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Nov 09, 2015 | economistsview.typepad.com
"There is a darkness spreading over part of our society":
Despair, American Style, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: A couple of weeks ago President Obama mocked Republicans who are "down on America," and reinforced his message by doing a pretty good Grumpy Cat impression. He had a point: With job growth at rates not seen since the 1990s, with the percentage of Americans covered by health insurance hitting record highs, the doom-and-gloom predictions of his political enemies look ever more at odds with reality.Yet there is a darkness spreading over part of our society. ... There has been a lot of comment ... over a new paper by the economists Angus Deaton (who just won a Nobel) and Anne Case, showing that mortality among middle-aged white Americans has been rising since 1999..., while death rates were falling steadily both in other countries and among other groups in our own nation.
Even more striking are the proximate causes of rising mortality. Basically, white Americans are, in increasing numbers, killing themselves... Suicide is way up, and so are deaths from drug poisoning and ... drinking... But what's causing this epidemic of self-destructive behavior?...
In a recent interview Mr. Deaton suggested that middle-aged whites have "lost the narrative of their lives." That is, their economic setbacks have hit hard because they expected better. Or to put it a bit differently, we're looking at people who were raised to believe in the American Dream, and are coping badly with its failure to come true.
That sounds like a plausible hypothesis..., but the truth is that we don't really know why despair appears to be spreading across Middle America. But it clearly is, with troubling consequences for our society...
I know I'm not the only observer who sees a link between the despair reflected in those mortality numbers and the volatility of right-wing politics. Some people who feel left behind by the American story turn self-destructive; others turn on the elites they feel have betrayed them. No, deporting immigrants and wearing baseball caps bearing slogans won't solve their problems, but neither will cutting taxes on capital gains. So you can understand why some voters have rallied around politicians who at least seem to feel their pain.
At this point you probably expect me to offer a solution. But while universal health care, higher minimum wages, aid to education, and so on would do a lot to help Americans in trouble, I'm not sure whether they're enough to cure existential despair.
bakho said...
There are a lot of economic dislocations that the government after the 2001 recession stopped doing much about it. Right after the 2008 crash, the government did more but by 2010, even the Democratic president dropped the ball. and failed to deliver. Probably no region of the country is affected more by technological change that the coal regions of KY and WV. Lying politicians promise a return to the past that cannot be delivered. No one can suggest what the new future will be. The US is due for another round of urbanization as jobs decline in rural areas. Dislocation forces declining values of properties and requires changes in behavior, skills and outlook. Those personal changes do not happen without guidance. The social institutions such as churches and government programs are a backstop, but they are not providing a way forward. There is plenty of work to be done, but our elites are not willing to invest.
DrDick -> bakho...
The problem goes back much further than that. What we are seeing is the long term impacts of the "Reagan Revolution."
The affected cohort here is the first which has lived with the increased financial and employment insecurity that engendered, as well as the impacts of the massive offshoring of good paying union jobs throughout their working lives. Stress has cumulative impacts on health and well-being, which are a big part of what we are seeing here.
ilsm said...
Thuggee doom and gloom is about their fading chance to reinstate the slavocracy.
The fever swamp of right wing ideas is more loony than 1964.
Extremism is the new normal.
bmorejoe -> ilsm...
Yup. The slow death of white supremacy.
Peter K. -> Anonymous...
If it wasn't for monetary policy things would be even worse as the Republicans in Congress forced fiscal austerity on the economy during the "recovery."
sanjait -> Peter K....
That's the painful irony of a comment like that one from Anonymous ... he seems completely unaware that, yes, ZIRP has done a huge amount to prevent the kind of problems described above. He like most ZIRP critics fails to consider what the counterfactual looks like (i.e., something like the Great Depression redux).
Anonymous -> sanjait...
You are the guys who do not consider the counterfactual where higher rates would have prevented the housing bubble in 2003-05 and that produced the great recession in the first place. Because preemptive monetary policy has gone out of fashion completely. And now we are going to repeat the whole process over when the present bubble in stocks and corporate bonds bursts along with the malinvestment in China, commodity exporters etc.
Peter K. -> Anonymous...
"liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate... it will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people."
sanjait -> Anonymous...
"You want regulation? I would like to see1) Reinstate Glass Steagall
2) impose a 10bp trans tax on trading financial instruments."
Great. Two things with zero chance of averting bubbles but make great populist pablum.
This is why we can't have nice things!
"3) Outlaw any Fed person working for a bank/financial firm after they leave office."
This seems like a decent idea. Hard to enforce, as highly intelligent and accomplished people tend not to be accepting of such restrictions, but it could be worth it anyway.
likbez -> sanjait...
" highly intelligent and accomplished people tend not to be accepting of such restrictions, but it could be worth it anyway."You are forgetting that it depends on a simple fact to whom political power belongs. And that's the key whether "highly intelligent and accomplished people" will accept those restrictions of not.
If the government was not fully captured by financial capital, then I think even limited prosecution of banksters "Stalin's purge style" would do wonders in preventing housing bubble and 2008 financial crush.
Please try to imagine the effect of trial and exile to Alaska for some period just a dozen people involved in Securitization of mortgages boom (and those highly intelligent people can do wonders in improving oil industry in Alaska ;-).
Starting with Mr. Weill, Mr. Greenspan, Mr. Rubin, Mr. Phil Gramm, Dr. Summers and Mr. Clinton.
Anonymous -> Peter K....
"2003-2005 didn't have excess inflation and wage gains."
Monetary policy can not hinge just on inflation or wage gains. Why are wage gains a problem anyway?
Lets face it, this Fed is all about goosing up asset prices to generate short term gains in economic activity. Since the early 90s, the Fed has done nothing but make policy based on Wall Street's interests. I can give them a pass on the dot com debacle but not after that. This toxic relationship between wall street and the Fed has to end.
You want regulation? I would like to see
1) Reinstate Glass Steagall
2) impose a 10bp trans tax on trading financial instruments.
3) Outlaw any Fed person working for a bank/financial firm after they leave office. Bernanke, David Warsh etc included. That includes Mishkin getting paid to shill for failing Iceland banks or Bernanke making paid speeches to hedge funds.
Anonymous -> EMichael...Fact: there was a housing bubble that most at the Fed (including Bernanke) denied right upto the middle of 2007
Fact: Yellen, to her credit, has admitted multiple times over the years that low rates spur search for yield that blows bubbles
Fact: Bursting of the bubble led to unemployment for millions and U3 that went to 10%what facts are you referring to?
EMichael -> Anonymous...
That FED rates caused the bubble.
to think this you have to ignore that a 400% Fed Rate increase from 2004 to 2005 had absolutely no effect on mortgage originations.
Then of course, you have to explain why 7 years at zero has not caused another housing bubble.
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FEDFUNDS
Correlation is not causation. Lack of correlation is proof of lack of causation.
pgl -> Anonymous...
anne -> anne..."You are the guys who do not consider the counterfactual where higher rates would have prevented the housing bubble in 2003-05 and that produced the great recession in the first place."
You are repeating the John B. Taylor line about interest rates being held "too low and too long". And guess what - most economists have called Taylor's claim for the BS it really is. We should also note we never heard this BS when Taylor was part of the Bush Administration. And do check - Greenspan and later Bernanke were raising interest rates well before any excess demand was generated which is why inflation never took off.
So do keep repeating this intellectual garbage and we keep noting you are just a stupid troll.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/10/29/1518393112September 17, 2015
Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century
By Anne Case and Angus DeatonMidlife increases in suicides and drug poisonings have been previously noted. However, that these upward trends were persistent and large enough to drive up all-cause midlife mortality has, to our knowledge, been overlooked. If the white mortality rate for ages 45−54 had held at their 1998 value, 96,000 deaths would have been avoided from 1999–2013, 7,000 in 2013 alone. If it had continued to decline at its previous (1979‒1998) rate, half a million deaths would have been avoided in the period 1999‒2013, comparable to lives lost in the US AIDS epidemic through mid-2015. Concurrent declines in self-reported health, mental health, and ability to work, increased reports of pain, and deteriorating measures of liver function all point to increasing midlife distress.
Abstract
This paper documents a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013. This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround. The midlife mortality reversal was confined to white non-Hispanics; black non-Hispanics and Hispanics at midlife, and those aged 65 and above in every racial and ethnic group, continued to see mortality rates fall. This increase for whites was largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis. Although all education groups saw increases in mortality from suicide and poisonings, and an overall increase in external cause mortality, those with less education saw the most marked increases. Rising midlife mortality rates of white non-Hispanics were paralleled by increases in midlife morbidity. Self-reported declines in health, mental health, and ability to conduct activities of daily living, and increases in chronic pain and inability to work, as well as clinically measured deteriorations in liver function, all point to growing distress in this population. We comment on potential economic causes and consequences of this deterioration.
ilsm -> Sarah...
CSP said...Murka is different. Noni's plan would work if it were opportune for the slavocracy and the Kochs and ARAMCO don't lose any "growth".
Maybe cost plus climate repair contracts to shipyards fumbling through useless nuclear powered behemoths for war plans made in 1942.
Someone gotta make big money plundering for the public good, in Murka!
DeDude -> CSP...The answers to our malaise seem readily apparent to me, and I'm a southern-born white male working in a small, struggling Georgia town.
1. Kill the national war machine
2. Kill the national Wall Street financial fraud machine
3. Get out-of-control mega corporations under control
4. Return savings to Main Street (see #1, #2 and #3)
5. Provide national, universal health insurance to everyone as a right
6. Provide free education to everyone, as much as their academic abilities can earn them
7. Strengthen social security and lower the retirement age to clear the current chronic underemployment of young peopleIt seems to me that these seven steps would free the American people to pursue their dreams, not the dreams of Washington or Wall Street. Unfortunately, it is readily apparent that true freedom and real individual empowerment are the last things our leaders desire. Shame on them and shame on everyone who helps to make it so.
kthomas said...You are right. Problem is that most southern-born white males working in a small, struggling Georgia town would rather die than voting for the one candidate who might institute those changes - Bernie Sanders.
The people who are beginning to realize that the american dream is a mirage, are the same people who vote for GOP candidates who want to give even more to the plutocrats.
sanjait -> kthomas...The kids in Seattle had it right when WTO showed up.
Why is anyone suprised by all this?We exported out jobs. First all the manufacturing. Now all of the Service jobs.
But hey...we helped millions in China and India get out of poverty, only to put outselves into it.
America was sold to highest bidder a long long time ago. A Ken Melvin put it, the chickens came home to roost in 2000.So you think the problem with America is that we lost our low skilled manufacturing and call center tech support jobs?
I can sort of see why people assume that "we exported out jobs" is the reason for stagnant incomes in the U.S., but it's still tiresome, because it's still just wrong.
Manufacturing employment crashed in the US mostly because it has been declining globally. The world economy is less material based than ever, and machines do more of the work making stuff.
And while some services can be outsourced, the vast majority can't. Period.
Inequality has been rising globally, almost regardless of trade practices. The U.S. has one of the more closed economies in the developed world, so if globalization were the cause, we'd be the most insulated. But we aren't, which should be a pretty good indication that globalization isn't the cause.
cm -> sanjait...
Yes, the loss of "low skilled" jobs is still a loss of jobs. Many people work in "low skilled" jobs because there are not enough "higher skill" jobs to go around, as most work demanded is not of the most fancy type.
We have heard this now for a few decades, that "low skilled" jobs lost will be replaced with "high skill" (and better paid) jobs, and the evidence is somewhat lacking. There has been growth in higher skill jobs in absolute terms, but when you adjust by population growth, it is flat or declining.
When people hypothetically or actually get the "higher skills" recommended to them, into what higher skill jobs are they to move?
I have known a number of anecdotes of people with degrees or who held "skilled" jobs that were forced by circumstances to take commodity jobs or jobs at lower pay grades or "skill levels" due to aggregate loss of "higher skill" jobs or age discrimination, or had to go from employment to temp jobs.
And it is not true that only "lower skill" jobs are outsourced. Initially, yes, as "higher skills" obviously don't exist yet in the outsourcing region. But that doesn't last long, especially if the outsourcers expend resources to train and grow the remote skill base, at the expense of the domestic workforce which is expected to already have experience (which has worked for a while due to workforce overhangs from previous industry "restructuring").
likbez -> sanjait...
"Inequality has been rising globally, almost regardless of trade practices."
It is not some unstoppable global trend. This is neoliberal oligarchy coup d'état. Or as it often called "a quite coup".
sanjait -> cm...
"Yes, the loss of "low skilled" jobs is still a loss of jobs. Many people work in "low skilled" jobs because there are not enough "higher skill" jobs to go around, as most work demanded is not of the most fancy type.
We have heard this now for a few decades, that "low skilled" jobs lost will be replaced with "high skill" (and better paid) jobs, and the evidence is somewhat lacking. "
And that is *exactly my point.*
The lack of wage growth isn't isolated to low skilled domains. It's weak across the board.
What does that tell us?
It tells us that offshoring of low skilled jobs isn't the problem.
"And it is not true that only "lower skill" jobs are outsourced. Initially, yes, as "higher skills" obviously don't exist yet in the outsourcing region."
You could make this argument, but I think (judging by your own hedging) you know this isn't the case. Offshoring of higher skilled jobs does happen but it's a marginal factor in reality. You hypothesize that it may someday become a bigger factor ... but just notice that we've had stagnant wages now for a few decades.
My point is that offshoring IS NOT THE CAUSE of stagnating wages. I'd argue that globalization is a force that can't really be stopped by national policy anyway, but even if you think it could, it's important to realize IT WOULD DO ALMOST NOTHING to alleviate inequality.
cm -> sanjait...
I was responding to your point:
"So you think the problem with America is that we lost our low skilled manufacturing and call center tech support jobs?"
With the follow-on:
"I can sort of see why people assume that "we exported out jobs" is the reason for stagnant incomes in the U.S., but it's still tiresome, because it's still just wrong."
Labor markets are very sensitive to marginal effects. If let's say "normal" or "heightened" turnover is 10% p.a. spread out over the year, then the continued availability (or not) of around 1% vacancies (for the respective skill sets etc.) each month makes a huge difference. There was the argument that the #1 factor is automation and process restructuring, and offshoring is trailing somewhere behind that in job destruction volume.
I didn't research it in detail because I have no reason to doubt it. But it is a compounded effect - every percentage point in open positions (and *better* open positions - few people are looking to take a pay cut) makes a big difference. If let's say the automation losses are replaced with other jobs, offshoring will tip the scale. Due to aggregate effects one cannot say what is the "extra" like with who is causing congestion on a backed up road (basically everybody, not the first or last person to join).
"Manufacturing employment crashed in the US mostly because it has been declining globally. The world economy is less material based than ever, and machines do more of the work making stuff."
Are you kidding me? The world economy is less material based? OK maybe 20 years after the paperless office we are finally printing less, but just because the material turnover, waste, and environmental pollution is not in your face (because of offshoring!), it doesn't mean less stuff is produced or material consumed. If anything, it is market saturation and aggregate demand limitations that lead to lower material and energy consumption (or lower growth rates).
In the aftermath of the financial crisis, several nations (US and Germany among others) had programs to promote new car sales (cash for clunkers etc.) that were based on the idea that people can get credit for their old car, but its engine had to be destroyed and made unrepairable so it cannot enter the used car market and defeat the purpose of the program. I assume the clunkers were then responsibly and sustainably recycled.
cm -> sanjait...
"The lack of wage growth isn't isolated to low skilled domains. It's weak across the board.
What does that tell us?
It tells us taht offshoring of low skilled jobs isn't the problem."
This doesn't follow. First of all, whether a job can or is offshored has little to do with whether it is "low skilled" but more with whether the workflow around the job can be organized in such a way that the job can be offshore. This is less a matter of "skill level" and more volume and immediacy of interaction with adjacent job functions, or movement of material across distances. Also consider that aside from time zone differences (which are of course a big deal between e.g. US and Europe/Asia), there is not much difference whether a job is performed in another country or in a different domestic region, or perhaps just "working from home" 1 mile from the office, for office-type jobs. Of course the other caveat is whether the person can physically attend meetings with little fuss and expense - so remote management/coordination work is naturally not a big thing.
The reason wages are stuck is that aggregate jobs are not growing, relative to workforce supply. When the boomers retire for real in another 5-10 years, that may change. OTOH several tech companies I know have periodic programs where they offer workers over 55 or so packages to leave the company, so they cannot really hurt for talent, though they keep complaining and are busy bringing in young(er) people on work visa. Free agents, it depends on the company. Some companies hire NCGs, but they also "buy out" older workers.
cm -> cm...
Caveat: Based on what I see (outside sectors with strong/early growth), domestic hiring of NCGs/"fresh blood" falls in two categories:
- Location bound jobs (sales, marketing, legal, HR, administration, ..., also functions attached to those or otherwise preferring "cultural affinity") - which are largely staffed with locals, also foreigners (visa as well as free agent (green card/citizen))
- "Technical functions" and "technical" back office (i.e. little or no customer contact) - predominantly foreigners on visa (e.g. graduates of US colleges), though some "free agent" hiring may happen depending on circumstances
Then there is also the gender split - "technical/engineering" jobs are overweighed in men, except technical jobs in traditionally "non-technical/non-product" departments which have a higher share of women.
All this is of course a matter of top-down hiring preferences, as generally everything is either controlled top-down or tacitly allowed to happen by selective non-interference.
cm -> sanjait...
"You could make this argument, but I think (judging by your own hedging) you know this isn't the case. Offshoring of higher skilled jobs does happen but it's a marginal factor in reality. You hypothesize that it may someday become a bigger factor ... but just notice that we've had stagnant wages now for a few decades."
I've written a lot of text so far but didn't address all points ...
My "hedging" is retrospective. I don't hypothesize what may eventually happen but it is happening here and now. I don't presume to present a representative picture, but in my sphere of experience/observation (mostly a subset of computer software), offshoring of *knowledge work* started in the mid to late 90's (and that's not the earliest it started in general - of course a lot of the early offshoring in the 80's was market/language specific customization, e.g. US tech in Europe etc., and more "local culture expertise" and not offshoring proper). In the late 90's and early 2000's, offshoring was overshadowed by the Y2K/dotcom booms, so that phase didn't get high visibility (among the people "affected" it sure did). Also the internet was not yet ubiquitous - broadband existed only at the corporate level.
- 15-20 years ago it was testing and "low level" programming, perhaps self contained limited-complexity functions or modules written to fairly rigid specifications, or troubleshooting and bug fixes implemented here or there.
- Then 10-15 years ago it advanced to offshore product maintenance, following up on QA issues, small development projects, or assisting/supporting roles in "real" projects (either conducted offshore or people visiting the domestic offices for weeks to months).
- This went on in parallel with domestic visa workers from the first 15-20 years ago wave either being encouraged or themselves expressing a desire to go back home (personal, career, family reasons etc.) and "spread the knowledge" and advancing into technical/organization management roles.
- Then 5-10 years ago with clearly grown offshore skills (my theory is that people everywhere are cut from the same cloth, and we are now at 10+ years industry experience in this narrative), the offshore sites started taking on ownership of product components, while all the "previous" functions of testing, R&D support, tech pub (which I didn't mention earlier), etc. remained and evolved further. Also IT (though IT support is more timezone bound and is thus present in all time zones).
