Thanks for your reply. I'm all in favor of redressing the consequences of racism--and have thought (and read) extensively about the consequences of how slavery was ended in the U.S., and how that has permitted racism to survive (if not flourish). I'm also quite familiar with civil rights litigation--albeit as it relates to handicapped people, rather than to the black community.
But to support civil rights does not necessarily require support for Jesse Jackson. And I think the cause of civil rights has been significantly marginalized by the practice of some in the "civil rights" community to take advantage of public sentiment to "persuade" corporations to sign "consulting" contracts--such as the "diversity campaign" by NASCAR that pays Operation PUSH $250,000 per year (mentioned in the link I included in the post). The National Hockey League, another group that suddenly became interested in diversity, is paying $50,000 per year to Operation PUSH. And--surprise of surprises--Operation PUSH is asking all kinds of questions about black ownership and black leadership in football and basketball--but saying nothing about black participation in stock car racing and hockey.
I don't think that is anybody's idea of furthering the cause of civil rights--although it's a terrific way to further the cause of the leaders of an organization.
My take on the article was that this ordinance in Manalapan was designed to scare minorities (and questionable white folk like me) from daring to enter the city confines. The way to deal with issues like that--particularly with people or communities that flaunt their wealth--is to make them pay the price. Big court judgements, and substantial national publicity. Post the names of every resident on the Internet, and JOIN that list with corporate officers and board members. When stockholder meetings include questions about FatCatCo's commitment to civil rights, given that two board members maintain residences in a "known enclave for racists" the community will start to feel the heat.
(Ultimately, I think the slavery/racism issue will end by the emergence of a broad popular consensus--and that consensus is forged through public debate in places like boardrooms, city council meetings, churches, etc. We can't sue our way to justice--but we can develop a national consensus on the subject, and shaming the scoundrels is a big part of that. But that's a longer rant for another time.)
Find a lawyer willing to take on a civil rights case with a potentially huge payout.
Line up all your friends "of color," and have then drive through Manalapan.
Wait for one of them to have his or her plates run for wants and warrants.
Have the attorney bring suit, alleging discriminatory application of this law against people of color.
During the discovery phase of the suit, determine that Manalapan's cops are overwhelmingly using this to run the plates of blacks and Hispanics. Present this evidence to the judge.
The resulting whopping civil rights award will mean...
Profit!
Hackneyed e-business jokes aside... ...this looks a lot like a variation on the old game of dreaming up ordinances to give the cops the ability to run the "riffraff" out of town. It has appeared in various disguises over the years--with a variety of names, a variety of methods, but one single purpose: to give a cop plausible reason to stop a black or Hispanic driving through town, and tell him or her to leave.
Which is, of course, illegal. In a town with an obscene amount of money (note the statistic that there are 11 police officers in Manalapan, for only 321 residents--and they only have two or three burglaries a year) fighting a traffic stop through appellate procedures would be futile. But once they establish a pattern of stopping and harassing minorities, Manalapan will be a sitting duck for a lawsuit by any number of "public interest" groups like Jesse Jackson's Operation PUSH.
Perhaps you would like to go back to the early 20th century when children were worked 14+ hour days, and people were treated like machines (oh, wait, that second one hasn't changed much). If it weren't for Unions, chances are that you would be working a miserable, low wage job, and the country would be entirely in the pockets of the rich by now. You have quite a bit to be grateful for, it's too bad that you don't realize it.
Child labor
Simply put, organized labor had little to do with the end of child labor. See, for instance, Houghton-Mifflin's Reader's Companion to American History. While organized labor was certainly involved in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (which implemented a sweeping federal solution) child labor advocates had been working on the issue (including passage of two laws by Congress that were overturned by the Supreme Court) since the 1880s. Their appeal to Eleanor Roosevelt, and her subsequent influence, were crucial to including child labor in the FLSA. To the extent that this was a union issue, it was because the unions recognized that a) children worked cheaper, and b) couldn't legally sign a yellow card (a parent or guardian would have to). Organized labor, even today, is generally hostile to child workers--routinely arguing for an increase in the minimum wage, not because it would have any impact on a union member, but because it drives up the price of cheap teenaged labor, making it less competitive.
And let's not get all ga-ga about the unions
While unions have certainly been instrumental in fighting corporate villains, unions have certainly been guilty of their own evils as well. Two words: "Longshoremen" and "Teamsters." Organized crime figured out a long time ago that managing the assets of a union was a substantially better way to steal money than holding up banks--the Teamsters' Central States Pension Fund was plundered by the Mob and its union leadership cronies, with absolutely zero concern for the workers they claimed to represent.
And it isn't just crime
Sometimes the union behaves just like the Big Business they claim to oppose. Case in point: in the early 1980s Mack Truck was faced with an aging assembly plant in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and wanted to build a new assembly plant in Lehigh County. They bargained with the affected union locals, and came to an agreement that gave the (struggling) company givebacks on wage rates, but gave the employees job security. However--the UAW rules required that any local bargain could not be voted on by the local membership--it could only be approved by the national union. And the UAW management decided that if they approved the Mack deal, they would find themselves in a bad position in upcoming negotiations with Caterpillar. The result: the Mack bargain was rejected--and the union repeatedly refused to let the union members (who strongly backed the deal) vote on it. Mack subsequently built the plant in Winnsboro, SC, outside the jurisdiction of the union locals. They offered jobs in Winnsboro to any Plant 5C employee who wanted to take the position--but at non-union rates, with no job guarantees. Some workers made the move (and subsequently organized the plant in Winnsboro, but at substantially lower rates). Most just lost their jobs. And the upcoming negotiations with Caterpillar? That became one of the longest, nastiest strikes in late 20th century American labor history--and the union lost.
Bottom line: UAW executives (who, incidentally, continued to earn six-figure salaries) forced thousands and thousands of union families out of work, into the cold, in the worst job market since the Depression.
Unions have, in some places, in some circumstances, been a very positive influence. But they had scant influence on child labor, and there have been many circumstances where they have done real damage to the very people they claim to represent.
While this is a sad story--especially about the poor guys with Indian "consultants" following them around asking a zillion questions about how to do their jobs--it's worthwhile to remember where the article appears: CIO magazine. CIO is focused on the needs/wants/interests of the guys in ties in a corporate IT environment--and in general a lot of CIOs think that outsourcing/offshoring is a hell of a good idea. The general tone of this article is "look at how these yobbos bungled the implementation of Siebel CRM." What they didn't mention at all is, "look at how these geniuses totally misunderstood their business, and pissed away roughly $40 billion in stock capitalization in just three years. And therefore died the death that they so richly deserved."
It's the technology, stupid...
There are companies, even in the 21st century, that can ignore cutting-edge technology. You don't need to be e-commerce enabled to be a plumber. But if you're in the wireless telephony business, in the midst of a headlong rush into a blizzard of new technologies, the core focus of your business isn't marketing or sales or re-carpeting the executive suite. Your core focus MUST be on the technology--and as soon as you lose sight of that focus, your competitors will consume you.
And these geniuses decided to offshore 3,000 jobs. And were doubtless shocked--shocked, I tell you!--to hear that employee morale about the developers was down.
I'm no techno-protectionist
I remember discussing the inevitable introduction of competition from overseas back in the late 1980s, and debating the possibility endlessly while working in Japan in the mid-90s. There will be companies that decide that, in their businesses, in their business models, IT work is a cost, not an investment. They will decide that they want to minimize that cost. They will focus on maintaining existing systems (with marginal, incremental improvements) and eschew major new developments. They will find that that approach may make it feasible to hire developers in the Third World. But those businesses that do so are making a conscious, deliberate decision: we're not going to focus the company on technology. We're going to try to minimize the company's dependence on technology. IT is a cost--it does not contribute to revenue.
For a wireless telephone company to take this position is simply insane: they are in the technology business. They are smack in the middle of a global technology race--one of the few technology races with competitors from practically every part of the northern hemisphere. They need to be faster to market with new products; the new products must be faster, better, more efficient, and more effective; and they have to have a world-beating customer service experience. Instead of fleeing from technology, they should be driven by it. They should be absolutely focused on it. They should be actively recruiting talent to build their strengths....
Because that's what every other company that's focused on technology is doing. Subcontracting out your technology--in a technology business--is sort of like farming, but buying all your crops at the supermarket.
I am not a lawyer...
But I am an engineering team leader at a U.S. electronics company that leads the world in our industry: lighting controls. We export electrical and electronic equipment to countries around the world--including Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, and every country in Europe--because we focus on five core principles. And Principle #4 is "Innovate with high-quality products." In other words, we're in the technology business, so we focus--relentlessly--on the technology.
Once upon a time, AT&T did too...
AT&T Wireless was spun off from AT&T--but the corporate heritage is obviously there. And AT&T, once upon a time, ruled the world--literally chan
Executive summary: in this post I suggest that our Canadian cousins aren't at fault for carrying technology too far (in using event recorders to prosecute a vehicular homicide case), but that they do not go far enough. I propose that if we're going to use technology in support of public policy (safe driving, etc.) there's a lot better technology to use. Is this a good idea, or a bad one? You decide.
Let's suppose that we're the feds, and we want to "use technology to save lives..." ...in the Vietnam-era sense of "we had to destroy the village in order to save it." Let's think about how we could--relatively inexpensively--implement technology solutions to:
Identify vehicles driven with expired registration, inspection, or insurance records
Identify vehicles driven by inappropriate drivers (junior licenses after midnight, etc.)
Identify vehicles associated with known felons (or associated with people who have permits to carry guns)
Put a transponder on the vehicle instead of a license plate
Vehicle identification today is based on century-old technology: the stamped metal license plate. Why not replace the license plate with a transponder? It would be a simple exercise: just embed the transponder on the license plate you already use, and pass legislation to make interfering with the device a summary offense. There would be some immediate benefits: a police officer stopping a vehicle at night, particularly a vehicle with an obscured license plate, could interrogate the transponder and automatically retrieve information about drivers associated with the car. If the stopped vehicle belongs to a person with a prison history for violent crime, the officer might respond with a lot more caution, or with backup. The felon is driving his girlfriend's car? Well--we can easily use a database to identify associations: if she posted bail, if she let him report her address to his parole officer, etc., we'd have her information in the database, associated with his. So if the cop stops a car licensed to her, he'd still be warned that there might be a violent felon behind those dark-tinted windows. That's a good thing, right?
Integrate the transponder with in-vehicle information systems already in police cars
A major cause in reduction in crime has been the installation of in-vehicle information systems in police cars. A cop can check outstanding wants or warrants in a jiffy, instead of having to radio information back and forth to somebody else at headquarters. When they were installed in a local township nearby, an enterprising sergeant went to a local shopping center on Saturday afternoon, and started typing in license plate numbers: he made half a dozen arrests that afternoon. Let the guy point a radio at the transponder instead, and integrate the radio with his in-vehicle system, and presto! Watch his productivity soar. A clever use of technology, no?
Require mag-stripe devices as part of the ignition system
Your driver's license probably already has a mag stripe on it--require a simple device in the car to accept a valid driver's license to start the car. And wire the device to the transponder--so interrogating the transponder identifies the vehicle AND the driver. Just think of what we can do then! We can identify kids driving on junior licenses after midnight, we can identify who was driving the car when the vehicle speeds past a checkpoint, or we can use information about vehicle and driver to monitor traffic patterns (where you live vs. where you work). Just think of the ways we can improve public safety, or even public transit. Neato, huh?
Do we have your civil libertarian juices pumping, bunky?
So ask yourself, is this a good thing?
Because, through the course of history, government has used practically every new technology to advance its causes. Sooner or later it will use transponders, databases, and high-speed networks. And if those uses make you nervous, you might start thinking about what arguments you might make.
You're in either Pennsylvania or New York. And you're on a river that has been actively dammed and controlled for over two hundred years. Which means that your property either has deeded mill rights, or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, you have no legal right to divert the water in the river to power a generator. Which is to say, attempting to divert river flow to generate electricity could get you in a world of trouble.
What about in-river systems?
Good question--and I'm sure that your state environmental agency will tell you. And I'd bet money their first answer will be "no." Bureaucrats are bureaucrats--and anything that is likely to cause them additional work is almost certain to be turned down.
