Quote of the Day
Murphy's Sixth Law:If you perceive that there are four possible ways
in which a procedure can go wrong and circumvent these,
then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop.
Image of the Day
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| Cf Reason via Rubén Poblete |
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| Via Libertarian Republic |
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| Via Jason David Frank on FB |
Carol Anne Bond, upset at her husband's mistress, smeared a harmful chemical substance on surfaces the mistress would likely touch. Rarher than be content with local prosecution as per the Tenth Amendment of traditional responsibilities left to the states, the Obama Administration decided to prosecute Bond as violating the Chemical Weapons Implementation Act and got her convicted for 6 years for a minor burn treatable by rinsing the affected area with water. Bond pointed out that she was not a member state signatory and should not apply use the international agreement to rationalize federalizing local law matters. SCOTUS agreed. (I would have preferred to see the Act itself ruled unconstitutional, but I'll take it).
The lawless Obama Administration lost at least its tenth unanimous reversal since 2012.
Sunday Talk Soup: MTP 5/13/14 Part II (Part 1)
I ran into technical update issue on yesterday's post with respect to the Abramson termination discussion. So what I'm about to write is repetitive to me. As someone whom has done empirical research, I know better than to generalize from anecdotal personal experiences, but I do have a perspective; I've had my share of male and female bosses, project managers, clients, etc., from a fairly young age (for example, I did work/study library work at OLL (at the main library and at the social work location)). I'm not sure there are any gender-specific characteristics, although I think some of the women in the Age of Political Correctness tended to be more argumentative and were more likely to read more into situations (there was this unspoken "it's because I'm a woman, isn't it?"). As a consultant, I have to be blunt and sometimes have to tell the client things he doesn't want to hear; women were more likely to argue a point (e.g., I would point out the client wanted to do somethng, e.g., that violated Oracle's support guidelines), explicitly reference their authority or even threaten termination. This is not to say that male bosses in my experience were better but they handled it differently.
For example, I once worked as a city subcontractor. The city had hired consultants to do an upgrade project on an accelerated time schedule. The consultants were obligated to do 2 dry runs within 3 months. The consulting company had hired some independent subcontractors and passed them off as perm hires; I was deeply concerned because the technical consultants were incompetent, the project manager had not even requested certain licensed software required for the upgrade, and 6 weeks into the 3-month schedule, not only hadn't they done a single dry run but hadn't even initiated the main upgrade patch on a test database (quite often certain data issues arise during a dry run that need to be investigated and resolved, which can be nontrivial: e.g., certain past transactions had been booked in a way incompatible with upgrade processes). (I was the operational Apps DBA whom had experience with both software versions and the upgrade procedure, and I was concerned about firefighting for months after a botched upgrade.) I had futilely addressed relevant (non-personnel) concerns at daily status meetings and privately with my prime contractor supervisor. His primary concern was that if the project failed, he didn't want the project manager pointing fingers at his "uncooperative" DBA. My boss didn't threaten me; he knew that I knew all he had to do was place a call to my agency, and he kept a prominently placed pile of DBA resumes on his desk where I could see them. I could easily see certain women managers in his place being in a state of denial over the failing project, being dismissive of my concerns or questioning my competence. (In dealing with technical people, these are people skill issues.)
At one employer, I had worked on an Indonesian project, at the request of the CEO, and I eventually got put into a lead role reporting to the other company co-founder. The executive VP (who would eventually run for and lose the GOP nomination for a local Congressional race after the longtime Congressman retired) was upset over the status quo: our developers were chewing up diskspace faster than we could acquire new disks, we had contracted data loads behind schedule, etc. He gave me a broad mandate without a blueprint to get operations under control. My efforts succeeded beyond top management's expectations, although some developers griped over losing some of their privileges. My boss said that hiring me was one of the 2 best management decisions he ever made. Now flash forward. After a management transition, I was now reporting to a new female manager, whom had been in charge of mainframe developers (we were phasing out our mainframe operations) and had no exposure to Unix/microsystems/database environment I had been working in and the main focus of the business unit. Our first conversation took me entirely by surprise, but she took on an unexpectedly very aggressive, confrontational approach, which I would paraphrase, not out of context, as: "I don't care what you've accomplished here in the past; I'm the new sheriff in town and you have to prove yourself to me". The weeks that followed made my life miserable as she micromanaged me to the point of harassment. Those unsolicited calls from a Big 6 consulting firm were sounding better all the time. I finally went to top management with my concerns and eventually won a lateral movement in the company, where I got a chance to work on the new million-dollar SBC (AT&T) account and for our South American clients, the biggest credit card issuer on the continent. [She tried to block my business trip to Brazil, afraid my successor couldn't handle things in my absence despite documentation and mutiple shadow walkthroughs.]
