Growing up

New Horizons

My life is about to change a bit.  I'm going to start a business.  A friend and I are opening a software development company, fulfilling the default ambition of most MBAs.  Which means that I need to not be the ranty opinionated guy on the internet anymore.  It's not that I stopped having opinions, but the things I say in public are now going to have an effect on people besides myself.  So I'm going through this blog and removing my inflammatory posts so that they (hopefully) aren't found and used against me later.

That said, the new public me will still have critical thoughts and aspirations to share.  Maybe I'll blog my way through starting my first business.  I have almost started a business before, and I know what an emotional roller coaster I'm strapping myself into.  Being an introvert I am not a natural sharer of my thoughts.  That's part of the purpose of this blog, to try and put more of myself out there.  I figure that since my wife is the only person who reads my blog, I'm not really taking that big a risk.

While I'm here, I want to highlight another blog that I just started following.  It belongs to the wife of a friend of mine.  She has decided to blog her weight loss journey to the world and everybody.  I'm also trying (procrastinating) to lose weight, so I am humbled by the courage that it must take to share that journey with the internet.  The blog is at JamieWalks and if you would drop by and just give her a +1 of support or something, I know she'd appreciate it.  Maybe more, seeing that bravery might even inspire some of us to get off our own behinds and do it ourselves.

America: Not for you.

It's time to talk about the quiet crisis here in the Americas.  According to the Telegraph, we are on track to see 130,000 unaccompanied children come across our southern border from as far away as Nicaragua.  Unaccompanied.  That means that there are five and six year old children crossing the Rio Grande without a mommy or daddy.  If they are lucky they have a sibling with them, but many do not.  When my children were six I got worried if they slipped out of site in a place I knew well.  I get a sort of horror in my heart thinking of sending them alone into a different country.

I can only imagine that my peers south of the border(s) feel the same way.  So it bears exploring what has brought them to this point and what sort of duty that Americans have under the circumstances.

Why did they come?

Because it doesn't see much coverage in our news it seems easy to forget that there is a drug war of epic proportions raging to the south.  CNN has a nice fact sheet with timeline about the history of the war.  And here is a page of statistics about what has been going on.  Fifty thousand dead people in Mexico since 2006.  I could not find numbers for Guatemala or Nicaragua but some reports indicate that drug cartels are targeting the young for recruitment there as well.  These nations have incredible rates of poverty even without the drug war happening.  So as a parent in these countries, your only choice is to work all day to provide for your family and hope the cartels don't take your kids while you are gone.

For class today, can you draw a picture of your family?

Death by hunger, disease, or violence is all you can look forward to at home.  I can accept that as motivation to leave, even to send your kids away to a better place.  Know that these kids are being sent.  No five year old decides to travel 5,000 miles on their own.  What are they hoping to find?

In 2012 President Obama stated that he would defer the deportations of those foreigners who had arrived as children but were now adults.  Many people have misinterpreted this as amnesty, including people on the street in Central America.  They are being told that America is now welcoming all children, and so children have been sent.  Even if the children cannot stay it is possibly years that they will be cared for in the American deportation system before they are sent back to their homes.  That is still leagues better than life on the streets with Los Zetas.

How do we handle it now?

In the old days what the border patrol would do upon coming across an illegally arrived family is take down their names and give them a date to appear in court.  The immigrants were then released to provide for themselves.  All that people needed to do to stay in the country was lose themselves in our huge country, and there exist networks specifically to help them do that.

The treatment of children was different for Mexicans than for those from countries further south.  Border agents were allowed to interview Mexican children and, if the child expressed no fear of persecution for returning to Mexico, the agent would simply take them back and drop them off.  This practice has been hugely exploited by drug and human traffickers on our southern border.  They could coerce a child into smuggling across the border with the knowledge that if the child got caught, they would be brought back quickly.  It must be nice to have the US government rounding up your stray mules.

Children from non-contiguous countries were not interviewed, they were put into the full immigration/deportation process.  This means that they were detained in a facility for the months or years it would take for their case to be seen by the immigration court.  If it turns out that we bear a moral or legal responsibility to assist these children, then we have done far worse by Mexicans than by people of other nationalities.

Do we bear a legal responsibility?

This one has a quick and easy answer.  Yes we do.  The William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 extends an earlier law that makes it our duty to combat human trafficking.  It was signed by President Bush, as was the 2005 version.  There are 2000 and 2013 versions of the same act, presumably signed by Clinton and Obama respectively.  This is not a partisan issue.  Though when you hear about "immigration reform" on the news, it is largely this law to which they are referring.