Since then there has been little change, it is pretty much a steady state.
BTW the primary offshore location is India, probably in good part because of good to excellent English language skills, and India's investment in STEM education and industry (especially software/services and this is even a public stereotype, but for a reason).
Syaloch -> sanjait...
Whether low skilled jobs were eliminated due to offshoring or automation doesn't really matter. What matters is that the jobs disappeared, replaced by a small number of higher skill jobs paying comparable wages plus a large number of low skill jobs offering lower wages.
The aggregate effect was stagnation and even decline in living standards. Plus any new jobs were not necessarily produced in the same geographic region as those that were lost, leading to concentration of unemployment and despair.
sanjait -> Syaloch...
"Whether low skilled jobs were eliminated due to offshoring or automation doesn't really matter. "
Well, actually it does matter, because we have a whole lot of people (in both political parties) who think the way to fight inequality is to try to reverse globalization.
If they are incorrect, it matters, because they should be applying their votes and their energy to more effective solutions, and rejecting the proposed solutions of both the well-meaning advocates and the outright demagogues who think restricting trade is some kind of answer.
Syaloch -> sanjait...
I meant it doesn't matter in terms of the despair felt by those affected. All that matters to those affected is that they have been obsoleted without either economic or social support to help them.
However, in terms of addressing this problem economically it really doesn't matter that much either. Offshoring is effectively a low-tech form of automation. If companies can't lower labor costs by using cheaper offshore labor they'll find ways to either drive down domestic wages or to use less labor. For the unskilled laborer the end result is the same.
Syaloch -> Syaloch...
See the thought experiment I posted on the links thread, and then add the following:
Suppose the investigative journalist discovered instead that Freedonia itself is a sham, and that rather than being imported from overseas, the clothing was actually coming from an automated factory straight out of Vonnegut's "Player Piano" that was hidden in a remote domestic location. Would the people who were demanding limits on Freedonian exports now say, "Oh well, I guess that's OK" simply because the factory was located within the US?
Dan Kervick -> kthomas...
I enjoyed listening to this talk by Fredrick Reinfeldt at the LSE:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=3253
Reinfeldt is a center-right politicians and former Swedish Prime Minister. OF course, what counts as center-right in Sweden seems very different from what counts as center-right in the US.
Perhaps there is some kind of basis here for some bipartisan progress on jobs and full employment.
William said...
I'm sure this isn't caused by any single factor, but has anyone seriously investigated a link between this phenomena and the military?
Veterans probably aren't a large enough cohort to explain the effect in full, but white people from the south are the most likely group to become soldiers, and veterans are the most likely group to have alcohol/drug abuse and suicide problems.
This would also be evidence why we aren't seeing it in other countries, no one else has anywhere near the number of vets we have.
cm -> William...
Vets are surely part of the aggregate problem of lack of career/economic prospects, in fact a lot of people join(ed) the military because of a lack of other jobs to begin with. But as the lack of prospects is aggregate it affects everybody.
Denis Drew said...
" At this point you probably expect me to offer a solution. But while universal health care, higher minimum wages, aid to education, and so on would do a lot to help Americans in trouble, I'm not sure whether they're enough to cure existential despair."
UNOINIZED and (therefore shall we say) politicized: you are in control of your narrative -- win or lose. Can it get any more hopeful than that? And you will probably win.Winning being defined as labor eeking out EQUALLY emotionally satisfying/dissatisfying market results -- EQUAL that is with the satisfaction of ownership and the consumer. That's what happens when all three interface in the market -- labor interfacing indirectly through collective bargaining.
(Labor's monopoly neutralizes ownership's monopsony -- the consumers' willingness to pay providing the checks and balances on labor's monopoly.)
If you feel you've done well RELATIVE to the standards of your own economic era you will feel you've done well SUBJECTIVELY.
For instance, my generation of (American born) cab drivers earned about $750 for a 60 hour (grueling) work week up to the early 80s. With multiples strip-offs I won't detail here (will on request -- diff for diff cities) that has been reduced to about $500 a week (at best I suspect!) I believe and that is just not enough to get guys like me out there for that grueling work.
Let's take the minimum wage comparison from peak-to-peak instead of from peak-to-trough: $11 and hour in 1968 -- at HALF TODAY'S per capita income (economic output) -- to $7.25 today. How many American born workers are going to show up for $7.25 in the day of SUVs and "up-to-date kitchens" all around us. $8.75 was perfectly enticing for Americans working in 1956 ($8.75 thanks to the "Master of the Senate"). The recent raise to $10 is not good enough for Chicago's 100,000 gang members (out of my estimate 200,000 gang age minority males). Can hustle that much on the street w/o the SUBJECTIVE feeling of wage slavery.
Ditto hiring result for two-tier supermarket contracts after Walmart undercut the unions.
Without effective unions (centralized bargaining is the gold standard: only thing that fends off Walmart type contract muscling. Done that way since 1966 with the Teamsters Union's National Master Freight Agreement; the long practiced law or custom from continental Europe to French Canada to Argentina to Indonesia.
It occurred to me this morning that if the quintessential example of centralized bargaining Germany has 25% or our population and produces 200% more cars than we do, then, Germans produces 8X as many cars per capita than we do!
And thoroughly union organized Germans feel very much in control of the narrative of their lives.
cm -> Denis Drew...
"thoroughly union organized Germans"
No longer thoroughly, with recent labor market reforms the door has likewise been blown open to contingent workforces, staffing agencies, and similar forms of (perma) temp work. And moving work to nations with lower labor standards (e.g. "peripheral" Europe, less so outside Europe) has been going on for decades, for parts, subassembly, and even final assembly.
Denis Drew said...
Very rough figures: half a million Chicago employees may make less than $800 a week -- almost everybody should earn $800 ...
... putative minimum wage? -- might allow some slippage in high labor businesses like fast food restaurants; 33% labor costs! -- sort of like the Teamsters will allow exceptions when needed from Master agreements if you open up your books, they need your working business too, consumer ultimately sets limits.
Average raise of $200 a week -- $10,000 a year equals $5 billion shift in income -- out of a $170 billion Chicago GDP (1% of national) -- not too shabby to bring an end to gang wars and Despair American Style.
Just takes making union busting a felony LIKE EVERY OTHER FORM OF UNFAIR MARKET MUSCLING (even taking a movie in the movies). The body of laws are there -- the issues presumably settled -- the enforcement just needs "dentures."
cm -> Denis Drew...
Union busting is generally (?) understood as direct interference with the formation and operation of unions or their members. It is probably more common that employers are allowed to just go around the unions - "right to work", subcontracting non-union shops or temp/staffing agencies, etc.
cm -> Denis Drew...
Why would people join a union and pay dues when the union is largely impotent to deliver, when there are always still enough desperate people who will (have to) take jobs outside the union system? Employers don't have to bring in scabs when they can legally go through "unencumbered" subcontractors inside or outside the jurisdiction.
cm -> cm...
It comes down to the collective action problem. You can organize people who form a "community" (workers in the same business site, or similar aggregates more or less subject to Dunbar's number or with a strong tribal/ethnic/otherwise cohesion narrative). Beyond that, if you can get a soapbox in the regional press, etc., otherwise good luck. It probably sounds defeatist but I don't have a solution.
When the union management is outed for corruption or other abuses or questioable practices (e.g. itself employing temps or subcontractors), it doesn't help.
Syaloch said...
Peter K. said...There was a good discussion of this on last Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl5kFZ-SZq4
Surprisingly, I pretty much agree with David Frum's analysis -- and Maher's comment that Trump, with his recent book, "Crippled America", has his finger on the pulse of this segment of the population. Essentially what we're seeing is the impact of economic stagnation upon a culture whose reserves of social capital have been depleted, as described in Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone".
When the going gets tough it's a lot harder to manage without a sense of identity and purpose, and without the support of family, friends, churches, and communities. Facebook "friends" are no substitute for the real thing.
Jared Bernsetin:
"...since the late 1970s, we've been at full employment only 30 percent of the time (see the data note below for an explanation of how this is measured). For the three decades before that, the job market was at full employment 70 percent of the time."
We need better macro (monetary, fiscal, trade) policy.
Maybe middle-aged blacks and hispanics have better attitudes and health since they made it through a tough youth, have more realistic expectations and race relations are better than the bad old days even if they are far from perfect. The United States is becoming more multicultural.
Jesse said...
Jesse said...Credibility trap, fully engaged.
Fred C. Dobbs said...The anti-knowledge of the elites is worth reading. http://billmoyers.com/2015/11/02/the-anti-knowledge-of-the-elites/ When such herd instinct and institutional overbearance connects with the credibility trap, the results may be impressive. http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2015/11/gold-daily-and-silver-weekly-charts-pop.html
cm -> Fred C. Dobbs...White, Middle-Age Suicide In America Skyrockets
Psychology Today - May 6, 2013
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/reading-between-the-headlines/201305/white-middle-age-suicide-in-america-skyrocketsSuicide, once thought to be associated with troubled teens and the elderly, is quickly becoming an age-blind statistic. Middle aged Americans are turning to suicide in alarming numbers. The reasons include easily accessible prescription painkillers, the mortgage crisis and most importantly the challenge of a troubled economy. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention claims suicide rates now top the number of deaths due to automobile accidents.
The suicide rate for both younger and older Americans remains virtually unchanged, however, the rate has spiked for those in middle age (35 to 64 years old) with a 28 percent increase (link is external) from 1999 to 2010. The rate for whites in middle-age jumped an alarming 40 percent during the same time frame. According to the CDC, there were more than 38,000 suicides (link is external) in 2010 making it the tenth leading cause of death in America overall (third leading cause from age 15-24).
The US 2010 Final Data quantifies the US statistics for suicide by race, sex and age. Interestingly, African-American suicides have declined and are considerably lower than whites. Reasons are thought to include better coping skills when negative things occur as well as different cultural norms with respect to taking your own life. Also, Blacks (and Hispanics) tend to have stronger family support, community support and church support to carry them through these rough times.
While money woes definitely contribute to stress and poor mental health, it can be devastating to those already prone to depression -- and depression is indeed still the number one risk factor for suicide. A person with no hope and nowhere to go, can now easily turn to their prescription painkiller and overdose, bringing the pain, stress and worry to an end. In fact, prescription painkillers were the third leading cause of suicide (and rising rapidly) for middle aged Americans in 2010 (guns are still number 1). ...
When few people kill themselves "on purpose" or die from self-inflicted but probably "unintended" harms (e.g. organ failure or accidental death caused by substance abuse), it can be shrugged off as problems related to the individual (more elaboration possible but not necessary).
When it becomes a statistically significant phenomenon (above-noise percentage of total population or demographically identifiable groups), then one has to ask questions about social causes. My first question would be, "what made life suck for those people"? What specific instrument they used to kill themselves would be my second question (it may be the first question for people who are charged with implementing counter measures but not necessarily fixing the causes).
Since about the financial crisis (I'm not sure about causation or coincidence - not accidental coincidence BTW but causation by the same underlying causes), there has been a disturbing pattern of high school students throwing themselves in front of local trains. At that age, drinking or drugging oneself to death is apparently not the first "choice". Performance pressure *related to* (not just "and") a lack of convincing career/life prospects has/have been suspected or named as a cause. I don't think teenagers suddenly started to jump in front of trains that have run the same rail line for decades because of the "usual" and centuries to millennia old teenage romantic relationship issues.
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Oct 16, 1999 | Amazon.com
Britta Sahlgren, October 16, 1999An intriguing story of human relationships in the extreme.Bold Endeavors by Jack Stuster proved to be a real page-turner! Since childhood reading about adventures and explorers had been my favorite literature. In this book the persons behind these endeavors came to life.
They were of flesh and blood and you as a reader took part of their everyday life, their hardships and personal problems. A thrilling experience. A lesson in the importance of relationships not only among people in isolation
A lesson of use at job interviews, schools and even in families. I am thankful for an added knowledge and understanding of the many problems associated with these Endeavors. This book should be a "must" to all young people.
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June 24, 2015 | cyberciti.biz
... ... ...
Bash v4.0+ has inbuilt support for setting up a step value using {START..END..INCREMENT} syntax:
#!/bin/bash echo "Bash version ${BASH_VERSION}..." for i in {0..10..2} do echo "Welcome $i times" doneSample outputs:
Bash version 4.0.33(0)-release... Welcome 0 times Welcome 2 times Welcome 4 times Welcome 6 times Welcome 8 times Welcome 10 times... ... ...
Three-expression bash for loops syntax
This type of for loop share a common heritage with the C programming language. It is characterized by a three-parameter loop control expression; consisting of an initializer (EXP1), a loop-test or condition (EXP2), and a counting expression (EXP3).
for (( EXP1; EXP2; EXP3 )) do command1 command2 command3 doneA representative three-expression example in bash as follows:
#!/bin/bash for (( c=1; c<=5; c++ )) do echo "Welcome $c times" done... ... ...Jadu Saikia, November 2, 2008, 3:37 pm
Nice one. All the examples are explained well, thanks Vivek.Andi Reinbrech, November 18, 2010, 7:42 pmseq 1 2 20
output can also be produced using jotjot – 1 20 2
The infinite loops as everyone knows have the following alternatives.
while(true)
or
while ://Jadu
I know this is an ancient thread, but thought this trick might be helpful to someone:Peko, July 16, 2009, 6:11 pmFor the above example with all the cuts, simply do
set `echo $line`This will split line into positional parameters and you can after the set simply say
F1=$1; F2=$2; F3=$3I used this a lot many years ago on solaris with "set `date`", it neatly splits the whole date string into variables and saves lots of messy cutting :-)
… no, you can't change the FS, if it's not space, you can't use this method
Hi Vivek,Michal Kaut July 22, 2009, 6:12 am
Thanks for this a useful topic.IMNSHO, there may be something to modify here
=======================
Latest bash version 3.0+ has inbuilt support for setting up a step value:#!/bin/bash
for i in {1..5}
=======================
1) The increment feature seems to belong to the version 4 of bash.
Reference: http://bash-hackers.org/wiki/doku.php/syntax/expansion/brace
Accordingly, my bash v3.2 does not include this feature.BTW, where did you read that it was 3.0+ ?
(I ask because you may know some good website of interest on the subject).2) The syntax is {from..to..step} where from, to, step are 3 integers.
You code is missing the increment.Note that GNU Bash documentation may be bugged at this time,
because on GNU Bash manual, you will find the syntax {x..y[incr]}
which may be a typo. (missing the second ".." between y and increment).see http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Brace-Expansion
The Bash Hackers page
again, see http://bash-hackers.org/wiki/doku.php/syntax/expansion/brace
seeems to be more accurate,
but who knows ? Anyway, at least one of them may be right… ;-)Keep on the good work of your own,
Thanks a million.- Peko
Hello,is there a simple way to control the number formatting? I use several computers, some of which have non-US settings with comma as a decimal point. This means that
for x in $(seq 0 0.1 1)gives 0 0.1 0.2 … 1 one some machines and 0 0,1 0,2 … 1 on other.
Is there a way to force the first variant, regardless of the language settings? Can I, for example, set the keyboard to US inside the script? Or perhaps some alternative to$xthat would convert commas to points?
(I am sending these as parameters to another code and it won't accept numbers with commas…)The best thing I could think of is adding
x=`echo $x | sed s/,/./`as a first line inside the loop, but there should be a better solution? (Interestingly, the sed command does not seem to be upset by me rewriting its variable.)Thanks,
MichalPeko July 22, 2009, 7:27 am
To Michal Kaut:
Hi Michal,
Such output format is configured through LOCALE settings.
I tried :
export LC_CTYPE="en_EN.UTF-8″; seq 0 0.1 1
and it works as desired.
You just have to find the exact value for LC_CTYPE that fits to your systems and your needs.
Peko
Peko July 22, 2009, 2:29 pm
To Michal Kaus [2]
Ooops – ;-)
Instead of LC_CTYPE,
LC_NUMERIC should be more appropriate
(Although LC_CTYPE is actually yielding to the same result – I tested both)By the way, Vivek has already documented the matter : http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-find-supportable-character-sets.html
Philippe Petrinko October 30, 2009, 8:35 am
To Vivek:
Regarding your last example, that is : running a loop through arguments given to the script on the command line, there is a simplier way of doing this:
# instead of:
# FILES="$@"
# for f in $FILES# use the following syntax
for arg
do
# whatever you need here – try : echo "$arg"
doneOf course, you can use any variable name, not only "arg".
Philippe Petrinko November 11, 2009, 11:25 am
To tdurden:
Why would'nt you use
1) either a [for] loop
for old in * ; do mv ${old} ${old}.new; done2) Either the [rename] command ?
excerpt form "man rename" :RENAME(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide RENAME(1)
NAME
rename – renames multiple filesSYNOPSIS
rename [ -v ] [ -n ] [ -f ] perlexpr [ files ]DESCRIPTION
"rename" renames the filenames supplied according to the rule specified
as the first argument. The perlexpr argument is a Perl expression
which is expected to modify the $_ string in Perl for at least some of
the filenames specified. If a given filename is not modified by the
expression, it will not be renamed. If no filenames are given on the
command line, filenames will be read via standard input.For example, to rename all files matching "*.bak" to strip the
extension, you might sayrename 's/\.bak$//' *.bak
To translate uppercase names to lower, you'd use
rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *
- Philippe
Philippe Petrinko November 11, 2009, 9:27 pm
If you set the shell option extglob, Bash understands some more powerful patterns. Here, a is one or more pattern, separated by the pipe-symbol (|).
?() Matches zero or one occurrence of the given patterns
*() Matches zero or more occurrences of the given patterns
+() Matches one or more occurrences of the given patterns
@() Matches one of the given patterns
!() Matches anything except one of the given patternssource: http://www.bash-hackers.org/wiki/doku.php/syntax/pattern
Philippe Petrinko November 12, 2009, 3:44 pm
To Sean:
Right, the more sharp a knife is, the easier it can cut your fingers…I mean: There are side-effects to the use of file globbing (like in [ for f in * ] ) , when the globbing expression matches nothing: the globbing expression is not susbtitued.
Then you might want to consider using [ nullglob ] shell extension,
to prevent this.
see: http://www.bash-hackers.org/wiki/doku.php/syntax/expansion/globs#customizationDevil hides in detail ;-)
Dominic January 14, 2010, 10:04 am
There is an interesting difference between the exit value for two different for looping structures (hope this comes out right):
for (( c=1; c<=2; c++ )) do echo -n "inside (( )) loop c is $c, "; done; echo "done (( )) loop c is $c"
for c in {1..2}; do echo -n "inside { } loop c is $c, "; done; echo "done { } loop c is $c"
You see that the first structure does a final increment of c, the second does not. The first is more useful IMO because if you have a conditional break in the for loop, then you can subsequently test the value of $c to see if the for loop was broken or not; with the second structure you can't know whether the loop was broken on the last iteration or continued to completion.Dominic January 14, 2010, 10:09 am
sorry, my previous post would have been clearer if I had shown the output of my code snippet, which is:
inside (( )) loop c is 1, inside (( )) loop c is 2, done (( )) loop c is 3
inside { } loop c is 1, inside { } loop c is 2, done { } loop c is 2Philippe Petrinko March 9, 2010, 2:34 pm
@Dmitry
And, again, as stated many times up there, using [seq] is counter productive, because it requires a call to an external program, when you should Keep It Short and Simple, using only bash internals functions:
for ((c=1; c<21; c+=2)); do echo "Welcome $c times" ; done
(and I wonder why Vivek is sticking to that old solution which should be presented only for historical reasons when there was no way of using bash internals.
