When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.
Anais Nin
Hypocrisy of Obamanomics Exposed Yet Again....
Any faithful reader of this blog notes that time and again, I've argued for consistent, simpler, lower tax policy across industries, sizes, etc. Obama doesn't understand a very simple pragmatic point: workers at the start of the Great Recession were hired across a diverse economy. Some jobs can be highly specialized (e.g., in very large companies, by technologies, etc.), and many businesses sell not directly to consumers but to other companies. When, say, Big Energy is discriminated against, being targeted for high-cost, even special-purpose taxes or regulations, it affects customers (whom ultimately pay those costs), employees, and suppliers.
Obama and his Democratic cronies are disrupting the economy by choosing winners and losers. Reuters earlier this month ran a story about how Australia, with more robust Asia-focused economic growth, has started to recruit Americans (as well as Europeans and Indians) for various tradesmen NOT requiring college degrees (electricians, plumbers, and builders) as well as health care professionals and social workers. These types of policies are a variation on what Austrian School economists refer to as malinvestments. In essence, you can create labor bubbles; even if health care is a sixth of the economy, there's the remaining five-sixths of the economy. I have three relatives whom are registered nurses--and they didn't need federal intervention. One of them even had to go to another state to find a school with an opening into their nursing degree program. When you promote college like snake oil, you will end up with oversupplies of, say, school teachers or lawyers where there's already a glut. (I personally know three college graduates with education degrees (over 20 years ago) whom never got a related job offer.) Obama from the get-go was pushing for education, infrastructure, and green energy--hardly representative of the American economy as it exists.
We sometimes find that we have to adjust to the economy as it exists. Some readers might wonder, why did I double-major in math and philosophy? It wasn't due to those high-paying pure math or applied philosopher jobs on the market. I initially started out with the idea of becoming a priest--and philosophy is a typical major for those pursuing the priesthood. I also had the idea of becoming a high school math teacher, within a religious order like the Jesuits. Only life gets in the way. Like being a 19-year-old college graduate whom never never had a date in high school and had been attending a college two-thirds coed. Thoughts of the priesthood and high school teaching had drifted away; I had discovered a new vocation: becoming a college professor. To this day, my middle brother never did understand why I hadn't chosen, like he did, a career as an engineer. He, not then married, already owned a house in Beaumont, while I struggled to get by on modest monthly stipends as a UH graduate fellow teaching a couple of classes a semester.
So here we have, on both sides of the aisle, e.g., Obama on the left and (no longer running) Santorum on the right, both pushing special tax breaks for manufacturing. So imagine how pleased I am to read notable economist Gary Becker and Carpe Diem economist blogger M. J. Perry echo free market themes of low, consistent tax policy, rejecting this misguided attempt to influence the economy instead of accepting it as it exists.
Of course, Obama and his Democratic cronies are trying to take claim for manufacturing gains! What hubris! Pure economic illiteracy and intentionally misleading propaganda: the Democrats have been pushing to retain unsustainable low-margin, low-value-added factories, not the high-end, value-added manufacturing at the heart of the current boom, which has more to do with tax policies that the progressive Democrats fought every step of the way. We have been talking about favorable investment tax policies that GOP-controlled Houses passed at their initiative separately under Clinton and Bush. The idea that Democrats can try to claim credit at manufacturing gains when, in fact, they've dumped a record number of regulations on American business in general while fighting each step of the way to increase investment tax rates, income/business tax rates on small business owners and other job creators, is simply audacious and morally outrageous.
The point I'm trying to make is instead of building this porous, convoluted tax system where all the special interests (including unions, green energy, and other companies which President Obama and Democrats conveniently insist are NOT what they call special interests) get "their fair share" via thousands of lobbyists and political contributors (on BOTH sides of the aisle), KISS--keep it simple, stupid! I disdain the notion of this allegedly symbiotic relationship between government and various businesses or other constituent special-interest groups. I have been arguing against farm subsidies, PERIOD--and farm states generally support the GOP nominee for President, generally more supportive of free market concepts. If businesses are doing well, they'll invest in their IT infrastructure--and I'll benefit. I've had it with Obama's picking winners and losers in business: we need an "everyone wins" consistent, simple tax policy.