This doesn't mean you're dead
What you can do to help grease the skids with your state authorities is to contact your local state legislator. If you're in Pennsylvania you'll find that a lot of legislators are extremely interested in "constituent service." Call the legislator's district office, and explain where you live (make sure you live in that legislator's district) and what you're trying to do. You want to know if the state has any information on the subject, and how you can go about finding out. You will be talking to an intern--a breathless, endlessly enthusiastic young person who is just itching to find answers. You may find it astonishing how quickly you will get answers--and since the question came from Rep. Stuffedshirt's office, the answer is far more likely to be "yes."
Visit the county courthouse
If your property at the river's edge shows any kind of swale or evidence of an old channel, go to your county courthouse and ask for the Recorder of Deeds office. Ask for help in searching for mill rights--and whether or not your property ever had mill rights assigned, or was subdivided from property that had mill rights. If the answer is yes, you should ask your county bar association for a referral to an attorney with experience in real estate law--what you're looking to do is assert that you want to take advantage of mill rights that were deeded with the property years ago.
On the off chance that mill rights were awarded to your property years ago, you may be able to do this. In the more likely event that you do not already have mill rights, you'll have to do some design work, get a registered professional civil engineer, and go through a planning process that will include the state environment regulators, the utility company that owns the hydro dam downstream (most likely PP&L), and probably the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. And unless you have a very long stretch of shoreline, you'll have to get permission from your neighbors to dig a mill race upstream, and a tail race downstream. (This, of course, means that you'll be providing them with free electricity too.)
But what about a floating generator in midstream?
If you're in Pennsylvania, good luck. The Susquehanna is full of boaters and fishermen, and the state is going to regulate you to death with concerns about who might hit it, how you'll secure it during the winter, and whether you have adequate insurance coverage for any possible liability.
In short--I think you'll find that the licensing, permitting, and assorted legal folderol will make the project economically infeasible.
Am I the only person here who finds this incredibly objectionable? Internet traffic is/should not be subject to any law except the laws governing the sending/receiving points for it. Under their reasoning, they can apply their own laws to almost the entire Internet, since so much of the Internet is routed through the US's pipes.
Why not? The Internet was originally developed by the U.S. Department of Defense, and is--today--governed (ultimately) by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The Department of Commerce has effectively outsourced management of the Internet to ICANN--but have no illusions: the U.S. government paid for it, and they have no (and should have no) qualms about taking advantage of that.
Does that make you uncomfortable?
If you're not a U.S. citizen, it might be a bit chilling to think that U.S. officials might be peering at your email. Well, hey--they're routinely photographing your house with satellites, too. You can start wearing tin foil hats and worrying about Little Black Helicopters--or perhaps you might reflect on the fact that the U.S. government, and particularly the U.S. Department of Defense, has spent billions of dollars on technology that they let you use, for free. The Internet is one example, but there are others: the LORAN network (Long Range Aid to Navigation), GPS, the U.S. Naval Observatory time servers, and the International Ice Patrol (keeping track of icebergs in the North Atlantic) are just some that spring to mind.
The U.S. military isn't a fount of altruism--they have uses for GPS and the Internet too. But the fact that the U.S. taxpayer foots the bill for lots of stuff that the rest of the world gets for free might, might, suggest that we're not the incarnation of evil that some people overseas ([cough], [cough], France) would suggest.
Almost one in five information technology workers has lost a job or knows someone who lost a job after training a foreign worker, according to a new survey by the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers. The study is the first to quantify how widespread the practice is.
I followed the link to Yahoo, read the article, and said to myself, "I'd like to read more." So I went to the WashTech web site. And right there, at the top of their page...was a news article dated March 6, 2004. The "new survey" that Yahoo quotes isn't anywhere to be seen.
Maybe I'm just too skeptical--but if they can't post the study before they pitch the story to the news media, perhaps the "study" isn't as authoritative as they'd have us believe.
"Not quite so anonymous any more, is it, Mr. Murdoch?"
Nope--and it no longer needs to be. This happened two-and-a-half years ago, and Daughter #1 no longer works there. And isn't likely to want to go back.
Anonymity matters
When I threatened the restaurant chain they took it seriously. And when they landed on the local restaurant staff, some of the assistant managers spent some time trying to figure out who had sent it. They guessed that the letter came from the parent of one of the waitresses who were under 18 (since I'd mentioned keeping minors past midnight), and quietly pulled those workers aside and asked them if they knew who sent the email. Daughter #1, having been coached on the ethics of the situation, lied through her teeth.
(Digression: you are only responsible to tell the truth to people who have a legitimate claim to the truth. When the Nazis ask if there are Jews in your basement [assuming there are] you are perfectly correct to lie. The 'Nazis at the door' question is standard stuff for a seminary ethics class, and we had this conversation with Daughter #1 when I sent the email.)
But if the assistant managers had found out who it was, her life would have been miserable. That's the beauty of anonymous email: you can threaten the company--or complain to the authorities--without retribution. If the authorities won't move without a complaint (from a soon-to-be-unemployed-employee) you can make your pitch to the local newspaper. Practically every TV station in America has a "Channel 8 HelpLine" type of crew: they investigate complaints, putting the most photogenic ones on TV. They'd love to do a "concealed identity" interview about how your boss is stealing money from your paycheck, followed by the obligatory denials from the home office, etc.
As I wrote earlier, the trick is to shine light on the cockroaches. With the Internet, it's easier to do.
Daughter #1 came home from her job at a regional restaurant chain, one night during high school, and complained bitterly that she was getting cheated. It seems the restaurant's assistant managers had decided that they were going to make some policy changes to save costs--and the costs they had in mind were the payroll costs of the "cleaners", two or three people who did cleaning chores in the kitchen and the restaurant area. Their brilliant plan: the cleaning chores would be assigned to the wait staff--who would have to perform them after going off the clock at the end of their shifts.
For those of you keeping score at home, this is a federal crime.
An Internet solution...
So I registered for a Hotmail account, under the pseudonym of a noted villain in American labor history, and found an email address for the chain's corporate parent from their web site. The email went something like this:
Your restaurant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania has a problem. The problem is that minors are being kept past midnight, wait staff is being worked off the clock, etc.
This is a management opportunity: deal with this, or face hearing about it from the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry.
I hope to see clear, demonstrable evidence that you are addressing this issue within the next days. Or I'll drop the dime.
The company jumped
I sent the email late Friday night. By Saturday afternoon the company had descended, announced that the restaurant would be closed on Monday and Tuesday for "training," and Tuesday night had a staff meeting announcing that this would not happen again, yadda yadda yadda. The assistant managers got spanked.
In an age of anonymous email, there's no excuse for putting up with this
Especially because, for just a couple of bucks, you can register a domain that will scare the stuffing out of your typical PHB (oh, like "People United for Fair Wage Reporting", "Pennsylvania Labor Standards Action", "Mid-Atlantic Coalition for Labor Justice", and so forth), and be sure to "copy" your anonymous emails to a name at that domain. Or, for that matter, copy a local newspaper columnist.
The cockroach principle
Shine a bright light, and cockroaches will scatter like, well, cockroaches. An anonymous email to corporate headquarters, or the local newspaper, will focus a lot of attention on the cockroaches who are trying to pull this stuff.
Point #1: this is illegal.
The United States has a bewildering array of laws and regulations governing how people are paid. They're bewildering because they're written by lawyers, and they're written by lawyers because a seemingly endless list of companies have tried to cheat. But the bewildering array--in the end--ain't all that tough to understand: if she works for 40 hours, she gets paid for 40 hours. You can define the weekly pay period (in the sense that some employers count Sunday as the first day of the week, some Monday, some Saturday, etc.) but it must apply to everybody. Overtime applies after 40 hours (and after 8 hours per day, in some circumstances).
But there's more: if the worker is under 18, there are limits on the number of hours worked per week, and worked per day, during the school year. If the worker is under 18 (for some equipment), or under 16 (for *lots* of equipment) the worker cannot use some kinds of equipment, and generally can't clean any equipment more sophisticated (or dangerous) than a spoon. There are all kinds of rules. And all kinds of draconian penalties that the government will slap you with if you get caught.
Point #2: The question is, who gets caught?
Notice a theme that runs through the article: over and over again somebody says, "the district manager told me that overtime was prohibited, so I had to make sure we had none on the books." Put another way, somebody in senior management issues a decree: payroll will be less than N% of gross sales for the month, Or Else. And the local store manager is left with the problem of making sure that payroll stays below N%--because he or she is perfectly aware of what "Or Else" means. Or--perhaps--because he or she has figured out that being a senior company manager is a nice life, and wants to stand out as a cost-cutting superstar. Either way, (and here's the crucial point) the local manager is the one who is fiddling with the time cards.
So somebody (oh, say, like the irate father of a cheated employee) calls the cops. If the call goes to the company's "confidential" reporting line, the manager gets yelled at. If the call goes to the state Department of Labor (and every U.S. state has one) the company will put on a charade--they'll have big meetings, they'll express all kinds of sensitivity, and they'll issue a press release saying that they have fired the manager. And firing the manager, of course, solves the problem.
And if you think this problem is caused by the chump store manager...
Firing the guy two rungs up on the ladder from minimum wage doesn't stop the problem. When a consistent pattern exists of timeclock cheating (which the Times article flatly asserts) the problem belongs to the company. (Note, particularly, the last item in the story: the writer expressly makes the point that McDonald's does not do this.) We've been down this road with civil rights and sexual harassment: a pattern of practice across the company is more telling than a few memos telling managers not to do something wrong.
The solution:
Launch a federal task force into wage and timeclock abuse at Wal-Mart. There is an ongoing investigation into the use of illegal aliens on cleaning crews at Wal-Mart--now this. Clearly there's grounds to dig into the mess. Find a few smoking guns, and then start arresting people. Who told you to do this? Who showed you? Who knew what? When?
Send a CEO to prison, and maybe people will pay attention.
They're not out to spy on you
The point of loyalty cards is not to allow a secret cabal of abstemious zealots to monitor whether you buy yellow mustard or brown. The point is to be able to identify frequent shoppers, and their buying preferences, and thus tailor the inventory of the store (and its "specials") to those frequent customers. Key point: they're identifying a class of people, not keeping track of you.
Here's how it works
Let's pretend that you and I are the management team at a local supermarket. The seafood manager says that we've sold every ounce of salmon in the store today--and we sold out yesterday, too. He wants to expand the space in the display case for salmon. In the old days you and I would look at one another, shrug, and say, "go ahead, Gene, sounds like a plan." Today we'd look to see whether the salmon was purchased by our core customers or not.
The point of a loyalty card plan is to identify customers who shop in our store every week. The industry has a pretty good picture of retail shopping patterns: they know that people spend roughly $30-40 per week (per person) on groceries. If they identify someone who is spending over a hundred dollars per week in a store, they can confidently identify that person as a "core shopper." Those core shoppers constitute the vast bulk of that store's business: it will pay the grocery chain big time to tailor that store's inventory and pricing to the tastes and preferences of those core shoppers.
Think back to our conversation with Gene, the seafood manager. He's selling salmon like, well, hotcakes--and now we've identified that practically all of that salmon is being bought by core shoppers. We notice that lots of other seafood is being bought by core shoppers. And, we notice, deli sales are more or less flat. Perhaps we can increase revenue by giving a bit more case space to the seafood counter, and take a little space from the deli (pretend they're adjacent).
Once upon a time grocery stores used to "floorplan" every store to a similar pattern. And for some categories (laundry soap) they will continue to plan each store similarly. But for lots of categories store inventories within a chain will vary widely--because your local store has a customer base that buys lots of salmon, or lots of kosher food, or lots of home baking products.
