to an investment outflow (not good for American jobs), not to mention a decreased standard of living, and inevitable inflation is a cruel tax, particularly for the lower-income workers.) I also want to see MORE 'repeal' and LESS 'replace'. I want to see more regulate-as-you-go, with a super-majority vote required for any new regulations (and, say, at least three comparable regulations expired for every new regulation enacted).
As for me, I continue to write this little blog which no one seems to notice; I don't have unrealistic expectations, I fight the good fight, but I'm content to watch the wheels go round.
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| Courtesy of shadowstats.com |
U-3 Statistics Available Through BLS
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2002 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.9 | 5.8 | 5.8 | 5.8 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.9 | 6.0 | |
| 2003 | 5.8 | 5.9 | 5.9 | 6.0 | 6.1 | 6.3 | 6.2 | 6.1 | 6.1 | 6.0 | 5.8 | 5.7 | |
| 2004 | 5.7 | 5.6 | 5.8 | 5.6 | 5.6 | 5.6 | 5.5 | 5.4 | 5.4 | 5.5 | 5.4 | 5.4 | |
| 2005 | 5.3 | 5.4 | 5.2 | 5.2 | 5.1 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 4.9 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 4.9 | |
| 2006 | 4.7 | 4.8 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 4.6 | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 4.5 | 4.4 | 4.5 | 4.4 | |
| 2007 | 4.6 | 4.5 | 4.4 | 4.5 | 4.4 | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 5.0 | |
| 2008 | 5.0 | 4.9 | 5.1 | 5.0 | 5.4 | 5.6 | 5.8 | 6.1 | 6.1 | 6.5 | 6.8 | 7.3 | |
| 2009 | 7.8 | 8.3 | 8.7 | 8.9 | 9.4 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.6 | 9.8 | 10.0 | 9.9 | 9.9 | |
| 2010 | 9.7 | 9.8 | 9.8 | 9.9 | 9.6 | 9.4 | 9.5 | 9.6 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.8 | 9.4 | |
| 2011 | 9.1 | 9.0 | 8.9 | 9.0 | 9.0 | 9.1 | 9.1 | 9.1 | 9.0 | 8.9 | 8.7 | 8.5 | |
| 2012 | 8.3 | 8.3 | 8.2 |
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2002 | 130591 | 130445 | 130421 | 130337 | 130328 | 130375 | 130275 | 130264 | 130209 | 130330 | 130338 | 130175 | |
| 2003 | 130270 | 130111 | 129898 | 129849 | 129840 | 129840 | 129865 | 129820 | 129929 | 130126 | 130140 | 130259 | |
| 2004 | 130421 | 130465 | 130802 | 131051 | 131361 | 131442 | 131488 | 131610 | 131771 | 132119 | 132182 | 132316 | |
| 2005 | 132453 | 132693 | 132834 | 133194 | 133364 | 133607 | 133981 | 134174 | 134240 | 134320 | 134654 | 134814 | |
| 2006 | 135097 | 135413 | 135696 | 135877 | 135891 | 135967 | 136176 | 136359 | 136516 | 136507 | 136711 | 136882 | |
| 2007 | 137118 | 137211 | 137401 | 137473 | 137612 | 137687 | 137647 | 137629 | 137702 | 137781 | 137893 | 137982 | |
| 2008 | 138023 | 137939 | 137844 | 137636 | 137446 | 137248 | 137038 | 136764 | 136332 | 135843 | 135040 | 134379 | |
| 2009 | 133561 | 132837 | 132038 | 131346 | 130985 | 130503 | 130164 | 129933 | 129734 | 129532 | 129490 | 129319 | |
| 2010 | 129279 | 129244 | 129433 | 129672 | 130188 | 130021 | 129963 | 129912 | 129885 | 130105 | 130226 | 130346 | |
| 2011 | 130456 | 130676 | 130922 | 131173 | 131227 | 131311 | 131407 | 131492 | 131694 | 131806 | 131963 | 132186 | |
| 2012 | 132461 | 132701(P) | 132821(P) | ||||||||||
| P : preliminary | |||||||||||||
Political Humor
"A new picture was just released of President Obama giving the Star Trek Vulcan salute at the White House. Even Spock was like, 'Whoa — look at that guy’s ears!'" - Jimmy Fallon
[You know with those ears, Obama didn't hear Joe Biden's advice against forcing the Catholic Church to pay for employee artificial birth control expenses. Just like Obama can't hear certain sounds his dog Bo can hear, he doesn't hear certain sounds the rest of us hear, like anything Biden has to say.]
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| Courtesy of Kurtzman/About.com |
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Doobie Brothers, "Black Water"
