Tag: Politics

Pipelines And Registries

A few weeks ago, requests to “check in” around the Standing Rock protest was circulating Facebook. It presupposes that one shares such information with strangers – perhaps that is the norm. It also presupposes that law enforcement peruses those check-ins. The whole thing reminded me of a discussion of ghosts that I had whilst touring the Bryn Mawr College campus — the student with whom I was walking casually crossed the street, pointed to a house a few houses down on the side of the street that we had been strolling down, and mentioned that the house is supposed to be haunted. Of course, she continued, being a worldy University student she didn’t believe in such things. Just the same, it  didn’t actually take effort to walk down the other side of the street … worst case you did something for no reason, best case you avoided the ghosts.

Checking in at Standing Rock sounded pretty much the same to me – didn’t cost me anything, aside from potentially confusing someone who saw my location it didn’t harm anything … may have been a pointless action, or maybe it stopped police from being able to use social media data to research protesters.

I keep seeing a Muslim registry being suggested — in seriousness, not in the Godwin’s Law / serial numbers tattooed on arms sort of way. I wonder how many people who are willing to check-in at Standing Rock would also be willing to volunteer for the additional scrutiny that I’m sure membership in the Muslim registry gets you. The efficacy of the registry is a question of resource allocation  — if a few thousand people register nationwide (say, Imams who are already well known), then the resources involved in making their lives miserable are relatively few. If half of the country registers as Muslim … either our new government will solve unemployment (double the national debt in the process, but who cares about a debt ceiling when it’s your party doing the spending?) by hiring a few million people to monitor self-professed Muslims or “additional scrutiny” becomes an increased probability in the IRS audit flag algorithm.

Shocked

I sincerely hope my fear of Trump’s plans prove to be unfounded — hopefully he’s been playing a part during the primaries and general election. Over the top promises made as an act, not because he actually plans to ban Muslims and Mexicans en toto. Or create the Great Wall Prime. Or racial profiling. Or religious tests for entry into the country. Or stop-and-frisk. Or launching military action when another country’s navy makes rude gestures at our sailors. Or any number of outlandish statements he’s made.

And if the current vote totals stay similar once every vote has come in, I hope this is enough to end the electoral college system. If Bush/Gore was not sufficient, I don’t hold out much hope. Especially since I don’t see ANYONE talking about the POPULAR vote where Clinton is leading. The focus is all on the EC points – but I don’t see anyone asking why the EC is there in the first place. But maybe, once the final numbers come in, focus will shift to the system that allows someone to have more votes than their competitors and lose the election.

Walls

I find the idea of a wall to stop illegal immigration to be … beyond silly. As a military barricade — that is, to prevent large-scale movements across a border — it can be effective (it can also be completely INeffective, see: Maginot Line). But if there were thousands of people marching across the Mexican/Texan desert, we could watch for heat signatures & deploy border patrol to intercept. Illegal immigration won’t look like a Mongol army marching across the steppes.

Reviewing walls that have been erected throughout history, the only truly effective method to prevent small scale involves a lot of manpower and a dead-zone. The fourth generation Berlin Wall is a good example of an effective stop to emmigration. But it had over 100 watchtowers in less than 100 miles and several bunkers housing the troops who guarded the wall. There were also two walls with a “death strip” in the middle – material that provided no cover or camouflage for anyone attempting to sneak across. Scaling the Berlin Wall configuration to a 2,000 mile border would require thousands of additional border guards, twice as much material as a single wall, and more than twice the land. Still wouldn’t stop persons wishing to illegally enter the United States from taking to waterways and entering through California and the Gulf coast states. To say nothing of people who come in through proper channels and simply overstay their visa.

But let’s assume that a significant portion of illegal immigration does come by land across the Mexican border at points that are not proper border crossings. For far less than the low-ball estimated cost of a wall being provided, we could have fifty thousand of autonomous drones (I’ve watched enough movies to advocate for unarmed drones) and solar charging stations. Existing border patrol agents would be notified when a target is acquired. Because we have SO many drones available, when a drone acquires a target it would signal for a new patrol drone to launch and then track the target until a border patrol agent detains the person.

