Donald Trump has announced his new initiative for governmental efficiency. This is a derivative idea pushed most famously by Elon Musk.
It has “Efficiency” right there in the name, but it has two co-chairs? Two? This is "efficiency"?
The two leaders are to be Vivek Ramaswamy ("failed presidential candidate") and Elon Musk ("purchaser of politicians"). I am gonna love seeing Vivek and Elon share leadership. Pass me the popcorn.
I reviewed the new (2025) Medicare Plan D drug plan options a month or so ago, when the information first came out, and I just re-reviewed them all. In 2024, I have a plan that is $3.30/month and the drugs I use are at no additional cost. For 2025, that same plan goes up to $36/month and the drugs now come at an added cost for an annualized total of $908. Yes, the plan goes from about $50/year to $900/year. Naturally, I looked at other plans.
I conclude that I am the product.
If the plan costs nothing and the drugs cost nothing, then my information is being collected to be bought and sold. Yeah, there is HIPAA "to protect me" but I am sure they have clever ways to, uh, comply while still selling information.
The nine plans available to me run between $0 and $2150 (annualized). At that top end, there is no deductible, but it is about $600 more expensive than the next most expensive - and the deductible is about $600. Strange, that.
I assume I will spend the rest of my life on this merry-go-round, chasing low-cost options each year, and getting "collected" by various insurance companies each time I switch.
Democrats are not well-served by a meltdown, a spiral of demoralization that zaps their energy to counter the Trump administration and bounce back in two and four years. Understanding what happened is important because it impacts the future.
He is right. The Competitive Hyperbole is the story of the hour/day/week hogging the headlines and the airwaves but it illuminates nothing. There was no "Trump mandate" and it was a close race, even with the House and Senate races assessed. Trump has a thin, thin margin. Democrats need to point out that There Is No Trump Mandate forcefully & repeatedly. The so-called analysis is just the same old players playing their same old talking points to their same old audiences. Bernie sees it as a failure to court the middle class because, of course he does. Others see it as a failure to boldly support Palestine because, of course they do. And so on. The fact is that Kamala is the second woman presidential candidate to lose and was only the second non-white candidate to run. We are talking about simple sexism and racism in the electorate. Exactly how we fix it - well, I have opinions, but the important thing is to abandon familiar, comfortable arguments and really understand what actually happened.
I do not know who will rise to lead the Democrats. Mr. Jeffries? Ms. AOC? I know it will not be Bernie or a Palestinian advocate, and it cannot be a "bipartisan" throwback. I do know that Democrats must absorb the pain, stop the blame, unify the aim, and get back into the fight.
Metric. Of course, all the units are metric - kilometers per hour (km/h, sometimes "clicks"), kilometers (km, sometimes "clicks"), and meters (m). Speed limits are posted in km/h, usually a multiple of ten. The gauges in the car are in the same units, so conversion is not required, but as an American, I like to think in terms of miles, so I take the value in km and drop the last digit, then multiple by six and round up to a multiple of five. For example, 70 km/h becomes 7 * 6, giving 42 and rounding up to 45; 100 km/h becomes 10 * 6, giving 60 mph.
Roundabouts. In Boston, these are called rotaries but we call them roundabouts in the Pacific Northwest. They are beloved structures in France (outside Paris) to the point that traffic lights are relatively rare and there are very few STOP signs. On various errands, I would barely touch my brakes while covering 35 km because everything was a rotary rather than a STOP sign or traffic light. There are two key tricks for rotaries - entry and exit.
Rotary entry is a merge process. You wan to avoid stopping; instead, adjust your entry speed so that you fit into traffic. In rush hour, this may not be possible and you will stop to wait for an entry, but mostly you will slow a bit to merge into the flowing traffic. That is it - other drivers expect it and will be surprised (unpleasantly) should you stop.
Rotary exit can be confusing, so stay alert. The first thing is to know which exit you want. Larger rotaries will have five or more roads meeting, so you may want an exit other than a right angle (right, straight, left). Some rotaries also have blocked exits (these do not count) or exits for special purposes like maintenance or parking lots (especially park-and-ride lots), and these do count. When I say "count", your GPS (or navigator) should tell you which exit number you want. For example, "second exit" is often the equivalent of straight through. In another style, my wife and I would talk about "virtual left" meaning to take the exit around 270 degrees, which could be more or fewer than the third exit.
While many rotaries are effectively a single lane, there are larger rotaries with two entrance, travel, and exit lanes and people will use all the lanes. When you enter a rotary in a two-lane entry, keep to your lane: right lane to the outer lane and left land to the center lane. Be alert for someone traveling on your left who wants to exit - let them in. It helps to signal your intentions - signal left to stay in the rotary and signal right when you are going to take the next exit.
Tolls. The major roads, Routes National or N-number roads, will likely have tolls and some smaller roads may, too, as well as larger bridges. France has an automated toll system and your rental car my have a transponder; check with the agent when you pick up the car. Cars with transponders can use the lanes marked for "e" or "EZ", typically to the left side of the block of toll booths. If you want to pay in cash, the marked lanes are typically to the right. The lanes in the middle are for payment by credit cards, and these allow "contactless" (aka "tap") if your card is capable. Sometimes there are special lanes to the far right for trucks, so stay out of their way. My experience is that the contactless lanes happily accept Apple Pay and Google Wallet, either from a phone or from a smartwatch.
Toll tickets. As you enter a Route National, you will probably pick up a ticket at the booth. As you exit the Route National, you will insert the ticket, then present payment (e.g., contactless card). In another style, you will simply pay a fixed toll at a toll booth, but there will still be EZ, card, and cash lanes.