By the way, this historical recall should be placed only at topic end, and not on top of the topic, which makes newbies sticking to the not-up-to-date technique ;-) )Sean March 9, 2010, 11:15 pm
Andi Reinbrech November 18, 2010, 8:35 pmI have a comment to add about using the builtin for (( … )) syntax. I would agree the builtin method is cleaner, but from what I've noticed with other builtin functionality, I had to check the speed advantage for myself. I wrote the following files:
builtin_count.sh:
#!/bin/bash
for ((i=1;i<=1000000;i++))
do
echo "Output $i"
done
seq_count.sh:
#!/bin/bash
for i in $(seq 1 1000000)
do
echo "Output $i"
done
And here were the results that I got:
time ./builtin_count.sh
real 0m22.122s
user 0m18.329s
sys 0m3.166stime ./seq_count.sh
real 0m19.590s
user 0m15.326s
sys 0m2.503sThe performance increase isn't too significant, especially when you are probably going to be doing something a little more interesting inside of the for loop, but it does show that builtin commands are not necessarily faster.
The reason why the external seq is faster, is because it is executed only once, and returns a huge splurb of space separated integers which need no further processing, apart from the for loop advancing to the next one for the variable substitution.
The internal loop is a nice and clean/readable construct, but it has a lot of overhead. The check expression is re-evaluated on every iteration, and a variable on the interpreter's heap gets incremented, possibly checked for overflow etc. etc.
Note that the check expression cannot be simplified or internally optimised by the interpreter because the value may change inside the loop's body (yes, there are cases where you'd want to do this, however rare and stupid they may seem), hence the variables are volatile and get re-evaluted.
I.e. botom line, the internal one has more overhead, the "seq" version is equivalent to either having 1000000 integers inside the script (hard coded), or reading once from a text file with 1000000 integers with a cat. Point being that it gets executed only once and becomes static.
OK, blah blah fishpaste, past my bed time :-)
Cheers,
AndiAnthony Thyssen June 4, 2010, 6:53 am
TheBonsai June 4, 2010, 9:57 amThe {1..10} syntax is pretty useful as you can use a variable with it!
limit=10 echo {1..${limit}} {1..10}You need to eval it to get it to work!
limit=10 eval "echo {1..${limit}}" 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10'seq' is not avilable on ALL system (MacOSX for example)
and BASH is not available on all systems either.You are better off either using the old while-expr method for computer compatiblity!
limit=10; n=1; while [ $n -le 10 ]; do echo $n; n=`expr $n + 1`; doneAlternativally use a seq() function replacement…
# seq_count 10 seq_count() { i=1; while [ $i -le $1 ]; do echo $i; i=`expr $i + 1`; done } # simple_seq 1 2 10 simple_seq() { i=$1; while [ $i -le $3 ]; do echo $i; i=`expr $i + $2`; done } seq_integer() { if [ "X$1" = "X-f" ] then format="$2"; shift; shift else format="%d" fi case $# in 1) i=1 inc=1 end=$1 ;; 2) i=$1 inc=1 end=$2 ;; *) i=$1 inc=$2 end=$3 ;; esac while [ $i -le $end ]; do printf "$format\n" $i; i=`expr $i + $inc`; done }Edited: by Admin – added code tags.
The Bash C-style for loop was taken from KSH93, thus I guess it's at least portable towards Korn and Z.
The seq-function above could use i=$((i + inc)), if only POSIX matters. expr is obsolete for those things, even in POSIX.
Philippe Petrinko June 4, 2010, 10:15 am
Right Bonsai,
( http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/xcu_chap02.html#tag_02_06_04 )But FOR C-style does not seem to be POSIXLY-correct…
Read on-line reference issue 6/2004,
Top is here, http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/mindex.htmland the Shell and Utilities volume (XCU) T.OC. is here
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/toc.html
doc is:
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap01.htmland FOR command:
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/xcu_chap02.html#tag_02_09_04_03Anthony Thyssen June 6, 2010, 7:18 am
TheBonsai wrote…. "The seq-function above could use i=$((i + inc)), if only POSIX matters. expr is obsolete for those things, even in POSIX."
I am not certain it is in Posix. It was NOT part of the original Bourne Shell, and on some machines, I deal with Bourne Shell. Not Ksh, Bash, or anything else.
Bourne Shell syntax works everywhere! But as 'expr' is a builtin in more modern shells, then it is not a big loss or slow down.
This is especially important if writing a replacement command, such as for "seq" where you want your "just-paste-it-in" function to work as widely as possible.
I have been shell programming pretty well all the time since 1988, so I know what I am talking about! Believe me.
MacOSX has in this regard been the worse, and a very big backward step in UNIX compatibility. 2 year after it came out, its shell still did not even understand most of the normal 'test' functions. A major pain to write shells scripts that need to also work on this system.
TheBonsai June 6, 2010, 12:35 pm
Philippe Petrinko November 22, 2010, 8:23 amYea, the question was if it's POSIX, not if it's 100% portable (which is a difference). The POSIX base more or less is a subset of the Korn features (88, 93), pure Bourne is something "else", I know. Real portability, which means a program can go wherever UNIX went, only in C ;)
And if you want to get rid of double-quotes, use:
one-liner code:
while read; do record=${REPLY}; echo ${record}|while read -d ","; do field="${REPLY#\"}"; field="${field%\"}"; echo ${field}; done; done<data
script code, added of some text to better see record and field breakdown:
#!/bin/bash
while read
do
echo "New record"
record=${REPLY}
echo ${record}|while read -d ,
do
field="${REPLY#\"}"
field="${field%\"}"
echo "Field is :${field}:"
done
done<data
Does it work with your data?
- PP
Philippe Petrinko November 22, 2010, 9:01 am
Of course, all the above code was assuming that your CSV file is named "data".
If you want to use anyname with the script, replace:
done<data
With:
done
And then use your script file (named for instance "myScript") with standard input redirection:
myScript < anyFileNameYouWant
Enjoy!
Philippe Petrinko November 22, 2010, 11:28 am
well no there is a bug, last field of each record is not read – it needs a workout and may be IFS modification ! After all that's what it was built for… :O)
Anthony Thyssen November 22, 2010, 11:31 pm
Another bug is the inner loop is a pipeline, so you can't assign variables for use later in the script. but you can use '<<<' to break the pipeline and avoid the echo.
But this does not help when you have commas within the quotes! Which is why you needed quotes in the first place.
In any case It is a little off topic. Perhaps a new thread for reading CVS files in shell should be created.
Philippe Petrinko November 24, 2010, 6:29 pm
Anthony,
Would you try this one-liner script on your CSV file?This one-liner assumes that CSV file named [data] has __every__ field double-quoted.
while read; do r="${REPLY#\"}";echo "${r//\",\"/\"}"|while read -d \";do echo "Field is :${REPLY}:";done;done<data
Here is the same code, but for a script file, not a one-liner tweak.
#!/bin/bash
# script csv01.sh
#
# 1) Usage
# This script reads from standard input
# any CSV with double-quoted data fields
# and breaks down each field on standard output
#
# 2) Within each record (line), _every_ field MUST:
# - Be surrounded by double quotes,
# - and be separated from preceeding field by a comma
# (not the first field of course, no comma before the first field)
#
while read
do
echo "New record" # this is not mandatory-just for explanation
#
#
# store REPLY and remove opening double quote
record="${REPLY#\"}"
#
#
# replace every "," by a single double quote
record=${record//\",\"/\"}
#
#
echo ${record}|while read -d \"
do
# store REPLY into variable "field"
field="${REPLY}"
#
#
echo "Field is :${field}:" # just for explanation
done
done
This script named here [cvs01.sh] must be used so:
cvs01.sh < my-cvs-file-with-doublequotes
Philippe Petrinko November 24, 2010, 6:35 pm
TheBonsai March 8, 2011, 6:26 am@Anthony,
By the way, using [REPLY] in the outer loop _and_ the inner loop is not a bug.
As long as you know what you do, this is not problem, you just have to store [REPLY] value conveniently, as this script shows.for ((i=1; i<=20; i++)); do printf "%02d\n" "$i"; donenixCraft March 8, 2011, 6:37 am
+1 for printf due to portability, but you can use bashy .. syntax too
for i in {01..20}; do echo "$i"; doneTheBonsai March 8, 2011, 6:48 am
Well, it isn't portable per se, it makes it portable to pre-4 Bash versions.
I think a more or less "portable" (in terms of POSIX, at least) code would be
i=0 while [ "$((i >= 20))" -eq 0 ]; do printf "%02d\n" "$i" i=$((i+1)) donePhilip Ratzsch April 20, 2011, 5:53 am
I didn't see this in the article or any of the comments so I thought I'd share. While this is a contrived example, I find that nesting two groups can help squeeze a two-liner (once for each range) into a one-liner:
for num in {{1..10},{15..20}};do echo $num;done
Great reference article!
Philippe Petrinko April 20, 2011, 8:23 am
@Philip
Philippe Petrinko May 6, 2011, 10:13 am
Nice thing to think of, using brace nesting, thanks for sharing.Hello Sanya,
That would be because brace expansion does not support variables. I have to check this.
Anyway, Keep It Short and Simple: (KISS) here is a simple solution I already gave above:xstart=1;xend=10;xstep=1
for (( x = $xstart; x <= $xend; x += $xstep)); do echo $x;doneActually, POSIX compliance allows to forget $ in for quotes, as said before, you could also write:
xstart=1;xend=10;xstep=1
for (( x = xstart; x <= xend; x += xstep)); do echo $x;donePhilippe Petrinko May 6, 2011, 10:48 am
Sanya,
Actually brace expansion happens __before__ $ parameter exapansion, so you cannot use it this way.
Nevertheless, you could overcome this this way:
max=10; for i in $(eval echo {1..$max}); do echo $i; done
Sanya May 6, 2011, 11:42 am
Hello, Philippe
Thanks for your suggestions
You basically confirmed my findings, that bash constructions are not as simple as zsh ones.
But since I don't care about POSIX compliance, and want to keep my scripts "readable" for less experienced people, I would prefer to stick to zsh where my simple for-loop worksCheers, Sanya
Philippe Petrinko May 6, 2011, 12:07 pm
Sanya,
First, you got it wrong: solutions I gave are not related to POSIX, I just pointed out that POSIX allows not to use $ in for (( )), which is just a little bit more readable – sort of.
Second, why do you see this less readable than your [zsh] [for loop]?
for (( x = start; x <= end; x += step)) do
echo "Loop number ${x}"
doneIt is clear that it is a loop, loop increments and limits are clear.
IMNSHO, if anyone cannot read this right, he should not be allowed to code. :-D
BFN
Anthony Thyssen May 8, 2011, 11:30 pm
If you are going to do… $(eval echo {1..$max});
You may as well use "seq" or one of the many other forms.
See all the other comments on doing for loops.Tom P May 19, 2011, 12:16 pm
I am trying to use the variable I set in the for line on to set another variable with a different extension. Couldn't get this to work and couldnt find it anywhere on the web… Can someone help.
Example:
FILE_TOKEN=`cat /tmp/All_Tokens.txt` for token in $FILE_TOKEN do A1_$token=`grep $A1_token /file/path/file.txt | cut -d ":" -f2`my goal is to take the values from the ALL Tokens file and set a new variable with A1_ infront of it… This tells be that A1_ is not a command…
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January 27, 2006 | www.cyberciti.biz
... ... ...
Linux / UNIX will not allow you to unmount a device that is busy. There are many reasons for this (such as program accessing partition or open file) , but the most important one is to prevent the data loss. Try the following command to find out what processes have activities on the device/partition. If your device name is /dev/sdb1, enter the following command as root user:
# lsof | grep '/dev/sda1'Output:vi 4453 vivek 3u BLK 8,1 8167 /dev/sda1Above output tells that user vivek has a vi process running that is using /dev/sda1. All you have to do is stop vi process and run umount again. As soon as that program terminates its task, the device will no longer be busy and you can unmount it with the following command:
# umount /dev/sda1How do I list the users on the file-system /nas01/?Type the following command:
# fuser -u /nas01/Sample outputs:
# fuser -u /var/www//var/www: 3781rc(root) 3782rc(nginx) 3783rc(nginx) 3784rc(nginx) 3785rc(nginx) 3786rc(nginx) 3787rc(nginx) 3788rc(nginx) 3789rc(nginx) 3790rc(nginx) 3791rc(nginx) 3792rc(nginx) 3793rc(nginx) 3794rc(nginx) 3795rc(nginx) 3796rc(nginx) 3797rc(nginx) 3798rc(nginx) 3800rc(nginx) 3801rc(nginx) 3802rc(nginx) 3803rc(nginx) 3804rc(nginx) 3805rc(nginx) 3807rc(nginx) 3808rc(nginx) 3809rc(nginx) 3810rc(nginx) 3811rc(nginx) 3812rc(nginx) 3813rc(nginx) 3815rc(nginx) 3816rc(nginx) 3817rc(nginx)The following discussion allows you to unmount device and partition forcefully using mount or fuser Linux commands.
Linux fuser command to forcefully unmount a disk partitionSuppose you have /dev/sda1 mounted on /mnt directory then you can use fuser command as follows:
WARNING! These examples may result into data loss if not executed properly (see "Understanding device error busy error" for more information).Type the command to unmount /mnt forcefully:
# fuser -km /mntWhere,
- -k : Kill processes accessing the file.
- -m : Name specifies a file on a mounted file system or a block device that is mounted. In above example you are using /mnt
Linux umount command to unmount a disk partition.
You can also try the umount command with –l option on a Linux based system:
# umount -l /mntWhere,
- -l : Also known as Lazy unmount. Detach the filesystem from the filesystem hierarchy now, and cleanup all references to the filesystem as soon as it is not busy anymore. This option works with kernel version 2.4.11+ and above only.
If you would like to unmount a NFS mount point then try following command:
# umount -f /mntWhere,
- -f: Force unmount in case of an unreachable NFS system
Please note that using these commands or options can cause data loss for open files; programs which access files after the file system has been unmounted will get an error.
See also:
- Forcefully unmount a disk partition under FreeBSD and Solaris Unix operating system
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Nov 14, 2015 | news.yahoo.com
Students held rallies on college campuses across the United States on Thursday to protest ballooning student loan debt for higher education and rally for tuition-free public colleges and a minimum wage hike for campus workers.
The demonstrations, dubbed the Million Student March, were planned just two days after thousands of fast-food workers took to the streets in a nationwide day of action pushing for a $15-an-hour minimum wage and union rights for the industry.
About 50 students from Boston-area colleges gathered at Northeastern University carrying signs that read "Degrees not receipts" and "Is this a school or a corporation?"
"The student debt crisis is awful. Change starts when people demand it in the street. Not in the White House," said Elan Axelbank, 20, a third year student at Northeastern, who said he was a co-founder of the national action.
... ... ...
"I want to graduate without debt," said Ashley Allison, a 22-year-old student at Boston's Bunker Hill Community College, at the Northeastern rally. "Community college has been kind to me, but if I want to go on, I have to take on debt."
Dealing with swiftly mounting student loan debt has been a focus of candidates vying for the White House in 2016. Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders has vowed to make tuition free at public universities and colleges, and has pledged to cut interest rates for student loans.
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Andrew Jackson
Free taxpayer supported public education means more college administrators earning $200,000 or more, more faculty earning $100,000 or more working 8 months a year and more $300 textbooks. Higher education costs are a direct correlation to Federal Student Loans subsiding college bureaucracies, exorbitant salaries for college administrators and faculty.
terrance
What fantasy world do these people live in. There is nothing for free and if you borrow tens of thousands of dollars you can't expect later that someone else will pick up your tab. Pucker up bucky, it is your responsibility.
Furthermore, a lot of this money didn't go to education. I have read where people went back to school so they could borrow money to pay their rent, or even their car payments. As for 15 dollars an hour to sling burgers, grow up.
sjc
Having been out of college for a few years, I am curious. I went to a State University. Tuition was high, I had to take loans, I drove a cheap 10 yr old vehicle, but it didn't kill me. My total debt was about the price of a decent new car back then.
Today, the average student loan debt after graduation is just under $30,000. Around the price of a new car. And these kids are trying to tell us that this is too much of a burden??? Look around any campus these days, and you will see lots of $30,000 cars in the parking lots.
I can see having a low, federally-subsidized interest rate on these loans....which I seem to recall having on some of my loans, but anyone wanting anything for free can take a hike, IMHO.
Meed
Careful what you wish for, kiddies. It's simple math and simple economics (things I learned in school while studying instead of protesting). Every university has a maximum number of students it can support, based on the number and capacity of dorms, classrooms, faculty, etc.
The tuition rates have always closely matched the amount of easily-accessed loans available - the easier the access to loans, the higher tuition is. The simple reason is that the universities raise tuition rates to manage the demand for their limited resources, and can always raise rates when there is more demand than there are openings for incoming students.
Thanks to the windfall from that high tuition, today's universities have student unions, recreation facilities, gyms, pools, and lots of amenities to attract students. Imagine what they will offer when they can't jack up the tuition. Ever visit a university in a country that has "free" college education for its' citizens? It's pretty austere. These kids need to think past the clever sound bytes and really consider the effect of what they are asking for.
matthew
Oddly enough, a majority of these students attend colleges who has sport teams sponsored by Nike, Under Armour, Adidas, or Reebok. So, should theses companies atop providing the uniforms and equipment free of charge and donate the money to make more scholarships available? Then the student athletes can purchase their own gear on their own dime. Where one group attains, another must lose. Let this be debated on college campuses and watch the students divide themselves. We will find out what is most important to them.
JB
What really needs to be addressed is the skyrocketing cost of college education PERIOD! At the rate it's going up pretty soon only the children of billionaires will be able to afford to go to college.
Some junk yard dog investigative journalist needs to dig into the rising cost of college education and identify the cause. Once the cause are understood then something can be done to make college more affordable. College tuition cannot be allowed to just continue to escalate.
just sayin'
Seriously how do we let our children out of high school without enough information to decide if going to college is actually a good investment? If a high school grad can't explain in detail how much cash is needed, and how spending all that cash and time for education is going to provide a positive return on investment, he or she should not be going to college. This should be near the top of things that teens learn in high school.
pcs
I get really cynical about all graduates claiming they had no idea how much their loans were going to cost them. I mean, they had enough math skills to be accepted, then graduate, from college. If you didn't bother to read your loan docs before signing, or research likely monthly payments for your loan, that's your fault!
E
College costs went up far faster than inflation, often because colleges built fancy sports and living facilities...because they figured out these same millennials pick colleges based on those things. If you tour colleges, and I toured many in the past few years with my kids, you don't see a classroom or lab unless you ask.
The standard tours take students through fancy facilities that have nothing to do with quality of education. Add declining teaching loads that have decreased from 12 class hours to 3 class hours per week for a professor in the past 25 years and the rise in overhead for non-academic administration overhead positions like "chief diversity and inclusion officer" and you have expensive college.