If we’re that worried about people tunneling under to avoid detection, add drones with ground penetrating radar. If we’re worried about people coming in through Baja or Corpus Christi, extend the drone patrol line up the coast.

I don’t know if this proposed wall is meant to be a monument to American power (silly, but that’s kind of what the Great Wall is in China) or the sort of WPA project that Republicans actually like. But as an effective deterrent to illegal border crossings, it is an enormous waste of money, resources, time, and space.

Bad Deal

A friend of mine posted a graphic that basically said ten years and six trillion dollars later, we’ve got ISIS in Iraq instead of Hussein and we’ve got the Taliban in Afghanistan instead of … oh, wait, the Taliban. I understand the six trillion dollar figure looks at long term costs for veteran care *and* direct costs of the occupation. Still, the graphic got me to wondering — could we have simply purchased the country for the amount of money we will eventually spend? Iraq is 108,000,000 acres. That’s an average of 33,333$ per acre — now there are some fertile areas, some developed areas … which may well go for more than 30k per acre. But there’s a lot of desert too – not in an oil rich area – which wouldn’t go for anything like 30k an acre.

Population is something like 33,420,000 people. We could have saved near a trillion dollars ( 987,000,000,000) by giving each person in Iraq 150,000$ to do whatever we asked of them. Sure, a few would have held out … but if the alternative clearly was a foreign invasion and no 150k, I’m thinking we could have literally overthrown a government by just bribing the citizens to revolt.

Real People

When I was in college, I went out to a bar with some friends. They had a friend, who had graduated a year or two previously, visiting; this guy came out with us. This friend-of-a-friend and I were sitting at a table while everyone else was getting a drink, and the guy said he wanted to meet a beautiful girl like me … but he doesn’t know how to approach one. What, he asked me, would be the best “pick up line”? To which I quickly answered “Hi, I’m Eric”. Why is speaking to a cute girl different than talking to any other human being?

I subsequently learned that, indeed, young attractive women are treated a lot differently — the sort of things people assume are acceptable make the 2005 ‘grab them by the pussy’ recording … well, not surprising. My office at the University had been a photography darkroom. It had two separate rooms — an antechamber and the darkroom part. A friend of mine and I were in the darkroom part, and she was on the phone with someone. Glenn, one of my work-study students came in to speak with me. Not wanting to interrupt her conversation, I asked him to come into the antechamber. He proceeded to back me into a chair, physically restrain me by sitting on me, and kiss me on the mouth. My rather loud entreaty for my friend to come into the other room was met with an annoyed “I’m on the PHONE”. Luckily she finished her call before the student got beyond unwanted kissing, and he backed off when he heard her walking.

And to people who say “but no one reported it happening, so it didn’t happen”. I didn’t report the student either — there’s no evidence. There’s nothing beyond my say-so. And I’m sure he’s going to say it never happened. And that’s a scenario where I at least knew the person. Random guys at a club who take similar liberties — how would that work? Gently move his hand from my crotch to the table, then ask for his name and number? Remove yourself from the situation, and make sure a friend stays close to you at the club — that was my realistic solution.

Loopholes

When Mitt Romney was running for President, I recall some disclosure about his 401(k) value — something like 20-100 million dollars. The guy was like 65 years old. Even if he’d started contributing in 1978 & dropped in the full 30k you could do at the time … that’d be 1.2 mil in contributions over the course of his lifetime. Which is an amazing rate of return if you factor in normal market performance over the 34 years. Contribution limits sure aren’t 30k per year anymore! How do you get tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in an account? You get a special class of stock priced at one penny, put in 15k worth of it (1,500,000 shares) into your 401(k). And then revalue the stock at 10$ a share. Giving you 15 million dollars when there’s a 15k contribution limit.