Speed limits. Speed limits on the N-number roads tend to be 130 km/h, but this varies and can be as low as 100-110 km/h, and the exit speeds are closer to 70 km/h. Speed limits on mid-sized roads are usually around 100 km/h and speed limits on the smaller roads are 80-90 km/h, varying. As the mid and smaller roads enter towns, the speed limits will drop quickly to about 70 km/h and then down to 50 km/h. These are typical speed limits and you should always check the posted speeds.
Speeding tickets. Many towns are equipped with traffic cameras that will record your license plate number and speed. If you are speeding, the Republique Francaise will send you an Avis de Contravention - a speeding ticket. The report (ticket) will tell you when and where the contravention happened and what the infraction was, such as "exces de vitesse" for speeding, a parking ticket, etc. This will cost you a fine, conveniently payable by credit card. The rental car company will also send you a letter explaining that they were contacted by the government to ask for information about the registered driver(s). The rental car will charge you for this contact using the payment information on record (fees vary, but expect euro 40-50). There are many variables to determine the cost of a speeding ticket, but expect euro 45-180, depending on how quickly you pay and how fast you were going.
So there you have some thoughts on driving in France.
The first jury duty call was in metro Chicago. Chicago had a one-day-one trial jury process. We reported for jury duty for one day, and if not empaneled onto a jury, we were done. If we were empaneled, we served for one case.
For this case, we waited in a pool for the morning and were released for lunch. When we came back from lunch at 1pm, we were told that the defendant had accepted a plea deal and we were dismissed. Evidently this is common.
The second jury duty call in Chicago was for a drug case. I was put on a jury for a drug case. A defendant had been found in a basement apartment, fleeing from police officers. An officer came into the room to see the defendant sitting on the bed in skimpy clothing (I no longer recall the details, but "underwear and a man's shirt" would not be too far off). Searching the room, the officer found a syringe in the wastebasket. The officer arrested the woman on drug possession charges. A lab report (submitted in evidence) later confirmed the presence of an illicit drug on the syringe. The officer told the jury that the defendant must have been holding the syringe when the cops burst in, she dashed to her bedroom and tossed the syringe into the wastebasket.
Complication #1: The officer did not see the syringe or any drugs in the hands of the defendant, and she testified that the drugs belonged to her boyfriend (not present at the time of the arrest).
Complication #2: her fingerprints were not on the syringe.
If convicted, this would be the third drug conviction for the defendant and she would be sent to prison for a long, long time (10 years or longer).
The officer told the jury that a group of officers were responding to a report of domestic violence when they came across the defendant. When she ran, they chased her into the basement apartment.
Complication #3: The defendant did not live at the address associated with the domestic violence. The police were at the wrong address.
Given a choice of conviction or release, the jury did not find enough evidence of a crime by the defendant.
The next jury duty call was in Massachusetts. The MA rules were for two-days-one-trial and my first day in the pool was uneventful. I was selected on the second day for a workman's compensation case. A man working as a plasterer was standing on a moveable scaffold when it collapsed, injuring the man. He had been studying to become a mycologist, and the injury meant that he was incapable of performing the physical duties of raising mushrooms (hefting heavy bags of compost, etc.). The man was suing the scaffold company for lost wages and lost opportunities. Each side brought in witnesses and experts to present their story. The dueling experts were professors, one explaining that the caster would fail in a way to cause the injury, and the other explaining that the caster failing could not happen without damage to the caster (therefore the scaffolding company would not be liable and someone else would be). Everyone agreed that the accident happened and that a failed caster contributed; the question was the cause and timing of the failure of the caster and the answer would point to a different party. Some miscellaneous facts that I recall: the scaffold was discarded after it failed and the claimant had to return to the worksite to pull it from the on-site garbage pile; there was no chain of custody of the scaffold; and the casters were to be inspected each day before use by the workmen before they used the scaffold.
It was a hung jury split down the middle, six and six. We were told after the trial that the injured workman had already been covered for medical expenses under Workman's Compensation (fund, laws). We were not told this and only presented with a question of liability and the damages (if any) were to be based on liability and lost income. This was also the second trial; the first trial had also resulted in a hung jury. I do not know if the workman went for a third trial.
I was called for jury duty since then, but my wife received the call and explained that I had just served for a week of jury duty withn the year, and the clerk marked by records so that I would be exempted for two years. That was twenty years ago and I have not been called since.
As citizens, we have few formal duties. Follow the laws, vote, and serve on juries. Service on a jury gives deep and personal insight into how the laws are applied and how citizens are deprived of their liberty. We should each welcome jury duty.
The sorrow is that said citizen was able to manipulate the system to avoid responsibility and evade accountability while rising to the highest office in the land.
Yet, somehow, his machinations are not yet over. It is not a simple matter of remanding him to authorities to be held until sentencing; in fact, he roams free. The battle continues.
CNN reports Trump Guilty on All 34 Felony Counts
It started this morning when a well-known SM personality opined that YouTube had done her a disservice. To quote her question, "did the algorithm just fuck me over?" Seeing someone somewhere on the Internet making a mistake, I was compelled to query in response,
“Never assign to malice what mere incompetence can explain” - does that apply here?
The SM personality replied,
I didn't suggest malice. I just said it's weird.
Confused by this, I replied,
I apologize if I am being argumentative, but your wording is stronger: “but did the algorithm just fuck me over?” I do not think I am being thin-skinned or puritanical.
But back to my point, I suggest it is an inept programmer acting under deadlines rather than a focused attempt to fuck over or protect any individual. I have no data to support this beyond anecdotal experience.
