Love is a fire.
But whether it is going to warm your hearth or
burn down your house,
you can never tell.
Joan Crawford
Larry Ellison Gives Up Title As Oracle CEO
That a 70-year-old CEO gives up his title (not retiring) is not that unusual; Bill Gates did it several years ago, and he's still in his 50's. In fact, Larry's approach to easing out of the spot parallels Gates in a sense: he's taking on a Chief Technology Officer role and remains chairman of the board; unlike Gates, he will have 2 co-CEOs succeeding him.
There's a reason I'm mentioning Ellison. When I took my graduate database courses at UH, my professor assigned us relational database assignments to be done using Oracle database software which was installed on the university IBM mainframe compatible system. Oracle was one of the first vendors of relational database software; you can think of a relational database as a set of tables or arrays of field data, partitioned in a way to minimize redundancy and inconsistency (e.g., for an address change you should be able to process it in one vs. multiple tables). IBM had developed a Structured Query Language (SQL), which is the lingua franca for extracting data from relational databases (Oracle is the market leader in RDBMS; other vendor/products include IBM DB2 and MS/Sybase SQL Server). Oracle had earned market share in part by providing RDBMS support across a number of vendor platforms.
We were a fairly early adopter of Oracle; I think the company was maybe 5 years old or so. We were running version 2 (the current release is 12C), the documentation was in 3-ring binders, and the interface was called UFI (user-friendly interface), which evolved to SQL*PLUS. I loved my database courses, although the university had a staffer doing DBA work part-time and not very good at it, and I recall we all had to take an incomplete one semester because the frequent downtime made it impossible to work on our customized applications. Unfortunately, none of the universities I taught at as a professor had it on their systems. I think they released Version 5 while I was at UWM and priced the PC version at about $200, and I bought a copy. I finally got a chance to teach database during my one-year exile at UTEP; I used a textbook that had a limited version of XDB bundled with it.
When I had to leave academia during a recession (my temp assignment at ISU was nonrenewable, and it was a buyer's market: maybe 1 job for every 4 applicants), I wasn't able to find a research or an academic computing opening and while working on other things, I looked for an Oracle DBA opportunity, which I eventually landed on a federal contracting gig for the EPA regional headquarters in Chicago. (I think my second day on the job the vendor lost the recompete on the contract so I was only there for a few months.) I've often had supplemental responsibilities, e.g., as a developer, system administrator, or tech lead, but I've continued to do Oracle DBA work since then, including as a senior principal consultant with Oracle itself in 1998 (in its public sector practice); one of the nice perks at the time was (no, no stock options) but you could buy discounted stock up to a certain percent of salary (I maxed out my purchases, a profitable investment). Under the right circumstances, I would have stayed at Oracle, but I had differences with my practice manager over a Chicago assignment.
I never met Ellison in person, and the closest I ever came to the corporate offices was driving past Redwood City on the way to San Francisco on 101. I had a wheeler-dealer IT manager in Santa Clara (who actually lived in the SF area) who claims that one or more of the Ellison kids attended the same school his children did; my boss was supposedly overseeing some school production, when Ellison reportedly tried to take it over and failed. I'm not sure I ever bought the story; I thought he was trying to impress me claiming to know Ellison personally. (Personally, I'm not that impressed with celebrities. About the closest I ever came was shaking Pat Nixon's hand at a campaign rally in San Antonio (this was before I could vote, and the closest I ever came to an American President); and I thought I once saw Oprah Winfrey walking past me on Michigan Ave., but she avoided eye contact and didn't return a friendly 'hello'.)
Image of the Day
Remy is Back With an ISIS Crisis Rap
Some of the lines here are inspired, as Remy talks about hitting them with an economic stimulus, ObamaCare, high tech sabotage via the IRS, etc.