Do we bear a moral responsibility?

Lacking a lifetime of classical education to walk around in togas, eat grapes, and ponder the meaning of things I am left to borrow from the output of those who have had that privilege.  This leads me to the Categorical Imperative of Immanual Kant.  In summary the idea of the Imperative is that a thing can only be moral if it could be applied to all people at all times. For example, it is morally wrong to steal because society would crumble if all people stole whenever they wanted to.

This same principle can, and is, being applied both ways to these refugee children.  

Should we (and therefore all people) provide refuge to children from war torn lands?  Yes

Does violence in a different country obligate me (and therefore all people) to spend my earned resources on its effects?  No

These arguments are simple, and the current state of our politics does not encourage soul searching over the issue of the day.  However, these arguments are irresponsible to make in the first place.  It's easy to say that we have nothing to do with street gangs in Honduras, but is that true?

The great drug cornucopia

First, regardless of your own hobbies, you have to admit that America is a place that wants the drugs and has the money to pay for them.  The cartels are bringing in ten figures per year selling drugs to us.  That's in American dollars.  Our combination of a zero tolerance ban on drugs and inadequate services for addicts raises demand through the roof.  One might even say we're willing to pay out the nose for it.  

There are two routes from South America to the US.  One is by water through the Caribbean.  In the past decade there have been major busts along that route.  It helps that the water is international, so the US Navy, Coast Guard, and DEA can go about their anti-trafficking efforts without having to cater to a foreign government.  That leaves the land route through Mexico as the direction of choice for the large cartels.

Side note:  Cartel is the wrong word.  A cartel gets together and regulates price and production for mutual benefit.  These drug organizations are in a massive bloody war with each other.  They are not cooperating.  But I'll still call them cartels, despite all sense.

With billions of dollars on the table and US politicians publicly pushing policies that will continue to keep the demand and price for drugs at historic highs, it is clear that a supply market will exist for the foreseeable future.  The US government is the voice of the people via their election.  So when our government continues policies that encourage these trade routes and the violence that comes with them, then we can not escape responsibility for their existence and the effects they have on affected countries.

Back to Kant

Having established our responsibility, at least in part, for the atrocities happening in countries to our south we must return to our duty to tend to the repercussions.

Do we (and therefore all people) bear a responsibility to use our resources to care for refugees from locations made violent by our policies?

Historically the answer has been no.  The last time we gave succor to refugees on our own turf they were fleeing the Third Reich.  In the name of whatever cause was popular at the time we have helped bring fiery death to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria since then.  The case of Afghanistan is special because our premise for war wasn't against the government but against violent actors within that nation's borders.  

Read that last sentence again.  I'll wait.

The number of deaths attributable to the Taliban directly and not our efforts against them are hard to find.  I have seen numbers from 1,100 to 5,000 people killed directly by the Taliban.  If you want to add in Al Qaeda and their 4,400 murders that number comes to less than 10,000.  Compare that to the 50,000 people who have died from cartel infighting in Mexico and it seems ridiculous that we do not treat them as the greater threat.

Yeah, it's like that.

Put another way, a child is five times as likely to die from the Sinoloa or Los Zetas cartel than they are to die from the Taliban and Al Qaeda combined.  Holy AK-47 on a stick, Batman.  Besides dying, kids are being conscripted into the drug cartels and into the sex trafficking world.  It is fair to say that nobody in the world should be sending children into that environment, and therefore we have a moral duty to not do that.

WWJD?

It seems to surprise people that I know parts of the bible.  I went to Sunday school like most other kids, and modern politics sends me to the bible to fact-check the passages that evangelicals use to browbeat other people into their policy positions.  Anyway, this situation gives me the chance to reference my favorite verse of all time, Matthew 25:40:

"The King will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'"

And the corollary, Matthew 25:45:

"He will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'"

Today's post was inspired by a conversation I had, mainly with a very smart, successful, and Christian cousin of mine.  He looked to the pragmatic aspect of the whole issue.  Can we afford to house and care for these refugees?  How many should we accept before we say enough?  Should we allow them to exploit the system we have built for their own gain

The conversation was had on Facebook, which is not a great place for deep and long form dialogue.  I've had some time to brew on it now.  Admittedly my religious understanding could use some work, but it seems that the teachings of Jesus demand compassion for these immigrant children.  Taking the verse above, each of these children is an Avatar of God.  If you turn them out in order to protect your material wealth then that is your statement to God about who you are as a person.  If it calls for you to give an orphan your last jacket, is that something Jesus would refuse to do?

I'm sorry little girl, but amnesty isn't tracking well in the polls right now.