The SM personality replied,
when comments are off, the algorithm stops recommending your video and therefore views go down. calm down, you're being weird
I was puzzled by this because I was not being weird or un-calm, I was quoting the SM personality. My confusion was magnified when someone else replied to me,
it sounds like you are being both thin-skinned and puritanical tbf
that's a perfectly reasonable thing to say and not imply malice
So, the word "fuck" is now an ordinary verb and polite conversational manners are passe. Thus, I have become a boomer. I did think of several clever responses but I decided that they would fall on deaf ears and so I just walked away from the stupidity.
Working remotely has problems, big problems.
In a recent news article in The Stranger, a Seattle popular newspaper, a report was posted:
Texas Attorney General drops challenge of Seattle hospital: In December, a Seattle hospital filed a lawsuit against Texas AG Ken Paxton after he demanded the hospital turn over the medical records of Texas children who receive gender-affirming care from the hospital. Paxton dropped the request for medical records as part of a settlement agreement with the hospital, according to KOMO. However, the hospital also had to drop its registration to do business in Texas. That won't affect children receiving gender-affirming care, but it may be annoying to the hospital employees who live in Texas and work remotely for the hospital. [23 April 2024 as reported by Ashley Nerbovig]
To recap briefly, the Texas AG (Attorney General) had demanded medical records from a Seattle hospital based on Texas state laws and the hospital sued the Texas AG (I do not know why they did not simply ignore the demand, but that is not material.) They settled the suit and mutually agreed to drop everything.
As part of the agreement, the hospital cancelled its registration to do business in Texas. I do not know what else a Seattle hospital might do in Texas, but the Seattle hospital can no longer have employees based in Texas because the hospital no longer is registered in Texas. I deduce from the report that the hospital must have have employees in Texas or plans to have employees in Texas. A company (or hospital) that has employees in a state must usually pay taxes and provide benefits for the employees to that state, and that implies some sort of registration process so that the state knows who the employer is and what reports and payments are required. Texas has no state income tax but they do have unemployment tax and other state-specific fees and taxes, therefore the hospital must register as an employer if they have anyone working in Texas. (Attendance at conferences, business meetings, and training events and other business travel are usually exempted from the definition of "working".)
As a result of this decision to drop the case and drop registration, the Seattle hospital must move or terminate all employees in Texas because they no longer have a business registration there.
This is a consequence of working remotely that most employees do not see and most analysts do not include. If a complay has even one employee in a state, they must be prepared to withhold taxes, pay taxes, and pay for benefits in that state. If a company has health insurance for employees but the insurance company is not registered to work in a particular state, the company cannot offer benefits in that state without a special contract with another insurance company(s). This is a burden that most companies would take only reluctanctly (read that: only for VPs or perhaps Directors, but not for regular employees below an executive level). The situation is made yet more complex and expensive is "remote" includes other countries.
At the end of the day, this requirement for registration in every state is one of the key reasons that working remotely is a bad idea.
I start with a paper shredder. I used to use a strip shredder that produce long strips from the sheets fed into the top. This was OK, but newer shredders are "crosscut", and they produce "chips" of paper that are far harder to reassemble. Go for a crosscut shredder; strip shredders are obsolete.
Many years ago, it was sufficient to simply dispose of the shredded strips in the garbage, but this is easily improved (in a defensive cannot-reassemble sense). I started mixing the shredded paper in with the used cat litter. I would dump the cat litter into paper grocery bags and put the shredded paper on the bottom. This may not stop someone from reassembling your shreds, but it will certainly make it unpleasant for them. If you lack cat litter, coffee grounds will work well as a mixer.
This worked well for a long time, but I have two further improvements to offer.
As a base protocol, I shred anything that has personal information on it, especially anything that has an account number or other ID on it. However, this helps a reassembler because they have some guarantee that they are spending their time and effort to assemble something of value. They can even focus on areas and shredded bits that have, say, numbers in the hope that the number will prove to be the account number. Do not give them any hints. A simple and effective improvement is to shred a lot of stuff that is generic or not sensitive. First, shred the envelopes that the documents come in. Second, shred all the supplementary informaton in the envelope - privacy notices, advertisements, and the like - after you take it out of the envelope. The shredders tend to clump pages as part of the shredding process, so take things out of the envelopes to disassociate them. Expanding this, shred nonsensitive information: junk mail. This increases the bulk, making it harder to find the good stuff. Further, it confuses the reassembler because they have far more material to select from.
The last improvement is probably the most effective. Compost the shreddings. I mix my shreds with coffee grounds. Use your home grounds and augment the bulk with used coffee grounds in bulk from your local coffee shop. They will be happy to provide you with the day's bag of used grounds. The used grounds may contain a few paper filters, but they will break down, too. Mixing shredded paper and coffee grounds in roughly equal parts is a good mix for your compost pile. I think the coffee grounds qualify as "green" and the paper as "brown". If you have read much about compost piles, you will recognize that green-brown blending accelerates the compost action. Be sure to moisten everything to get the pile cooking. In the short term, the wetted coffee will stain all the paper brown, making it much less legible. In the long term, you will have dirt for your garden, dirt that cannot be reassembled into anything. You can add any vegetable or yard trimmings that you wish to your compost. There are particular warnings against using certain weeds in home composting, and I would strongly recommend against using animal waste of any kind in a garden compost pile - no dairy, no meats, no bones, no grease, and no animal waste.
In summary, the shredded paper and coffee grounds will create a soil amendment that is totally secure and cannot be reassembled or read. Even the composting process obliterates much of the information on the shreds, so this is pretty good security for a homeowner.