To this day, I have never seen a more inept, incompetent manager of either gender, including a cartoonishly bad egotistical manager back in Houston, whom had made some unexplained allegation about his wife and me to his boss in Virginia. (I met the wife only once; he had moved the branch office from inside the loop to the Northwest suburbs to cut down on his commute to the office. She had brought doughnuts to the office opening, and I only met her in passing. This guy was a real piece of work; he decided he would hire his own competing programming staff, all women. How "progressive" of him, would you think? Hardly. He felt he could hire them more cheaply and pocket the difference... He would start out every discussion with "in my 17 years of DP experience". He and I got into a disagreement when he caught me retrieving my original office chair from his vacant programmers' room; he had replaced it with a chair with a broken caster. Like I said, he was a real piece of work.)
Moving on....
DAVID GREGORY:I liked Ms. Fiorina when she ran for the Senate from California--heaven knows that she would be an improvement over either Boxer or Feinstein, but this comes across to me as a former CEO whom still has an ax to grind over her own ouster. Look, getting terminated is not a pleasant experience; in certain ways, it's like getting divorced. A company may itself be embittered over its mistake in promoting Ms. Abramson in the first place and no doubt had unsuccessfully counseled her in her dealings with subordinates. Now it's finding its motives being challenged as alleged retaliation over Abramson's questioning of equitable pay. I personally think Ms. Abramson's handling of the situation has been unprofessional and lacked class; I understand her frustration (I have experienced many adverse moments in life I've felt were unfair), but I've always felt I didn't want to work somewhere where I did not have the confidence and respect of management and colleagues. It's their loss and my opportunity for a new beginning elsewhere. Of course, a company is not going to say it made a mistake in discharging someone. I can't speak for the Times and how it handled the dismissal; it may well be they offered her a graceful way out and she spurned it. But methinks that Fiorina is personalizing the event in terms of her own experience.
Would a man be treated the same say upon an exit?
CARLY FIORINA:
Absolutely not. And the most obvious example of that is the announcement about her departure. Here is a woman who, having been told she has an abrasive style, how many times have women heard that? She's been a distinguished reporter for The New York Times, an editor for three years. There is not a single word in her departure announcement about her contribution, about her record, about her time at The New York Times. She is excised from history.
No more lectures, please, from The New York Times about the treatment of women. Arthur Sulzberger, the more he talks, the more clear it becomes to me that, of course, she was treated differently. Whatever the issues in the newsroom were, the dynamics around her departure would not have been the same for a man.
CARLY FIORINA:
There wasn't a single positive comment about her in her statement of departure. Not, "Thank you for your time." Not, "Thank you for a wonderful record of service to The New York Times." Not a word. That is disrespectful.
DAVID GREGORY:It's hard enough to know where to start with this politically correct rant--do we want to start with the fact that a "reporter" is crossing the line into public policy advocacy? How about her disingenuous, incompetent, misleading use of labor statistics? I mean, let's disregard the fact that more women are graduating overall and in many, if not most, disciplines than men (including at the graduate school level)--and college graduation is positively related to higher expected income. (Mark Perry of Carpe Diem has published innumerable posts on these topics.) Let's disregard that ideological feminism and victimization is shoved down our throats throughout school and the popular media.. Let's pretend that there aren't female entrepreneurs whom couldn't build viable businesses exploiting any alleged systematic discrimination.
I'm joined now by NBC News's Maria Shriver...Maria, you and I have been talking about this. The facts of Jill Abramson may be murkier now, right? Not completely resolved. The larger question about equal pay, about equal treatment for women in leadership, is a conversation that will go on independent of Jill Abramson's circumstances. What do you think?
MARIA SHRIVER:
Absolutely. I think this is a teachable moment. We don't know the facts of Jill Abramson's situation. But pay discrimination, pay inequity, does exist. It's like global warming, only a fringe few deny its existence. And it particularly affects women in low income jobs, women of color, 57%, 57 cents on the dollar. It's one of the reasons one in three women in this country, working women, are on the brink of poverty.
Things can change that. Passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act can change that. I think this is also a teachable moment for women in leadership. How do women lead? What is their style? Are they judged differently? I think they are. And women have to decide for themselves what kind of leaders do they want to be?