This concept of tailoring inventory to match customer demand is crucial to the grocery store chain--because the margins in groceries are so small. The essence of the grocery store business (at least financially) is inventory management: and the essence of inventory management is to turn your inventory as many times per year as you can. Inventory turn is a simple calculation: sales divided by inventory. If you have $5 million in sales, and you have $800,000 in inventory, your inventory turn is a respectable 6.25. If you have a 2% profit margin on sales, you're earning $100,000 in profit on those sales, which amounts to a 12.5% return on your investment in inventory. (This is a crude example [e.g. it doesn't include capital expenses] but you get the general idea.) A 12.5% return on investment (ROI) is terrific these days--but using those loyalty cards you can break down your sales figures by department, and determine your ROI, literally, aisle by aisle through your store. And you can determine how much of your sales are to core customers, aisle by aisle through your store. And thus you can tailor your inventory--dropping slow movers, expanding shelf space for hot products, and using your knowledge to better guess what new products to shelve.
In short, improving profitability by focusing on your core customers and serving them better is a pretty cool use of technology.
So what's the end result?
You shop at a grocery store that has more of what you want, and less of what you don't. Yes--the truly paranoid are correct in saying that the grocery store company could deduce a lot about you by examining what you buy (lots
Nope--there was nothing funny at all about the price-fixing in vitamins led by Hoffman-LaRoche. I know a manager at a local plant of Hoffman-LaRoche, and used to work (in a different industry) with a man who at one point was HLR's general manager of animal vitamins. So I've heard about the court case (which went on for years, and included anti-trust action in the EU and in the United States, and possibly elsewhere).
Is price-fixing in vitamins a big deal? First, we're not talking about somebody trying to corner the market in One-A-Day tablets. We're talking about a small group of chemical companies colluding to fix the prices of (and markets for) vitamins that are included in food products. That's things like the Vitamin D in your milk. And--more significantly in terms of market size--it is the vitamin supplements included in animal feeds.
A brief discussion of animal feed
I am a geek--but I am a geek who is heavily involved in 4-H (non-U.S. readers: 4-H is a program for American youth [mostly farm youth] funded by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture.) People who are feeding animals frequently want to feed a "complete" feed--a feed that includes all of the nutrients an animal requires. Example: dog food. You don't want Bowser running down kids in the neighborhood to supplement the meager protein requirement you feed him: you want him to get all the nutrition he requires from his bowl. In the same way, most cat owners don't want little Fiona sneaking out to hunt down the local rodent population just because there isn't enough "meat, and meat byproducts" in her Fancy Feast. (In case you're curious, a "meat byproduct" is what goes crunch when little Fiona does manage to eat one of the local rodents.)
Are you with me so far? If you live in the urban jungle you may not think of animal feeds beyond dogs and cats. And while that business is not small, there is also a huge business in other animal feeds. Think of cows, horses, chickens, and turkeys. In a nutshell, "chicken feed isn't chicken feed." Animal feeds are a multi-billion dollar business--and a major cost component for a feed manufacturer is the cost of the vitamin supplements included in the feed.
So the manufacturers get together...
It has been illegal for many years, in the United States, for manufacturers to compare prices or sales practices for common customers. But price and/or market collusion was not illegal in many other countries--and a number of multinational companies got a bit clever. If it wasn't illegal to collude on pricing in Switzerland (and in the 1980s it was not) you simply met with your counterparts in Switzerland, agreed on your prices and markets, and shook hands. According to a friend who was involved in some of these meetings (in Switzerland) everybody benefited: the people involved made their sales quotas, kept their profits up, and were spared the headaches of having to endure real competition. Sure--the customers (and ultimately the consumer) got rooked, but that was a "political issue." My friend (a U.K. citizen) assured me that Americans were far too zealous about such things. All of that ended when the U.S. government found out about it--Hoffman LaRoche, a Swiss company, settled for $500 million; BASF ("we don't make the products you buy, we just make them cost more") agreed to a fine of $250 million; other companies involved paid lesser amounts.
Want to know more?
One of the really cool things about the Web in general, and SlashDot in particular, is the ability to click on a link and go off on a tangent--learning something you'd never even thought of before. This link connects to a law firm involved in the matter.
Yet countries with social healthcare cover more of the elderly and other "non productive citizens" better than we do....Our system is nowhere near perfect, and I could critique it for hours, but a social healthplan does not mean the death of elders and retards.
Unfortunately, it does. Consider this article from the Copenhagen Post in which one doctor out of ten in Denmark admitted to practicing "active euthanasia"--and another 10 percent of Danish doctors said they would if they had proper training. Who did the survey? A group called "A Dignified Death" that actively promotes "assisted suicide." I remember reading about how senior citizens in the Netherlands were terrified of going into the hospital--because so many of them seemed to agree to "assisted suicide" procedures when they were there.
I'm not impartial in this...
I'm writing this at 10:40 pm--and I really should get off the computer and put Daughter #3 to bed. She has Down syndrome--while she was born in 1991, for all intents and purposes she's a six-year-old. I do volunteer work with other children who have all sorts of disabilities--some who have a future in the work force, but some who do not. The parents of those children have a variety of different experiences, based on the kinds of disabilities they work with. But we share one thing in common: a haunting dread of what will happen to our children when we can no longer provide for them. Or defend them.
This raises the question of whether every medical treatment should be available to everyone. Whether or not we should ration our public health dollars to give the best return ie. bumping up the queue those who have the best chance of survival, who require the least money to treat, treat working age citizens and reasonably healthy children before the elderly and those who are very sick etc.
In short, your post is an extremely good argument for America's system of private health care. When we start deciding how our public health dollars are spent, it doesn't take long for the healthy to realize that they outnumber the sick. When people realize, for instance, the very large portion of medical expenditures targeted at the elderly--well, hey. They're not productive members any more. And let's not forget about the special ed kids in school: some kid drooling in a wheel chair is never going to hold down a job or pay taxes either. If we just stopped giving them medical services, they'd die--and stop costing us money. Right?
Years ago I attended an economics lecture given by Milton Friedman, the Nobel prize-winning economist. He described a situation much like this, and went on at great length about the "tyranny of democracy." What happens, he asked, when 51% of Congress votes to shoot the other 49? In much the same way, the tyranny of democracy is expressed when the young, the healthy, the tax-paying, the well-educated discover that they could pay a lot less in taxes if they just killed off the lame, the halt, and the feeble.
This isn't an abstract argument: a population phenomenon in the United States called the Baby Boom means that an abnormally large population of people was born between 1948 and 1960. The oldest Boomers are nearing retirement age--and when 2025 rolls around (when the youngest Boomers turn 65) a disproportionately large portion of U.S. citizens will be expecting retirement benefits. As we get closer and closer to that point, I fully expect to hear more people claiming to be "courageous" and "willing to take a stand" by demanding that we kill old people.
For now at least, we (collectively) have no say in whether or not an Italian baby can have a lot of organs transplanted. And I think that's a good thing.
Wouldn't this give IBM a nice fraud case against SCO's current owners??
Nope. Simple accounting: IBM would be buying the assets of SCO, plus a premium for the value of SCO's business as an ongoing concern. SCO is losing money every quarter--so the value of the business as an ongoing concern is probably a negative number. Thus IBM would be paying for assets--which establishes that SCO's IP portfolio (regardless of its actual legal merit) has value.
Recent changes in accounting rules, however, require IBM to estimate the value of their intangible assets every year--and take a charge against earnings for the value they write off. IBM would be required to write off practically the entire value of their acquired "assets" from SCO in the first year--meaning that IBM shareholders would ultimately end up taking the loss.
The only way for this to really end is for SCO's claims to be defeated in court.
Lawsuits between businesses practically never end up in court. My employer is presently involved in a patent law case that has been going on for years. It may well end up on court--but the vast majority of lawsuits are settled.
Why? For starters, a billing rate of $300 per hour for an associate, which is to say, somebody who graduated from law school in the past couple of years. And who is expected to bill 50-60 hours per week. Assemble a staff of associates, along with several partners billing at $400 to $600 per hour, and you're talking about an incredible legal bill.
And who pays the bill? As I've explained elsewhere, the company doesn't. The company's liability insurance company will conduct the defense of the lawsuit, and the insurance company will pay the bill. Which gives the insurance company a powerful incentive to settle the case.
On Wall Street they call this "greenmail."
Back in the 1980s, during the huge craze for Mergers & Acquisitions (see, for instance, Barbarians at the Gate) an investment firm would raise enough capital to buy a significant chunk of a firm's stock. They would surreptitiously buy just under 6% (the threshold at which you have to declare ownership), then "move" on the stock in a short period to take a big chunk of additional stock while driving up the price. They would then announce a "takeover bid"--and in the parlance of the street, the victim company would be "in play."
One of four things would happen: the victim company's executives would fight off the takeover attempt with a long, drawn-out proxy fight; they would attempt to keep control by encouraging another company (called a "white knight" to buy them instead); or they would buy the attacker's stake at a premium to the already-inflated price. Or they'd succumb to the takeover, and watch their company get pillaged (since the takeover firm would then promptly sell as many liquid assets as they could find, to recoup their cash.)
In theory, the "buyout firm" (the attacker) would be happy with any of the four outcomes. In practice, they achieved the highest return on their investment (in a ridiculously short period of time) when the victim company bought their stake. And once the buyout firms ("sharks") figured this out, they started beating the bushes looking for companies with lots of liquid assets on the balance sheet, but with relatively low stock prices. When they identified a victim, they would plunder the company of its liquid assets (cash, saleable real estate, accounts receivable, etc.)--while congratulating themselves for making the victims "more efficient." When they'd talk about "shareholder rights"--they typically meant "victimizing anybody else." The now cash-starved victims typically were forced to close plants, lay off employees, and drastically downsize--while the sharks moved on to the next victim.
But it didn't always work
In order to successfully put a target "into play," the attacker had to have a viable business plan. They had to have a company willing to buy the target, or a management team with "Street credibility" that could step in and take over. Sometimes the victim company would mount a "Pac-Man" defense--where the takeover target would respond by going after the attacking company. Instead of fighting off an attacker, they'd just buy them.
SCO is doing something very similar.
As I have written elsewhere in this thread, SCO is doing something very similar. And they have some history: SCO is the corporate successor to Caldera, and Caldera was spun off from Novell by Ray Noorda, Novell's founder, when Novell went public. Caldera had one asset: the surviving legal claims of Digital Research (which had been bought by Novell) a
Thanks for your kind words. A paragraph in your post intrigued me:
I don't know if I agree with you re: the mechanics of AZ's liability insuror forcing IBM to indemnify AZ at this point in time. AZ isn't on the hook for anything right now, other than some legal fees. There's nothing for the insuror to make good on currently. So I would imagine they'd take a wait-and-see on whether the action progresses or not, and how it's appearing to progress in the future. If SCO wants to vamp legally for the next who-knows-how-many months/years, well, AZ's lawyers aren't going anywhere.
As it happens, I've done some work with liability claims for a large insurance company, and I've done other insurance work as well. I'm pretty familiar with the mechanics, as you put it, of how liability claims are handled.
A casualty insurance claim is based on a loss: something of value that you own (or lease) is damaged or destroyed. Your car is wrecked, a tree falls on your house, your wife's engagement ring is stolen, or your boat sinks. You realize what happens, and you call up the insurance company and say, "Ack! My boat sank!" The claims technician identifies your policy, identifies the limits on the policy, and initiates a financial transaction called "establishing a reserve". That means that the insurance company is aware that it will have to pay a claim for your $45,000 boat--and by law the company is required to set aside cash equal to the value of all claims that it will have to pay in the short term.
A liability claim is a little bit different: the claim is typically a lawsuit. And a liability policy almost always includes a requirement that the insurance company have "the free and unfettered right" to defend the claim. Which is to say, AutoZone's insurors will respond to the lawsuit from SCO--AutoZone's internal counsel will not. Remember the bit above about establishing a reserve? The same thing happens with a liability claim--except that it isn't quite as cut and dried. The insurance company will evaluate the claim based on a number of factors (nature of the claim [i.e. is it a known issue, such as asbestos], prior history with this plaintiff, prior history with plaintiff's counsel, prior history in this jurisdiction, etc.) and try to determine an adequate reserve to set aside. The insuror wants to set aside the smallest possible reserve, but also wants to ensure that the reserve is adequate so that an insurance examiner (a government official) does not find that they are under-reserving.
So what's the big deal about the insurance reserve? And why does it matter in SCO v. AutoZone?
