Tag: corpocracy

18,000 and H1B

Item 1: Microsoft Chief
Executive Officer Satya Nadella kicked off one of the largest layoffs in
tech history on Thursday, hoping to reshape the aging PC industry titan
into a nimbler rival to Apple and Google, and jolt a culture at the
company that is used to protecting its existing Windows and Office
franchises.
Microsoft Corp said on Thursday
it will slash up to 18,000 jobs, or 14 percent of its workforce, over
the next 12 months as it almost halves the size of its newly acquired
Nokia phone business and tries to become a cloud-computing and
mobile-friendly software company. The
larger-than-expected cuts are the deepest in the software giant’s
39-year history and come five months into Nadella’s tenure.

Item 2: Bill Gates says the United States’ position as the global leader in innovation is at risk. The Microsoft chairman says there is a deficit of Americans with computer-science degrees, and he wants the government to make it easier for Microsoft to hire foreign-born workers. Gates testified before the House Committee on Science Technology on Wednesday about what he sees as a need to liberalize rules for H1-B visas for skilled foreign workers. Currently, Congress has set an annual limit on H1-Bs at 65,000, with an additional 20,000 earmarked for foreign students with advanced degrees from U.S. universities.

Item 3: Immigration and visa reform are necessary to boost the U.S. economy and job market, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Monday. Disputing the idea that Silicon Valley execs are simply trying to secure a higher number of H1B visas for their own companies, Zuckerberg told attendees at the event: “This is something that we believe is really important for the future of our country — and for us to do what’s right.”

It’s not terribly difficult to understand why nations experiencing economic stress are so often inclined to resort to nationalizing corporations, not when the corporate executives are so blatantly acting against the interests of the citizenry.

Great Depression 2.0

Only instead of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, we have the geniuses who permitted the NSA to spy on allied countries:

Germany Instructs Its Companies To Limit Cooperation, Procurement Orders With The US

Update: it just got worse. Moments ago Bloomberg followed up with the second, and expected, part of this story, namely that just like China cut off major US corporations from big procurement contracts leading to a collapse in CSCO and IBM Asian revenues, it is now Germany’s turn. Per Bloomberg, the German Interior Ministry reviewing rules for awarding govt contracts for computer, communications equipment and services as political rift w/ U.S. widens, people familiar with matter told Bloomberg News’ Cornelius Rahn, Amy Thomson.

  • Ministry will probably issue new purchasing guidelines in coming weeks to replace “no-spy-order” dated April 30
  • Details being worked out, may require suppliers of components of bidder’s goods or services to guarantee they don’t hand over confidential data
  • IBM, CSCO, MSFT may be affected by any tightening of procurement procedures: Forrester Research analyst Andrew Rose

It could be for show, but I tend to doubt it. German companies have to be slavering at the notion of having an excellent excuse – nay, reason – to bar their American competitors from government contracts.

Gatekeepers vs the defensor lector

A pair of contrasting views on the Amazon vs Major Publishers battle appear in the New York Times. Joe Nocera writes of Amazon’s “bullying” tactics:

The story really began some years ago, when Amazon began issuing a standard price for e-books of $9.99 — in some cases selling below cost. Publishers feared that they would become locked into the $9.99 price the same way the music industry had been locked into 99-cent songs by Apple’s iTunes service. They fought back by joining forces with Apple, cutting preferable deals to participate in Apple’s e-book-selling service, and then forcing Amazon to go along with the same terms. E-book prices quickly rose.

Unfortunately for the publishers, their brilliant idea turned out to be an illegal conspiracy, and the government forced them to settle on terms that had the effect of boosting Amazon. Although Amazon has not entirely reverted back to $9.99 e-books, it could if it wanted to, and it has in some cases. In other cases — especially with self-published books or romances — e-book prices are down to $5.99 and even $2.99. “There is a strong gravitational pull downward,” said one publisher (who did not want to be quoted, fearing Amazon’s wrath).

The way I hear it, what Amazon is insisting upon is a deal where it would no longer have to bear the full brunt of its discounting — the publisher would have to bear some of it, in the form of tighter margins, or even losses. Hachette, meanwhile, contends that it needs to be compensated for the important things publishers do: editing, marketing, and curating.

This is an argument that may appeal to the cultural elite, but it is unlikely to move Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive. Publishers, he has been known to say, are gatekeepers. “Even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation,” he wrote in his 2011 letter to shareholders, according to Brad Stone, the author of a recent book about Amazon, “The Everything Store.”

