The Religious Right(s)

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

Sounds pretty straight-forward doesn't it? It's my religion, you can't tell me how to express it. You can't make me pay for contraception insurance coverage for my employees, even if they're not of my faith.

Reality is more nuanced though. Mitt Romney can only marry one wife, even though Joseph Smith said otherwise. If I were a worshiper of Satan, any human sacrifice would be considered murder. Mohammed Atta, if he'd lived, would not have received a free pass even though the hijacking was an expression of his perversion of Islam. All these things have something in common: they are religious practices that harm other people. Refusing to include contraception coverage in your insurance coverage for your employees harms those employees. You, as an individual, are free to not use contraception, but the government is within its rights to insist that you cover contraception in your insurance package, just as you cover erectile dysfunction treatments. QED.

Trickle Me Elmo

(I originally wrote this in the summer of 2008 but didn't publish it. Sadly, it's as apropos now as it was then.)

What loon came up with the notion of trickle down economics? This notion that somehow if you give more money to the rich, it will benefit everyone? That somehow if you give businesses more money, they will "naturally" take that money and invest it in their operations, grow them, create jobs, etc.? Would you like to hazard a guess as to where the rich and business tend to put their excess money? Yes: they buy various investments from other rich people and businesses who think they've made enough money on whatever it is they're selling.

What is it that actually prompts businesses to invest in and expand their operations? Sales. What drives sales? The 95% of the country that aren't rich. Haven't we been hearing Didn't we hear for most of the Bush administration that it's "consumer spending that has been supporting the economy"? All the while the businesses were retrenching following the dot-com implosion, it was consumers buying what businesses had to sell that brought us out of that recession. It wasn't the rich buying stocks, or golf club memberships, or fleets of cars, or $10,000 shoes, or any of the things one tends to buy when one has more money than one can sensibly use.

It's a very simple concept any capitalist can get behind: businesses grow their business when they can make more money by doing so, and they can only do so if there's a market, and there's only a market if people have money to buy what's being sold. Giving a tax break to a business for which there's no market simply causes them to put more money in the bank, or pay the additional profits out as dividends.

Update: Goldy posted an eerily similar post on the SLOG today.

Welcome to the Dark Side

For anyone who doesn't know me, I work for Google. Have done for almost 3 years. Enjoy it. A lot. I'm just stunned at the level of antipathy getting directed at Google lately. Talk about being in the down part of the news cycle. It used to be people loved Google and what Google did for them. The media couldn't write enough positive stories. The excellent search. The free email with lots of space. And the ads were occasionally useful. These days, though, there's this nebulous fear that Google Will Do Something Evil. That the data Google collects, which is collected in the service of giving you better information when you search, is going to be turned over to... the government? the advertisers? Someone Who Will Do Unspeakable Things With Their Newfound Knowledge Of Me And My Searches And Email And Photographs And Everything Else I Put In The Cloud. Today Google had to pull their Olympic-themed logo because of outcries that Google was capitalizing on the very sad death of a luger in a practice run.

Yes Google collects information. It also makes a lot of what it knows available to you and gives you control over a lot of it. But how is it wrong or evil to show you an advertisement that interests you, as opposed to one that doesn't? Are you such a marketing tool that you can't resist when you see an advertisement for something you want? I didn't think so.

Questions for the Health Care Conservatives

I've been listening to the health care reform debate with increasing bewilderment. Not over what we should do. I've already been pretty clear about that. No, I really want the answers to these questions:

• Why is a private-sector bureaucrat incented to not pay for your health care better than a government bureaucrat whose directors are incented to keep you healthy?
• How can you call the insurance market, as it currently stands, a competitive marketplace? Most companies contract with only one insurance company, so the only way for most people to choose their insurance is to go work for someone else.
• Why are all the expenditures made by private insurance companies, the lack of which expenditures constitutes the supposed advantage a public option has over private companies, so valuable / important that we should continue wasting money that could otherwise go to keeping people healthy?
• How do you sleep at night, given all the lies and bullshit you're tossing out there to make people afraid?