Remember that God has been known to do a bit of genocide against nations that displease Him.  My insurance doesn't cover meteor damage.

Here's a bit more bible on the subject:

"Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God." - Proverbs 14:31

"Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the LORD, and he will reward them for what they have done." - Proverbs 19:17

"And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who is my disciple, truly I tell you, that person will certainly not lose their reward." - Matthew 10:42

"God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them." - Hebrews 6:10

I've got some Qu'ran to lay down too:

"Have you seen him who denies the religion? He is the one who harshly rebuffs the orphan and does not urge the feeding of the poor.  So woe to those who do prayer, and are forgetful of their prayer, those who show off and deny help to others." - Surat al-Ma'un: 1-7

"They ask you about giving: say, "The charity you give shall go to the parents, the relatives, the orphans, the poor, and the traveling alien." Any good you do, God is fully aware thereof." - 2:215

So we take them all?

Illegal immigration is one of the issues where I usually fall more red than blue.  I am against giving them driver's licenses and generally support the quick and summary deportation of any that we find.  Crime has consequences and if I have to obey the law to enjoy the freedoms of this country, then so do you.  And for the steady stream of people who have been crossing our border since before the drug war began, I say that nothing has changed.  Go back and get in line like everyone else.

Real life morons stopping deportees from leaving the country.

However, it would be intellectually dishonest to ignore the fact that the current wave of child refugees is different than the stream of migrant workers we had before.  These kids aren't seeking employment so much as safety.  They'd rather spend the next year on the cement floor of a warehouse than in a brothel in Bogata.

As with all foreign affairs, the answer is not simple.  Wherever you get your morals from, we have both a secular (Kant) and a religious (Bible/Qu'ran) duty to make an effort on behalf of these orphans.  That doesn't have to mean taking them into our own country and supporting them, but it must also not mean putting them out in the rain.  We bear responsibility for their problems, so we must engineer their solution.

We must treat the drug cartels as more than a threat to our public health, but to our national security.  (Priorities there seem out of whack, but whatever.)  If we add together the amounts we spend on the border patrol, detention facilities, immigration courts and drug-related crime and medicine we would have more than enough of a "war chest" to pay for a war against them.  Los Zetas specifically were formed from members of the Mexican Special Forces units, but I'm willing to see how much that means against the US war machine.  These people are terrorists in their own countries, ruling through fear and corruption.  If we can wreck terror operations on the other side of the planet, we can annihilate these problems in our own back yard.

Notice the resemblance to Al Qaeda.  

We must bring our treatment of drugs in this country into this century.  Treat it as a contagion.  Treat the drugs as biological weapons, perhaps.  Those who have been exposed need to have treatment, both medical and psychological, made available to them.  

Reduce demand, which is easier said than done. Prohibition taught us what happens when you attempt to reduce demand by mandate.  It also shows us that drug usage remains high even when the drug is legalized.  There are many efforts to reduce demand already in play, largely focusing on education and building up our youth.  All I can say is that I wish those efforts success.  I don't have any better ideas.

Uncle Ben said it best.

These child immigrants are here because of the poor way we have addressed our own drug problem.  To send them back into the hands of the cartels is both irresponsible and immoral.  Keeping them here permanently is not a viable solution for both economic and security reasons.  So the only path forward that has any integrity is to make their homes a more palatable place to return them to.  That means setting our Eye of Mordor directly on the drug supply lines and giving them the attention they clearly deserve.  I'm not naive enough to think that drugs won't still find their way into our country.  But what we can do is kick these cartels so hard in the balls that they'll go underground like a normal terrorist operation for fear of incurring our wrath again.  

This far, and no farther.

The new location of the Hamptons totally keeps those foreigners from coming here.

The financial side of company loyalty

I had intended to do a post discussing the fact that the reason employees have no company loyalty is because companies have lost their employee loyalty.  But then I went for supporting material and found that the topic had been done over and over.  And usually with better writing style than I possess.

So instead I decided to drill down further to make it less abstract and more concrete.  Hopefully, if any management types get their hands on this post, it'll give them something to think about when doing the budgets for the next year.  First, let's set some baselines.  

A low income, front line worker at our company makes roughly $10/hr.  That means $20,000 per year at full time before taxes or benefits.  The poverty rate for a family of 3 is $19,790 so this person must pay the lowest tax rate and carry health insurance.  Tax works out to $2,546.25 so that leaves $17,453.75 for this employee to live on, purchase health insurance, and support up to two more people.