As usual with any security process or advice, adapt this to your particular circumstances. If you oversee a lot of wealth, this advice may not be sufficient for you. If you oversee nominal or minimal wealth, this is a low-cost, low-effort way to protect your personal information.
Does this make me antisocial?
Astronomy is the Sport of Optimists in the PNW.
A solar eclipse will scan across the United States on Monday, 8 April 2024. In a long stripe running from Texas to Maine, the ground track of totality will be a midda thrill for millions of viewers. Some of them have questions and the Internet, in its infinite wisdom has answers, many of which are wrong. The following are real questions with real answers.
Will it be safe to look directly at the sun? No.
It is never safe to look directly at the sun. Use certified eclipse glasses, not just cheap drugstore/internet glasses and not welder's glass, but filter-glasses that have been certified by a real agency.
Will my cell phone service be reduced or curtailed? No.
The solar eclipse involves the sun, the moon, and visible light. There is nothing that relates the sun, the moon, or visible light to cell phones. None. Carry on.
Will there be a Zombie Apocalypse triggered by the eclipse? No.
The last solar eclipse did not trigger one and this one will not, either. No eclipse has ever triggered Zombies. Ever.
Will there be the Rapture? No.
No eclipse has ever triggered the Rapture and this one will not.
Will there be earthquakes, rain of blood, locusts, or other natural disasters? No.
There is always a chance of earthquakes, volcanos, and other natural disasters, but if they happen, it will have nothing to do with the solar eclipse.
Will animals behave strangely during the totality? Yes.
Birds will go silent and other animals may show signs of sleepiness. This is well-documented from previous solar eclipses. Nature and life will return to normal as the local eclipse ends.
If you are in the path of totality - congratulations! Enjoy the show. Protect your eyes. If you are outside the path of totality, maybe next time. Maybe I will see you in 2044 or 2045!
According to a report today,
Amazon ditches "Just Walk Out" tech: The futuristic cornerstone of Amazon's grocery store experience was a lie. Amazon advertised this experience where a completely automated process tracked your moves in the store, watching what you grabbed and tallying your bill as you "just walked out," nullifying the need for any pesky cashiers. However, it turns out the process wasn't automated at all. Instead, over 1,000 people in India were watching the cameras and assembling bills for whatever you put in your basket.
https://gizmodo.com/amazon-reportedly-ditches-just-walk-out-grocery-stores-1851381116
I have experienced ratcheting, a subtle management technique that is easy to apply and hard to detect. I do not recommend it - in fact, I abhor it - but there are some defenses.
"Hey, about that report on router efficiency - can you include some analysis of the file servers, too?"
"I was thinking about that analysis of router efficiency. Can you also apply some regression analysis and give us some idea of the problems caused by each primary traffic type?"
Alternatively, the manager can pull in the expected delivery date.
"The meeting to present the report on router usage got pulled up to Thursday, so be sure you are ready for that."
"I have a preparatory meeting with the VP, so I need your preliminary numbers by noon, tomorrow. Keep working on the final numbers, but be sure there are no surprises in the interim."
The obvious defense is to agree and then ask what other work can be dropped or delayed to compensate. The ratcheting response is to minimize the work or the disruption.
"It is just an Excel sheet, so you should be able to pull in that deadline."
"The changes are pretty simple and the text editor / word processor program should handle most of the work."
The offered techniques for work simplification usually do not affect the workload. The "automated work" is often just a fraction of the total workload. In my work, the bulk of my energy was usually spent in collecting and cleaning the input data while the analysis was pretty mechanical; filling in the gaps required thought and not just typing.
Finally, the ratcheting causes some sort of breakdown. The employee explodes or rejects the new work and the manager backs down. A little. This is when the ratcheting technique makes clear its value. Now that the employee is used to the higher level of work, the manager pauses a little bit, and then resumes the ratcheting when the employee has calmed down. The employee gets a day or two of relief and then the ratcheting starts all over again.
Complementing the ratcheting technique is the continuous offer of benefits or a threat of consequences. The manager promises the extra effort will "help your career" in some non-specific way that never quite materializes, or lack of the extra effort will put the employee behind the curve of the rest of the team and their bonus or promotion prospects will suffer. This latter has then benefit that the employee feels they are disappointing the rest of the team and so the extra work is required as a matter of group loyalty. None of this is true and none of it ever happens, but the employee is now acclimated to the new work level.
If you feel stressed at work, take a moment to look for evidence of ratcheting.
It appears to be common wisdom in the technology business that the way to get promoted is:
As one of my managers used to say:
If you want to get a promotion, you don’t need to complete 1,000 tasks; you need to figure out how to eliminate the need for the 1,000 tasks.
This particular example of the common wisdom comes from the SeattleDataGuy via his newsletter on Substack.
This is balderdash. Naive, well intended, perhaps even a closely held belief, but balderdash. Let us take a look at this in more detail.
If you hold a task-driven job, it may be the right path to eliminate those 1000 tasks on your way to promotion, but a task-driven job is pretty low on the totem pole, so this might get you promoted among the minnows and guppies but it will not help your career much. Note that I am not saying that it is a bad idea to eliminate tasks, but it is far from sufficient for promotion and it is not necessary.
To get promoted, think about the responsibilities that your boss has and help solve them. Making the group more productive is clearly a responsibility of your boss while your own productivity is your own responsibility -- therefore, creating and sharing improvements is the proper path forward. Creating improvements is necessary but not sufficient. You must also make sure that your boss (and collegues) know the source of the improvements is you. This does not have to be a billboard or major production on a stage, but you do need to be sure that your contributions and solutions are tied to the improvements. Think of it as "reporting the news".