Things I Dislike About Bainbridge Island

They say that Bainbridge Island has the highest per-capita number of lawyers of any city in the state. Possibly the country. I mostly like BI, the small-town feel, driving at night with my high-beams on because there are almost no street lights. All the trees. What I don't like is the self-important hypocritical nasty-ass gits who seem to flock to the place. Take, for example, the blog Let the dog in, that Google Reader was kind enough to suggest to me. I looked at the first post in Reader and thought, "meh." Then I got to the bottom of the post, where it says this:

"Copyright © 2009 Let the dog in!. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement and in BIG, BIG TROUBLE. Please contact legal@www.letthedogin.com so we can take legal action immediately."

It reminds me of the story I heard of a guy from the city who was putting up a fence at a park, and was greeted pleasantly each day by one of the neighbors, and when he was just about done with the fence was told that that same neighbor was suing the city because the fence was too high. Number one: who the hell would be taking posts from some random housewife (and I mean no disparagement to housewives, but usually what goes on in their house is of interest only to the people that live there) and putting them on their website? Number two: if someone were foolish enough to do that, who would be such an idiot as to reproduce such a notice along with the content? Really? You're going to set up a special email address for people to contact you about copyright infringement? Really? Really? Puhlease.

Poeta Vox Vocis

I find myself

vexed

by that lugubrious animal

The Poet's Voice.

You know it.

As it takes a piece of beauty

and rends it

piece

by

piece

with unexplained

pauses

and odd rushes of breathless heartless pointless babble

so unlike a brook that I can brook no reading

that treats its subject so harshly.

Poems are precious

not precious,

as poets recite them.

They are lively.

They should move with a natural flow,

like a happy creek,

not creak along

like an old man

with narcolepsy.

It's 1:30 in the Morning. Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

Perhaps your children are the pricks with the firecrackers and other things that go BOOM that are keeping me up. The acepromazine has mostly worn off my dogs, so I'm reluctant to go to bed, where the noises are more present than up here with the TV on. It's at times like this that I want one of those old loudspeaker trucks and an endless loop of Tiny Tim singing Tiptoe Through the Tulips, so I can park next to these assholes and let 'er rip.
A firetruck goes screaming up Stone Way. Is it uncharitable of me to hope that one or more of these nitwits has set themselves on fire? I think not.
If you don't know where your children are, perhaps you should get their asses in bed, and put the rest of us out of our misery.

Did I Miss a Memo?

So, apparently today was Be a Dick to Pedestrians Day in Seattle. Normally I find the place pretty friendly, but today on the way to work I was walking in an unofficial crosswalk (i.e. from one street corner to the opposite corner) and this douchebag in a pickup, one of these big guys who likes to drink a lot of beer and push people around, comes barrelling down 35th St as I'm crossing. I glare at him as I'm crossing, because it's clear that stopping is not in his plans, and as he slows down he yells, Get out of the fucking road! I glare more and yell, Respect the fucking crosswalk, asshole! while his buddy's on the phone in the passenger seat. Dude starts to slow down and ease over to the side of the road, so I start walking towards him, and he changes his mind. This being Seattle, though, as I continue my walk to work, a guy in a Forerunner who'd been waiting to drive across 35th leans out his window and says, I'm sorry man, that was bullshit.

Then on the way home, I'm standing on the edge of the Burke-Gilman trail under the Aurora Bridge taking a picture of it, and some punk on a bicycle goes whizzing by and yells, You're standing in the way! so I yell back, No I'm not! and keep taking my picture. What a weird day.

