Friday, April 30, 2004

Google going public, but staying private

I read an interesting thing today. That Google's public offering prospectus indicates that the $2.7 billion or so of common stock they are offering for sale to the public will actually not give control of the company to those that buy it. Instead control will remain with those that own a different class of stock that will only be available to employees and current owners of the presently private Google Inc.

How does this work?

Well remember that a corporation issues shares to raise money and establish ownership of the company. The shareholders pay for the shares and in return literally own the company in proportion to the number of shares they hold. Normally, the ownership of stock lets the shareholders elect board members who in turn determine the CEO and how much various executives get paid. Thus although shareholders don't run the company, they technically get to decide who does.

However Google has decided, in offering its shares for sale publicly, that it doesn't want large institutional buyers and ficle street investors determining how to run its company. Although they still legally have an obligation to manage the company to enhance shareholder value, they want to be the ones to decide how that occurs and retain the ability to determine who is on the board and hence who is running the company.

They have achieved this by giving each share of stock owned by employees and the current owners ten times the voting power of shares that are going to be made available to the public. Hence the majority of voting rights will always remain tightly controlled and within "the company" as defined by employees and current owners.

If you believe in Google or are one of the employees or owners this is probably good. It gives you all the power to take $2.7 billion from public investors without any of the responsibility to do their bidding when it comes to running the company. But as far as I can see this all revolves around the enduring goodness of Google and if one day, some errant power came to control those "insider" majority voting shares, then the public owners won't have any way to do something about it.

Although this scheme is apparently not new and used by newspapers and some other companies, I believe it sets a dangerous precident of even further divorcing stock owners from the company they own stock of. If the Google manouver becomes more common place we could see a raft of publicly traded companies where the board feels complete empowerment to do as they feel with little or no worry about what investors might think.

What if, for example, the company were a chemical company and decided that the best way to make money was one that had some hideous environmentaly disasterous side-effects but, hey, to heck with it - why not? And what if the majority of common stock holders thought that was a really bad idea? Well in the Google scheme they could no longer get together and put some share holder initiative on the ballot and get it passed, they couldn't even successfully vote to fire the board. Their ownly possible recourse would be to just sell the stock - and presumably some other person with less scruples would come along an scoop it up and take the profit anyway.

Basically what Google has done just goes to show how undemocratic corporations are and how they are embarking on paths that make that even more so. Given that corporations are inextricably linked to our nations "democratic" process I think its a really, really bad idea that the actions of corporations are being removed even further from control of the public realm.

A brief history of tea-time

For the best part* of the first 18 years of my life every morning started with a cup of tea brought to me by mum, or as young English kids say "Mummy". For the first five or so of those tea drinking years it was warm, milky and had a couple of teaspoons of sugar. Which might explain why by age 10 I had more fillings than Shell has filling stations.

One of my earliest memories involved being forced to drink tea as a treatment for shock. It was right after I was dragged out of the back of our family Mini (the original Austin Mini) which Dad had handily rolled into a ditch. He never did get his license, and after that never drove a car again, sticking instead to a motorcycle that was eventually to be the cause of his death. Hence in some bizarre way a hot cup of tea is connects one of my earliest memories and my fathers untimely death some fifty years later.

I think learning to drink tea is one of those things English people do to be grown up. Your parents do it, and you want to do it to. If they'd smoked I'd probably have ended up smoking too. In this case the offer to try tea was daily until I succumbed to it, and finding it warm, milky and sweet it really wasn't that bad. After that I was a three cups-a-day kid for life. It wasn't until I went to university and after experiencing a shortage of fresh milk, that I briefly experimented with various black teas (lapsang souchong, darjeeling, gunpowder, oolong, etc. etc.) and then plumped for coffee which tasted far better black than PG Tips.

After that I was pretty much hooked on coffee and my tea drinking days were over except for trips home and to relatives who really didn't get the coffee thing. Actually I really don't know why I was drinking coffee back then because it was actually a very distant relative to what I call coffee now. It was that nasty freeze dried Nescafe stuff that was warm and black but only vaguely coffee like in smell or taste. In fact when I return to the UK I'm now very careful about what coffee I accept and often as not will go for tea rather than coffee. To be honest, the good old English cuppa is much more constant across the world and far harder to screw up than a cup of joe.

So why all this reminiscing about tea? Well it turns out in the past months since I've been spending increasing amount of time at home, that I've found I'm up to as much as one cup of tea every few days. The afternoon cuppa is almost becoming somewhat of a ritual in my life again filling the gap between the morning espresso, and evening nightcap quite nicely. I think I can blame my cousin Chris for starting this off on her last visit to the West Coast family pile, being a hardened tea-drinker herself, so long as there was something sweet on the side to go with it.

Regardless, I thought I'd share that not only is my soul enduring a tea-time of sorts, so is my body.

* Obviously not including the first two or three years, but actually quite soon after

Claim vs. Fact

Thanks to South Knox Bubba for pointing out the new database Claim vs Fact that "that charts conservatives' distortions, lies and dishonesty, and refutes them with well-documented facts." Select your favourite topic, favourite Republican deceiver, and watch the whoopers fly...

Here's a starter for ten:

Topic: Halliburton

Speaker: Cheney, Dick - Vice President

Date: 7/30/2000

Quote/Claim:
"But what I'll have to do, assuming we're successful [in the election], is divest myself, that is, sell any remaining shares that I have in the company."

Fact:
A congressional report found that Cheney still owns "more than 433,000 Halliburton stock options," including "100,000 shares at $54.50 per share, 33,333 shares at $28.125 and 300,000 shares at $39.50 per share." - CNN, 9/25/03

Now I know that options are not the same as shares, but having such a huge vested interest in the future stock price of a company does very effectively prevent one from divesting from it. To state that simply selling ones shares would achieve divestiture is massively misleading, but would we expect anything else from old duck for brains?

Thursday, April 29, 2004

Not a fake.