Mark Perry sarcastically notes that the Democrats would ideologically call for "windfall profits" taxes (see an impressive chart of manufacturer aggregate profits via the above link) except that unlike the case of Big Oil, manufacturers are supported by unions.
Hypocrisy of Dems? Of course.
Drawing on Personal Experiences With Recessions
I have extensive experience as an Oracle DBA with ERP application systems (integrated software across the enterprise--accounting, human resources, manufacturing, etc.) When we had the stock market bust (starting in the spring of 2000 with the pricking of the Nasdaq bubble, companies reacted by doing things like freezing or canceling IT projects (including ERP upgrades). Many companies (particularly Internet businesses and consulting companies) went out of business. Most companies weren't hiring IT consultants: they were wary about retaining "overqualified" personnel if and when the economy turned the corner, and if they did, they could be highly selective. I found myself having to compete for commodity-priced core Oracle DBA assignments which were not worthy of my multifaceted knowledge, ability and skill sets. My best hopes for more suitable professional assignments were with a more robust recovery, giving business executives enough confidence to take deferred projects off the back burner.
I thought about reentering academia during this period, but many universities had frozen hiring. I remember after the end of my one-year contract with ISU (this position went away with state budget cuts during the Bush 41 recession) with no follow-up academic job offers, one Michigan university tried to contact me halfway through the fall semester about possible interest about filling in for a faculty member, whom for some unknown (medical?) reason was on the shelf for an indefinite but finite period of time: the college made it clear this opening was not a tenure-track position. I was pursuing other faculty opportunities at late fall semester conferences; I thought with my PhD in hand, 8 years of teaching a large number of courses under my belt, and a very competitive number of publications for a junior professor in MIS, I would surely get selected over, say, ABD ("all but dissertation") candidates. I didn't want to have to move for a fourth time in 4 years; finding another academic job is huge sinkhole of time, taking over another professor's class in the middle of a semester in a new university would be very time-consuming and difficult. Woulda, coulda, shoulda: I had no idea then that I wouldn't get an offer for the second consecutive year. (I should point out that the Michigan college never made an offer; they were just floating the idea, and for all I knew, they were interviewing other substitutes as well.)
I should point out stories like mine were not at all that exceptional. A few months back, I was contacted by a tech recruiter in the Michigan area. There are 3 states years ago I swore I would never consider moving to: California, New York, and Michigan. (There are a variety of reasons for the latter; I once went on a campus visit to Grand Valley State, and they declined to make an offer, which is sort of like a presumptuous homely girl you never wanted to date telling everybody that she isn't interested in dating you. Yes, that actually happened to me once; it's embarrassing.) It turned out that this recruiter has a PhD in math and once had a well-paying job doing some mathematical modeling for one of the Big Three automakers. Presumably he was let go during a downsizing move and now was earning a living as a headhunter. (No comment except to say I would rather mop floors than be a tech recruiter.) He quickly reassured me we weren't talking about Detroit--but Ann Arbor, a college town. He had placed the IT manager at this thriving business there a while back, and they needed someone with my background. Several days later: yup, the same old same old "overqualified", a second rejection from an ugly girl.
I'm not saying these two examples are typical. But there's this myth from high tech firms that they can't find suitable candidates. During that slow period in Chicago I mentioned above, I was discussing a position with a consulting company (subsequently acquired by a Japanese high tech conglomerate) out of its Milwaukee office, maybe an hour's drive away; in fact I had commuted to a location west of Milwaukee for months in 2001. I had a lease but told the recruiter I was willing to relocate after my lease expired. I wasn't going to get an apartment lease without an offer, but she refused to present me until I lived in the Milwaukee area. So a couple of weeks later, I end up getting a call from the hiring manager for the very same position. No, not through the recruiter. He needed a subcontractor for a Chicago area gig he was staffing, and this Indian body shop I was working with forwarded a copy of my resume. He ended up filling that job through another internal resource but called me directly to discuss the perm position he had been trying to fill for 6 months. I then told him about my experience with the HR recruiter. He laughed and said that he didn't care where I lived so long as I lived near an airport and was willing to travel. Still, he had to have me work through the recruiter from an internal standpoint (I knew that was a mistake from the get-go because the recruiter had a vested interest in my rejection). Needless to say, the HR recruiter didn't respond well to this development, being forced to process someone she had specifically rejected. Obviously this did not reflect well on her judgment and was a major loss of face; she predictably reacted by manipulating the recruitment process (i.e., the tech screen I had focused on things not in the resume, and I knew that the hiring manager already told me he wanted to hire me), and then issuing a typical "we have found a candidate better suited to our needs" rejection letter.
