Current Affairs

As I move through life, I have had to learn to apply rapid evaluation techniques to conversations, comments, postings and arguments on the internet to determine if the conversation is worth getting involved in.
There are a few basic rules that I apply when parsing writings in order to make that determination. The presence of one or more of the following is likely to send me in the direction of Away.
1. Use of juvenile ad hominems in the first sentence.
If you have a decent argument, you don’t need to try and diminish the person you are in dialogue with. This is a dead giveaway that you are not remotely interested in a good-faith discussion, and instead you are just trying to piss on people
2. Capitalization of WORDS OR SENTENCES
For some reason, people with defective weak or non-existent arguments always seem to think that if they capitalize certain words in a sentence, it magically endows those words with significance or gravitas. It doesn’t. When I see that, i automatically activate my bullshit detector, since it invariably means I am now reading something that is mostly or entirely nonsense
3. Use of “air quotes” or other sneering devices such as “so-called”
Another tell that you are engaging in juvenile sneering. Discussions are for adults, not children.
4. The use of slogans and other forms of word salad
I am usually able to discern rather quickly whether commenters spend too much time watching TV or listening to talk radio. Talk radio fans always argue in slogans, because that is how many talk radio hosts talk. It’s the verbal equivalent of argument by meme (see below). Slogans are not arguments, and linking multiple slogans together merely shows an ability at rote cut-and-paste, not the ability to construct useful commentary.
5. Argument using memes
If a posting relies on a meme and not much else, my conclusion is that the person does not have the time or enthusiasm to bring their own voice into the conversation, but instead is borrowing slogans from somebody else. In that case, why would I bother to waste my time?

1. Thinking of trying populist economics? Not so fast
Economic populism as practiced by governments has a long history. Many governments have tried to insulate their countries from economic realities by all manner of avoidance tactics and strategies, including price control, tariffs, financial import and export controls, and, if all else fails, printing of money to perpetuate the illusion of liquidity.
As this paper analyzing the results of populism in Latin America shows, most of these measures do not work in the medium-term.

2. The illusion that trade deals are bad for the USA and that the USA can do something about it
Another rhetorical flush that Donald Trump played consistently in his campaign was to claim that most of the bilateral and multilateral trade deals that the USA has with other countries and trading blocs are really bad deals. In the typical blustery braggadocio of the deal-maker, Trump promised to renegotiate those deals and get a better outcome for the USA.
Umm…no. This article explains why some of those deals were actually quite good deals for the USA at a time when the USA had a lot more economic leverage than it currently has. The USA will find that re-opening these deals will result in worse outcomes for the USA, unless Donald Trump is thinking of upping the ante by sending over the carrier groups, or some other form of threats. That would not be a good thing. The world economy does not like uncertainty.

3. So President Trump just claimed to have negotiated down the cost of the F-35 program? Yes, sure he did
The POTUS is apparently claiming credit for a $600m cut in the cost of the next batch of F-35 planes. Remember that this was a project he was distinctly uncomplimentary about a few months ago. Now, in addition to claiming the credit for the cost reduction, he now says it is a great program.
Which is a summary of multiple layers of uttered POTUS bullshit. As the article explained. The planes were always going to cost less.

One of the refrains by Donald Trump and many of his supporters (as part of the proposed actions to Make America Great Again) was “buy American”.
When i read this being used as a phrase, i smiled inwardly and outwardly.
I understand the sentiment, particularly if you are of the worldview that your country is The Best. If it is The Best, why would you buy anything not made here?
However, the reality is going to win out every time over this fine-sounding phrase.
When i was growing up in the UK, it was a period where the British Empire had essentially disappeared, first gradually, then more rapidly. The United Kingdom had walked away from it, or given away most of it since it had become clear that it could not afford to police it or defend it any more following World War II. The UK was essentially bankrupted by that war.
The loss of Empire was jarring for many people, especially ex-military people. After all, we had seen off that nasty Mr. Hitler, so why could we not keep these damn countries in line?
Out of the overall national angst, in the middle of a period of poor UK economic performance in 1968 (the UK essentially had no foreign currency reserves, because the Pound was overvalued, being pegged to the Dollar), five secretaries in a London suburb volunteered to work an extra half hour a day to help the country.
Thus was born the “I’m backing Britain” campaign.
The campaign soon expanded beyond working unpaid time (an idea that was swiftly torpedoed by the trades unions, whose interests were diametrically opposed to this idea, they wanted people to work less hours for MORE money), to the idea that people should “buy British”.
However, like all grass-roots campaigns, it was soon surrounded by would-be hijackers, including newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell, who was soon embarrassed (this is going to sound familiar) when his “I’m Backing Britain” t-shirts were found to have been made…not in the UK.
The campaign even had a theme song. (WARNING – You may be about to enter the cringe zone).
I sat and watched as the campaign started, soared, stuttered spluttered, and fizzled out within a space of about 3 months. Within a year almost everybody had forgotten about it, or did not even want to be reminded of it. Mentions of it would result in comments along the lines of “nice weather we have today”.
The reality was that at the time Britain was being flooded by cheap imported goods from a host of other countries, led by Hong Kong, as other countries began to industrialize and found that they could make finished consumer goods cheaper than UK companies. Steel cutlery, for example, used to be supplied almost exclusively from Sheffield in northern England, but by the end of the 1960s the Sheffield steel industry was becoming a historical footnote, as most of the steel cutlery was being supplied from overseas. It was part of the beginning of de-industrialization in the UK.
One of the contributory factors to the total failure of I’m Backing Britain was that for it to be successful (at least the “Buy British” part) it required consumers in the UK to be willing to pay more for domestically-produced goods. That is the sort of requirement that most people do not want to meet, particularly if they have a limited budget. The only way to ensure that people buy domestic goods is by government rigging the market, using some combination of price controls and tariffs on imported goods. The government in the UK was not prepared to do that.
I therefore remain enduringly cynical that any campaign based on the slogan “buy American” will not succeed at the street level in the USA. Consumers are not going to reduce their standard of living in order to buy US-made goods.