I thought the aforementioned label was a fake. However I quickly dug up this story that led me to the true manufacturer of the laptop case Tom Bihn. On their site is a link about the label on their products which has subsequently become known as "The Treason Tag".

Bihn is now selling a T-Shirt with the French-English care label on it, all proceeds from its sale will go to the Seattle Vet Center. Maybe I see a large Cafe bag or crimson/black ID bag in my future...

Apology for a president

A friend of mine sent me the image below. It might be a fake, but even if it is its a good and funny one. If not then its priceless.

I had to share this find. I recently purchased a high-quality computer sleeve from a small boutique manufacturer. I was checking if it could be washed. The photo is the attached tag with the washing instructions in both English and French. The English is exactly what you would expect and so is the French, for the first 6 lines. The last three lines of French are most interesting. "We are sorry that our President is an idiot. We didn't vote for him." Given recent strained relations between our two countries, it's good to see that not all Americans agree with the current administration.


Wednesday, April 28, 2004

Free at last!

I just hit the "Send" button on the email below:

April 28th 2004
Dear -----,

I regret to inform you that I have reached a point where I feel it would be mutually beneficial for me to leave ------ ahead of schedule.

Therefore, in accordance with Section C of my severance agreement, I am informing you that I wish to leave ------ before the June 11th termination date. With the stated two weeks notice period I believe my last day of employment will be Tuesday May 11th.

I apologize for the inconvenience of breaking this news while you are still out of the country, but I hope I can work with ----- to achieve a smooth transfer of any remaining work I have outstanding.

Blog Gently

It's a sign of the times when you can sit at work (which is the desk at the end of your bed), compose an email, send it to your boss (who's somewhere in Europe) and terminate almost five years of employment. All this without so much as a look in the eye, hand shake and without even putting pen to paper. Will anyone care about this so virtual of corporation-employee breakups? Well of course not. My termination was already pre-ordained to happen on June 11th anyway, and I've already been written off as a "restructuring expense" in this quarters financials, and I was notably absent from any invite to the company meeting today so really, why bother sticking around any longer?

What now?

Well if all goes according to plan, on May 11th I'll get my severance check and become "frictionally unemployed". If things go really well I may even fall out of the labor force all together and become a "discouraged worker", even though in reality I'll be a "putting my feet up worker". Putting my feet up activities will include some travel, some sailing, maybe even snowboarding in Chile, tons of reading, a trip to the gym once in a while, some volunteer work and who knows what else? When you're no longer chained to a corporate money making machine the world is your oyster.

Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Make your vote count - use your wallet!

Thanks to LDTT reader Jimmy for pointing out that for many voters in the USA the best way to make your vote count in November is often just to donate as much money as you can. This is thanks to the antiquated and undemocratic institution known as the electoral college. That's the reason that in 2000 Bush still managed to swing the Presidency inspite of losing the popular vote by over 500,000 votes.

Of course some (including me) might also say that it was actually one vote in the the Supreme Court that did it since ultimately, it was them who had a say in whether the votes should be completely re-counted in Florida. But really, if it wasn't for the electoral college system the few hundred disputed votes in Florida would have been irrelevant, even the 40,000 or so mostly democratic voting citizens illegally struck from the register by Florida would have been irrelevant. Indeed the electoral college system brings up scads of questions about the legitimacy of America dictating what is freedom and democracy when we still have such an anachronistic system selecting our Presidents.

Originally the electoral college system was designed as a compromize between the various States to ensure that a President couldn't skip over the small less densely populated states and just campaign in the places where big cities were located. Basically they wanted to ensure that large rural areas still had some say and weren't forced to abide by the wishes of a few small big city States. In theory the electoral college for a State has the ability to cast its votes in anyway it pleases, even proportionately to the number of democrat and republican votes cast in that state. In reality few ever do, most noticeably in Florida 2000 where the votes were so closely split between Bush and Gore that it was basically who won was hidden by the margin of error of the antiquated punch card voting system used.

So, thanks to the electoral college system we actually get the complete opposite of the phenomenom it was designed to prevent. Candidates expend vitually all their resources campaigning in less densely populated and rural swing states. California and other solidly democratic states will receive scare attention from the Presidential campaign since they are assumed to be a slam dunk for the DNC. That means many voters in such States end up feeling disenfranchised and disinclined to vote at all. Thus the best way to make your vote count in a non-swing state is to reach for your pocket book and donate to your party, candidate or PAC of choice and ensure that the swing states receive the message from your candidate's of choice. Personally I loathe this idea that selecting a President in this country all comes down to money but those are the ground rules that have been forced on the citizenry by the super-citizens that prey on us - the Corporations. Without their massively undemocratic influence on our political system and governments such things might not actually be necessary.

And do you know what is even more bizarre? I as a non-citizen can donate to a PAC like MoveOn and help them pay for issue adds that will help influence the Presidential selection. Hence even I, non-voter - can in some way have my vote. Of course as a resident, a tax payer to Federal, State, and local governments, and someone who can be drafted to defend the United States see no reason why I shouldn't be able to. In fact I'd go further in saying I believe I should be able to actually vote otherwise its just taxation without representation.

In the mean time I suggest all you right thinking Anybody But Bush Again voters in places like California consider trotting over to MoveOn PAC and making donations to some of their many issue ad campaigns. While you're at it you can go watch Justice Is Duck Blind about Cheney and the Supreme Court. Seeing Bush as a dog fetching rabbits may be funny, but the reality is its the points about Cheney and Scalia are all sickeningly true, but according to Scalia, irrelevant to whether he is impartial to judging Cheney.