I still had the hiring manager's contact information; he told me they had only interviewed two people and I had been ranked the better candidate and he couldn't explain why the tech screen was rigged against my experience or the rejection, done without his knowledge or consent. This was all about office politics, but I assure you this kind of stuff happens all the time. He finally agreed to give me a subcontract for a limited engagement while trying to navigate a path for an offer. I subsequently had a payment dispute with the account manager, whom didn't want to pay me until after the client paid its invoice for my services on net 30 terms--which in essence passed on me all the risk for customer collection. The manager should have anticipated the issue and eventually resolved the issue to pay me on a similar timetable as his own employees but passively aggressively blamed me for scotching his attempts at securing me a full-time offer. I finally resigned the subcontract in order to move to the Baltimore/DC area to take a federal subcontracting gig at National Archives.
I wanted to rant about this because I am sympathetic to free market immigration. In part, you have to blame short-sighted IT managers, whom can be penny-wise and pound-foolish. There have been gigs where I've been turned down paying a quarter of what Oracle was billing for my services as a senior principal a little over a decade ago; it never even got to an interview process. I have repeatedly diagnosed, fixed and cleaned up after serious DBA problems the clients never even knew existed. Because managers really don't have the technical expertise, they don't realize sometimes they were living on borrowed time.
Let me give a very simple example: one of the first things I discovered at National Archives was this RAID-5 device was "running on its spare tire" (to use a driving analogy). If a second drive fails, your file system (and any dependent database) is toast; furthermore, this was on a production server. Who knows how long it was that way? Probably months. There were government employees and contractors walking past the servers every day. Not one of them noticed an amber (vs. green) light: how do you NOT see that? Have they never encountered a dead disk before? Even if they didn't maintain those servers, those servers were owned by the US government--not its contractors. You would have thought at least one competent person would have done or said something. This is a classic example of the perverse effects of commonly owned property; nobody had a vested interest in taking care of the problem. I did something about it. The buck stopped with me.
Most executives do not realize that a gifted IT professional, unlike manual professionals, can literally do the same amount (only better) work than 8 or more average ones (I seem to recall an IBM programmer productivity study to that effect years ago). John D. Cook has a very readable, short discussion of this issue with respect to programmers (faithful readers will remember that I used to be an APL programmer/analyst when I started my MBA part-time in the 1980's at UH), but the same concepts operate in other IT professional contexts (including DBA work) (I wrote my own dynamic hot backup scripts and database alert notifiers before Oracle offered related standard functionality.) (my edits):
The most productive programmers are orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers. If some programmers are 10x more productive than others, why aren’t they paid 10x as much?...Extreme productivity may not be obvious. Software output cannot be measured as easily as dollars or bricks. The best programmers do not write 10x as many lines of code and they certainly do not work 10x longer hours. Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code. It may take a while to realize that someone routinely comes up with such time-saving insights.A great DBA is like great documentation: people may not realize it until they need the resource (e.g., a database goes down and doesn't come back up right away). There are opportunity costs most people never realize. I was the corporate DBA for the American subsidiary of a Japanese chip testing equipment manufacturer. Over a 13-month period I won a record 3 CEO awards, but I'm prouder of two technical feats which never got recognized. I never told my best friend, an Indian whom later became the company's IT manager, about one of these. About two or 3 years later, he wrote me an unsolicited email gushing over this customization I had written for Oracle EBS which barely needed any tweaking during an Apps upgrade--and this guy is also a software entrepreneur and has worked as a contractor at places like Cisco.
