It’s the 21st Century, Stupid!

That’s what David Ignatius writes about in the Washington Post. What it comes down to is a variation on my criticism of what motivates much of the current American business world. It’s not enough to make a profit. There’s never enough profit, apparently. The search is always on for a greater margin or rate of return no matter how risky or how questionable it might be for the long term good of the company or our society. It doesn’t matter what happens to those thousands of people you fire from their jobs so that Wall Street will approve of you enough to up the stock value and the incomes of those executives who receive a significant part of their income from stock options. There is no other value that matters. Now keep in mind that many would have this environment and set of values determine everything about our health care system.

MSNBC also informs you of 9 Things the Insurers Don’t Want You to Know. Among them is that if you become expensive to them they’ll go over your records to see if there is absolutely anything that they can use against you as a reason to drop your coverage retroactively. They call it recission.

You know how the insurance companies tell you that you should get things pre-approved? Look at this little gem.

 “Preapproval is often what triggers the rescission review,” says Shernoff. “If it’s for hip surgery, that’s an expensive item that they’ll look at and see if you’re a candidate for rescission.

Catch-22, anyone?

At almost any blog that discusses politics the subject of health care will come up. There is no lack of people to defend the current system if it’s been good to them. Of course good to them generally means no serious illness in their life or the lives of those close to them. Because the great shock is that often those who are hurt worst by the system, having their financial lives destroyed are in fact insured when their ordeals begin. MSNBC had this report about what is not nearly as rare as it ought to be. In fact it just shouldn’t be allowed to happen at all. Don’t forget that your credit rating is looked at now by potential employers and landlords as well as places you want credit from. Destroying your financial life has far greater implications than most people realize.

Is there anyone who wasn’t in on doing stupid stuff in the housing market? In our most recent run-up the builders became lenders and BusinessWeek Online through MSNBC reports that it isn’t a good thing.

I agree with the scientific consensus that global warming is real and that much of it is caused by human activities. With that out of the way I will also note that I often see on blogs a huge spectrum of denial of that concept. Some say that it must be natural cycles. They somehow never consider that the climatologists that disagree with them are far more aware of what contributes to natural cycles of warming and cooling than they are. People just can’t do enough to this huge complex planet to affect its climate is another favorite. It never occurs to them that over six billion people, many of whom live in a technological society that has a huge appetite for energy and use sources for that energy that affect the environment can do a heck of a lot to a planet as time goes by. And they have help. Lots of help. Newsweek writes an extensive piece about the organized and well funded global warming denier industry.

 And the false parity part? As is noted in the Newsweek article it is an unfortunate failing of huge numbers of what currently passes for journalists to follow a lazy way of being “fair and balanced” or objective. Just find someone who disagrees with the overwhelming weight of evidence provided by research, which is easy to do with the denier industry that has grown up and report what they say without ever researching if it approaches being accurate. Don’t check what their real credentials are or where their funding comes from if it might bring their objectivity into question. That isn’t objective reporting. Objective reporting means you report on what the climatologists report and if someone says they disagree you ask for their proof and have that proof reviewed by other scientists. Note the plural. Gee, that might take some time and effort. Maybe real staffs that might cut the profit margin some. We can’t have that, can we?

Rupert Murdoch has basically completed his acquisition of the Wall Street Journal. Newsweek says it means all-out war. My first thought was “Eee-e-ew!!” and a reflexive holding of my nose. My second thought was that at least the opinion section wouldn’t have to change because it’s already to Murdoch’s taste.

Also in this morning’s Star was an op-ed on oil company hypocrisy concerning their refusal to install equipment to handle the hot fuel issue. For those who might not be aware of this, it is a simple fact of physics/chemistry that when liquids or gases are heated they take up more volume. this applies to pretty much everything much less volatile liquids like gasoline. So when you buy gasoline on a day like today around here, when it’s going to reach 96°F and it’s been that warm for days, you are in reality getting less actual fuel for your vehicle than the pumps are measuring out since it measures by volume. The oil companies scream loudly about the idea of replacing pumps with ones that can adjust to account for this fact. They say that it would cost too much. Customers aren’t really being hurt by it. The litany is long.

A commenter on the article said that he just doesn’t see where there is any hypocrisy involved. Apparently he missed the very telling part about oil company operations in Canada. There they do not complain about pumps that adjust for temperature at all. In Canada, where the temperature differential has to do with “cold” fuel instead of “hot” fuel the pumps work in their financial favor instead of hurting their customers. Hypocritical, indeed.

No, this is not some evil socialist, pinko, “I hate America.” screed. It’s not about the Bush Administration, Iraq or any of those subjects.

It’s about a New York Times article about how it is entirely possible for a millionaire, someone who is making enough money to propel themselves into the top 2% of American families so far as wealth is concerned, to not even consider themselves as being rich. I know some people who live in the San Francisco area. Frankly, I don’t ask them how much they make but it is always a source of amazement to me that they can make it given the cost of living there. But the article points out that there is more at work in the social dynamics of Silicon Valley. There is not so much a “keeping up with the Joneses” issue as knowing what the Joneses have. This psychological factor in an area of so much wealth makes some feel like they aren’t all that high up the economic food chain even if the raw numbers say different.