Junk coming out day

When I go to Best Buy * or Ikea I'm always amazed at the tons of big boxes pouring out the door, happy shoppers in tow. I wonder just where all this stuff goes and how it is that this country hasn't sunk into the Earth's crust by now. Well the flip side of this insane demand for new stuff is a massive supply of old stuff that we now deem obsolete. This old stuff is sometimes sitting in the trash, and on its way to the trash pile or already there, buried under tons of other trash. Apparently the Japanese are the best at this game, they have the highest turn over of "white goods" and other high price consumer goods in the world. An 18-month dishwasher is not just obsolete, its pre-historic, pre-cambrian, pre-pared to be thrown in the dumpster. Or the junk that is tomorrows trash might and hence demand for new stuff is probably just be sitting in your closet, attic, basement, garage, garden shed or even the car...

I've read a couple of interesting tales of people dealing with their junk and how liberating it is to deal with it and how surprising it is there is just so much. OVer at South Knox Bubba you can read of boxes that were moved five times and never opened, a ton of stuff hauled to the dump, and a garage sale that raised over $500 but probably cost several thousand to hold in time and effort. Over at SchmoozeLetter you can read about a home full of towering piles of books, garments, and other random assorted stuff that are no sooner tidied up than replaced by more stuff...

If you watch a movie like Baraka, or Powaqqatsi you'll see scenes of the desperately pour laboring over a trash pile looking for tiny scraps of anything useful. Whenever the issue of throwing stuff out comes along I'm always wondering, just how do I get my junk into their hands where it would do most good. Having just replaced a ten year old microwave that was falling apart but otherwise fully functional, and being about to replace a dishwasher that is dying but still has a few months or even years of use (with some servicing), I really hope they aren't hauled away to be buried in the ground somewhere. What a waste.

* To be honest yes I do buy stuff there sometimes, but its mostly to browse, or to get something I need today rather than have delivered

Reverse-mullet economics

Thanks to GuvWurld for pointing out three interesting articles on the US Economy and its continuing deficit, blissful understatement of inflation, and the global impact of a sinking dollar.

In fact a lot of this information comes from those frightfully helpful folks over at the IMF and their monthly report on the state of the worlds economy. For April they devote a half of Chapter 2 of their report to Americas problems caused by its deficit. They really don't mince their words when talking about how bad it is right now:

The budget turnaround from FY2000-04 as a ratio to GDP is the fastest in the past fifty years and nearly double the previous worst four-year setback since the Korean War.

Indeed it was awfully nice of them critique the Bush administrations claims that the deficit will soon be halved by doing basically nothing:

In the five years after 2004 the U.S. Administration projects that the deficit will fall to roughly half its FY2004 level (Figure 2.2). This projected decline is predicated on a series of somewhat optimistic assumptions about government operations, including a comeback in revenue buoyancies, no reform of the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT)-which is neither indexed for inflation nor adjusted to compensate for the recent tax cuts and will affect a growing number of people - no costs to U.S. taxpayers of peacekeeping operations in Iraq beyond FY2004, and a strict containment of non-defense and nonhomeland- security-related spending in the coming years. Clearly, if these assumptions did not materialize, the fiscal outlook would turn out to be considerably worse.

Shocker. Indeed even in the scenario where the deficit is reduced by 50% by 2009 it still yields a 2.55% reduction in global economic output. With no reduction (which is clearly what the IMF thinks current Bush policies will yield) it would be a 4.5% reduction in global economic output. Basically that means Bush is persuing reverse-mullet economics. A mullet is a style of haircut also know as "business at front, party at the rear". So reverse-mullet economics puts the party at the front and conservative times at the rear. Hence the definition is:

Reverse-mullet economics: party at the Whitehouse, poverty at the back.

Monday, April 26, 2004

Mmmmm global warming...

Well, its April and was 88 degrees outside today (Fahrenheit of course!), at 11pm its now 70 degrees and still shorts and T-shirt weather. Kind of reminds me of some days of my youth spent in Florida, except without the humidity and yes, the sea is never as cold in Florida at any time of the year as it is around here at the warmest. Still it makes me glad that the summer in San Francisco is actually colder than spring and fall otherwise this place might actually be too hot and sunny.

Okay, so many places have discovered the wonder of air conditioning, but for me, I think its just great that I can live here with virtually no energy expended keeping it cooler in summer and hotter in winter. Yeah, yeah, there's that pesky problem that all our water has to be brought down from the mountains, and most of the food is grown miles away in the central and other valleys of California. But really, virtual energy independence for a simple thing like getting the temperature right is a wonderful thing.

Search engines gone wild

Some of you may have noticed way down on the left hand side there is a web counter... Basically I'm experimenting with alternative ways of gathering statisitcs for this site. I started fretting about the effects of various unknown robots bumping up the figures, and also the problem of what to do about people accesing the content via RSS news aggregators which as best I can tell will really screw up or squew most statistics.

One side effect of this was while monitoring my stats at StatCounter I noticed someone had come to The Long Dark Tea-Time having used Google's shopping search engine Froogle. It turns out that someone typed in "Cheap sand and dirt in Boise" and low and behold, Froogle lists me #2 as selling the aforementioned for $1000. Apparently Froogle does more than just list prices for merchants, it actually extracts prices and products from ordinary web pages. No, I'm not selling sand and dirt and $1000 isn't cheap either. However I did have a blog entry that mentioned sand and dirt, and another that mentioned "$1000" in relation to air-bag prices.

I'd say this is a prime example of search engines gone wild. Try it and see.

I, Inventor (Part #1)

The title is not a reference to the book "I, Claudius" by Robert Graves which I haven't read. It is a reference to the book "I, Robot" by Issac Asimov which I have and I note is being made into a movie starring Will Smith. It is the second of his books to be made into a major Hollywood movie, and even though "Bicentenial Man" with Robin Williams wasn't a huge hit, it does show that Hollywood is quite intent to plunder the works of early sci-fi writers (like Phil K. Dick) to come up with a least semi-plausible plots for their special effects extravaganzas.

Anyway, back to the title...