Reporting The News is a key concept. Many people are concerned that they will be seen as braggards or that they will be confused with the people that steal the work of others. Nope. I am not suggesting braggadocio, but rather a simple news reporting function. Put it in your status report (you do not write a status report? start now!). Announce the improvement at your next group meeting ("I have found a simpler/faster way to perform this task") and share it with your team. Put it in the source tree for your project(s).
To summarize, automate, eliminate, or streamline tasks that are measured by your organization, and report the news of your improvements to your boss and colleagues. Do not just do 1000 things, even if they are important to you; study the larger picture.
In a move that surprised no one, Starbucks is shutting down its NFTs.
At one point, NFTs, blockchain, and blockchain-contracts were the triplet powerhouses that were going to drive Web3 into the future. NFTs are failing left and right, blockchains and crypto-vendors are rug-pulling weekly, and e-contracts are often used to steal from crypto-vendors, so the future of Web3 is looking a little disorganized. #NoSurprise
Reference - Engadget article, 16 March 2024 , subtitled The program ends on March 31 and its NFT marketplace will be shifted over to Nifty.
Yesterday was the Washington Presidential Primary for Republicans and Democrats. Washington does not require a voter to be registered in a particular party, but the voter does need to declare a preference or an affiliation for the election. Once declared, a particular voter cannot vote for candidates from the other parties. I did not see an Independent or an Other option, however there were protest votes. On the Democratic side, there was a campaign underway for people to vote Uncommitted, and on the Republican side, there is a continuing effort for Nikki Haley even though she has formally withdrawn from the primary contest. The results were that 85.6% of Democratic primary votes went to Biden while 7.5% of ballots went to uncommitted delegates, leaving 6.9% in some other category. On the Republican side, Trump picked up 74% of votes, Nikki Haley, who dropped out of the race but was still on the ballot, is pulling 22%, and the remainder were scattered for Ron DeSantis (also dropped) and some miscellaneous categories. Some of Haley's 22% represents cross-over Democrats doing protest votes, but we cannot determine how many.
The uncommitted-as-protest group will claim victory based on the 7.5%, however the significance of the Uncommitted vote is unclear. The 7.5% participation is a small number of the whole and no one knows what it would have been without the protest vote. Therefore the other side (who?) can also declare victory. In the end, the uncommitted-as-protest campaign was much sound and fury signifying nothing.
As in the last decade, the vote was primarily by mail with scattered drop boxes usually located near libraries, post offices, and the like. I have not heard any reports of irregularities.
As of "Super Tuesday", Trump and Biden have clinched the required number of delegates to secure their nominations. For all intents and purposes, the Presidential campaign season has begun.
Today is the Washington primary election day and The Stranger, a local progressive newspaper, is recommending that Democrats vote for Uncommitted. I have thoughts.
Vote for Uncommitted in the Dem primary? That has got to be the most mealy-mouthed idea I have heard since Nader was running. "Uncommitted sends a message" because of Gaza? Because of student loans? Because of inflation? Because your milk turned sour before the sell-by date? A clear message! NOT!
You could instead write a letter to the White House and your congresscritters that explicitly and clearly expresses your views. And how could The Stranger imply that TFG is even remotely acceptable?
You don't tug on Superman's cape,
You don't spit into the wind,
You don't vote Uncommitted on the Dem ballot,
And you don't give TFG a win.
The Ides of March may be being overtaken by 11 March. On this day in 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic, and on this day in 2011, the Tohoku earthquake broke the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
We start today with a tragedy. According to a news report in The New York Post, "Angela Chao, the billionaire former CEO of dry bulk shipping giant Foremost Group, tragically died at the age of 50 on Feb. 10 after accidentally backing her car into the pond while making a three-point turn." If that name does not ring a bell, note that Angela Chao’s sister, Elaine Chao, is married to Senator Mitch McConnell and served as Secretary of Labor under President George W. Bush and Secretary of Transportation in President Donald Trump’s administration. Mitch recently retired as Minority Leader (R) in the US Senate.
Angela Chao was hosting some friends on a ranch in Texas and wanted to return to the main ranchhouse at the end of the evening. As it was cool, she decided to drive her Tesla rather than walk the four minutes from the guest houses to the main house. At some point along the way, she backed her car into a pond where the car sank.
The tragedy is multiplied by the design of the Tesla. Rather than mechanical door handles, the main doors are opened electronically with a button. Obviously, this is not a great design for an electric car sinking in a pond (loss of power). There is an emergency mechanical door latch, but from the descriptions, it seems that it is hard to find, especially when sinking into a pond. Chao was trapped inside the sinking car, unable to get out. She had enough air in the car to be able to use her cell phone to call friends, but no one was able to help in time.
Many of the prior deaths in Tesla accidents have involved fire, but this is the first to involve water.
Condolences to the Chao family.
Some would claim that the Internet, the World Wide Web (WWW), or computing have changed history, and these have left their marks on life, but nothing has become as pervasive and as impactful as the smart phone. The Internet, the WWW, and computing have contributed to the march of the smart phone, but so have many other technologies such as NFT, Bluetooth, and Wifi, but the smart phone is the agent of change.
In my smart phone, I can carry my wallet (except for cash, and even Venmo would object to that exception), my keys, my identification, my theater tickets, my shopping list, my maps, and the only things I need carry now are a pocket knife and a handkerchief. Most people do not even carry handkerchiefs anymore. And all this fits in one pocket.
We do not always recognize the revolution when it starts; in fact, we rarely do. Transistors were big, chunky things with poor gain (a measure of transistor quality). Horseless carriages were hard to start and broke down easily - and they needed roads to get somewhere. Steam trains were noisy and smelly, too. Medicine was glorified speculation until germ theory.