The reserve set-aside is a transaction that takes funds (real, cold, hard, U.S. currency one-dollar simolians) from the company's assets and sets them aside as a liability. The insurance company must also set aside money from its cash accounts when it issues a new policy--and the insurance company must keep a percentage of its total assets in cash. The effect of this is to create a tension between claims and underwriting: if too much cash is set aside as a reserve, the company will not have enough cash to underwrite new policies. Or, if too many policies are written, the company will not have enough cash to set aside to handle potential claims. So when some jerk (read "D-a-r-l") sues a policyholder for $1 billion (or whatever) the insuror appears to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. They have to set aside an adequate reserve--but they want to set aside as little as possible. Too much, they lose sales (and profits). Too little, and they get in big trouble with the insurance examiners. What to do?
The answer? Look for someone else to blame. You can reduce your reserve set-aside requirement by the amount you expect to recover from another party. In this case, the other party is IBM. You can reduce your set-aside by suing the other party, but typically (especially in a case like this, where the plaintif
There are a couple of reasons to sue AutoZone. Neither have much to do with AutoZone's tech savvy or their understanding of the different *nix kernels. They're both about business.
Let's talk microeconomics
The cost of any good is measured in currency and utility. Put simply, you'll buy a product if a) it contains what you want, and b) you want it badly enough. That's why people routinely pay $1.09 in a convenience store for bottles of water--they realize that the water is worth pennies (at best), but the convenience of the bottle (and the refrigeration) make the purchase worthwhile. Similarly, utility can be expressed as "reputation," "quality," "resale value," and similar terms. The reason you drive a Honda, rather than a substantially less-expensive Chrysler, is the utility cost of the car. Key point: utility is a significant factor in the price of a good.
The point of this lawsuit isn't to punish AutoZone themselves. It is to raise the utility cost of using Linux in the eyes of other businesses. Probably the single biggest utility cost that managers evaluate is risk. The great marketplace advantage of Linux is that a company can download a copy for free. (They could care less about "free as in speech." They're only interested in "free as in beer.") Microsoft has argued that Linux has a higher TCO--which is effectively asserting a utility cost. SCO is now raising another kind of utility cost: the likelihood of being sued.
The impact will be substantial, and immediate: auto parts retailers run thousands of POS systems. Any company using a Unix-based POS system (and there are tens of thousands of them across the U.S.) who has even been contemplating moving to a Linux-based system is having meetings this morning to assure senior management (or just try to assure senior management) that SCO is bluffing. This afternoon those same senior managers will be talking to lawyers, who will likely tell them that while SCO probably is bluffing, SCO can bluff in court for a long time, and who wants to be lawsuit #2? The effect of this lawsuit is to dramatically raise the ultimate cost of any Linux-based solution.
The other reason: making SCO look more attractive to IBM
Remember that SCO is primarily focused on litigation with IBM. SCO claims that IBM is the reason that Unix code "leaked" into Linux--many observers in the financial markets believe that SCO is really angling to get bought by IBM in a new dot-com form of greenmail. IBM was involved in developing AutoZone's new POS system--but evidently did not indemnify AutoZone against claims of infringement (a common practice in licensing these kinds of systems). AutoZone has liability insurance to cover this kind of claim (any company does). But that coverage almost certainly requires that the insurance company have the "free and unfettered right to conduct a defense". Because the suit is based on actions by IBM, the insurance company will instantly seek to force IBM to indemnify AutoZone. If IBM declines, the insurance company will sue IBM on AutoZone's behalf. That instantly creates a bunch of costs (legal costs, outside counsel costs, etc.) for IBM. And, since it's likely that IBM's own insurors will respond to the claim from AutoZone's insurors, sooner or later somebody will say, "hey--it's cheaper to just buy these jerks out." Which is precisely what SCO wants.
This isn't about free software.
Darl and his investors aren't doing this out of a noble belief in the goodness of their cause--or due to a bad case of technomegalomania. They're doing it because they expect an significant return on their investment. They use a legal claim that has enough merit to at least get them into court, and they leverage that claim to make enough of a nuisance that IBM buys them out at a premium. They make a couple of million, and move on. It's about money.
I think you should bear in mind that the concept of "stress" as we think of it is relatively new. In earlier days people would not think of an atmosphere where one was
highly paid, by practically any standard
working inside
doing no heavy lifting
...as having any down sides at all. Lots and lots of jobs--even "professional" jobs--through history have involved real risk. A lot of software developers are infatuated with the notion that software is a form of engineering--so for fun, let's compare a software developer's job with some of the real engineering disciplines. The comparison might be informative.
Civil engineering
These guys build tunnels, which might cave in; they build bridges, which might collapse; they climb mountains, ford streams, confront wild animals, and deal with all sorts of heat, cold, rain, snow, etc., while surveying. Comparison: The software "engineer" moves into a new cubicle with a $900 Herman Miller Aeron chair, and bitches because his new cube is one hundred feet further from the cappucino machine. Conclusion: Software is a lot less stressful.
Electrical engineering
These guys build electrical devices, working in shops or offices with long plastic hooks displayed prominently. What are the hooks for? To pull you off in the event that you are being electrocuted. Comparison: The software "engineer" is given a new computer with USB mouse and keyboard. Which means his MP3 player has to be plugged into a USB port on the back of the box. Conclusion: Despite this enormous stress on the poor software guy, the persistent risk of imminent, excruciating death causes us to conclude that the EE's life is just a tad more stressful.
Chemical engineer
As a general rule, ChemE's work in one of three fields. Stuff that blows up; stuff that is incredibly toxic; and stuff that will kill you in some other way. Sometimes (working with liquid hydrogen springs to mind) the stuff can kill you multiple ways. Comparison: The software "engineer" is stuck working for a dot-com startup that only offers two flavors of smoothies in the company cafeteria on Thursdays. And do you realize how painful a brain freeze from that smoothie can be? Conclusion:The ChemE trying to identify a "stable" mixture of phosphene and silane (if the explosion doesn't kill you, the nerve gas will) has just a bit more stress to deal with.
Mechanical engineer
These guys lead a cushy life--they sit in an office, working with CAD tools to create neat drawings. Which they give to machinists and other employees to actually build. Except--those "machinists and other employees" are dues-paying members of the United Auto Workers, the United Steelworkers, or the Machinists' Union. You have not known stress until you have had to explain to a Machinists Union shop steward that existing work patterns will have to change. Comparison: The software "engineer" has to deal with LAN admins in IS. Who may have read the BOFH files. And believed them. Conclusion: The MechE has more stress.
My point:
If you look at the course of labor history, technology has consistently been used to eliminate expense--almost always labor expense. And the labor that has been eliminated is typically dangerous, routinely debilitating, and generally a lot more "stressful" than any office job that might be created instead. Where you might make a point about stress is when technology is used to raise productivity (e.g. we give everybody a computer and expect them to type their own email; as a result we don't have secretaries for each middle manager any more, and most companies do not have a mail room staff). If we implement technology that saves 20% of a person's time, we then only need four people to do the work that five used to do. I submit that that change does not--per se--cause stress. If the company fires one of those five, saying that he wasn't needed because of the new technology, that would cause stress. I think that's stress caused by a whip-cracking employer, not stress induced by new technology.
Secondly I would buy a cheap ink jet printer ($70?) to sit in your dorm instead of a scanner.
What printer to buy depends, I think, on what you're studying, and how well you study. If you're doing a lot of things that can benefit from color, an ink jet is a good choice. If you're taking a lot of courses that require submitting papers, then a high-quality laser printer, and a 10 ream box of bright 24 lb. paper, make an enormous amount of sense. Presentation matters--and there have been so many studies of how the presentation of a paper impacts the grade that nobody counts anymore.
In either event, I would not go for a cheap printer--unless you're the type who finishes the assignment days in advance. If you're like the rest of us (it's been twenty-five years, and I still remember typing papers at 2 am) you will value the ability to print your ten-page paper in less than twenty minutes. Cheap printers are s-l-o-w printers.
My oldest daughter is a sophomore in college, and she's had both a desktop and a laptop. I've been working with various kinds of portable computing initiatives since 1995--including working with a predecessor of the Fujitsu Stylist in Japan.
How will you use it?
Unless you're going to tote spare batteries with you all day, chances are you won't take your computer to class. There are very few notebook options with real world (as opposed to advertised) battery life records of longer than 2 hours. There are very few college days with fewer than 2 hours of class. Do the math: you either carry extra batteries, or leave the computer in your room. (A survey of Daughter #1's dorm mates: nobody brings a computer to class.)
So a desktop is a good idea?
The big advantage of a desktop is the price--a desktop these days is extremely inexpensive. Taking a desktop to school will save your parents (or you, if you're financing college with loans you'll have to pay back) a ton of money. The down side of the desktop is that it pretty much stays on the top of your desk. So when you're in the library--you're stuck. You take notes by hand, or you stand in line at the photocopier. A laptop makes an enormous amount of sense at the library--and you'll find that most schools have wired the carrels in the library for the campus network. So you can work on your laptop in the library, access Internet resources, and use whatever local file & print resources you have set up with your roommates. Getting a laptop makes a lot of sense.
Do you need a tablet?
In a word, "no." The business case for tablets assumes that the end user either a) doesn't know how to type, or b) isn't in a position to type. If you have enough typing aptitude to submit an article to SlashDot, you know how to type. You will enter a lot more data, with a much higher rate of accuracy, using a keyboard. And the gee-whiz features of a tablet (the reversible, touch-sensitive screen) adds a whopping amount to the price. It's kind of like buying an air-conditioner for your igloo: the feature is undoubtedly cool, but you're not likely to get much benefit from it.
What you should buy instead
First, you should buy a notebook. Second, you should buy an inexpensive, lightweight flatbed scanner. While you will want to take notes at the library, you will also find zillions of times where you will need to photocopy or type information that you find in a reference volume. If you have a scanner with you, presto! Just scan the pages. I strongly recommend the Visioneer 9020 USB scanner. It is very lightweight, it is extremely easy to use, and the work flow (what steps you have to take to scan pages) is very, very simple. The one concern that might surface is that an overzealous librarian might question whether you're violating copyright law by scanning. I'd suggest that you're not doing any more than you would be using the photocopier, but the library may "have a policy" about it. Let me suggest packing the scanner in and out in your backpack, and not make a point of drawing attention to yourself.
Bottom line:
Skip the tablet. Buy a laptop. Buy a cheap scanner (the Visioneer 9020 is $99). Spend fifty bucks taking your parents to dinner to say "thank you" for all they're doing for you, and put the other $950 you'll save aside for other, better uses.
I can understand why filing a patent costs a lot of money. But if a bad patent is granted it should be easy to have it revoked, not $9000+. After all, we're essentially doing the job that the reviewer should have done in the first place.
Or, we're abusing the patent process to jerk around a competitor. Or we're abusing the process to defeat the nefarious schemes of companies we despise. Or maybe we're senior citizens that have adopted filing patent claims as a hobby....
Once upon a time patents cost very little--and the actual costs of the USPTO (like lots of parts of the U.S. government) were borne by the average taxpayer. In the 1970s and following the government moved toward "user fees"--charging the recipients of a federal program for its costs. Thus visitors to most national parks pay a fee, cruise ship operators pay a fee for Coast Guard inspections, and children pay an annual fee to participate in 4-H. This is the same thing: the people who do business with the USPTO help fund its operation. And the cost structure deters people (hopefully) from clogging it unnecessarily.
Again, you don't know that. Just because he has some special skill doesn't mean he's a 'consultant'.... He probably responded to a post asking for a person to do some work.
According to the article, quoting a New York state official, Dennis was hired "as a consultant" by Genessee Community College. It strikes me that he has two issues: first, he clearly isn't very competent as a consultant to do something like this; and second, I would think that Genessee Community College might object to his re-posting their consulting assignment (even without confidential data) on a board named RentACoder.