Once in a while, like many people, I come up with at least semi-plausible ideas for inventions. Like most people I mentally note them down and then promptly forget about it. After all, very few people have the time, money or inclination to follow through with crazy inventions. I've seen some of my ideas appear in the real world, most recently the electronic music stand, now being sold by Free Hand Systems. That doesn't mean I'm a genius inventor, probably the things I've thought of were just plain obvious and were on the tips of many peoples tongues (or the cerebral equivalent). Anyway I have decided, since I'm not going to actually implement any of these ideas, then why not just share them and perhaps hasten their realization in the real world by someone with the means too.

So today's invention is: Vacu-Milk.

Vacu-Milk is the realization that its not just wine that goes bad quickly. Yes milk will keep in the fridge for perhaps a week once opened, but how many of you bachelors and infrequent shoppers find that one week just doesn't cut it? How many cups of coffee and bowls of cereal have been spoiled by that unexpected lumpy pour?

This is actually an evolution of an idea I had after clearing out my kitchen cabinet that was filled with many jars of spices and finding quite a few of them had gone bad. Okay, one of them was quite possible ten years old (!!!) but I figured these little glass jars would be perfect to put a rubber Vacuvin wine saver stopper on and pump out the air from them.

Yes, Vacuvin probably has a nifty patent on their product (although there are quite a few similar imitators), but I figured what if I don't clone their idea, what if I just sell a little plastic adapter that fits over the top of any existing glass or rigid plastic bottle at one end, and at the other has a wine bottle sized hole that an existing Vacuvin stopper will fit into. Then anyone who already owns a wine saver (Vacuvin or otherwise) can just use their existing pump and stoppers to save spices. This is much more convenient than buying one of those home vacuum sealing kits that are not only expensive, but are big, require electricity and only work with certain types of jars.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that people probably don't care enough about spices to bother doing this. But today I realized that for milk and other volatile fridge liquids they probably do. Yes, you could just poor your milk from the carton into a wine bottle - but wine bottles are too tall for many fridges, don't hold a lot of liquid and are a pain to clean. So, what you sell is a large glass bottle that's got a wide neck for easy pouring and cleaning, but has a sealing lid that includes a wine bottle sized hole to insert your Vacuvin stopper. Put on the lid, insert stopper, pump away and you're done. Kept in this way milk, cream and other liquids should last almost as long as the advertised shelf life.

Saturday, April 24, 2004

Dot Com Vol 1

"There is a theory which states that if anyone discovers just exactly what the universe is for and why we are here, that it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. Then there is a theory which states that this has already happened." Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

The reason I open this entry with a quote from Douglas Adams is because I was reminded the other day how, just as I'm exiting the very long and tenuous tail end of that other bizarre and inexplicable event "The Dot Com Era", I find myself encountering the very nebulous and leading edge of the next big thing.

Except that for all intents and purposes the next big thing shows all the signs of being just another effort re-invent the advertising wheel, only (to quote Adams again)

"This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything."

Oy!

After all "Dot Com Vol 1" was basically founded on the idea that there was this very cheap and easy mechanism to put eyeballs in front of advertisments. This meant that all of a sudden advertising could be used to distribute, exploit and most importantly sell almost anything, to almost anyone, anywhere in the world. What followed had the characteristics of an hyperinflationary era of the value of advertising and the Internet as real things with real value.

Like money, both advertising and the Internet don't have any intrinsic value on their own. You can't keep the rain off your head with the Internet and you can't eat advertising for breakfast. No, its the information on the Internet that gives it actual value, and its the medium that puts advertising in front of eyeballs with the ability to consume that give it value. As such they appear to be perfect symbiotic partners. But it took a while for anyone to put some serious thought to the question: "If an adverts plays on the Internet and nobody buys, does it create value?". Inspite of all the red ink on balance sheets, for the longest time the perception was that the whole dot com era was really, genuinely, honest to Greenspan, creating value. Unfortunately all that value was based on investment, and investment attracting more investment, for all intents and purposes, a classic pyramid scheme.

Now what of "Dot Com Vol 2"?

... to be continued

Monday, April 19, 2004

How to bake goods and influence people

In 1978 the Supreme Court threw out a Massachusetts law that prohibited corporations from spending money to influence legislation unrelated to their business. The arguement used was that spending money is equivalent to free speech and hence limiting a corporations right to spend money is equivalent to limiting its right to free speech. In throwing out the law the Supreme Court implicitly upheld the notion that corporations are people, are protected by the 14th amendment and hence have the right to free speech. Since then corporations have been spending, spending, spending and legislation has been changing, changing, changing.

In an effort to redress the balance the MovenOn political action committee held a "Bake Bush out of the Whitehouse" event this weekend. Volunteers baked goods and sold them, donating the proceeds to the MoveOn PAC which is financing various issue ads to help make the case against Bush being re-elected. This was a fine example of showing that baking is free speech and should be protected by the constitution. Here's what my better half baked (icing by yours truly)

Bush Cakes

Your death will be televised

Early this morning I was dimly aware of a helicopter. Then it got louder, and louder, and louder. Finally I got up an looked out of the skylight at the end of the end, yup sure enough there's a helicopter hovering over our building. I turn on the TV to see what's up, expecting that home desperado is holed up in the hood and the police are waiting to nab him. However all they are showing is traffic on the freeway.

So at 6:30am I get dressed and go to the roof. To my surprise there are no less than four helicopters within a few hundred yards of my building hovering at about 500ft, and all pointed towards the freeway. And there they stayed. One for each of Channels 2, 4, 5 and 7 showing all the TV viewers the same view of the freeway with a big truck, a smashed up car and a huge tailback all the way to the Bay Bridge. I went back to bed and tried to sleep, but it was another hour before they finally buzzed off to somewhere else.

It turns out the crash involved a fatality and some poor person died in that car. Apart from the noise and aggravation caused by four helicopters sitting over a residential neighborhood I ask you, why does it require four helicopters to televise a fatal accident? While rubber-necking ourselves we are always quick to chastise the other people doing it too, we rubber neck the rubber neckers. So why does TV encourage it with four helicopters rubber necking for the other several million Bay Area viewers who didn't happen to be passing by?