The very complaint that Amazon is selling $9.99 books at a loss reveals that it is the publishers who are the bad guys here. They are desperately trying to retain the outdated model for physical books and apply it to ebooks, which makes absolutely no sense, because that allows them to significantly increase their profit margins at the expense of a) Amazon, b) book buyers, and c) authors. Bezos is correct to dismiss the publishers as gatekeepers, and I very much doubt he considers them to be well-meaning ones.

The other article, a defense of the publishers, inadvertently proves the exact same point:

How did Amazon attain such monopsony power? By providing valuable services? Perhaps, to some extent. But consider that from the moment it introduced its Kindle product, Amazon sold e-books at prices far below what it was buying them for. If Amazon bought an e-book from Hachette for $13, it resold it to a consumer for $9.99, losing $3.01 per e-book. It should come as no surprise that under these circumstances, e-book buyers flocked to Amazon….

So far, Hachette, to its credit, has been unbending. But Amazon still
has its nuclear option. It would appear that unless Amazon backs down —
through public pressure or government intervention — publishers will
have no choice but to employ their own nuclear option: pull all their
books from Amazon and throw their weight behind a law-abiding
alternative. Perhaps the best solution would be an online marketplace
controlled by the publishers — with the 30 percent commission being
split 50-50 with the authors in addition to the author’s royalty.

The ironic thing is that the pro-publisher position is based on the fear of the possibility that Amazon might one day do what the publishers have already done. It is based on the idea that Amazon will eventually jack prices up, never mind the fact that Amazon’s entire business model is based on selling more goods and lower prices. The thing is, even if Amazon QUADRUPLED its average price to the book buyer after driving all the major publishers out of business, retail prices would still be lower than the suggested retail price given by most of the major publishers.

Seriously. The average Amazon price for an ebook is around $6.94. The publishers have been trying to push ebook retail prices up to $27.99; as I pointed out the other day, a new Tor ebook has a digital list price of $27.99, one dollar more than the retail price of $26.99 for the hardcover.

The inept nature of the defense of the publishers can be seen in the proposed solution. The publishers would NEVER be content with such a system; they would fight it even more vehemently than they are fighting Amazon’s attempt to bring ebook prices down below $5. The major publishers want the old system where they sell the book for half the retail price and pay $2.50 to the author. At $28, they get $14 from which they pay $2.50. That is $11.50 gross profit with an 82 percent profit margin; very healthy indeed.

If they set up Publizon, they’d have to reduce their prices to $9.99 to compete with Amazon. They’d pay $2.50 to the author as a royalty, plus another $1.50 as per the suggested model. That means that their gross profit would fall to $5.99 and their profit margin to 60 percent. Still healthy, but far less profitable and probably insufficient to maintain their New York office space and the rest of their expensive overhead. And that’s assuming people are willing to buy books at Publizon; knowing the publishers’ general contempt for the book buying public, it is highly unlikely they can successfully set up a retail operation catering to it.

Meanwhile, they are also competing with Castalia and the other independents, who are selling high-quality ebooks for $4.99. As well as with the self-publishers selling books for as little as $0.99. Any way you look at it, the major publishers cannot possibly survive with their current editorial and distribution structures intact.

Amazon isn’t the bad guy here. Amazon is the defensor lector, the hero of the hour. And speaking of Amazon, fans of a certain fedora-wearing author will no doubt be pleased to know that Castalia will be announcing the release of a new book on Amazon in the coming week, one entitled CITY BEYOND TIME: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis.

Mailvox: employment advice

DH, who has more than a little expertise in the area of employment and human resources,  offers some excellent advice in this age of purges:

Make them fire you. If you resign under pressure you have basically no legal standing. Make. Them. Fire. You. If they pressure you to resign, you should write a letter, declining to resign, declining to take any responsibility for your private, off-duty, speech and/or actions. Specifically point out that you are exercising your personal discretion to engage in political and social commentary regarding current events, that you are not willing to be subjected to a hostile work environment for your unorthodox political views, and that you are not willing to explain or defend or justify those personal political views.

Always make them do their own dirty work.

Most of the time, employment purges are not legal. If you are being pressured to resign, that is in itself a de facto admission that they know they can’t fire you. Of course, none of this will prevent you from getting blackballed when applying for a new job, which is why it is wise to always use an untraceable pseudonym on the Internet and to avoid social media.

It will be used against you, somehow, by someone. Whether or not that is fair and desirable is irrelevant. Those are the new rules of the game. Master them and play by them. Play by them ruthlessly and remember that the Left tends to be far more careless about these things than the Right because they assume their positions are beyond criticism.