The transistor continues to change our modern world, but the smart phone has surpassed it.
Simply, babies born today (as I write, it is 29 February 2024) are being born on the 60th day of the year 2024. Your annual birthday is based on rotation about the sun and therefore it falls on the same day each year, at roughly the same angular rotation point around the sun. This year, that falls on 29 February and next year the 60th day will fall on 1 March 2025. No big deal. It is the calendar that is faulty and that causes the 60th day to fall variously on 1 March and 28 February. I see no problem. The 60th day is the 60th day - and happy birthday to those who celebrate. In 2025, the babies born on the 60th day will use 1 March to describe their day, but it is still the 60th day whether in 2025, 2026, or 2027.
A problem does arise at the end of the year. In 2024, the last day of the year is the 366th day, 31 December 2024. In 2025, 2026, and 2027, there are only 365 days in the year, therefore there is NO 366th day. This leaves those New Years Eve babies as the ones with an issue.
When last I wrote about WFH, I was upset at the radio, but I have now returned to being continuously upset about what someone said on the Internet. I am a creature of habit. As to subject matter, I was complaining about Work From Home, WFH, also known as Working Remotely. I had spoken about "hard metrics" and was about to discuss "soft metrics". Allow me to reestablish the rant, uh, conversation.
In the classic goal-setting process of management-by-objectives (MBO), the emphasis is on specific and measurable goals (part of the larger "S.M.A.R.T." framework for goal setting). A classic goal is "deliver a report to the customer by the end of the quarter". This is much more useful than "be a good employee" or "do good work" and it has the welcome attribute that there is little argument because the report gets delivered on-time or it does not. What can one argue with?
Well, one can argue with this because of the soft metrics. I can deliver a "report", even a long report, that is on-time but full of garbage. The word "report", even qualified with some number of pages, is a soft metric, and so we see that metrics can be misleading and metrics can be gamed.
WFH or remote work has virtually the same problems as SMART. It is overly fixed on things that can be measured and these things are often a narrow part of the job. If the job is full of rote processes, then WFH can be perfect. A customer service agent (first-line) can answer calls and reset passwords or refund orders with little supervision needed. The rare problems can be handled with voice recordings of the customer transactions and depend on the customers to escalate situations to higher levels of support. But not all jobs are rote and simple metrics are usualy inadequate. Engineering, software, business and accounting positions require at least spreadsheet or database work, and art positions require lots of computer interactivity, thus many positions now include some sort of computer programming. All of these (engineering, software, business, accounting, art) require some degree of originality and inventiveness, perhaps within bounds but still require novelty. The behavior we want to encourage is more than just words and formulas on a page, requiring human judgement beyond simplistic metrics.
But that human judgement often requires exposure and observation. Management can often tell a difference in actions when practiced at the office that is not visible when working from home. I management cannot see the individuals as they practice their expertise, it rapidly becomes hard to evaluate the level of expertise.
And that is why WFH only works for rather rote role and starts to fail as one moves through a career.
Note: I got stalled and distracted by this note. It took multiple tries to edit it down to something readable and focused. Therefore, there are multiple dates on the title line.
A warning about computer security for medical computing systems was recently raised by a neighbor named Steve Moeller. He wrote:
Here is an article from the Seattle Times talking about the threat from cybercriminals to the national and local healthcare system: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/why-health-care-has-become-a-top-target-for-cybercriminals/#Echobox=1708874045
From the article:
When a cyberattack hit Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center late last year and exposed the personal data of nearly a million patients, many were caught off guard, stunned a breach could infiltrate such a large and highly resourced health care organization.
This is a problem and it is more widespread than most people realize.
The Internet was designed with open access in mind, so it is proving hard to make it secure. This means that *anything* attached to the Internet has some degree of exposure that depends on how much thought and effort the "owner" has put into security. The answer to "how much effort" is often little to none. This means that everything from your medical records to your banking records are at risk. Further, your power grid, your road systems, and even your personal cars are all at risk. The old phone system is relatively secure (ok, I remember 2600 and phone phreaks) but the new wireless systems are far more exposed. Social media like Facebook, Instagram, Xitter, and Snapchat are all exposed, and even giants in the field like Google and Microsoft are exposed.
My point? You should be checking with each and every supplier you use to ask them what their security policies are. In the main, you will find that the corporate security policies protect the corporation but you? You are left dangling. We need legislation that places the burden back on the corporations.
Twenty-three years ago was the Good Friday Nisqually Earthquake. At 10:54am, I was sitting with my boss, Gene Pope, in his Amazon.com office near S. Weller and 5th Ave S in Seattle, near the International District. At first, it sounded like a freight train rumbling from the distance and then, the shaking started. The lights were suspended on cables from the ceiling and I remember watching them swing back and forth, swinging wider as the shaking continued. Someone was standing nearby in an area of cubbys and I yelled something like "get under the furniture". I do not recall if he moved or not. After an eternity or two, the shaking stopped and we started to assess what we had. The Seattle bus tunnel was closed for a couple of hours while the engineers checked it for damage. After it opened, I took a bus home and continued work from there.
There used to be an "earthquake rose" but the original seems to have been pulled from the internet. You can read about it here --
https://inhabitat.com/a-beautiful-and-mysterious-rose-created-by-an-earthquake-and-a-pendulum/
The implications of choosing to work remotely, we're told, are: "1) no funding for team onsite meetings, even if a large portion of the team is flying in for the meeting from other Dell locations; 2) no career advancement; 3) no career movements; and 4) remote status will be considered when planning or organization changes -- AKA workforce reductions."