Donald Trump’s billion dollar loss (great business acumen, huh?) — assuming it was a legit loss (and I think we know why the guy gets audited every year. If he’s still carrying forward his billion dollar loss … he’s got something funky on each return that may well flag it for audit) and it’s actually debt (not just loss of value) — where is that debt? That’s what reminded me of Romney’s 401(k) … if you are dealing with internal funny money, can you then proceed to buy that debt for pennies on the dollar (I’ll sell you this billion dollars of debt for a mere million dollars) and then never attempt to collect it? The debt still exists, your earnings are tax free as they are offset by that loss … but really there isn’t even debt.

Non-solutions

This post takes as a priori knowledge (i.e. not something I necessarily believe to be true based on my experience) that white flight is still a thing – that African Americans primarily live in urban centers – and that these urban centers are an absolute wreck of violent crime and disintegration.

I’ll admit to being advantaged by a lot of implicit bias — I’m a grown up white person. A female, though … and a female in science/technology fields … so it is something I’ve experienced occasionally. The first major company for which I worked, a top-level manager in the IT org hired in a lot of his at-the-time girlfriends. The new girl showing up was assumed to be incompetent, and it is a lot harder to convince someone of your competence if they start out knowing that you are only here because you are sleeping with the boss. Frustrating, but nowhere near the level of “the cops got called when I was standing at my front door trying to find my key”.

My specifics don’t give me a lot of understanding of minorities who suffer implicit bias, racial profiling, and outright discrimination … but I cannot fathom how “stop and frisk” is meant to solve either problem. Even if 25% of the people who live here are degenerate criminals, 75% of the people aren’t. Statistically you spend a lot of time hassling innocents — who may well not consider it a worthwhile trade-off to eliminate one burglar.

The nearest analogy in my life-experience is DUI and seat-belt check-points. I remember being late to work one morning because a seat-belt check-point was on my route. Slowed down traffic quite a bit, stopped on the queue waiting for my turn. Plus it took a couple of minutes for the check itself (they were doing about the nosiest check-point I’d ever seen — basically taking as much time as they could to peruse the plain-sight contents of your vehicle, asking questions, etc). There’s a sanctity of human life argument that says that the potential to save one life has more weight than a hundred people being delayed for twenty minutes that morning. Which, as a one-off … whatever. How many times, though, could I be detained before *I* don’t care all that much about the life of some goober who intentionally refused to fasten their seat belt.

And there’s a difference between reducing and relocating crime. New York City got very “tough on crime” and was able to reduce crime significantly. But Philadelphia saw a dramatic increase in crime — NY didn’t stop people from committing crime, they just stopped people from committing crimes *in NYC*. I don’t see stop-and-frisk having the slightest chance of reducing crime. Relocating, sure, but not reducing.

Knee-jerk reactions

Companies for whom I have worked have blown many millions of dollars on knee-jerk reactions to bad situations. Some of the biggest expenses never even addressed the problem at hand — but the business directive was essentially that we had a big problem and needed to be seen spending money “fixing it” even if a more nuanced study of the situation and solution showed a complete disconnect. No one outside the company could even see the details of Project CYA, and everyone inside the company was complicit in perpetrating the belief that Project CYA did whatever you needed it to do today.

I appreciate the need to do something immediately, but it seems more sensible to me that the immediate action be a stop-gap solution to provide time for a more thorough review of the situation. One of the most egregious examples was a situation where an employee was terminated under bad circumstances, drove over to one of our retail stores, and asked to borrow the logged on computer of a sales guy. Who let him use it. The guy then proceeded to credit thousands of dollars to his friends’ accounts. We spent a year and quite a bit of money implementing an identity management system — one that had many benefits, but didn’t stop an employee from letting someone else use their already logged on terminal whilst they went back and grabbed a cup of coffee. My proposal was a termination alert & photo e-mailed to all employees working within X miles of the terminated employee’s location code be sent for a few weeks while options (beyond the obvious “don’t let anyone use your logged on terminal – log off & let them go in under their ID) were explored. It would have taken a day of coding, but we already have each employee’s photograph in the security system for ID badges, a feed of terminated employees, and a work address for all employees. Sure, not everyone is going to read the message right away … but someone in the store is apt to have read it in the two hours between the guy’s manager bringing him in for the unhappy talk and the guy’s arrival at the retail store.