Free speech in corporate America

While self-described savages are openly attacking free speech at SF conventions, more men are losing their jobs for expressing their opinions on current affairs:

A tech guru who was accused of making ‘weird and insensitive’ comments about the murderous manifesto written by Santa Barbara shooter Elliot Rodger has been fired. Rap Genius co-founder Mahbod Moghadam posted a series of bizarre annotations alongside extracts from the virgin killer’s 141-page memoir, including one that speculates that Rodger’s sister must be ‘smokin hot’. After the accusations, he was lambasted as being misogynistic, and it has since emerged that he was let go from the company he helped found.

Would it have been less indicative of hatred for women had Mr. Moghadam speculated that this girl was ugly? Rodger wasn’t an unattractive young man and since his Eurasian features were on the feminine side, it would be logical to conclude that his sister was likely more attractive than the norm. As, in fact, appears to be the case.

I would think that women, in particular, would want to avoid an employment standard where one will lose one’s job simply for expressing an opinion about a woman’s attractiveness. I tend to suspect that the company was simply looking for an excuse to rid itself of an unwanted founder and took advantage of an opportunity. But coming as it does on the heels of other opinion-related dismissals, the news is somewhat troubling.

UPDATE: as is so often the case, Moghadam was not actually fired. He merely resigned: “In light of this, Mahbod has resigned – both in his capacity as an
employee of the company, and as a member of our board of directors,
effective immediately.”

Women and productivity

Don’t laugh, paternity leave sounded just as ridiculous at one point:

Slate had already tackled the issue, with writer Katy Waldman dismissing it by saying, “… don’t offer us paid period leave. We’ll just spend it all taking self-pitying Buzzfeed quizzes.” But when HuffPost Live interviewed Skepchick.org founder Rebecca Watson and Mikki Kendall, editor at Hood feminism.com, the women got positively cranky.

“Just by asking the question, ‘Should women get paid menstruation leave?’ biases the listener into saying, ‘Oh, of course not,’ because you’re talking about special treatment,” said Watson. “But if you were to say, should men get paid time off if they were kicked in the testicles, yes, like if you have a medical problem, you should get to take time off,” she added.

Of course, men typically don’t get kicked in the testicles every month, but who’s counting?

Watson continued: “And again, what we’re talking about, really, is just simple workers’ rights. Studies show that when you give a worker unlimited sick days, compared to a restricted number of sick days, they actually take fewer sick days and they’re happier and more productive.”

Ask employers trying to make a profit about unlimited sick days, Rebecca.

Kendall was just as sure as Watson that menstrual leave was necessary, saying: “Just give us all more paid leave. Most people, for one reason or another, probably need a couple days off in a given month because of illness, because of family emergencies, because they woke up that day and they don’t feel great and they’re just overwrought and overtired, whatever. And so if we increase the amount of PTO available to all employees, you’d see a healthier workplace, among other things. People would stop coming to work with the flu and spreading their disease and germs to everyone else.”

Because, as we all know, menstruation is contagious.

Have you ever noticed that the chief areas of interest to women in the media with regards to employment are a) sexual harassment, b) paid leave, and c) sick days? It’s remarkable, and potentially informative, that the actual topic of work itself never seems to be of much interest to them.

If paid menstrual leave did actually result in net productivity gains, this would raise some serious questions about the overall effect of women in the work force.

“A tollbooth on the bankster turnpike”

A retiring SEC attorney criticizes the Securities and Exchange Commission:

James Kidney, who joined the SEC in 1986 and retired this month, offered the critique in a speech at his goodbye party. His remarks hit home with many in the crowd of SEC lawyers and alumni thanks to a part of his resume not publicly known: He had campaigned internally to bring charges against more executives in the agency’s 2010 case against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS)

The SEC has become “an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors,” Kidney said, according to a copy of his remarks obtained by Bloomberg News. “On the rare occasions when enforcement does go to the penthouse, good manners are paramount. Tough enforcement, risky enforcement, is subject to extensive negotiation and weakening.”

Kidney said his superiors were more focused on getting high-paying jobs after their government service than on bringing difficult cases. The agency’s penalties, Kidney said, have become “at most a tollbooth on the bankster turnpike.”

This doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know, but it confirms everything we suspected. Government regulation simply Does Not Work. It is easily coopted and corrupted, most particularly in industries where large quantities of money are involved.

Fines simply do not work when penalizing corporations. They just pass on the costs to their customers, or in the case of banks, create more money out of thin air. And it’s too easy to place the blame on employees who no longer work there.

Day by Day

I was a little surprised to see that. I already knew that a fair number of people whose names you might recognize have the blog in their regular rotation, as sometimes they send me email, but I had no idea that Chris Muir did.