Intuit Doesn't

Back in the day, the folks at Intuit gave a damn about the user experience, but the people who cared seem to have long left the building. The sorts of things I see in Quicken 2008 or TurboTax just make me shudder. Let me give you a few examples:

• I'm filling out my taxes this year, for the 2008 tax year, and I enter a date, like, say, 4/13. Can you guess what date TurboTax thinks that is? 4/13/08? Ha! It actually thinks you meant April 1, 1913. I kid you not.
• I have my main Quicken file on a server in the basement, and the internal database management is so incredibly bad, after every operation, the entire screen flashes (I mean, every single UI control in the screen) as it redraws, and it puts up a little dialog telling me it's refreshing Quicken data. This is on a machine with several gigs of RAM just waiting to be used.
• While I'm talking about refreshing, I just had to close quicken, because it got into some kind of refresh argument with internet explorer, where each window kept repainting and repainting and repainting and repainting and repainting and repainting. You get the picture.
• My favorite idiocy in quicken is when it's matching up downloaded transactions, and rather than matching a transaction with an uncleared transaction for the exact same date as the downloaded transaction, it'll choose to match it against a cleared transaction for a month prior. I mean, who wrote that code? Sarah Palin?

The sad thing is, from everything I hear, all the other financial management packages suck even worse, so I stick with Quicken, and I stick with TurboTax. But damn!

Capital Losses

Quick: name me one form of gambling income that isn't taxed at your normal income tax rate. Slots? Lottery? Multi-state Powerball? Nope. It's "capital gains" on stock sales.

If you talk to defenders of the capital gains tax, and especially those who have argued for it to be lower than regular income tax, they'll tell you about how important it is to encourage people to Invest In Companies That Provide Jobs And Other Good Things, and I completely agree. Except 99% of the shares out there are not actually shares that were bought from the company. There was absolutely zero capital invested In Companies That Provide Jobs And Other Good Things. By giving preference to the stock market, people are encouraged to buy shares from the people who do Invest In Companies, and ensures that they make a lot of money. But let's not kid ourselves that we're encouraging investment in companies.

If we want to encourage investment in companies, rather than encouraging the development of a financial industry that siphons off billions of dollars a year without actually producing anything (oh, except for the financial crisis we're experiencing now), we'd give preferential tax treatment only to the sale of shares that were purchased from the company, i.e. only those things that can truly be considered to be "capital".

What? This would discourage people from investing in the stock market? How do you figure? People were investing in the stock market before the drop in the capital gains tax rate. There's no lesser appeal to the money to be made by buying into the chance that someone down the road will be willing to pay more for your share, except people making that choice won't be able to make as much money as before. But why is this bad? What good does gambling on the market provide to the society, to warrant preferential tax treatment? Gambling on a company, sure, but when you buy a share of stock, you're buying a share of stock, not investing in a company. The stalwarts will continue to maintain that you should value shares based on the performance of the company that issued them, but really, come on. Did the dot-com bubble teach them nothing? The rationales people come up with to justify the different P/E ratios of different shares are just rationalizations. What it comes down to is this: for long periods of time, people implicitly agreed that stocks should be valued based on the underlying performance of the company, but that's just a principle, it's not a requirement, as we've seen all too well.

Let's take the company I work for: Google. In late 2007, its shares were trading north of $700 a share; this month, they're at $300 a share. What has happened to the fundamentals of the company in those 14 months? Still bringing in a heap of money quarter after quarter, with nice gains year over year, even as it expanded its workforce and costs significantly. Yet its "value" is down over 50%. Neither price is based on fundamentals: they're both based on opinion.

Buying stock is gambling, pure and simple. You're wagering that beyond some horizon with which you're comfortable, someone else's opinion of the company is going to make them willing to pay you more for your share than you paid for it. But don't kid yourself that you're "investing in the company": most of the time you're just paying off another person that took the same gamble you are.

So how about we get building businesses again: change the capital gains rate to apply only to the sale of shares that were purchased directly from the company, and make that same rate apply to interest earned from purchasing bonds, in both cases regardless of how long a person holds the instrument. Encourage investors to actually invest, not endanger the economy by frittering away money on more and more elaborate financial ploys.

Greenspan is Shocked, Shocked!

I was listening to the radio today, and had the "pleasure" of listening repeatedly to Alan Greenspan's testimony to Congress about how his ideology / world view seemed to have a flaw in it. How he was "shocked" that absent regulation, the bankers would so betray their shareholders as to get into a pickle with credit-default swaps and other instruments and endanger the livelihood of their institutions.