The last three points are the most significant. The first point is optional - some companies will fund team meetings and some will not. I think Dell is wrong on this point, but it is their company so they make their rules.
The most important point is - no career advancement. Let us say you are the manager and you are faced with a key decision, assigning important tasks, choosing a promotion candidate, or simply assigning bonus budget. You have two employees, one who is often in the office where you see their work, see their interactions with other team members, and see their presentations, and a remote employee that you see intermittently, see no interactions, and see only video presentations. Which one are you going to select for rewards and the best assignments? Pretty obviously the on-site person. If you think that is wrong, ask your mother if it is OK to just call from now on, and you will stop your in-person visits. Ask yourself if you would rather put your kids to bed and read them a story rather than read a bedtime story over the phone. No mother or kids? What would your dog think? Expanding on this, no career movements is a reasonable extension. As a manager, you can choose a local candidate that you see routinely or you can choose someone who is always at the far end of a phone line. Not hard to choose. Finally, the old rule is "out of sight, out of mind" and that will trump over "absence makes the heart grow fonder" - when it comes time to downsize, it is far easier to lay-off someone on a phone line compared to someone you see routinely in the office. It just is.
Note that "routinely in the office" includes hybrid and full-time office sightings. Seeing someone Monday-Wednesday-Friday is closer to Monday-Friday than never or rarely. I am not arguing against work-from-home, simply stating boundaries.
Furthermore:
Another employee said: "Choosing to be remote does indeed put career advancement at a standstill."
As one advances up the ranks, there are more and more leadership and team skills required to work on larger projects. If your job is one person (you) in one place (your home or office), then advancement within these constraints is possible. But if your job requires interactions and teams, that is best done in-person. To advance, you need to demonsrate those leadership and team skills, and you cannot do that sitting alone in your home-office with the dog.
So if you want to be a Lyft driver or work on small projects for the rest of your life, work from home. But if you want to advance in the corporate environment, get to the office.
After weeks of rain, a day of snow, and overnight frosts, I grabbed a partly sunny day to unwind my limbs and refresh the e-bike. I just puddled around the neighborhood for 6.2 miles, up and down and around. It was a bit on the cold side, 47F, but I was able to wrap up. The main "save" was the pair of gloves that I wore. My fingers get cold after the frostbite session on that China trip.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/sgey47DQpqEUi76HA
The obvious problem is the size of the 200-foot tower. It takes time and equipment to down it and haul it away. You need a couple of hours to rig it, to lower it to the ground, to dismantle it, and then to haul it away. The word "stolen" implies surprise or stealth. The radio station had hours to respond to any surprise attempt to take the tower. The police had hours to respond when called. This tower was not stolen.
The other problem is the electrical power being pumped into the antenna. There are thousands of watts of power being pumped into the antenna in order to broadcast, perhaps as high as 50,000 watts, but likely less in this case. When you walk up to the tower and touch it, you become the path to ground. Big shock - literally. Someone had to have the smarts to cut off the transmitter before anyone touched the tower. Yes, the report talks about evidence of a break-in, suggesting that the thief did have the requisite smarts. But radio stations monitor their signal - they listen to themselves to make sure they are still transmitting. Again, no surprise is possible when the transmitter gets cut and the antenna gets "stolen".
Reporters really need to pause and think before they report this stuff.
Source: Alabama station in disbelief after 200-foot radio tower stolen at NBC News.
In a recent report from Consumer Reports, "Using a panel of 709 volunteers who shared archives of their Facebook data, Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to the social network. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies." And as noted by Bruce Schneier, "This isn’t data about your use of Facebook. This data about your interactions with other companies, all of which is correlated and analyzed by Facebook."
This is not Facebook/META alone - this is all the big Internet companies, including a bunch you do not know about like Palantir Technologies. You are not a hapless victim. Contact your representatives and senators to demand protection. Consumer Reports probably has some good suggestios of where to start.
When COVID began, there was a medical reason for everyone to avoid crowds and that included avoiding the shared office. When I decided to close our local ABC Corporate office (a branch office of about 100 people and anonymized), I expected that it would be for 2-3 weeks until the pandemic abated. I think it was pretty commonly understood that closing offices and sending people home was temporary and we would return to normalcy in a month or so. As time went on and people continued to die from COVID, it became clear that our initial estimates were naively optimistic and that WFH (work from home) was a long-term state, verging on a year.
While a high proportion of ABC Corporate workers could be sent home to work, there were key jobs that needed to continue on-site and in the office. In our branch location, there were about 10 employees that needed to be in the office daily and 2-3 more that would come in occasionally. The 10 folks needed access to labs and equipment that could only be on-site and could not be taken home. The 2-3 folks varied each day from the 90 who were WFH - they were not usually the same individuals, but there were consistently 2-3 of them in the office.
In our group (about a third of the 100 people in the branch), we had long-standing key metrics (KPI - Key Performance Indicator - is a common industry buzzword, but we did not use the phrase KPI). The primary metric among these was the continued delivery of high-quality results as promised in the schedules and contracts. As a general rule, the team was able to maintain successful delivery of all the group metrics. From this, one might conclude that WFH was acceptable as a stable, long term strategy for the team. After all, the overall team was spread across four primary sites already, so dispersing to homes was of marginal impact, right? Wrong, but I have gone on too long in this posting and will reserve further thoughts for a second posting.