If students want a cheap education, go to the junior college for general ed classes then transfer to a four-year school. It is not glamorous but it yields a quality education without a fortune in debt.
Rich
Getting an education is obviously the biggest scam in history!!!! Look at who controls education. Look at all the Universities presidents last names then you will know what they are. I can't say it here on Yahoo because they will take my comments out for speaking the truth. These presidents make millions of $$$$$ a year off of students and parents who are slaves and work hard to pay those tuitions. Not only that but look at the owners last names of the Loan
50 CAL
Universities are money munching machines with no regard for how the students will repay the loans. Universities annually raise tuition rates(much of which is unnecessary) with no regard of how these young minds full of mush are going to repay the crushing debt, nor do they care. Locally one university just opened a 15 million dollar athletic center, which brings up the question, why did they need this? With that kind of cash to throw around, what wasn't at least some used to keep tuitions affordable?
Mike D
These 'loans' are now almost all, Pell Grant underwritten. Cannot Bankrupt on, co-signers and students can lose their Social Security money if defaulting. 1.5 trillion$ of these loans have been packaged, like Home Loans, derivative.
What happens to peoples retirement accounts when their Funds have investments in them, what happens to the Primary Dealers when the derivatives bubble bursts?
How are these loans to be made 'free' if existing loans bear interest? If the student of 'free education' defaults, doesn't graduate, will he owe money-will his parent, or will the 'free school' simply become a dumping ground for the youth without direction, simply housed in college's dorm rooms?
Lots of questions and two things to keep in mind, the Banks and Teaching institutes love the idea of 'free', the students are believing there might be a free ride.. ignoring schools and Banks don't, won't and never do anything for free.This is not going to turn out well for consumers. Sure, Household payments of Education may drop, but the Institution of Education cannot keep even its slim success rate it has now. I don't know how educators managed to turn education into a purely self gratifying industry, giving anything to purchasers they wished for that Education loan, but never ever ever, has underwriting by the Central improved the quality of business. Complete underwriting of the important system of education at the Fed level will be a disaster.
There will be almost zero accountability for institutes and students, we will have a more expensive system that turns out the worst grads.
Don't try believing that other countries abilities with free Ed can be duplicated here.. not without serious socialism, a condition where qualifying for Ed advancement is determined by the Central.
Where it is free, but only to the select, the performers, most American Students would not qualify in other countries for advanced Ed. Blanket quals are almost a condition here, American Students are in for a serious surprise. They will not be so able to buy/loan their way to college and have to excel to get into college.
The joke is on the American student.
Jim
i was one of seven children- i worked my way through four years of undergrad and three years of grad school with my parents only being able to pay health insurance and car insurance- i worked shelving books, busing tables, delivering pizzas and for the last five years as a parimutuel clerk at dog and horsetracks- i never got to go on spring break, do a semester at sea or take classes in europe- i graduated debt free from public universities- have no sympathy for a bunch of whiny brats who have to drive better cars than their professors and believe they are entitled to special treatment- get a job and quit acting like a bunch of welfare queens who feel they deserve entitlements
Linda
My son is in college. Because grandpa saved his money over the years, he volunteered to pay for college costs. We hope to continue the tradition with our grandchildren and carefully save our money as well. We don't live high or purchase new. He will graduate zero dollars in debt.
My son's college roommate comes from a very wealthy family. They own a plane - two houses - dad works on Wall Street - mom is a Doctor. He has to pay for his own education and gets loans for everything. His parents simply don't have the cash to pay for his education.
It's priorities people! If something is worth it, you'll make it happen.
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nickgeoghegan.net
Disaster Recovery needs to be a primary objective when planning and implementing any IT project, outsourced or not. The 'Cloud' isn't magic, the 'Cloud' isn't fail-proof, the 'Cloud' requires hardware, software, networking, security, support and execution – just like anything else.All the fancy marketing speak, recommendations and free trials, can't replace the need to do obsessive due diligence before trusting any provider no matter how big and awesome they may seem or what their marketing department promise.
- Why do Data Centers have UPS and Diesel Generators on-site? They know electricity can and does fail.
- Why do we buy servers will dual power supplies? We know they can and do fail.
- Why do we implement RAID? We know hard drives can and do fail.
Prepare for the worst, period.
Putting all of your eggs in one cloud, so to speak, no matter how much redundancy they say they have seems to be short-sighted in my opinion. If you are utilizing an MSP, HSP, CSP, IAAS, SAAS, PAAS, et all to attract/increase/fulfill a large percentage of your revenue or all of your revenue like many companies are doing nowadays then you need to assume that all vendors will eventually have an issue like this that affects your overall uptime, brand and churn rate. A blip here and there is tolerable.
Amazon's downtime is stratospherically high, and their prices are spectacularly inflated. Their ping times are terrible and they offer little that anyone else doesn't offer. Anyone holding them up as a good solution without an explanation has no idea what they're talking about.
The same hosting platform, as always, is preferred: dedicated boxes at geographically disparate and redundant locations, managed by different companies. That way when host 1 shits the bed, hosts 2 and 3 keep churning.
Nobody who has even a rudimentary best-practice hosting setup has been affected by the Amazon outage in any way other than a speed hit as their resources shift to a secondary center.
Stop following the new-media goons around. They don't know what they're doing. There's a reason they're down twice a month and making excuses.
Personally, I do not use a server for "mission critical" applications that I cannot physically kick. Failing that, a knowledgeable SysAdmin that I can kick.
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Jun 09, 2013 | YouTube
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Nick Geoghegan
James Maguire's article raises some interesting questions as to why teaching Java to first year CS / IT students is a bad idea. The article mentions both Ada and Pascal – neither of which really "took off" outside of the States, with the former being used mainly by contractors of the US Dept. of Defense.
This is my own, personal, extension to the article – which I agree with – and why first year students should be taught C in first year. I'm biased though, I learned C as my first language and extensively use C or C++ in projects.
Java is a very high level language that has interesting features that make it easier for programmers. The two main points, that I like about Java, are libraries (although libraries exist for C / C++ ) and memory management.
LibrariesLibraries are fantastic. They offer an API and abstract a metric fuck tonne of work that a programmer doesn't care about. I don't care how the library works inside, just that I have a way of putting in input and getting expected output (see my post on abstraction). I've extensively used libraries, even this week, for audio codec decoding. Libraries mean not reinventing the wheel and reusing code (something students are discouraged from doing, as it's plagiarism, yet in the real world you are rewarded). Again, starting with C means that you appreciate the libraries more.
Memory ManagementManaging your programs memory manually is a pain in the hole. We all know this after spending countless hours finding memory leaks in our programs. Java's inbuilt memory management tool is great – it saves me from having to do it. However, if I had have learned Java first, I would assume (for a short amount of time) that all languages managed memory for you or that all languages were shite compared to Java because they don't manage memory for you. Going from a "lesser" language like C to Java makes you appreciate the memory manager
What's so great about C?
In the context of a first language to teach students, C is perfect. C is
- Relatively simple
- Procedural
- Lacks OOP features, which confuse freshers
- Low level
- Fast
- Imperative
- Weakly typed
- Easy to get bugs
Java is a complex language that will spoil a first year student. However, as noted, CS / IT courses need to keep student retention rates high. As an example, my first year class was about 60 people, final year was 8. There are ways to keep students, possibly with other, easier, languages in the second semester of first year – so that students don't hate the subject when choosing the next years subject post exams.
Conversely, I could say that you should teach Java in first year and expand on more difficult languages like C or assembler (which should be taught side by side, in my mind) later down the line – keeping retention high in the initial years, and drilling down with each successive semester to more systems level programming.
There's a time and place for Java, which I believe is third year or final year. This will keep Java fresh in the students mind while they are going job hunting after leaving the bosom of academia. This will give them a good head start, as most companies are Java houses in Ireland.
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nickgeoghegan.net
Filed in Programming No Comments
A few things can confuse programming students, or new people to programming. One of these is abstraction.Wikipedia says:
In computer science, abstraction is the process by which data and programs are defined with a representation similar to its meaning (semantics), while hiding away the implementation details. Abstraction tries to reduce and factor out details so that the programmer can focus on a few concepts at a time. A system can have several abstraction layers whereby different meanings and amounts of detail are exposed to the programmer. For example, low-level abstraction layers expose details of the hardware where the program is run, while high-level layers deal with the business logic of the program.
That might be a bit too wordy for some people, and not at all clear. Here's my analogy of abstraction.
Abstraction is like a car
A car has a few features that makes it unique.
- A steering wheel
- Accelerator
- Brake
- Clutch
- Transmission (Automatic or Manual)
If someone can drive a Manual transmission car, they can drive any Manual transmission car. Automatic drivers, sadly, cannot drive a Manual transmission drivers without "relearing" the car. That is an aside, we'll assume that all cars are Manual transmission cars – as is the case in Ireland for most cars.
Since I can drive my car, which is a Mitsubishi Pajero, that means that I can drive your car – a Honda Civic, Toyota Yaris, Volkswagen Passat.
All I need to know, in order to drive a car – any car – is how to use the breaks, accelerator, steering wheel, clutch and transmission. Since I already know this in my car, I can abstract away your car and it's controls.
I do not need to know the inner workings of your car in order to drive it, just the controls. I don't need to know how exactly the breaks work in your car, only that they work. I don't need to know, that your car has a turbo charger, only that when I push the accelerator, the car moves. I also don't need to know the exact revs that I should gear up or gear down (although that would be better on the engine!)
Virtually all controls are the same. Standardization means that the clutch, break and accelerator are all in the same place, regardless of the car. This means that I do not need to relearn how a car works. To me, a car is just a car, and is interchangeable with any other car.
Abstraction means not caring
As a programmer, or someone using a third party API (for example), abstraction means not caring how the inner workings of some function works – Linked list data structure, variable names inside the function, the sorting algorithm used, etc – just that I have a standard (preferable unchanging) interface to do whatever I need to do.
Abstraction can be taught of as a black box. For input, you get output. That shouldn't be the case, but often is. We need abstraction so that, as a programmer, we can concentrate on other aspects of the program – this is the corner-stone for large scale, multi developer, software projects.
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nickgeoghegan.net
There are times when you will want a single purpose user account – an account that cannot get a shell, not can it do anything but run a single command. This can come in useful for a few reasons – for me, I use it to force an svn update on machines that can't use user generated crontabs. Others have used this setup to allow multiple users run some arbitrary command, without giving them shell access.
Add the userAdd the user as you'd add any user. You'll need a home directory, as I want to use ssh keys so I don't need a password and it can be scripted from the master server.
root@slave1# adduser restricteduserSet the users passwordSelect a nice strong password. I like using $pwgen 32
root@slave1# passwd restricteduserCopy your ssh-key to the serverSome Linux distros don't have the following command, in this case, contact your distro mailing list or Google.
root@master# ssh-copy-id restricteduser@slave1Lock out the userPassword lock out the user. This contradicts the above step, but it ensures that restricteduser can't update their password.
root@slave1# passwd -l restricteduserEdit the sshd configDepending on your system, this can be in a number of places. On Debian, it's in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. Put it down the bottom.
Match User restricteduser AllowTCPForwarding no X11Forwarding no ForceCommand /bin/foobar_commandRestart sshroot@slave1# service ssh restartAdd more ssh keysAdd any additional ssh key to /home/restricteduser/.ssh/authorized_keys
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October 28, 2015 | Peak Prosperity
We are damned to fail when we avoid hard truthsWednesday, October 28, 2015, 9:10
I wrote the article below in January 2013, but never published it. The strong response to last week's post on the hubris and hype of Silicon Valley, as well as this recent interview, jogged my memory and inspired me to dig this out of the mothballs. I was pleased to see how relevant it remains 2.5 years later.
My old employer, Yahoo!, has been in the news again of late.
Its latest CEO (and former Googler), Marissa Meyer, is currently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where she has just given her first televised interview detailing her strategy for the beleaguered web giant.
I wish her and the current team at Yahoo! well with their plans, I really do. The saga of Yahoo!'s descent over the past decade was heartbreaking to watch and experience from the inside. I'd love to see the company find a way to become a leader again.
But I don't have faith.
In my opinion, the company can't be "fixed." At least not the way the tech pundits and the past parade of Yahoo! CEOs have touted it can.
Why? Because of a congenital failure to define its identity, paired with a chronic refusal to be honest with itself.
I get asked a lot for my opinion regarding Yahoo!'s fall from grace. I believe the seeds of its failure were sown from the beginning, and I've come up with the following analogy to make it as intuitive as possible. It all starts at the very formation of the company.
The Importance of Clear VisionFirst, look at Google. When the founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page first started collaborating, the Internet had been around for a while and they were insightful enough to realize that the data on the Web was growing exponentially. They reasoned that the company who made it possible to sift through all this data and find the most useful content, when needed, would create immense value.
So, they designed the Google platform from Day 1 to optimize around their core goal: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." This gave them a maniacal focus that enabled them to target talent, refine strategy, and prioritize resources. To this day, while there are many other businesses that Google has become involved in (from alternative energy to self-driving cars), everything revolves around first making sure that the central mission is protected and enhanced, and then leveraging the core platform to do ever more innovative things.
In this way, you can think of Google as the Borg of the Internet, following their mission of technical perfection with a methodical, measured dedication; unwavering in its focus.
Now, look at Yahoo!. Yahoo! is the Internet's Jedd Clampett.
If you don't know the story, the founders Jerry Yang and David Filo shared a trailer while graduate students at Stanford in the early 1990s. (It was literally a trailer. Stanford's graduate campus housing has improved much since then.) The graphical pages of the World Wide Web were just emerging, and as interested computer science students, David and Jerry spent a lot of time exploring them. As the number of Web sites multiplied, they created a simple directory – really nothing more than a page of bookmarked links – to help them keep track of the growing number.
This was the Internet's equivalent of Jedd Clampett missing a varmint with his shotgun, only to find "a-bubblin' crude" spilling out of the earth.
As simple as this directory was, nothing like it existed yet. So word got out, and people started flocking to it in ever-greater numbers. Pretty soon, the founders realized they had a phenomenon happening before their eyes, and they were savvy enough to enlist some seasoned help in structuring a business around it and monetizing it through advertising.
Well, the rest is history. Yahoo! experienced mind-boggling, stratospheric growth over the next several years. For a period of time for most people,Yahoo! WAS the Internet. For everyone else, it was the Internet's front door: occupying the best real estate within the new virtual universe of the World Wide Web.
But the key element to note here is that there was no fundamental vision or guiding mission that preceded Yahoo!'s creation. The company simply sprang into existence; a "happening" created by an unforeseen, rapid and gargantuan transmogrification of the world's analog audience base into digital 'users'.
And it's because of this lack of central identity that Yahoo! has floundered. What is Yahoo!? is a question that has plagued its executives since before I walked in the door in 2001. You would not believe the amount of manpower, brain cycles, and advertising agency dollars that have been thrown at answering this – and yet no enduring answer has emerged.
The Cost of Willful BlindnessWithout knowing what its "core" is, Yahoo! hasn't known where to put its focus. It has tried to do everything, and as a result, its diluted efforts allowed pure-play competitors to claim the dominant position in each of the important verticals that it wanted to win. Google became the dominant player in search (helped along in its early days, ironically, by Yahoo!'s patronage). Ebay won auctions. Amazon won online retail. Facebook dominates social media. YouTube cornered the online video space. The list goes on...
As the early 800-lb gorilla, Yahoo! could easily have claimed any or all of these industries. But it didn't. And I know why: Unrealistic expectations.
I personally was involved in several of the never-ending attempts to resolve this need to define Yahoo!. Each one ended up devolving into inaction – or worse, producing some declarative statement of vague pablum that only made folks even more confused. (Examples: Yahoo! is a "life engine," Yahoo! is "the premier digital media company," Yahoo is "you.")
The main reason for the failure to craft a clear vision is that the executive staff was unable to imagine giving up on major existing lines of business, even if there was no clear strategy for why they existed. Because there were so many directions Yahoo! could go in, you could make a compelling reason for why Yahoo! should retain its foothold in any multi-billion-dollar market segment. So again and again, after all the pontificating, theYahoo! executive team would convince itself it could indeed be all things to everyone.
Of course, having a clear identity means you know what you are and you know what you AREN'T. That second part is easily as important as the first. It's what gives you the discipline to say "no." To look at alluring market opportunities and pass on them, knowing that your core competencies aren't a good enough fit. To avoid wasting time and treasure chasing a losing game.
Without this clarity and discipline, Yahoo!s diluted and aimless efforts have resulted in its services becoming less and less relevant as the Web has evolved and matured.
I used to believe very passionately that the company could be turned around. But as time went on, I lost that hope, for two reasons.
First, I witnessed enough changings of the executive guard to conclude that the courage and ruthlessness required is simply not likely to happen. There are business lines at Yahoo! that are like Tolkien's Ring of Power. Every new CEO thinks they can withstand their allure as they unsheathe their cutting sword, and then soon finds themselves jealously protecting their "precious".
The second is that too much time and damage has occurred. Yahoo! has been rotting for years, resulting in unwieldy infrastructure, underperforming talent, poor partner relations, and consumer apathy. If the new CEO was suddenly bestowed from above with the "next big idea" for the Internet, why would you possibly want to saddle that gift with all of the albatrosses around Yahoo!'s neck? She'd be much better off starting a new company from scratch, with the right talent, the right culture, the right platform, and a clean shot at defining the brand.
The Hard TruthSo why am I going on so much about a struggling tech company?
Because I read this today from Robert Reich:Brace yourself. In coming weeks you'll hear there's no serious alternative to cutting Social Security and Medicare, raising taxes on middle class, and decimating what's left of the federal government's discretionary spending on everything from education and job training to highways and basic research.
"We" must make these sacrifices, it will be said, in order to deal with our mushrooming budget deficit and cumulative debt.
But most of the people who are making this argument are very wealthy or are sponsored by the very wealthy: Wall Street moguls like Pete Peterson and his "Fix the Debt" brigade, the Business Roundtable, well-appointed think tanks and policy centers along the Potomac, members of the Simpson-Bowles commission.
These regressive sentiments are packaged in a mythology that Americans have been living beyond our means: We've been unwilling to pay for what we want government to do for us, and we are now reaching the day of reckoning.
The truth is most Americans have not been living beyond their means. The problem is their means haven't been keeping up with the growth of the economy - which is why most of us need better education, infrastructure, and healthcare, and stronger safety nets.
He goes on to make the argument for a wealth tax on the richest Americans to pay for that education, infrastructure, and healthcare.
I'm not going to tackle the wealth tax concept here (though I have strong opinions). But I want to point out that I see the same blindness to reality, the same unrealistic expectations, in Reich's commentary as I did in Yahoo!.
Reich mentions but then dismisses the only point that matters: America does not have the wealth to meet the entitlements it has promised. Nor can it sustainably meet its operating costs.
Why is that? Because we, as a society, have very much indeed lived beyond our means. By building up such a tremendous amount of debt through our profligacy that a small rise in interest rates would be catastrophic. That our children and children's children will be "paying backwards" for our largess, unless some debt-clearing event transpires (which I think will).