We're going to create a fictitious CEO, not at all like the one at my own company, and say he receives a base salary of $1 million and further compenation of $9 million in stock and other forms of compensation.  Remember that at any publicly traded company the salaries of the top executives must be made public so they can be found in the SEC filings.  Also, several financial sites list out the compensations most major companies, with Forbes nearly always being at the top of the google search.

The view from the cheap seats

One year, at this company, the word came down that the average raise would be 2.5%.  That means each front line manager has the authority to give out yearly raises as they see fit so long as the department's total pay rose exactly 2.5%.  Should they wish to reward someone financially for going above their normal duties, they would need to take that money out of someone else's raise.  Since everyone knew that the standard was 2.5%, whoever received below that amount knew that their money had been given to someone else on the same team.  

Also, by simply checking the internet every employee could see that the CEO's pay had gone from $4.2M to $10M for a total of nearly 250% raise.  Just his base salary went up by 15%.  The inequity isn't in the straight dollar amounts, it's in the fact that he got 100 times the award allocated to the employees.  Not that a CEO isn't an important and difficult job, but can you really classify their work as equivalent that of 100 people?

That is the point where loyalty dies.  Not only is your own raise merely a rough toss towards yearly inflation, reducing your real dollars gained to nothing at all, but then you watch the people on the upper deck reward themselves with ludicrous raises.  Yes, they deserve their own raise, but everyone in the company works towards its success.  I'd like to see an executive fix a server outage as efficiently as 100 of their employees.

Big Buck Ballparking

The realm of executive compensation is complicated.  In grad school I ended up doing three different research papers on the subject for different classes, so I consider it one of my specialties.  I am here to tell you that is worse than you think.

When the Board of Directors sets the CEO's pay for the next year, what they do is look at other CEOs in the same industry, and of companies of a similar size, and they come up with a pay range that their CEO position would fall into on the open market.  Then they pick a spot in the 50th to 75th percentile of that range, and that becomes the CEO's new pay.  I'll say again, for doing an adequate job without special merit, their next year's pay is above the average for their industry.  That adjustment hikes up the entire pay range for the next company that ballparks.  And by the time a whole year has gone by, CEO compensations have leapfrogged each other to a much higher level..  

economist.com

This has a lot to do with scope, too.  A potential CEO will move anywhere to take an inviting job.  That makes the market for CEOs national or global in scale.  IT specialists though, we can't move nearly as easily for a nice offer.  Your compeition for a good salary is determined by how far people will move to take your job.  For my job that means I am competing against my city's metro area.  Which is also why I can't ask for pay that would be competitive in San Jose.  On the macro level this is a good thing because businesses will migrate to places where the talent is less expensive.  On the flip side, it means that companies will attempt to maintain those attractive conditions and that means suppressing employee pay.

Getting engaged

The words of the day in HR circles are "employee engagement".  When your employees are engaged in their jobs and the company mission they are far more productive.  This is easy to see in companies with very powerful missions.  Boeing, NASA, Tesla, Google, Apple, all of these employers have a very engaged workforce because their core mission is to change the world.  When you have a plan to make the world a better place, it becomes easy to get people on your bandwagon.  

Not every company has such a dynamic mission, though.  Banks, insurance companies, credit companies and other such places may do good works but they aren't building the future.  A recent survey at my company asked what the employees thought the business's purpose was, and the most common answer was "to make money".  That's true in a strict sense, but betrays the fact that the vision of the company hasn't been communicated to employees.

Fortunately, some companies do respect the contributions of their employees and share success with them.  Some engineering firms I have spoken to are employee owned, with the employees getting "stock" which lets them benefit when the company makes a profit.  Other places are publicly traded, but reward stock to employees for both longevity and for merit increases.  A steel mill I worked at gave the line workers pay equal to the percentage of the quota that was produced.  (The workers regularly produced 250% of their quota and the parking lot was chock full of big shiny trucks.)  If working harder creates a reward in a way that matters to the employee, then they will devote themselves to the task.  If the reward for exemplary work is given to someone else, then you have created active disengagement.  These people will sink your company.

Now you're hitched

Who moves your cheese?

The team you hitch your wagon to makes all the difference.  Would you like your cart to be pulled by the Budsweiser clydesdales?  Or by Eeyore?  This hitch reference also works on the marriage side.  On a given weekday I spend 9 hours at work, maybe 5 hours with my family and 1 hour in commute.  I spend more time with my employer than with my wife and that's not counting being accessible for emergencies at all hours.  Employers need to take this relationship seriously.  Picture getting some sort of financial windfall or huge raise and telling your wife that she wasn't allowed to benefit from any of it.  It is fair to say that you would no longer enjoy domestic bliss.  So if that wouldn't work at home, why do executives think it would work better to say that to the people who run all the ins and outs of your business?  A wife may make you sleep on a couch, but a disengaged workforce will take all of your trade secrets to the highest bidder and leave all the doors unlocked on the way out.