Although the key metrics, including consistent, timely, high-quality deliverables continued to be met, these are all "hard" metrics. These are hard metrics because they are countable. The deliverable was provided or it was not; the deliverable was on time or it was not; and the customer accepted the deliverable or they rejected it. However, there were other, less countable metrics that were not always met, and many of these "soft" metrics are also on a scale, but hard to quantify. Without covering all of the next post, consider "innovation". There is no good measure of innovation. There are simple measures (e.g., the number of patents authored) of these soft metrics, but simple measures can easily miscount or mislead (e.g., an idea can be patentable but it may be kept as a trade secret instead). A more critical measure is readiness for promotion or other recognition, which is very hard to measure.
Until next time when I discuss soft metrics.
Of course, some people could try to delay in the hopes that plate tectonics will come to the rescue as the New Pangea reassembles itself.
An underappreciated skill, learning how to talk to executives can boost your career. This sounds trite, but it is true. Many an engineer has capped out because they talked too much.
If engineers as a group have a fatal flaw, it is the failure to be succinct. Ideally, when they ask a question, a manager or executive wants to hear "yes" or "no", to hear a single number or date. Answering with a "yeah, but..." is not going to succeed. In many cases, you can respond that you will get back to them with an answer, but be succinct. And if you promise to get back with an answer, give them a date for the answer and meet that date.
In a bit of cognitive dissonance, managers are creatures of action and of delay. On the one hand, managers want to get things decided and done, minimize delays, minimize waste, eliminate idleness. On the other hand, managers will wait if promised more information, but it must be high-quality information that will inform a better decision. Balancing these two is hard, but it is what managers are paid to do. In the end, advance actions and options.
As an aside, some managers get confused. One type of manager will made decisions fast in the belief that any decision is better than no decision. Another type of manager will kick the decision down the road in the hope of avoiding blame. Both of these are wrong. Each decision will be different - some will invite immediacy and some will demand delay - but a manager that always leans one way or the other is wrong. Either that, or they have no authority (delay) or they have no understanding (immediate). End of digression.
Results are what a manager seeks. Negative results are often called consequences. Ultimately, the manager is not as interested in the work, but in the results or impact of the work. A particular proposal may require an engineer to work nights and weekends, but the manager is interested in avoiding impact on the customer, and impact that might cause the customer to change to a competitor.
Clarity in defining the problem is critical. If an engineer delivers a perfect technical solution to the wrong business problem, it is not a solution, it has no value.
As a particular point of communication, email has become a dominant way to communicate with managers, and the first line if that communication is the Subject line. Write your subject lines to be clear, concise, and meaningful. Bad examples include, "that answer you wanted", "FYI", or "suggestion". A journalist would say that you have buried the lede. You want the Subject line to be relevant to the manager and give them something of value, something to catch their attention. Subjects like "solution for Jones case", "Q4 capital request", or "retention problem" are going to catch their attention. Your email is not a mystery novel - state the key inforamtion up-front, name the murder in the first sentence. Sometimes you need to temper this for confidentiality, and so some vagueness is in order in the subject line. You want to say "retention problem" rather than "Jones about to quit" in case someone is reading over the manager's shoulder.
Be terse. This bears repeating because being succinct is critical. All your work to craft a brilliant three-page document will be wasted if no one reads past the first paragraph.
There are managers and executives that will try to isolate you from the "next level up" and even peers will try to squeeze you out in an effort to out-compete you. If you work to become a good communicator with executives, they will seek you out.
To the surprise of absolutely no living person, Ron Desantis and Vivek Ramaswamy have dropped out of the primary process to be the Republican nominee for President in 2024. We also got news that Chris Christie had dropped out recently. As to Desantis, NBC blamed "Muddled messages, hiring too many staffers and even a puzzle." There are probably similar defenses of Ramaswamy as a candidate. Both of these argument threads miss their respective points.
Ramaswamy was a tech-bro who drank his own coolaid. He got lucky in business, parlayed that into a little bit of political success, and started inhaling his own gaslighting. Like Desantis, he presented himself as a Trump without the baggage. What Ramaswamy calls baggage, we would call a history of recorded and reported statements, policies, and actions. But I digress... Ramaswamy was another sideshow and no one wanted his also-ran tickets, either. On leaving, he has endorsed Trump.
Chris Christie is more of a question mark. He clearly sees Trump for what he is and is willing to state it, but Christie is too little, too late. But even if he were the right amount and on-time, he is running on a negative-Trump platform rather than a content-filled platform of his own. No one knows what Christie stands for outside "not MAGA".
For all intents and purposes, this leaves Nikki Haley. She is but a pale imitation of Trump (pun intended), and the only real question is whether Haley will pull out before Trump falls over from bad health.
But we can be a bit relieved because we are now free of the Ron-Vivek virus.
P.S. Yes, Trump continues to bounce among his various legal cases. I think there are four, perhaps a fifth that I lost track of, and still 91 felony counts hanging over him. He has been recently making more and more verbal mistakes in the press. Confusing Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi is the most recent one, but they are coming in a steady flow. Trump is still the unchallenged favorite to get the Republican nomination.
Inflation has been a key concern of many in the USA for the last year, perhaps longer. FOX News [sic], in particular, has been banging on President Biden and his "failure" to control inflation, rating it one of the key problems that Biden "must solve". However, now a more complete truth is coming out, backed by actual data and studies rather than gaslighting (from FOX).
The report, compiled by the progressive Groundwork Collaborative think tank, found corporate profits accounted for about 53% of inflation during last year’s second and third quarters. Profits drove just 11% of price growth in the 40 years prior to the pandemic, according to the report.
Note that second sentence - profits are driving almost 5x the amount of price growth that has been historic.
As a shareholder, I am delighted, but as a consumer, hang 'em all! And the next time you consider the "benefits" of trickle-down economics, remember this, and ask yourself if the explanations of trickle-down economics are complete or if they are masking a deeper strategy better described as trickle-up.