But that's beside the point: liability is the least of this guy's worries. He's likely to be prosecuted, and if/when convicted he will be fined. (I'd be flummoxed if the guy got jail time.) "I'm too stupid to use a little common sense" generally doesn't fly as a criminal defense. It is even less likely to be successful if the guy held himself out to be a professional consultant. And what's important is, this guy deserves what he gets. And probably more--there are things in any profession that are deemed inexcusable. And I'd think in practically any consultant's book that posting client data on the Internet is one of those inexcusable things. And there's simply no excuse for not knowing better (especially since this joker was warned by another user of RentACoder on January 26th, acknowledged that he shouldn't have done it, and then posted another copy of the database the next day). That goes past dumb or irresponsible all the way out to conscious, deliberate stupidity.
First, please let me apologize for the unbelievable number of cretins who have posted most of their sexual fantasies. "Pathetic" isn't nearly enough of a word.
Second, let me suggest doing something that combines technology and ergonomics, and will constantly remind your beloved of you. And this wee giftie includes the Two Things Every Guy Wants Most:
A remote control
Lots of flashing LEDs
Let me suggest that you guy your beloved a Lutron Spacer dimmer. There is a wallstation version you can install in a den or office; or a tabletop version that controls a single lamp (perfect for a cubicle). Either version comes with a remote control.
It's not just what you give, but how you give it.
It's a guy thing--even for non-geek guys. We like to do the Manly Thing and install stuff. Especially if it involves tools. (This is central to Home Depot's business plan.) Buy the wallstation dimmer, and give it to him. And let him install it--whereupon you can take the remote and dial the lights down a click or three. (It is Valentine's Day, after all.)
If you opt for the tabletop version you don't have the instant opportunity for romance--but you will likely guarantee that he'll have the coolest cubicle at work. (He'll probably have to lock up the remote to keep it from being swiped.) Either way, it's a killer geek gift.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi!
Thanks for your reply. I'm all in favor of redressing the consequences of racism--and have thought (and read) extensively about the consequences of how slavery was ended in the U.S., and how that has permitted racism to survive (if not flourish). I'm also quite familiar with civil rights litigation--albeit as it relates to handicapped people, rather than to the black community.
But to support civil rights does not necessarily require support for Jesse Jackson. And I think the cause of civil rights has been significantly marginalized by the practice of some in the "civil rights" community to take advantage of public sentiment to "persuade" corporations to sign "consulting" contracts--such as the "diversity campaign" by NASCAR that pays Operation PUSH $250,000 per year (mentioned in the link I included in the post). The National Hockey League, another group that suddenly became interested in diversity, is paying $50,000 per year to Operation PUSH. And--surprise of surprises--Operation PUSH is asking all kinds of questions about black ownership and black leadership in football and basketball--but saying nothing about black participation in stock car racing and hockey.
I don't think that is anybody's idea of furthering the cause of civil rights--although it's a terrific way to further the cause of the leaders of an organization.
My take on the article was that this ordinance in Manalapan was designed to scare minorities (and questionable white folk like me) from daring to enter the city confines. The way to deal with issues like that--particularly with people or communities that flaunt their wealth--is to make them pay the price. Big court judgements, and substantial national publicity. Post the names of every resident on the Internet, and JOIN that list with corporate officers and board members. When stockholder meetings include questions about FatCatCo's commitment to civil rights, given that two board members maintain residences in a "known enclave for racists" the community will start to feel the heat.
(Ultimately, I think the slavery/racism issue will end by the emergence of a broad popular consensus--and that consensus is forged through public debate in places like boardrooms, city council meetings, churches, etc. We can't sue our way to justice--but we can develop a national consensus on the subject, and shaming the scoundrels is a big part of that. But that's a longer rant for another time.)
Thanks for your reply.
JM
Hackneyed e-business jokes aside...
...this looks a lot like a variation on the old game of dreaming up ordinances to give the cops the ability to run the "riffraff" out of town. It has appeared in various disguises over the years--with a variety of names, a variety of methods, but one single purpose: to give a cop plausible reason to stop a black or Hispanic driving through town, and tell him or her to leave.
Which is, of course, illegal. In a town with an obscene amount of money (note the statistic that there are 11 police officers in Manalapan, for only 321 residents--and they only have two or three burglaries a year) fighting a traffic stop through appellate procedures would be futile. But once they establish a pattern of stopping and harassing minorities, Manalapan will be a sitting duck for a lawsuit by any number of "public interest" groups like Jesse Jackson's Operation PUSH.
Child labor
Simply put, organized labor had little to do with the end of child labor. See, for instance, Houghton-Mifflin's Reader's Companion to American History. While organized labor was certainly involved in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (which implemented a sweeping federal solution) child labor advocates had been working on the issue (including passage of two laws by Congress that were overturned by the Supreme Court) since the 1880s. Their appeal to Eleanor Roosevelt, and her subsequent influence, were crucial to including child labor in the FLSA. To the extent that this was a union issue, it was because the unions recognized that a) children worked cheaper, and b) couldn't legally sign a yellow card (a parent or guardian would have to). Organized labor, even today, is generally hostile to child workers--routinely arguing for an increase in the minimum wage, not because it would have any impact on a union member, but because it drives up the price of cheap teenaged labor, making it less competitive.
And let's not get all ga-ga about the unions
While unions have certainly been instrumental in fighting corporate villains, unions have certainly been guilty of their own evils as well. Two words: "Longshoremen" and "Teamsters." Organized crime figured out a long time ago that managing the assets of a union was a substantially better way to steal money than holding up banks--the Teamsters' Central States Pension Fund was plundered by the Mob and its union leadership cronies, with absolutely zero concern for the workers they claimed to represent.
And it isn't just crime
Sometimes the union behaves just like the Big Business they claim to oppose. Case in point: in the early 1980s Mack Truck was faced with an aging assembly plant in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and wanted to build a new assembly plant in Lehigh County. They bargained with the affected union locals, and came to an agreement that gave the (struggling) company givebacks on wage rates, but gave the employees job security. However--the UAW rules required that any local bargain could not be voted on by the local membership--it could only be approved by the national union. And the UAW management decided that if they approved the Mack deal, they would find themselves in a bad position in upcoming negotiations with Caterpillar. The result: the Mack bargain was rejected--and the union repeatedly refused to let the union members (who strongly backed the deal) vote on it. Mack subsequently built the plant in Winnsboro, SC, outside the jurisdiction of the union locals. They offered jobs in Winnsboro to any Plant 5C employee who wanted to take the position--but at non-union rates, with no job guarantees. Some workers made the move (and subsequently organized the plant in Winnsboro, but at substantially lower rates). Most just lost their jobs. And the upcoming negotiations with Caterpillar? That became one of the longest, nastiest strikes in late 20th century American labor history--and the union lost.
Bottom line: UAW executives (who, incidentally, continued to earn six-figure salaries) forced thousands and thousands of union families out of work, into the cold, in the worst job market since the Depression.
Unions have, in some places, in some circumstances, been a very positive influence. But they had scant influence on child labor, and there have been many circumstances where they have done real damage to the very people they claim to represent.
While this is a sad story--especially about the poor guys with Indian "consultants" following them around asking a zillion questions about how to do their jobs--it's worthwhile to remember where the article appears: CIO magazine. CIO is focused on the needs/wants/interests of the guys in ties in a corporate IT environment--and in general a lot of CIOs think that outsourcing/offshoring is a hell of a good idea. The general tone of this article is "look at how these yobbos bungled the implementation of Siebel CRM." What they didn't mention at all is, "look at how these geniuses totally misunderstood their business, and pissed away roughly $40 billion in stock capitalization in just three years. And therefore died the death that they so richly deserved."
It's the technology, stupid...
There are companies, even in the 21st century, that can ignore cutting-edge technology. You don't need to be e-commerce enabled to be a plumber. But if you're in the wireless telephony business, in the midst of a headlong rush into a blizzard of new technologies, the core focus of your business isn't marketing or sales or re-carpeting the executive suite. Your core focus MUST be on the technology--and as soon as you lose sight of that focus, your competitors will consume you.
And these geniuses decided to offshore 3,000 jobs. And were doubtless shocked--shocked, I tell you!--to hear that employee morale about the developers was down.
I'm no techno-protectionist
I remember discussing the inevitable introduction of competition from overseas back in the late 1980s, and debating the possibility endlessly while working in Japan in the mid-90s. There will be companies that decide that, in their businesses, in their business models, IT work is a cost, not an investment. They will decide that they want to minimize that cost. They will focus on maintaining existing systems (with marginal, incremental improvements) and eschew major new developments. They will find that that approach may make it feasible to hire developers in the Third World. But those businesses that do so are making a conscious, deliberate decision: we're not going to focus the company on technology. We're going to try to minimize the company's dependence on technology. IT is a cost--it does not contribute to revenue.
For a wireless telephone company to take this position is simply insane: they are in the technology business. They are smack in the middle of a global technology race--one of the few technology races with competitors from practically every part of the northern hemisphere. They need to be faster to market with new products; the new products must be faster, better, more efficient, and more effective; and they have to have a world-beating customer service experience. Instead of fleeing from technology, they should be driven by it. They should be absolutely focused on it. They should be actively recruiting talent to build their strengths....
Because that's what every other company that's focused on technology is doing. Subcontracting out your technology--in a technology business--is sort of like farming, but buying all your crops at the supermarket.
I am not a lawyer...
But I am an engineering team leader at a U.S. electronics company that leads the world in our industry: lighting controls. We export electrical and electronic equipment to countries around the world--including Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, and every country in Europe--because we focus on five core principles. And Principle #4 is "Innovate with high-quality products." In other words, we're in the technology business, so we focus--relentlessly--on the technology.
Once upon a time, AT&T did too...
AT&T Wireless was spun off from AT&T--but the corporate heritage is obviously there. And AT&T, once upon a time, ruled the world--literally chan
Executive summary: in this post I suggest that our Canadian cousins aren't at fault for carrying technology too far (in using event recorders to prosecute a vehicular homicide case), but that they do not go far enough. I propose that if we're going to use technology in support of public policy (safe driving, etc.) there's a lot better technology to use. Is this a good idea, or a bad one? You decide.
Let's suppose that we're the feds, and we want to "use technology to save lives..."
...in the Vietnam-era sense of "we had to destroy the village in order to save it." Let's think about how we could--relatively inexpensively--implement technology solutions to:
Put a transponder on the vehicle instead of a license plate
Vehicle identification today is based on century-old technology: the stamped metal license plate. Why not replace the license plate with a transponder? It would be a simple exercise: just embed the transponder on the license plate you already use, and pass legislation to make interfering with the device a summary offense. There would be some immediate benefits: a police officer stopping a vehicle at night, particularly a vehicle with an obscured license plate, could interrogate the transponder and automatically retrieve information about drivers associated with the car. If the stopped vehicle belongs to a person with a prison history for violent crime, the officer might respond with a lot more caution, or with backup. The felon is driving his girlfriend's car? Well--we can easily use a database to identify associations: if she posted bail, if she let him report her address to his parole officer, etc., we'd have her information in the database, associated with his. So if the cop stops a car licensed to her, he'd still be warned that there might be a violent felon behind those dark-tinted windows. That's a good thing, right?
Integrate the transponder with in-vehicle information systems already in police cars
A major cause in reduction in crime has been the installation of in-vehicle information systems in police cars. A cop can check outstanding wants or warrants in a jiffy, instead of having to radio information back and forth to somebody else at headquarters. When they were installed in a local township nearby, an enterprising sergeant went to a local shopping center on Saturday afternoon, and started typing in license plate numbers: he made half a dozen arrests that afternoon. Let the guy point a radio at the transponder instead, and integrate the radio with his in-vehicle system, and presto! Watch his productivity soar. A clever use of technology, no?
Require mag-stripe devices as part of the ignition system
Your driver's license probably already has a mag stripe on it--require a simple device in the car to accept a valid driver's license to start the car. And wire the device to the transponder--so interrogating the transponder identifies the vehicle AND the driver. Just think of what we can do then! We can identify kids driving on junior licenses after midnight, we can identify who was driving the car when the vehicle speeds past a checkpoint, or we can use information about vehicle and driver to monitor traffic patterns (where you live vs. where you work). Just think of the ways we can improve public safety, or even public transit. Neato, huh?
Do we have your civil libertarian juices pumping, bunky?
So ask yourself, is this a good thing?
