Category Archives: culture

The Boss Wants to Know

Posted on by
Reply

Bari Weiss, newly hired CBS News editor-in-chief, wants to know what her employees in her news division do while they’re on the company clock.

On Friday [10 October], she sent a note to CBS News staffers asking each member of the organization to detail what they do, and what they believe is working or not working, by Tuesday [14 October].

Weiss, in so many words:

I want to understand how you spend your working hours—and, ideally, what you’ve made (or are making) that you’re most proud of. I’m also interested in hearing your views on what’s working; what’s broken or substandard; and how we can be better. Please be blunt—it will help me greatly[.]

You’d think two things would obtain here in an honest industry. One is the widely understood concept that bosses get to know what their employees are doing on the clock to earn their paycheck. The other is that such reporting would be simple and straightforward to carry out. In those industries where employees are required to keep time sheets, it would be a simple matter for employees to submit theirs or for bosses to get them from HR. In those industries where time sheets are not kept, those employees still know what they’re doing, and it would be simple to write down a few bullets and submit those.

In the present case, Weiss is also asking her employees what they think works and does not work. This is the employees’ opportunity to provide serious input and to simply bellyache about how hard their work life is.

However.

The Writers Guild of America East, which is a union representing many of those news room employees, is advising its membership to refuse to supply the data.

That’s a highly instructive tell.

Either these unionized employees spend their time on the clock largely goofing off and want to cover that up, or this is all-too-typical union obstructionism solely for the sake of obstructing. Or both.

Wess needs to instruct her HR to prepare termination notices for those employees not meeting the deadline (who did not meet the deadline as this is posted a couple of days after it) and to instruct her legal department to prepare to defend in court (no settlement) those terminations.

Note: Since I wrote this, Weiss has acquiesced and advised the union that writers who ignore her deadline will be acting with impunity–she will not punish them for their disobedience.

What He Said

Posted on by
Reply

I don’t often agree with Vivek Ramaswamy, and I don’t always disagree with him. This is one of those times when I agree. This, from The Wall Street Journal‘s excerpt of Ramaswamy’s speech at a recent Turning Point USA gathering:

Do we play the left’s game—silencing, canceling, punishing, authorizing the government to pick winners and losers in the private sector? Or do we stick to the principles of the American founding—freedom, merit, the rule of law, the pursuit of excellence? … I believe the answer is crystal clear. We don’t care about owning the libs, not anymore. We care about owning responsibility for saving our country…
…
So how do we respond? Do we turn around and fight the Pharaoh on the shores of the Red Sea, or do we cross? The answer, my friends, is that we keep going. Their brutal tactics should never cause us to change who we are. But when we lower ourselves to play according to their rules, when we concede the idea that might makes right, that we settle our disagreements with force rather than debate, then we lose the very thing we were fighting for, and that is our identity as Americans.

This is not too far afield from Sun Tzu’s injunction to leave the enemy a path off the battlefield. Just let the Left go, and the rest of us will move on, prosper, and those Leftist violence favorers will be left behind.

30-Year Mortgages

Posted on by
Reply

Patrick Brenner, Southwest Public Policy Institute President, thinks these have been terrible ideas. I disagree. Central to his thesis this:

The 30-year mortgage locked families into a lifetime of interest payments that cost the borrower far more than the original price.

However, he never mentions a Critical Item that also obtained throughout his period of interest, the post-WWII mobility, both geographically and economically upward, of the American working force/homeowner population.

Two personal examples illustrate, and I claim our examples are typical, not unusual.

When my wife and I were starting out, as Lieutenants in the USAF, we were able to buy our first house courtesy of one of those “dangerous” shorter term balloon payment loans. We were highly mobile as USAF officers, but that mobility, as I claim, wasn’t unusual—the civilian work force also was highly mobile, and that mobility allowed homeowners to sell their homes, pursuant to their mobility, before the balloon came due, and buy another home in their new location, now with a variable rate loan (fixed for a period of years, then floating with the market), 15-year fixed mortgage, or an evil 30-year mortgage, with interest rates favoring the variable rate and the 30-year. Again, mobility allowed most homeowners to sell their homes before the variable rate reset, along with selling their 30-year mortgaged homes long before being “locked in for life.”

It also was the case that many of these balloon mortgage homeowners refinanced into a new variable rate loan or into a 15-year or 30-year mortgage. Banks expected these sorts of refinances and smoothed the path.

Many years later, as my wife and I were long established civilians and approaching retirement, we bought our current house with a 30-year mortgage. We’ve since refinanced that mortgage a number of times as interest rates went down, and currently have a monthly payment a bit over half that original payment.

So much for ever being locked in for life with a high-rate mortgage. With that mobility, very few homeowners actually paid more in aggregated principal and interest than the value of their homes—they refinanced down, or they sold and moved on.

The only thing in the way now is a greatly reduced mobility in our homeowner population. There are a number of reasons for that reduction in mobility, but the key here is that reduced mobility. Being “stuck” in some way with a 30-year mortgage is a symptom of relative immobility, not a cause of affordability. That immobility also contributes heavily to the lack of houses on the market while demand for homeownership remains high—that’s excess elevated pricing for homes.

“Democracy Wanes in South Asia”

Posted on by
Reply

Sadanand Dhume uses as his canonical examples Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, wherein riots forced the removal of despotic governments and their replacement by popularly chosen leaders. In Nepal in particular, new elections have been set for next March.

Dhume did point out popular failures in Pakistan and Myanmar; however, his apparent concept that popular uprisings are, of necessity, antidemocratic is badly flawed.

This is what our own Declaration of Independence has to say about such popular violence.

[W]henever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

A government deciding unilaterally and with little to no warning to censor—abolish!—major communications systems, a government that has had a single Prime Minister for 15 years during carefully controlled elections with opposition candidates routinely jailed, a government dominated for 17 years by a single pair of brothers whose government did little to protect its population from routine violence—each of these governments with their long train of abuses and usurpations… would seem to be prime candidates for the people to decide that their governments’ evils are sufferable and so to move to exercise their right…their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards.

What must Dhume think of the Color Revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, or the People Power revolution in the Philippines, each of which involved the successful popular overthrow of Despotic governments and their replacement with more democratic institutions?

We’ll see what happens in the subsequent elections, particularly in Nepal. Dhume may be correct vis-à-vis his examples, but it’s much too soon to tell.

Apologize?

Posted on by
Reply

Recall Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones’ overt threat of murder against a political opponent and his family. Now Virginia Progressive-Democratic Party Senator Tim Kaine is making clear his enthusiastically continuing support for Jones.

Jay has apologized[.]
I’ve known Jay Jones for 25 years. I think those statements were not in character, and he has apologized—I wish other people in public life would sincerely apologize for stuff.

Jones has apologized, and that makes everything all better. That’s Party’s view of taking full responsibility. Just say some words and call it a day.

No.

Words of apology, no matter how sincerely they’re offered, are nothing but that—words—absent any accompanying corrected behavior, behavior that lasts for a substantial period of time.

Jones has demonstrated no corrected behavior. He’s staying in the race for State’s AG, and he’s doing nothing to atone for his call for murder, nor is he showing any altered behavior regarding his fellow State citizens, political opponents or otherwise.