Does this guy run your data center?

It simply makes no business sense to fail to share the profits with the employees or to skew them so grotesquely towards the top of the corporate ladder.  It sends the message that the skills and efforts of the employee are not valued and were only purchased for the bargain of their normal salary.  

Here's an idea to lower costs.  Give everyone a 15% raise.  What you'll see is a greater than 15% boost in productivity and the ejection of dead weight from your company.  Low level employees understand the revenue minus costs formula as well as any executive, and if you get them invested in generating profits then they'll do so in a way that will make your head spin.  But so long as you are taking your employees' lunch and handing it to the top suits, you shouldn't be surprised when you get mediocre results and the loss of your top talent.

Hobby Lobby and the death of all reason

Today the Supreme Court released their verdict in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby or, as people know it, the case about contraception.  The ruling came down 5-4 with all the women plus one dissenting.  The talking heads have been at it all day and I doubt that I could add anything very novel to the discussion about the politics around the case.  That said, my particular schooling is in business so there are some things I want to say about that.  First let's talk about the case.

Just the facts

Hobby Lobby, Conestoga Wood, and Mardel are each corporations that are privately owned by small families.  For brevity I will refer to Hobby Lobby from here on out, but I include all three companies when applicable.  These families have brought cases against HHS over the Affordable Care Act's mandate that large employers provide contraception to their workers.  Specifically they object to four of the 20 contraceptives that have been approved by the FDA on the basis that they can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus..

• Plan B "morning after pill" (Note the sidebar box at the top of the page)
• Ella "morning after pill"
• Two different Intra-Uterine Devices (IUDs)

According to the Mayo Clinic, Ella can prevent a fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus.  As for the IUDs, one does and one doesn't according to WebMD.  Disclaimer here:  I'm not a doctor.  Do not take what I say as definitive medical knowledge.  I just know how to use Google to find things.

So Plan B and the copper IUD prevent the egg from ever getting fertilized.  That seems like relevant information in a case about abortifacients but who needs facts in a legal case?  I can find no place where actual doctors were brought in to educate anybody about how these things work.  Just accept that two contraceptives whose only function is to prevent fertilization were lumped in as abortion drugs.  And real abortion drugs, such as RU-486, are not mandated to be covered by the Affordable Care Act.

If you really want to get your nerd on, here's an actual academic paper on emergency contraception.

Seems legit

There are particular lines from the verdict I want to call out.  Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent is becoming perhaps the mostly widely read dissent (by laymen) in history so I'll leave that alone.  I'm more interested in lines from the majority opinion.

"According to HHS ... if these merchants chose to incorporate their businesses ... they would forfeit all RFRA (and free-exercise) rights."

Yes.  Exactly this.  By definition a corporation is its own "person" in the legal sense.  To quote that link, "The process of legally declaring a corporate entity as separate from it's owners." (emphasis mine)  It is separate.  This is meant to protect the owners, but it also means that the new entity does not share any personal traits of whoever owns it at the moment.  Not heredity, nationality, opinion or religion.  This new entity is not concerned about it's own immortal soul, and can make no decisions concerning religion.  So it is right that once you incorporate a business, the business loses RFRA protections.  The owners are still protected personally, but the gap that keeps them safe from liability also separates the business from their religion.

"As we will show, Congress provided protection for people like the Hahns and Greens by employing a familiar legal fiction: It included corporations within RFRA’s definition of “persons.”

Even the majority acknowledges that considering corporations to be people is a fiction.

"And protecting the free-exercise rights of corporations like Hobby Lobby, Conestoga, and Mardel protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control those companies."

Nope.  They're two separate groups.  See above for the definition of incorporation.

“General business corporations do not, separate and apart from the actions or belief systems of their indi­vidual owners or employees, exercise religion." - Third Circuit

"All of this is true—but quite beside the point. Corporations, “separate and apart from” the human beings who own, run, and are employed by them, cannot do anything at all. " - Alito

Someone send the Third Circuit a basket of cookies.

Let's look at Alito's point.  Apart from the people who run it, the corporation is basically a stump.  When I was a boy, my great-grandmother was almost always sedated by her medications.  Other people cared for her and made necessary day-to-day decisions for her.  If one of the people who saw to her needs was Jewish, would that make my grandmother a Jew?  No, it wouldn't.  What if they were gay, would my grandmother get a hankering for girls?  No, that's idiotic.  The traits of those who act on behalf of an entity are not assumed by that entity.