Why is it that society is so fascinated by carnage on our roads and yet feels no real urge to do something about the 40,000 or so people who die on our roads each year? I think its the very disconnect with reality that TV introduces, so it has become an accepted fact that people will always die on our roads each day. They will just become inconvenient impacts on our transit times, economic blips on the efficiency of cars; and yes, in some bizarre final act of your participation in society, if you die on the freeway your death will be televised.

Unemployment for dummies

There is an often cited figure that since taking power Bush has presided over the loss of 3 million jobs. With the last two published figures for unemployment being better than analysts expect I can see El Shrubo jumping up and down for joy that the figure is now significantly less than 3 million. However, since I happen to be studying economics right now I was over at the Government Printing Office site browsing some economic indicators. Low and behold looking at the March figures I noticed the following interesting facts (totals in thousands)...

Date2000March 2004
Civilian noninstitutional population212,577222,550
Civilian labor force142,583 146,650
Civilian employment136,891138,298
Unemployment5,6928,352
Not in labor force69,99475,900
Not in labor force %32.934.1
Unemployment %4.05.7

Why so interesting? Well this represents the change in employment between 2000 when Bush entered the Whitehouse and today. What we see is that the number of people unemployed has increased from 5.69 million to 8.35 million, yes thats 2.66 million more... However much worse than that is the number not in labor force which has zoomed from 70 million to 75.9 million, which is another 5.9 million.

So, what does "not in labor force" mean? Well basically it means the number of people who, when the phone rang and they were asked "Did you work last month" said "No" and when asked "Did you look for a job last month?" also said "No". These people are eligible to work but didn't bother to look for work, they are also known as discouraged workers. Now at the end of the Clinton era this represented 32.9% of the "noninstitutional population". At the end of the Bush era (we hope) it now represents 34.1% of the population. So basically what we've seen is that while unemployment is 2.7 million higher than before Bush, the number of disgruntled workers has skyrocketed 5.9 million.

Yes, its true that the civilian population has increased by ten million (from 212.6 million to 222.6 million) since Bush started, however that's just a growth in population caused by immigration, more babies, fewer people retiring etc. etc. Normally those people just add consumers to the big economic machine and more consumers means more consumption, and more consumption creates more production, which means more jobs, which means the unemployment rate doesn't increase. However you should be able to see that under Bush this didn't happen. The increase in population went largely straight into the "not in labor force" category largely because increases in production occured without hiring more people, quite the contrary actually - people were laid off, inventories were plundered, and manfacturing jobs went overseas. So what happened was unemployment went from a record low of 4.0% to the current figure of 5.7%, and the discouraged workers "not in labor force" went from 32.9% to 34.1%. Thus a total of 2.9% more of the population are now either unemployed or just plain not looking for a job any more.

Why do I bother mentioning this? Well according to my economics teacher, since 1940-something statistically, if unemployment is decreasing mid-year before the presidential election, then the encumbant (or presumably the encumbant party) will be re-elected. Right now unemployment is decreasing - people are finding jobs - so I'm really not happy to hear my teacher say something like that.

But the fly in the ointment for Bush is that once people starting realising there are some jobs out there at last, all those "discouraged workers" start thinking about finding a job too. So off they jolly well go and start looking for one and we all know its much easier to look for a job than actually find one. Right now jobs mostly find you, not the other way around. Which means come the end of the month when the phone rings and the Bureau of Labor statistics asks "Did you look for a job this month?" they'll have to say "Yes" and bingo, they are no longer counted as "discouraged" but are instead now part of the "unemployed" group, hence the unemployment rate goes up!

Note, these figures are quite different from the number of people actually claiming unemployment benefits which is not really useful at all except to measure recent job loss and how many people still have benefit payments left to spend. For the unemployment rate all that really matters is whether someone is eligible to work (noninstitutionalized), whether they are working, and whether they looked for work. So despite the fact that unemployment is currently decreasing I still have some hope that by the middle of the year all those discouraged workers will rush out to look for jobs and manage to temporarily screw up Bush's hopes to have the unemployment rate decreasing. Remember someone looking for a job and not finding one is going to be as unhappy as someone who hasn't bothered looking for one at all because the impact of failure and rejection on ones morale is generally quite negative. If that other 1.2% of discouraged workers comes out of their fallout shelters thinking the era of fear, uncertainty and doubt is over that will actually cause the unemployment rate to skyrocket into the 6% zone and beyond.

Fingers crossed...

Sunday, April 18, 2004

Shameless self-promotion

In a fit of shameless self-promotion I would like to announce a sister blog for the long dark tea-time. The new blog is called "The Long Dark Tech-time of the Soul" and will focus on my trials and tribulations with techonlogy and how no matter what brave new world is just around the corner, it always fails to live up to expectations.

The birth of tech-time will allow me to dedicate tea-time to non-technological issues and wax lyrical about my technology woes elsewhere. This seemed appropriate as according to most blog taxonomies the long dark tea-time is firmly in the "political" category. If technology and politics collide then I shall probably post in the tea-time.

Both blogs have Atom compatible XML feeds which you can read with a number of Atom, RSS and RDF news aggregators, I encourage you to give one a whirl as they can save you a lot of time.

Saturday, April 17, 2004

Good Lawd! It's just raining high CARB stories today...

A quote from David Rubenstein, co-founder and Managing Director of The Carlyle Group, made at a speech to the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association:

But when we were putting the board together, somebody [Fred Malek] came to me and said, look there is a guy who would like to be on the board. He's kind of down on his luck a bit. Needs a job. Needs a board position. Needs some board positions. Could you put him on the board? Pay him a salary and he'll be a good board member and be a loyal vote for the management and so forth.

I said well we're not usually in that business. But okay, let me meet the guy. I met the guy. I said I don't think he adds that much value. We'll put him on the board because - you know - we'll do a favor for this guy; he's done a favor for us.