Being unwilling to acknowledge this unpleasant but fundamental truth dooms any attempts to avoid it, via wealth redistribution or any other means. It's the same flavor of willful ignorance that caused Yahoo! to convince itself it could claim all mountaintops until it eventually begrudgingly realized it wasn't summitting any.
There were many times in my years at Yahoo! where I would listen to the "rah rah" all-hands presentations by the executives and walk away disconcerted. Despite the assurances of the great talent within the company and the wonderful ideas currently on the drawing board, it increasingly appeared that they were not admitting the obvious: The strategy was flawed, the company was failing, and radical change was needed if we wanted to succeed again.
That's exactly how I feel when reading Reich's piece. If this is the logic that our country's leaders are using in their decision-making, then Houston, we indeed have a problem. Having seen this movie play out in the smaller Yahoo! microcosm, I have no appetite for watching a sequel at the national level. But I fear that's what we're in store for.
I don't know how much influence Reich has these days, as he's not working in the current Administration as he did for three other Presidents (Ford, Carter and Clinton). But from the current fiscal and monetary policy we're pursuing, it sure seems like his mindset is not that far from those currently in DC.
So I find myself reflecting on how I reacted when I decided Yahoo! wasn't going to change course. I decided I was going to need to change mine, instead.
I invested in self-discovery to identify work that was meaningful for me. Fulfilling work that I'd be happy doing no matter the compensation. I cut the cord, resigning before I knew what I would do next. Staying on would only delay the hard work I'd need to do to create my future. I started developing the skills I'd need for my new chosen profession. And I began to tap the power and goodwill of other people who could help me (and whom, in turn, I could help back).
Seems to me this is good advice for our national predicament.
The ride from here is likely to get bumpy as reality punctures our leaders' unrealistic expectations. But if we, as individuals, invest in living authentically, working hard, and fostering supportive community, we'll enjoy the benefits of a resilient life regardless of what transpires.
Adam,
Understanding Reich
I, for one, am ecstatic that both you and Chris realized "something" was off kilter with our present situation and have done us a tremendous service by escaping the corporate treadmill and then running this site.
You are 100% correct for pointing out that people have unrealistic expectations about future financial directions.
However, I think you need to see another side of this. Reich is representing the lower class vision of the economy. In this regard he is acting as a politician, more than as an economist.
IMHO we are looking at the death throes of a debt backed, paper money system and it is very similar to playing musical chairs. Reich is fighting for the slower and less coordinated people to get access to some of the chairs. Otherwise, the Predator class naturally ends up with every chair. There is always more money for "Defense", more money for Israel, more money for "Homeland Security", and if there is another bank issue, there will be more money for that-again. There will always be more money for the well connected and well represented until we hit the wall.
My point is Reich is providing a little bit of balance in the political spectrum, probably knowing full well that one day this will all end up really ugly. No politician would dare tell people the economic truth, as we see it. If such a politician appeared on the scene, and was taken seriously, he or she would be dealt with as a severe threat to the status quo.
gillbilly
Frankenstein Capitalism
Found this article on Yahoo's finance page. It dovetails nicely with this article.
Happy Halloween!
davefairtex
wealth redistribution
why would anyone be against wealth re-distribution?
Ok, I'll bite. Let's pretend we live in a society that is run by sociopaths, whose entire apparent goal is to redirect a good chunk of the tax loot they collect to their friends that run various cartels - let's call them the military industrial complex, TBTF banking, big pharma, big tobacco, industrial sugar & fatty food production, captive media, big energy ... have I missed anything? Yeah anyhow, lets pretend the mechanism of governance is completely captured by this group: sociopaths & cartels.
Only, we don't really need to pretend, do we? Because that's pretty much where we live.
So if you are advocating raising taxes on - pretty much anyone - and handing the money to the sociopaths, I'm going to say that's a bad idea.
Here's the thing. Under your plan, wealth will DEFINITELY be redistributed. I just don't think it will end up in the place you hope it will end up.
If we can arrange to have a system that isn't run by sociopaths - somehow - then I'd be for some amount of redistribution. That, of course, is the trick. Those pesky sociopaths always seem to float into positions of power. Communism had that issue, if I recall correctly...
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Nov 04, 2015 | naked capitalism
... ... ...
Despite Wolf's bloodless language, he clearly regards the issue as serious. He describes this withdrawal from work as a "dysfunction" and says it demands not just study but action as well.
The underlying pathology is not hard to describe: employers (enabled by the Fed which has since the 1980s been only too wiling to provide for higher levels of unemployment so as to curb labor bargaining power to keep inflation tame) have succeeded in eliminating labor bargaining power. That program has been aided and abetted by the popularization of libertarian ideologies, which encourage many to see themselves as more in charge of their destiny than they are and thus see success and failure as the result of talent and work, as opposed to circumstance. For instance, one group that could have disproportionate power if they chose to use it, tech workers (particularly systems administrators and key support personnel in large systems deployments) have never seemed inclined to find a way to use it.
And as we saw in the widely reported story yesterday, on rising death and morbidity rates in less-educated white men and women aged 45 to 54, the scarcity of jobs in some parts of the country and the erosion of low-end work conditions and pay is now doing damage on a societal level. And some of this is, as Wolf suggests, not just because candidates can't find jobs, but in many cases, the jobs just aren't good enough (or more accurately, the pay is not good enough; the fundamental rule of neoliberalism is that everything can be solved by prices, and higher pay makes a crappy job more bearable).
This is not just armchair theorizing. In 2014, the New York Times reported on the issue of how labor force participation had fallen among prime working age men since the 1960s and have been accompanied by a decline in the participation of women since 2000. The article focused on how some middle aged men were remaining unemployed even though there were jobs they could take because they felt the work didn't pay enough. From the story:Frank Walsh still pays dues to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, but more than four years have passed since his name was called at the union hall where the few available jobs are distributed. Mr. Walsh, his wife and two children live on her part-time income and a small inheritance from his mother, which is running out…
"I'd work for them, but they're only willing to pay $10 an hour," he said, pointing at a Chick-fil-A that probably pays most of its workers less than that. "I'm 49 with two kids - $10 just isn't going to cut it."
The article relied on a poll by the Times, CBS News, and the Kaiser Foundation. From its findings:
Many men, in particular, have decided that low-wage work will not improve their lives, in part because deep changes in American society have made it easier for them to live without working. These changes include the availability of federal disability benefits; the decline of marriage, which means fewer men provide for children; and the rise of the Internet, which has reduced the isolation of unemployment.
At the same time, it has become harder for men to find higher-paying jobs. Foreign competition and technological advances have eliminated many of the jobs in which high school graduates like Mr. Walsh once could earn $40 an hour, or more. The poll found that 85 percent of prime-age men without jobs do not have bachelor's degrees. And 34 percent said they had criminal records, making it hard to find any work.
This ties into the widely-reported story yesterday, of rising death rates among less-educated whites aged 45 to 54. Recall that the rising mortality and morbidity afflicted both men and women. And remember that work is important not just to provide income, and in the old days, health insurance, but as a way to organize one's time and to see people during the day, some of whom generally become at least social acquaintances. So the "oh I can busy myself on the Internet" may be true short-term, but over the long haul, it's not a substitute for seeing real people.
And these men recognize that they are paying a price for not taking work, yet a significant portion could take a job but can't stomach the pay and other terms of offer:
For most unemployed men, life without work is not easy. In follow-up interviews, about two dozen men described days spent mostly at home, chewing through dwindling resources, relying on friends, strangers and the federal government. The poll found that 30 percent had used food stamps, while 33 percent said they had taken food from a nonprofit or religious group.
They are unhappy to be out of work and eager to find new jobs. They are struggling both with the loss of income and a loss of dignity. Their mental and physical health is suffering.
Yet 44 percent of men in the survey said there were jobs in their area they could get but were not willing to take.
jonboinAR, November 4, 2015 at 8:25 am
It's just unconscionable to pay people less than it takes to live. I understand that a wage minimum might put some kind of distortion or other on the "labor market" (I don't know what, but that's what will be argued by someone of a libertarian bent who chimes in), but so be it!
griffen, November 4, 2015 at 8:25 am
Profit margins. And short term obsessed managers or executives ( who can be accused of lacking vision past 12 months ).
jonboinAR, November 4, 2015 at 8:27 am
Note: I know we have wage minimums already. I'm talking about having meaningful ones like $18/hr or something.
ChrisFromGeorgia, November 4, 2015 at 9:38 am
i think the employers "wet" dream is no employees/slaves whatsoever – just "virtual" ones. Robots, small shell scripts and AI to replace us all. How awesome – no pesky unemployment insurance or health care benefits to pay! But as you point out, there is a fly in the ointment – who's left to buy their crapified products?
Ivy, November 4, 2015 at 9:48 am
Job crapification ... has been underway for decades. When consumers have their demand curves probed continuously through targeted pricing (monetary or otherwise), there is a wear-and-tear effect as lives are worsened.
Extrapolate that probing across all consumers and you see a decline in the societal goodwill that took generations to nurture. The trend is toward an atomization of life, where each interaction (monetary or otherwise) is targeted at extraction of the last ounce of available assets, or of potential for greater debt. Welcome back to the jungle.
Jetfixr in Flyover, November 4, 2015 at 10:21 am
Carla"Non college educated" includes me, an aircraft mechanic with 30 years plus experience, and a page long list of technical training on airframes, engines, and avionics.
My discussion with the CFO of the company I work for is illuminating.
(As the chief mechanic/technician in the flight department, I'm a direct report to the CFO)
Laid off, out of work for almost a year in 2009 (when the SHTF, the first people thrown under the bus are the company airplanes). Hired in as a contractor, which turned into a full time position, at 40% below what various salary surveys say I should be making. Brought this disparity up at my performance review, provided print copies of the various surveys, etc. In the end, I was told "It is what it is, and if you don't like it, feel happy to pursue employment elsewhere"
The suits screw employees "because they can" and much like the fable about the turtle and the scorpion, its in their nature.
And this is supposedly a job where there is a "shortage of qualified people".. Which there is. Mainly due to the fact that they are throwing old, expensive guys under the bus as fast as they can, and replacing them with newbies who are making a lot less money
In my case, I've become a part time contractor that enables me to pull down another $10-20k/ year. But its not lucrative or steady enough work to live on. It did save my azz when I was out of work for almost a year in 2009.
@Jetfxr: your experience is a perfect description of job crapification: you actually do work that is ESSENTIAL to the safety and well-being of the public (not only the flying public, BTW, but all of us on the ground whom you and your colleagues save from being crushed by falling airplanes). And the thanks you receive is to be mis-treated and ill-paid so that some suit who never did a lick of essential work in his life can sneer "It is what it is, and if you don't like it, go elsewhere."
Well, I would like to say "Thank you" to you, and to all the millions of Americans who perform the essential tasks everyday that keep so many of us safe and relatively comfortable. I wish you were fairly compensated and decently treated, and I wish my current level of safety and comfort extended to everyone else. And I do not take it for granted for a second.
And not once will it ever occur to the suit that the 100K bonus he receives (or gives himself) for "keeping costs down" is carved directly out of the salaries of people like this gentleman.
I wonder if the newbies can be brought in because at least one old guy is left to do the training and the quality control. Amazing that this is done for aircraft maintenance! If only more CEOs and CFOs directly experienced the downside of their actions. My experience has been that employers have taken advantage of employee good will. Good, talented employees have taken on more responsibility without added pay and do most of the training for new employees. But, the mood is different now that the abuse has continued for so long. While not directly refusing the employer demands, saying no can cost you your job, the task is just done poorly.
He keeps paying union dues to preserve his shot at a pension, but that also means he can't get nonunion work as an electrician. He says he would like a desk job instead. He used email for the first time last month, and he plans to return to community college in the spring to learn computer skills.
Wait, I thought that people like Frank Walsh were supposed to wake up and realize their reliance on the quasi-nanny state of unions and pensions is what is really holding him back. Isn't he supposed to become an entrepreneur? It's almost as if the guy hasn't read Atlas Shrugged.
However, that trip back to community college sounds like a great plan. Lifelong skills developed in one area that are no longer "economically viable," a few classes in computer technology and boom, problem solved! Wonder who gave him such a great idea. Good luck getting rid of that student loan debt!
The trend seems to be "rewarding" the "creative people" in the "profit centers", while squeezing the turnips who are considered "overhead". This includes everyone who keeps the house of cards infrastructure in this country running
I find it interesting that the monkey in the video who is shortchanged with the cucumber reward throws the cucumber at the researcher on the second go. Also, shakes the cage a bit.
For some time I've been mystified by my fellow citizens reaction to the wealthy elite who have been steeling and lying to them for years. There is a form of respect and reverence that is always extended to them that I just don't get. At the very least, looting elites should be shunned by working class people. Respect is a two way street, and the wealthy do not respect working class people at all. Why should our limited resources and energy be extended to them- in any form. Being forced into an exploitive situation is one thing, willful participation is another.
The larger issue is that the current economic system is rewarding corruption at the cost of long term stability of both businesses and society as a whole. Rebuilding that system from the bottom up based on fairness is the only way to go. When more people turn off their TVs, embrace their poverty with dignity, and dedicate themselves to helping and creatively working with others, maybe there is a chance for a future.
The new frontier is turning ones back, once and for all on the elite worldview of greed and corruption.
Not taking crappy jobs is good thing if you are doing so to rebuild your life in a more dignified manner. Honest employers can hire workers at living wages. Not buying products or services from corporations working on the model of slave labor would send a strong message. Power of the boycott.Like banks that are too big to fail, jail or hang, businesses that should have failed for not supplying jobs with a living wage are being supported to viable status by handouts from the government directly to the CEO's or to their workers so the workers can continue to work at less than livable wages and the CEO's can claim higher and higher bonuses. This corporate welfare state is crapifying everything and people should be horrified – but they're not. We're surrounded by zombies, zombie banks, zombie corporations of nearly every ilk and, like a mad scientist, a government that insists on keeping them alive through direct transfusions from every American citizen – this is the zombie apocalypse.
"DIE QUICKLY!" The Democratic answer to suppressed wages, industrial decline and a stagnant labor market. Older white working class people offing themselves with pills and alcohol – what's not to like? That counts as an all-upside no-downside policy for Blue Team.
Great post. Thank you.
Reading this and yesterday's post on declining life expectancy I wonder who in the EU thinks it a good idea to join the TTIP ? Serious question. If EU countries think joining TTIP will be great because they'll get access to the supposedly rich US consumer market, these to posts ought to wake them up to the fact that the US consumer market has been hollowed out to nothing by neoliberal policies of both parties.
What is has happened in the US would shock even Dickens.
The Greek concept of themis is in play here. As social order and fairness falls by the wayside, increasing numbers recognize that playing by the rules is a fools errand. This is what drove Hercules berserk and we see it played out regularly now in mass murder events.
Classic reaction. Millenia old. Mass media promulgates the oligarchic narrative.
I went to the funeral of a 50-ish former co-worker about a year ago. Died of a "accidental drug overdose". Was demoted from his mid-tier management job for cost cutting reasons, then terminated by his new boss, for drinking. Was a licensed mechanic, but that work was demeaning/regressive, eventually fired from several jobs. Last job before he went to the halfway house was wearing a blue vest at Lowe's.
He always acted like manual work was below his station, I suspect his ego would not accept the fall from the rarified heights. There's no such thing as "second chances" anymore, if you are among the "wretched refuse"
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www.nakedcapitalism.com
Level since 2010, Even Share Buybacks Don't Work Anymore
By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience. Originally published at Wolf Street.
Financial Engineering bites back
When IBM announced earnings last week, it talked about all the great things it was accomplishing to compensate for the fact that revenues had plunged 14% from a year ago to $19.28 billion, and that even "revenues from continuing operations," after accounting for operations it had shed, dropped 1%. It was the 14th quarterly revenue decline in a row. Three-and-a-half years!
It's not the only American tech company with declining revenues. There are a whole slew of them, mired in the great American revenue recession, including Microsoft, whose revenues plunged 12%. So they – big tech – are in this together.
But turns out, IBM's revenues, as bad as they have been, might have been subject a little more financial engineering than normally allowed.
Today, IBM disclosed that the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating how it has accounted for these lousy revenues. The one-sentence disclosure was tucked away in a footnote on page 45 of its SEC Form 10-Q, which it filed today:
In August 2015, IBM learned that the SEC is conducting an investigation relating to revenue recognition with respect to the accounting treatment of certain transactions in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland. The company is cooperating with the SEC in this matter.
"A company spokesperson wasn't immediately available to elaborate on the probe," according to the Wall Street Journal.
As I'm writing this, IBM is down 4% to $138, a new 52-week low:
Chris in Paris October 28, 2015 at 3:23 amClive October 28, 2015 at 4:41 amThey've been up to the same behavior (the stock buybacks) for 15 years. Gutting the internal employee knowledge base, especially accounting teams, which were impeccable in the past, made a mistake inevitable. Sad.
sam s smith October 28, 2015 at 12:57 pmIt isn't the first software company to have been tempted by the siren call of financial engineering in an attempt to solve a revenue decline problem and I don't suppose for one singe second it will turn out to be the last. There's one biggie already which is well known for its, ah-hem, "aggressive" culture which already seems particularly stinky to me.
As Chris in Paris rightly notes above, if you prod the zombie a little and analysed the reasons why revenue has declined, the reason is that what has now reinvented itself as a Professional Services enterprise lacks the skills and competencies which are essential to actually deliver - IBM is neither professional (amateurish is more like it) nor does it provide much of a service (unless you think the ability to gibber inanely in a heavy and largely incomprehensible Asian/Indian/East European accent is the same thing as providing a service).
Even the stupidest of corporate CIOs (and they are pretty stupid, as a whole, it's only taken them about 10 years to have spotted this decline) eventually realises that people get fired all the time for buying IBM because of the, well, general crapness.
This isn't even the first time IBM has done something like this.
Back in the late 80's, IBM leased the majority of its mainframes. Someone came up with the bright idea of converting those leases to sales. Income jumped and bonuses were paid for the next 5 years. At that time, there were no more leases to convert and sales plummeted.
Jim Haygood October 28, 2015 at 6:55 am
cnchal October 28, 2015 at 8:20 am'Instead of blowing tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks … IBM should have invested those funds in actual engineering and in people, which might have helped it become great again.'
Stock buybacks aren't necessarily bad. Whether IBM should invest in growth depends on its investment opportunities.
If (as it appears) IBM is basically in long-term liquidation (a la Xerox) as its 20th century mainframe technology fades from the scene, then stock buybacks are a more tax efficient way than dividends to return capital to the shareholders, until it's all gone.
cdub October 28, 2015 at 8:45 am. . . then stock buybacks are a more tax efficient way than dividends to return capital to the shareholders, until it's all gone.
Would it be more or less tax efficient if IBM just gave up the ghost, and had a fire sale auction of it's assets instead of waiting till it's all gone?
Jim Haygood October 28, 2015 at 8:46 amBut no management team has ever elected to go that course. If just the Board would take action. Snap, back to reality.
cnchal October 28, 2015 at 9:37 amIt's still a $140 billion company in market cap, so the number of potential buyers is limited.
IBM's corporate culture would be a good fit with Microsoft, I reckon.
Jim Haygood October 28, 2015 at 10:24 amI was thinking more along the lines of say having Ritchie Bros Auctioneers come in and sell the physical assets. There must be some interesting machine tools that IBM is misusing that would be more "productive" in someone else's hands, no?