Because, through the course of history, government has used practically every new technology to advance its causes. Sooner or later it will use transponders, databases, and high-speed networks. And if those uses make you nervous, you might start thinking about what arguments you might make.
You're in either Pennsylvania or New York. And you're on a river that has been actively dammed and controlled for over two hundred years. Which means that your property either has deeded mill rights, or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, you have no legal right to divert the water in the river to power a generator. Which is to say, attempting to divert river flow to generate electricity could get you in a world of trouble.
What about in-river systems?
Good question--and I'm sure that your state environmental agency will tell you. And I'd bet money their first answer will be "no." Bureaucrats are bureaucrats--and anything that is likely to cause them additional work is almost certain to be turned down.
This doesn't mean you're dead
What you can do to help grease the skids with your state authorities is to contact your local state legislator. If you're in Pennsylvania you'll find that a lot of legislators are extremely interested in "constituent service." Call the legislator's district office, and explain where you live (make sure you live in that legislator's district) and what you're trying to do. You want to know if the state has any information on the subject, and how you can go about finding out. You will be talking to an intern--a breathless, endlessly enthusiastic young person who is just itching to find answers. You may find it astonishing how quickly you will get answers--and since the question came from Rep. Stuffedshirt's office, the answer is far more likely to be "yes."
Visit the county courthouse
If your property at the river's edge shows any kind of swale or evidence of an old channel, go to your county courthouse and ask for the Recorder of Deeds office. Ask for help in searching for mill rights--and whether or not your property ever had mill rights assigned, or was subdivided from property that had mill rights. If the answer is yes, you should ask your county bar association for a referral to an attorney with experience in real estate law--what you're looking to do is assert that you want to take advantage of mill rights that were deeded with the property years ago.
On the off chance that mill rights were awarded to your property years ago, you may be able to do this. In the more likely event that you do not already have mill rights, you'll have to do some design work, get a registered professional civil engineer, and go through a planning process that will include the state environment regulators, the utility company that owns the hydro dam downstream (most likely PP&L), and probably the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. And unless you have a very long stretch of shoreline, you'll have to get permission from your neighbors to dig a mill race upstream, and a tail race downstream. (This, of course, means that you'll be providing them with free electricity too.)
But what about a floating generator in midstream?
If you're in Pennsylvania, good luck. The Susquehanna is full of boaters and fishermen, and the state is going to regulate you to death with concerns about who might hit it, how you'll secure it during the winter, and whether you have adequate insurance coverage for any possible liability.
In short--I think you'll find that the licensing, permitting, and assorted legal folderol will make the project economically infeasible.
Why not? The Internet was originally developed by the U.S. Department of Defense, and is--today--governed (ultimately) by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The Department of Commerce has effectively outsourced management of the Internet to ICANN--but have no illusions: the U.S. government paid for it, and they have no (and should have no) qualms about taking advantage of that.
Does that make you uncomfortable?
If you're not a U.S. citizen, it might be a bit chilling to think that U.S. officials might be peering at your email. Well, hey--they're routinely photographing your house with satellites, too. You can start wearing tin foil hats and worrying about Little Black Helicopters--or perhaps you might reflect on the fact that the U.S. government, and particularly the U.S. Department of Defense, has spent billions of dollars on technology that they let you use, for free. The Internet is one example, but there are others: the LORAN network (Long Range Aid to Navigation), GPS, the U.S. Naval Observatory time servers, and the International Ice Patrol (keeping track of icebergs in the North Atlantic) are just some that spring to mind.
The U.S. military isn't a fount of altruism--they have uses for GPS and the Internet too. But the fact that the U.S. taxpayer foots the bill for lots of stuff that the rest of the world gets for free might, might, suggest that we're not the incarnation of evil that some people overseas ([cough], [cough], France) would suggest.
I followed the link to Yahoo, read the article, and said to myself, "I'd like to read more." So I went to the WashTech web site. And right there, at the top of their page...was a news article dated March 6, 2004. The "new survey" that Yahoo quotes isn't anywhere to be seen.
Maybe I'm just too skeptical--but if they can't post the study before they pitch the story to the news media, perhaps the "study" isn't as authoritative as they'd have us believe.
Nope--and it no longer needs to be. This happened two-and-a-half years ago, and Daughter #1 no longer works there. And isn't likely to want to go back.
Anonymity matters
When I threatened the restaurant chain they took it seriously. And when they landed on the local restaurant staff, some of the assistant managers spent some time trying to figure out who had sent it. They guessed that the letter came from the parent of one of the waitresses who were under 18 (since I'd mentioned keeping minors past midnight), and quietly pulled those workers aside and asked them if they knew who sent the email. Daughter #1, having been coached on the ethics of the situation, lied through her teeth.
(Digression: you are only responsible to tell the truth to people who have a legitimate claim to the truth. When the Nazis ask if there are Jews in your basement [assuming there are] you are perfectly correct to lie. The 'Nazis at the door' question is standard stuff for a seminary ethics class, and we had this conversation with Daughter #1 when I sent the email.)
But if the assistant managers had found out who it was, her life would have been miserable. That's the beauty of anonymous email: you can threaten the company--or complain to the authorities--without retribution. If the authorities won't move without a complaint (from a soon-to-be-unemployed-employee) you can make your pitch to the local newspaper. Practically every TV station in America has a "Channel 8 HelpLine" type of crew: they investigate complaints, putting the most photogenic ones on TV. They'd love to do a "concealed identity" interview about how your boss is stealing money from your paycheck, followed by the obligatory denials from the home office, etc.
As I wrote earlier, the trick is to shine light on the cockroaches. With the Internet, it's easier to do.
Daughter #1 came home from her job at a regional restaurant chain, one night during high school, and complained bitterly that she was getting cheated. It seems the restaurant's assistant managers had decided that they were going to make some policy changes to save costs--and the costs they had in mind were the payroll costs of the "cleaners", two or three people who did cleaning chores in the kitchen and the restaurant area. Their brilliant plan: the cleaning chores would be assigned to the wait staff--who would have to perform them after going off the clock at the end of their shifts.
For those of you keeping score at home, this is a federal crime.
An Internet solution...
So I registered for a Hotmail account, under the pseudonym of a noted villain in American labor history, and found an email address for the chain's corporate parent from their web site. The email went something like this:
The company jumped
I sent the email late Friday night. By Saturday afternoon the company had descended, announced that the restaurant would be closed on Monday and Tuesday for "training," and Tuesday night had a staff meeting announcing that this would not happen again, yadda yadda yadda. The assistant managers got spanked.
In an age of anonymous email, there's no excuse for putting up with this
Especially because, for just a couple of bucks, you can register a domain that will scare the stuffing out of your typical PHB (oh, like "People United for Fair Wage Reporting", "Pennsylvania Labor Standards Action", "Mid-Atlantic Coalition for Labor Justice", and so forth), and be sure to "copy" your anonymous emails to a name at that domain. Or, for that matter, copy a local newspaper columnist.
The cockroach principle
Shine a bright light, and cockroaches will scatter like, well, cockroaches. An anonymous email to corporate headquarters, or the local newspaper, will focus a lot of attention on the cockroaches who are trying to pull this stuff.
Or, well, sorta.
Point #1: this is illegal. The United States has a bewildering array of laws and regulations governing how people are paid. They're bewildering because they're written by lawyers, and they're written by lawyers because a seemingly endless list of companies have tried to cheat. But the bewildering array--in the end--ain't all that tough to understand: if she works for 40 hours, she gets paid for 40 hours. You can define the weekly pay period (in the sense that some employers count Sunday as the first day of the week, some Monday, some Saturday, etc.) but it must apply to everybody. Overtime applies after 40 hours (and after 8 hours per day, in some circumstances).
But there's more: if the worker is under 18, there are limits on the number of hours worked per week, and worked per day, during the school year. If the worker is under 18 (for some equipment), or under 16 (for *lots* of equipment) the worker cannot use some kinds of equipment, and generally can't clean any equipment more sophisticated (or dangerous) than a spoon. There are all kinds of rules. And all kinds of draconian penalties that the government will slap you with if you get caught.
Point #2: The question is, who gets caught? Notice a theme that runs through the article: over and over again somebody says, "the district manager told me that overtime was prohibited, so I had to make sure we had none on the books." Put another way, somebody in senior management issues a decree: payroll will be less than N% of gross sales for the month, Or Else. And the local store manager is left with the problem of making sure that payroll stays below N%--because he or she is perfectly aware of what "Or Else" means. Or--perhaps--because he or she has figured out that being a senior company manager is a nice life, and wants to stand out as a cost-cutting superstar. Either way, (and here's the crucial point) the local manager is the one who is fiddling with the time cards.
So somebody (oh, say, like the irate father of a cheated employee) calls the cops. If the call goes to the company's "confidential" reporting line, the manager gets yelled at. If the call goes to the state Department of Labor (and every U.S. state has one) the company will put on a charade--they'll have big meetings, they'll express all kinds of sensitivity, and they'll issue a press release saying that they have fired the manager. And firing the manager, of course, solves the problem.
And if you think this problem is caused by the chump store manager...
Firing the guy two rungs up on the ladder from minimum wage doesn't stop the problem. When a consistent pattern exists of timeclock cheating (which the Times article flatly asserts) the problem belongs to the company. (Note, particularly, the last item in the story: the writer expressly makes the point that McDonald's does not do this.) We've been down this road with civil rights and sexual harassment: a pattern of practice across the company is more telling than a few memos telling managers not to do something wrong.
The solution:
Launch a federal task force into wage and timeclock abuse at Wal-Mart. There is an ongoing investigation into the use of illegal aliens on cleaning crews at Wal-Mart--now this. Clearly there's grounds to dig into the mess. Find a few smoking guns, and then start arresting people. Who told you to do this? Who showed you? Who knew what? When?
Send a CEO to prison, and maybe people will pay attention.
They're not out to spy on you
The point of loyalty cards is not to allow a secret cabal of abstemious zealots to monitor whether you buy yellow mustard or brown. The point is to be able to identify frequent shoppers, and their buying preferences, and thus tailor the inventory of the store (and its "specials") to those frequent customers. Key point: they're identifying a class of people, not keeping track of you.
Here's how it works
Let's pretend that you and I are the management team at a local supermarket. The seafood manager says that we've sold every ounce of salmon in the store today--and we sold out yesterday, too. He wants to expand the space in the display case for salmon. In the old days you and I would look at one another, shrug, and say, "go ahead, Gene, sounds like a plan." Today we'd look to see whether the salmon was purchased by our core customers or not.
The point of a loyalty card plan is to identify customers who shop in our store every week. The industry has a pretty good picture of retail shopping patterns: they know that people spend roughly $30-40 per week (per person) on groceries. If they identify someone who is spending over a hundred dollars per week in a store, they can confidently identify that person as a "core shopper." Those core shoppers constitute the vast bulk of that store's business: it will pay the grocery chain big time to tailor that store's inventory and pricing to the tastes and preferences of those core shoppers.
Think back to our conversation with Gene, the seafood manager. He's selling salmon like, well, hotcakes--and now we've identified that practically all of that salmon is being bought by core shoppers. We notice that lots of other seafood is being bought by core shoppers. And, we notice, deli sales are more or less flat. Perhaps we can increase revenue by giving a bit more case space to the seafood counter, and take a little space from the deli (pretend they're adjacent).
Once upon a time grocery stores used to "floorplan" every store to a similar pattern. And for some categories (laundry soap) they will continue to plan each store similarly. But for lots of categories store inventories within a chain will vary widely--because your local store has a customer base that buys lots of salmon, or lots of kosher food, or lots of home baking products.
This concept of tailoring inventory to match customer demand is crucial to the grocery store chain--because the margins in groceries are so small. The essence of the grocery store business (at least financially) is inventory management: and the essence of inventory management is to turn your inventory as many times per year as you can. Inventory turn is a simple calculation: sales divided by inventory. If you have $5 million in sales, and you have $800,000 in inventory, your inventory turn is a respectable 6.25. If you have a 2% profit margin on sales, you're earning $100,000 in profit on those sales, which amounts to a 12.5% return on your investment in inventory. (This is a crude example [e.g. it doesn't include capital expenses] but you get the general idea.) A 12.5% return on investment (ROI) is terrific these days--but using those loyalty cards you can break down your sales figures by department, and determine your ROI, literally, aisle by aisle through your store. And you can determine how much of your sales are to core customers, aisle by aisle through your store. And thus you can tailor your inventory--dropping slow movers, expanding shelf space for hot products, and using your knowledge to better guess what new products to shelve.