Are all economists this stupid? First the whole nonsense about trickle-down economics, when a giraffe could tell you that if consumer spending has been what's buoyed the economy for the past umpteen years, through the dot-com burst and other travails, then you're best off ensuring the masses keep more of their money, rather than letting the rich trade money as they gamble in the stock market. Now this eminent banker is stunned that people who make their money by engaging in risky behavior, and who never actually suffer the consequences of their company getting into trouble ("thanks for the retention bonus, Mr. Bankruptcy Judge!"), would do anything else?

The corporate liability shield is what will destroy this world: people who direct the companies should absolutely be held liable for what they direct their companies to do. No one will take a chance? Maybe that'd be better. People would act properly if they knew they'd pay for acting improperly.

Happy F****** "Birthday"

I used to enjoy July 4th. When I was growing up, the Regent Street Neighborhood Association held a little parade over by the high school, and my father and brothers and sister and I would march in it in the band. My brother and I played the kazoo, if I remember right, and my dad would always play the big bass drum. We'd get together at a neighbor's house a couple times before the parade to "rehearse". Good times.

That was before I took on some dogs who have issues with fireworks. One runs around the house (inside or outside, and I do mean runs around the house) barking madly, while the other quivers and shakes. A third dog has started being scared of the banging too. Living on Bainbridge Island doesn't help, because we're near the Suquamish reservation, which means miles upon miles of fireworks for sale. (Now the local Ace Hardware store has gotten into the act, hosting a fireworks stand for four days. Not helpful. Not hardware, man.)

So these days I have this to say about July 4th: how very fucking apropos that we celebrate the marketing, not the achievement, of independence, and we do it with crap that was invented in China. Bite me.

Impeach Them Now

It's funny how it's the small things that really get to you. How the camel's back really can be broken by something as insignificant as a straw. For nearly 6 1/2 years we've watched, and occasionally protested, as Bush and Cheney have degraded their offices and this country. For nearly 6 1/2 years these people who pledged to bring honor and integrity "back" to the White House have stained that building with rapacious self-interest. With the commuting of Scooter Libby's sentence, the camel lies immobile on the ground. The trail of high crimes and misdemeanors are clear for all to see. Congress should impeach them both. Do it now.

For an inspired rant on the topic, watch Keith Olbermann on MS-NBC.

Smokers are Idiots

These days I walk a lot. Up the hill from the ferry to the bus. From the bus to the office. Back again. I wait for the bus a lot too. Everywhere I go, I'm walking into clouds of smoke, because everywhere I go, there are people smoking. In cars with their windows rolled down. At bus stops with no-smoking signs. Huddled outside buildings getting rained on and shivering. What is wrong with these people? They pay $5 - $10 per day for the privilege. Interestingly, when you hear these personal finance gurus on Oprah, they'll talk about not buying a daily latte but I have yet to hear them tell someone they should stop smoking. $3,600/year is a heck of a lot of dough.

I've got no problems with people harming themselves, so long as I don't end up paying for it somehow. People should be able to smoke in their own homes (though if they have kids, it smacks of child abuse). Whatever. But not near me.

Look, if someone enjoyed sniffing nitrous oxide and walked around with a canister of it whiffing from a tube so that a bunch of it went into other people's lungs and left them woozy and disoriented, we wouldn't allow that. If someone wore a hat that spun a monofilament line around them to enforce a 3-foot personal space, we wouldn't allow that. So what gives with smokers?

Don't they feel stupid and manipulated and pathetic? That's certainly how I see them. If you're a smoker, you start out at a serious respect deficit with me. I've got friends who smoke, but it's definitely in spite of their idiocy; they're pretty special people, or it wouldn't be worth it.

People can do whatever they want so long as the only person they harm is themselves, but this smoking in public crap has to stop. It has to.

Support the Troops

I was watching The Daily Show the other day, where Jon was interviewing Jeremy Scahill about his new book, and it came out that a "private security" person in Iraq earns in a month what a soldier earns in a year. That is just so wrong on so many levels. Then it occurred to me: this society runs on money, so a really effective way to get the troops out of Iraq while smelling like a rose would be to dramatically increase their combat pay and make staying in Iraq prohibitively expensive.