The service side of the business could be sold off piece by piece. IBM looks like the individual parts are worth more than the whole.
I completely discount the $140 billion market cap as a pure Fed enabled fiction.
This just in -
IBM Corp. on Wednesday confirmed the purchase of The Weather Company, which includes the Weather Channel and its related technology platforms and sensors, to enhance its cloud ecosystem.
IBM said the purchase adds to the $3 billion investment IBM committed earlier this year to build out products and services in the Internet of Things.
It's all too likely that a simple semantic error - confusing white puffy clouds with high-tech electronic ones - has led to a tragic misallocation of capital.
Arizona Slim October 28, 2015 at 11:49 am
Jason October 28, 2015 at 4:38 pmIBM buying The Weather Company reminds me of AOL and Time Warner merging. Can't put my finger on why, but …
Once again, life imitates The Onion imitating life…
http://www.theonion.com/video/hp-offers-that-cloud-thing-everyone-is-talking-abo-28789
sam s smith October 28, 2015 at 12:54 pm
Tata or Wipro would be a better suitor. IBM already has a large number of its employees outside the US.
MikeNY October 28, 2015 at 10:33 am
Lil'D October 28, 2015 at 11:27 amI remember an academic paper from some years ago demonstrating a negative correlation between share buy-backs and future stock prices. The obvious explanation is that such financial engineering is attractive to management only when all other options (organic growth, attractive acquisitions) have either been tried, and/or are unappealing. In other words, it's usually sick companies that resort to it.
MikeNY October 28, 2015 at 11:39 amAlthough the empirical evidence actually show that shares of companies with share buybacks have price return greater than that of the general market. Basis behind TTFS and PKW ETFs. Trim Tabs (which really sounds like a diet pill company) keeps track of float. Of course share price increasing is not the same thing as company value increasing
Well, it probably depends on the time frame and the cohort. If I can dig up that old study I'll post it.
Jim Haygood October 28, 2015 at 1:04 pm
MLS October 28, 2015 at 1:36 pmFrom Bloomberg:
The S&P 500 Buyback Index is up 7.5 percent this year through Oct. 3 compared with the 6.5 percent advance in the S&P 500, after beating it by an average of 9.5 percentage points every year since 2009.
Buybacks increase leverage. It's not surprising that companies shrinking their equity base (often while simultaneously enlarging their debt) outperform in a bull market.
Presumably these same companies will get smashed harder when we finally (like Thelma and Louise) drive off the edge of the Permanently High Plateau.
And the index:
http://us.spindices.com/indices/strategy/sp-500-buyback-index
As S&P points out, there's an ETF for that. Two of em, in fact.
MikeNY October 28, 2015 at 5:19 pmBuybacks increase leverage. It's not surprising that companies shrinking their equity base (often while simultaneously enlarging their debt) outperform in a bull market.
Presumably these same companies will get smashed harder when we finally (like Thelma and Louise) drive off the edge of the Permanently High Plateau.
Correct. Buybacks increase the risk of the equity by changing the capital structure. They are helpful to a certain extent to eliminate the dilutive effect of employee stock options, but beyond that they add no long-term value of the company.
Yes, I agree with you on the effect of shrinking the equity base. It increases equity vol.
participant-observer-observed October 28, 2015 at 12:52 pm
Arizona Slim October 28, 2015 at 12:53 pmEspecially if you are going to live happily ever after on the MIC boondoggle:
Drones, IBM, and the Big Data of Death
IBM could also return to selling CD ROMs of installable SPSS instead of looking for subscription junkies.
I'm typing this comment on a pre-Lenovo IBM ThinkPad. And I'm remembering the days when IBM actually made things that were good to own. Y'know, like this laptop.
participant-observer-observed October 28, 2015 at 12:55 pm
They seem to be in the banality of evil business, keeping the homeland in freedom, etc etc, when not supplying social scientists with data analysis software:
Chauncey Gardiner October 28, 2015 at 12:22 pm
MLS October 28, 2015 at 1:34 pmConsidering the numbahs, Wolf Richter is much too charitable in this piece IMO. Where are the debt rating agencies?… back in the same bars they hung out in back in the day? And does the SEC have authority to investigate beyond accounting treatment of matters like revenue recognition? IBM is far from the only major corporation where this behavior, which also serves to maximize gains under executive stock options, has been occurring.
Negative $19 billion tangible net worth and very high debt leverage after massive stock repurchases and high dividend payouts over a period of years. Wonder what will happen if interest rates ever rise?
… Oh, but Look!!… The stock is up this morning! "The Market" has spoken. All is well, people!… Move along.
Howard Beale IV October 28, 2015 at 8:04 pmI'm a little confused – on one hand the author is saying that IBM has been "pulling a bag over investor's heads" by tricking them with faulty per-share metrics. One the other hand there's a chart of IBM that shows that the stock is flat since the end of 2010 – a period where the broad market is up over 60%. There was certainly a period where IBM did well in that time, but that was largely on the expectation that they were actually turning the business around and taking steps to, you know, try and grow the thing. When that failed to materialize, the stock rolled over.
I don't disagree with the author that financial engineering in general is hardly the panacea Wall Street makes it out to be, but I think investors as a group deserve more credit for figuring out what's really going on.
Some of the smaller iSeries shops are more at risk of getting converted over to more modern systems as well as some of the smaller zSeries boxes-but the bigger the systems the higher the risk and cost to do so-IBM released the z13 family earlier this year and got billions in orders and sales. They're still the backbone of just about every major financial corporation in the world (we just got done upgrading all of our boxes last month.)
The real problem is that colleges and universities stopped teaching mainframe technology two decades ago-so now we have to do the education ourselves
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Sep 30, 2015 | Economist's View
Education is not the only cause of inequality, but it's part of the problem:
Are American schools making inequality worse?, American Educational Research Association: The answer appears to be yes. Schooling plays a surprisingly large role in short-changing the nation's most economically disadvantaged students of critical math skills, according to a study published today in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.Anonymous -> Anonymous...Findings from the study indicate that unequal access to rigorous mathematics content is widening the gap in performance on a prominent international math literacy test between low- and high-income students, not only in the United States but in countries worldwide.
Using data from the 2012..., researchers from Michigan State University and OECD confirmed not only that low-income students are more likely to be exposed to weaker math content in schools, but also that a substantial share of the gap in math performance between economically advantaged and disadvantaged students is related to those curricular inequalities. ...
"Our findings support previous research by showing that affluent students are consistently provided with greater opportunity to learn more rigorous content, and that students who are exposed to higher-level math have a better ability to apply it to addressing real-world situations of contemporary adult life, such as calculating interest, discounts, and estimating the required amount of carpeting for a room," said Schmidt, a University Distinguished Professor of Statistics and Education at Michigan State University. "But now we know just how important content inequality is in contributing to performance gaps between privileged and underprivileged students."
In the United States, over one-third of the social class-related gap in student performance on the math literacy test was associated with unequal access to rigorous content. The other two-thirds was associated directly with students' family and community background. ...
"Because of differences in content exposure for low- and high-income students in this country, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer," said Schmidt. "The belief that schools are the great equalizer, helping students overcome the inequalities of poverty, is a myth."
Burroughs, a senior research associate at Michigan State University, noted that the findings have major implications for school officials, given that content exposure is far more subject to school policies than are broader socioeconomic conditions.
do you think schools in China/India have funding on the level you are implicitly arguing for? As Eva Maskovich is showing in NYC - it takes better teachers, not more money.pgl -> Anonymous...
I live in NYC
"According to Success Academy Charter Schools founder and President Eva Moskowitz".
Ah yes - the charter school crowd. As in Mayor Bloomberg's push for privatizing our public education system. They have a lot of really dishonest ads attacking our new mayor. So you are with these privatization freaks? Go figure!
Anonymous -> kthomas...I am an Asian immigrant who came to the US to pursue the American dream. My education allowed me to run circles around most students at the university. I ended up with triple major and a post grad degree. So, go ahead. call the rigorous schooling horrifying all you want. It is silly to raise kids in an ultra sheltered environment. The jobs are going to go where qualified highly productive people who want less money are. Then they will have to face reality anyway. We can sit here and argue about it all we want. The truth is that kids in Asia can do the job I started with sitting there better for a fraction of the cost here. And this is a job requiring advanced degrees.
Anonymous -> Anonymous...
And you can add Eastern Europe to Asia. The competition is going to degrade our standard of living as it has whether we like it or not.
DrDick -> Anonymous...Sorry, but this is pure BS. We are talking about the presence of AP, foreign language, and advanced math classes. Having new textbooks and enough textbooks for all students, class sizes, laboratory equipment for science classes, and building maintenance, among many other very significant differences.
https://edtrust.org/press_release/funding-gap-states-shortchange-poor-minority-students-of-education-dollars-2/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/12/in-23-states-richer-school-districts-get-more-local-funding-than-poorer-districts/
Anonymous -> DrDick...
yes. they spend on things that count. instead of hockey rinks and olympics standard gyms for toddlers.
DrDick -> Anonymous...
None of which are characteristic of public schools. Have you ever even visited reality? Charter schools suck up a much greater share of available public resources and further starve the schools serving the poor and minorities, as happened in Chicago. Unlike you, I believe in fact based decision making.
EMichael -> Tom aka Rusty...
few anecdotes
geez
" The new school year has been marred for many students all over the country by severe budget cuts, shuttered schools, and decimated staff. Philadelphia, where students went back to school Monday, is seeing some of the most extreme effects of these budget cuts.
Nine thousand students will attend 53 different schools today than they did last fall after 24 were closed down. Class sizes have ballooned in many schools, with parents reporting as many as 48 students in one classroom. Meanwhile, the district laid off 3,859 employees over the summer.
A new policy also eliminates guidance counselors from schools with fewer than 600 students, which is about 60 percent of Philadelphia schools. Now one counselor will be responsible for five or six schools at once. Arts and sports programs have also been sacrificed.
Philly's new barebones regime was implemented after Gov. Tom Corbett (R) and the Republican-dominated legislature cut $961 million from the basic education budget, or 12 percent overall. Federal stimulus funds cushioned schools from state cuts for a couple of years, but they are now dwindling.
The district is struggling to fill a $304 million deficit. In order to open schools on time, the state gave an extra $2 million in funding and the city borrowed $50 million. Corbett is also withholding a $45 million state grant until teachers unions agree to concessions of about $133 million in a new labor pact. The district plans to sell 31 shuttered school properties. "
http://thinkprogress.org/education/2013/09/09/2588691/philly-schools-budget-cuts/
pgl -> Anonymous...
I love how the Aussies do the terminology:
"All Australian private schools receive some commonwealth government funding. So they are technically all "Charter" schools although the term is not used in Australia."
Charter schools are precisely what Milton Friedman recommended. He has the integrity to call this privatization. Anonymous does not. Funded by taxpayers but these schools are for profit entities.
Anonymous - have the courage to admit your agenda next time.
ilsm -> pgl...
Charter schools are like privatized arsenals, all cost cutting, profit and no performance.
US privatized the arsenals starting after WW I when a lot of "qui tammers" got to send arms to the Brits.
How long before the charter industry complex has enough unwarranted influence to ruin education?
djb -> Anonymous...
the charter schools cherry pick the best students and they don't deal with problem kids
this I known, they do poorly especially in new York city
as pgl said it is the fact that schools are fund locally that is the problem
to use a favorite right wing phrase
public education is an "unfunded mandate"
it should be paid for by the federal government
then all the mostly right wing politician could use property tax for divide and conquer politics
and funding can go where it is needed
djb -> djb...
then all the mostly right wing politician could NO LONGER use property tax for divide and conquer politics
DrDick -> pgl...
I think this is the primary issue. The schools in my hometown of 30K, national headquarters for Phillips Petroleum with a major research facility at the time, were excellent and most students went to college. Elsewhere in Oklahoma, students from similar sized towns were barely literate when they graduated. The primary reliance on local funding guarantees perpetuation of inequalities and the failure of the poor. This is exacerbated in larger communities by differential funding and resources allocated to schools within the district. When I lived in Chicago, Lincoln Park High School, in an affluent neighborhood, had world class programs. Meanwhile, schools on the predominately black west side and south side were literally falling apart with peeling lead paint and asbestos insulation falling on the students (along with occasional pieces of the cielings).
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Sep 15, 2015 | Zero Hedge
SixIsNinE
yeah thanks Carly ... HP made bullet-proof products that would last forever..... I still buy HP workstation notebooks, especially now when I can get them for $100 on ebay .... I sold HP products in the 1990s .... we had HP laserjet IIs that companies would run day & night .... virtually no maintenance ... when PCL5 came around then we had LJ IIIs .... and still companies would call for LJ I's, .... 100 pounds of invincible Printing ! .
This kind of product has no place in the World of Planned-Obsolesence .... I'm currently running an 8510w, 8530w, 2530p, Dell 6420 quad i7, hp printers hp scanners, hp pavilion desktops, .... all for less than what a Laserjet II would have cost in 1994, Total.
Not My Real Name
I still have my HP 15C scientific calculator I bought in 1983 to get me through college for my engineering degree. There is nothing better than a hand held calculator that uses Reverse Polish Notation!
BigJim
HP used to make fantastic products. I remember getting their RPN calculators back in th 80's; built like tanks.
Then they decided to "add value" by removing more and more material from their consumer/"prosumer" products until they became unspeakably flimsy. They stopped holding things together with proper fastenings and starting hot melting/gluing it together, so if it died you had to cut it open to have any chance of fixing it.
I still have one of their Laserjet 4100 printers. I expect it to outlast anything they currently produce, and it must be going on 16+ years old now.
Fuck you, HP. You started selling shit and now you're eating through your seed corn. I just wish the "leaders" who did this to you had to pay some kind of penalty greater than getting $25M in a severance package.
Automatic Choke
+100. The path of HP is everything that is wrong about modern business models. I still have a 5MP laserjet (one of the first), still works great. Also have a number of 42S calculators.....my day-to-day workhorse and several spares. I don't think the present HP could even dream of making these products today.
nope-1004
How well will I profit, as a salesman, if I sell you something that works?
How valuable are you, as a customer in my database, if you never come back?
Confucious say "Buy another one, and if you can't afford it, f'n finance it!"
It's the growing trend. Look at appliances. Nothing works anymore.
Normalcy Bias
Son of Loki
GE to cut Houston jobs as work moves overseas
http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2015/09/15/ge-to-cut-houston-job...
" Yes we can! "
Automatic Choke
hey big brother.... if you are curious, there is a damn good android emulator of the HP42S available (Free42). really it is so good that it made me relax about accumulating more spares. still not quite the same as a real calculator. (the 42S, by the way, is the modernization/simplification of the classic HP41, the real hardcord very-programmable, reconfigurable, hackable unit with all the plug-in-modules that came out in the early 80s.)
Miss Expectations
Imagine working at HP and having to listen to Carly Fiorina bulldoze you...she is like a blow-torch...here are 4 minutes of Carly and Ralph Nader (if you can take it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC4JDwoRHtk
Miffed Microbiologist
My husband has been a software architect for 30 years at the same company. Never before has he seen the sheer unadulterated panic in the executives. All indices are down and they are planning for the worst. Quality is being sacrificed for " just get some relatively functional piece of shit out the door we can sell". He is fighting because he has always produced a stellar product and refuses to have shit tied to his name ( 90% of competitor benchmarks fail against his projects). They can't afford to lay him off, but the first time in my life I see my husband want to quit...
unplugged
I've been an engineer for 31 years - our managements's unspoken motto at the place I'm at (large company) is: "release it now, we'll put in the quality later". I try to put in as much as possible before the product is shoved out the door without killing myself doing it.
AGuy
Do they even make test equipment anymore?
HP test and measurement was spun off many years ago as Agilent. The electronics part of Agilent was spun off as keysight late last year.HP basically makes computer equipment (PCs, servers, Printers) and software. Part of the problem is that computer hardware has been commodized. Since PCs are cheap and frequent replacements are need, People just by the cheapest models, expecting to toss it in a couple of years and by a newer model (aka the Flat screen TV model). So there is no justification to use quality components. Same is become true with the Server market. Businesses have switched to virtualization and/or cloud systems. So instead of taking a boat load of time to rebuild a crashed server, the VM is just moved to another host.
HP has also adopted the Computer Associates business model (aka Borg). HP buys up new tech companies and sits on the tech and never improves it. It decays and gets replaced with a system from a competitor. It also has a habit of buying outdated tech companies that never generate the revenues HP thinks it will.
BullyBearish
When Carly was CEO of HP, she instituted a draconian "pay for performance" plan. She ended up leaving with over $146 Million because she was smart enough not to specify "what type" of performance.
GeezerGeek
Regarding your statement "All those engineers choosing to pursue other opportunities", we need to realize that tech in general has been very susceptible to the vagaries of government actions. Now the employment problems are due to things like globalization and H1B programs. Some 50 years ago tech - meaning science and engineering - was hit hard as the US space program wound down. Permit me this retrospective:
I graduated from a quite good school with a BS in Physics in 1968. My timing was not all that great, since that was when they stopped granting draft deferments for graduate school. I joined the Air Force, but as an enlisted airman, not an officer. Following basic training, I was sent to learn to operate PCAM operations. That's Punched Card Accounting Machines. Collators. Sorters. Interpreters. Key punches. I was in a class with nine other enlistees. One had just gotten a Masters degree in something. Eight of us had a BS in one thing or another, but all what would now be called STEM fields. The least educated only had an Associate degree. We all enlisted simply to avoid being drafted into the Marines. (Not that there's anything wrong with the Marines, but all of us proclaimed an allergy to energetic lead projectiles and acted accordingly. Going to Canada, as many did, pretty much ensured never getting a job in STEM fields later in life.) So thanks to government action (fighting in VietNam, in this case) a significant portion of educated Americans found themselves diverted from chosen career paths. (In my case, it worked out fine. I learned to program, etc., and spent a total of over 40 years in what is now called IT. I think it was called EDP when I started the trek. Somewhere along the line it became (where I worked) Management Information Systems. MIS. And finally the department became simply Information Technology. I hung an older sign next to the one saying Information Technology. Somehow MIS-Information Technology seemed appropriate.)
Then I got to my first duty assignment. It was about five months after the first moon landing, and the aerospace industry was facing cuts in government aerospace spending. I picked up a copy of an engineering journal in the base library and found an article about job cuts. There was a cartoon with two janitors, buckets at their feet and mops in their hands, standing before a blackboard filled with equations. Once was saying to the other, pointing to one section, "you can see where he made his mistake right here...". It represented two engineers who had been reduced to menial labor after losing their jobs.
So while I resent all the H1Bs coming into the US - I worked with several for the last four years of my IT career, and was not at all impressed - and despise the politicians who allow it, I know that it is not the first time American STEM grads have been put out of jobs en masse. In some ways that old saying applies: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
If you made it this far, thanks for your patience.
adr
Just like Amazon, HP will supposedly make billions in profit analyzing things in the cloud that nobody looks at and has no use to the real economy, but it makes good fodder for Power Point presentations. I am amazed how much daily productivity goes into creating fancy charts for meetings that are meaningless to the actual business of the company.
IT'S ALL BULLSHIT!!!!!