In short, improving profitability by focusing on your core customers and serving them better is a pretty cool use of technology.
So what's the end result?
You shop at a grocery store that has more of what you want, and less of what you don't. Yes--the truly paranoid are correct in saying that the grocery store company could deduce a lot about you by examining what you buy (lots
Nope--there was nothing funny at all about the price-fixing in vitamins led by Hoffman-LaRoche. I know a manager at a local plant of Hoffman-LaRoche, and used to work (in a different industry) with a man who at one point was HLR's general manager of animal vitamins. So I've heard about the court case (which went on for years, and included anti-trust action in the EU and in the United States, and possibly elsewhere).
Is price-fixing in vitamins a big deal?
First, we're not talking about somebody trying to corner the market in One-A-Day tablets. We're talking about a small group of chemical companies colluding to fix the prices of (and markets for) vitamins that are included in food products. That's things like the Vitamin D in your milk. And--more significantly in terms of market size--it is the vitamin supplements included in animal feeds.
A brief discussion of animal feed
I am a geek--but I am a geek who is heavily involved in 4-H (non-U.S. readers: 4-H is a program for American youth [mostly farm youth] funded by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture.) People who are feeding animals frequently want to feed a "complete" feed--a feed that includes all of the nutrients an animal requires. Example: dog food. You don't want Bowser running down kids in the neighborhood to supplement the meager protein requirement you feed him: you want him to get all the nutrition he requires from his bowl. In the same way, most cat owners don't want little Fiona sneaking out to hunt down the local rodent population just because there isn't enough "meat, and meat byproducts" in her Fancy Feast. (In case you're curious, a "meat byproduct" is what goes crunch when little Fiona does manage to eat one of the local rodents.)
Are you with me so far? If you live in the urban jungle you may not think of animal feeds beyond dogs and cats. And while that business is not small, there is also a huge business in other animal feeds. Think of cows, horses, chickens, and turkeys. In a nutshell, "chicken feed isn't chicken feed." Animal feeds are a multi-billion dollar business--and a major cost component for a feed manufacturer is the cost of the vitamin supplements included in the feed.
So the manufacturers get together...
It has been illegal for many years, in the United States, for manufacturers to compare prices or sales practices for common customers. But price and/or market collusion was not illegal in many other countries--and a number of multinational companies got a bit clever. If it wasn't illegal to collude on pricing in Switzerland (and in the 1980s it was not) you simply met with your counterparts in Switzerland, agreed on your prices and markets, and shook hands. According to a friend who was involved in some of these meetings (in Switzerland) everybody benefited: the people involved made their sales quotas, kept their profits up, and were spared the headaches of having to endure real competition. Sure--the customers (and ultimately the consumer) got rooked, but that was a "political issue." My friend (a U.K. citizen) assured me that Americans were far too zealous about such things. All of that ended when the U.S. government found out about it--Hoffman LaRoche, a Swiss company, settled for $500 million; BASF ("we don't make the products you buy, we just make them cost more") agreed to a fine of $250 million; other companies involved paid lesser amounts.
Want to know more?
One of the really cool things about the Web in general, and SlashDot in particular, is the ability to click on a link and go off on a tangent--learning something you'd never even thought of before. This link connects to a law firm involved in the matter.
Unfortunately, it does. Consider this article from the Copenhagen Post in which one doctor out of ten in Denmark admitted to practicing "active euthanasia"--and another 10 percent of Danish doctors said they would if they had proper training. Who did the survey? A group called "A Dignified Death" that actively promotes "assisted suicide." I remember reading about how senior citizens in the Netherlands were terrified of going into the hospital--because so many of them seemed to agree to "assisted suicide" procedures when they were there.
I'm not impartial in this...
I'm writing this at 10:40 pm--and I really should get off the computer and put Daughter #3 to bed. She has Down syndrome--while she was born in 1991, for all intents and purposes she's a six-year-old. I do volunteer work with other children who have all sorts of disabilities--some who have a future in the work force, but some who do not. The parents of those children have a variety of different experiences, based on the kinds of disabilities they work with. But we share one thing in common: a haunting dread of what will happen to our children when we can no longer provide for them. Or defend them.
In short, your post is an extremely good argument for America's system of private health care. When we start deciding how our public health dollars are spent, it doesn't take long for the healthy to realize that they outnumber the sick. When people realize, for instance, the very large portion of medical expenditures targeted at the elderly--well, hey. They're not productive members any more. And let's not forget about the special ed kids in school: some kid drooling in a wheel chair is never going to hold down a job or pay taxes either. If we just stopped giving them medical services, they'd die--and stop costing us money. Right?
Years ago I attended an economics lecture given by Milton Friedman, the Nobel prize-winning economist. He described a situation much like this, and went on at great length about the "tyranny of democracy." What happens, he asked, when 51% of Congress votes to shoot the other 49? In much the same way, the tyranny of democracy is expressed when the young, the healthy, the tax-paying, the well-educated discover that they could pay a lot less in taxes if they just killed off the lame, the halt, and the feeble.
This isn't an abstract argument: a population phenomenon in the United States called the Baby Boom means that an abnormally large population of people was born between 1948 and 1960. The oldest Boomers are nearing retirement age--and when 2025 rolls around (when the youngest Boomers turn 65) a disproportionately large portion of U.S. citizens will be expecting retirement benefits. As we get closer and closer to that point, I fully expect to hear more people claiming to be "courageous" and "willing to take a stand" by demanding that we kill old people.
For now at least, we (collectively) have no say in whether or not an Italian baby can have a lot of organs transplanted. And I think that's a good thing.
Nope. Simple accounting: IBM would be buying the assets of SCO, plus a premium for the value of SCO's business as an ongoing concern. SCO is losing money every quarter--so the value of the business as an ongoing concern is probably a negative number. Thus IBM would be paying for assets--which establishes that SCO's IP portfolio (regardless of its actual legal merit) has value.
Recent changes in accounting rules, however, require IBM to estimate the value of their intangible assets every year--and take a charge against earnings for the value they write off. IBM would be required to write off practically the entire value of their acquired "assets" from SCO in the first year--meaning that IBM shareholders would ultimately end up taking the loss.
Hi!
Lawsuits between businesses practically never end up in court. My employer is presently involved in a patent law case that has been going on for years. It may well end up on court--but the vast majority of lawsuits are settled.
Why? For starters, a billing rate of $300 per hour for an associate, which is to say, somebody who graduated from law school in the past couple of years. And who is expected to bill 50-60 hours per week. Assemble a staff of associates, along with several partners billing at $400 to $600 per hour, and you're talking about an incredible legal bill.
And who pays the bill? As I've explained elsewhere, the company doesn't. The company's liability insurance company will conduct the defense of the lawsuit, and the insurance company will pay the bill. Which gives the insurance company a powerful incentive to settle the case.
On Wall Street they call this "greenmail."
Back in the 1980s, during the huge craze for Mergers & Acquisitions (see, for instance, Barbarians at the Gate) an investment firm would raise enough capital to buy a significant chunk of a firm's stock. They would surreptitiously buy just under 6% (the threshold at which you have to declare ownership), then "move" on the stock in a short period to take a big chunk of additional stock while driving up the price. They would then announce a "takeover bid"--and in the parlance of the street, the victim company would be "in play."
One of four things would happen: the victim company's executives would fight off the takeover attempt with a long, drawn-out proxy fight; they would attempt to keep control by encouraging another company (called a "white knight" to buy them instead); or they would buy the attacker's stake at a premium to the already-inflated price. Or they'd succumb to the takeover, and watch their company get pillaged (since the takeover firm would then promptly sell as many liquid assets as they could find, to recoup their cash.)
In theory, the "buyout firm" (the attacker) would be happy with any of the four outcomes. In practice, they achieved the highest return on their investment (in a ridiculously short period of time) when the victim company bought their stake. And once the buyout firms ("sharks") figured this out, they started beating the bushes looking for companies with lots of liquid assets on the balance sheet, but with relatively low stock prices. When they identified a victim, they would plunder the company of its liquid assets (cash, saleable real estate, accounts receivable, etc.)--while congratulating themselves for making the victims "more efficient." When they'd talk about "shareholder rights"--they typically meant "victimizing anybody else." The now cash-starved victims typically were forced to close plants, lay off employees, and drastically downsize--while the sharks moved on to the next victim.
But it didn't always work
In order to successfully put a target "into play," the attacker had to have a viable business plan. They had to have a company willing to buy the target, or a management team with "Street credibility" that could step in and take over. Sometimes the victim company would mount a "Pac-Man" defense--where the takeover target would respond by going after the attacking company. Instead of fighting off an attacker, they'd just buy them.
SCO is doing something very similar.
As I have written elsewhere in this thread, SCO is doing something very similar. And they have some history: SCO is the corporate successor to Caldera, and Caldera was spun off from Novell by Ray Noorda, Novell's founder, when Novell went public. Caldera had one asset: the surviving legal claims of Digital Research (which had been bought by Novell) a
Hi Eric!
Thanks for your kind words. A paragraph in your post intrigued me:
As it happens, I've done some work with liability claims for a large insurance company, and I've done other insurance work as well. I'm pretty familiar with the mechanics, as you put it, of how liability claims are handled.
A casualty insurance claim is based on a loss: something of value that you own (or lease) is damaged or destroyed. Your car is wrecked, a tree falls on your house, your wife's engagement ring is stolen, or your boat sinks. You realize what happens, and you call up the insurance company and say, "Ack! My boat sank!" The claims technician identifies your policy, identifies the limits on the policy, and initiates a financial transaction called "establishing a reserve". That means that the insurance company is aware that it will have to pay a claim for your $45,000 boat--and by law the company is required to set aside cash equal to the value of all claims that it will have to pay in the short term.
A liability claim is a little bit different: the claim is typically a lawsuit. And a liability policy almost always includes a requirement that the insurance company have "the free and unfettered right" to defend the claim. Which is to say, AutoZone's insurors will respond to the lawsuit from SCO--AutoZone's internal counsel will not. Remember the bit above about establishing a reserve? The same thing happens with a liability claim--except that it isn't quite as cut and dried. The insurance company will evaluate the claim based on a number of factors (nature of the claim [i.e. is it a known issue, such as asbestos], prior history with this plaintiff, prior history with plaintiff's counsel, prior history in this jurisdiction, etc.) and try to determine an adequate reserve to set aside. The insuror wants to set aside the smallest possible reserve, but also wants to ensure that the reserve is adequate so that an insurance examiner (a government official) does not find that they are under-reserving.
So what's the big deal about the insurance reserve? And why does it matter in SCO v. AutoZone?
The reserve set-aside is a transaction that takes funds (real, cold, hard, U.S. currency one-dollar simolians) from the company's assets and sets them aside as a liability. The insurance company must also set aside money from its cash accounts when it issues a new policy--and the insurance company must keep a percentage of its total assets in cash. The effect of this is to create a tension between claims and underwriting: if too much cash is set aside as a reserve, the company will not have enough cash to underwrite new policies. Or, if too many policies are written, the company will not have enough cash to set aside to handle potential claims. So when some jerk (read "D-a-r-l") sues a policyholder for $1 billion (or whatever) the insuror appears to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. They have to set aside an adequate reserve--but they want to set aside as little as possible. Too much, they lose sales (and profits). Too little, and they get in big trouble with the insurance examiners. What to do?
The answer? Look for someone else to blame. You can reduce your reserve set-aside requirement by the amount you expect to recover from another party. In this case, the other party is IBM. You can reduce your set-aside by suing the other party, but typically (especially in a case like this, where the plaintif
Hi!
There are a couple of reasons to sue AutoZone. Neither have much to do with AutoZone's tech savvy or their understanding of the different *nix kernels. They're both about business.