DAVID GREGORY:
I want to ask Maria, because when you and I were talking about this this weekend, I raised this, as well. I have an eight-year-old daughter. Now, fast-forward to the point maybe she's in her early 20s, the advice that I might give her about getting into this business that I know something about that can be pretty rough and tumble. What qualities would I want her to have? I'd want her to be true to herself. But I also would want her to have the toughness to deal with what she'd have to face in an industry still dominated by men, which would create a certain toughness that not all--
MARIA SHRIVER:
--David. Well, I think any advice you give your daughter today about the workplace she's going to walk into will be outdated. The fact is the United States of America needs to modernize its laws to help women stay in the workforce. We don't have paid leave. That's one of the reasons that women drop out and then come back to lower paying jobs.
In The Shriver Report, we reported that if we closed the pay gap, we would cut poverty in half in this country, add half a trillion dollars to the economy. So I think we need to have these discussions about leadership, about how women are treated, about the pay gap. We need to talk about modernizing our laws so that young women can grow up and work and still take care of their families, still be treated with respect, be judged for who they are as leaders and human beings as opposed to women or men.
No, we don't need even more dysfunctional labor legislation that gives employers more liabilities to consider in terms of possibly hiring more women; if anything, we need less labor policies, period. We don't need some crackpot "vast employer conspiracy" to explain why unmarried careerwomen with no dependents have the same advantages--they gain job experience, work longer hours, maintain, even enhance their knowledge and skills, etc. I have a lot of respect for women whom decide to leave the workforce to raise their young family; I have 2 sisters whom have done that and a third sister whom returned to her job after maternity leave. The former sisters have since returned to the workforce and their careers have thrived, one recently earning a graduate degree. A business doesn't go on hiatus based on family decisions; projects don't get put on hold. The idea that government needs to make policy to see the "true" market value that employers don't see is a departure from reality. There may be business policies which help keep the new mom's knowledge and skills current or allow reduced-hours, telecommute or workshare schedules. But businesses don't need some economic-illiterate "journalist" or clueless government bureaucrat to remind them of their investment in human capital, the employee's business or industry know-how.or to compensate her commensurate with her productivity.
And shame on Shriver for playing the race card; there are a number of factors that contribute to poverty, including promiscuous sexual behavior encouraged by a licentious culture, morally hazardous if not perverse government welfare net policies, etc. Not to mention perverse minimum wage laws that price many young/unskilled workers out of the labor force
DAVID GREGORY:My basic issue with Kinzinger's approach is that veterans are going to get caught in the middle of boundary disputes over where you draw the lines. I have a family member whom is experiencing bureaucratic issues not unlike the Arizona problem; he has been experiencing excruciating pain while waiting to get onto some party's appointment book. Look, remember the farce of the so-called public option (during the early House deliberations over ObamaCare), where the Statists incompetently, falsely suggested they could bend the cost curve because they could allegedly cut out administrative costs, a profit margin, etc.? As if any company could compete against an entity that could run up a $17.5T debt and print its own money! How do you think the government-sponsored duopoly Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac went from about 6% marketshare to nearly half, using access to cheap government loans?
One provocative thought from Colonel Jack Jacobs, who's an NBC News contributor, and he wrote an op-ed, Congressman. He said, "It makes no sense to have a parallel universe to take care of our veterans, separate doctors, separate facilities, equipment and even protocols. There's no reason that veterans who would otherwise wait for months to be seen at a VA health clinic can't be seen by private doctors, private-- the same doctors who treat everybody else." Should we get rid of this arm of the VA and put them into regular health care?
ADAM KINZINGER:
I'm not going to so far as to say get rid of the arm of the VA yet. But I have actually a bill out there that says if you live X amount of miles away from the clinic or a hospital, then you just go to your local doctor. And what you see is that's a good way to get rid of a year long backlog. If somebody's waiting, let them go to their doctor and bill the VA for it.
I have repeatedly called for privatizing the operations; if not that, at least consider outsourcing operations. In any event, the VA should guarantee a private-sector option under serious health circumstances, when they are running full-capacity or vets do not have convenient access to a local VA facility
New Proposals...
Oh, she is so sweet and adorable! He's truly blessed!
Very cool! He wrote an original song for the occasion...
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Gary Varvel and Townhall |
Roberta Flack, "The First Time Ever I Saw Yout Face". I think my baby sister featured this song at her wedding reception, and I still see my first girlfriend's beautiful face when I hear the song. I couldn't believe that the prettiest coed at the university was interested in a math/philosophy nerd wearing glasses. She was the older woman--22 while I was a mere 18. She wanted a commitment from me or she would join some Pentecostal commune in the Dallas area; I didn't feel ready yet for that commitment and refused to be responsible for her decision. She left and never looked back. Still, to this day I wonder: what if? We would have had some beautiful babies; I would have been a most excellent Dad. I had to settle for being an awesome uncle.