Folks, the dirty little secret underlying the H1-B issue is that corporations have been working to cut IT costs for decades. IT is always being hammered by business users in most corporations with variants of the “day late and a dollar short” or “you guys are so expensive, I could run my own IT shop with 2 guys and a visit to Best Buy” complaints.
The onset of “offshoring”, “best shoring” or whatever other Doublespeak phrase you want to use, was specifically underwritten by corporations starting around 20 years ago.
Along the way, IT service levels steadily declined. I watched as EDS clients moved work offshore, or demanded that we provide services at equivalent offshore rates, or they would go to an offshore vendor. It soon became clear that they were quite cheerfully prepared to accept lower levels of service and quality across the board as part of the price for reduced IT costs. They would of course, demand “high quality”, but when asked about how much they were prepared to pay, it would soon become clear that their price did not low for high service levels.
This, everybody, is part of the reason why cellphone phone vendor customer service went from being staffed by knowledgeable US workers to being staffed by offshore neophytes reading from scripts.
It is also why when I hear IT leaderships in clients waxing eloquently about Quality, I always have one hand firmly attached to my bullshit detector. Most IT leadership teams don’t give a rats ass about quality. If they did, they wouldn’t be buying solely on price. Sure, they talk a lot in negotiations about “quality” (often without being at all specific about measurable quality objectives – that is a tell that they are not serious) and then load up the contracts with SLAs, but most of those SLAs have nothing to do with levels of service as experienced by the end customer. They are simply fairly standard CYA boilerplate for IT fundamentals like uptime, defect resolution timeframes etc. etc.
But…
…when people huff and puff about crappy service from IT and tech vendors and systems, yet at the same time complain about other countries “stealing” jobs, I have to remind them of one basic fact.
They supported the process by buying and patronizing these businesses.
If (for example) customers had terminated their agreements with cell service providers when they found that they were not getting onshore customer service, we wouldn’t be facing the standard scenario where the guy named Rudy (real name is Rajamaranan) on Customer Service line #3 is sitting in Hyderabad while cheerfully pretending that he is stateside by asking you questions about the weather. (this is no knock on “Rudy”, he is simply doing the best job he can, probably with an out of date set of scripts written by a person who, if they were being WFR’d to make way for the Rudys, was in no mood to tell the new people everything they knew).
All of us consumers in the USA benefit from cheap IT services, no matter where they come from. If the goal is to move all IT work back to the United States, sure, it can probably be done, but it will only happen over a long period of time (this offshoring trend has been going the other way for close to 20 years), IT costs will leap, and this will feed through into consumer prices. You can expect to end up paying more for a wider range of IT-intensive services such as banking, telecomms, airlines and transportation.
Oh, and, by the way, don’t expect an increase in quality. At least not until you, collectively, the consumers, are prepared to punish businesses for piss-poor service and customer support quality by walking away from them

and telling them why

.