There are a couple of other examples to make my point. At an east LA sugar processor, I wrote a simple application in less than 4 hours (in addition to my assigned tasks for the same number of hours) to provide custom functionality integrating data from other plants; Oracle wanted to charge $30K in licensing fees for an EDI solution, not including consulting work to implement and annual maintenance fees.
Second, I worked at a private company before its purchase by Equifax. I had been deliberately excluded from the team designing an application designed to create a mailing list of millions (they were probably afraid I would dominate the meetings); the end task was to take place over the Fourth of July weekend. The meetings and work took place over a few months. They designed, implemented and tested their solution. The mailing list was due on Monday. They kicked off the application on Friday or Saturday. I got a call on Saturday afternoon, one that they would have given anything to avoid, but they knew I was the only guy in the company whom could pull it off. Their process, which had never been tested for scalability, was yielding one record every 15 minutes. In literally less than 15 minutes and no advance preparation time, I completely redesigned and implemented an alternative process operating at the table versus row level of granularity--with minimal briefings on the problem statement and data structures. And, of course, my solution worked like a charm, and it did not take long for me to generate the mailing list. A single person had designed a better application off the top of his head than an entire team over a few months.
I also probably explained another example while I was a National Archives subcontractor. We had a military records procurement Siebel application running on an Oracle database. There were something like 400-450 clerical people in the St. Louis area supporting the application. Every once in a while, there would be a network outage between College Park and St. Louis. This hosed the client sessions--still running from an Oracle standpoint; if and when connections resumed, clients would start up new sessions: but the problem was that we needed to free up old connections so everybody could connect to an Oracle session. My predecessors had simply decided to reboot the database, which took an estimated 20 minutes and took out both old and new connections--that meant St. Louis employees couldn't do their jobs (but they were still on the clock). I devised a script that cleaned out all the old sessions while keeping the new ones up, in a matter of a couple of seconds. I think the civil servant in charge of the application estimated an outage as costing $10,000 an hour. That means rebooting the database cost over $3300 in lost employee productivity--which my little script saved time and again. The client manager never asked me to do this, and I never got any recognition. I guess if some people talk about 'random acts of kindness', call my effort a 'random act of patriotism'.
CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act):
Thumbs DOWN!
Any collusion between Big Business and Big Government, bypassing the Courts (i.e., the Bill of Rights, including all applicable unalienable enumerated and unenumerated negative rights) is fundamentally unacceptable; I have zero tolerance for the private sector being subordinated under Big Government Knows Best under a blank check "War on Terror"; I am increasingly skeptical of this bogeyman. The backdoor approach of economic fascism (in short, a government-dominated economy) must be resisted at all costs. Ron Paul, as usual, is quite elegant in making the case against CISPA. Along with Ron Paul, a brilliant patriot, let me point the interested reader to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Unconstitutional Executive Orders: Thumbs DOWN!
The Bill of Rights Applies To ALL US Citizens
Again, using a blank check "War on Terror" to make the Bill of Rights "paper, just paper" is a moral outrage. An American citizen is guaranteed due process regarding his unalienable right to live. Any President or any other individual believing that he has the authority to act unilaterally to kill an American citizen, bypassing the Judicial Branch, is acting without the authority of the Constitution; these acts are murderous and, in my judgment, an impeachable offense.
The Obama Credit Limit Has Maxed Out....
Time To Turn Out the Lights in the Obama White House
Can We FINALLY Have a Reasonable Conversation
About Immigration Policy?
The Pew Hispanic Center has published a new report showing for a number of reasons, including a more robust Mexican economy, changing demographics (smaller Mexican families), a stagnant US economy and various changes in border protection and immigration policy enforcement, we have seen attempts of unauthorized entry shrinking to a fraction of the rate just 7 years ago.
The Obama Administration has claimed credit for slowing unauthorized immigration, and I agree to a certain extent they are correct. No, not the unethical double standard where some unauthorized immigrants (say, criminals) are less equal than others (what I deem "catch-and-release") (an unconstitutional process violating equal protection principles), but if you so thoroughly mismanage the domestic economy as Obama has done during his 3.5 year tenure, you can make life unbearable for anyone to want to stay here, including foreign-born, American-educated entrepreneurs and in-demand professionals, millionaires and unauthorized immigrants.