• You're taking care of the troops
• You're paying something closer to what the market has set as the value of the service
• Can you really see Shrub vetoing this?

Seems like a winner to me.

Why Hate the Jews?

Random thought resurrected by listening to a piece on NPR about the gospel according to Judas: how is it that Christians have through history villified the Jews for having turned Jesus over to the Romans for crucifiction, when the death of Jesus (in my mind the willingness of Jesus to die relying on his faith that he was in fact the son of god and would be resurrected) is the central act that redeemed their sorry asses? Did the Jews not do them a favor?

Executive Severance

I'm not going to get into the issue of executive compensation (yet), though I will say the number of executives I've met or heard of who actually have the impact implied by their compensation is vanishingly small. No, can we talk about executive severance instead? Good.

Here's the thing: severance is meant to recognize the efforts a person has put into the company and smooth the transition to a new job. If someone gets axed because of changed business circumstances, I think it's right to compensate them for that in a way that eases the pain while allowing the company to get on with those changed circumstances. If a company gets bought and an executive is redundant, the same principles should apply; one shouldn't avoid making the right decision for the shareholders because one is afraid of suddenly being out of a job.

But what about when an executive isn't doing what they're supposed to be doing, or doesn't agree with where the company is going? Anyone else would be fired, or would resign and go find work somewhere else. Strangely, though, this doesn't seem to happen in the executive ranks, where salary anywhere from 6 months to 18 months, plus other perks seems to be the rule. At my previous company we had

• The VP of engineering who couldn't make a decision and whose directors spent a lot of time talking among themselves figuring out how to get around the VP so stuff could actually happen; dude got dismissed with 6 months salary and went off rock-climbing for a while. I'm pretty sure we never called him up for assistance during that "transition period"
• The VP of Operations (as in data center operations) who hadn't a clue about computer networks, spent more time trying to sneak favorable (and exceptional) stock option grants for himself (in his role as General Counsel) past the CEO, and got fired for incompetence. 6 months severance because, being a lawyer, he was happy to sue the company and the board determined that legal costs would be more than the 6-months' salary.
• The VP of Sales who went to the board to tell them he could run the company way better than the current CEO, only to find that they thought things were going quite fine. He stayed on the payroll, not doing anything for the company, until he found a job someplace else.

You would think that reading about the myriad other companies where this crap goes on would make me feel better about this stuff, but it doesn't. I am mystified as to why these institutional investors that own most of these companies are willing to put up with it. All I can think is that (a) they deal with large amounts of money, so these numbers don't seem so large, and (b) it's only a couple people at a time; lord knows if the company were so generous with the rank-and-file when they laid them off, there'd be hell to pay. Just ask the workers at Delphi.

What is the point of all my rambling? It is this: where is the incentive for the executive to perform well, if they know that should they be dismissed for doing a poor job, they're going to continue with their already-large salary for a nice long time? So many people are motivated to work extra hard, even when trying to meet ridiculous goals set by executives who have no real sense of the level of effort involved, because they're afraid if they don't do what they're told, they'll be fired, often with no severance at all. Have executives somehow risen above such base concerns that they wouldn't be similarly motivated? Hardly.

Ridiculous executive severance remains because it's set by executives who like that perk of their own jobs. But the company would be better served by a little fear in the executive wing. Indeed it would.

Retelling an Old Joke

President Bush decides he wants to create a national appreciation day for either the sun or the moon, but he can't decide which one. It has to be the one that's most important to us, but he can't make up his mind.

So he calls in his science advisers and asks them, which is more important: the sun or the moon? They talk to him about fusion and reflection and refraction and rotation and photosynthesis and convection until his head is spinning.

He thanks them for coming in and thinks for a bit, which makes his head spin even more. So he calls in Dick Cheney.

The VP talks to him about oil and solar power and hydrogen made using solar power, and it all becomes clear.

The next day, the President holds a press conference to announce that tomorrow will be National Moon Appreciation Day, because after due deliberation and consultation he has determined that it is the moon that is most important to us: the moon lights up the night, while the sun only shines during the daytime, when we don't need it.

