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.
Does this make me antisocial?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The success of new companies of the world is highly dependent on diligently and daily applying innovation to their products and processes. Bookstores were simple repositories of books until Amazon unleashed technology on the selling and shipping of books and more. Cars were glorified wristwatches until hybrids and then full electric vehicles (EVs) caused a reinvention of the automobile. Even companies like Intel were glass manufacturers until ARM, Apple, Nvidia, and AMD showed that fabless semiconductor companies could be a thing. You can debate specific examples, but the clear trend of business from 1924 to 2024 shows that those failing to apply technology have been left as footnotes; at best, they are quaint companies turning out homespun crafts.
In recognition of this innovation force, companies set up internal procedures to generate patents. IBM is probably the cannonical example. IBM has long had an internal process that collected IP ideas, evaluated them through a committee process, and awarded IP "points" to inventors on patent filings that could be turned into cash and prizes. (No kidding - my prize for one set of points was luggage.) Little mafias and cliques grew up within IBM to keep churning out patents. If your idea had the right co-inventors, you got points. Even ideas that did not deserve filing were "published" and the authors got IP points as a result. Perverted results aside, the system worked well, and IBM was the largest patent producer in the world for decades. The innovations of IBM were world-class as demonstrated in their products, and IBM ruled the computer world. Somewhere along the line of history, IBM reduced their emphasis on IP and technological excellence and pushed financial engineering. While other companies continued to grow, IBM sold off parts of the company and shrank. As I write this, the market capitalization of IBM is about $150 billion, while Apple and Microsoft are each (each!) $2.9 trillion.
In the last few days, IBM has announced that they are terminating the old program (that would issue cash and prizes) for a new program that issues BluePoints. It is unclear what one can do with BluePoints, but cash awards for accumulating points seems to be elimiated. Combined with other changes over the years, it is not clear that IBM has figured out how to exit their death spiral. Cold days ahead for innovation at IBM. Sad.
Among the patent ideas I wrote in about 2003 or so was the idea that a camera should combine GPS information with compass readings and focus data to determine what someone was photographing. If you are standing in a particular location (GPS data) and pointing your camera in a particular direction with a focus point about 200 yards away, then you are probably taking a photo of the Eiffel Tower. And so on. Clearly this did not work for photos of people or pets, but you would at least be able to say that the Eiffel Tower was in the background of your photo of little Fee-Fee. This was in the days before AI - long before something as small as a camera could carry the training set or network of a large language model (LLM-AI).
Sadly, the idea was denied by the local patent team. They felt it was too easy to fake using false GPS transmitters and the like (as if anyone wanted to disrupt your photos of Fee-Fee such that they would spend thousands of dollars and risk arrest to disrupt your GPS signals. But I digress.)
Recently, Swarovski has announced new binoculars that will identify birds. The Swarovski product is a variant of my idea - the one I could not patent. (Viz., to use geospatial and image data to deduce situational information when taking or viewing an image.) I wish them well.
Ultimately, nuclear power is a poisonous gift to our descendants, not a solution to anything.
And when the supporters are done arguing (fruitlessly) against these arguments, nuclear power is expensive. Solar and wind are already cheaper, so nuclear has lost the war.
We do have a continuing nuclear-waste problem with smoke detectors. They contain a small amount of Americium (I think it is) to generate ions that help detect the smoke. Instead of being properly disposed of, instead of being recycled, the bulk of these units are simply discarded in household waste. That means all of our garbage dumps are becoming nuclear waste dumps. Clever that.
Recently, some researchers in China announced the development of a 50-year battery...that is nuclear powered. Oh, joy. In the article, Chinese-developed nuclear battery has a 50-year lifespan , the researchers use an isotope of Nickel to generate power for small devices (e.g., phones). The article reports that "Betavolt says its nuclear battery will target aerospace, AI devices, medical, MEMS systems, intelligent sensors, small drones, and robots – and may eventually mean manufacturers can sell smartphones that never need charging." Even though the batteries may last 50 years, the small devices will only last a couple years (I found numerous Google articles that quoted 2-3 years based on actual studies). Let us assume the 50-yr batteries will double the lifetime of the average cell phone to six years. That still means that millions of little radioactive devices will be discarded every year; more likely tens of millions or more. All of those devices will be dumped into landfills and garbage heaps to add to the radioactivity of the smoke detectors.