We put him on the board and [he] spent three years. Came to all the meetings. Told a lot of jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of said to him, after about three years - you know, I'm not sure this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else. Because I don't think you're adding that much value to the board. You don't know that much about the company.

He said, well I think I'm getting out of this business anyway. And I don't really like it that much. So I'm probably going to resign from the board.

And I said, thanks - didn't think I'd ever see him again. His name is George W. Bush. He became President of the United States. So you know if you said to me, name 25 million people who would maybe be President of the United States, he wouldn't have been in that category. So you never know. Anyway, I haven't been invited to the White House for any things.

Courtesy of "Unfogged"

Friday, April 16, 2004

A no CARB diet in the future for Powell?

Thanks to my friends over at Chicken Or Beef I now know the true meaning of a No CARB diet. That's right kids, its means no Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld or Bush. Somehow I have a feeling that when Woodward's new book "Plan of Attack" hits the streets Powell may be heading for a career involving a no CARB diet, if so then luck old him.

Why?

Well apparently according to Woodward Powell and Cheney are "barely on speaking terms" and "Powell believed Cheney took ambiguous intelligence and treated it as fact." Furthermore "Powell felt Cheney and his allies -- his chief aide, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith and what Powell called Feith's 'Gestapo' office -- had established what amounted to a separate government,"

Sounds too good to be true? But wait, there's more...

Woodward also interviewed Bush Junior by name, junior by nature. According to Woodward Bush said "he prayed for divine guidance in launching the war.... I am prepared to risk my presidency to do what I think is right".

Okay, so what you are saying is that you prayed to God and because he didn't intervene it must be God's hand guiding you on the path of the righteous man? Okay, I think that romoving "Under God" from the "Pledge of Allegiance" is clearly the least of our worries.

But wait there's more...

Woodward says:
"Bush hoped to leave a record that "will enable other leaders, if they feel like they have to go to war, to spare innocent citizens and their lives."
I see so he's teaching us by counter example right? Well at least no I hope we've all learned that probably the best way to spare innocent citizens and their lives might actually be not to go to war in the first place. And Bush told Woodward:
"But the news of this, in my judgment, the big news out of this isn't how George W. makes decisions ... To me the big news is America has changed how you fight and win war, and therefore makes it easier to keep the peace in the long run. And that's the historical significance of this book, as far as I'm concerned."

I see so you think "America has changed how you fight and win war..." That's very interesting George. Now tell me about your father...

Well, I think these quotes tell us just about all we need to know about how out of touch the CARBs in the Whitehouse are. Colin Powell, I've been on a no-carb diet and I can thoroughily recommend it and afterwards, there's probably plenty of room for you over in the DNC if you'd care to sign up...

Remember kids, just say no to CARBs.

Quotes courtesy of Reuters

Thursday, April 15, 2004

Harry Shearer on Bush

A reader forwarded me this comment by Harry Shearer that is definitely worth passing along:

Saddam Hussein was quietly moved to Qatar where he continues to be interrogated by intelligence officials. He remains uncooperative and is providing very little information. He appears not to know much of what was really going on in the country because he was surrounded by sycophants....

Good thing we don't have a president like that!

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

The Corporation - Part 2

No, there isn't a sequel for "The Corporation" already, its just an update on the previous entry from me as tonight I was able to see a pre-release screening of the documentary. I have to say after a slightly shaky start it, in my opinion it quickly turned into a very definitive and important work. In fact I would put this up there with Manufacturing Consent as a must see movie for changing the way you think about the world around you. The history of corporations and corporate personhood are actually covered quite quickly, which is just as well as although fascinating, they don't make for a high impact viewing experience. Which left the bulk of the running time (which must have been about two hours) for a very wide ranging and at times, in depth, review of all aspects of corporations and how they impact your day to day life. In fact not just your life, but your future, your children's future and everyone in the worlds life and future - whether you realize it or not.

Filmed in a very similar style to Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" (hardly surprising since Achbar was a co-director of MC), it draws on a lot of historical footage, some contemporary images, and a great deal of interviews with some leading acolytes of philosophical, sociological and economic thinking including Noam Chomsky, Milton Friedman, Howard Zinn, and yes that pain in the ass troublemaker, Michael Moore. Even more surprising is they actually capture a great number of captains of industry and people from the business world talking candidly about some very surprising things. Like the former CEOs of Shell, and Goodyear talking about environmental policies, or a woman who took great pride in describing how important to selling kids products it is to make the kids nag their parents and how her company devises advertising that encourages kids to do just that. Or the Wall Street commodities trader saying how probably every trader on the streets first thought after hearing about 9/11 was "How much did the price of gold go up?" Or the two investigative reporters for Fox who dug up the huge story about how Monsanto lied about the harmful effects of rBST in milk, only to find that Fox after being threatened by Monsanto then tried to kill the story, then tried to fire them, then tried to bribe them to keep quiet, and then forced them to edure 8 months of 86 edits at the hands of a lawyer before showing it on TV.

The stories just go on and on. Individually you can write them off as just progressive scare mongoring. Together, as a lengthy and homogeneous work they have a much greater effect and really paint a quite depressing and at times shocking story of life out of balance with money. One in which unelected corporations are increasingly asserting their role as the true arbiters of what is right and wrong for us, their captive consumers and workers. Ultimately, it is suggested, they want to own ever last square inch of earth, sea and sky and let only the free market economy choose what is good and bad for humanity. This means take governments out of the picture and replace them with unelected trade organizations that will be final arbiter of power. Some very serious examples of how this is already going badly wrong in many countries. From sweatshops in Indonesia, to water riots in Bolivia, you see it all from the other perspective - the unincorporated working masses.

Finally we are given positive examples of how people can make a difference. For example Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, the worlds largest manufacturer of carpets who had an epifany and realized that the entire first industrial revolution is just a giant Flugtag escapade over a cliff. Like the gungho Flugtag pilot we think we are flying i.e. we think we are growing, we think we are progressing and really getting somewhere. In reality we are just plundering in a true tyranny against future generations and the ground is rushing up to meeting us real, real fast now and the painful, messy landing is dead ahead. Addressing a meeting of business leaders Anderson pointedly says, "Do I know you well enough to greet you as my fellow plunderers?".