"According to HHS and the dissent, these corporations are not protected by RFRA because they cannot exercise religion. Neither HHS nor the dissent, however, provides any persuasive explanation for this conclusion."

Wait... people arguing in front of the Supreme Court couldn't explain how a mental concept couldn't exercise religion?  Who did the government send, Mr. Bean?  Dorf does law?  WTF?  One more:

"The owners of the businesses have religious objections to abortion, and according to their religious beliefs the four contraceptive methods at issue are abortifacients."

See how science and reason were barred from the courtroom?  Show me in the bible where anyone discussed Plan B or copper IUDs.  Plenty of religion relies on unquestioning faith and I'm not challenging anything intangible like heaven or a soul or a deity or the divinity of certain practices.  But I am challenging the idea that uninformed opinions can be passed off as religious beliefs.  I mean opinions about things that can be explained in the here and now.  

I guess, in the face of Young Earth Creationists, that needs to be narrowed further.  These drugs and devices were invented recently, and information about how they actually work is only hidden behind the effort to find it.  Just researching this blog post I have 20 or so tabs of information open.  It is easily found.  This isn't ignorance on the part of the Greens and Hahns, it's forced negligence.

What now?

The critical problem here is that the separation between owners of corporations and their companies has now been bridged.  Under the guise of religious liberty (and isn't that always the way?) owners can now enforce whatever they want on the employees of their companies.  It doesn't even have to pass a test as a legitimate part of the religion or even a fact.  So long as the owner claims it is his/her religious view, they now have Supreme Court precedent to enforce it on their employees.

What about when the pendulum swings the other way?  When someone dies because they didn't have access to medicine or a transfusion or some other thing denied by religious edict, will the owner still enjoy the protection of the corporate structure?  Or will that protection be found meaningless in light of the transference of actions between owner and corp?  All people attached to a corporation work on behalf of that entity.  If the entity itself is working on behalf of a person, then the separation is meaningless and will be found so before a judge before too long.  This gap in liability is what separates a corporation from a sole proprietorship.  Today's ruling carries dangerous precedent for our entire approach to business structuring.

I submit that the solution to not just today's travesty but several rulings going all the way back to Citizens United is this: Update the Dictionary Act definition of "person" to not include non-biological entities.  Give those things that enjoy legal status but are not human another word.  Perhaps "entity".  And that way we could leave behind this last decade of insanity where people seriously discussed whether the company itself, instead of the people acting on its behalf, were actually capable of worship, or participation at a super-citizen level in our democracy.

Aereo shut down by SCoTUS

Today, 6/25/14, the Supreme Court released their verdict [PDF] on the trial of ABC v. Aereo in favor of ABC and other major networks.  At issue was the question of whether live television could be captured out of the air and rebroadcast on the internet for a fee.  This being exactly what Aereo was built to do.

How does television work?

There are three major sets of players in broadcast television.  The content creators are where the shows are filmed.  Disney is an easy example of a content creator between its Disney channels, ESPN and other properties.  Once the shows are created, the rights to air them are purchased by major networks.  Here we're talking about ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox.  These titans buy the exclusive rights to distribution and sell those rights to local stations around the country.  The local stations are the final player.  They raise money by selling advertising time (commercials) and using that money to pay a network for content.

What about Aereo?

The history of the Aereo case has been a little ridiculous.  Broadcast television signals have traditionally been free.  Anyone with a set of rabbit ears could watch whatever was being broadcast.  At first, Aereo simply put up a single expensive antenna and allowed subscribers to its own service to watch that stream via the internet.  After all, the broadcast was free.  And the internet is free.  So why not glue the two together for a small fee?

An early legal argument was that the people watching on the internet didn't even have their own antennae.  Long story short, Aereo now has a warehouse full of tens of thousands of tiny antennae which are nominally receiving the broadcasts.  When you subscribe to their service you are renting one of these things and getting its signal on your internet device.  I highly doubt that you aren't still watching a stream from the original antenna, but it made some lawyers happy for a while.

Legal history and Judo

The original copyright act gave the holders of a copyright the legal right to determine how their work was distributed.  When all TV was sent through the air all parties were happy with this deal.  Then something called CATV was invented where one well-placed antenna was connected via coaxial cable to hundreds of homes.  This enabled many homes to receive signals they couldn't otherwise get due to geography or other factors.  It was initially found that CATV services were "viewers" and not "performers" because they only enabled the actual viewer to get a better connection.  The Democrat controlled 94th Congress fixed that right up when they amended the Copyright act and added the Transmit Clause.  Now the rights of the copyright holder don't stop at the antenna on your roof, they stop right at your eyeballs.  Anybody or anything that forwards on a copyrighted work is a "performer", and this is where Aereo got hit.