A lot of vague talk today about “H1-B visa program abuses”, but no specifics are being cited. Whenever I read vague waffle like this, I start to wonder about the rationale for any proposed changes. The cynic in me says that “abuse” is simply code for “too many damn furriners”.
There seems to be a naive assumption underpinning many of the job protectionists’ thought processes that if the H1-B visa program is scaled back, all of the IT jobs currently filled by foreign nationals will suddenly be available for Americans.
That is not likely to be the outcome. If we consider the Indian “pure plays”, who have large numbers of Indian nationals in the USA on H1-B visas, the rules may oblige them to move those nationals back to India. However, most IT work can be performed from just about anywhere in the world, unless there are certain restrictions such as national security (and H1-B holders and Permanent Residents can’t get security clearances anyway).
If the pure plays have to repatriate their workers from the USA, they will go to their clients and offer them pretty much the same range of support services as before, probably at lower rates, since they will now be back to paying Indian salaries, not lower-tier US salaries. Corporations increasingly see IT as a commodity service, so they will most likely continue to use the Indian pure plays, only this time instead of 800 people in a warehouse in Upper Podunk, they will have 800 people in a warehouse on the outskirts of Bangalore, or Hyderabad, or Chennai.
The only way that the corporations will be deterred from taking that course of action will be if they are prevented by law, or other financial disincentives like tariffs or fines, from using overseas corporations to deliver services to the USA.
There is also another reality check angle that needs to be factored into this equation. If 60,000 Indian IT workers disappear from the USA, there are unlikely to be 60,000 US replacements of equivalent experience and skills available on a short timeframe. This will result in a mad scramble for replacements, which might benefit me in the short term since it is likely to increase salaries. However, it will be damaging to US businesses in the medium term. The more likely outcome is that the US corporations will manouver to keep the workers, this time overseas.
This structural change in the job market is also unlikely to benefit many of the electors who voted for Donald Trump. (As a long-term tech worker, I can tell you that in my corporate and personal circles, open Trump supporters are in a small minority). The people in beat-down rural areas who supported Donald Trump will not see any short term benefit if the USA starts expelling tech and IT workers. Rural areas are simply not significant sources for IT and tech people. Anybody with ambitions to work in those sectors is already elsewhere, like in a major tech city.

One of the more amusing events since the inauguration of President Trump has been the speed with which the GOP supporters have begun demanding that people “respect the office”, “give the President a chance”, “stop dividing us” etc. etc.
That does make me laugh inwardly and outwardly. It seems only a few months ago that a lot of GOP partisans were still vituperating about President Obama, still trying to de-legitimize every aspect of his Presidency, right down to the umpteen hundredth recycling of the “muslim” and “not born in the USA” memes.
Today I Unfriended one person on Facebook who thought it was amusing to print a tabloid’s latest expose of the Obamas. That person can continue to post muck-raking juvenilia in their own world, but I’m not interested in it. Another person, as of today, is in the Last Chance Saloon because he decided to sign on to a meme about President Obama being a supporter of ISIS. That person will be gone if they ever post any more crap like that.
Now the same group of supporters want me to “respect the President”?
Sure. I will provide the same respect to President Trump as you juvenile conspiracy-addled baying children provided to President Obama. Actually, I will show President Trump slightly more respect, in that I promise to focus purely on his performance as POTUS and the respect that he shows to alternative ideas, opposition, the Constitution and the governance processes within the USA.
Deal?

In a capitalist society, the only power that really matters in peacetime is economic power.
If large groups of disaffected people want to create attention for their objectives, economic power, aggregated across a large group, is considerable.
Therefore, boycotts of businesses and industries that act in ways contrary to the objectives of disaffected groups is not only an option, it is one of the few ways in which businesses can be forced to respond to disaffected people. (the reverse, of patronizing businesses that do support the objectives of a group, is part of the tactics and strategies also).
A 10% drop in revenues for a major retailer will immediately force that retailer to take actions. Sure, they can respond in ways that, in the short term, look to be counter-productive for many people , such as closing outlets and other facilities. However, any business that loses 10% of its revenues simply because the officers of the company and the leadership supported actions by political parties that people found objectionable is going to come under immediate stockholder pressure (up to and including lawsuits) to address the issue. Stockholders want the fortunes of the corporation to continually increase, not decline. They are not going to willingly sign on for a corporate contraction if the solution to address (for example) a consumer boycott is to publicly move off of some ideological position that they originally adopted in the interests of short-term expediency.
At this point in the history of the USA, we are starting to see the onset of authoritarian actions by a central government that is totally controlled by one political party, with many state governments also controlled by that party. The only acceptable and usable short-term counter to authoritarian actions in a capitalist society is economic power. Marches and demonstrations can certainly keep the opposition in the media, but by themselves they are unlikely to effect short-term change. Until the next Federal election cycle in 2018, principled opposition to the sorts of authoritarian horseshit currently being implemented has to include the exercise of economic power.