One of the people interviewed for this article puts it into perspective this way

David Koblas, a computer programmer with a net worth of $5 million to $10 million, imagines what his life would be like if he left Silicon Valley. He could move to a small town like Elko, Nev., he says, and be a ski bum. Or he could move his family to the middle of the country and live like a prince in a spacious McMansion in the nicest neighborhood in town.

But Mr. Koblas, 39, lives with his wife, Michelle, and their two children in Los Altos, south of Palo Alto, where the schools are highly regarded and the housing prices are inflated accordingly. So instead of a luxury home, the family lives in a relatively modest 2,000-square-foot house — not much bigger than the average American home — and he puts in long hours at Wink, a search engine start-up founded in 2005.

“I’d be rich in Kansas City,” he said. “People would seek me out for boards. But here I’m a dime a dozen.”

And he’s right. When Sprint was a rapidly growing concern and was consolidating operations in the Kansas City metro area they were shutting down IT operations in California and trying to lure their people to Kansas City. They would bring them here and show them what their housing budget could buy. They could purchase a house twice the size with a backyard facing a lake and the development had a golf course as part of the deal for less than they were spending in California. It was a persuasive argument to many.

Why do I title this post “A Slice of American Insanity”? First, what kind of technology company can be taken seriously as doing the best they can for their stockholders when they stay someplace that drives their costs for real estate and employee compensation to these kinds of levels? The standard excuses are that this is where everyone is and that this produces advantages and the educational system producing good tech workers is also here and it just can’t be reproduced anywhere else. Isn’t it nice to have arguments that your board and shareholders buy into that just can’t be quantified? And these folks are some of the staunchest defenders of the free market system and existing structures for all things economic. Also, why do companies whose life blood is technology feel so strongly that e-mail, phone calls and video conferencing just aren’t good enough? They don’t seem to mind it when they outsource jobs to India and China? That distance doesn’t seem to matter but the idea of just maybe placing their company or at least some major components of it somewhere in the United States that could save many millions of dollars terrifies them. Yep, they’re irrational and just maybe certifiable.

The removal of the bald eagle from the endangered species list has been in the news a lot recently. However, the state of the agency tasked with managing the list and protecting endangered species seems pretty endangered itself. As noted in the L.A. Times it’s budget is being slashed, positions are left unstaffed and what passed for an assistant secretary of the interior who was in charge of it had the competence and integrity so common among Bush administration appointees. The article notes at one point that

Meanwhile, the endangered-species staff is rife with in-fighting, according to a report last month by the Interior Department’s inspector general. And recovery programs, listing decisions and efforts to remove wildlife from existing protections have been heavily influenced by Bush appointees with close ties to industries that have contested the law.

Julie A. MacDonald, a deputy assistant secretary of the Interior who oversaw the endangered-species program, resigned last month after the inspector general found that she had ordered scientists to change their findings, and shared internal documents with lobbyists for agricultural and energy interests.

Somehow this reminds me of the Administration’s approach to global warming. The current head of the program,  Bryan Arroyo, defends the approach that he takes as a loyal Bush employee. He says it’s more effective to work with industry. You can’t affect the economy for the sake of protecting an endangered species is what he seems to be saying. What’s interesting about his claims about the superiority of his approach is that the only example he gives is from his days in Texas. Couldn’t he think of a success story at the federal level of the superior approach he espouses?

I know that lots of people, myself included, wonder about some of what happens because of a species being declared endangered. Aren’t they going too far in thinking that all species, especially those with extremely limited habitats should stop all development? Sometimes they are reasonable doubts. But I worry more right now about the pendulum going too far the other way when 54 out of 58 species added to the list during the Bush administration were only added because of the government being sued. It is true that a reasonable balance should be struck. I just don’t trust anyone that the current Administration might appoint to do that.

Google has had one of its employees create a (so far) relatively minor brouhaha over comments she made concerning Michael Moore’s Sicko, criticizing it heavily and pointing out that the ads that Google can sell health care companies can help them “…better manage their reputations through “Get the Facts” or issue management campaigns.”. When her post started getting noticed she “clarified” things.

In my opinion her clarification contains one of the greatest fallacies I’ve heard in recent history. She claims

Whether the healthcare industry wants to rebut charges in Mr. Moore’s movie, or whether Mr. Moore wants to challenge the healthcare industry, advertising is a very democratic and effective way to participate in a public dialogue.

Whatever you might feel about the de facto situation in this country just when did it become so very acceptable to equate money with “democracy” or something being democratic? Admittedly the Supreme Court has told us that limiting money in political campaigns is the same thing as limiting speech. And then someone actually thinks that having the money, and we’re not talking small change here, is what makes for a democratic way to participate in public discourse. Is that really where we want to go? Where is the voice of those who don’t have money when any organization that tries to speak for them is dismissed as just another special interest group or denigrated by some other name?

Will being an individual who has that kind of money be the only “acceptable” way to have a discernible voice in public debates some day? I may write a blog but I am lost in a sea of similar voices. Won’t this be true of the overwhelming majority of the non-wealthy who try to find a voice? No, advertising is not a force for democracy or on behalf of the individual in any conflict between the wealthy and non-wealthy in our society.