Let's talk microeconomics
The cost of any good is measured in currency and utility. Put simply, you'll buy a product if a) it contains what you want, and b) you want it badly enough. That's why people routinely pay $1.09 in a convenience store for bottles of water--they realize that the water is worth pennies (at best), but the convenience of the bottle (and the refrigeration) make the purchase worthwhile. Similarly, utility can be expressed as "reputation," "quality," "resale value," and similar terms. The reason you drive a Honda, rather than a substantially less-expensive Chrysler, is the utility cost of the car. Key point: utility is a significant factor in the price of a good.
The point of this lawsuit isn't to punish AutoZone themselves. It is to raise the utility cost of using Linux in the eyes of other businesses. Probably the single biggest utility cost that managers evaluate is risk. The great marketplace advantage of Linux is that a company can download a copy for free. (They could care less about "free as in speech." They're only interested in "free as in beer.") Microsoft has argued that Linux has a higher TCO--which is effectively asserting a utility cost. SCO is now raising another kind of utility cost: the likelihood of being sued.
The impact will be substantial, and immediate: auto parts retailers run thousands of POS systems. Any company using a Unix-based POS system (and there are tens of thousands of them across the U.S.) who has even been contemplating moving to a Linux-based system is having meetings this morning to assure senior management (or just try to assure senior management) that SCO is bluffing. This afternoon those same senior managers will be talking to lawyers, who will likely tell them that while SCO probably is bluffing, SCO can bluff in court for a long time, and who wants to be lawsuit #2? The effect of this lawsuit is to dramatically raise the ultimate cost of any Linux-based solution.
The other reason: making SCO look more attractive to IBM
Remember that SCO is primarily focused on litigation with IBM. SCO claims that IBM is the reason that Unix code "leaked" into Linux--many observers in the financial markets believe that SCO is really angling to get bought by IBM in a new dot-com form of greenmail. IBM was involved in developing AutoZone's new POS system--but evidently did not indemnify AutoZone against claims of infringement (a common practice in licensing these kinds of systems). AutoZone has liability insurance to cover this kind of claim (any company does). But that coverage almost certainly requires that the insurance company have the "free and unfettered right to conduct a defense". Because the suit is based on actions by IBM, the insurance company will instantly seek to force IBM to indemnify AutoZone. If IBM declines, the insurance company will sue IBM on AutoZone's behalf. That instantly creates a bunch of costs (legal costs, outside counsel costs, etc.) for IBM. And, since it's likely that IBM's own insurors will respond to the claim from AutoZone's insurors, sooner or later somebody will say, "hey--it's cheaper to just buy these jerks out." Which is precisely what SCO wants.
This isn't about free software.
Darl and his investors aren't doing this out of a noble belief in the goodness of their cause--or due to a bad case of technomegalomania. They're doing it because they expect an significant return on their investment. They use a legal claim that has enough merit to at least get them into court, and they leverage that claim to make enough of a nuisance that IBM buys them out at a premium. They make a couple of million, and move on. It's about money.
Hi!
I think you should bear in mind that the concept of "stress" as we think of it is relatively new. In earlier days people would not think of an atmosphere where one was
...as having any down sides at all. Lots and lots of jobs--even "professional" jobs--through history have involved real risk. A lot of software developers are infatuated with the notion that software is a form of engineering--so for fun, let's compare a software developer's job with some of the real engineering disciplines. The comparison might be informative.
Civil engineering
These guys build tunnels, which might cave in; they build bridges, which might collapse; they climb mountains, ford streams, confront wild animals, and deal with all sorts of heat, cold, rain, snow, etc., while surveying.
Comparison: The software "engineer" moves into a new cubicle with a $900 Herman Miller Aeron chair, and bitches because his new cube is one hundred feet further from the cappucino machine.
Conclusion: Software is a lot less stressful.
Electrical engineering
These guys build electrical devices, working in shops or offices with long plastic hooks displayed prominently. What are the hooks for? To pull you off in the event that you are being electrocuted.
Comparison: The software "engineer" is given a new computer with USB mouse and keyboard. Which means his MP3 player has to be plugged into a USB port on the back of the box.
Conclusion: Despite this enormous stress on the poor software guy, the persistent risk of imminent, excruciating death causes us to conclude that the EE's life is just a tad more stressful.
Chemical engineer
As a general rule, ChemE's work in one of three fields. Stuff that blows up; stuff that is incredibly toxic; and stuff that will kill you in some other way. Sometimes (working with liquid hydrogen springs to mind) the stuff can kill you multiple ways.
Comparison: The software "engineer" is stuck working for a dot-com startup that only offers two flavors of smoothies in the company cafeteria on Thursdays. And do you realize how painful a brain freeze from that smoothie can be?
Conclusion:The ChemE trying to identify a "stable" mixture of phosphene and silane (if the explosion doesn't kill you, the nerve gas will) has just a bit more stress to deal with.
Mechanical engineer
These guys lead a cushy life--they sit in an office, working with CAD tools to create neat drawings. Which they give to machinists and other employees to actually build. Except--those "machinists and other employees" are dues-paying members of the United Auto Workers, the United Steelworkers, or the Machinists' Union. You have not known stress until you have had to explain to a Machinists Union shop steward that existing work patterns will have to change.
Comparison: The software "engineer" has to deal with LAN admins in IS. Who may have read the BOFH files. And believed them.
Conclusion: The MechE has more stress.
My point:
If you look at the course of labor history, technology has consistently been used to eliminate expense--almost always labor expense. And the labor that has been eliminated is typically dangerous, routinely debilitating, and generally a lot more "stressful" than any office job that might be created instead. Where you might make a point about stress is when technology is used to raise productivity (e.g. we give everybody a computer and expect them to type their own email; as a result we don't have secretaries for each middle manager any more, and most companies do not have a mail room staff). If we implement technology that saves 20% of a person's time, we then only need four people to do the work that five used to do. I submit that that change does not--per se--cause stress. If the company fires one of those five, saying that he wasn't needed because of the new technology, that would cause stress. I think that's stress caused by a whip-cracking employer, not stress induced by new technology.
Hi!
What printer to buy depends, I think, on what you're studying, and how well you study. If you're doing a lot of things that can benefit from color, an ink jet is a good choice. If you're taking a lot of courses that require submitting papers, then a high-quality laser printer, and a 10 ream box of bright 24 lb. paper, make an enormous amount of sense. Presentation matters--and there have been so many studies of how the presentation of a paper impacts the grade that nobody counts anymore.
In either event, I would not go for a cheap printer--unless you're the type who finishes the assignment days in advance. If you're like the rest of us (it's been twenty-five years, and I still remember typing papers at 2 am) you will value the ability to print your ten-page paper in less than twenty minutes. Cheap printers are s-l-o-w printers.
Hi!
My oldest daughter is a sophomore in college, and she's had both a desktop and a laptop. I've been working with various kinds of portable computing initiatives since 1995--including working with a predecessor of the Fujitsu Stylist in Japan.
How will you use it?
Unless you're going to tote spare batteries with you all day, chances are you won't take your computer to class. There are very few notebook options with real world (as opposed to advertised) battery life records of longer than 2 hours. There are very few college days with fewer than 2 hours of class. Do the math: you either carry extra batteries, or leave the computer in your room. (A survey of Daughter #1's dorm mates: nobody brings a computer to class.)
So a desktop is a good idea?
The big advantage of a desktop is the price--a desktop these days is extremely inexpensive. Taking a desktop to school will save your parents (or you, if you're financing college with loans you'll have to pay back) a ton of money. The down side of the desktop is that it pretty much stays on the top of your desk. So when you're in the library--you're stuck. You take notes by hand, or you stand in line at the photocopier. A laptop makes an enormous amount of sense at the library--and you'll find that most schools have wired the carrels in the library for the campus network. So you can work on your laptop in the library, access Internet resources, and use whatever local file & print resources you have set up with your roommates. Getting a laptop makes a lot of sense.
Do you need a tablet?
In a word, "no." The business case for tablets assumes that the end user either a) doesn't know how to type, or b) isn't in a position to type. If you have enough typing aptitude to submit an article to SlashDot, you know how to type. You will enter a lot more data, with a much higher rate of accuracy, using a keyboard. And the gee-whiz features of a tablet (the reversible, touch-sensitive screen) adds a whopping amount to the price. It's kind of like buying an air-conditioner for your igloo: the feature is undoubtedly cool, but you're not likely to get much benefit from it.
What you should buy instead
First, you should buy a notebook. Second, you should buy an inexpensive, lightweight flatbed scanner. While you will want to take notes at the library, you will also find zillions of times where you will need to photocopy or type information that you find in a reference volume. If you have a scanner with you, presto! Just scan the pages. I strongly recommend the Visioneer 9020 USB scanner. It is very lightweight, it is extremely easy to use, and the work flow (what steps you have to take to scan pages) is very, very simple. The one concern that might surface is that an overzealous librarian might question whether you're violating copyright law by scanning. I'd suggest that you're not doing any more than you would be using the photocopier, but the library may "have a policy" about it. Let me suggest packing the scanner in and out in your backpack, and not make a point of drawing attention to yourself.
Bottom line:
Skip the tablet. Buy a laptop. Buy a cheap scanner (the Visioneer 9020 is $99). Spend fifty bucks taking your parents to dinner to say "thank you" for all they're doing for you, and put the other $950 you'll save aside for other, better uses.
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Or, we're abusing the patent process to jerk around a competitor. Or we're abusing the process to defeat the nefarious schemes of companies we despise. Or maybe we're senior citizens that have adopted filing patent claims as a hobby....
Once upon a time patents cost very little--and the actual costs of the USPTO (like lots of parts of the U.S. government) were borne by the average taxpayer. In the 1970s and following the government moved toward "user fees"--charging the recipients of a federal program for its costs. Thus visitors to most national parks pay a fee, cruise ship operators pay a fee for Coast Guard inspections, and children pay an annual fee to participate in 4-H. This is the same thing: the people who do business with the USPTO help fund its operation. And the cost structure deters people (hopefully) from clogging it unnecessarily.
According to the article, quoting a New York state official, Dennis was hired "as a consultant" by Genessee Community College. It strikes me that he has two issues: first, he clearly isn't very competent as a consultant to do something like this; and second, I would think that Genessee Community College might object to his re-posting their consulting assignment (even without confidential data) on a board named RentACoder.
But that's beside the point: liability is the least of this guy's worries. He's likely to be prosecuted, and if/when convicted he will be fined. (I'd be flummoxed if the guy got jail time.) "I'm too stupid to use a little common sense" generally doesn't fly as a criminal defense. It is even less likely to be successful if the guy held himself out to be a professional consultant. And what's important is, this guy deserves what he gets. And probably more--there are things in any profession that are deemed inexcusable. And I'd think in practically any consultant's book that posting client data on the Internet is one of those inexcusable things. And there's simply no excuse for not knowing better (especially since this joker was warned by another user of RentACoder on January 26th, acknowledged that he shouldn't have done it, and then posted another copy of the database the next day). That goes past dumb or irresponsible all the way out to conscious, deliberate stupidity.
Hi!
First, please let me apologize for the unbelievable number of cretins who have posted most of their sexual fantasies. "Pathetic" isn't nearly enough of a word.
Second, let me suggest doing something that combines technology and ergonomics, and will constantly remind your beloved of you. And this wee giftie includes the Two Things Every Guy Wants Most:
Let me suggest that you guy your beloved a Lutron Spacer dimmer. There is a wallstation version you can install in a den or office; or a tabletop version that controls a single lamp (perfect for a cubicle). Either version comes with a remote control.
It's not just what you give, but how you give it.
It's a guy thing--even for non-geek guys. We like to do the Manly Thing and install stuff. Especially if it involves tools. (This is central to Home Depot's business plan.) Buy the wallstation dimmer, and give it to him. And let him install it--whereupon you can take the remote and dial the lights down a click or three. (It is Valentine's Day, after all.)
If you opt for the tabletop version you don't have the instant opportunity for romance--but you will likely guarantee that he'll have the coolest cubicle at work. (He'll probably have to lock up the remote to keep it from being swiped.) Either way, it's a killer geek gift.