That is a lovely gift for our descendants. Lovely.
I have kept up my vaccinations, adding RSV and seasonal flu vaccinations to the string of COVID vaccinations. I mask on airplanes and often in airport waiting areas. But I confess that I am pretty lassaiz faire the rests of the time. I have not been masking in retail establishments but the numbers are starting to concern me, and I may start masking in stores.
You will need to study and analyze to understand the corporate strategy. This is good advice in general, but I am encouraging you to leverage what you know and learn. For example, I worked at a chip company at a time in which "virtual reality" was the stated goal, the stated strategy of the corporation. Those familiar with the timeframe around 2019 will recognize instantly that "virtual reality" fizzled. A bunch of people working on virtual reality features and products were laid off. This does not contradict my advice because "virtual reality" was never really the corporate strategy. Press releases and CEO speeches would proclaim "virtual reality" as a major focus of investment. Press analysts sucked it up and proclaimed it to be "the year of virtual reality". Serious people would nod when others predicted that virtual reality would generate billions of dollars in sales in the coming years. But "virtual reality" was a tactic, and a half-hearted tactic at that. When "virtual reality" collapsed, bitcoin was the Next Big Thing. A similar story can be written about generic bitcoin and blockchain technology. The bubble may have been a bit bigger, but bitcoin mining crashed quickly. It is still struggling to survive as I write this, but the obituary is written and the casket has been built.
The technologies of "virtual reality" and "bitcoin" were never strategic to anyone (outside the huckster-con community). While people were distracted with them, server computers were growing as substantial strategic thrusts. Further, although the details are still playing out, artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI appear to be rising as valid strategic thrusts. The difference is that AI actually accomplishes tasks and makes work more efficient. There are plenty of problems yet to solve (hallucinations, for example), but solid progress has been demonstrated. Servers were clearly a strategy as smartphones exploded in popularity. Phone and internet companies (e.g., Verizon, Google) needed one server per 100 smartphones. As time went on and smartphones continued to grow in capability, that dropped (grew?) to one server per 10 smartphones. That kind of substance and growth is a sign of strategy at work. I choose high-tech examples because of my work experience; you need to choose examples that come from your profession.
Having identified key strategies, to reduce risks, you should seek out positions that support those strategies. Become a key contributor (creator or manager) of a component of those strategies. The strategy will become a revenue source and you will continue to be well positioned having attached yourself to revenue, but youcan start with attaching yourself to strategy.
Google and Amazon are in the headlines again, for layoffs, again. Initial reports about Google indicated a few hundred affected people, and newer reports are estimating more than one thousand. Amazon is at similar levels, perhaps a bit higher. Although Amazon is firing some of the creative folks in Amazon Studios, most of the people affected are "core engineering", mostly software developers. Being told that your job is no longer needed, that you are no longer employeed, is traumatic. Some people bounce back quickly, but most people are stunned by the news and take several days or a week to process and absorb the change. Anger is often a quick response, but anger, confusion, or sadness are all the same in that none of them change the fact that you have been laid off. Psychologists will talk about the five stages of grief, and entrepreneurs will tell you that it is a blessing in disguise. Set this aside. There are several ways to recover, but I would like to look at the root causes - to look at makes one a layoff candidate and what can one do to prevent it.
An engineer worked for me. Let us call them "Chris" (not their real name). The company we worked for had just be acquired and there were many rumors of layoffs coming. Chris came to me and asked, "What are the safe jobs? Can you transfer me to a safe job today?" I told Chris that there were no "safe jobs", but that individuals can be safe or at risk. I told Chris that there are three primary things you can do to make your job more secure. Not "safe", but more secure.