Follow the money

Why does all this matter?  Stations pay networks "retransmission fees".  Aereo doesn't pay anyone anything.  If they prevailed in court then the whole money pyramid would have fallen apart.  Local stations might not have paid for content and instead found some free way to acquire it.  All protected works that could be captured by camera or other device would enter into the public domain without payment to or even consent of the copyright holder.  People don't pay for things they don't need to pay for, so a lot of money would have been sucked out of the whole TV industry as people got squirrely trying to find their free TV.

What I say

I have been pulling for Aereo all along the way.  I'm a huge fan of technology and innovation and thought that Aereo might have something worthwhile with their model.  If something was going to be free anyways, it should be free however I want to receive it, right?  One of my goals in writing this blog was to force myself into thinking about these things more critically.  I can understand the calls of artists and entertainment workers who say, "If someone is making money off of my work, then I want a cut."  The warm glow of appreciation doesn't pay the rent.  

Innovation and entrepreneurship are awesome.  Technology for the sake of technology though, that's usually dumb.  The "pain" Aereo is addressing is that I can't watch local New York TV while I'm in Texas.  That's not a thing I'm entitled to.  My desire to have all the things that I want is not reason enough to jeopardize the livelihoods of the hundreds of thousands of people who make TV possible.  If I put out a performance with a copyright, I feel justified in saying that nobody else can profit from it without my say so.  If you want to redistribute it for free, have at it.  But if you're going to make $97 million off of my work you're going to give me some of that.

I think there's a market for a home product that takes broadcast signals and streams them from your home computer.  Maybe Aereo will evolve that way.  As much as I hate to say it, I think I side with big business on this one.  Congress clearly defined the old Community Access Television (CATV) services as "performing" the works they were redistributing and that ruling stuck with the cable companies that followed.  Aereo is effectively one giant CATV service, and those are the rules they'll have to play by.

What everyone needs to know about macroeconomics

All politics boil down to economics.  As far as college majors go, Economics is the "why" of politics and Poli Sci is the "how".  Once you know who stands to profit from a specific thing then you can watch who lines up for or against that thing, and know who is owned by who.  So here comes a bold statement which I'll spend the rest of this post explaining.

The richest people in the country profit when the United States fails.

Finance 101: Risk, Bonds, and Interest Rates.

A bond, in financial terms, is a contract for a loan of money.  If you buy a bond from my company, it means that you will pay me (for example) $1,000 today and I will pay you that money back plus some interest in the future.  You, as an investor, need to make a decision about which company you will make this contract with.  Obviously you want the safest investment, but maybe a bigger payoff might be worth a bigger risk?  This is exactly the sort of decision investors make.  Companies will then offer interest rates on their bonds that reflect the risk of the investment in order to entice investors.  Thus...

Interest rates indicate risk.

We can all see this in our dailiy lives.  Car and home loans to risky people carry hefty interest rates.  "Insurance for anybody" places have exhorbitant rates.  It's all about risk.  

So what is the safest investment out there?  The US Treasury Bond.  The US has never defaulted on its debts and is unlikely to lose its sovereignty, so it is the global standard for financial stability.  (Regardless of what we see on TV.)  It is so stable that other financial markets are built on top of it, using the "T-Bond" rate or "Bond Rate" as the basis of their calculations.  If you have owned a credit card then you have heard about the "Prime Rate".  The Prime Rate is calculated by taking the Bond Rate and adding some number of percentage points to it.  So when the Bond Rate goes up, so does your credit card payment.

Who holds the bonds?

The fear-mongers like to tell you that China holds the majority of our bonds, and thus are some sort of "majority shareholder" in our country.  It's not true.  They do own a little bit, but most of it is owned by our own people.  When I say our own people, what I mean is corporations and financial institutions.  And who owns THEM?  Usually more financial institutions.  Repeat and repeat and eventually you'll end up with something like a hedge fund or some "bank" you've never heard of that is controlled by someone you probably have heard of.  Someone like Warren Buffet or George Soros or the Koch brothers.  In short...

The richest of the rich control most of the US Treasury Bonds on the market.

Regardless of how many layers of companies and banks we're talking about here, the rich people control the bonds.  So from here forward I'll skip the middle men and refer to them directly.

So how do they profit?