Reliance on knee-jerk solutions was the biggest fault I saw in George W Bush’s governance — the “trust my gut” and “go with my instincts” methodology. Without the hubris to come along later and analyze how those instinctive decisions worked out.

Trump makes George W seem positively restrained and self-aware. Beyond his constant self-aggrandizing, self-serving tax and regulation policies, and middle school bully approach to inter-social relationships … I cannot fathom how this man will lurch from manufactured crisis (the Iranians gave us the finger!?!) to manufactured crisis (Some world leader won’t meet me on the tarmac, I’m going home) to real crisis (Russia invades the Eastern Bloc, Pakistan and India decide to nuke each other, manufacturing continues to collapse even after illegal duties are slapped on everything brought into this country, Iraqis object to our plundering their oilfields and a whole host of other countries who fear the same thing join their defense against us).

Reality

Donald Trump has two premises behind his ‘make american great again’ initiative — (1) the solution to outsourcing and automation is to ask [a.k.a. use presidential power to bully] companies into manufacturing products domestically and (2) that no one has tried this because they just aren’t as clever as he and never thought of it.

Reality is that most people have a much firmer grasp of the long-term and wide-scale repercussions of their actions. His approach may work as a one-off — a single company or industry certainly doesn’t want the bad publicity associated with the president of the United States denigrating their reputation (see broccoli & Pres Bush #1 in 1990). Specifically mentioning Carrier during the debate was notable. A president specifically singling out one company for offshoring manufacturing jobs will be national news. There’s a cost/benefit analysis. Shifting manufacturing overseas saves a million, but bad publicity costs five mil in sales … OK, we’ll ship a quarter of the jobs overseas and keep more than the 0 we initially planned on leaving here.

This approach has diminishing returns. Who is going to read the White House Press Office’s list of today’s “companies that suck because they want to offshore production”?! Individually calling out one company is news partially because it is so outside the norm. If his plan was to select the three largest potential employers and strong-arm them into keeping jobs in the country … OK, it’s a strategy. I doubt, though, that Carrier is one of the largest potential employers in America.

The other reality that Trump ignores is that manufacturing automation negates wage differences — we’re all going to be unemployed while robots make everything, AI engines diagnose illness and negotiate legal proceedings, workflows process mortgages. We have the opportunity now to retrain people for the post-robotic world – hypothesize what jobs will look like and fund training programs to ready people for those opportunities. Bullying companies might work in the short term – even keep jobs around long enough for re-election. But this is the same ideology that wrote NINA mortgages a decade ago — *I* am making money *now*, who cares about next year. Eventually the conjecture of lost sales will be insignificant compared to the savings offered by automation.

Hypocrisy

First of all, some understanding of the NATO charter would be good before you go talking about countries not living up to contractual obligations. But eh, facts are so passe. NATO counties that are not funding their military at the 2% level (a.k.a. the countries that are not paying their fair share for protection) are a huge problem and we should remove our services … but not paying your federal taxes makes you smart? And failing to pay contractually obligated fees to vendors … also a good thing? As long as *I* am the one screwing someone, it’s fine but no one else better do it to me. Hypocrite.

And I’m surprised no one speculates on the awful judgement of someone who engages with so many vendors who fail to meet expectations (taking at face value the statement that the payments were not made for this reason). Either you have the absolute best judgement about everything (including the hire of subordinates who may be engaging these contractors) and could only select the best vendors (in which case, you should be paying them).  Or you’ve misjudged something in your life (oh, the horror).