Health Care Not Insurance

Can we talk for a bit about the health insurance crisis in this country? It's been bugging me for a while.

For starters, it's not a Health Insurance crisis, it's a Health Care crisis. Complaining about all the people who are uninsured implicitly agrees that the best way to provide health care to people is through an insurance plan.

Have you ever thought what it would be like if Auto Insurance were the same as Health Insurance? Whenever you took your car to the mechanic, you'd pay a $10 copay. There'd be in-network mechanics and out-of-network mechanics. Maybe you'd have to pay 10% of the cost of any repair, to try and give you an incentive to shop around, but really it's just to reduce the cost to the insurance company and incent you to try and get by without the repair. Mechanics would have elevated prices that would be their official rate for things, but they'd discount them heavily for the insurance companies, so anyone without Auto Insurance would be getting doubly-reamed.

It all sounds pretty silly, doesn't it?

Insurance was created to distribute risk, to allow people to gamble on the luck of the world. As a side-effect, it enabled people to take more risks than they otherwise would have, which enabled us to move the society forward faster than we could have done if individuals had been forced to carry the whole risk of a venture.

People's health has nothing to do with this.

People get sick through all sorts of mechanisms, and most of them come down to chance. Sure there are illnesses that are due to lifestyle choices (smoking / drinking / obesity -- though that last one is starting to show signs of being partly due to viral infection or differences in intestinal flora), but guys who, in their twenties, get staph infections in their blood that build up on their heart valve and break off and travel up into their brain...that's not a lifestyle choice, that's just bad luck. And it can happen to anyone at any time.

So why should handling all this be subject to the profit motive? Why the insane salaries for insurance executives, and the excessive marketing dollars, and the motivation to only insure the healthy? There are those who point out the difference in administrative costs between private and public health care (read: medicare) is 10x, while others, such as The Council for Affordable Health Insurance like to play around with the numbers to reduce the difference (ignoring the reality that one of the reasons the "hidden" administrative costs of medicare are hidden is because they are inherently part of running the government). Even playing with the numbers doesn't bring the levels in line with each other -- they are left only with trying to justify the higher costs saying they help keep costs low by reducing fraud. But there already are many people who work for medicare looking to reduce fraud; my stepmother used to do this work for the state of wisconsin.

If the private sector and the market are so great at keeping medical costs down, why have they utterly failed to do so? Why are we as a country paying so much more for health care and getting so much less?

People say that the private sector performs more efficiently because the profit motive incents them to keep costs under control. What prevents those same controls from working in the public sector, without the added burden of having to show a profit? If it's only a matter of incenting the administrators appropriately, those mechanisms are just as available to the public sector as to the private. With the added benefit of making defrauding the health care system a criminal offense, not a civil one.

The goal of anyone looking at health care should not be to ensure that everyone has health insurance, it should be to ensure that everyone has health care. Only then can we really put in place the mechanisms to take care of all our citizens.

Don't Be Afraid of the Ketchup

Let me say this and get it over with: if we have to rely on overworked TSA employees at the airport to protect us from terrorists, then we are in seriously deep doo-doo. We're now expected to not bring on board any liquids or gels, not even little tubes of toothpaste, for fear that they could be combined into an explosive device. Are we next going to be required to travel naked? While some might enjoy an exotic-erotic plane flight, the reality is that there will always be people who can think of ways to get stuff on board. Adding checks for whatever has been tried in the past is not the answer; addressing the root motivations of terrorism is.

While the ideology espoused by fanatical islamists provides a pathway, people don't step on that road because they fundamentally believe it. They tread that path for the same reason people join gangs: they are disenfranchised, feel powerless, have no hope for the future, and are looking for something to belong to. Until we find ways to overcome the main weakness of capitalism -- the tendency to widen the disparity between the haves and the have-nots, and the amorality of corporations -- we will continue to be threatened in this way.

Even if we lost 10 full airliners a year to terrorists, it would still be safer to fly than to drive.