Monthly Archives: February 2016

An Empirical Test

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It isn’t often that we get to run a controlled experiment in economics, but one seems to be beginning in Oregon on the matter of minimum wages.

Oregon lawmakers have approved landmark legislation that propels the state’s minimum wage for all workers to the highest rank in the US, and does so through an unparalleled tiered system based on geography.

The legislation will raise the state’s minimum wage to

$14.75 in metro Portland, $13.50 in smaller cities such as Salem and Eugene, and $12.50 in rural communities.

This will be complete in just six years, by 2022.

And that’s the experiment. Over the course of these next six years, watch employment rates adjust across the three geographies, and watch small business startup and development across those three geographies.

Hmm….

An Academic’s Self-Importance

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Professor Cal Newport, a Georgetown University Computer Science professor, has some interesting ideas regarding how Americans should work and how we should communicate with each other. He laid out these views in a recent Harvard Business Review piece.

This unstructured workflow arose from the core properties of email technology—namely, the standard practice of associating addresses with individuals (and not, say, teams, or request type, or project)….

This is bad, of course, because the individuals doing the work didn’t actually do that. Someboedy else did—those nebulous “teams,” or this thing called a “request type.”

But the big demonstration of an Academic’s self-importance is in this:

But just because this unstructured approach is standard and easy doesn’t mean it’s smart. It’s important to remember that no blue ribbon committee or brilliant executive ever sat down and decided that this workflow would make businesses more productive or employees more satisfied.

Yeah. No Betters told these plebes what to do. They just stumbled around in the dark, using this complex new tool—email!—without guidance, without an Expert’s or a Blue Ribbon Committee’s instruction. Never mind that they got the work done, and better, using this new tool (among others) their way instead of in the Approved Way.

A consequence of this workflow is that an organization’s tasks become entangled in a complicated network of dependencies with inbox-enslaved individuals sited at each node. The only way to keep productive energy flowing through this network is for everyone to continually check, send, and reply to the multitude of messages flowing past—all in an attempt to drive tasks, in an ad hoc manner, toward completion.

Now he’s projecting and assuming everyone shares his shortcomings. Of course in serious work, this isn’t the case. It certainly wasn’t the way we worked—with email and instant messaging—at a major defense contractor that was my latest employer.

Newport’s piece goes on in this vein, but you get the idea.

A Problem with Veterans Administration Management

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Leo Shane described one aspect of this in his piece in the Military Times. Shane centered his article on Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders’ (I, VT) role in making it nearly impossible to fire non-performing Veterans Administration executives.

Sanders—the independent Vermont senator who at the time was chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee—insisted on preserving the protection board’s appeals role, and held up reform legislation in his chamber until it was included.

That protection board is the Merit Systems Protection Board, an allegedly independent facility with a degree of judicial authority that supposedly ensures that nobody gets fired without due process. In the realization this Board, which Sanders was so desperate to protect, is a union facility that ensures that nobody gets fired.

The larger problem, though, is less Sanders’ union’s interference with the VA leadership’s inability to get rid of the trash and other non-performers in the VA leadership, than it is that inability to throw out the trash.

In recent weeks, the VA has seen a host of job actions against senior employees overturned by the Merit Systems Protection Board [see, for example, here]…. They include the demotion of two VA executives accused of gaming the department’s hiring system for personal benefit, and the dismissal of a New York VA director over patient safety concerns.

And

The appeals fight has grown into an escalating intra-administration showdown between VA leaders, who call the decisions off-base, and protection board officials, who blame bad legislative changes for the unsatisfactory rulings.

These union hacks even are trying to turn the problem back onto Congress:

They also accused lawmakers of overhyping problems within the department, saying lawmakers are conflating malice and malfeasance with mistakes made by under-trained supervisors.

Under-trained? The union hacks agree, then, that these supervisors are unfit for their positions, yet they insist these unfits must be retained, anyway. No trash out, not under-performers out, nobody out.

After all, our veterans are used to the idea of becoming casualties on a war’s battlefield. They and everyone else should just shut up, and our veterans should accept being casualties on an artificial VA battlefield, too.

Veteranos administratio delende est.

Government Arrogance Should Disqualify It

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…in its case trying to force Apple to disable encryption on its iPhones.

Rather than assist the effort to fully investigate a deadly terrorist attack by obeying this Court’s Order of February 16, 2016, Apple has responded by publicly repudiating that Order…Apple has attempted to design and market its products to allow technology, rather than the law, to control access to data which has been found by this Court to be warranted for an important investigation.

Never mind that under free American jurisprudence, Apple is allowed to appeal the lower court’s order to a higher court and to seek relief from complying—irreversibly, mind you—with the lower court’s order until Apple’s appeals are adjudicated. No: Apple disobeyed the high and mighty and must be punished for its impertinence.

Never mind that Apple is rightfully concerned with the sanctity of its customers’ privacy and with the ability of Americans generally to be free of the prying eyes of government. Apple disagrees with the awesome personages of FBI agents, and so it cannot possibly be behaving honestly.

DoJ’s lawyers are projecting their own failings.

Where Apple designed its software and that design interferes with the execution of search warrants, where it manufactured and sold a phone used by an ISIL-inspired terrorist, where it owns and licensed the software used to further the criminal enterprise, where it retains exclusive control over the source code necessary to modify and install the software, and where that very software now must be used to enable the search ordered by the warrant, compulsion of Apple is permissible under New York Telephone Co.

This is plainly, dishonestly specious. Apple designed its software and…manufactured and sold a phone used by…millions of American citizens, where it owns and licensed the software used to further the private affairs of American citizens…. It is plain from the careful construction of the government’s argument that it intends to expand it to pry into all of our private affairs whenever it takes a notion to.

…the Order will facilitate only the FBI’s efforts to search the phone; it does not require Apple to conduct the search or access any content on the phone. Nor is compliance with the Order a threat to other users of Apple products. Apple may maintain custody of the software, destroy it after its purpose under the Order has been served, refuse to disseminate it outside of Apple, and make clear to the world that it does not apply to other devices or users without lawful court orders….

This is deliberately disingenuous. No one is arguing that Apple is being required to conduct the government’s search. Of course, compliance with the order is a threat to other users of Apple products: the encryption, once broken or a way once found to bypass entry controls, is permanently and everywhere defeated. The FBI’s IT personnel know this. So do the government’s NSA personnel. Neither can Apple make clear to the world that it does not apply to other devices or users without those personnel making such statements being guilty of lying. Breaking an encryption algorithm or producing a way past its entry controls permanently and everywhere destroys the security of that algorithm. Without lawful court orders is just as disingenuous, as the second quote above demonstrates.

Apple is not above the law in that regard….

[M]arketing or general policy concerns are not legally cognizable objections to the Order…. This Court should not entertain an argument that fulfilling basic civic responsibilities of any American citizen or company—complying with a lawful court order—could be obviated because that company prefers to market itself as providing privacy protections….

Neither is the government above the law, and these government lawyers know full well that Apple is engaging in purely legal, solely legal, behavior in appealing the court’s order. That this is inconvenient to the government’s lawyers is their problem. Furthermore, here is the government’s lawyers repeating their reprehensible, not to say unethical, claims that because Apple is so impertinent as to dispute with them, Apple cannot possibly be acting entirely honorably and entirely out of valid concerns for Americans’ privacy—especially when that privacy is at risk of so blatantly arrogant and overreaching a government as this one is presenting itself to be.

The government’s case should be dismissed in its entirety and with prejudice over this arrogance.