The primary rule is Attach Yourself to Revenue. As engineers, we all love to work on "cool" technology, on cutting-edge stuff. It is rewarding, challenging work, but it may not be important to the corporation. As engineers, we all love to deliver "cool" solutions, clever stuff that impresses other engineers. It is rewarding to solve a challenging problem and show an insightful answer, but it may not be important to the corporation. Furthermore, we can do cool, insightful stuff, but if we proceed in a manner that annoys our managers or causes them extra work, we will not be marked as important to the corporation. Thus, before all the advice to be highly productive, highly creative, highly communicative, you want your most visible contributions to be important to the corporation. Revenue is the more important thing in a typical company, so the conclusion is to contribute most visibly to results that generate revenue (and do not annoy managers). When it comes time to name names for cutting, your name will be less likely to come up because losing you would (potentially) reduce revenue. This works at salary-and-bonus time, too. You do not have to be the most clever person on the team, you do not have to be the most productive person on the team, but you do want to try to generate the most revenue.
In this sense, "revenue" can take on many forms. It may mean, simply, sales. You may create or develop a feature that makes money for the corporation. Or it may mean savings. You identify a way to reduce costs for the corporation, savings that can be retained, passed to customers, or passed to shareholders (dividends). This latter category can include reduced production costs or reduced support burdens.
Working hard, being clever and innovative need to be focused on the right things. If you improve a product that no one is buying anyway, it does not affect revenue. Conversely, you may be working on some dull maintenance task that leaves little room for creativity, but that IS important because it is for the primary corporate product, the product that generates a lot of revenue for the corporation.
This means that personal benefits coming from hard, clever, innovative work may not pay off. Stay alert when new opportunities come up. Evaluate them as if you were the CEO. If you are a risk-loving adreneline junky, you might want to chosse the cool new project. But if you are seeking to be "safe", you might want to select the job that has the greatest revenue opportunity and attach yourself to that project. It may feel less satisfying to work on such a job, but you can channel your creativity into other areas of your life.
23andMe is in the headlines because they suffered a security break-in that revealed private information for their users. 23andMe has taken to the headlines to claim that their users are the reason, the cause of the failure. In short, 23andMe claims that users reused their passwords from other sites, thus enabling hackers to break in.
I do not know why I have to say this, but if you (corporate or person) collect information from me for a specific purpose, then you have the responsibility to protect that information from other users and hackers, and you have the further responsibility to use that information only for the purposes under which it was collected.
I protect my personal information at home and I surrender that information only for purposes that I choose. I expect you to protect my personal information in exactly the same way. This is made explicit in HIPAA laws in the United Stated and in personal privacy regulations elsewhere (e.g., GPDR laws in the EU). Should you fail to protect my information, you are subject to liabilities and consequences.
Furthermore, I provide my information only for specific purposes (again, see HIPAA and GPDR for examples), and you need to limit yourself to those purposes.
Companies and individuals set up security protections for these very reasons. Everything from firewalls to encryption and more are technologies for security and protection of systems and information. For 23andMe to turn around and blame users for any data breaches is absurd. 23andMe bears full responsibility.
Why do we have to say these things? Are there no adults running 23andMe, no adults who can guide the rest of their company to do the right things?
Rant over. The photo is of a 10th-11th Century castle built for protection in Portugal.
Generative Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI) has hit the big time. As evidenced by ChatGPT by OpenAI or Bard by Google, the massive growth of available compute resources has allowed large language models (LLMs) to start working their way into daily use. Some people use LLMs to generate product descriptions or speeches, some publications use LLMs to generate articles, and others are using LLMs to create novel images and movies. The Internet is being slowly poisoned by the creeping influence of LLM-generate data.
This is silly and people should know better. To borrow a concept from (I think) the Gartner Group (GG) consultanting group, LLMs are approaching the Peak of Inflated Expectations in the GG Hype Cycle, and we will soon see the Trough of Disillusionment. For more details, the reference is in the Gartner Group Hype Cycle chart. How can I, a mere pleb, a common person, claim this to contradict the great Gartner Group geniuses and the wisdom of the great commentators of our time?
One word: Hallucinations. The LLMs we use today commonly inject massive errors into their results, errors that are commonly called hallunications in polite company, and 🐄💩 in more direct company. You can feed good stuff into an LLM and get garbage out (aside, the new meaning of GIGO for AI is Good Input Garbage Output). So hiring poor programmers or non-programmers to run your great LLM Programming Machines will tend to generate garbage that only experienced programmers will be able to detect and fix. Programmers are not going away, at least not because of LLMs.