And speaking of the new intolerant standard for American business, here is a way to let Mozilla know your opinion directly on their feedback page. As per Conservative Intelligence Briefing: “If Mozilla was hoping to avoid controversy by edging out former CEO Brendan Eich, the company has most certainly failed. The graph below comes from the feedback page on their site. This chart goes back to when the comment system was adopted, and the highest number of “sad” comments is today, by a factor of about two. The second highest number came yesterday.”

A sample of the comments posted:

  • Im still in disbelief at Mozilla inane and intolerant decision to have
    its CEO step down. Apparently they value the opinion of LGBT over the
    first amendment. Shame 
  •  Gay folks didn’t struggle to come out of the closet just so that
    christian folks could now be shoved into it. I’ve uninstalled Firefox
    after many years of using it and I will never recommend your product to
    anyone ever again.
  •  THOUGHT NAZIS will soon reap what they sew … Uninstalled on 23 work
    and home computers. This is just the beginning you FASCISTS!!! 
  •  Giving in to the thought police is unnaceptable. The guy didn’t TREAT
    any homosexual badly, just donated a modest sum (for an executive) to a
    campaign that even BARACK ‘GOD OF THE LIBERALS’ OBAMA supported. This
    isn’t “progress”, this is medieval persecution. Wolf in sheep’s
    clothing, you are. F*ck you. 
  • It has been great riding with you since 1994. Good luck in your future endeavours.
    I have uninstalled Mozilla Firefox, Nightly, and Thunderbird
    No longer willing to support or associate with your products.
    Thanks.  

It will be informative to see how long it takes before Mozilla shuts down their feedback page. Like many supporters of the gay rights agenda, they appear to have badly miscalculated the demographic math.

Mailvox: breaking the ceasefire

Gara demonstrates that he doesn’t understand the difference between legal right and common practice:

Gara: So many people bitching about the whole Mozilla thing. One would expect a self described libertarian like Vox would understand that this is eactly how the free marketplace of ideas is supposed to work. Firefox’s CEO approves of discrimination against same sey couples. And other individuals and companies such as OKCupid responded by exercising their right of free association, declining to support a CEO who holds a viewpoint they found abhorrent. This is how democratic persuasion always operates guys. If you are so angry about it, then try with all means to make your OkCupid boycott work. See if you can get even half the influence they have.

Toby: Free marketplace of ideas involve demanding another person to step down from a position/quit from work because of his/her ideas? Gara, are you crazy?

Gara: Yes it does. You have all the right to say “If Mr X does not quit his position, I won’t have anything to do with your company anymore”. And the company can they react as they see fit. Liberals have the right to do things like that as much as conservatives do.

What we have here is a left-winger and a right-winger talking past each other. Gara is absolutely right in one sense. OKCupid and the various Mozilla employees were perfectly within their LEGAL rights to behave as they did. No one, to the best of my knowledge, has accused them of criminal activity or called for them to be prosecuted.

However, Toby is equally correct to observe that it was absolutely crazy for OK Cupid and the various Mozilla employees to exercise their legal rights in that manner. Because while it is LEGAL for employers and businesses to discriminate on the basis of political beliefs and affiliations, it has most certainly not been the ACCEPTED PRACTICE for them to do so openly.

Indeed, one of the great complaints about the universities and the media is that they secretly impose political litmus tests concerning who is permitted employment in their institutions, and the danger of this practice becoming open knowledge was so great that to this day the universities and media corporations still deny what is statistically undeniable and readily obvious to even the most casual observer.

But now, thanks to the Eich affair, political employment discrimination is overt, and what was previously only legal is now PUBLIC AND ACCEPTED PRACTICE. It is purge or be purged time. So, if you are an employer in many states, you can now feel free to stop employing every non-critical employee who voted for Obama or is known to be a member of the Democratic Party. And you can impose a political litmus test on your new hires; contact DH for his new service if you don’t want to bother surfing Facebook for incrimination evidence of inappropriate politics.

What Gara has failed to realize is that there had been a de facto political ceasefire in the corporate world. The Mozilla debacle broke the ceasefire and now the political Right has the ability to return fire with impunity. I doubt it will do so openly yet, but I have no doubt that there will be more than a few unexpected dismissals quietly taking place over the next few months now that corporate executives understand what the new reality is.

Most conservatives in the corporate community have prided themselves on being “colorblind” with regards to the political spectrum. I suspect that many of them will, sooner or later, understand that they have to abandon that position as being no longer tenable or intellectually justifiable.

And in keeping with the end to the ceasefire, I have removed Mozilla Firefox from my various systems and devices. I have replaced it with Pale Moon, about which more anon. #uninstallfirefox.