I find it frankly morally unacceptable to treat Mexican immigrants any differently than previous waves of Irish or German immigrants. Yes, we need an orderly process, but anti-immigrant xenophobes are treating the symptoms, not the disease; the blame is not with Mexicans but with dysfunctional American policy, being manipulated by special interests such as unions. We need to treat all visitors to American, authorized or not, respectfully and not make foreign visitors scapegoats for dysfunctional public policy beyond their control and responsibility; remember, if we are visiting other lands, we ourselves expect to be treated with all due respect, dignity and due process.
Yes, Mexican immigrants need to conform with bilaterally negotiated immigration policy. In many cases, we have legal chained immigrants (i.e., eligible for lawful entry) having to wait for years for reunification with their loved ones, and they are trying to work around government bottlenecks and an obsolete quota system. (As for the influx of criminal aliens: perhaps we need to do something about dysfunctional drug prohibition policies luring them here with the promise of obscene profits.)
Let me go beyond just compassionate reasons: immigration policy can be misused to interfere with economic rights, including a business owner's ability to contract for labor services in a timely manner. Unions in particular want to engage in protectionist policies, e.g., to manipulate the number of manual laborers in order to create or maintain artificially high labor rates. This stand is fundamentally anti-consumer: it creates deadweight loss. All that labor unions achieve by this is to divert investment and jobs overseas.
Political Humor
"Political analysts are saying that President Obama doesn't want to be too critical of the Secret Service because their agents protect him every day — which explains why today President Obama said it was fiscally responsible to refuse to pay the prostitute." - Conan O'Brien
[The Secret Service agent thought that he had protection, too. Except he had to take money out of his wallet to make room for the condoms...
Obama doesn't want to be too critical of the Secret Service. They know things... If getting drunk in Colombia results in $800/night prostitutes, just imagine how much Obama has to drink to spend over $3.7T... Americans are paying too high a price to get screwed every April 15...
No doubt the Big Brothels in Nevada's sanctioned counties are upset at government-paid employees spending hard-earned taxpayer revenues on expensive foreign tricks: government johns should be investing in good-paying jobs for domestic working girls...]
"For the first time in 40 years, more Mexicans are leaving the United States than are coming to it. Not because of our economy. Because they're sick and tired of explaining that Taco Bell isn't real Mexican food." - Conan O'Brien
[Even illegal immigrants are finding it hard to find work under the Obama Recovery. Not only are college graduates competing for hourly work in restaurants, construction and hotels, but the price of Mexican diet staple corn has nearly quadrupled over the past dozen years, courtesy of the Federal Reserve's loose money policy and Obama's corn-based ethanol subsidies and tariffs. Another four years of this?]
"It now appears that as many as a dozen members of the Secret Service were involved in that Colombian prostitution scandal. Now six of the agents have been reassigned. The other six are now party planners for the GSA." - Jay Leno
[Jay, that was supposed to be a secret... No doubt a tip from WikiCondomLeaks.
The new party planners are already paying benefits. For instance, they didn't need a scouting trip (just the Internet) to discover that prostitution in Las Vegas isn't legal; however, phone sex is an available option at only $4.99 per minute.]
Methinks that the old, fat Gray Lady is getting ready to sing; she won't be eating cat food--but maybe her own dog food courtesy of her own columnists. Here's an idea: now that you've discovered what the rest of corporate America discovered years ago, that defined-benefit pension programs are unsustainable given the massive wave of in-process retiring, longer-living Baby Boomers, perhaps you'll say, hey, why are government workers entitled to defined-benefit pensions if we, like the rest of corporate America, can't afford them? As for sweetheart, golden parachute deals for incompetent former CEO's whom failed to adjust to changing Times (pun intended), and for reporters whom couldn't smell out the story behind their own company: as McLuhan would say, "The medium is the message."
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Rolling Stones, "19th Nervous Breakdown"