In the end if you walk into "The Corporation" having at least an inkling that not everything is right in the world (and who doesn't), then you may find this an enlightening experience, if not the epiphany you have been waiting for to walk out and feel that not only that you can make a difference, but that you must make a difference. Because we need everyone - people and businesses to pull together and help us avoid that splash landing at the bottom of the cliff formerly known as economic progress.

The Corporation - the next Bowling for Columbine

You heard it hear first, watch out for "The Corporation" a documentary from Zeitgeist Films coming soon to select theaters.

In this complex, exhaustive and highly entertaining documentary, Mark Achbar, co-director of the influential and inventive MANUFACTURING CONSENT: NOAM CHOMSKY AND THE MEDIA, teams up with co-director Jennifer Abbott and writer Joel Bakan to examine the far-reaching repercussions of the corporation's increasing preeminence. Based on Bakan's book THE CORPORATION: THE PATHOLOGICAL PURSUIT OF PROFIT AND POWER, the film is a timely, critical inquiry that invites CEOs, whistle-blowers, brokers, gurus, spies, players, pawns and pundits on a graphic and engaging quest to reveal the corporation's inner workings, curious history, controversial impacts and possible futures. Featuring illuminating interviews with Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn and many others, THE CORPORATION charts the spectacular rise of an institution aimed at achieving specific economic goals as it also recounts victories against this apparently invincible force.
Watch the trailer, clips from the movie or see the movie itself in theaters. See the schedule of performances for details.

FBI to Ashcroft: this is a shovel - you dig

It shouldn't be a surprise to find Ashcroft pointing his finger-o-blame at the FBI and Clinton for the 9/11 attacks. I mean I didn't honestly believe that a current Bush sycophant would stand up and take some blame, admit guilt, confess to responsibility or even just plain apologize. No of course not, in fact we should all just sit down and pray how lucky we are to be living under the perfect government. The one that never makes any mistakes, and hell no way would ever need to apologize for anything and thank you God for every day showing them the (corporate) road to perfection (for it is paved with gold, and riches).

However... it appears that the FBI really didn't like Ashcroft making a scape goat of them. You see the FBI dates back further than Bush, Clinton, Bush Senior or any of those punk-ass fly-by-night career politicians. Now Bush is on the scene with his department of homeland this, and M15 style department of spying-on-you-homeland-insurgents that, so naturally they feel a bit threatened, unloved and plain just pissed off. So former FBI chief Freeh said:

"intelligence services were aware of the danger that a terrorist might use a hijacked plane as a weapon. Steps were taken to defend the White House as well as special events at home and abroad, such as the 2000 Olympic Games and meetings of world leaders, against such a threat but nothing was done to protect the country at large.
So might that explain why government officials were avoiding regular airlines just before 9/11? And Pickard, FBI Director at the time of 9/11 said he had:
"briefed Ashcroft on terrorist threats in late June and July 2001 but the attorney general was not interested. After two such briefings, the attorney general told him he did not want to hear this information anymore"

All indications are the heat is definitely on and I can't say I'm upset. So John Ashcroft, Mr "I know the difference between enforcing the law and making it", here's the shovel - you dig?


One shovel for me please!

Monday, April 12, 2004

Plane speaking

When I was a kid I played this game on my Atari that was a simulation of being an air traffic controller. You got to direct planes for some pretty complicated scenarios, it even used the 4-bit audio to do speech synthesis so you could click on a plane and hear the pilot say something like "this is flight six nine one at four thousand feet heading two seven zero". Once in a while Concorde would come in at double speed or maybe a plane low on fuel that had to land immediately. The Chicago graveyard shift was the worst scenario, I crashed a lot of planes on that one.

Anyway, now you can see just how packed the skies over you really are thanks to Passur Airport Monitor. For instance how about seeing (with a 10 minute delay for security) all the planes overhead in an 80 mile radius from San Jose, or Los Angeles. Be patient it takes a little while to load the applet and fill the skies with data but once its there, cripes CJ that's a lot of planes! Click on an individual one to find out its flight number, plane type and altitude. Other airports are monitored and a list is available at Passur's site.

Friday, April 09, 2004

SNAFU, but why did anyone expect anything else?

It behooves me to say something about what is going on in Iraq. I've been biting my tongue for some time now because I really didn't want to sound like I'm saying "I told you so" when people are dying out there. Of course they've been dying ever since day one when Bush pressed the big red button labeled "Blood for Spoil" (yes, I did mean to say spoil and not oil). Even after Bush announced major combat operations were over I have been at pains to point out that an Iraq that enjoys even average American levels of criminal activity would see a massive increase in crime compared to its pre-war levels. That was based on the assumption that Iraqis are no less lawless than the rest of us freedom loving westerners.

What has really pushed me to say something was the experience of watching the video from Fallujah where young kids and men gleefully look on, cheering and shouting as burned remains are dragged through the streets, mutilated and then strung up in some gory spectacle reminicent of a medieval torture session. This was clearly not some small faction of insurgents, this was a ugly outpouring of hate, anger, resentment and fear from ordinary people in the streets. Indeed it looked to me exactly like what you'd see if some other country had rolled its forces into the heartland of America and tried to suppress and control the entire country. Think about inner city riots that have occured across the rest of the world and how quickly they can drag in a huge section of the population to engage in opportunistic looting, violence and a rampage of mindless destruction. Under such extreme duress of a year of occupation why should Iraqis act any differently?

Using the same ratio of troops per capita as exists in Iraq think about 1.5 million armed troops trying to control the USA... If only 10% of Americans were unhappy and reached under their bed and pulled out a hand gun, shotgun, rifle or something more devastating, that would be 30 million people with an axe to grind and the invaders would be outnumbered 20 to 1. Now think about Iraq, a heavily armed country that post-invasion was left with unguarded stock piles of arms and ammunition. Just think about how much havoc 10% or even 1% of the population can cause if they so desire.