Entertainment Potpourri: PBS "The Roosevelts" Part 6
This episode mostly focused on FDR's third term and our entry into WWII. Burns for the most part doesn't talk about economic policy, other than to address issues of black exclusion from defense contract vendors, black segregation in the military; he points out the wartime economy finally put in an end to chronic unemployment (strange what happens when you take 16 million men out of the domestic economy and put them in harm's way), not to mention a stupendous national debt fueled by wartime defense expenditures. Burns does pay lip service to waste and crony Big Defense sweetheart contracts but goes out of his way to extol the massive centrally planned war economy, boasting how some products came out every few minutes out of a mega-factory. I don't have too many complaints, although I thought he could have done a better job explaining some things, like why Germany and Italy declared war on the US days after Pearl Harbor. The Axis agreement only called for doing so if the US, not Japan, had initiated hostilities. Why would they risk opening up a second, western front--which obviously was to Stalin's advantage? Perhaps they felt the US itself fighting two remote fronts would be spreading itself thin... (I have read the Germany declaration, and there's nothing new there; the same arguments could have been made weeks or months earlier.)
I have a number of other comments:
- I have been an ardent supporter of Senator Robert Taft, whom lost the GOP nomination to Willkie. The GOP leadership worried Taft's non-interventionist policies would make him unelectable and would repeat this in 1952 using Dwight Eisenhower.
- I consider FDR's violation of the 2-term limit abominable; he put his political ambition above that of the nation. He subsequently died early in his fourth term.
- I think conscription (the draft) is a type of slavery and fundamentally unconstitutional (never mind SCOTUS). A voluntary service would be a check on the propensity to wage war.
- Warmaking impoverishes nations, not increases wealth. Economic policies during the war favored crony businesses, not the consumer, and wage-price controls led to the insanity of government policy meddling in the healthcare sector.
- I am not a conspiracy theorist on Pearl Harbor, but some points: the military specifically warned Pacific posts before the attack of possible Japanese action; Pearl Harbor was an American hub with a concentration of ships and personnel. It was an obvious target if you were looking to take out the Americans, although there were logistic issues given the distance. There is no doubt Roosevelt was fooling no one except himself on "neutrality": a Lend-Lease Act that explicitly designated Allied vs. Axis countries was hardly "neutral". A peacetime draft and military buildup? Economic sanctions on Axis countries?
There was (and remains) a separatist movement in Quebec, from which my nineteenth-century ancestors emigrated to New England. I was visiting my maternal uncle, having interest in our Franco-American roots, and he seemed totally disinterested, snapping back, "If you think it's so great, move there."
I've been pushing forward principles of Subsidiarity and devolving authority/federalism, so I had some principled preferences for independence or at least a weak federation. PM Cameron promised some devolving authority to UK members; let's see if he keeps his word. I suspect the fact that an aging Scotland with health and pension issues (never mind uncertainty of change) probably make the difference, although the Scots have been more socially liberal than conservative from the standpoint of UK politics. I think that an independent Scotland would have had to come to grips sooner than later with the unsustainable welfare state; still, one could imagine legendary Scot Adam Smith would have opposed secession if it meant trade barriers among the UK members.
Facebook Corner
(IPI). Illinois' unemployment rate fell from 6.8% to 6.7% in August, once again driven entirely by workforce dropouts.
Another 19,000 Illinoisans dropped out of the workforce, causing the state's labor force participation rate to hit a new 35-year low.
Since April, 82,000 Illinoisans have dropped out of the workforce
Ok....why is my son, a recent graduate of the University of Illinois, and many of his U of I classmates, still looking for works. Maybe because these unemployment rates are not factoring in college grads looking for work.
Are they engineering majors? ME's , GE's, or EE's, or chem E 's?
No he has a degree in International Business and Marketing. He has been doing some part-time and temporary jobs but nothing full-time and permanent.
The point is that we have sickly economic growth. The rising tide of economic growth lifts all boats. I have a brother who's a chem E and he graduated into a good job with a major energy conglomerate but when I went back to graduate school in the 80's during a tanked energy recession, I knew a sharp chem-E grad who couldn't find anything, went back and got a math PhD. I've been watching the PBS series "the Roosevelts" which covered the New Deal nonsense; Dems are clueless: they repeated the same type policies lately they did back then--they raised the cost of labor (note the obsession lately with the minimum wage and of course healthcare), they've run anti-business policies, they've created uncertainties with fiscal and monetary policies--it's like watching someone repeatedly beating his head against the wall.
Just a side note to OP: if he's working temp jobs or part-time, congratulations! He's part of the "Quinn recovery"'; part-time/temp workers count in the official statistics.
Proposals
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Lisa Benson and Townhall |
Barry Manilow, "Can't Smile Without You"