Holding a treasury bond is like treading water financially.  Having it doesn't make you rich.  Any other investment you make is going to make you money faster.  It just keeps the money you put into it safe from inflation.  Mostly.  That's meat for a different post, but for now we're just going to say that Treasury Bonds keep your wealth current for the times, but do not increase it.

What happens if that interest rate were to suddenly go up?  Those bonds could be sold for more money than they were purchased for, and the sellers would cash in very nicely.  How might that happen?  At a normal company a bad product launch or the death of the founder might cause rates to go up as the company's future is less certain than it was before.  Countries are more stable, and the US is the most stable of all.  But we're not immune.  

Just a couple of years ago we saw our elected representatives hold the country's reputation for stability hostage.  Remember that the entire world relies on us to be their rock, financially.  When our economy tanks, so does everyone else's.  It wasn't the first time that we saw a "Debt Limit" fight happen with the sitting President.  But it was the first time we got our credit rating downgraded.  (A credit rating is the score a bunch of professionals give to bonds to let investors know how risky they are.)  

Why did it go that far?  Was it really the case that the ideological differences between the Republicans and the President brought them to this impasse?  It wasn't.  While there are a few notable statesmen out there, most of our politicians reverse themselves on their ideology so often they make a Tilt-A-Whirl dizzy.  So what was it then?

Bringing it all together

If the US is seen to have an increased risk of defaulting on it's obligations, then our interest rate must go up.  That's just math.  When it goes up, the people who hold the bonds can sell them for a profit.  We're talking Trillions here, collectively.  Crazy crazy money.  Where does that money come from?  You and I.  It's like this...

You -> Loan Company (mortgage, etc) -> Bank -- (Buy)--> T-Bonds --(Sell)--> Koch Industries 

Everyone to the left of "T-Bonds" on that line gets hurt when the Bond Rate goes up.  Everyone to the right benefits.  Which side is now allowed to make unlimited donations to financial campaigns?  Both, technically. But you can see whose money is going to who by what they're trying to do to our Bond Rate.  People serve their masters.  It's always a matter of trying to help their masters profit.  Watch what people do to see who they feel their masters are.

Recursive Loop

A recursive loop is a programming mistake where a bit of code replicates itself over and over until you run out of memory.  Think of it like tribbles.  I figure every blog is going to have a post about the purpose of the blog.  What to expect, who am I, all the cocktail party details to discuss where we're going from here.  Blogging about blogging.  It's recursive by nature.  See what I did there?

Who am I?

I was born and raised in California.  I moved around a bit, but generally consider Riverside County, CA to be my home "town".  My teenage years were spent in Hemet which is where I graduated high school.  It's a pit.  Never go there unless your mission to rescue someone from living there.  I got to experience the "tech boom" of Seattle first hand.  Especially the part where tons of overqualified people desperately searched for any job they could find after the bubble burst.  In 2003 I moved to Alabama where I quickly learned to hate college football, but also where I began my college education.

I now have a BSBA in Management Information Systems (summa cum laude, baby!) and an MBA on my wall.  I have been in IT since 1997 in a variety of roles.  Business and technology are my areas of specialization and I expect to blog mostly about them.  I also play Eve Online and may share my thoughts on that.  I consider it an MMORPG with no equal out there and deserving of some serious discussion.

Where are we going? (And why am I in this handbasket?)

What I want to do here is to put my thoughts out there in a way that lets me add detail and logic in a way that just isn't possible with Facebook posts.  I'm not a journalist by nature, so I hope that this will school me to do more research on my topics than I might for a casual conversation.  I expect to address topics in managment, economics, politics, technology and gaming.  I'll also be looking into some of my interests such as alternative energy and transportation.  So this blog will wander some as it goes.  But since I expect my only readers to be friends of mine then it should be okay that they come here for my take on things and not as their main news source.

Why?

I do more than what is expected of me.  I think bigger thoughts than are required for my day job.  I am required to write code and do low level SCCM administration 8 hours a day.  I am educated to do corporate level strategy for a major corporation.  The disconnect between my capability and my actual job leaves me with tons to say and nobody to say it to.  So the overflow will land here where hopefully I can educate and be educated in return.  (This being why I named the blog what I did.)  If the feedback points me to do more posting on a certain arena maybe the blog will crystallize in that direction.  But for now it is just me trying out putting content on the web and seeing what shakes out.

Fair warning: I have opinions.  Anything I post from the political realm will probably be ranty in nature.  Our national discourse is in the toilet, and I expect to be lamenting that here in written form.  But we'll get to that later.  For now, stay with me and help me improve and I will try to turn this thing into something worth reading.