So given that Iraq consists of three factions with very long histories of not getting along together, just why did anyone at the Whitehouse ever think that they, of all people could unite this country in anything other than opposition of enforced "freedom" American style? I really don't know and clearly Bush didn't know what the hell he was doing either. He wont admit he made a huge mistake in not only starting this war, but also his execution of the "post-war"* operations, and even if he did it may be way too late to correct it**.

Most people who suggest a strategy (other than going on vacation and forgetting about it) seem to believe that the correct thing to do is a massive intensification of the number of troops on the ground combined with preparing the American public for many, many times the number of casualties that have occurred so far. Just looking at simple numbers it seems clear that you'll need two, five even ten times the number of troops to really "hammer home" the freedom message. That would require commitment, money and forces from all over the world to pull off - something that seems unlikely to happen at this stage.

If it doesn't then my prediction is that Bush will go ahead with his hand off of power to Iraqis. After that resistance to the invading troops will rapidly spread to include into faction against faction fighting. Before we know it US casualties will be dozens per day, every day. America will eventually pull out blaming the Iraqi insurgents, terrorists, and freedom-haters for their failure. Iraq will enter a phase of bloody civil war with massive civilian casualties and possibly genocide. They'll end up with either "war lords" in control of various regions like in Afghanistan, or the entire country yet again under control of another dictator like Saddam. Hopefully by then America will once again be free of people who want to meddle in the internal affairs of foreign countries, at least for another thirty years or however long it takes for people to forget and for history to repeat itself (again).

* In quotes because as far as I'm concerned the war never ended, this is just the delayed street-to-street fighting phase that the military never wanted to fight

** As if one can correct the thousands of deaths and countless billions of dollars expended on mass destruction of Iraqi infrastructure

Musical interlude: tunes for tea-time

I was fortunate to discover Epitonic today. Collecting together free, full length, high quality tracks of commercially available music, Epitonic provides hours of musical listening and browsing pleasure. Samples are organized by genre from drum and bass to contemporary classical composers, and has quite a wide range of samples for each. Use it to browse and discover new artists or just exploit the huge library of free content - you can create your own collections and then stream them to your player, or just download tracks and play them later.

Epitonic is a good complement to Magnatunes that sells content licensed to Magnatunes by independent artists. In a two fingered gesture to the mainstream music industry Magnatunes brands itself as "we are not evil", I have to say I agree.

Thursday, April 08, 2004

Comic relief: a guest entry by John Kerry

I noticed President Bush is taking some days off down in Crawford, Texas, I'm told when he takes days off that he totally relaxes. He doesn't watch television. He doesn't read the newspapers. He doesn't make long-term plans. He doesn't worry about the economy.

I thought about that for a moment and I said "Sounds to me like it's just like life in Washington".

An open letter to Arianna Huffington

Dear Arianna,

While you were running for governor you told us that if elected didn't matter if the senate worked with you, because you'd start ballot initiatives to get the changes you wanted and let the people decide. Indeed you told us you'd do this even if you weren't elected. So what happened? I know you've been busy on your book Fanatics and Fools but hopefully you can soon find some time to continue the reforms you had planned for California because goodness knows, Arnie is not doing it for you.

If you pick up the San Francisco Bay Guardian this week you'll read an editorial and two articles Assessing Blame and Assessed out. In them you'll see that corporations are out with their begging caps looking for phenomenal cuts in their property taxes. As you know, property taxes are a cities prime source of revenue and when property taxes are slashed cities have to slash their services, or else go to the State for hand outs. However everyone knows that California is broke and has an appalling credit rating now, the result is drastic cuts in services.

I don't blame corporations, what they are doing in San Francisco is perfectly legal due to Proposition 13 and as we all know corporations do what they have to do to cut costs and make money, after all making money and protecting it is a corporation's reason for existence. So thanks to Prop 13, during boom time corporations get minimal increases in the property taxes year to year regardless of how quickly their capital assets are appreciating. Consequently they are able to lease and exploit their capital investments for phenomenal gains. During bust times they get to ask for massive cuts in their assessed property values and because of Prop 13 they have to be granted. Because of the cycle of economic activity this means that assessed property values never have time to catch up to their true values and businesses on average get a huge benefit from Prop 13.

Furthermore corporations very rarely sell their properties, or are able to transfer ownership of them without a traditional "sale" being recorded. Hence these inequities can go unchecked for decades. In fact some of the oldest corporations in America are over one hundred years old so eventually these corporations will end up paying a fraction of market rates. In less than 30 years in San Francisco this has led to inequities in property taxes that businesses are paying per square foot of 20 fold. How does that make any sense? How is a business with a newly acquired property supposed to compete with one paying one twentieth of the taxes on their property? Besides being a terrible loss of revenue to a city, by discouraging real estate sales it leads to a freezing of the commercial real estate market that surely can't be helping the free market economy. Instead long term incumbent corporate property owners get a free pass to achieve a stranglehold on property in cities and then lease it out at market rates, creaming off the profits in the boom times and not contributing anything like their fair share to the City coffers.

If a businesses is exploiting a property they own then the need to pay their fair share of taxes on that property to the city and those taxes should be in proportion to the benefits that corporation receives from the city and its workforce. They should not creep up in boom times and then jump down in bust times. Its time to repeal or drastically reform Prop 13 for corporations so this huge inequity between corporations and people is removed. I know some efforts are already underway, but I don't think they go far enough and we need to find a way to stop the blather about California driving away businesses with such efforts. That's hogwash, corporations are lining up to serve the 35 million Americans in this State and if corporations don't want to then small businesses will and that wont be such a bad thing.

So please, once your book tour is over, can you get back to your plan to save California and help us put an end to this corporate tax dodging scandal.

Blog Gently
Oakland, California