UPDATE: the ceasefire is observably over:

The director of corporate giving for Google Inc. has resigned in protest from the board of a Christian aid organization after the charity reversed its decision to hire employees in same-sex marriages. As the Associated Press reported Thursday, Jacquelline Fuller said in an email Wednesday to AP that while she remains a “huge fan” of the group’s work on behalf of the poor, she resigned Friday “as I disagreed with the decision to exclude gay employees who marry.” 

If people are more concerned about homogamy or equality than with helping the poor or basic Christian principles, they should certainly resign from any Christian aid organization. Indeed, they should not be involved with the group in the first place.

The true culprits

As I predicted when the issue first went public, Brandon Eich was not saved by his desperate supplication to his critics. But as awful as those critics are, they are not the real culprits in L’affaire d’Eich:

Brendan Eich, the well-known techie who has gotten swept up in a controversy about his support of California’s anti-gay marriage law Proposition 8, is resigning as CEO of for-profit Mozilla Corporation and also from the board of the nonprofit foundation which wholly owns it.

Mozilla confirmed the change in a blog post.

“Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it. We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we haven’t stayed true to ourselves,” read the post, in part. “We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better.”

In several interviews this week, Eich had insisted that he would not step down from the job he was only recently appointed to, due to the intense backlash over a $1,000 donation he made in 2008 in support of the ballot measure to ban gay marriage.

“So I don’t want to talk about my personal beliefs because I kept them out of Mozilla all these 15 years we’ve been going,” he said to the Guardian, for example, yesterday. “I don’t believe they’re relevant.”

Not so, of course. In an interview this morning, Mozilla Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker said that Eich’s ability to lead the company that makes the Firefox Web browser had been badly damaged by the continued scrutiny over the hot-button issue, which had actually been known since 2012 inside the Mozilla community.

“It’s clear that Brendan cannot lead Mozilla in this setting,” said Baker, who added that she would not and could not speak for Eich. “The ability to lead — particularly for the CEO — is fundamental to the role and that is not possible here.”

Now, while it was both wrong and dangerous for the gay fascists to go after Eich, I’m not interested in that aspect of the case here. What is more informative is Eich’s hapless response to the attacks. As I said at the time, Eich’s immediate response should have been to fire his internal critics for insubordination and to attack his external critics through the media. That’s what an effective leader like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates would have done; a leader never backs down from a defensive fight.

I suspect his critics knew that Eich was weak, both in terms of the lukewarm support he enjoyed from the Mozilla board as well as his personal character. All one had to do was look at his face to see that he is a pleaser, and pleasers tend to handle conflict by immediately resorting to submission. When attacked, they grovel and plead, they don’t fight back.

The fact is that most people focus on attacking soft targets they believe to be safe and weak. Look at how few bloggers openly criticize me anymore, or even dare to mention my name. Where are all the World o’Craps and Dark Windows and Amandas and PZ Myers and Scienceblogs and Electrolytes and Hayden Nielsens and John Scalzis now? Are we to believe I am simply beneath notice? That seems unlikely given that they were all attacking me directly, by name and with links, when my blog readership was ONE-SIXTH what it is now. The primary difference is that it is now generally appreciated that I am a hard target, and what is more, a hard target that doesn’t hesitate to shoot back.

Eich was a safe and soft target. He made it clear that he wouldn’t return fire despite his position of power, which emboldened all the critics who might have otherwise feared his potential power, influence, and ability to fire them. So, they promptly piled on, Eich couldn’t take the heat, and promptly resigned. Eich was doomed from the moment of that first inept response because you cannot win a battle when you refuse to take the field.

The irony is that although they have damaged American corporate culture by sowing seeds that will bear destructive fruit for years and decades to come, Eich’s critics did Mozilla a genuine service by exposing the mistake that was made in promoting a man who had been a very effective technology innovator to the CEO position. Eich was less a victim of the point-and-shriek crowd than the Peter Principle, which states: “in a hierarchy every employee tends to
rise to their level of incompetence”.

And now Mozilla is out a perfectly good CTO, Eich has been humiliated and is unemployed, the left-wing lunatics have been encouraged by successfully taking a scalp, and every Christian and conservative in corporate America now knows that it is purge or be purged time. (Don’t forget, small business owners, it is legal under federal law to fire an employee for his Democratic Party affiliations.) All because the Mozilla board did not know its internal candidate well enough to realize that he lacked the backbone to be a CEO-caliber leader. 

That is why the true culprits here are the board members. First they picked the wrong man, then they failed to have his back when he came under fire. This does not bode well for Mozilla.