I designed more products in one year for the small company I work for than a $15 billion corporation did throughout their entire design department employing hundreds of people. That is because 90% of their workday is spent preparing crap for meetings and they never really get anything meaningful done.
It took me one week to design a product and send it out for production branded for the company I work for, but it took six months to get the same type of product passed through the multi billion dollar corporation we license for. Because it had to pass through layer after layer of bullshit and through every level of management before it could be signed off. Then a month later somebody would change their mind in middle management and the product would need to be changed and go through the cycle all over again.
Their own bag department made six bags last year, I designed 16. Funny how I out produce a department of six people whose only job is to make bags, yet I only get paid the salary of one.
Maybe I'm just an imbecile for working hard.
Bear
You also have to add all the wasted time of employees having to sit through those presentations and the even more wasted time on Ashley Madison
cynicalskeptic
'Computers' cost as much - if not more time than they save, at least in corporate settings. Used to be you'd work up 3 budget projections - expected, worst case and best case, you'd have a meeting, hash it out and decide in a week. Now you have endless alternatives, endless 'tweaking' and changes and decisions take forever, with outrageous amounts of time spent on endless 'analysis' and presentations.
EVERY VP now has an 'Administrative Assistant' whose primary job is to develop PowerPoint presentations for the endless meetings that take up time - without any decisions ever being made.
Computers stop people from thinking. In ages past when you used a slide rule you had to know the order of magnitude of the end result. Now people make a mistake and come up with a ridiculous number and take it at face value because 'the computer' produced it.
Any exec worht anythign knew what a given line in their department or the total should be +or a small amount. I can't count the number of times budgets and analyses were WRONG because someone left off a few lines on a spreadsheet total.
Yes computer modeling for advanced tech and engineering is a help, CAD/CAM is great and many other applications in the tech/scientific world are a great help but letting computers loose in corporate and finance has produced endless waste AND - worsde - thigns like HFT (e.g. 'better' more effective ways to manipulate and cheat markets.
khnum
A recent lay off here turned out to be quite embarrassing for Parmalat there was nobody left that knew how to properly run the place they had to rehire many ex employees as consultants-at a costly premium
Anopheles
Consultants don't come at that much of a premium becaue the company doesn't have to pay benefits, vacation, sick days, or payroll taxes, etc. Plus it's really easy and cheap to get rid of consultants.
arrowrod
Obviously, you haven't worked as a consultant. You get paid by the hour.
To clean up a mess. 100 hours a week are not uncommon. (What?, is it possible to work 100 hours a week? Yes, it is, but only for about 3 months.)
RaceToTheBottom
HP Executives are trying hard to bring the company back to its roots:
The ability to fit into one garage...
PrimalScream
ALL THAT Meg Whitman needs to do ... is to FIRE EVERYBODY !! Then have all the products made in China, process all the sales orders in Hong Kong, and sub-contract the accounting and tax paperwork to India. Then HP can use all the profits for stock buybacks, except of course for Meg's salary ... which will keep rising astronomically!
Herdee
That's where education gets you in America.The Government sold out America's manufacturing base to Communist China who holds the debt of the USA.Who would ever guess that right-wing neo-cons(neo-nazis) running the government would sell out to communists just to get the money for war? Very weird.
Really20
"Communist"? The Chinese government, like that of the US, never believed in worker ownership of businesses and never believed that the commerical banking system (whether owned by the state, or private corporations which act like a state) should not control money. Both countries believe in centralization of power among a few shareholders, who take the fruits of working people's labor while contributing nothing of value themselves (money being but a token that represents a claim on real capital, not capital itself.)
Management and investors ought to be separate from each other; management should be chosen by workers by universal equal vote, while a complementary investor board should be chosen by investors much as corporate boards are now. Both of these boards should be legally independent but bound organizations; the management board should run the business while the investor board should negotiate with the management board on the terms of equity issuance. No more buybacks, no more layoffs or early retirements, unless workers as a whole see a need for it to maintain the company.
The purpose of investors is to serve the real economy, not the other way round; and in turn, the purpose of the real economy is to serve humanity, not the other way around. Humans should stop being slaves to perpetual growth.
Really20
HP is laying off 80,000 workers or almost a third of its workforce, converting its long-term human capital into short-term gains for rich shareholders at an alarming rate. The reason that product quality has declined is due to the planned obsolescence that spurs needless consumerism, which is necessary to prop up our debt-backed monetary system and the capitalist-owned economy that sits on top of it.
NoWayJose
HP - that company that sells computers and printers made in China and ink cartridges made in Thailand?
Dominus Ludificatio
Another company going down the drain because their focus is short term returns with crappy products.They will also bring down any company they buy as well.
Barnaby
HP is microcosm of what Carly will do to the US: carve it like a pumpkin and leave the shell out to bake in the sun for a few weeks. But she'll make sure and poison the seeds too! Don't want anything growing out of that pesky Palm division...
Dre4dwolf
The world is heading for massive deflation. Computers have hit the 14 nano-meter lithography zone, the cost to go from 14nm to say 5nm is very high, and the net benefit to computing power is very low, but lets say we go from 14nm to 5nm over the next 4 years. Going from 5nm to 1nm is not going to net a large boost in computing power and the cost to shrink things down and re-tool will be very high for such an insignificant gain in performance.
What does that mean
- Computers (atleast non-quantum ones) have hit the point where about 80-90% of the potential for the current science has been tap'd
- This means that the consumer is not going to be put in the position where they will have to upgrade to faster systems for atleast another 7-8 years.... (because the new computer wont be that much faster than their existing one).
- If no one is upgrading the only IT sectors of the economy that stand to make any money are software companies (Microsoft, Apple, and other small software developers), most software has not caught up with hardware yet.
- We are obviously heading for massive deflation, consumer spending levels as a % are probably around where they were in the late 70s - mid 80s, this is a very deflationary environment that is being compounded by a high debt burden (most of everyones income is going to service their debts), that signals monetary tightening is going on... people simply don't have enough discretionary income to spend on new toys.
All that to me screams SELL consumer electronics stocks because profits are GOING TO DECLINE , SALES ARE GOING TO DECLINE. There is no way , no amount of buy backs will float the stocks of corporations like HP/Dell/IBM etc... it is inevitable that these stocks will be worth 30% less over the next 5 - 8 years
But what do I know? maybe I am missing something.
In anycase a lot of pressure is being put on HP to do all it can at any cost to boost the stock valuations, because so much of its stock is institution owned, they will strip the wallpaper off the walls and sell it to a recycling plant if it would give them more money to boost stock valuations. That to me signals that most of the people pressuring the board of HP to boost the stock, want them to gut the company as much as they can to boost it some trivial % points so that the majority of shares can be dumped onto muppets.
To me it pretty much also signals something is terribly wrong at HP and no one is talking about it.
PoasterToaster
Other than die shrinks there really hasn't been a lot going on in the CPU world since Intel abandoned its Netburst architecture and went back to its (Israeli created) Pentium 3 style pipeline. After that they gave up on increasing speed and resorted to selling more cores. Now that wall has been hit, they have been selling "green" and "efficient" nonsense in place of increasing power.
x86 just needs to go, but a lot is invested in it not the least of which is that 1-2 punch of forced, contrived obsolesence carried out in a joint operation with Microsoft. 15 years ago you could watch videos with no problem on your old machine using Windows XP. Fast forward to now and their chief bragging point is still "multitasking" and the ability to process datastreams like video. It's a joke.
The future is not in the current CPU paradigm of instructions per second; it will be in terms of variables per second. It will be more along the lines of what GPU manufacturers are creating with their thousands of "engines" or "processing units" per chip, rather than the 4, 6 or 12 core monsters that Intel is pushing. They have nearly given up on their roadmap to push out to 128 cores as it is. x86 just doesn't work with all that.
Dojidog
Another classic "Let's rape all we can and bail with my golden parachute" corporate leaders setting themselves up. Pile on the string of non-IT CEOs that have been leading the company to ruin. To them it is nothing more than a contest of being even worse than their predecessor. Just look at the billions each has lost before their exit. Compaq, a cluster. Palm Pilot, a dead product they paid millions for and then buried. And many others.
Think the split is going to help? Think again. Rather than taking the opportunity to fix their problems, they have just duplicated and perpetuated them into two separate entities.
HP is a company that is mired in a morass of unmanageable business processes and patchwork of antiquated applications all interconnected to the point they are petrified to try and uncouple them.
Just look at their stock price since January. The insiders know. Want to fix HP? All it would take is a savvy IT based leader with a boatload of common sense. What makes money at HP? Their printers and ink. Not thinking they can provide enterprise solutions to others when they can't even get their own house in order.
I Write Code
Let's not beat around the bush, they're outsourcing, firing Americans and hiring cheap labor elsewhere: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-15/hewlett-packard-to-cut-up-to-30-000-more-jobs-in-restructuring It's also shifting employees to low-cost areas, and hopes to have 60 percent of its workers located in cheaper countries by 2018, Nefkens said.
yogibear
Carly Fiorina: (LOL, leading a tech company with a degree in medieval history and philosophy) While at ATT she was groomed from the Affirmative Action plan.
Alma Mater: Stanford University (B.A. in medieval history and philosophy); University of Maryland (MBA); Massachusetts Institute of Technology
==================================================================
Patricia Russo: (Lucent) (Dedree in Political Science). Another lady elevated through the AA plan, Russo got her bachelor's degree from Georgetown University in political science and history in 1973. She finished the advanced management program at Harvard Business School in 1989
Both ladies steered their corporations to failure.
Clowns on Acid
It is very straightforward. Replace 45,000 US workers with 100,000 offshore workers and you still save millions of USD ! Use the "savings" to buy back stock, then borrow more $$ at ZIRP to buy more stock back.
You guys don't know nuthin'.
homiegot
HP: one of the worst places you could work. Souless.
Pancho de Villa
Ladies and Gentlemen! Integrity has left the Building!
space junk
I worked there for a while and it was total garbage. There are still some great folks around, but they are getting paid less and less, and having to work longer hours for less pay while reporting to God knows who, often a foreigner with crappy engrish skills, yes likely another 'diversity hire'. People with DEEP knowledge, decades and decades, have either gotten unfairly fired or demoted, made to quit, or if they are lucky, taken some early retirement and GTFO (along with their expertise - whoopsie! who knew? unintended consequences are a bitch aren't they? )....
If you look on a site like LinkedIN, it will always say 'We're hiring!'. YES, HP is hiring.....but not YOU, they want Ganesh Balasubramaniamawapbapalooboopawapbamboomtuttifrutti, so that they can work him as modern day slave labor for ultra cheap. We can thank idiot 'leaders' like Meg Pasty Faced Whitman and Bill 'Forced Vaccinations' Gates for lobbying Congress for decades, against the rights of American workers.
Remember that Meg 'Pasty Faced' Whitman is the person who came up with the idea of a 'lights out' datacenter....that's right, it's the concept of putting all of your computers in a building, in racks, in the dark, and maybe hiring an intern to come in once a month and keep them going. This is what she actually believed. Along with her other statement to the HP workforce which says basically that the future of HP is one of total automation.....TRANSLATION: If you are a smart admin, engineer, project manager, architect, sw tester, etc.....we (HP management) think you are an IDIOT and can be replaced by a robot, a foreigner, or any other cheap worker.
Race to the bottom is like they say a space ship approaching a black hole......after a while the laws of physics and common sense, just don't apply anymore.
InnVestuhrr
An era of leadership in computer technology has died, and there is no grave marker, not even a funeral ceremony or eulogy ... Hewlett-Packard, COMPAQ, Digital Equipment Corp, UNIVAC, Sperry-Rand, Data General, Tektronix, ZILOG, Advanced Micro Devices, Sun Microsystems, etc, etc, etc. So much change in so short a time, leaves your mind dizzy.
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Aug 30, 2015 | blog.erratasec.com
Stefan Anica said...This article is more full of bullshit than a bull stable .... with shit in it.Don il said...
BTW, comments such as next:"This article is more full of bullshit than a bull stable .... with shit in it."
bring to my mind all the comments from Microsoft fans/paid-for-shills in other forums. They tend to attack anyone not accepting things imposed on them.
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May 27, 2015 | nakedcapitalism.com
Disturbed Voter May 27, 2015 at 12:52 pm
Great post with lots of out-of-box insight.
In the IT world, one can see both the dumbing down of the users, and the dumbing down of the IT staff. Thanks to automatic spell check and copy/paste … the clerical world has pretty much absorbed as much productivity increase as it can … but the people doing the writing on a PC with Word are less skilled than someone with an IBM Selectric was 30 years ago.
This is applied to IT personnel as well … IT support is increasingly centralized with fewer and fewer local support people, thanks to more highly skilled specialists at the server farm, but the net-net is fewer people and lower labor costs. Eventually local IT help will only be able to show users what they could have done for themselves, if only they had read the instructions. This promotes less able users … since they don't have to do this themselves, they can always call up an IT dog's-body to come show them for the Nth time how to do something.
And not only is quality declining, but superfluous quantity is king … particularly with email.
Mark, May 27, 2015 at 1:54 pm
Interesting thesis. One answer about why we work is to live, but another quite separate answer is, to secure the means we need to live the lives we think we ought to live.
That is to say, the Western preoccupation with occupation has perhaps shifted (devolved?) from a dutiful, industrious working out of some sense of calling to some to more material motivation for industriousness purposed toward working out how to keep up with the Joneses, whoever they are. In this, organisational productivity is not unimportant, but perhaps appearances of importance to productivity are more important. As you note, the work that goes into appearing important is often at odds with actually getting a task completed faster, or for less. In this logic, having a certain job is a bit like what it meant to have a title in eras and states where nobility came with real privilege. So people go for these things, big time.
As I think about the ridiculous efforts required to make it in "society" in bygone eras, I'm uncertain whether this decoupling of work and material productivity is a new thing.
Either way, it's a big thing.
subgenius, May 27, 2015 at 4:04 pm
I have actually been fired from a job for "time-wasting"… Thing is, I was so much faster than the surrounding drones that I had completed all my alloted tasks. Apparently appearance is all when working for little napoleon bosses (who, incidentally, have no problem telling you exactly how easy something THEY can't personally do is…)
hunkerdown, May 27, 2015 at 2:01 pm
Ritualized, exactly spot-on. The need for production may have lessened, but the desperate, singular need to take the inferior side of a power relationship that only gets worse… well, it is the English we have to blame for that.
Brooklin Bridge, May 27, 2015 at 10:45 am
In a corrupt society, the devices we invent and the system in which they operate will be corrupted. The rent extraction nature of smart phones, the case of John Deere and GM arguing their vehicles are part of a licensing agreement and are not "owned" by buyers, are good examples. That's the problem I have with technology more than unfair and harmful replacement of human labor.
At some point, assuming we deal with the above, we will have to deal with some sort of basic economic/resource guarantee based simply on being born. Robots and systems will be capable of doing more and more work from basic, to very sophisticated, so yes at some point they will replace more people than they create work for.
Another consideration and one that seems particularly overlooked is that all these things need energy and lots of it. It will be amusing (perhaps more along the lines of tragic) to create a society totally dependent on robots (where people forget how to be auto-mechanics, doctors, lawyers, or mathematicians, or really expensive people such as plumbers only to have it shut down (in some drawn out unplanned manner) due to energy depletion.
Pepsi, May 27, 2015
You're right on and you address what I was going to post.
This confluence of robots, jobs, and profit lead one to wonder, what is a job, what is profit, why do we need to make things at lower cost? There are no satisfying answers, just loops back to creating profit and satisfying some arbitrary need. We have to destroy this 'market' based thinking and instead think about things in terms of the world and its people, or we'll all be screwed, robots or no.
Peter, May 27, 2015 at 12:06 pm
Digby calls it "The Midas Cult." Which I think sums America up quite nicely.
Disturbed Voter, May 27, 2015 at 1:07 pm
Having effective artificial doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers … other than providing labor saving tools for the people already doing those jobs … is based on the AI myth. AI is a con, and unfortunately most people aren't intelligent themselves to see thru it. A back hoe replaces a ditch digger, but there is nothing like a ditch digger to replace a thinking individual.
TG, May 27, 2015 at 10:48 am
The possibility that someday someone might produce a robot that can reliably act as a general purpose maid is of no relevance to TODAYS labor market.
For some jobs that need very high levels of precision like welding car frames or wave-soldering SMT components, robots are used. Some tasks, like mass-producing nails, are so efficiently done by machines that nobody will ever do that by hand no matter how cheap labor gets. But in general, industries are using LESS automation, not more! Nike has its shoes made by hand in Vietnam by disposable workers paid 57 cents an hour – even today we could at least substantially automate that process, but it would require a massive up-front capital investment. For now automation is a red herring, like gay marriage, designed to distract us from the real causes of falling wages.
Today $100,000 can buy you an industrial robot that can sort clothes about as well as a brain-damaged orangutang. Will robots someday be able to perform these tasks at human/human+ levels? Probably, although it could still be a ways off. But even then, how much will these robots cost? Computers are getting cheaper all the time – industrial machinery, not so much. It's not just whether a robot can someday do the job, but what are the total amortized costs and risks? (A sick or excess Vietnamese worker can be fired – a million dollar robot that breaks down or is no longer needed is a big hole in the bottom line of any business that purchased it).
One notes also that automation is generally found in high-wage countries like Japan, not so much in low-wage countries like Mexico or Vietnam. If automation was a major cause of low wages wouldn't you expect the opposite? The bottom line is that automation does not (for now) cause low wages – rather, because it is (for now) generally so expensive, automation is a reaction to high wages, that allows sufficient productivity so that businesses can operate with $40/hour labor costs.
So don't believe your lying eyes when you see pictures of workers jammed into sheds like battery hans assembling iphones by hand – no, believe that it's the evil robots that are taking all our jobs and driving wages down!
craazyboy, May 27, 2015 at 11:01 am
A cynic may even conclude that "capital" knows robots are expensive and offshored labor is cheap!
Santi, May 27, 2015 at 10:50 am
Somehow, the Japanese mean, we should turn Henry Ford's quotation upside down:
"I will build a motor car for the great multitude…constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise…so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one -- and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces."
Instead of building products for the great multitude, nowadays businessmen should aspire to build consumers for their products… No wonder most products from the dot com panoply are free…
Bart Fargo, May 27, 2015 at 12:03 pm
The problem with robotic surgery is that it doesn't give any better results than manual minimally invasive surgical techniques, but is much more expensive – often multiple times the cost of laparoscopic surgery. That could change in the future, but for now demand is driven by direct-to-patient marketing by da Vinci's manufacturer (Intuitive Surgical, which has a monopoly on robotic MIS) as well as hospitals who buy the robots to advertise that they are cutting-edge and then are stuck trying to recoup the purchase cost by increasing volume, since insurance reimburses all forms of minimally invasive surgery the same.
http://www.healthline.com/health-news/is-da-vinci-robotic-surgery-revolution-or-ripoff-021215#5
roadrider, May 27, 2015 at 3:22 pm
The main problem with the results not surpassing traditional procedures is most likely the steep learning curve associated with the surgical "robots" (they're not really robots but are instead remotely operated devices that translate movements of the surgeons hands into more precise movements of the instruments). Once hospitals spend millions to acquire these devices they have quite an incentive to use them as much as possible. That means that patients may unwittingly become part of a surgeon's transition period from traditional procedures during which they may produce no better or even worse results. Trying to get information out of surgeons and hospitals about the experience level and outcomes is a trying exercise at best. This is a big problem in community hospitals trying to make a name for themselves.