One of the perpetually puzzling aspects of voter behavior in the midwest and heartland of the USA, as seen from a progressive viewpoint, is the extent to which poor and economically depressed areas of the country vote Republican, despite the reality that Republican actions to reduce or eliminate “safety net” programs will negatively impact those areas, and despite Democratic party support for measures such as the Affordable Care Act, which have resulted in a large number of people now enjoying health coverage for the first time.
Whenever the decisions of humans collectively fail to make sense, it is tempting to write those decisions off as the result of stupidity, indoctrination or some other defective decision-making process. While attractive, this is self-reinforcing for the worldview of the person engaging in the dismissal, while also absolving them of further responsibility for analysis. (Think of the phrase “they don’t get it”. This is most commonly deployed as a discussion-closing dismissal).
If you go back far enough, everybody in the continental USA is a descendant of immigrants. However, when considering the dynamics of the modern USA, it is probably best to start with the original European settlements, which gave rise to the modern USA.
One interesting pattern that sociologists have noted is that the descendants of recent immigration (starting at the end of the 19th century and continuing to the present day) lean to the left and Democratic in their voting patterns.
A paper that I discovered online (and did not bookmark, so now I am unable to find it) discusses this difference and contrasts it with the voting patterns of the heartland. The paper explains that there were effectively three waves of immigration into the USA:

Wave 1: 1760 to 1840
Wave 2: 1840 – 1890
Wqve 3: 1990 – present day

The thesis of the paper is that the Wave 2 immigrants settled the midwest and the heartland, coming mostly from Ireland, Scotland and to a lesser extent Germany and Scandinavia. Many of the moves were triggered by social upheaval (a good example being the Potato Famines in Ireland, which led to mass emigrations). They brought with them the rugged individualism mindset (essential in an era where they grew up in an agrarian society) and a deep suspicion of government, who had in many cases, by arbitrary and capricious discrimination, tossed them from their original places of residence. Those immigrants, nearly all white and religious, are the original antecedents of many heartland Americans, and many of their values still exist today in their descendents.
Wave 3 immigrants are much more ethnically diverse, comprising, in many cases, people from minority communities who were victims of persecution (the classic example being Jewish people who increasingly emigrated to the uSA in the early years of the 20th Century as anti-Semitism arose in Europe). Rather than government persecution based on the fact that they were poor, the persecution was in many cases based on the fact that they were more educated and successful than the majority communities in which they lived. Those immigrants tended to settle in coastal cities and clustered in the North East and (to a lesser extent) the West Coast, and tended to avoid the heartland. They brought with them values of hard work, but also of education and the need for governments to be protectors of social justice and the integrity of the legal system.
So, if you find the thesis in the paper to be compelling, part of the difference in voting patterns can be explained by the differing origins and careabouts of the newly arrived populations of different parts of the USA.
Now, the wretched question of why those damn rural voters vote against their better interests?
It turns out that there is a rather simple answer. It is explained in this article here.
The people who really are at the bottom of the heap – the really poor, chronically unemployed etc. etc. are unlikely to vote. This is not news. We have known for a while that, in most democracies, non-voters are disproportionately comprised of poor and marginalized groups. They have given up on participating in a system that they probably believe is rigged against them.
The people who are driving voting patterns in many rural areas are the people the next level up on the economic ladder. They are mostly employed, but they feel insecure, simply by looking at the people below them, they are probably thinking “I could be like those guys if things get worse”. They are seeing increasing dependence on welfare by the people below them (in an economically depressed area this is kind of a “Duh!” thing that is bound to happen) but that makes them resentful of those people, who they regard as unable or unwilling to better themselves. Hence the juvenile slogans about “moochers” and “takers”. It is a defensive variant of Othering, the separation of the world into the Deserving (Me and Folks like Me) and the Undeserving (those moochers and takers and People Not Like Me).
In this climate of FUD, political messaging based on resentment memes will find a ready audience. The GOP messaging of self-reliance and personal responsibility also resonates with potential voters who are not at the lowest economic level. It is part of the inherited value system of the heartland immigrants. Get government out of the way, the values say, and everybody will be better off.
if you want a compelling example of how distorted the voting behaviors can apparently become, this article about rural Kentucky throws the paradox into sharp relief. However, it is only incomprehensible if you think that the poorest people are the GOP voters. The people who gave Donald Trump 82% of the vote in Whitley County KY were not the long-term unemployed, who most likely would be eligible for Medicaid (if they were able to work out how to use it). The ACA proportionately helped working people, who still, despite the help, voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. While some of the reasoning in this article by supporters of Donald Trump seems to lie somewhere between cloud-cuckoo land and fantasy island (especially the idea that Trump didn’t really mean it when he and the GOP said they would repeal the ACA), the underlying discontent with “business as usual” politics, and the visceral appeal of Donald Trump to people who are fed up with stagnant wages and declining economic activity in their local regions completely negated any single benefit from the ACA.
Goerge Lakoff would, at this point, be nodding his head and explaining that the result in the heartland are perfectly comprehensible when you realize that people vote values, not policies. That is another reality that has to be overlaid on the electorate to fully understand the paradox. However, at its heart, the seemingly puzzling failure of electors to vote their own self-interest is not actually a paradox at all if you understand how various economic tiers participate in the electoral system.