I went through this last year when I had a robotic procedure (prostate). I declined to have my community urologist perform the procedure because I had doubts about his experience level about which he could not provide me with adequate reassurance. I ended up having the procedure at a high-volume government/academic medical center to which I had access as part of a clinical study (full disclosure: insurance – or lack of same – issues also figured into this decision). So far, I've been very happy with the results.
My advice: find the best surgeon accessible to you irrespective of the tools he/she chooses to use.
Steven, May 27, 2015 at 12:45 pm
This is a huge issue which I hope will be revisited in much greater depth. When you substitute machines and computers powered from inanimate energy sources for human labor and what Frederick Soddy called "diligence" (i.e. machine tending), it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that less labor will be required to produce what had been regarded as life's essentials. The real economic problem for more than a century has been finding a way to distribute what an advanced industrial economy has been able to produce. Even the 'iron law of wages' is under attack as human labor becomes more and more redundant.
Even in Soddy's day (the 1920s – 50s) our civilization found it easier to address the contradiction between its incessant drive to render human labor redundant and its rigid enforcement of the rule that '(s)he who does not work neither shall (s)he eat' than address more fundamental questions like the definition of wealth and 'how much is enough?' The Keynes / New Deal 'solution' was, along with some much needed investment in public infrastructure from which the bankers and financiers couldn't make enough profit, make-work programs for the public sector and vast subsidies for an 'American lifestyle' built around suburbia, the automobile culture, waste and planned obsolescence for the private sector. Those much vaunted 'services industry' jobs turned out to be mainly MILITARY services.
Some of us are old enough to remember all the talk and the promise of a 'leisure society' in which people had enough time to understand the world around them and perhaps explore the meaning of life, should they so chose. Apparently that is not to be. It must be sacrificed in the interest of a 'full employment for money' program under which profit margins not protected by government cost-plus contracts are allowed and encouraged to extract their required margins with ever more 'efficiency' (read displacement of human labor).
Nancy Pelosi is supposed to have asked "Where did they get all that money?" when informed of the sums involved in the Fed's QE policies. Perhaps the country's (and the world's) political leadership really is that dense when it comes to questions of money and economics. But the rest of us need not be. After 2008 it should be pretty clear by now that all that money was not real 'wealth'. It was – and remains – debt. For people who have more wealth than they could ever consume in several lifetimes, that debt is the real goal – control over the life and labor of present and future generations – of people or at least machines).
Time is running out for the West – if not the world – to order its affairs with by better definition of wealth than the money created by its bankers and financial engineers. Soddy's definition of wealth is a good place to start:
Wealth as a form, product or result of a draft upon the flow of available energy consists of the special forms, products, or results which empower and enable human life.
The keynote of the age is discovery, and life itself is discovery. Once made, countless generations may use it and live by it without conscious apprehension of the nature of it, without further changing their mode of livelihood, and, indeed, deeming it the only possible way to live.
Discovery, Natural Energy and Diligence- the Three Ingredients of Wealth.
Soddy, Frederick M.A., F.R.S.. Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt (Kindle Locations 874-876, 1982-1983, Location 1276 ). Distributed Proofreaders Canada.
Not all of us can be scientists or engineers. But most of us are at least capable of understanding who and what butters our bread. That is a job much more important than raking rocks.
Disturbed Voter, May 27, 2015 at 1:11 pm
Raking rocks is a job you assign to a junior Zen monk. It is the job of the senior Zen monk to contemplate the resulting aesthetic ;-)
fresno dan, May 27, 2015 at 1:52 pm
"I have to differ a little with the cheery, "Better policy will create new/different jobs." What passes for our leadership believes in the mantra of more education and more skilled workers as the answer. In fact, America is going in reverse in this category, as educational attainment has fallen and college and higher education costs rise into the stratosphere. Moreover, the notion that there is a raft of highly technical jobs with lots of unmet demand is a canard. As we've discussed at some length, STEM graduates are finding it hard to obtain work (see confirming evidence in The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage from the Atlantic last year)."
I can't help but reiterate what was pointed out in NC in the past:
AND
http://www.cnet.com/news/a-shortage-of-tech-workers-not-so-fast/
So whether it is flat out conspiracies to suppress wages, or conspiracies to import workers, it amounts to the same thing. There is a desire at the top to harvest all the gains of society for themselves.
So, let's look at the arguments that more tech will increase productivity, and that rising productivity helps everyone. If that were so, we should all work less and have a higher standard of living. I think the working less is indisputable (maybe just not voluntarily). The higher standard of living…not so much.
Again, I would say that 99% have had stagnating incomes for 40 years. During this time there has been the "tech boom" – Whether its tech or policies that is the cause of the stagnation, it doesn't seem to me that the oligarchy is much inclined to change what is making themselves richer and richer….
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March 23, 2015 | Economist's View
The true goal of Republican's "deficit fetishism":Congressional Budget Plans Get Two-Thirds of Cuts From Programs for People With Low or Moderate Incomes, by Richard Kogan and Isaac Shapiro, CBPP: The budgets adopted on March 19 by the House Budget Committee and the Senate Budget Committee each cut more than $3 trillion over ten years (2016-2025) from programs that serve people of limited means. These deep reductions amount to 69 percent of the cuts to non-defense spending in both the House and Senate plans.Each budget plan derives more than two-thirds of its non-defense budget cuts from programs for people with low or modest incomes even though these programs constitute less than one-quarter of federal program costs. Moreover, spending on these programs is already scheduled to decline as a share of the economy between now and 2025.[1]
The bipartisan deficit reduction plan that Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles (co-chairs of the National Commission on Federal Policy) issued in 2010 adhered to the basic principle that deficit reduction should not increase poverty or widen inequality. The new Congressional plans chart a radically different course, imposing their most severe cuts on people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. ...
DeDude
What they increase instead of cutting is our absurdly overblown defense spending. It should be turned around with all the cuts in defense and a slight increase in non-defense (as we desperately need to invest in infrastructure.
ilsm said in reply to DeDude...They cannot cut defense, how will they pay to fix the F-35's they are taking possession of?
Billions a year in contracts because we pay soldiers too much to do combat support services......
Perpetual war is "security", just not the kind that a poor kids food stamps should pay for.
400 ppm CO2 said in reply to ilsm...
"Perpetual war is..."
~~ilsm~Perpetual war is perpetual refugees. Most of the young kids are fleeing Ukraine as we network. Older folks are glued to their retirement plans which are being taxed to the max.
We need to write to Congressional Creatures and beg for some refugee relief for our cousins now in Ukraine. We need to organize community action. Make a place for some of them here. A daunting task, but somebody has got to do it before even more Ukrainians get maimed and killed.
Russian cousins should also get their shjt together and help relocate some of the refugees. It will be easier for the Живаго-s to extricate victims. Живаго-s are closer than we. It is everyone's responsibility.
Zinsky said...
This is an immoral piece of proposed legislation. The wealthy in the United States are doing just fine, thank you, and don't need another gratuitous tax cut. Especially given the fact that it wouldn't do a thing to stimulate the U.S. economy, all the right-wing rhetoric to the contrary.
The United States is a very wealthy country. We can afford to feed the hungry and help trodden. In fact, if we truly were a Judeo-Christian country, we would be morally obligated to do so. Of course, most conservatives are phony Christians who care not a whit for the poor and broken. Shame on them.
Darryl FKA Ron said in reply to Zinsky...
[Yep! Ayn Rand was an atheist.]
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March 14, 2015 | naked capitalism
participant-observer-observed, March 14, 2015 at 5:19 am
This is int'l but insofar as City sleeps with Wall St, it may be relevant to see that City has a new boyfriend, getting front page coverage at the Taipei TimesBeijing yesterday hailed Britain's announcement that it would seek to join a Chinese-led development bank, after Washington voiced caution about the move.
. . . .
London's move drew a cautious response from Washington, a rare note of discord in their "special relationship," which follows criticism from the US about Britain's cuts to defense spending.
China and 20 other countries signed a memorandum of understanding to establish the Beijing-headquartered bank in October.
"We believe any new multilateral institution should incorporate the high standards of the World Bank and the regional development banks," US National Security Council spokesman Patrick Ventrell said.
"Based on many discussions, we have concerns about whether the AIIB will meet these high standards, particularly related to governance, and environmental and social safeguards."
The bank has support from countries including India, Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
China's official Xinhua news agency rapped the US for its skepticism, writing in a commentary yesterday that Washington "exhibited nothing but a childish paranoia towards China."
"It seems that the US government needs to be reminded that bias and a deep-rooted strategic distrust towards China are by no means helpful in forging a healthy relationship with the country," Xinhua wrote.
"It's imperative for Washington to change its mindset," it said.
World Bank president Jim Yong Kim yesterday also welcomed the setting up of the China-backed bank.
Llewelyn Moss, March 14, 2015 at 8:51 am
If the US is at Full Employment and the Economy is at full steam ( as Obot lackeys keep telling us), then why is the Fed Funds rate still at 0%.
Isn't 0% Fed rate an indicator of an Economy On Life Support. Tell me why I'm wrong.
cassiodorus, March 14, 2015 at 5:02 pm
Employment-population ratio: 59.3%, where it was in July of 2009
Employment-population ratio, 25-54: 77.3%, about where it was at the beginning of 2009
There has, then, been only a limited recovery.
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Mar 12, 2015 | www.cio.com
"Heavy-handed approaches are not going to eliminate shadow IT, it'll just go farther underground," says Deputy CTO Steve Riley at Riverbed, an enterprise software vendor. "There's no positive outcome for being a disciplinarian about something like this. You might end up with services that are even more dangerous, where people now actively seek to circumvent policies."Usually, employees who decide to engage in shadow IT don't have bad intentions. They do so because what they're getting from corporate IT isn't good enough: Corporate-issued devices and apps are clunky, enterprise security measures ruin the user experience, IT is too slow to respond to requests.
CIOs need to change this perception but not in an antagonistic way. Riley advises CIOs to work with employees in areas where shadow IT tends to start and spread, such as file sharing and instant messaging. It's easier to rein in data from five services than 30, Riley says.
Battling on another front, CIOs should reach out to shadow IT vendors with an olive branch. While it's reactionary to slam vendors for bypassing IT, this won't stop them from selling directly to employees. Instead, CIOs should focus on building a relationship with vendors so that their services can spread throughout the organization on a long-term basis rather than sold to individuals and business units on an ad hoc basis, Riley says.
CIOs can use Clinton case as a teachable moment
Ironically, the Clinton case might help CIOs fight against shadow IT by spurring employees to police themselves. Even if the political furor over Clinton's private email system subsides and continued debate shows shadow IT as a common practice -- "Colin Powell, Rick Perry and Jeb Bush used private email" for government business, Riley says -- this doesn't mean there aren't severe consequences.
There will likely be inquiries about whether or not Clinton broke the law. Her reputation as someone to be trusted has been tarnished. Her peers might think twice about lending their support if she put her political party at risk. If a smoking-gun email surfaces or a national security breach comes to light, Clinton will be under fire.
CIOs hope these fears have lasting effects, at least in the workplace. Clinton proved that she wasn't able to get away with her personal email system, and the fallout to her career can be great. Her situation should sound a warning to employees about the dangers of shadow IT.
"The message is, if you try to circumvent us, then you're going to cause pain for yourself," Riley says. "But if you work with us, we're more than willing to give you whatever you need."
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On the costs of unemployment:
Being 'laid off' leads to a decade of distrust, EurekAlert!: People who lose their jobs are less willing to trust others for up to a decade after being laid-off, according to new research from The University of Manchester.Being made redundant or forced into unemployment can scar trust to such an extent that even after finding new work this distrust persists, according to the new findings of social scientist Dr James Laurence. This means that the large-scale job losses of the recent recession could lead to a worrying level of long-term distrust among the British public and risks having a detrimental effect on the fabric of society.
Dr Laurence ... finds that being made redundant from your job not only makes people less willing to trust others but that this increased distrust and cynicism lasts at least nine years after being forced out of work. It also finds that far from dissipating over time, an individual can remain distrustful of others even after they find a new job. ...
gunste said...
I was laid off many years ago, because my usually correct advice to management bugged them when I was proved right. Best thing that ever happened to me, because I found that I was able to use the projects that I managed and start my own business. It grew and became known world wide. I provided some QC, accelerated test equipment for my industry that was unique. Since the market was limited, no one else got into it. I thrived for 14 years, when the equipment became obsolescent and retired - very comfortably.
The lesson is, if you have new areas to explore and start your own business based on something you know very, very well, you can make it as your own boss -- which is the best boss you will ever have.
cm -> gunste...
"you can make it as your own boss - which is the best boss you will ever have"
That's only the case if you are in a line of work where somebody else doesn't specify the details of what you have to do (to some level), which is often the case if your work can be described as a "service". But you sound happy so you weren't in that place.
reason...
gunste
you do realize what the probability of new business succeeding is? It is like winning the lottery, and saying look there is no problem, just go in a lottery.
Because you succeeded, there is no guarantee that anybody else could. And as cm pointed out, you may not have a boss where you work, but your customer is your boss. You are still not fully self directed (and a good boss can give you some room for making you own decisions).
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Feb 04, 2015 | The Enterprisers Project
The press is full of stories about Americans being overstretched and overworked. The U.S. Travel Association reported in August that 40 percent of us will leave paid vacation days unused this year. I know that work-life balance is a challenge because I, along with my colleagues in IT, live it every week. When I recently took my family on a vacation five time zones west of my home base in Dallas, I was excited because I could work in the morning before they got up and shut the computer off when they did.
In retrospect, should I have turned my computer on at all?
In the evenings, I've stopped counting how many times I go look at my phone just to see what's going on. Rationally I know that if something alarming is going on I'll get a text or a call, but for some reason I still check. And I know it's not just me, because of all the other people I see responding and working during the evening hours. The point is, you can never truly stay ahead of your email, but so many of us try regardless. We know it's insanity, but for some reason we still do it.
Better culture, less process
At PrimeLending we're trying to take our out-of-balance lives back again. We call this effort Enhancing Culture. One thing I'm asking everyone on the technology team to do is send me ideas on how to enhance culture.
Another initiative is to reduce process. Here, too, I'm looking for ideas where team members see process is too heavy or unnecessary such that we can eliminate or reduce it. Anything we can do to make people want to work here, to enjoy working here more, is on the table.
Where have we landed thus far? Here are a few of our directions:
- We plan to celebrate victories more, which is hard to do in an industry that prides itself on expediting and moving to the next step
- We plan to work from home more, starting every other Friday, since there is little reason a lot of us can't do our work from home. The balance to strike there is that don't want someone to take on so much working from home that their work is their home.
- We're embedding some of our IT staff with our corporate marketing team, which is moving to a new creative space that should free up more time to think proactively and less reactively.
Am I satisfied yet? Not really. Part of the difficulty is the mortgage industry, of course, since our employees are meeting with customers in the evening, on weekends, and at their jobs. We don't really have set business hours. Our corporate office opens and closes 7:00 to 5:30, but the actual folks who are supporting the people in the field across the country have to work. They have to meet with borrowers when it's convenient for the borrowers, not when it's convenient for us.
Just as with vacations, though, we need to be able to turn it all off and step away. I know I feel the stress and I know folks on the team feel it. We have conversations all the time about it. When there wasn't a smartphone, there was a lot more downtime and a lot more conversations with folks. I don't think we're handling the smartphone well as a country, to be honest. Just like email, staying on top of your smart phone literally never ends. If I clean out my inbox tonight, it's going to be filled right back up tomorrow.
We asked some of our Enterprisers to respond to Tim's thoughts, here are their responses:
Sven Gerjets, chief technology officer at Pearson
- Define success measures for your employees. Hours spent is the worst way to measure productivity and value. I would never measure the success of my financial planner this way, as an example. I would rather have him spend an hour a day on me and get a 25 percent return than spend 12 hours and get a 10 percent return. Similarly, I think the key to balance is in helping our employees figure out the measure of their success. This is often easier said than done. If they don't understand the KPIs that show they are or are not successful they will burn the midnight oil to earn your approval.
- Act on priorities immediately. I think the other thing that erodes productivity and creates waste is our reliance on email and meetings. Well over half of the emails we get are a waste, in my opinion. Burning through these as quickly as possible, if you can't stop them, is critical. For the few important emails you do get, addressing them right away is critical. The longer they sit the more you get and after a while you will have 100 emails that you have to spend time on, which becomes impossible. On the meeting front, I think pushing for agendas and expected outcomes helps guide the time and documented decisions and named action items helps prevent the need for follow up meetings because of misunderstanding and confusion about accountability.
Rajeev Jaswal, director of IT at Red Hat
As you know there is no magic bullet. Five principles we apply in our groups are:
- Effective delegation with the ability to check (trust but verify periodically)
- Accountability at all levels to avoid the hero syndrome
- Rotation into roles that cause disruption of work/life balance (pager duties)
- Reward for the right behaviors
- Establish clip levels of authorization rather than the funnel approach.
In other words, delegate authority downward into the organization so our associates feel more ownership for change approvals, financial approvals, or project checkpoint approvals. This goes hand-in-hand with accountability.
Tom Soderstrom, IT chief technology officer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
This is a difficult problem. For example, I'm responding to this after 11 p.m. on Sunday, and have worked all weekend, so we're not necessarily there yet. But here are three things we do:
- We celebrate successes with awards, get-togethers, lunches, dinners, etc., which include spouses.
- We do a 90/80 work schedule, which means seven nine-hour days in a two-week period, one eight-hour day and then a free Friday every other week.
- We encourage outdoor meetings and provide outdoor space. We're now creating more open space inside and outside and more creative space.
Peter Buonora, enterprise architect at BJ's Wholesale Club
Become a business chemistry expert. One of the keys to avoiding team burnout starts with building a team that has a strong chemistry - hiring people that will be driven to succeed together and would ideally spend time together outside of work. The team should enjoy doing things together and be able to bond and make a human connection with each other, almost like an extended family. This becomes an internal support system and I believe these types of teams can conquer just about anything. It is also critical that they have a strong sense of purpose far beyond just what they are working on today, tomorrow or for the next six months.
I am reading a great book called "Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose" by Tony Hsieh – founder of Zappos. I would highly recommend it for new ideas on building a great culture. I believe this is the key to sustaining great team performance and avoiding burnout. Check out the culture book that they put together. Each year they ask team members to describe in 500 words or less what Zappos culture means to them. Whether it is good or bad it goes into their culture book.
Even though teams may have to work long and hard, it is those teams that build a strong bond that will be able to not only endure, but deliver things nobody thought possible and will over-deliver in the of toughest times.
John McGregor, CTO of Kronos Inc., also has some ideas about how to mitigate the burnout effect on staff. Read his interview, "CIOs should look for the 3 C's: character, collaboration and competence."
Tim Elkins joined PrimeLending in November 2008 as Senior Vice President, Chief Information Officer. In October 2012, Tim was promoted to executive vice president, chief information officer, and he is responsible for information security, IT operations, and technology initiatives.
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